Director

Donald R. Roden, fired in November as chief executive of Bergen Brunswig Corp. in Orange, has resigned as a director of the nation's third-largest drug wholesaler, the company said Monday. Roden, 53, who joined Bergen as president in 1995, had assumed the top operating position three years ago amid great fanfare. But the troubled company's performance faltered and Wall Street pounded the stock, which has lost more than 80% of its value over the past year.

The body of award-winning film director Claude Jutra, who disappeared from his Montreal apartment last November, has been found in the St. Lawrence River, police in Quebec told the Associated Press Thursday. A former medical student who turned to drama at Montreal's Theater of the New World, the French-Canadian was probably best known as a leading Canadian exponent of cinema verite.

Clarence Brown, the one-time engineer and World War I aviator who became one of the film world's most prolific directors, enhancing the careers of such diverse stars as Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Norma Shearer and Elizabeth Taylor, died late Monday night at St. John's Medical Center in Santa Monica. Medical center spokesman Armen Markarian said Brown, a six-time Academy Award nominee, had been admitted Aug. 8 and died at 11:15 of kidney failure.

The actors, finished with the run-through, pause. The director, not pausing, jumps up from his chair. He crosses over the bright red tape that marks the edge of the imaginary stage in the rehearsal room and huddles with his cast. "You don't have to move so quickly . It's not like I'm asking you to behave like marionettes," he says gently. "Rather, it's a case of discovering, moment to moment, how you get from this line to that line, this move to that move. That takes time.

There's nothing better for the theater's intellectual health than a scandal--of the proper sort. Not the sleazy kind where Miss Z is arrested for using controlled substances, or where Mr. Y has to explain what he did with the grant money. I mean an old-fashioned artistic cause celebre , where the onlooker is forced to do some hard thinking about the principles at issue.

Fred Kahan, retired Los Angeles-area director of the Jewish National Fund of America, the support organization that has turned millions of desert acres into the nation of Israel, died Tuesday. He was 77 and died in his Studio City home of an apparent aneurysm, a spokesman for the fund said. Born in Jerusalem as the descendant of 11 generations of rabbis, Kahan came to the United States after World War I and attended a seminary in New Jersey.

For years, the top director of Los Angeles County's child protective services agency sat in an office hidden behind an unmarked, locked door. When current director Philip Browning arrived, he made an early decision to use a doorstop to prop it open. And he publicly posted his own name and picture as well as those of his managers, prompting protests by some who feared for their safety. "The goal is to change the culture," Browning said, acknowledging the embarrassment that some feel at an agency shamed by repeated failures that have allowed at-risk children to die. "What I would like to see is for the worker to be so proud of what he's doing that he tells his next-door neighbor where he works, which is not the case right now. " Browning, 66, who rises at 4:15 a.m. to run five miles before work, is attempting to revive one of the most troubled public agencies in Southern California.

AS I write this, I'm well into the third week of rehearsals for my new play at the Geffen Playhouse, "The Quality of Life. " As the playwright, I would have ducked out by now to let the director and the actors work out the nuts and bolts of interpreting the play. Maybe I'd get the occasional phone call from the director wondering if they could possibly add or cut a line. But mostly I would rightfully be asked to disappear so everyone could mess around with the text in peace without having me hunched in the back of the rehearsal room wringing my hands.

There's a notable moment in "Olympus Has Fallen," director Antoine Fuqua's action thriller that arrives in theaters Friday: a desecrated American flag is discarded from atop the White House by North Korean terrorists and falls, in slow-motion, to the ground as dirge-like music plays in the background. It's the type of scene - bold to his fans, cringe-worthy to his critics - that Fuqua has used in nearly all of his films. "I wanted to create an exciting movie, but give it these small moments of truth," the director said, noting that he sought to show America's post-9/11 vulnerability.