Ian Hunter

Playing with Charles Chaplin's "The Gold Rush" (1925), with its famous shoe-eating sequence, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie is one of the most rarely seen Louise Brooks films, the 1926 "Love 'Em and Leave 'Em." Based on a novel in verse by John V. A.

The already crippled mental health system in the San Fernando Valley was dealt another blow Tuesday when Los Angeles County officials announced that the clinics will have to absorb roughly $700,000 in cuts if more state funds are not received. "The system is in such unbelievably bad shape, the prospect of further cuts is unconscionable, unbelievable," said Ian Hunter, executive director of the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center.

All right: who messed with the space-time continuum controls at the Roxy? Dramarama--the L.A. via New Jersey band that has built a loyal local following through KROQ airplay over the last couple of years--performed last week decked out in colorful, '60s-ish shirts on a stage strewn with Love Generation flowers; its music reflecting an array of '70s glitter and punk influences, its audience a slam-dancing morass of collegiates and skinheads drawn to the band's '80s suburban- Angst themes.

CD buyers are generally older and more affluent than vinyl or cassette album customers, retailers tell us. Still, Billboard magazine's weekly CD chart and its regular Top 200 album chart (which reports vinyl, cassette and CD sales) tend to be largely interchangeable. The notable exception in recent weeks: the Jimi Hendrix Experience's "Radio One" album. Released by Ryko, the album has been in the CD Top 20 for more than two months, but has yet to crack the Top 100 on the regular LP chart.

Astaging of George Balanchine's "The Nutcracker," featuring guest stars from the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet and the National Ballet of Cuba; a Down Under bill of Midnight Oil, INXS and Men at Work; and a barbecue with Willie Nelson highlight the Universal Amphitheatre's 2001-02 season.

The already crippled mental health system in the San Fernando Valley was dealt another blow Tuesday when Los Angeles County officials announced that the clinics will have to absorb roughly $700,000 in cuts if more state funds are not received. "The system is in such unbelievably bad shape, the prospect of further cuts is unconscionable, unbelievable," said Ian Hunter, executive director of the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center.

By the late 1940s, the Cold War had stifled the joy of winning World War II and Washington was on a witch hunt, egged on by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy looking for communists embedded anywhere in the American fabric. Hollywood took much of the heat. With the industry in peril of censure by the public, frightened studio heads established a secret blacklist of those named as communists in congressional hearings or people even just suspected of leftist leanings.

Waldo Salt's life sounds as compelling as one of his Oscar-winning screenplays. At the age of 22, he was a Hollywood up-and-comer. The graduate of Stanford University scored a hit with his first screenplay for the 1938 Margaret Sullavan-James Stewart romance, "Shopworn Angel." The son of a suicidal mother and a right-wing extremist father, Salt was an idealist. The same year "Shopworn Angel" was released, he became a devoted member of the American Communist Party.