Los Angeles Film Festival

Davis Guggenheim calls himself a "Behind the Music" junkie, watching every episode of the VH1 show chronicling famous rock stars' rise and fall and rise again amid triumph and self-destruction. He loves it, he says, but the Academy Award-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth" had other ideas for his own documentary on the electric guitar.

The Los Angeles Film Festival on Thursday named producer and board member Rebecca Yeldham its new director, replacing Richard Raddon, who was pushed out of the job in November following his support of Proposition 8. In appointing Yeldham to the top job, festival organizer Film Independent picked someone who not only was familiar with the festival's internal operations but also had served as a programmer of the Sundance Film Festival.

Hollywood is full of filmmakers who are uncompromising perfectionists, but only Michael Mann could boast that he not only has a favorite room to screen his films -- the Zanuck theater on the Fox lot -- but also a favorite row in the theater where he thinks you should park your fanny for the optimal viewing experience.

One is notable for being the only X-rated film to win an Oscar. The other marks the first starring role for an actor who would later change the face of American cinema. Both are playing the Los Angeles Film Festival this week as special retrospective screenings.

As Newsweek's veteran movie critic, David Ansen has reviewed thousands of movies during his career. The eyestrain is about to grow even worse: Ansen was named Monday as the artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. In his new position picking some 80 dramatic and documentary features for the LAFF, Ansen and his programming staff must sort through as many as 5,000 annual submissions. But Ansen said his long career reviewing movies (Ansen was the magazine's critic from 1977 to 2008 and now serves as a Newsweek contributing editor)

In the eyes of Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten, his documentary "Bananas!" is a balanced, nuanced depiction of a trial pitting Nicaraguan banana plantation workers and a prominent L.A. attorney against a powerful multinational agribusiness. "It is a classical David-Goliath story," the director said in a phone interview last week. In the eyes of Dole Food Co.