The Brief

A group of organizations have filed a lawsuit against L.A. alleging the city council violated state environmental regulations when it certified an environmental impact report and approved an expansion plan.

The lawsuit, filed by the Friends of Griffith Park, a body of environmentalists and preservationists, and the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust, alleges that the L.A. City Council violated the California Environmental Quality Act and that the plan “will destroy 16 acres of Griffith Park’s native California chaparral habitat in order to develop the California Planning Area.”

It also states that while some efforts have been made for improved animal habitat and conservancy, the plan is mostly centered on increasing the L.A. Zoo’s use as an entertainment and events venue.

The EIR, according to the lawsuit, also fails to mention how the development will address the environmental effects of excavating a canyon, removing existing vegetation, and does not contain key documentation requested by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Friends of Griffith Park have asked the court to rescind approvals to the zoo's vision plan.

Marian Dodge, a former president of Friends of Griffith Park, said the area proposed for “Condor Canyon” within the California Planning Area — a section of the zoo where visitors can learn about the California condor and the conservation efforts — is on a ridgeline covered with chaparral.

“It's an important ridgeline because it's the very eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains. A lot of people don't realize that the Santa Monica Mountains go all the way to Griffith Park and it's extremely visible,” she said. “That would be a huge impact, digging that trench through the middle of this ridge to get from one part of the mountain around to the backside of the mountain. The second thing that they want to build in that area is a California visitor center that would be placed on the top of that ridge line.”

The 18,000-square-foot proposed building, she said, would change the view and the habitat.

“It would be visible from all the people living in Atwater Village or in Eagle Rock. It would have events there at night, so they'd be bringing a lot more people,” she said. “So, that's why we filed the lawsuit. We want them to step back.”

The city’s EIR states that they would explore a tunnel instead of a canyon to avoid blasting during construction.

“This feature (Condor Canyon area) would improve not only the visitor experience, but also visitor safety and operational excellence,” the EIR states.

But the environmental impact of a tunnel has not been outlined in the EIR.

“We don't know what impact that (tunnel) might have on the habitat,” Dodge said. “The zoo also offered to reduce the size of the California Visitor Center and place it lower on the hill, but again, we have no details whatsoever on that. It was something that was just mentioned, it was not in the EIR.”

The EIR does state that the zoo is committed to “making the California visitor center smaller in scale and less obtrusive on the hillside and ridgeline and not in the style of a Yosemite lodge.”

However, no details are given about what that would entail.

On the zoo’s website, the current iteration of the vision plan — named Alternative 1.5: The California Focused Conservation Alternative — is deemed as an “environmentally superior update to the plan.”

In this new iteration, spaces dedicated to animals will increase by 162%, and 95% of trees will be protected with zero expansion into Griffith Park.

A representative Los Angeles Zoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For the past nine years, if you’re the kind of person who nerds out on Star Wars, Marvel, Game of Thrones, or any nerd franchise that exists in the galaxy, you’ll have found your community at Scum and Villainy Cantina in Hollywood.

While the exterior looks like just another unassuming business on the often bustling street, walking in reveals a highly curated space honoring every facet of nerd culture down to the last detail. The design honors the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Custom cocktails allude to different fandoms with names like “Sauron Sour” and “Harley Quinn.”

Scum & Villainy Cantina's bar may look familiar.

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Jim Donnelly

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Courtesy Scum & Villainy

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Most importantly, the people enjoying the space are openly expressing their love for these stories and universes, whether that be through intricate costumes or lively debate. It’s a scene one might find after (or before) a sci-fi convention, which is exactly what J.C. Reifenberg, co-owner of Scum and Villainy, intended.

“We wanted to create the post-convention bar experience every night of the week,” Reifenberg said.

As a veteran of such conventions, he’s seen Mark Hamill (who played Luke Skywalker) speak numerous times, but he doesn’t remember any of the speeches. He does remember the people he met at the bar when the long day was over.

Revel in nerd culture (costumes encouraged) at Scum & Villainy.

