It’s one of those cliche observations about Hollywood: people here confuse movies with reality and are out of touch with the real world. Today, Marketwatch.com columnist Jon Friedman profiles NYT Hollywood correspondent Sharon Waxman. Here’s Friedman’s idea of local color:

The town can seem like the ego-bashing, backbiting, trash-talking capital of the world. Think “The Player,” in which a studio boss kills a writer with his bare hands, or “Swimming with Sharks,” where a studio executive’s assistant gets revenge on his boss-from-hell by breaking into his mansion, holding him hostage at gunpoint and torturing him.

And don’t forget, Los Angeles is also a futuristic dystopia populated by androids who want to be treated like humans. Or maybe Friedman didn’t rent ‘Blade Runner’ when he was doing background research for the piece.

The LAT Business section has a piece explaining the issues behind the rumored format shift at Indie 103.1. Sounds like it’s really happening. If this were a crappy ’90s movie about an underground radio station (c.f. ‘Pump Up the Volume’, ‘A Matter of Degrees’) there’d be a grass-roots listener effort to Save The Music. You know, impassioned anti-consumerism monologues, a scrappy pirate radio station set up in the basement of the house of someone’s oblivious parents, etc.

But radio consultant Jeff Pollack, quoted in the Times, hits it on the head:

“People fall in love with the concept of the station,” Pollack said, but he added that “in this era that kind of eclectic music mix is competing with offerings on the Internet and the music collections of people with their own iPods.”

In other words, it’s not necessarily competition from broader-appeal stations like KROQ that’s limiting Indie 103′s growth potential. Instead, it’s the consumption patterns of 103′s intended demographic. Upwardly mobile white people in LA own MP3 players and don’t really need radio. So if you want to save Indie 103, don’t smash the system. Smash your iPod.

In the new LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold makes a rare non-restaurant-related appearance with this write-up of the band Mars Volta. He makes it to the second-to-last paragraph without mentioning food at all until he calls the band’s new album “as indigestible as last year’s fruitcake.”

Elsewhere in the piece, Gold reveals that he was once incarcerated for a weekend for scalping tickets to an Emerson, Lake and Palmer show. Which I guess is slightly less embarrassing than admitting that you actually once attended an Emerson, Lake and Palmer show.

In the weird analogy department, Defamer links to a Reuters piece in which an unnamed Disney source claims that the post-Weinsteins Miramax will be rolled into the studio and retrofitted into an “elite SWAT team.” No word on how many of the approximately 200 current Miramax employees will be invited to join this SWAT team and how many will be forced to move to small towns where they partner with naive but good-hearted cops and learn important lessons about life.

Drudge has posted a rambling screed from Robert Evans defending his chum Michael Eisner from the overthrow attempt orchestrated by Roy Disney. He calls Eisner “the single most competitive, cunning, cantankerous, calculating, creative visionary that this hybrid industry/art form has possibly ever dealt with.” He also, wait for it, compares Roy Disney to Adolf Hitler:

Allowing the exploitive PR industry to bend our thinking in praise of a witless Roy Disney as a replacement to the brilliance of a Michael Eisner is somewhat reminiscent of Goebels[sic] propagating the heroics of Adolf Hitler.

So, in Evans’s view, Disney=Hitler. The PR industry=Goebbels. Eisner=uh, Field-Marshal von Hindenburg? Bad analogy, Robert. Bad, bad analogy. (Full disclosure: I believe I own two shares of Disney stock, a Bar Mitzvah gift from my Uncle Irving.)

LAObserved reports that KCRW will make several of its more popular shows available as podcasts, which one can download straight to one’s Rio Karma. (Or one’s Ipod, but I thought it was time that another Mp3 player got some press.) I’m hoping they release an anthology podcast of their pledge drives compiled by theme: ‘Most Urgent Ruth Seymour Last-Minute Pleas’, ‘Oddest Challenge Matching Grants’, ‘Anecdotes About How The Fringe Benefits Card Has Changed The DJ’s Life’, etc.

When one is IMing a Los Angeles media professional and one types something deemed amusing, the response tends to be ‘lol.’ But when one performs the same linguistic operation to an East Coast communicant in the same professional cohort, the response is always ‘hahaha’ or ‘heheh.’ What to make of this schism? Are Angelenos more comfortable with claiming (well, pretending) that they’re “laughing out loud” while New Yorkers have an idiomatic tendency towards ironic quasi-onomatopoeia? Expect a full analysis of this issue on the next slow news day.

If you only read one trashy piece of celebrity puffery in the line at Ralph’s this month, read the Russell Crowe interview in the new GQ, in which Crowe endears himself to that important taste-making demographic, pudgy rock critics in their late thirties. (Watch out, John Cusack.)

A lot of people seem to think, This stuff is one big selling machine, so chill out.

I absolutely have – in my mind, in my heart, in my being – the credibility required to be a serious artist, as laid down by NME in 1976. That’s what I fucking believe in, and I’ll never change.

What sort of stuff inspired you in that era?

Individual artists? Elvis Costello. The Pistols-but the Pistols was just a laugh.

I don’t think it seemed like a laugh at the time. I don’t know if you’re being wise after the event. It was a laugh, but it mattered, too.

[nods] It really mattered. It really mattered… And Sham 69, the Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet,” the Buzzcocks…

Elsewhere in the interview Crowe discusses Al Qaeda’s purported plan to kidnap him, which the FBI took seriously enough to assign him a security detail — “it was about taking iconographic Americans out of the picture as a sort of cultural-destabilization plan.”

A genuinely strange movie star interview.

My sister site FishbowlNY links to this Observer piece profiling David Halbfinger, who will be sharing the New York Times Hollywood beat with Sharon Waxman in this post-Weinraub era. Choice quote:

“As much as people warned me about this town, I think I actually like this kind of person – the movie person.”

Whom exactly does Halbfinger refer to by the term ‘movie person?’ I didn’t realize that the entire industry was composed of one kind of person.

In the latest silly salvo in the Estrich vs. Kinsley match, Estrich friend (and wife of Frank) Carol Biondi circulated an email to Estrich’s list of supporters yesterday afternoon with the subject line Check this out!!!!! linking to Jack Shafer’s Friday piece in Slate and quoting this purportedly anti-Kinsley paragraph:

And before I go, I’d like to second Susan Estrich, who has attacked Michael Kinsley on the charges of sexual discrimination, which he feebly attempts to repel. In his long, miserable chauvinist career, Kinsley has done more to block women, their views, and their professional aspirations than any journalist I know. Just ask Dorothy Wickenden, Ann Hulbert, Jamie Baylis, Emily Yoffe, Helen Rogan, Suzanne Lessard, Jodie Allen, Judith Shulevitz, Jodi Kantor, Margaret Carlson, Dahlia Lithwick, Kathleen Kincaid, Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan, June Thomas, and others (Addenum, 2-22-05: Bonnie Goldstein). They’ll fill you in. Send e-mail to pressbox@hotmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Carol, check this out!!!!! Shafer is being sarcastic. Those women he lists are all friends of Kinsley’s and/or journalists or editors whose careers he has supported. Way to rally the troops.