The recent dust-up between the Hollywood studios and Internet companies reveals how out of touch Hollywood has become with its own customers. The idea of punishing consumers for ignoring Hollywood's business model is a futile strategy, as the music companies have learned over the past decade.

As Chris Anderson...

Thorton Wilder's play is arguably the greatest work in American dramatic literature. It combines elements of the mundane and universal, the quotidian and the divine, the parochial and the eternal. Director David Cromer has reassembled the award-winning production that had a successful run at the Barrow Street Theatre in...

The Actors Gang, founded in 1981 by Tim Robbins and a group of LA actors, and whose members include Jack Black and John Cusack, has become a staple in the Los Angeles theater scene. While the company has had its ups and downs, it is now on firm footing, presenting...

With the decline in funding for arts education, one of the most pressing needs in our nation is for the development of young artists in the visual, performing and literary arts. Since 1981, YoungArts, the core program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA)...

A new musical from the creators of Avenue Q, In the Heights, Next to Normal and other hit shows just opened in LA and it is a smash-mouth cheerleading sensation, with dazzling choreography, standout performances and even a couple of provocative ideas to chew on. What more could you want...

You would think that a wholesale customer revolt against the big banks, including Bank of America, Chase and the others, might wake them up to the error of their ways in soaking their depositors with fees for everything from checking accounts to ATMs. But bank transfer protests and demonstrations...

The Shakespearean authorship controversy has spawned its own genre of books, films and plays, most recently the movie Anonymous, which dramatizes the theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the author of the Shakespearean canon. The "Oxfordian" theory is just as weak as any...

The prospects for President Obama's re-election have dimmed considerably in the past few months, but it is worth considering -- especially for his supporters -- what an Obama second term might look like. While the President's failings in the first term have been well chronicled, most recently in Ron Suskind's...

A few years ago, as I was preparing to run for Congress in California, one of my first steps was to hire a campaign treasurer. My friends who were elected officials recommended Kinde Durkee -- without any reservation. Durkee, who had represented dozens of Democratic officials and organizations, seemed...

In his recent book, Pinched, about the Great Recession, author Don Peck points out that the top 1 percent of Americans possess as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. In terms of income growth, two out of every three dollars in growth goes to the top 1 percent,...

With the Toronto Film Festival going on, it's worth pointing out the crucial role that national film commissions like Canada's National Film Board and Telefilm Canada have played in the global film marketplace. These agencies of the Canadian government not only assist filmmakers in the production of...

Would you believe that, after the recent scandals in Bell and elsewhere in California around illegal compensation and government secrecy, the California legislature is keeping the budgets of legislators and legislative committees secret? Unbelievable, right? But that's exactly what is going in Sacramento. Despite all the fuss over...

In the late 1960s, at a nursery school on the campus of Stanford University, Walter Mischel, an Austrian-born psychologist, began an experiment involving four-year-olds and marshmallows. He offered the children a tempting choice -- they could have one marshmallow right away, or if they waited a few minutes, they...

It takes a certain amount of courage these days to mount a classic family drama from the 1960's. The tone of theater -- not to mention the attention span of audiences -- has changed considerably since those days. But the revival of Robert Anderson's family drama about a son's...

There has been a lot of fuss in the past several weeks about the lack of a coherent "Obama doctrine" in foreign policy. Critics and commentators have been dissecting his past speeches and pronouncements, searching for a coherent "doctrine" to support his foreign policy approach to events in Libya...

If there is one thing that is certain about recent events in the Middle East, it is uncertainty. Who would have predicted six months ago that the immolation of a college-educated street peddler in a rural Tunisian town would lead to the fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt,...

The raging debate between Democrats and Republicans over government spending and taxation touches on fundamental questions about the rationale for government, questions that go back as far as Plato's Republic. The biggest hue and cry is coming from the Tea Partiers, whose views range from traditional small government advocates to...

I began as a playwright in New York, spent years as a screenwriter and critic in Los Angeles, and am now a novelist in Pasadena (with a run for Congress along the way). While my first love was theater and I am happily at work on my next novel (my...

What would you do if you walked into a downtown McDonald's and were confronted with a group of men carrying guns? If you are like most of us, you would probably flee for your life and then immediately call the cops. However, in California and many other states, there...

In what will hopefully be her political "last hurrah" as a presidential contender, Sarah Palin has revealed her small-minded approach to leadership. In a time of national mourning, Palin has seen only the attacks on her own image rather than the larger, more complex issues that the assassinations in Tucson...