U S Comedy Arts Festival

MOVIES Items Seized: Police on Friday seized about 25 movie memorabilia items that were to have been auctioned Sunday at Butterfield & Butterfield's Sunset Boulevard showroom. The items--worth less than $50,000--were seized as part of a continuing investigation against David Elkouby, a North Hollywood resident who has been charged with several counts of receiving stolen property, police said. Butterfield & Butterfield has not been charged or implicated in any way in the case, police said.

Sketch comedy has been around awhile, obviously, but the short form has a particular currency in our ADD age, when we measure out our life in download times. All Internet comedy is sketch comedy by default. The Whitest Kids U' Know is a five-man comedy group with some cyberspatial currency. They came more or less out of New York's School of Visual Arts, established themselves as a going thing in the city, won an award at HBO's U.S.

It was the best of trips. It was the worst of trips. Nah, that's disingenuous. No business trip that starts in Aspen, Colo., can be the worst of trips, and no trip that lands in Fresno can be the best. But I did, on this Thursday-through-Sunday adventure, encounter qualities about airline travel to both hate and praise -- things that, in some cases, I had taken for granted. As with so many trips these days, it was a series of small triumphs and assorted frustrations.

Where do theater companies come from? How are they born? In the 1930s, the legendary Group Theatre in New York grew out of an intense study of the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Locally, the nationally acclaimed South Coast Repertory got a creative start giving performances out the back of a truck. The Valley's Theatre West was born out of play readings in a Hollywood apartment.

There is a special delight in loving a thing you are sure no one else loves, or could love -- the thing that is strange and scruffy beyond description. (Call it the Velveteen Rabbit effect.) Such was my love, and perhaps yours, for "SCTV," the Canadian-sprung sketch-comedy series that sneaked onto the air in 1976, the year after "Saturday Night Live," and kept a fairly low profile thereafter, never really emerging from underneath the shadow of its better-heeled, media-beloved cousin.

Ed Wood is still dead. The reason that bears noting is that apparently the standard-less spirit of the infamously awful director ("Plan 9 From Outer Space," widely considered to be the worst movie ever) lives on today. Don't believe it? Have you tried sitting through "An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn" or "Krippendorf's Tribe," two recently opened critical and commercial dogs.

Pardon Danny Hoch his cynicism, but it's a little tough for him to get excited about Hollywood when agents and executives who tell him how great he is know of him solely from press clippings. "When I started getting big," recalled the 24-year-old New York theater performer (he rejects being called a "performance artist" or "monologuist"), "agents started calling from L.A., who hadn't even seen the show but had read about it, offering me jobs. It was insane.

If all goes according to plan, the second annual Los Angeles Improv Festival, which kicks off Sunday evening, will be four days longer, three venues stronger and 58 shows funnier than it was the first time around. Organizers of the event, which in its first year drew a couple of thousand people and a handful of acts over three days, say they're prepared for more than 5,000 attendees at four theaters to take in more than 85 performances over the course of a week.