Topline:
As Brain Dead celebrates 10 years in an 82 -year-old theater, we take a look at the messy history of the screening spaces that came before it, and what Brain Dead Studios is bringing to the L.A. community today.
Why it matters: Brain Dead founder Kyle Ng was worried about ongoing movie theater closures taking community spaces away from creatives and artists. The small brand has always blended film and fashion, and is dedicated to keeping this theater's lights on.
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Brain Dead is a fashion brand that’s been around Los Angeles for 10 years now, and has stores in Tokyo, New York, and London. You’ve probably seen its skate and post punk inspired pieces on cool kids around the city: graphic tees, fuzzy sweaters, A24 collabs. (If you look closely, you can even catch a Brain Dead shirt on oldest daughter Margo in the Despicable Me 4 trailer.)
You’ll also see their logo on the marquee of the old Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, or, as it’s known now, Brain Dead Studios.
The company’s founder, Kyle Ng, took over the 82-year-old theater and reopened it in October 2020. The venue came with quite a bit of baggage that we’ll get into later, but Ng said he was driven by his love of indie film and concerns about the many theater closures during the pandemic.
“It was from film and music that I learned about anything about fashion,” he said. “We need to keep places like this alive to inspire generations.”
The 163-seat theater has digital and 35mm projection capabilities, and sits just up the street from the iconic Canter’s Deli. There’s a retail showroom upstairs and a patio and cafe, Heavy Head, in the back. It’s an inviting space.
“I realized that I wanted to create a place where it was more inclusive and more inviting to an audience that maybe never felt like they were being spoken to by the repertory cinema,” Ng said.
Ng came to Los Angeles to work in film shooting music videos after being inspired by picking up a copy of RES magazine. He was hanging out with Rick Stello in the import DVD section of Meltdown Comics, picking up official releases of international films like Oldboy and Battle Royale.
“Through curiosity we learn and get excited about different things we've never learned about,” said Ng. That curiosity that led him from comics and music to film and fashion. Now, with the movie theater, Ng said his team can “take risks and do things to make the theatrical experience a little different.”
Brain Dead Studios has screened docs for the skateboarding community, hosted Magic the Gathering tournaments and created fashion collaborations with some of the films it’s screened, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
And it leans on its audience for feedback.
Like many repertory theaters in 2024, the Brain Dead audience is young. If folks sign up for a monthly membership at the theater, (that’s $28 a month for unlimited film screening tickets and a 10% discount on clothing and concessions) they’re invited to write in with films they’d like to see.
“Most people wrote old titles,” Ng said. “And the cool thing is that old titles is so subjective to our audience because an old title might be Lost in Translation or it might be a '90s film.”
He noted that Sofia Coppola movies sell out, screenings of films like Speed Racer sell out, and anime will always garner interest.
It’s a connection to the theater’s past as a revival house, but with a slightly different niche.
The movie theater originally opened in the 1940s, built by John Hampton and his wife Dorothy. According to theater historian and film professor Ross Melnick, Hampton was a “massive silent film nut, if you will,” and loved silent cinema growing up in Oklahoma.
The Silent Movie Theatre was a classic mom-and-pop operation — Dorothy sold tickets and worked concessions, while John was in the projection booth screening his collection of silent film prints.
By the '40s, silent cinema was old news, so the theater filled a niche. Hampton’s collection was huge — an archival treasure trove of a medium known for being difficult to preserve. The couple screened films for 38 years.
By the 1980s, Hampton was having health issues and audiences were dwindling. He sold about half of his collection (most of which ended up in the archive at UCLA) and died in 1990. That’s when trouble broke out in his family.
As Melnick explained, his “nephew came in during a cleaning spree and just threw out hundreds of rare prints, posters, lobby cards — all that would be worth today, probably millions of dollars.”
Dorothy Hampton retained ownership, but the theater was empty until a family friend, Lawrence Austin, began running the space in 1991.
“He improved the theater, he brought in a live organist, and so it was, again, humming as the only operating silent movie theater in the country,” said Melnick. The theater was “attracting people from all over the world, not just those here in L.A.”
Lawrence Austin’s partner, James Van Sickle, was the theater’s projectionist, and the sole beneficiary of Austin’s estate. For about $30,000, Van Sickle hired a man named Christian Rodriguez to murder Austin and make it look like a robbery.
Austin was shot and killed, but another theater employee survived and identified Rodriguez, which led to Van Sickle. It was determined they had worked together, and both were sentenced to life in prison.
