Characters

Janice Steinberg's latest creation isn't technically her creation at all. Rather, the protagonist in her new novel, "The Tin Horse" (Random House: 352 pp., $26 hardcover), is the fully formed version of a marginal character plucked from Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep," a figure Steinberg had been preoccupied with for a while. An unnamed young woman who appears for a few brief pages in Chapter 5 of Chandler's famous noir - she's in a bookstore, reading a law book, when the detective Philip Marlowe wanders in and asks her about one of the other stores on the street.

The risk with basing any novel on a true story is that - as the saying goes - truth is so frequently stranger than fiction. Choosing to novelize the curious tale of Christian Gerhartsreiter, the Rockefeller impersonator and con man who abducted his own daughter in 2009, is a particularly gutsy move. So it's a testament to Amity Gaige's deftness as an author that her new novel, "Schroder," is a fascinating psychological portrait of love, longing and self-loathing - despite the countless magazine articles and TV special reports that Gerhartsreiter's exploits have already inspired.

Bruce Willis says he's never had a grand strategy for his career. But, thanks to a fateful decision he made just as he was on the cusp of major Hollywood stardom in the late 1980s, he's managed to navigate the tricky waters of fame and remain vital even while many of his peers have fallen on hard times. "I was doing TV for a long, straight shot - four, four and a half years - and I realized somewhere in there that I didn't want to be in every frame of every day," said the former star of "Moonlighting," whose latest movie, "A Good Day to Die Hard," debuted Thursday.

A quick perusal of the popular hashtag #IWishICouldMeet on Twitter led to a couple of conclusions. First, more than anything, people want to meet Justin Bieber, although Jesus is a close second. And a lot of people would like to be able to be another person meeting themselves, or their true love, whoever that might be. There didn't seem to be many bookish figures in the mix, so Tuesday morning we asked people on Twitter what authors or fictional characters they'd like to meet. A pair of Jane Austen's characters immediately jumped to the top of the list - Elizabeth Bennet and her dreamy Mr. Darcy just about tied.

Honestly, “Home” threatened to be a bit of a bore for me until its well-nigh transcendent final 10 minutes. But those final 10 minutes were so good that they ended up boosting my opinion of the episode as a whole quite a bit. Hey, if you're going to nail something in an episode of TV, you may as well nail the ending and leave everybody with a good taste in their mouths. Let's start at that ending, because I watched this episode a few hours ago, and already, everything that's not the ending is slipping from my memory.

DreamWorks Animation SKG is licensing its movie characters for various theme parks being developed in Russia, an increasingly important market for the Glendale-based studio. The creator of the "Shrek," "Madagascar" and "Kung Fu Panda" franchises said it had signed a licensing agreement with Regions Group of Companies, which is developing what is billed as Europe's largest indoor theme parks. Regions says it's the fourth-largest retail property owner in Russia. The parks, scheduled to open in 2015, would be located in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yekaterinburg and include various attractions based on DreamWorks characters.

My favorite moment of any given “Walking Dead” episode is the moment leading out of the teaser and into the opening credits, when the buzzing, anxious strings of the show's theme song gradually crowd whatever is happening on screen off it so the audience can stare at some images of the world after the zombie apocalypse arrives. I think I love this because the music is so perfect but also because it forces the audience into the minds of the characters on the show. They're people always looking behind themselves, waiting for death to catch up. As a comfortable, privileged guy who lives in Long Beach and writes about TV for a living, I expect that music is about the closest I'm going to get to feeling that sort of all-consuming existential terror.

It was no accident that British makeup artist Stuart Freeborn resembled his most famous movie creation - Yoda, the wrinkled, ancient sage from the "Star Wars" films. "I looked at myself in the mirror and decided that I was comic, with all these little knobbles. So I built myself in," he later said, and added a "highly intelligent" flourish by incorporating Albert Einstein's furrowed face. A self-taught wizard of greasepaint and gadgets, Freeborn crafted the diminutive Yoda partly out of wire, electronic circuits and bubbly latex skin.

Veteran character actor Richard Erdman has come full circle. Discovered seven decades ago starring in a frivolous school play, "Ever Since Eve," at Hollywood High, Erdman was personally signed to a contract at Warner Bros. by Michael Curtiz, the Oscar-winning director of "Casablanca. " And 70 years later, Erdman's back in school - so to speak. He plays the recurring role of the irascible college student Leonard on NBC's acclaimed sitcom "Community," which returns for its fourth season on Thursday evening.

Casting Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of Lancaster Dodd in "The Master" was surely a no-brainer for director Paul Thomas Anderson, who has been friends with the Oscar-winning actor for 17 years and has cast him in five of his films (including a small role in Anderson's debut feature, "Hard Eight"). And Hoffman himself is effusive when talking about his good friend, who hired him for the first time in 10 years for "The Master. " "We met when I was like, 25," says Hoffman. "We talked a lot and became fast friends, and we've been friends ever since.