Attic

The extraterrestrial advance team in the kid-friendly adventure romp "Aliens in the Attic" qualifies as the most unthreatening bunch of cinematic space invaders since the waterlogged aliens in M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs." But then that's precisely the point, since adults have as much place in the movie's world as the grown-ups in the "Peanuts" comic strips.

Some people talk with their hands. Robert Hoffman talks with his fingers extending from the hands, flowing from the arms and the trunk. But the classically trained dancer, award-winning hip-hop choreographer and rubber-boned scene stealer of "Aliens in the Attic" isn't waxing balletic with those dexterous digits; he's describing prank videos in which he scares the bejesus out of total strangers.

Long before she became a TV icon as the ultimate Italian mamma Marie Barone on "Everybody Loves Raymond," Doris Roberts was a young actress trying to make a name for herself in New York in the 1950s alongside some classmates who went on to bigger things as well. "I was a member of the Actors Studio," Roberts said in a recent interview. "Marilyn Monroe used to come to class. Martin Balsam was there. Anne Bancroft was there. Geraldine Page."

A recent fire in a Milwaukee public school that dates back to 1894 resulted in an unusual find: a U.S. flag left in an unused attic area for more than 100 years. District officials say the flag is from 1897 and has 45 stars, representing the number of states at that time. They said the flag is believed to have been in the attic for 112 years.

A firefighter was injured Saturday while putting out a fire in the attic of a home. He had second-degree burns to his neck and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was listed in stable condition, said spokesman Cecil Manresa of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Manresa did not know whether debris had fallen on the firefighter, who was not identified. The fire was reported about 6 a.m. at a single-family home in the 7000 block of Bonsallo Avenue. At least 14 firefighters were involved in putting out the fire, Manresa said.

The Body Shop, a landmark strip club famed for giving Sunset Boulevard nude dancing and hundreds of struggling actresses work, was shuttered Wednesday after a dawn fire burned through its roof. A cleaning crew discovered smoke billowing from a side door of the West Hollywood building when they arrived at 6:45 a.m. No one was inside when the blaze began in the attic, the owner said. The kitchen, dressing room and office were seriously damaged.

W.R. Grace & Co. has agreed to pay as much as $140 million to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from its use of an attic-insulating product that contained asbestos. The specialty chemical maker will pay $30 million into a trust fund, an additional $30 million after three years, and make as many as 10 additional annual payments of $8 million if certain conditions are met, it said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A newly discovered tape of the Beatles laughing and chatting during an early recording session has sold for $23,446, an auction house reported Tuesday. Cameo Auctioneers said the reel-to-reel tape was recorded in 1964 and had recently been discovered by a man in northern England while he was clearing out his father's attic. The tape features John Lennon and Paul McCartney collapsing into fits of giggles as they try to finish the ballad "I'll Follow the Sun."

In a mere 50 minutes, dancer-choreographers and longtime collaborators Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters can create a magical world that is part Marceau, part Magritte and all polished craft. That's what they do in "An Attic an Exit," which received its L.A. premiere at Hollywood's Unknown Theater on Thursday. And by the way: Their movement vocabulary is nothing less than stunning.

In Los Angeles, a city known for discarding history, Mayme Clayton defied convention by collecting it. For four decades she prowled garage sales, flea markets, attics, used-book stores, even dumps. From these waste heaps of memory, the soft-spoken librarian rescued thousands of rare and unusual books, movies, sound recordings, photographs, letters and ephemera, much of it dating to the slavery era.