Charles Lustman, a singer-songwriter, purchased the theater in 1999 and reopened the space with silent films, a cafe, live acts and private party rentals. In the mid-2000s, deciding to rededicate himself to music and recently diagnosed with a rare bone cancer, he sold the theater to brothers Dan and Sammy Harkham.
Sammy, a 26-year-old cartoonist and Dan, 24 at the time, took over the space in 2006. Bringing in film producer Hadrian Belove, they opened Cinefamily in 2007. For 10 years, Cinefamily was one of the “hottest places to go see movies,” said Melnick.
Celebrities would come in for events, and you could catch anything from silent films to art house classics to indie premieres and retrospectives. “It was all given this kind of veneer of cool," Melnick added.
In 2017, allegations of harassment and abuse came to light. An investigation found “breaches of acceptable behavior alleged to have happened at Cinefamily offices and events,” according to a statement issued by the Cinefamily board of directors at the time.
Giles Miller, who spearheaded the investigation, told the Los Angeles Times his team reached “findings that were not conclusive, but that the board was able to work with." Executive director Belove and board member Shadie Elnashai apologized, resigned and denied the allegations. Cinefamily shut down permanently.
The Harkham brothers tried to reopen the theater with a new name, the Fairfax Cinema, detached from the former Cinefamily board in 2019, but due to issues finalizing opening night programming and the 2020 COVID shutdowns, the space stayed empty.
Brain Dead Studios reopened in the theater almost four years ago with A Nightmare on Elm Street.
“I think spaces always have a history and you have to learn and adapt," Kyle Ng said. "And I think that's what we're trying to do.”
Every month, in addition to director spotlights (this month’s is Wong Kar-Wai), there will be signature drinks in the back with Heavy Head cafe. It’s all part of the storytelling, Ng said.
“And we're going to start serving wine. So there's going to be a lot more night events,” he added.
Brain Dead Studios has also been moving beyond just this theater on Fairfax.
“We've been able to [co]produce a couple films like Carpet Cowboys with Memory, which is an amazing documentary,” said Ng. That’s alongside short animations Brain Dead’s produced. “When you come to the movie theater, we have a lot of … incredible short films and animations by so many different artists.”
Ng wants to keep the theater accessible and inviting to the community as a place of inspiration. “That's what makes me happy and sleep at night,” he said.
Despite being an independent brand in an industry that’s not known for being a cash cow, Ng said that “even if it's hard, we will do our hardest to make sure that this place always has its lights on.”
Check out the Brain Dead Studios calendar of upcoming films here.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is warning the public of a potential measles exposure from an unvaccinated individual who traveled through Union Station this month.
What's next: People who were at Union Station between those hours should monitor for symptoms until Oct. 3.
Go deeper: There are already more US measles cases this year than in all of 2025
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is warning the public of a potential measles exposure from someone who traveled through Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles earlier this month.
The unvaccinated passenger arrived at Union Station on Saturday, Sept. 12, by Amtrak train just after 7 a.m. and departed about four hours later on an Amtrak Thruway bus bound for Bakersfield.
People at Union Station during the exposure window of 8 a.m. to noon may be at risk of contracting measles seven to 21 days after exposure. The last day to monitor for symptoms is Oct. 3.
State health officials say the passenger was traveling on buses and trains through L.A. and at least five other California counties before leaving the state.
"This case, along with previous measles outbreaks in California this year, serve as reminders of the importance of vaccination against measles," said Dr. Rita Nguyen, assistant state public health officer. "Measles is one of the most contagious infections that can lead to severe lifelong consequences, including permanent brain damage, and can also be fatal, especially for children."
Symptoms of measles include fever, red, watery eyes, and a rash that usually develops several days after other symptoms and typically starts on the face.
As of Sept. 14, a total of 59 measles cases have been reported in California this year. In most cases, patients were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status.
Topline:
Long Beach is embarking on its biggest street redevelopment yet, reshaping over five miles of Studebaker Road into bike friendly lanes with other improvements.
Why it matters: Long Beach has been working toward this vision since it adopted its bicycle master plan 25 years ago, now with mounting urgency as auto-related fatalities rise.
Why now: The biggest project so far – the Studebaker Road Transformation Project – is bringing this vision to the doorstep of Studebaker Road residents. But not everyone is a fan.
Imagine a sprawling network of roomy bike lanes, generously landscaped to calm relentless traffic. Think Amsterdam with newer buildings and fewer waterways. That’s been Long Beach’s goal anyway.
