The Glowing Lights and Sleepless Nights of LA’s Film Industry

In his photo series Ext. Night, Gregg Segal captures the eerie, magical effect those lights have on the city. He got the idea 10 years ago while driving home to Altadena one night. Passing by Hollenbeck Park, he decided to stop and photograph the trees, illuminated in the glow of a shoot. He spent two hours making pictures, transfixed by the scene.

See more.

How Pong and the Odyssey Console Launched the Videogame Era

Although there are many inventions that could reasonably make some claim to being the first videogame, there’s no question what the first big hit game was: Atari’s Pong. The iconic table-tennis game became an overnight sensation after a prototype first appeared in a bar in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972, and in no time at all videogames went from almost zero to a multi-billion dollar global industry.

Read More.

You Can Now Play Oregon Trail Online for Free

The Internet Archive, which is best known for running the world wide web’s time capsule, The Wayback Machine, has put the game that traumatized countless children of the ’80s and ’90s online. That means future generations can feel the oppressive horror of attempting to fight their way across the Oregon Trail on a steady diet of squirrel meat with only an axe, some rope and frequent bouts of dysentery, pausing in their manifest destiny only long enough to etch grandma’s epitaph on a makeshift tombstone on the side of trail.

Read More.

Artists Put Rooms on City Streets and Invite You to Play House

Bettman and Eker dismantled their first set—the living room where two children sit on a couch with a typewriter and a goldfish bowl—shortly after the shoot, but then decided to leave them up with a sign that invited pedestrians to snap and post a photo with #setinthestreet.

See more.

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.

See more.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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).

Read the article.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read more.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.

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.

Read More.