The niece of Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg about the kind of Halloween run that will make Tinseltown historians green with envy.

From 1921 through 1936, she lived right by the studio and celebrated each year’s Halloween growing up as sort of a combo Hallow’s Eve/birthday, because the latter falls on October 20 (per the headline, she just turned 103). One year, she and her family went the extra mile on the home front, and it paid off:

“I called the Universal Property Department, and they came up, and they rigged everything up for Halloween, you know? All kinds of spooky stuff… They did a beautiful job with lighting effects and everything—very spooky, you know?” The same men who had helped to make Universal the home of horror throughout the 1930s proved their talent that day, too, Laemmle laughs, because “as we were going down the pathway, this skeleton jumped out at one of my guests, and she fainted.”

Read more

In the new book Advertisers At Work, marketing professor Tracy Tuten interviews 20 leading industry execs and entrepreneurs. Leading off this dynamic compilation is Chris Raih, co-founder and managing director of Venice-based creative agency Zambezi.

Raih reveals that from a very young age growing up in Minnesota, he harbored dreams of writing for Sports Illustrated. But things took a turn for the ad world when the print journalism major interned at local agency Fallon. Today, Raih counts the Los Angeles Lakers as a client, has opened a field office in Shanghai and oversees with co-founder Brian Ford some three dozen employees just steps from the beach.

The irony is that Raih gets to work at Zambezi with various sports superstars. In the summer of 2010 for example, the agency put together a vitaminwater campaign with Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Petersen. As he explains in the interview, the icing on the cake was a certain voluble actor:

“The concept was freaking zany – basically that this athlete retained an attack-dog lawyer to try to sue Fantasy Football guys who had Adrian on their team… We cast for the craziest actor we could find and trust me, we found him! We got Gary Busey to play the lawyer…”

Read more

Comedian Mark Malkoff recently took a trip to LA from New York, and rather than paying for hotels he decided to cold call celebrities to see if he could crash at their places. Of course thirteen said yes.

It’s just that easy!

Malkoff got a bunch of name brand celebrities to take part. But our personal favorite was Martin Kove, who played the asshole karate instructor in Karate Kid. The guy has serious Gary Busey potential. Get him a show immediately.

In today’s LA Times, Patrick Goldstein, that brick-throwing radical, suggests that the Oscar producers are too old, too stuck in variety shows and that recruiting some fresh ideas from ESPN or FOX Sports might save the broadcast “event”.

We think forget sports, and look at reality shows.

Why not have the Best Song nominees warbled by the Best Actor nominees, ala American Idol?

Screenwriters can try their luck at acting out their scripts.

Editors should recut each other’s movies into very short YouTube films.

And new hosts? Why not Sarah Silverman and Margaret Cho with Gary Busey working the red carpet? Other than the whole good taste issue.

Cinematical’s Chris Campbell has some intriguing ideas as well, but his readers are livid:

these have to be some of the most stupid suggestions i have ever heard… and i am soooooo trying to take them as the joke i pray for them to be.

Whatever. The Movie Blog has some suggestions below, but boy, do they need an editor–this is slow.

We’re determined to find out what Gary Busey meant when he menacingly told Ryan Seacrest that he’d been looking for him for years. When Seacrest asked what he’d done, Busey said, “It’s what you haven’t done.”

What hadn’t he done? Our only guess is that he hadn’t asked the questions his researchers prepared for him — how else to explain so many celebrities’ perplexed faces? (George Clooney bought a house on a whim in Malibu?!)

Tom O’Neil thinks Busey was pissed because Seacrest didn’t recognize him on the Red Carpet.

Whatever Seacrest was guilty of, poor Jennifer Garner got in the middle of it like a 4-year-old girl outside the wrong house during a drive-by.