Instead of wide post-war boulevards, roads would become slower and leaner, transforming Long Beach into a top-five global cycling city, said former city traffic engineer Paul Van Dyk. “Some of that is tongue-in-cheek, but if you shoot for the moon you land in the stars.”
Long Beach has been working toward this vision since it adopted its bicycle master plan 25 years ago, now with mounting urgency as auto-related fatalities rise. The biggest project so far – the Studebaker Road Transformation Project – is bringing this vision to the doorstep of Studebaker Road residents.
It has drawn mixed reviews.
“The intent of the design is malicious — it’s immoral,” said Joey Schilling, who drives the road six days a week and wrote a social media post criticizing the project that drew almost 1,000 comments. ”It’s people who do not use the road trying to tell other people how to use the road.”
Amid red cones and barriers, a woman and her dogs navigate the construction zones at Studebaker Road and Willow Street in Long Beach on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.The $65 million project runs over five miles from Second Street all the way up to Carson Street. It includes bike lanes, greenways and stonescape with fiber-optic cable running underneath. It is crucial to the city’s long-term plan of knitting together 300 miles of bikeways by 2040 to bring bicycle culture to Long Beach, as well as create safer streets.
The massive project funded from 13 federal, state and local agencies, gives a glimpse of what’s to come for Long Beach thoroughfares. The Clark Avenue work is in progress. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue “backbone” plans are on deck. Now Studebaker Road, the biggest, longest and most expensive, is well underway, spending the most dollars and, arguably, drawing the most resident anger.
Schilling, who lives near Studebaker Road actually does ride his bike to work in Seal Beach and said he is OK with bike lanes in general. However, he says the project is not practical in a community where he says most drive to work. “It’s not a reasonable solution. It’s not even for the greater good, that would be to appease the 95 percent who use their cars. The cost and the benefit do not match up. The cost is too high, the benefit too low.”
The Studebaker project features raised bus stops and wider bike lanes than have been seen previously. No more flimsy bollards separating bikes from cars, said Van Dyk, the city traffic engineer who helped usher in the bikeway and traffic-calming street plan before he went on to consult on other urban bike projects.
The green bollards seen on Bellflower Boulevard and Studebaker before the redo often get hit by cars and can resemble thick blades of stomped grass. “People do not like the way they look, and I agree with their frustrations,” said Van Dyk. “That’s why we moved towards those concrete medians.“ He said planners “learned a lot of lessons along the way.”
Studebaker will feature roomier bike lanes – 9 feet wide compared with the old 6-foot-across version. Wider lanes will allow riders to travel two abreast for a better ride, Van Dyk said. It also makes them easier to clean. Debris-filled lanes are a sore spot with bikers.
The old bike lane sweeper the city used to clean narrow paths was notoriously difficult to move and use. (Fourth District Councilmember Daryl Supernaw joked that sightings of the small sweepers were less frequent than Bigfoot.) But a regular street sweeper can get into the broader lanes where it can’t on Broadway and Bellflower south of Atherton. (They actually set a street sweeper in a bike lane before planning and pouring the concrete to make sure it would fit.) Still, protected bike lanes are harder to clean than lanes merely separated by paint and “swept” by passing cars.
David Raslevich, a 41-year-old cyclist who frequently rides on the new lanes on Clark, said he has noticed branches, leaves and other debris. “I feel safer riding with the traffic, because they (cars) move debris out of the way for you.”
One new component of Studebaker and the other newer lanes are raised bus stops. The new stops designed to accommodate bikes and buses are about five inches off the ground and separated from the road by a curb. Buses will stop in the No. 2 lane, halting traffic behind them, and pick up passengers, instead of easing out of a bus turnout.
Van Dyk said that change evolved from talks with Long Beach Transit, which revealed that buses would sometimes get hit when pulling into traffic. Planners reasoned it’s better to have cars waiting for a bus to pick up passengers instead of forcing a bus waiting to pull into the No. 2 lane.
“It’s math my second grader can do: What’s better, 40 people on a bus wait or four people in cars,” Van Dyke said. “Which is the greatest cost to society? The bus is going to be more efficient.” He also contends the new system is safe; there is less ambiguity as a bus will slow down in front of a car, so the car would be more likely to stop instead of zipping around a protruding bus bumper.
It is too early to know how this plan will play out – the new bus lane curbs on Clark show missing chunks already from drivers that likely didn’t see them. Raslevich said he has seen cars turn into the curb by the raised bus stop. “They don’t know that there’s an island there, so they’re hitting that island, pretty much daily.”