"The best part about fandom is the community. That’s what people crave,” Reifenberg said. “This geek world has grown up with the kids that fell in love with it and continues to offer comfort, companionship, friendship and opportunity.”

Scum & Villainy Cantina in Hollywood.

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Harry Levin

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LAist

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Reifenberg is now taking that concept and doubling down, hoping to create not just another gathering place, but a community hub for makers and creators to learn the craft.

Expanding to Burbank

For the past eight months, he and his wife, Jen Smith, who designed the interior of both establishments, have been crowdsourcing to raise $1 million for Scum and Villainy: Rendezvous, which they hope to open in Burbank, steps below the AMC 16. It’s certainly attracting interest; so far the pair have raised more than $600,000 toward the goal.

Scum & Villainy, open to people of all galaxies.

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Jim Donnelly

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Courtesy Scum & Villainy

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Reifenberg said he can’t confirm an official launch date because they’re waiting on their permits from the Department of Planning in Burbank. But they are shooting to open by the time Avengers: Doomsday comes out on Dec. 18.

“My goal is for people to watch Avengers and walk down the steps to Rendezvous with everybody in the movie theater,” Reifenberg said. “We’ll have ‘No spoilers’ signs up until the last showing of the night is over.”

The new space is 5,200 square feet over two floors. The bottom floor is for the post-convention hangs, similar to the current Scum and Villainy. Upstairs, there will be private dining and a professional podcast and livestreaming studio. Reel Rejects, the movie and television commentary channel on YouTube, is partnering with Rendezvous for live events and recording.

There’s also a multi-purpose room hosting classes taught by entertainment professionals, for which they’ll be tapping some industry heavy hitters. After running Scum and Villainy and working in film and television, including many projects with fellow super nerd Kevin Smith, Reifenberg and Smith have come to know Marc Bernardin (who wrote episodes of Batman: Caped Crusader and Eyes of Wakanda), Fon Davis (who worked at George Lucas’s visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic), and many more professionals behind geek franchises.

“I’m connected to all these wonderful makers, and these people love to share what they learned,” Reifenberg said, noting that when he grew up in Chicago, not only was there not nearly as much of an industry for this kind of work, but any time he would share his big ideas, his peers would shoot them down as impossible. Not here in Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles is a city of dreamers,” Reifenberg said. “I remember how magical and untouchable these things were. What can I do to help inspire the next kid to do an impossible thing?”

Fundraising for it

The first five investors of $5,000 in the WeFunder campaign for Rendezvous will get to shoot their short films there, and there are plenty of bigger perks as well. Individual tiers go as high as $100,000, offering everything from lifetime discounts to being in a commercial for the space directed by Kevin Smith. (Smith invested $10,000, and has hosted numerous episodes of his podcast Fatman Beyond at the original Scum and Villainy). Then, if the total goes over $750,000 or reaches the total goal of $1 million, everyone who contributed gets extra benefits, such as 20% off merch.

The $1 million amount may seem ambitious, but in 2017, the original Scum and Villainy was just a weekend pop-up instead of a year-round establishment. After announcing it, they sold more than $1 million in tickets from April to July 2017, and they realized they needed to keep it open for the community.

The pair told me so many stories about how Scum and Villainy has changed people’s lives. Some are about couples meeting there on May 4 (yes, May the Fourth, the internationally recognized Star Wars holiday) who then proposed on a later May 4. Others are about people who came to every weekend of the pop-up in costume because it was the first place in their entire lives they felt truly safe to express who they are.

“I have worked in bars and restaurants for 20 years, and I have seen restaurateurs who don’t believe in their concept. They’re not willing to put the time and effort into massaging it to appease the community,” Smith said. “This whole place exists because the community is like ‘Please don’t close.’”

Reifenberg added: “If we build it, they will come.”

Right below Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar, the second-oldest cemetery in the San Fernando Valley has sat since the 1870s on a plot of land that’s gone from forgotten and overgrown to a cherished place where the living commune with the dead.

