Underground Railroad Images Retrace the Steps of Fleeing Slaves

Few photos of this Underground Railroad exist, which is why Jeanine Michna-Bales has spent months following some of the known routes north, photographing the homes, forests and caves where those escaping slavery sought shelter.

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Our brains lied to us about blowing into Nintendo cartridges

It’s been widely discredited that blowing into the cartridge had any real effect, but then why did people keep doing it? In the latest installment of It’s Okay To Be Smart, host Joe Hanson looked at the cognitive biases that lead people to ascribe various victories and failures to actions that, really, had no bearing on the outcome at all.

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Massive Auction of Vintage Cartoon Stills

Heritage’s collection includes cels from 1960s and 70s Saturday-morning classics like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Schoolhouse Rock, and some of the pieces—like the Challenge of the SuperFriends title cel—are expected to bring upwards of $2,500.

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Oh! You Kid!

If we listen closely to “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!” we may hear a surprising lesson: that the culture-quaking shocks, the salaciousness and transgression we associate with blues and jazz and rock and hip-hop, first arrived in American pop many years earlier.

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A Disorienting Survey of Suburban Sprawl, from Dubai to L.A.

There’s something about the suburbs that seems to utterly repel and fascinate artists. The postwar burb-boom of Burbank, California, for example, was Tim Burton’s inspiration for the rows and rows of identical homes in Edward Scissorhands, while the Smashing Pumpkins offered a much less gracious view in their video for “1979,” which depicted the destructive teen-age boredom they tend to instill.

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Beats Deal Brings Apple to L.A.

Apple and Beats declined comment (and an official announcement has not been made), but one thing is clear: Beats won't be moving its 300 employees to Cupertino anytime soon. Days before news of the deal for the headphones and streaming music service broke May 8, Beats began to transition staff from Santa Monica to a new campus in Culver City. And a rep for Beats campus developer Hackman Capital Partners tells THR that the company has a multiyear lease in the millions of dollars for more than 100,000 square feet in WorkScapes at the Hayden Tract.

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It's Adventure Time

An in-depth look at Adventure Time and the people who make it.
Adventure Time’s dozens of characters are complex in a way that is rarely seen on television for adults, let alone children; each seems to inhabit his own world. In E.M. Forster’s memorable phrase, they are round characters, “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Lumpy Space Princess is a lovable but ghastly teenager, tediously obsessed with her old boyfriend, the unprepossessing Brad; she treats her well-meaning parents very shabbily. Marceline the Vampire Queen’s father is present just enough to make it impossible for her to ignore or forget his cruelty and selfishness—qualities she has inherited, to some degree. Princess Bubblegum is afflicted with intellectual arrogance and an inability to anticipate the dangerous consequences of her scientific experiments. (One of the story’s most provocative threads concerns the tension between science and magic).

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When the World Thought California Was an Island

The idea of California as an island existed in myth even before the region had been explored and mapped. “Around the year 1500 California made its appearance as a fictional island, blessed with an abundance of gold and populated by black, Amazon-like women, whose trained griffins dined on surplus males,” Philip Hoehn, then-map librarian at UC Berkley wrote in the foreword to a catalog of the maps that McLaughlin wrote.

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The Definitive Oral History of Mystery Science Theater 3000

As fun as MST3K was, life aboard the Satellite of Love wasn’t always easy: The show was never a ratings smash, and tension between Joel Hodgson and producer Jim Mallon led to Hodgson leaving the show just a few years into its run. In later years, members of the show’s ­Midwestern-based, DIY-determined staff found themselves struggling with the sort of big-TV bureaucracy they’d long fought to avoid.

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Could a Hotel Bring Back Los Angeles’ Theater Row?

Perhaps the most promising re-launch is the United Artists Theater, which has been incorporated into the recently opened Ace Hotel. The Ace group is internationally renowned for its locally sourced design consciousness. … The addition of the UA Theater – a richly historic structure with strong links to the city’s entertainment industry DNA – sealed the deal, giving the company a distinctive foothold in LA rooted to local character.

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Fame Came to Beverly Hills: Why Old Hollywood Moved In

Stanley Anderson did more than simply welcome guests to the hotel. He lured one of the period's biggest stars to become a resident, helping Douglas Fairbanks find a hunting lodge near the hotel. Once Fairbanks leased the property (which doubled as a rustic aerie for assignations with Mary Pickford), the actor then invited friends such as Will Rogers -- who would become the new city's honorary mayor -- and Charlie Chaplin to his hideaway.

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From 'Escape From L.A.' to 'Star Trek,' California is sci-fi

In sci-fi movies and the books that serve as their inspiration, the future of the Golden State goes something like this: Ten to 150 years from the present, California has succumbed to natural disaster/economic and governmental collapse/a pandemic, which leaves Southern California a corporate-fascist-military state with gross financial and racial inequality and urban squalor—while Northern California rips up its pavement, learns permaculture, gets spiritual, and models better living through technology and communitarian diversity.

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The Surprisingly Real Los Angeles of Modern Family

The city is not presented as a dystopian hellscape, a gang-riddled slum, or a hedonistic lotus land just begging for its earth-shaking, flame-engulfed comeuppance from a disgusted God. It’s just a place where normal Americans lead normal lives, albeit one with better weather.

