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A piece of Hollywood, Spike Lee, hard news in the Valley
Orange County's Movieland Wax Museum is, eh, liquidating its inventory. Marilyn, Arnie, Michael J. Fox and the Little Rascals could all be yours at the March 11 auction. A lot of these figures were obviously made a while ago: Michael Jackson is brown. Stars start at $500; extras $100. You could almost get a live extra to stand around for that, although you'd have to buy him lunch.
Spike Lee came to town to speak about the hard work of being a black filmmaker ... in Torrance. When an audience member asked why he'd ended up in, of all places, the beach enclave, he replied, "We don't discriminate."
This weekend word spread around the nation that inmates were forced to strip naked by deputies in an effort to quell the jail rioting earlier this month. Even the ACLU says the unorthodox discipline is the result of the jails being underequipped and understaffed.
In the last two weeks, there have been four murders in North Hills in the San Fernando Valley. It's not just gangs killing each other; a 92-year-old man out for a morning walk was beaten to death.