Councilman Supernaw, whose district encompasses the $65 million project, had reservations about the price tag before ultimately supporting it.
“All anyone asked for is a repave, to get rid of potholes and have a smooth surface to drive on,” Supernaw said. “Should we just forgo the bike lanes and do a straight repave? The answer was no, we wanna use the grant money for the bike lanes.”
The city saw it as a grander vision, weaving together a puzzle of state and federal grants along with $8.5 million in local sales tax money for new transit stops, sidewalks and curb ramps that improve how all people can move through the city.
“It’s not just ‘I wanna ride a bike for fun.’ People need it to get to work,” said Jocelin Padilla, a spokesperson for the city’s Public Works Department.
A series of community meetings were held in 2024, drawing limited feedback. But when residents later saw painted pavement markings showing the planned curbs and bike lines, “they got involved in a big way,” Supernaw said.
“We call this communication via spraypaint,” said Supernaw. “Constituents see lines marked out and contact the council office.”
Aside from the cost and the bus islands, some residents are frustrated by the execution. Leslie Goldman, who lives near Studebaker and Stearns, said large piles of dirt – at times higher than cars – have blocked residents from crossing the street or seeing oncoming traffic. Some concerns were addressed, including a bus shelter that was added due to feedback from residents.
“We’re not saying we don’t want construction done ever, that’s life in the big city,” she said. But Goldman contends the “assembly line” construction approach, as opposed to the work done in shorter phases, is leading to more “noise, vibration, dust, traffic, blind spots, trash, roadblocks, … All at sporadic intervals unknown to residents. It’s not just an inconvenience, it’s a hardship.”
Padilla of Public Works acknowledged the hardship, but said the benefits would outweigh the short-term pain. She said doing the work in shorter segments would increase costs and project timelines – not a good thing when it needs to be finished by the Olympics. “This is a once-in-a-generation project,” she said.
Not all residents are wary. “Studebaker is gonna be awesome when it’s done,” said Dan Olsen, who lives near Studebaker and Atherton. “It’s new, it’s fresh, the neighborhood is going to benefit. It’s been a total pothole disaster for so long. … Even though there are catches and hooks, it’s still worth it.”
Long Beach is not yet Amsterdam; it’s still a patchwork of protected lanes and unprotected ones of varying degrees of newness. But Studebaker should be done in 2027. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue are next. The bike lanes and streets won’t uniformly connect, but there will be more of them – Artesia Boulevard to service Jordan High, Clark Avenue near Long Beach City College and now Studebaker. “Long Beach’s cycling network is reaching critical mass,” Van Dyk said.
Van Dyk and other bike proponents say it’s a long game. Amsterdam itself was car-dominated until the 1970s when the Stop de Kindermoord movement was launched in response to the high number of child deaths. “It’s a generational effort; it took multiple generations to give us the infrastructure we have today,” he said.
Will they help make transportation safer for cars and bikes? The city racked up 53 traffic deaths in 2025, the highest in a decade, and 32 bike/pedestrian and e-scooter deaths. This year has seen 36 traffic deaths through mid-September. The city is also trying other tools; speed cameras are being installed, and tickets will go out this fall.
It’s not yet any safer to ride through Long Beach than it was 10 years ago, “but it’s not safer to do anything in Long Beach,” said Kurt Canfield, a cyclist and organizer for Car Lite Long Beach, a bike advocacy organization. He often rides the Broadway bike path, which he considers a success despite debris in the lane and other issues.
“They wanna bike, they wanna walk, people are driving 300 horsepower crossovers. We’re in conflict for the same space,” he said. “But this infrastructure gives us the ability to be safer.”
Topline:
Pianist Hunter Noack brings his grand piano to Griffith Park for two shows in September, part of a nationwide series organized in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.
Why it matters: The Sept. 26 and 27 performances mark the first time the "In a Landscape" series has played Los Angeles in its 11-year run.
Why now: The shows nod to Trust for Public Land's work in the Griffith Park hills. The nonprofit helped raise the funds that kept Cahuenga Peak and the ridgeline around the Hollywood sign from being developed.
A grand piano, hauled in on a Ford F-350, will make its way next weekend to Griffith Park.
Then, right below the Hollywood sign, the flatbed will unfold into a stage for a recital by pianist Hunter Noack, who has played everywhere from Yosemite Valley to Joshua Tree National Park.
His Sept. 26 and 27 performances are all part of In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild, organized in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. (The show is sold out, but you can sign up for the waitlist.)
