Entertainment Industry

Plunk the kids down in the den and turn on the tube. Hello, "WWF Smackdown," and goodbye juvenile delinquency! That, anyway, is the marvelously counterintuitive notion of Jib Fowles, a communications professor at the University of Houston's Clear Lake campus.

The newly formed SAG-AFTRA board of directors has confirmed David White as the merged union's sole national executive director. The national board of SAG-AFTRA voted overwhelmingly Sunday to select White for the job, approving a new three-year contract. White, the former Screen Actors Guild executive director, was expected to assume the new position as the chief administrative officer for the union of about 160,000 members. He had been serving as co-national executive director with former American Federation of Television and Radio Artists leader Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, who announced last month that she was resigning.

Karen Higgins Construction coordinator Credits: Currently working on the comedy "Brothers Solomon"; just wrapped "Nancy Drew." Other films include "Anger Management," "50 First Dates" and "Good Night, and Good Luck." Job description: "The short definition is that I am head of the construction department, and the construction department is basically responsible for building the sets for a film or for TV or for commercials -- I do primarily film.

Keith Olbermann isn't mincing words in his $70-million lawsuit against Current TV. Dumped last week by the upstart cable network, Olbermann let loose a verbal barrage against co-founders Al Gore and Joel Hyatt in a 43-page legal complaint for breach of contract filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accusing them of blackmail and calling them "dilettantes portraying entertainment industry executives. " The lawsuit sets the stage for a high-profile legal battle between two leaders of American liberalism: Gore, a former U.S. vice president and Nobel laureate, and Olbermann, a fiery talk-show host.

When Creative Artists Agency Chairman Michael Ovitz was named Coca-Cola's pop-culture guru recently, it set off a wave of jokes about other possible talent agency marriages. International Creative Management, one of CAA's rivals, could represent 7-Up. Another rival might take on Valvoline. Hardly a company, it seemed, escaped parody. Ovitz's ambitious consulting pact with Coke marks the first time that a talent agency has been hired to shape a consumer product giant's image.

To understand what makes Skip Brittenham one of the most powerful entertainment attorneys in the country, picture him fly-fishing. Standing thigh-deep in one of his favorite roaring rivers, he knows just how to gauge where the biggest trout will be and which fly will catch its attention. Most important, he knows precisely when to strike.

In the brash, bare-knuckled world of Hollywood talent agents, Sam Gores is an anomaly. Competitors of Paradigm's chairman laud him as a gentleman, and actually mean it. Unlike agents obsessed with headlines and their place on the latest power list, Gores would rather do business out of the limelight. "He is the most un-agent-like agent in the business because he's a human being first," said actor and longtime Paradigm client Laurence Fishburne.

This week I was asked to speak at an evening program at a local temple on the ever-popular topic of "Jews in Hollywood." I brought along a true Hollywood Jew, Sony Pictures' Amy Pascal, who spoke quite eloquently and insightfully about her faith and how it's sometimes tested by her job.

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney mulled over arithmetic problems together. Lana Turner ditched typing class and got discovered as she sipped a Coke across the street. And Carol Burnett wrote and edited the school newspaper. Hollywood High School will turn 100 years old next month.

The newest management firm in Hollywood has no name. But it has snagged some of the biggest names in entertainment. Continuing a long tradition of entrepreneurial spinoffs by representatives of actors, directors and writers, a collection of six talent managers announced Wednesday that they had come together to create their own business.

For a recent episode of the TV series "Modern Family," Raul Ojeda crafted a pair of shoes covered in red sequins for actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson. His character, Mitchell, shows off the shoes for a "Wizard of Oz"-themed birthday party he throws for his partner, Cam. A decade ago, Raul Ojeda was working as a shoe shiner. Now the 29-year-old is leaving his own footprint in Hollywood, supplying custom-made shoes to stars such as Steve Carell and Sally Field. Ojeda is the owner of Los Angeles-based Willie's Shoe Service, a shoe repair shop that has been providing footwear to the entertainment industry since 1956, when Willebaldo "Willie" Rivera opened a small business across from Paramount Pictures on Melrose Avenue.

In many ways, too many ways, HBO's new comedy "Life's Too Short" is "Extras" with a dwarf. If that sounds harsh and potentially offensive, well, "Life's Too Short" is that too. It is also, at times, extremely funny. A faux documentary starring the very talented Warwick Davis ("Willow," the "Harry Potter" series) as a down-market version of himself, "Life's Too Short" is another way for creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to look at the reeking underbelly of the entertainment industry.

Despite complaints about his failure to support Hollywood's position on online piracy, President Obama does not appear to have lost his fundraising base in the entertainment community. As Obama arrives in Los Angeles on Wednesday, local campaign fundraisers said there has been no drop-off in Hollywood donations to his reelection bid since the D.C. demise of long-sought anti-piracy legislation. Hollywood's chief lobbyist Chris Dodd suggested last month that Obama and his fellow Democrats could pay a price for not representing the industry's interests in Washington.

The gig: Michael Palmer is co-founder and executive producer of Clevver Media, a nearly 6-year-old Hollywood company that has launched seven YouTube channels, including its flagship, ClevverTV, a teen version of TMZ or E! that provides entertainment and celebrity news for the "Twilight" generation. The intern: As a film production major at USC, Palmer interned for one of the most successful producers in Hollywood: Jerry Bruckheimer, whose credits include the popular "CSI" television series and "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie franchise.

After a week in which their anti-piracy legislation got derailed by the full force of the Internet lobby, the mood in Hollywood was one of anger, frustration and a growing resignation that the entertainment industry will be forced to accept a much weaker law than originally envisioned. A full-on counterattack by a tech industry opposed to the toughest elements in the congressional bills, including a well-publicized Wednesday shutdown by key Internet sites, halted the legislation.

Looking to expand its foothold beyond the AM-FM dial, radio giant Clear Channel has tapped entertainment industry veteran John Sykes to lead a push into television, digital and live events. Clear Channel, the nation's biggest owner of stations with 850 outlets across the country including KIIS-FM, KOST-FM and KBIG-FM in Los Angeles, wants to leverage its strength in radio across a wide range of platforms. "We can use that horsepower to create new products," said Bob Pittman, chief executive of Clear Channel parent company CC Media Holdings Inc. The hiring of Sykes is the first major move by Pittman since becoming chief executive of CC Media last November.

Tremors rocked the entertainment industry over the weekend as one Hollywood talent agency was sold, another prepared to go out of business and a third announced a management buyout. The William Morris Agency purchased Triad Artists, whose clients include actor Bruce Willis and country music star Vince Gill, for an undisclosed sum. At the same time, several top executives have left InterTalent in anticipation of the company's demise.

Besides rich clients and the world's fashion journalists, there are a handful of others who descend upon Paris each season for the haute couture shows, which took place this week. They are the celebrity stylists, such as Fati Parsia of Los Angeles, who come for a firsthand look at the world's most glamorous fashions for their clients to wear in magazine layouts, music videos, TV appearances, movie premieres and awards shows.

Every revolution has elements of tragedy as well as triumphs — even the bloodless revolutions in the way people earn a living. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called it "creative destruction," the entrepreneurial-driven process that "incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. " Such a process was set in motion by digital technology, which released information from...

In his private journal, Jason Michael Handy once described himself as a "pedophile, full blown. " Handy snapped more than 1,000 photos of girls at the elementary school across the street from his house, using a camera with a telephoto lens, according to court documents. He volunteered at a Malibu church, where he worked with 6-year-olds. And his job as a production assistant at one of the nation's most prominent producers of children's television programs, Nickelodeon, gave him access to child actors on and off the set, and allowed him to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with them.