Danny Elfman is a huge success, but he doesn\’t want you to know it. Humility is a hard thing to hang your hat on when you\’ve accumulated four Academy Award nominations, taken home a Grammy, and an Emmy and written some of the most popular theme music of all time, notably for “The Simpsons” and his many collaboration with filmmaker Tim Burton. But that doesn\’t stop Elfman from trying.
It’s hard to tell, what with the requisite girdles, supervised weigh-ins and protocol panty hose (“not too dark; this isn’t a cabaret”), that the 1960s world depicted in “Pan Am” is supposed to be about the era’s most worldly women.
Pop-folkie Matt Nathanson had just returned from hanging in Hawaii, but it was a vacation he only enjoyed “50 percent,” he said.
Jewish “bad boys,” an alleged cover-up by our government and the outing of an American female spy are among the themes highlighted in this autumn’s releases, which include a number of provocative documentaries as well as some dramatic films based on highly charged, real-life events.
When the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust officially opens in its new home in Pan Pacific Park on Oct. 14, it won’t just be moving to a bigger, more prominent and more easily accessible building. It will be moving into the 21st century.
“Fight Club” director David Fincher charts the rise of Facebook, casting Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate wunderkind who made enemies and fortunes on the road to developing the world’s largest social networking site.
Just weeks before she graduated from Yale University in May 1959, Eva Hesse — a child survivor of the Holocaust who would become renowned for her sculptural assemblages — railed against artists of the day: “The hell with them all,” she wrote in her journal. “Paint yourself out, through and through, it will come by you alone. You must come to terms with your own work, not with any other being.”
Matt Sax, the baby-faced composer-performer whose new show, “Venice,” was dubbed “the year’s best musical” by Time magazine, has a penchant for creating works in which life imitates art.
On June 21, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, two young Jews from New York and an African American from Mississippi were murdered while on a mission to register black voters in the South.
Following last year’s cancellation of the original New York version of the series after a venerable 20-year run — a record matched in drama only by the classic Western “Gunsmoke” — a new spawn will appear this fall: “Law & Order: Los Angeles.”
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