John Singleton

It's St. Valentine's Day, and somewhere love is for sale, though not on sale. For centuries the wealthy have lured the sexy and beautiful with jewels, cigars, fine wines and racing cars. Kate Spade bags, David Yurman rubies, Rolex watches or a Swiss bank account can work. But to close the deal, there's nothing like a well-furnished house. France's Louis XVI gave Marie Antoinette the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

An SUV driven by film director John Singleton struck and fatally injured a woman as she walked across a Los Angeles street in what was apparently a "tragic accident," a police spokesman said Friday. About 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Singleton was driving west on Jefferson Boulevard near 5th Avenue when his Lexus SUV hit Constance Russell, 57, said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Jason Lee. Russell was not in a crosswalk, he said. Russell died at a hospital Friday morning.

\o7I\f7\o7N\f7 Hollywood, to paraphrase the old James Brown song, it's a white, white, \o7very\f7 white world. Sometimes when I sit in on a production meeting or visit a movie set or have lunch at the Grill I'm struck by the fact that in an industry with an ever-growing roster of African American and Latino actors and filmmakers, the odds of my seeing a black or Latino executive are about as good as seeing a studio chief pumping gas at a truck stop in Wyoming.

RE "More Color, Please," by Patrick Goldstein, June 20: From what I know about the movie business, mainly from reading Calendar, the most desired audiences are young people, usually under 30. Most white Americans would be amazed to learn what demographers know: Among the population of the U.S. under 30, whites constitute only about 55%. In America today, more nonwhite babies are born than white babies. Unless immigration policy is changed dramatically, the audience of tomorrow will be overwhelmingly brown and black.

In one of the bigger sales ever to come down at the Sundance Film Festival, Paramount Pictures and MTV Films purchased writer-director Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow" for $9 million as part of an agreement, under which producer John Singleton will make two other films, that brings the total package to $16 million.

It's high-stakes poker played out in library stairwells, on snowy sidewalks and inside coffee bars and ear-deafening nightclubs, as well as in swank condos and hotel rooms spread all across this picturesque mountain resort. Every winter, Hollywood studios descend on the Sundance Film Festival to scoop up independent movies. But because of the condensed period during which buyers and sellers can meet and negotiate, Sundance is a far cry from the way deals go down in Beverly Hills.

A mere 10 months ago, the filmmakers, actors and producers of this year's Sundance sensation "Hustle & Flow" were celebrating the sale of their hip-hop romance about a pimp trying to rise above. It seemed like a fairy tale ending to a grueling indie saga. After getting rejected all over town, novice filmmaker Craig Brewer finally persuaded producer John Singleton to pony up a couple of million dollars of his own money to make the film.

The African American Film Critics Assn. has named "Crash" -- a gritty drama about race relations in Los Angeles -- its top film pick of the year. Terrence Howard was selected as best actor for his performance in "Hustle & Flow."

John Singleton is standing out on the sidewalk, admiring a row of palm trees that stretches down the block, out to the horizon. The moon is peeking through the palm fronds and, perhaps because film directors see things filtered through the gauzy eye of artistic intentions, the humble street just off Vernon Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard, with its gnarled backyard orange trees, seems to glisten with all the serenity of picture-postcard Los Angeles.

John Singleton is selling fictitious tales of "geto tragedy" to white mainstream America and defiling images of both black women and black men in the process ("A Difficult Coming of Age," by Patrick Goldstein, Feb. 27). It is especially ironic that this USC film school graduate, who is currently making a $14-million rehash of some black urban pathology theme from the 1960s Moynihan Report, is criticizing the "black bourgeoisie" for correctly calling the film misogynistic. Who is Singleton kidding?