Movies Television

After a marathon meeting, Hollywood's two main actors unions took a historic step toward creating the largest and potentially most powerful entertainment union in the industry. Leaders of the 125,000-member Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which has about 70,000 members, reached a merger agreement Monday after nine days of intensive talks at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel. If approved as expected by the union boards and memberships, the merger would end a decades-long competition between the two groups to organize actors.

Hollywood North is going south. That's the fear among many in the once-booming production community in Vancouver, Canada. Although Vancouver still attracts high-profile movies and television shows, including A&E's recently launched "Bates Motel," the city is rapidly losing its perch as one of the industry's busiest production hubs as it faces rising competition from cities in eastern Canada and south of the border. The city that pioneered the use of film incentives now finds itself struggling to compete with emerging rivals offering stronger tax credits and rebates.

A New Address: Actress Daphne Zuniga ("The Sure Thing," "Gross Anatomy") is joining Fox's "Melrose Place," cast as an aspiring young photographer who is running away from her past. Her first episodes will turn up in November.

Free movies and TV in economy class and free beer, wine and spirits in what the carrier calls Economy Comfort are among new services and amenities coming to Delta Air Lines flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The airline also plans to expand its entertainment library to offer up to 100 movie selections. "We've been making an investment in our transcontinental service, phasing in full flat-bed seats [in BusinessElite class]

The City Council appointed a liaison Tuesday to enforce city guidelines for movie and television filming in Monrovia. The city's Old Town business district has been popular for many years as a location for movies, television and commercials. Ivan Andjuar, a member of the city's administrative services staff, will supervise film shoots to make sure the companies abide by prearranged hours and guidelines that allow businesses to remain open during filming. Assistant City Manager Donald R.

Kim Chan, a character actor who broke through in film playing Jerry Lewis' butler in "The King of Comedy," died Sunday in New York City. He was believed to be either 93 or 94, his niece told the New York Times. After emigrating as a boy with his family from the province of Canton, China, he worked at his family's Chinese restaurant in New York City's theater district and discovered show business. He started out appearing in small parts in plays. In 1957, he made his film debut as a radio announcer in "A Face in the Crowd."

Free movies and TV in economy class and free beer, wine and spirits in what the carrier calls Economy Comfort are among new services and amenities coming to Delta Air Lines flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The airline also plans to expand its entertainment library to offer up to 100 movie selections. "We've been making an investment in our transcontinental service, phasing in full flat-bed seats [in BusinessElite class]

Netflix is testing a redesign of its website that would for the first time separate movies and television shows into separate tabs, each with dozens of subcategories to help users sort through their thousands of options. The potential redesign is currently being tested with a small number of users. If the video subscription company finds that the design increases overall usage, it could deploy the new look to all 23.4 million of its Internet streaming customers in the U.S. Currently, users can find movies and television shows to watch on Netflix's website by searching or via suggestions the company makes based on content the user previously watched.

Robert Sidney, who choreographed for the Broadway stage and Las Vegas nightclubs as well as for movies and television, died of pneumonia March 26 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to publicist Dale Olson. He was 98. Best known for his work in "This Is the Army," a 1942 Broadway show with music by Irving Berlin that later toured the world and was made into a movie in 1943, Sidney went on to create dance numbers for many of Hollywood's major talents.

Fanhattan, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that makes a smart guide to movies and television shows online, took its first steps beyond the iOS universe Thursday, releasing a version of its guide for the Web. The new guide is not only available to more people, it also adds several features designed to help people find something interesting when they don't have any idea what to watch. The company launched its app for iPads and iPhones in 2011, giving users the ability to search simultaneously through the libraries of a steadily expanding roster of sources of movies and TV shows.

The gig: Col Needham, 45, is founder and chief executive of Internet Movie Database, the world's leading online source for information about movies and television shows and for celebrity news. Every month, the site attracts more than 160 million visitors who come to watch movie trailers, read reviews or check out the comprehensive rundown of a movie's cast and crew. Its database contains more than 100 million items, including information about more than 2 million movies and TV shows and some 4 million cast and crew members.

John Krasinski is over being the nice guy. For the last seven years, he's played one on the television sitcom "The Office" as Jim Halpert - a goofy, mild-mannered romantic who is smitten with his coworker. On the big screen, he's also been the guy next door: the supportive husband to a pregnant wife in "Away We Go"; the supportive fiance whose lover is struggling to accept her parents' divorce in "It's Complicated"; the supportive friend who listens to his crush swoon over another man in "Something Borrowed.

She was a self-described "cartoon," a zany housewife-turned-comedian with an electrified hairdo who broke into the male-dominated world of stand-up comedy in the 1950s with an outlandish wardrobe and a barrage of self-deprecating jokes punctuated by her trademark guffaw. "I spent seven hours today at the beauty parlor; hell, that was just for the estimate," Phyllis Diller would say on stage, firing off one joke after another. "I'm in the 14th year of a 10-day beauty plan. " Diller, whose stand-up career spanned nearly 50 years, died in her sleep Monday at her longtime home in Brentwood, said her agent, Fred Wostbrock.

The Google Play store will now sell movies, TV shows and magazine subscriptions, Google announced Wednesday. This is important news for any Android users but it was overshadowed by other major Google announcements from its Google I/O keynote, especially since the announcement was basically used as a gap filler between the introduction of Jelly Bean and the unveiling of the Nexus 7 tablet. TV shows and magazine subscriptions are brand new additions to Google Play. Movies were previously available on the digital Google store but they could only be rented.

Netflix is testing a redesign of its website that would for the first time separate movies and television shows into separate tabs, each with dozens of subcategories to help users sort through their thousands of options. The potential redesign is currently being tested with a small number of users. If the video subscription company finds that the design increases overall usage, it could deploy the new look to all 23.4 million of its Internet streaming customers in the U.S. Currently, users can find movies and television shows to watch on Netflix's website by searching or via suggestions the company makes based on content the user previously watched.

The week-after-week format of television admittedly builds a depth of character study richer and deeper than most movies are capable of. But would you watch a 13- or 22-hour movie? Huge swathes of recent episodes of "Mad Men" would hit the cutting-room floor in even the most luxuriously paced movie, as the amount of wheel-spinning and narrative churning that can go into a television show would never pass with cinemagoers. Face it, the recent "Fat Betty" story line would definitely be trimmed from "Mad Men: The Movie.

After Benedict Freedman and his wife, Nancy, turned the true-life adventure of a teenager who married a Canadian Mountie into the bestselling 1947 novel "Mrs. Mike," one reviewer theorized that the couple partly based the book's happy marriage on their own. The Freedmans collaborated well into their 80s, writing 10 books that included two late-in-life sequels to "Mrs. Mike," which is still in print. It has appeared in 27 foreign editions and received the Hollywood treatment in a 1949 film of the same name starring Evelyn Keyes and Dick Powell.