Archives: March 2011

For a long time now, HBO has dominated the Cable Ace and Primetime Emmy Awards. This year, you can add the prestigious Peabody Awards to the pay cabler’s premium recognition parade.

The network claimed seven of 39 2010 Peabody Awards announced by the University of Georgia, more than any other news or TV outlet. Along with the Tom Hanks produced miniseries The Pacific and Spike Lee‘s follow-up New Orleans documentary If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, the HBO nods also encompass a pair of more unusual Peabody players:

Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals: Not your average sports biography by a long jump shot, it examines the different cultures from whence these NBA legends sprang, their unusually long rivalry and their unlikely friendship.

Read more

It’s been a few months now since former Variety staffer Dana Harris set up shop from a home office in Highland Park as editor-in-chief of indieWIRE. Just back from SXSW and one of her monthly sojourns at the Snag Films parented website’s New York headquarters, she took time to chat via telephone with FishbowlLA about what lies ahead for the rest of 2011.

On the heels of The Playlist and Ted Hope, Harris says the company will be announcing another addition to the indieWIRE blog network in April. In terms of evaluating potential partners who retain ownership of their blog and split advertising and other revenues, she says it’s not as simple as finding sites with a particular monthly traffic threshold.

“Blog network partners are programmed into a specific infrastructure,” Harris explains. “This represents a significant investment on our part, so it’s a real balancing act to find a partner like The Playlist that hits that sweet spot.”

Read more

This weekend the orange carpet will be lined with Katy Perry-loving children while they cheer on the nominees of 2011 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.  Working behind the scenes is Gavin Keilly, founder of a gifting company called GBK.  On March 31st and April 1st  from 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM, GBK, along with Tiger Beat and Bop, will host a luxury gift lounge for the award nominees and presenters at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills.  Proceeds from the event will go to the American Red Cross to help relief efforts in Japan.

Gavin Keilly started the nonprofit gifting suite for movie premieres and awards shows in 200o.  ”I wanted to help others, but I did not want to be a martyr in the process,” Keilly told Mediabistro.  GBK is a social venture that donates 20% of its profits to charity.  According to Reilly, the events have raised anywhere from $500,000 to three or four million dollars for charities such as City of Hope and the Make a Wish Foundation.

The company originally focused on bringing high-profile celebrities to charity events.  To give the celebrities an incentive to come back, Keilly sent them home with thank-you gift bags that were worth between $40,000 and $50,000. When Ozzy Osbourne took a watch Keilly had given him and put it in his mouth, the entrepreneur instantly saw the potential the gifts had for product placement.

Read more

On the high heels of a March 30th promotional event at LA’s Mondrian Hotel for the 2011 Victoria’s Secret “Swim” collection, the blogosphere is off and running with prurient speculation about the emaciated appearance of one of the models, Candice Swanepoel (pictured).

The South African stunner looked very different a few months ago. But now, per media pick-ups on Huffington Post, Hollyscoop.com, Hollywood Life and beyond, everyone is reacting to photos of the hotel event shot for Getty Images by Patrick McMullan and others. Per Hollywood Life:

Just look at the legs–skinny, they look like straight lines. (That’s not how the human body is meant to look.) Likewise, her waist appears to have disappeared completely… Is this the way VS wants the world to see women?

Read more

Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to the spotlight in animated form. The actor and recently retired governor of California is the basis for a fictional superhero known as ‘The Governator.’ And he’s working with Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee on the endeavor. Lee gave Entertainment Weekly details:

The Governator is going to be a great superhero, but he’ll also be Arnold Schwarzenegger. We’re using all the personal elements of Arnold’s life. Only after he leaves the governor’s office, Arnold decides to become a crime fighter and builds a secret high-tech crime-fighting center under his house in Brentwood.

Schwarzenegger told Entertainment Weekly that he’d rather be running for president, but since his foreign birth prevented it, the project was his “Plan B.” And by that we’re pretty sure he means revenge on America for thwarting his plans for world domination with our stupid laws.

There may soon be enough fake celebrity Twitter accounts to justify the addition by returning company CEO Jack Dorsey of a filter-tab. For now, the jokers mingle with the rest of the micro-bloggers, people like @DodgersGM, an account labeled with the description, “I’m not the real Ned Colletti, but I tweet like I am.”

The feelings of the account holder, who tweeted all through the 2010 season, are pretty clear: the image file name for the faux profile is “Colletti_the_traitor.” Given the kind of season the Dodger blue are likely to experience, should be fun times, picking up on the flavor of these recent tweets:

Read more

For the brand new Zócalo Square feature “Where I Go”, recent USC masters in writing grad Meghan Lewit decided to write up her gym.

This is no Pilates or yoga haven. Rather, it’s a 24-Hour Fitness in a Koreatown office building that has reviewers on Yelp reaching for the negative slams. Lewit shows a comical flair for description, dubbing the fitness room as being like the set of “an Olivia Newton John video” and sharing the humiliation of “being pitied by a fellow member of a [higher ranked LA area] 24-Hour Fitness.” But there’s a silver lining:

My gym brings together a genuine cross-section of the city. There are lots of Asians, many Latinos, a handful of blacks, a few whites, some Indians, and even the occasional Borat-like patron of mysterious origin. You might even say that my gym is the city of Los Angeles.

Read more

More internal promotions at The Advocate. Scott McPherson has just been named creative director for the Advocate Group–which includes The Advocate in all its various media incarnations as well as HIV Plus magazine and its website HIVPlusMag.com. McPherson was most recently the group’s art director, having previously worked as for Out and The Out Traveler.

Press release after the jump:

Read more

The LA Times is reporting that public television station KCET is in talks to sell their historic Sunset Boulevard studio to the Church of Scientology. The Los Feliz studio dates back to 1912, and was once the home of Monogram Pictures and Allied Artists. According to the LA Times, the Sunset Blvd. property has an assessed value of $14.1 million. KCET responded to the rumors with a post on the station website:

We would like to respond to the erroneous information being circulated about KCET. Here is the truth: KCET is NOT being sold. We are firmly committed to being Southern California’s independent public TV station.

Read more

It started innocently enough. Tribune reporter Mark Caro was struck while watching the recent Matt Damon movie The Adjustment Bureau when a phone number without that annonying “555″ phony movie prefix was uttered on screen.

Caro later dialed up 212-664-7665 and sure enough, it rang, but there was no answer. In his article, after sharing the colorful history of real-fake Hollywood phone numbers and the near litigious chaos that ensued when God’s digits were listed in Universal’s 2003 comedy Bruce Almighty as 776-2323, he offers this fascinating tidbit:

It turns out Universal, perhaps having learned from the Bruce Almighty fiasco, bought its very own number with a New York area code. It appeared in the studio’s 2008 movie Definitely, Maybe, in the studio’s 2010 movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And now it’s in The Adjustment Bureau.

Read more