For a decade, Noack has hauled his Steinway — the same model used at Carnegie Hall — through rough terrain to perform in unusual places: 370 concerts and counting.
"We've had the piano lid be ripped off by the wind. We've had the piano trailer tires catch fire on Highway 1. We've almost driven off the side of Mount Bachelor. We've played in 112-degree heat and negative 2 degrees in the winter," Noack said. And the piano has come out unscathed, including after it was towed down the washboard gravel along Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho — the only thing that happened was that it went out of tune.
Among the pieces on the program at Griffith Park is "Nature Boy," the song Eden Ahbez wrote while living outdoors under the first L of the Hollywood sign. The song was later made famous by Nat King Cole.
Audiences at the Griffith Park show will be provided with wireless headphones for concert-hall quality sound, he said. "Some people just set up their picnic chairs or blankets right near the stage. Other people lay down," Noack said. "When there's so much else that's happening visually ... the music kind of automatically becomes a soundtrack, and we all get to experience that together."
The series is named after "In a Landscape," a piece by John Cage, who believed any sound could be music — even "somebody crinkling on a bag of chips," Noack said.
During his first show in 2016 at the Columbia River Gorge, Noack was midway through a soft Schumann piece about a delicate flower when 40 Harley-Davidsons on a memorial ride rolled up and circled the piano.
Rather than pack it in, he answered with Frederic Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," a piece built to mimic the aggressive clatter of a cotton mill. "It was a conversation between the piano and these roaring Harleys," he said.
Where: Griffith Park, 3200 Canyon Dr., Los Angeles
When: 3 to 4:30 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 26 and Sunday, Sept. 27
Tickets: Both shows are sold out, but you can join the waitlist.
The show is held in partnership with the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that helps preserve Cahuenga Peak and the ridgeline around the Hollywood sign for the public.
Topline:
California accounted for the largest share of ICE arrests involving people from Asian countries during the first 18 months of President Trump’s second term, according to a new data tracker.
Why now: The new Asian and Pacific Islander ICE Tracker shows how arrests, detentions and deportations are rising faster among Asian immigrants than among immigrants overall.
Go deeper: ICE raids quiet SoCal's Asian hubs
California saw the largest share of immigration arrests of people from Asian countries during the first 18 months of President Trump’s second term, a new tracker shows.
More than 25% of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took place in California, home to the country's largest Asian population, followed by Texas and New York.
The findings come from the new Asian and Pacific Islander ICE Tracker launched by Stop AAPI Hate.
These communities are often missing from the national debate over immigration enforcement, said Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate during a briefing on the tracker.
“Asian and Pacific Islander communities deserve better than to be an afterthought in this crisis," Choi said. With the tracker, "we are aiming to ensure we cannot be ignored any longer."
The data shows that ICE actions targeting Asian immigrants rose much faster than enforcement against groups overall between January 2025 and August 2026.
Arrests were up 436% compared to a similar time period during the Biden administration; detentions up by 512%; deportations up by more than 1,100%.
The number of arrests peaked this past July with 1,950 recorded nationwide.
In California, there have been more than 5,300 arrests of Asian immigrants and more than 11,400 detention stints, which includes separate stays at different facilities during a single detention.
As for deportations, they were not broken down by state.
The largest numbers involved people from India and China, the countries of origin for the largest Asian immigrant populations in the U.S.
Stephanie Chan, Stop AAPI Hate’s director of data and research, noted that a rise in anti-Indian rhetoric centered on H1-B visa holders and truck drivers.
"You see a lot of elected officials saying things like, 'Indians are coming to take the jobs,'" Chan said.
Researchers also found that people from smaller communities — such as those from Laos and Uzbekistan — were arrested at rates far disproportionate to their share of the Asian noncitizen population.
The tracker draws from ICE records obtained through public-records requests by the Deportation Data Project at UCLA and UC Berkeley.
Leaders at Stop AAPI Hate said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is not only harming the people being swept up by ICE. Chan said the group’s annual survey of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders found more than half have felt the effects.
“That includes things like fearing that their status will be questioned,” Chan said. “That they will be arrested, detained, or deported.”
Choi drew parallels with how Asian Americans were scapegoated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who joined the briefing on the tracker, said the findings felt "very personal" because of the state’s large share of arrests.
A member of the Republican-led congressional China Committee focused on U.S. competition with the Chinese government, Khanna predicted Democrats would win the mid-terms and shift the tone of that panel.
"It's going to be much more about a celebration of Asian Americans — and documenting that — than the demonization of other countries," Khanna said.