Now, the San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery has become not only a place to remember the deceased, but also a favorite spot for locals who like to celebrate Summerween with a classic film screening.

That tradition continues Saturday night with an annual screening of Ed Wood’s 1957 classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space, which has a special relationship to this place.

From trampled to cherished 

I walked beyond the cemetery gates to meet up with Stefanie Garcia, the chairperson of the San Fernando Pioneer Memorial Cemetery. She explained that while this might be a peaceful place and an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument now, it wasn’t always so revered.

Members of the surrounding neighborhood, a longtime horse community, would even ride onto the grounds.

“Back in the day, they would trample through here,” Garcia said. “We’ve heard stories of people using the headstones to learn how to lasso and then they would rip them off their foundations.”

Garcia said this place took a turn for the better thanks to the San Fernando chapter of a nonprofit group called Native Daughters of the Golden West. The all-women organization worked to preserve the history of the cemetery beginning in the late 1950s.

Now Garcia keeps that effort going.

With the help of a ground-penetrating radar study done in 2010 and death certificates found over the years, Garcia said, the group learned that there were at least 500 people buried here at some point, including five Civil War veterans.

“We found the most concentrated amount of people are in that back corner where we have our movie night,” Garcia said.

Speaking of movie night, parts of Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space were shot here. The film is beloved both for its so-bad-it’s good-charm and for being Bela Lugosi’s last on-screen film appearance.

“It’s not scary or creepy, it’s a vibrant celebratory event,” actor and comedian Ben Jacob said, adding that he may come sporting a vampire's cape for the screening. "We love being here when the community is here.”

Jacob will emcee tonight’s screening along with Monique Ramirez, his co-host on the podcast, “Who’s Dead From Your Favorite Movie?”

Unmarked graves

“There’s a lot of Latino culture here,” Ramirez explained. “And there’s a lot of, specifically, Mexicans — I’m Mexican — that are buried here that are unmarked. And I feel like that’s an important and honorable part of our history here.”

One of the curious things about the cemetery is that there aren’t that many gravestones and markers. And most of the ones that do remain are to remember wealthier locals.

That’s because, as Garcia tells it, the cemetery became the final resting place for many of the region’s poorest residents.

“The majority of the people that are buried here are actually Hispanic. About 70 percent,” Garcia, who also runs local tours under the name SFV ROCKS, said.

Ticket sales from the Saturday night movie will go toward Garcia and her colleagues' biggest project: working to identify who is here so they can place markers and properly honor people.

“It tells a bigger story of what was going on in that time,” Garcia said, tearing up. “It makes me emotional... because of the fact that the poor were so underrepresented here... that the Hispanic community was so underrepresented here.”

“So, we’re here to tell their story. And that’s my favorite part of it,” she said.

A bloodless bullfight is taking place in Artesia today, part of a centuries-old religious tradition known as the Festa do Espírito Santo — or Festival of the Holy Spirit.

The performance features matadors and horsemen using Velcro-tipped darts to try to stick them onto a Velcro pad worn by the bull.

"It's Velcro on Velcro. It, most of the time, sticks. Sometimes it doesn't," said Paul De Medeiros, one of the organizers. "We don't want to injure the animals."

The show's taking place at Artesia D.E.S. (Divino Espírito Santo, or Holy Spirit) — a community hall built in 1927 by Portuguese immigrants who landed in the area.

"In Artesia, it used to be called Dairy Valley," said De Medeiros, who's president of Artesia D.E.S. "A lot of them were involved in either agriculture or dairy business. They built churches, but they also built social halls."

The diaspora also settled in Chino and San Diego, both with their own cultural event venues.

The community hall in Artesia has something special — its own bullfighting arena built in 1976.

"Both of my grandfathers — they have passed — they were actually the ones that built the bull arena, along with a couple of gentlemen," said Joey Martins, a longtime coordinator of the event. "Today [that] would probably never fly, and it's been grandfathered in."

Born and raised in Artesia, Martins grew up watching this style of bullfighting. Before the arena, he remembered the shows taking place at a local park.

