This past week, LAist got a chance to travel up to San Francisco to check out the Game Developers Conference. GDC is universally known as one of the most fun and exciting of the industry's gatherings, where publishers, press, and lecture attendees convene to discover the latest in gaming technology. This year we got to see a ton of kickass stuff, including an exclusive look at the new Street Fighter title from Capcom and......

Photo courtesy of In Between Sessions via Flickr Starting tomorrow and continuing through next week, LAist will be reporting live from the Sundance Film Festival. We'll be covering the films, the parties, the people and the various surreal and pointless events that comprise the most important film festival in the country. With the WGA strike still in full bloom, most are expecting a buying frenzy up in Park City as distributors stock up on......

In a preemptive move, the Director's Guild of America (DGA) announced yesterday that they'd made a satisfactory deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), giving them a new contract and therefore eliminating the need to strike once the current contract ended. So what does this mean for striking writers and the likelihood of an impending end to their current three-month-old strike? DGA President Michael Apted explains in an LA Times Opinion......

Apparently a Scientologist can be defined by a single question: "Would you want others to achieve the knowledge you now have?" The music, the insane laughter over abbreviations I had to look up (and are provided for you below), the conviction of "knowledge" that most of us do not have. Cue lights. Why it's Tom Cruise in a video made especially for the Scientology community! And even better, it was leaked out to the......

Orange County's fast-food favored son, Carl Karcher, died yesterday at the age of 90. It started as a hot dog cart, and grew to eventually become a ubiquitous fast-food mega-chain with the trademarked happy star. We all know Carl's Jr. as the place to get big burgers for a few bucks, but for Ohio-born Carl Karcher, things really kicked off in Anaheim in 1945 when he and his wife Margaret opened Carl's Drive-In Barbecue, which......

Johnny Grant was found dead tonight, around 7 p.m., on a bed at the Roosevelt Hotel where he lived on the 14th floor in a suite.Grant, 84, has been one of Hollywood's most enthusiastic supporters for more than 50 years. Grant got his start in entertainment by hosting a daily radio show in New York City for servicemen and women during World War II, and later co-hosted the first national telethon ever produced to help......

With yesterday's revelation that all 72 actors nominated for the upcoming Golden Globes are expected to not attend the January 13th ceremony, the appeal of the telecast comes sharply into question. The decision was made by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in order to show solidarity to their fellow strikers, and was announced by their union president Alan Rosenberg, who said: "After considerable outreach to Golden Globe actor nominees and their representatives over the......

Last night's Old Town Pasadena shooting that left an Arcadia man wounded is reportedly a result of a drug deal gone awry. Police today released the name of the accused shooter, who is 18-year-old Mark Cole of Claremont. It's awful hard to put a plain brown wrapper on the porn you check out online. A New Jersey-based company that runs several internet porn sites revealed they recentled suffered a security breach that made its users......

Listen to the interview here: Deborah Harry is on her way to LA to play the Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater tomorrow, Friday the 7th. She's got her first new solo album in fourteen years out, Necessary Evil, and you can hear some samples of it at her MySpace. Unfortunately our conversation sounds like I'm contacting her by sat-phone somewhere in Tibet but these are the days of multiline patch-ins so it couldn't......

It is estimated that 200 firms, 6000 workers and 1200 actors produce 4000-7000 adult films a year in Los Angeles. Yes, there are more porn-related, adult industry jobs than software jobs in this town. With $4.3 billion in sales and rentals (which is still nothing compared to the $12 Billion made from toys and books), the Adult Entertainment Industry puts $4 billion in revenue back into the local economy. “It’s in an industry producing......

Listen to the interview here: Bobby Slayton is an icon, he's been doing stand-up for 30 years, everyone in the industry knows him, and generations of us have grown up on his comedy. At his live show the crowd gets warmed up with a video of practically every single well-known American comic, from Don Rickles to Robin Williams, giving props to Bobby. I've been listening and seeing Bobby Slayton perform for 25 years, listening to......

Last Thursday, pornstar and director (and Fleshbot Crush Object, link NSFW) Dana DeArmond (MySpace) and her boyfriend Daniel (MySpace), along with pornstars Justin Long (NSFW) and Jon Jon (NSFW), were featured guest speakers in Professor Kassia Wosick-Correa's Sociology of Sexuality course at UC Irvine. According to TIME, the study of pornography on a collegiate level originated in the early 1990s, as the article mentioned Professor Linda Williams' Film and Rhetoric course at UC Berkeley,......

As the writers strike enters it's second week, a lot of attention continues to be paid to the issue of "new media". AKA The Internet. For negotiating purposes, the AMPTP insists that it doesn't know if they make money on the internet. They've also been trying to push the idea that internet content is purely promotional, and before talks broke off, were trying to get writers to agree to a clause that said they......

Writers march at the Desperate Housewives location. more photos after the jump......

