Writers

The Obama administration's new plan to stimulate refinancings of FHA mortgages is likely to help large numbers of homeowners — even those who are deeply underwater — cut their monthly costs by switching to a loan with a rate below 4%. Here's a quick overview of the "streamline refi" program and what it will take for you to qualify. First, the baseline criteria: Your current home loan must be FHA-insured and must have been put on the Federal Housing Administration's books no later than May 31, 2009.

A scathing review of the new stage musical "An Officer and a Gentleman" has prompted the show's writer to hit back in an editorial that recently ran in the Australian press. Douglas Day Stewart co-wrote the book for the musical, which based on his original screenplay for the 1982 movie starring Richard Gere and Debra Winger. "Officer" opened earlier this month at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney, Australia.

Distancing himself from Republicans on housing issues, President Obama pitched a $5-billion to $10-billion plan to help a key segment of struggling homeowners — those still making monthly payments, but on underwater mortgages. Obama proposed Wednesday to help about 3.5 million people with good credit who are unable to refinance at historically low rates because their homes are worth less than their mortgages. He argued that those homeowners — and the country — couldn't afford to let the housing market bottom out, as many Republicans, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have advocated.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 290 pp., $22 First things first: If you haven't read "Fun Home," Alison Bechdel's 2006 family memoir in comic form, drop everything and get a copy right away. In its pages, Bechdel does the miraculous: tracing deftly and with nuance her complex, claustrophobic relationship with her father, an English teacher and closeted gay man who died in 1980 (in what was either accident or suicide), shortly after Bechdel came out as a lesbian.

Often film sequels are slam dunks at the box office, a seamless continuation from where a previous hit left off. But as the new installment of the 15-year-old franchise "Men in Black" proves, getting to the big screen isn't always a cakewalk. One of the most troubled productions in recent Hollywood memory, Sony Pictures' latest movie in the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi-comedy franchise encountered multiple script rewrites, a discontented star and a three-month production shutdown as writers and studio executives scrambled to fix a project that nearly fell apart . By the time it was over, the studio had run up a tab of nearly $250 million - making "Men in Black 3" one of the most expensive releases of the summer.

The most ambitious federal mortgage program to date aimed at millions of underwater homeowners is poised to take off in the coming two weeks, yet some key issues could hinder borrower participation. One of them involves something most owners know nothing about: Who was your mortgage insurer on your underwater loan? Though it was announced by the Obama administration late last year, "HARP 2.0" — the second version of the Home Affordable Refinance Program — will finally hit full stride around the middle of this month, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac finish tweaking their automated underwriting systems to accept applications, and lenders and mortgage insurance companies start handling large volumes of requests.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Bob Baffert and Wayne Lukas were sitting next to each other at a recent racing function when Baffert said to Lukas, "Everyone used to hate you. Now they hate me." It's as clear as a giant flowered hat, and just as ugly. At rowdy Churchill Downs today, the only thing more quietly despised than Bob Baffert will be a Breathalyzer. The 128th Kentucky Derby will feature 19 horses, 150,000 fans, and one villain. Baffert will saddle longshot War Emblem.

If you give millions of seriously underwater homeowners a new equity position in their properties by reducing their principal mortgage debt, will they keep paying on their loans and avoid foreclosure? Call it a pipe dream or a significant model for other lenders and investors, but one company says it has found an important combination: Modify underwater borrowers' loans so that their payments are reduced to a manageable amount and cut their principal debt over time, but make the deal dependent on their scrupulous on-time monthly payments of the new amount plus sharing of a portion of any future profit they make on the house sale.

Claus von Bulow's girlfriend was turned down by the Supreme Court on Monday in her bid to overturn an order requiring her to give Von Bulow's stepchildren a copy of her manuscript on his trials for attempted murder. But the defiant woman vowed that she would never give the manuscript to the stepchildren, who want to use it in a $56-million suit against Von Bulow in which they charge he tried to kill their mother.

"Natural Selection," an intriguing and intelligent first effort from indie filmmaker Robbie Pickering, digs deep into the heart of Texas for its soulful tale of small town saints and sinners and a road trip to redemption. Laced with humor and regret, the film rests on a finely textured performance by Rachael Harris, a prolific character actress especially memorable as the harpy of a fiancée perpetually haranguing Ed Helms in "The Hangover. " Here she's dialed it down to a bare whisper for the 40ish Linda White, whose quiet life of desperation is about to be dissected.