The bullfight typically lasts around two hours, and De Medeiros described it as "a full-on professional show" with spectators coming from around L.A. and as far as away as Bakersfield and San Diego to pack the 1,000-seat arena.

"We have a matador coming from Mexico. And then we have the horse riders — what they call the cavaleiros — and there's one from Portugal that has arrived here last week," Martins said.

There are also the forcados, De Medeiros explained,  who will attempt to catch the bull toward the end.

And the bulls — they will arrive a couple of hours before showtime, with their owners or handlers in tow.

"They don't want to leave a bull in a foreign, unfamiliar area, because the bulls, they have routines," De Medeiros said.

A criminal justice watchdog is calling into question whether Latinos in the L.A. County Superior Court get a fair shot at bail.

The new report from the nonprofit La Defensa, which advocates for reform in the legal system, analyzes a sample of pretrial decisions from 2025 which had been documented by community court-watching volunteers.

One of the key findings was that defendants who were perceived to be Latino had an average bail amount of $157,700 — more than 15 times higher than white defendants and nearly three times higher than Black defendants.

Studies show that inability to pay bail can affect defendants’ livelihoods and their ability to defend themselves, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“ Most families — no matter what they did, no matter what they sold — cannot actually purchase that person’s freedom to give them the fighting chance to go against the state,” Titilayọ Rasaki, La Defensa’s state policy and legal affairs director.

The L.A. County Superior Court says it’s following the law on bail requirements and that the findings are missing context because observation is limited.

How court-watching works

La Defensa’s Court Watch LA program is a community-led effort to document and hold the courts accountable. They train volunteers to go in and observe cases.

The volunteers take notes on the charges, the judge’s conduct and the person’s criminal history, if it comes up. That then gets analyzed against publicly available case information and state law. Programs like this exist in several other cities around the country.

For the latest report, La Defensa volunteers observed 140 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, chosen at random, between January to November 2025.

Judicial accountability lead Bryanna Siguenza explained how she decided where to send the volunteers.

“ I choose a department, specifically ones that are pretty busy, have high case loads, and are arraignment and pretrial,” she said.

What watchers saw

Racial disparities in pretrial settings have been researched at local, state and national levels, but La Defensa’s findings are based entirely on human observation, Siguenza said.

The volunteers are trained to listen for important details that come up in proceedings, but they may not always get the full story behind the charges, like a defendant’s criminal history.

L.A. County Superior Court spokesperson Rob Oftring said the report needs more context.

“Many of the report’s findings, for example, do not appear to account for charge severity or criminal history, both of which are legally significant factors in any release decision…” he wrote in a statement.

La Defensa did not include in its report what charges had been filed in the cases observed. However, according to the report, comparable charges still had disproportionate bail outcomes that “couldn’t be explained by charge severity alone.”

The severity of charges legally informs bail decisions. The Superior Court is required to have standard bail amounts based on the crime, which judges have discretion to adjust.

State law also requires judges to weigh issues like public safety in bail decisions, as well as the defendant’s ability to post bail. According to the volunteers’ observations, the judges considered the latter in just a quarter of cases when setting bail.

Oftring said the court has taken steps to reduce money bail’s usage as allowed by law.

“Bail at arraignment is set only after both the defense and prosecution have been heard and the judge has weighed the specific facts of the case,” his statement read.

The limits of the findings

Oftring said the court values the role organizations like Court Watch LA play in keeping the justice system accountable, but that the sample size of the researchers used in their report is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Roughly 272,000 criminal cases took place during that time period, according to Oftring.

Representatives from La Defensa said they know the report is only a snapshot of the system, and that human observation has its limits.

That’s why in November, they requested 10 years of de-identified data to analyze whether bail outcomes differ across judges, courthouses and demographic groups. Rasaki said they haven’t received it.

“  We would say release the data … by all means, we want to partner. We want to analyze,” she said.

Oftring told LAist they are working on several projects that “provide data-informed scrutiny of how the court operates.”