Actors

You can't open up a sports section or read a sports blog without being bombarded by story after story about Manny Ramirez's tumultuous contract negotiations with the Dodgers. The whole affair has an air of melodrama, punctuated with more bitter recriminations, wounded egos and thinly veiled threats than a Middle East peace conference. But from my perch, what is most fascinating is the astoundingly public nature of the negotiations, with the most intricate financial details all out in the open.

At this stage of "Lost,""%20mystery no one actually believed that John Locke would remain dead, but still, it's satisfying to see him alive again. That is, alive in the way that you and I are -- not in flashbacks, and not in the way that the ghosts of Charlie and Ana Lucia appear to Hurley or the ghost or some supernatural semblance of Christian Shephard roams the island.

If it hadn't been for a girl, James LeGros may not have become one of the stalwarts of independent cinema. Though he's not quite a household name, the 46-year-old actor has consistently given complex and daring performances for the last two decades in such indie films as "Drugstore Cowboy," "Living in Oblivion," "Lovely & Amazing," and can be seen in a new comedy, "Sherman's Way," which opened in theaters on Friday.

Eight decades ago, audiences around the world flocked to see the remarkable stunts, supreme athleticism, swarthy good looks and boundless charm of Douglas Fairbanks in a series of lavish swashbuckling adventures including "The Mark of Zorro," "Robin Hood," "The Three Musketeers" and "The Gaucho." Two of his best films, 1924's "The Thief of Bagdad" and 1929's "The Iron Mask," are screening today and Monday, respectively, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Most people in Hollywood are bad at math, which is probably why actors are so wildly overpaid and movie budgets are always spiraling out of control. But in what other business could you possibly write the following equation: 0 x 0 x 0 x 0 = $100 million-plus? Or to make it a word problem: Is it possible to take four actors whose careers are virtually in commercial eclipse, throw them together in the same film and have movie marketers predicting the picture will be a big box-office success?

Cloris Leachman was convinced she was dead. "I felt the outlines of my body and nothing was in it," she recalls. "I had no brains, no guts, no heart, no bones. This was heaven and I was dead and I was standing there." Of course, she'd just been flung horizontally into the air -- gripped by a single arm and leg -- and twirled around by her dance partner, Corky Ballas, in an encore performance of their "Dancing With the Stars" routine on the talk show "The View."

It turns out that Michael Bay runs an audition a lot like he makes movies. Last year, Ramon Rodriguez visited Bay's Santa Monica offices seeking a key role in "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and, instead of a sedate line reading, the young actor was basically told to run for his life.

Nobody could play the brooding antihero better than James Mason. Tall and dark, with a voice so sonorous it could melt butter, the British actor came to fame in his native country in such films as Carol Reed's 1947 thriller "Odd Man Out," in which he played a mortally wounded Irish revolutionary. America soon beckoned and Mason quickly became a leading man with an edge, excelling in flawed, often dangerous, characters.

It's impossible to separate what makes John Cassavetes' "Husbands" exhilarating from what makes it exasperating. Following three suburban family men into the maw of a midlife crisis brought on by a mutual friend's untimely death, the movie is set at a fever pitch that at times approaches outright hysteria. Rarely has depression been so manic. Cassavetes conceived the 1970 movie, incongruously subtitled "A comedy about life death and freedom," as a showcase for three actors: himself, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, whose character takes the reminder of his own mortality most violently to heart.

Just a few weeks ago, Katie Featherston was balancing plates brimming with spaghetti and baked ravioli, working as a waitress at Buca di Beppo at Universal CityWalk. Micah Sloat was a struggling actor/computer programmer living in North Hollywood. Now, they're watching the micro-budget horror movie they filmed three years ago develop into a full-blown phenomenon. The two play the young couple haunted by a spectral force in the breakout hit "Paranormal Activity." The suspenseful supernatural thriller, reminiscent of "The Blair Witch Project," has become one of the year's biggest success stories.