What should the Lakers feel optimistic about against Oklahoma City? Mike Bresnahan: The Lakers actually showed some fire in their double-overtime victory over OKC last month. Can't remember a Lakers crowd ever getting that into a regular-season game. The Lakers' defense really showed me something in Game 7 against Denver. Not sure where it was the whole series, but the Lakers will have to employ it the entire time against OKC. Ben Bolch: The Lakers' 7-footers give them an advantage, provided they show up. Of course, that didn't always happen in the first round.

He had already been proclaimed "the Picasso of children's books" by Time magazine when Maurice Sendak, then in his 30s, wrote and illustrated "Where the Wild Things Are," a dark fantasy that became one of the 10 bestselling children's books of all time. Published in 1963, the book was a startling departure from the sweetness and innocence that then ruled children's literature. "Wild Things" tapped into the fears of childhood and sent its main character — an unruly boy in a wolf costume — into a menacing forest to tame the wild beasts of his imagination.

Build-a-Bear Workshop was introducing a line of stuffed animals called smallfrys and wanted to reach moms through Facebook. One video used in the online promotion showed a woman pulling up to a fast-food window. Her young daughter requests "a smallfry. " When her mom suggests a fruit cup or celery sticks, the daughter says, "Mom, order me a curly-haired bunny in a purple sequined bathing suit. " The 45-second smallfrys spot came not from a traditional advertising agency but from Poptent Inc., a "crowdsourced" video production studio that has built a global community of 50,000 writers, directors, cinematographers and animators to create commercials for Build-a-Bear, American Airlines, Dell, Intel, Jaguar, General Mills and others.

"Chinatown" writer Robert Towne has listed his estate on the Westside at $12.995 million. Built in 1926 and designed for grand entertaining, the restored English country-style mansion and guesthouse have seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and 10,000 square feet of living space. The nearly three-quarter-acre property is wooded and includes a swimming pool, a rose garden and a spice garden. Towne, 77, won an Oscar for original screenplay in 1975 for the Jack Nicholson-starring film about land and water rights disputes.

Digby Wolfe, an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer who helped producer George Schlatter develop "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," a landmark TV series that became an overnight sensation in the late 1960s, has died. He was 82. Wolfe, who later became a professor of writing at the University of New Mexico, died of lung cancer Wednesday at his home in Albuquerque, said his wife, Patricia Mannion-Wolfe. The British-born Wolfe - an actor, writer, singer and comedian whose early career included writing for the BBC's satirical "That Was the Week That Was" and hosting an Australian TV variety show - moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'60s.

PHILIP Anschutz made his first big splash in Hollywood five years ago when he cut a deal considered outlandish even by movie industry standards. The Denver industrialist not only agreed to pay $10 million per book for rights to the best-selling Dirk Pitt adventure novels, he gave author Clive Cussler extraordinary creative control over "Sahara," the movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz.

David Joyce marched his way to the front of the U.S. immigration line using his pocketbook, sinking half a million dollars into a Vermont ski resort. The British citizen had spent years in a futile effort to secure green cards for himself, his wife and their 9-year-old son so they could relocate to sunny Florida. Then, a fellow emigre tipped him off to a little-known federal program that helps foreigners gain permanent U.S. residency by investing in American businesses. Graphic: Number of investors' visas to U.S. "In six months, we had our green cards," said Joyce, 51. "Considering everything we've been through, this was easy.

A bio on NPR's website of its commentator Frank Deford notes that the magazine GQ christened him, quite simply, "the world's greatest sportswriter. " (Is he?) A story on ESPN's companion website, Grantland, referred to Deford as "a writer who had achieved legendary status by the age of 50. " (Did he?) OK. Maybe he is, and maybe he did. Wikipedia's entry for Sports Illustrated - if no one overnight has deleted it - alludes to an editor at that magazine who helped "launch the careers of such legendary writers as Frank Deford.

Hollywood's usual last-minute heroics don't factor in "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. " In writer-director Lorene Scafaria's opening scene, a space mission to prevent a 70-mile-wide asteroid from hitting Earth fails spectacularly, giving everyone on the planet just three weeks to live. With the clock ticking, Dodge (Steve Carell) and Penny (Keira Knightley) try to figure out how to do just that. Romance and the apocalypse don't seem like obvious movie partners, which is precisely why Scafaria (who wrote "Nick and Norah's Infinite Play List")