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Culver Studios Won't Become Condos, Says New Owner

The studio, located in downtown Culver City with its highly recognizable front lawn and columned mansion (used for the Atlanta fire scenes in Gone With the Wind), was originally created by silent movie pioneer Thomas Ince in 1918. Past owners of the 14-acre studio property have included Cecil B. DeMille, Joseph Kennedy, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, David O. Selznick and Howard Hughes.

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The Loneliest Place in America? L.A.’s Bus Stops at Midnight

The challenge was getting enough stability for a high-quality image without alerting riders to his presence. The low-light required a longer exposure than usual, and so his camera had to remain completely still to avoid blurring the image. When even a suction cup rig didn’t do the trick, Brown settled on a length of pipe insulation with a slit down one side. The insulation fit over a rolled-down car window, and with a friend at the wheel, Brown would call a halt when a promising scene presented itself. He’s then quickly rest the lens on the insulation to stabilize the camera.

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Dalai Lama Faces Tough Questions at Hollywood Gathering

In traditional saffron robes and matching visor -- colors that corresponded nicely with the nearby University of Southern California's -- the Dalai Lama offered ruminations on a number of serious topics, including his thoughts on materialism, faith, same-sex relationships and a woman's place in the Buddhist clergy. On the latter point, he stressed that Buddhism has a long tradition of female monks, and saw no reason why one couldn't eventually take his place.

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Oscars Flashback: The True Story Behind 1974's Streaker

The streaking incident became Hollywood lore overnight, and even now is widely cited as one of the Oscar's most memorable moments, thanks in part to Niven's quick riposte as the audience roared and tittered. But the incident's notoriety is also due to the unorthodox life and tragic demise of the streaker himself, a conceptual artist, photographer and gay rights activist named Robert Opel.

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5 Most Awesome Things About Writing "Everything Is AWESOME!!!" for The Lego Movie

After months of the song getting cut into various early versions of the rough film, I finally went down to Animal Logic to meet with writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Chris McKay and producer Seanne Winslow. That…was AWESOME. They were all so incredibly happy with my song and appreciative of it. Also, I was such a huge fan of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s work, so this was just getting to be ridiculous levels of fun. Even if the song never ended up in the final film, the ride getting there was the best experience.      Read More.

How Hollywood Resists Disruption

Netflix isn’t eating the TV industry’s lunch, it’s paying for it. Its commercially and critically successful moves into original content—fantastic shows like "Orange is the New Black" and "House of Cards"—were commissioned in Los Angeles, created and produced by studio-system veterans, and packaged by Hollywood agencies. In fact, Netflix paid slightly above the going rate for Hollywood scripts and talent.

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What Musicians Can Tell Us About Dyslexia and the Brain

If parsing sounds is really the whole problem, how do you explain dyslexic musicians? After all, musicians are supposed to excel at making sense of sound. But a small number of them, it turns out, have dyslexia. Now, a team of researchers at Hebrew University in Israel has tried to sort this problem out–by rounding up, for the first time, a cohort of dyslexic musicians and testing their language abilities.

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Philip Seymour Hoffman: 12 scenes that make us miss him

That's that, mattress man.

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Sylvester Stallone's 'Expendables' Launches Nasty Writers Battle

In an unusually contentious example of how murky authorship can be in Hollywood, Stallone, who is credited as the co-writer of Expendables, has gone to battle against one writer in arbitration and another in federal court. He's been flagged by a judge for making two conflicting arguments. And lately, the situation has become so heated that an appeals court intervened and a new lawsuit was filed that threatens to undercut the traditional screenwriter credit process.

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R.I.P. Ruth Robinson Duccini, the last surviving female Munchkin

The Los Angeles Times reports that Ruth Robinson Duccini, the last surviving female Munchkin from The Wizard Of Oz, has died at the age of 95. Duccini appeared in the 1939 film as part of a 124-strong troupe of diminutive actors, though she had no lines and received no official credit. But in the years since, as that group inevitably dwindled, Duccini became one of the last living links to the beloved movie, and she was often called upon to turn up at Oz promotional events like the one in 2007, when she appeared alongside her fellow surviving Munchkins to receive their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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The PC’s Death Might Also Mean the Web’s Demise

As app-happy mobile devices become the primary way we compute, the good old browser becomes irrelevant. The hyperlinked, free-flowing, egalitarian, and ubiquitous world wide web will fade away. Instead, digital existence will mostly transpire within the more self-contained domains of individual apps, which offer their creators the flexibility and power of building right into the mobile operating systems. We will still have the internet, but it won’t be the same wherever you use it.

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Silicon Beach Boom Hits the Playa Vista Housing Market

The Campus at Playa Vista, as its 3 million-square-foot office space area is known, already houses the likes of YouTube, Facebook, Belkin and ad agencies like 72andSunny on the eastern side of the 1.3 mile area once controlled by Howard Hughes. On the western edge are some 3,100 residences that started construction in 2001 and were completed last year.

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East Coast Blizzard Seen From Space

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