Reitman

Jason Reitman is the first to tell you that he's an "aisle." He prefers sitting in an aisle seat on an airplane, which is relevant because his new film, "Up in the Air," in theaters Friday, is shot extensively on planes and in airports. It details the life of urbane corporate-downsizing expert Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who flies around the country firing people and studiously avoiding human connection. For Reitman, an aisle is never just an aisle or a preference for legroom but an actual psychological tag, which he describes as "selfish."

Director Jason Reitman is promising some colorful stage directions when he and a group of actors perform a live, onstage reading of "Shampoo," the 1975 film that starred Warren Beatty as a promiscuous Beverly Hills hairdresser, on Thursday. "That will be the funny part. I will be reading all the sex scenes," Reitman laughs. "So I will be announcing every thrust. " Reitman's "Live Read" program has had instant sellouts since the series began last October as part of the new Film Independent program of classic and contemporary film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Once a month, Reitman presents a cinema favorite with a different cast of actors cold-reading the famous scripts.

It's as inescapable as any law of physics: To be a movie director, you must first direct a movie. But being a movie director and becoming one are two fundamentally dissimilar things, as the filmmaking participants in the Envelope Roundtable made clear. For nearly two hours, five of the year's most celebrated filmmakers gathered together at The Times discussed the challenges -- and rewards -- of making distinctive and often highly personal movies, even as the studios grow all the more interested in presold sequels, remakes and adaptations of board games.

Jason Reitman, director of the recently released comedy "Young Adult," has sold his Beverly Hills home for $1.475 million, the Multiple Listing Service shows. The redone contemporary house, built in 1962, features walls of glass and vaulted ceilings. The single-story, 2,459-square-foot home includes a media/family room, three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Glass panels enclose the swimming pool. Reitman, 34, was nominated for Oscars for directing "Up in the Air" (2009) and "Juno" (2007)

For Jason Reitman and the Coen brothers, the Toronto International Film Festival is like coming home -- all found their footing here when their first movies were embraced by this audience, as well as the pictures that have come since. This year, they're examining men in suits and their troubled souls: Reitman in "Up in the Air" and Joel and Ethan Coen with "A Serious Man." George Clooney in Reitman's movie and Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coen brothers' film play characters cut from the same cloth: men who set courses for their lives who are now forced to dig deeper just when they thought they had things figured out. These are locked-down lives where suits and ties are really not optional and answers don't come easily, though, if truth be told, they'd much rather the questions had never been raised.

NEAR the 18th hole of the Bighorn golf course in Palm Desert, publishing tycoon Duane Hagadone laid out his vision for a dream home to his architect. It would be set high on the bald mountain rising near the green yet be so inconspicuous that he'd have to point it out even to golf buddies.

The deaths of five skiers over a recent seven-day period on or near Mammoth Mountain appear to have been tragic accidents but have shaken this hamlet of outdoor enthusiasts. One victim was a Los Angeles dentist and avid outdoorsman, another a retired water deliveryman from Garden Grove, the third a San Diego teenager and the fourth a marketing representative from Laguna Niguel. The fifth was an accomplished ski patrol member traversing the Eastern Sierra's breathtaking backcountry.

FOR a salty comedy about a pregnant teen, "Juno" enjoyed a painless birth. "It was a perfect shoot," says director Jason Reitman in a room at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, still buzzing with energy from the Oscar nominees' luncheon he'd just attended downstairs. "We needed snow to shoot winter, and out of nowhere -- this never happens in Vancouver in the middle of March -- it just dumped snow for a day. This is a film that has just been blessed from moment one all the way until now.

Settling the biggest reported case of data theft by a financial insider, Bank of America Corp. will provide free credit monitoring, identity theft insurance and reimbursement for losses to as many as 17 million consumers who dealt with its Countrywide Financial mortgage unit. The agreement was approved Monday by a federal judge in Kentucky. Bank of America, which acquired Countrywide in 2008, denied all allegations of wrongdoing, saying it had settled only to "avoid the additional expense and uncertainty of further litigation.

Jason Reitman, director of the recently released comedy "Young Adult," has sold his Beverly Hills home for $1.475 million, the Multiple Listing Service shows. The redone contemporary house, built in 1962, features walls of glass and vaulted ceilings. The single-story, 2,459-square-foot home includes a media/family room, three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Glass panels enclose the swimming pool. Reitman, 34, was nominated for Oscars for directing "Up in the Air" (2009) and "Juno" (2007)

When it's done right, as it is in "Young Adult," there is something absolutely mesmerizing about watching a train wreck unfold on screen. When the wreck in question is a narcissistic beauty played to scheming, sour, downward-spiraling perfection by Charlize Theron, cringing is definitely called for, but so is laughter. In fact that's exactly the reaction director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody are going for. Paired up for the first time since their 2007 knockout punch "Juno," the two ironists have switched sides in a sense.

