Writers

Sophia Stewart didn't attend her June 13 hearing at the U.S. federal court building in downtown Los Angeles. She saw the proceeding as a minor hurdle on the way to an anticipated July 12 trial in her copyright infringement suit against directors Andy and Larry Wachowski, James Cameron and other defendants--a trial she imagined would be "one of the largest suits for damages in the history of the film industry."

BALTIMORE - As long as there are 8-year-olds, there will be baseball. Bud Selig has produced revenue-sharing and value-escalation. He deserves much credit. The mothers of this country have produced a never-ending supply of baseball customers. They deserve more. Once upon a time - Sunday, actually - a grandfather accompanied his 8-year-old grandson to a major league baseball game. His granddaughter was there too, but she had a friend with her. If you are a 10-year-old girl, you cannot be seen in public at a baseball game with your grandpa and little brother without a friend along.

All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty's Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary. It was April 1939, and she was 22, a Bronx transplant with typing and dictation skills. She'd been in Southern California for a little more than a year, coming west to help her father, a New York furrier, set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard. "Everybody said, 'You're a furrier?

WHEATON, Ill. - I'm standing in a cemetery, which is probably better than lying in one. I came to Chicago to write about the Angels, and while I seem to be focused on the dead, this has more to do with Mother's Day. My mom is here. This isn't the first time I've set out to write about the Angels and found myself mentioning my mother. Maybe the name Angels triggers her memory, or maybe I'm always trying to avoid writing about the Angels. Funny how the mention of Angels, though, never brings back memories of my father.

Olympic sprint champion Florence Griffith Joyner died after suffering an epileptic seizure, according to autopsy results released Thursday, and her family and friends say they hope the findings will put to rest rumors that drug use contributed to her death. Griffith Joyner died last month in her sleep at age 38. Her husband, Al Joyner, bitterly criticized those who suggested that she took performance-enhancing drugs.

Craig Johnson comes as advertised. Standing outside the Autry National Center on a boiling summer afternoon, the Wyoming-based crime novelist is decked out in a long-sleeve shirt made of heavy cotton, scuffed brown boots and a 10-gallon hat that provides shade, but not nearly enough. Spotting his interlocutor, Johnson sticks out his hand and delivers a booming "How ya doin'?!"

All across America, a panic is spreading. But you won't hear the terrified multitudes and their pleas for help, their expletives shouted at the sky. Why? Because these suffering people are mostly fiction writers. And fiction writers almost always suffer alone. The application deadline  for the fiction-writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts is just hours away. (To be precise, the deadline is 11:59 p.m. EST, or 8:59 p.m. PST.) Fill out a few forms, submit a sample of your work, and you have a shot at winning $25,000 to write your next book.

I was 12 the first time I read W.C. Heinz. I've never forgotten the story: "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete." It was a bittersweet look at Pete Reiser, undone by his own fearlessness when he was the Brooklyn Dodgers' golden child and marooned years later as a bush league manager with a bad heart and a rattletrap Chevy. You wouldn't think a kid plowing through True magazine's 1957 Baseball Annual would care, but I did. And even today what Bill Heinz wrote still gets me in the heart and the gut.

At times he seems a combination of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he paraphrases often, and Gandhi, whose countenance he resembles, as he speaks in soft, earnest tones while sporting little, round spectacles like the ones the Mahatma wore. Mark Mathabane, one muses, is a man in the process of self-creation.

Michael Verhoeven's film "The Nasty Girl" is Germany's entry in the foreign-language category in this year's Academy Awards. It is an occasionally surrealistic and often very funny account of a teen-aged Fraulein's distinctly unfunny and dangerous attempts to investigate the Nazi years in her hometown.

Somebody is going to get killed out there. I've said it a hundred times, thought it a thousand. The only question was, what ballplayer would have to die on the mound before something was done to protect pitchers? The issue, in the news again after Toronto Blue Jays pitcher J.A. Happ was felled by a line drive Tuesday night, is personal with me because it happened to my son Matt. Twice. He was struck in the face by a line drive in a high school game and on the side of the head during a scrimmage in college.

Stanley A. Dashew, an inventor and entrepreneur who helped revolutionize the credit card industry, died of natural causes Thursday in Los Angeles, according to a family spokesman. He was 96. Dashew held 40 patents in fields as diverse as credit card processing, mining, mass transit, medical equipment and offshore oil transportation. He also was an avid sailor, writer and photographer who late in life wrote for the Christian Science Monitor and the Huffington Post. At 94, he distilled his insights about life and business in a book, "You Can Do It: Inspiration and Lessons from an Inventor, Entrepreneur, and Sailor.

NEW YORK -- As Zach Braff and the people behind “Veronica Mars” could tell you, crowd sourcing isn't a half-bad way to raise some money for a film. But can it enable new forms of creativity too? That's what the longtime Hollywood director Paul Verhoeven set out to learn. A while back, the pulp auteur behind movies such as "Basic Instinct" and "Total Recall" decided to throw open the doors - not to the bank, but to the screenwriting process.  The Dutch-born filmmaker wanted fans in his native Holland to contribute chapters to a script for a short feature.

"Graceland" is a tense, twisty cinematic artichoke brimming with moral complexity and intriguing shades of gray. Writer-director Ron Morales masterfully juggles this brisk thriller's various puzzle pieces to create an unpredictable portrait of desperate times - and desperate measures. Marlon Villar (an excellent Arnold Reyes) is an earnest family man and longtime chauffeur to corrupt Filipino congressman Manuel Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias). Marlon finds himself careening down the rabbit hole when a kidnapper posing as a cop abducts his daughter, Elvie (Ella Guevara)

Bestselling novelist Jonathan Evison dropped by our video booth at the L.A. Times Festival of Books to talk with L.A. Times columnist Robin Abcarian about "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving," his novel that has just been released in paperback.  The book is about a middle-aged man whose life has bottomed out and who takes a night course in caregiving -- "he learns to insert catheters and avoid liability," Evison explains, showing some of...

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Joan Didion had it right. In her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” originally published in the New York Times Book Review, she lays out the template in no uncertain terms: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I , of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions -...

Every writer needs inspiration, and while Mindy Kaling's Twitter account might suggest she's never without quips, she shared with the Ministry one of her biggest muses: Rihanna. As co-creator of Fox's "The Mindy Project," the actress and author said that RiRi often gets staff juices flowing because of her broad appeal. "Rihanna is a big favorite," Kaling said on Saturday at West Hollywood's Mondrian hotel, where a reception was held ahead of the show's fall premiere, "whatever the reason the guys on my staff can get behind it. They think she's just super hot and intimidating.

Janet Fitch's first novel, "White Oleander," hit big when it was picked by Oprah for her book club. Before that happened, she was just another aspiring writer in this big city. She sat down with me at the L.A. Times Festival of Books and talked about who she used to come to see. Sometimes, when she couldn't get tickets to see an author, she'd sit on the grass and watch readers and writers pass by. Once, when her own writing wasn't going well, she couldn't bear to attend. That time passed -- she published "Paint It Black" in 2006 and is now hard at work on a new, very different novel.

At the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Molly Ringwald sat down with L.A. Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg to discuss her book of short stories, “When It Happens to You,” surprising tour encounters and the new book she's starting. VIDEO: AUTHOR INTERVIEWS FROM FESTIVAL OF BOOKS In honor of our new interactive map of literary L.A., Ringwald also talked about her favorite L.A. author, Joan Didion. "She was a definite inspiration...all of the car stuff [in “When It Happens...”]