I “worked” the morning shift today. Reporting into Gate 2 at Warner Brothers before heading to Gate 7 on Forest Lawn. Yesterday afternoon, Gate 7 was dead, but this morning it’s bustling. Lots of traffic coming in and out of the gate. Again, lots of honking and thumbs ups from the passing cars. Again, I’m marching with a lot of writers who work on the Warner Brothers lot. They have ridiculous energy for this......

a writer's perpective The first day of the strike is in the books. I marched at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. I was one of the only people who didn’t have a red shirt, but someone gave me a solidarity rubber wristband that says “No Justice. No Scripts.” I actually ended up walking for about five straight hours, and, even though I didn’t have tape to protect my hands from splinters (like some......

a writer's perspective As I get ready to join my brothers and sisters in the picket line, I’m flipping the channels, looking for some coverage. Fuckin’ Joe Torre is stealing our thunder. Finally, on KTLA, they break in with footage of Jay Leno pulling up on a motorcycle and handing three boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts to some writers. All writers are being encouraged to give 20 hours a week to the cause. No......

You know who makes a lot of sense? Michael Pollan does. If only he had the ear of the Senate as it prepares to pass a sorry, sorry Farm Bill. I love alcohol in unusual, fruit-oriented containers. Slashfood turns us on to this pumpkin keg -- yes the beer was actually brewed inside the pumpkin shell. Expect to see one of these at an LAist party near you very soon. It's good to know......

a writer's perspective The negotiating committees for the WGA and AMPTP are meeting today in a last-ditch effort to avert a strike. Personally, given the vitriolic rhetoric that has been spewed between the two parties, the cocky swagger of the producers, and the overwhelming solidarity of the writers, I find it hard to believe that we are headed anywhere other than the picket line come first thing tomorrow morning. There is a perverse inexplicable......

The WGA has just announced that they will go on strike beginning first thing Monday morning. The WGA West is currently holding a press conference and its members are in the midst of being notified. Last night, over 3,000 members of the guild crowded into the Los Angeles Convention Center for a standing room only meeting at which they were told that the negotiating committee was unanimously recommending a strike. A council of the......

Hollywood remains in a state of flux as it waits to see whether or not writers will trade in their pens in favor of picket signs. The contract between the WGA and the AMPTP expired at midnight last night with little fanfare other than continued antagonistic rhetoric between the two negotiating parties. Discussions yesterday were again fruitless, and mired in the contentious atmosphere that has been a constant since bargaining commenced. The day began......

The Writers Guild of America announced last night that its members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a strike authorization. According to the WGA, 90.3% of votes registered supported a strike. The vote also attracted the WGA’s highest turnout ever. The 5,507 votes eclipsed the previous record of 4,128 ballots cast during the 2001 contract negations. The strong show of solidarity should empower the WGA in their ongoing negotiations with the AMPTP. The Guild’s main concerns......

Andy Milonakis jumped into public consciousness after making some freestyle rap videos on the web, which led to him appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and then getting his own MTV program. Andy's come full circle and is currently at work on a full length rap album, but despite all he's accomplished so far he remains hard on himself for not doing more. Milonakis finds inspiration in his roommate, a newcomer to the industry who......

Halloween could bring a mixed bag of tricks and treats. The Writers Guild appears to be getting ready to go on strike at the end of the month which means that many shows might be affected in serious ways, while some might not even see the light of day. By Nov. 1, nets will have enough episodes of current shows in the can to get them through mid-January. But the February sweeps would be......

Sometimes after work this LAist just wants to go home. He wants to kick off his shoes, have some dinner and turn in early. Sometimes, a friend who works "in the industry" calls near the end of the day and says that the girl who was supposed to go to this party or that premiere has bailed and asks what is this LAist doing tonight? On a night like this, this LAist would've usually said......

Women in Film and General Motors have announced their second opportunity for Women in Film through the Acceleration Grant for Emerging Filmmakers program. Five up-and-coming female filmakers will be chosen to participate in a six-day, full-immersion mentoring program and also be assisted in getting meetings with studios, film professionals and distributors. Winners will be chosen from a WIF selection committee comprised of professional filmmakers and entertainment industry executives. Here are the details: Entries must......

Michael Bauer, he of the infamous review of Los Angeles restaurants, just posted this response on his blog: I figured I was treading into a tsunami when I wrote about the Los Angeles restaurant scene in Food last Wednesday. I knew some would disagree, but I had no idea what I wrote would be construed as dissing our sister city to the south. Several people sent me the links to comments on LAist and......

LAist loves Honor Student. They are a trio of L.A. funnymen-filmmakers: David's the one with the great hair who makes incredibly realistic masturbation faces. He stars in this installment of "Chasing Donovan", their on-going series of short comedic episodes (they've also done videos for The Mae Shi). Matt and Oz work behind the scenes, and their hair is also not too bad. They are also possibly the only Oklahoman-Dominican directing duo working in the......

Last night’s afterparty at Element for What We do is Secret was like a study in culture conflict. What We do is Secret is a movie about a punk rock band called the Germs. Punk rock was not just a form of music. It was a form of rebellion. Punk rock was rebelling against the mainstream music industry. So how do you hold a commercial event for something that by its very nature is......

I'll admit that it's nearly impossible to abstain from bias while reviewing Nomo & Nino Moschella. They're considerably under-appreciated by the masses. Nomo's show at Spaceland on Sunday was representative of that. Although they played a flawless set, chock-full of soulful improvisational instrumentals, the fact remains that the attendance did not suffice. So, I decided to attend the following show on Monday at Temple Bar with hopes of experiencing them in a more lively......