It was the last day of a speedy, 30-day shoot for Jason Reitman's "Young Adult" and the crew was ready to escape the cutting cold of suburban New York last November. But Reitman wasn't yet satisfied, even though all the scene he was shooting required was that his star, Charlize Theron, pull an audiocassette out of a bag and stick it into her car's tape player. Theron was playing the unstable ghost writer Mavis Gary, and the tape was a talisman of a life she once led that had vanished along with her youth, leaving Mavis a sad, 37-year-old singleton.

Much like her character in the new film "Young Adult," Charlize Theron is a stalker. While the film's Mavis goes after an old boyfriend, Theron has begun targeting interesting directors willing to see beyond her striking beauty. After having taken on challenging roles in the past only to have them disappoint in the execution, the 36-year-old actress now looks to work with visionaries at the helm of her films. She sought out Jason Reitman at last year's Academy Awards, where the writer-director had been nominated for his George Clooney-starring "Up in the Air," Theron's favorite film of 2009.

Loopy on a powerful cocktail of Zithromax and DayQuil to fight an infection that's making him cough like a "fat Doc Holliday," Patton Oswalt is on a tear. Bouncing from the merits of podcasting to the taboos of Comic-Con, the 42-year-old comedian is a veritable human Wikipedia, tossing thoughtful film and book references into every topic he touches. Flu medicine notwithstanding, it's a thinking man's stream-of-consciousness conversation. What makes it all so much fun is that Oswalt is doing the exact thing he's supposed to be doing.

Small wonder that L. Ron Hubbard had the creative chops to parlay his 1950s self-help system, Dianetics, into a worldwide religion — and a very lucrative one at that. Hubbard was, after all, a science-fiction writer, a dreamer, a charming teller of tales and the inventor of much of his own history: He fabricated or embellished aspects of his military service, education and personal adventures, not least of them his purported run-in with a polar bear in the Aleutians. His most famous invention, of course, was Scientology, a controversial religion-without-a-deity that has its own "technology," galactic story line and quirky vocabulary.

Jason Reitman, director and screenwriter of "Up in the Air," has listed his Beverly Hills home for sale at $1,595,000, the Multiple Listing Service shows. The redone contemporary house, built in 1962, features walls of glass, vaulted ceilings and terrazzo and hardwood floors. The single-story, 2,459-square-foot home has a media/family room, three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Glass panels enclose the swimming pool. Before Reitman, 33, was nominated for an Oscar for directing the 2009 film, he directed "Juno" (2007)

Small wonder that L. Ron Hubbard had the creative chops to parlay his 1950s self-help system, Dianetics, into a worldwide religion — and a very lucrative one at that. Hubbard was, after all, a science-fiction writer, a dreamer, a charming teller of tales and the inventor of much of his own history: He fabricated or embellished aspects of his military service, education and personal adventures, not least of them his purported run-in with a polar bear in the Aleutians. His most famous invention, of course, was Scientology, a controversial religion-without-a-deity that has its own "technology," galactic story line and quirky vocabulary.

After a two-year hiatus from the movie business, former Universal Pictures Chairman Tom Pollock is back. Known as a canny deal maker, Pollock, 54, is partnering with one of Hollywood's most commercially successful director-producers, Ivan Reitman, in a new production company that will be one-third owned by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.

Of course there are strings attached in Ivan Reitman's new romantic comedy, "No Strings Attached," starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher as best sex buddies. With a role-reversing twist ? it's the girl avoiding commitment and the guy hoping for love ? the film had possibilities. Sadly, an obsession with raunchy one-liners trips everything up, turning a clever conceit into something closer to a sleazy, cheesy affair. Though the bad jokes are a lot of what sours the film, I'm not laying blame solely at the feet of screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether, because the result reeks of intervention.

Filmmaker Jason Reitman took some time out of his hectic award season schedule (for his Oscar-nominated "Up in the Air") to take over programming at the New Beverly Cinema beginning Friday. The writer-director is also on tap to appear at the revival theater -- schedule permitting -- to introduce his faves. Screening Friday and Saturday is a Matthew Broderick double bill: John Hughes' "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" from 1986 and Alexander Payne's razor-sharp 1999 satire, "Election."