Tom Hanks welcomes Off-Ramp to the set of Larry Crowne ... Eat:LA on new Vietnamese food and make-your-own limoncello ... Dinner Party Download ... LA Film Festival ... Hard Times meets Peggy Martin ...
Off-Ramp exclusive: Tom Hanks and George Takei on "Larry Crowne"
6/21/11 -- UPDATE: "Larry Crowne" hits theatres July 1st. Here's our piece from the set of the movie while it was filming last summer.
Normally, the studios don't want journalists anywhere around a movie set (the Pentagon might want to follow this example), or they embargo any info gathered there, but Tom Hanks allowed Off-Ramp exclusive access to the set of the new movie he's written, directed, and starred in -- "Larry Crowne" -- which was entirely shot in the LA area, including a K-Mart in Long Beach.
Hard Times, Hard Life, Good Attitude
For our Hard Times series – conversations with people hit hard by the "Great Recession" – Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with 48-year old Peggy Martin in the front yard of her bungalow apartment in Pasadena.
Eat:LA's Vietnamese Evolution and Homemade Limoncello
Eat:LA's Colleen Bates looks at a new wave of Vietnamese restaurants, and talks with Joseph Shuldiner, who makes his own aperitifs from local fruit, much of it harvested from local backyards. Click HERE for the Limoncello Recipe!
Restaurants mentioned:
Spice Table
114 S. Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 620-1840
thespicetable.com?
Good Girl Dinette
110 N Avenue 56
Los Angeles, CA 90042-4112
(323) 257-8980
goodgirlfoods.com?
Ginger grass Silverlake
2396 Glendale Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90039-3209
(323) 644-1600
gingergrass.com?
Red Medicine
8400 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
(323) 651-5500
redmedicinela.com?
Xoia
1801 West Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90026-3226
(213) 413-3232
xoiaeats.com?
Author and former lifeguard Craig Lockwood on the way things were
Earlier this month, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson went to the Santa Monica Pier Paddle and Ocean Festival: both a paddle boarding competition and a celebration of the rich history behind LA surf culture. He spoke with Craig Lockwood: author, co-chair at the Surfing Heritage Foundation, AND a former lifeguard.
Craig's newest book is called Peanuts, a biography on the legendary surfer George Lawson. You can buy it through the Surfing Heritage Foundation's website.
KPCC's Crawford Family Forum hosts panel on the state of LA Theatre
For the first time in decades, the Theatre Communications Group, a nationwide theatre advocacy organization held its annual conference in Los Angeles. After the conference, which was the organizations 50th, KPCC's Steve Julian hosted a panel with several LA Theatre executives inside our Crawford Family Forum to discuss the state of live performance in LA today.
The panelists included:
Terence McFarland, Executive Director, LA Stage Alliance
Kappy Kilburn, Founder/Co-Producer, Director's Lab West
Ben Hill, Festival Director, Hollywood Fringe Festival
Mark Murphy, Executive Director, REDCAT/Co-Curator RADAR L.A.
Diane Rodriguez, Associate Producer/Director of New Play Production, Center Theatre Group/TCG Board Member and National Conference Co-chair, co-curator for RADAR L.A.
Marie-Reine Velez, Board President, TeAda Productions/National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival Steering Committee
Dinner Party Download talks sweetness and punishment with John C Reilly
Rico and Brendan--with the help of John C Reilly--help you get smart, informed and drunk. All so you can win your next dinner party.
Goodbye, Columbus Day. Hello #ColumboDay!
It's Columbus Day, honoring, as anthropologist Jack Weatherford puts it, the man "who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history:"
Autumn would hardly be complete in any elementary school without construction-paper replicas of the three cute ships that Columbus sailed to America, or without drawings of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance Columbus' trip.
This myth of the pawned jewels obscures the true and more sinister story of how Columbus financed his trip. The Spanish monarch invested in his excursion, but only on the condition that Columbus would repay this investment with profit by bringing back gold, spices, and other tribute from Asia. This pressing need to repay his debt underlies the frantic tone of Columbus' diaries as he raced from one Caribbean island to the next, stealing anything of value.
After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply - human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.
-- Anthropologist Jack Weatherford, Macalaster College
So instead of Columbus, let's honor Columbo!
Here's my 2010 interview with William Link, co-creator of "Columbo," along with "Mannix" and "Murder, She Wrote." Link explains how he and his partner came up with the idea of Columbo, and why they didn't approach it as a "whodunit."