Talk about an informative field trip stop. Last month, a group of students from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication came to LA and got to listen to the following LA Times entertainment journalists panel March 12: Steven Zeitchik, Amy Kaufman, Chris Lee, John Horn, Mary McNamara, Meg James, Scott Collins and Dawn Chmielewski.

The event was part of an ASU west coast swing titled “Covering the Business of Entertainment,” which has also encompassed visits to studio lots. From the Reynolds Center report about the panel discussion:

Kaufman said that reporters have to be careful about what information is on and off the record. It’s not a good idea to ruin a relationship with a publicist or contact, she added.

Read more

The admission prices for this weekend’s fourth PRODUCED BY Conference on the Sony Pictures lot are steep. But given the level of talent participating in the Producers Guild of America sponsored confab, attendees are willing to put forth boffo coin.

Speakers include everyone from Mark Cuban and LA Times entertainment reporter Dawn Chmielewski to Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein and produce Patrick Ward. Alongside a plethora of Saturday-Sunday events are something called Mentoring Tables. For a separate  fee of $100 per, participants get to sit down – Hollywood press junket style – and glean some more private, targeted words of advice.

If FishbowlLA was paying for an MT, we would be inclined to opt for either Snag Films CEO Rick Allen tomorrow afternoon or producer-director Gale Anne Hurd after lunch on Sunday. Organizers tell us that all but four of these ten-seat sessions have sold out.

Read more

The flagship program of YouTube content provider Clevver Media is the youth-oriented entertainment news show Clevver TV. Ahead of that program’s third-year anniversary in April, LA Times reporter Dawn Chmielewski caught up with company co-founder Michael Palmer.

Palmer tells her the channel gets 50 million monthly views. In other words, a decision more than ten years ago by the Irvine native and USC film school student to leave his internship position with Jerry Bruckheimer Films in favor of a career tilted towards the then-bubble-bursting Internet has handsomely paid off.

Read more

It’s a sensational storyline: convicted sex offender Jason James Murphy, under cover of a shortened name, makes his way to Hollywood and finds success as a casting associate, working on films such as Bad News Bears, School of Rock, Super 8 and forthcoming biopic The Three Stooges.

The LA Times article in question by Dawn Chmielewski and Harriet Ryan, with additional reporting from several colleagues, is also the kind of bellwether piece that leads to real-world changes. Expect the Casting Society of America and-or other unions and guilds to re-examine the background check procedures currently in place for casting office employees.

Since the story was first posted last night, it has been picked up by dozens of other outlets, starting with the Hollywood Reporter and continuing through to everyone from AP to the UK’s Daily Mail (which shoddily fails to credit LAT). The Washington state mugshot of Murphy (pictured) is extremely unsettling, since he looks more like an actor auditioning for a role than a criminal staring at jail time.

Read more

Hero Complex: Fanboy/reporter Geoff Boucher begins the first of his three-part interview with The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. We weren’t half as interested in Nolan’s answers as we were in Boucher’s questions, which were filled with commentary: “I winced when I read a lot of the political messaging that people said they detected in your film. I think a lot of that says more about my industry than it does yours.”

Disney Gets A ‘Bolt’ From Pixar: Claudia Eller and Dawn Chmielewski explore how Disney Animation has become ‘Pixar South.’

Primetime Heroics? The LAT Opinions page (Hearts) Barack Obama, but not his infomercial: “There’s something cheesy about a 30-minute commercial. One half expects Obama to be introduced by a pitchman in a loud sweater: “But wait, there’s more! If you act by Nov. 4, you also get the foreign policy expertise of Sen. Joe Biden!”

The Dopey-ist Place On Earth? Disneyland will spend $1 billion to try to save California Adventure — by remaking the failed theme park in the image of 1920s-era California. We didn’t read Dawn Chmielewski and Paloma Esquivel‘s whole story, but we assume this means that Jews and blacks shouldn’t bother renewing their annual passes.

Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal: There are obits, and then there are obits: Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the onetime Chicago bookmaker who ran four Las Vegas casinos in the 1970s and whose turbulent life and near-death experience with a car bomb inspired the movie Casino, has died. He was 79.

Screwball? Barack Obama‘s half-hour infomercial will delay the opening pitch for Game Six of the World Series. This is either a brilliant move or a dazzlingly hubristic one. Maybe both.

Driven: Bob Pool is surprised to learn that there are cab drivers in Burbank with hybrid cars. We are surprised to learn that there are cab drivers in Burbank.

Google Monde? The European Union is reviewing the Yahoo-Google deal for antitrust implications there, “adding to recent public criticism from major U.S. advertisers and a worldwide association of newspapers.” (photo stolen from here.)

Forget TV. What’s On IMDB: Dawn Chmielewski hips us to the fact that IMDB is now in the broadcast business. Kinda. The site “started offering more than 6,000 feature films and television episodes for free viewing online.”

Paps Feel The Pinch: Bad economic times are hitting everyone. Even the guys who follow Britney Spears around: “The prices that photos fetch are often overstated, but … an exclusive photo of Spears today would only bring a 10th of what it did during her most erratic times.” Soon paps will start sounding like laid off coal miners. Hot, angry, Brazilian coal miners.

It’s What The Kids Want: Dawn Chmielewski reports that ESPN will launch an online network dedicated to action sports — surfing, skateboarding and the like — to expand their fan base beyond, you know, your dad.

Late-Bird Special: Rachel Abramowitz notices that many of today’s blockbuster’s stars are over 40. That’s such an astute observation… that most entertainment journalists made it, like, a year ago.

Huh? We’re not entirely sure, but we think Rachel Abramowitz just compared Barack Obama to a superhero, a la Hancock or The Hulk. If this makes sense to anyone, please explain it to us.

Lawsuit Resolved: “NBC Universal has ‘amicably resolved‘ a $105-million lawsuit filed by a woman whose brother committed suicide during a taping of its controversial Dateline NBC series To Catch a Predator, both parties said today.”

Fandango Capitalizes on Disney’s Good Name: From Dawn Chmielewski: “Fandango Inc., the nation’s leading movie-ticketing site, on Monday acquired a similar but smaller website from Walt Disney Co. that sports an attractive address: Movies.com. Fandango hopes the acquisition of Movies.com, with its generic name, will give it broader reach for people seeking movie information online.”

Mo’bit: A quick blog post yesterday told LAT readers about Stan Winston‘s demise, giving the paper more time to complete a longer, more thoughtful obituary for the legendary special effects wizard filled with deeper insights and information — like quotes from the Orange County Register.

California Adventure? According to Dawn Chmielewski, “Walt Disney Imagineering melded the interactive elements of a video game with the kind of immersive 3-D experience of an amusement park to create Toy Story Midway Mania, a ride opening today at Disney’s California Adventure park in Anaheim.” We can see it now, frazzled parents screaming at their kids to put down their damn Game Boys so they can, um, play a video game.

Gay-A-Palooza: The first gay marriages in the state inspire SWAT-team like coverage, with Tony Perry And Tami Abdollah covering a Marine’s wedding in San Diego, Carla Hall reporting from Beverly Hills, John Glionna filing from San Francisco, Bruce Wallace reporting from Tokyo, Duke Helfand, Jessica Garrison, Jean-Paul Renaud, Rich Connell, Sandy Banks, Dana Parsons reporting from L..A and Orange County. (Former LAT reporter Jean Pasco even got into the act, being quoted as the current Orange County recorder spokeswoman.)