Hanksy

Weird Gal Yankovic

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Banksy is so 2010. Hanksy, the similarly secretive street artist and love child of Banksy and Tom Hanks, is reaching his own level of notoriety thanks to his celeb-inspired murals, the subject of Gallery 1988's upcoming exhibit, "How the West Was Pun," which opens May 24.

A couple of years ago, the Brooklyn-via-Midwest, 20-something law school dropout started spray painting Hanks' mug on stenciled images of Banksy in New York, which led to a couple of gallery shows. He's put up similar work in Chicago. (Dude even made it to the White House).

Earlier this year, Hanksy began lurking in our midst, creating street art inspired by Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Ellen DeGeneres, James Franco, Bradley Cooper and Christopher Walken, and accompanied by funny tag lines, in Hollywood along Melrose, Downtown and Culver City. You may have come across "Cage Against the Machine," "The Walken Dead" and our personal favorite, "Weird Gal Yankovic."

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Alexandra Wyman/Invision for LD Entertainment/AP Images

Duplass and Aselton

Mark Duplass has established himself as half of an independent film power couple. Over the last few years, the writer-director-producer-actor of the micro-budget mumblecore genre and his brother Jay (who are together known as the -- and whose production company is called -- Duplass Brothers) have worked on character-rich feature films like Safety Not Guaranteed, Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

But this isn't the only way Duplass keeps it in the family. With his latest film,Black Rock, he re-teams with his wife (and co-star on the F/X comedy The League) Katie Aselton. The feature, which Duplass wrote and Aselton directs and co-stars in with Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth, centers on childhood friends who set out on a camping trip to rekindle their friendships and end up in life-threatening circumstances after a drunken night of flirtation goes awry, opens May 17.

The film is, at times, dark with disturbing scenes that take on hot-button issues like war veterans' mental wellness and a woman's right to say no. The writer-director collaboration in making the film, however, wasn't nearly as polarizing.

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Sales' book, which shares a title with Sofia Coppola's upcoming film (pictured above), is an expansion of her 2010 Vanity Fair article "The Suspects Wore Louboutins."

"It seemed like something somebody would make up," author Nancy Jo Sales says on the phone from her New York home. "If you had pitched this as a movie, nobody would've bought it. It would've been too unbelievable." But the story of a bunch of young suburbanites who burglarized a string of celebrity homes in 2008 and '09 did happen. And somebody did buy it — director Sofia Coppola, whose upcoming film The Bling Ring (out June 14) is inspired by the Hollywood crime spree. It's also the subject of Sales' new book, likewise titled The Bling Ring.

Coppola hired Sales as a consultant on the film after optioning her 2010 Vanity Fair article, "The Suspects Wore Louboutins." Realizing she had enough material on the case for a book, Sales started writing The Bling Ring last summer. It hits bookstores next week.

The Bling Ring, a nickname coined by the L.A. Times, was made up of six kids mostly in their late teens, who stole more than $3 million in merchandise from the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson, Brian Austin Green, Megan Fox, Ashley Tisdale and The Hills' Audrina Patridge, as well as a few non-celebs. They were arrested in 2009, and all pled no contest.

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Warner Bros. Entertainment

William Friedkin directed The Exorcist, pictured, and The French Connection before a staggering fall from grace — detailed in his new memoir.

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Hollywood heavy hitters normally wait until they're out of the film game to write their memoirs. That way they can settle scores and write the first draft of their cinematic history without severing relationships they still need.

Not William Friedkin. Still going strong at 77, the director is releasing his tell-it-like-it-was memoir, The Friedkin Connection, in the middle of a late-career renaissance. Horror-thriller Bug (2006) and Killer Joe (2011) garnered some of the best reviews of his 50-year career. Killer Joe, a critical darling slapped with an NC-17 rating, would have done even better at the box office had Friedkin given in to the rating board's demands that he trim some of the Southern-fried depravity surrounding Matthew McConaughey's police detective with a side career as a contract killer.

Friedkin's against-all-odds success story is compelling reading from the start. He was raised in the white slums of Chicago by Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine; his mother was a saint who kept him away from the neighborhood toughs; his father a semi-pro baseball player turned clothing salesman. Inspired by Citizen Kane to become a director but with no money for college, Friedkin started working in the mailroom of TV station WGN. Within a couple of years he was directing live TV, and soon his documentary about a convicted murderer, The People vs. Paul Crump, won several awards and contributed to the commutation of Crump's death sentence.

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Aaron Stein-Chester

Dr. Vandana Shiva at an event in Venice

It's 3 p.m. on a Sunday, and on the back patio at Axe in Venice, wooden folding chairs and communal benches have been arranged in a semicircle opposite one cushioned chair, positioned front and center, where (the restaurant's chalkboard promises) Dr. Vandana Shiva, environmental activist, seed saver, proponent of food democracy and justice, will sit and share her wisdom.

The event is free, but as the garden begins to fill, it seems most of the people here have been invited by one of the event's hosts: Nina Clemente, former chef at Osteria Mozza and daughter of artist Francesco Clemente; actress/socialite Shiva Rose; Apple Via, a strategist for socially conscious events; and Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei, who personally called to invite the Weekly.

Tomei had pitched the event as the second effort from her fledgling advocacy group, reclaim REAL food, formed in response to the defeat of Proposition 37 last November.

Proposition 37 would have required retailers and food manufacturers to label products made with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Advocates like those at Axe today believe GMOs are responsible for the dramatic rise in food allergies and certain cancers in the United States since the 1990s, when they were introduced.

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Ryan Forbes

Legendary Bingo's Jeffery Bowman with hostesses Calpernia Addams, Willam Belli, Roxy Wood and Porsha Hayy

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"I just touched your boob." When was the last time you heard a bingo caller say that at a bingo game? When was the last time you played bingo?

If you have recently, and you're not on social security, you were probably at Legendary Bingo at Hamburger Mary's in West Hollywood. The irreverent twist on the old-fashioned game, held four times a week (and once a month at the Magnolia Lounge in Pasadena), turns 15 this year -- that's 30 in drag queen years.

To help celebrate, founder and producer Jeffery Bowman is hosting a three-day party, which kicks off at Magnolia Lounge April 8 and continues at the WeHo hotspot April 9 and 10 with bingo games, a champagne toast, drag and burlesque performances and celebrity guests, including the casts of ABC's Suburgatory, CBS' Golden Boy , Sheryl Lee Ralph from Smash and others.

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Jonathan Pierce

Danny Boyle and Josh Trank outside the Aero Theatre

Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle has an almost childlike quality about him. He appears to approach his surroundings with the brimming excitement of a kid who is just about to open a present and the sincerity of someone who hasn't been in this business for over 20 years.

The moment people recognized him last night at the Aero Theatre, a swarm of fans gathered around. Boyle was there for "A Conversation with Danny Boyle," which not only served as a Q&A session with Boyle and Josh Trank, director of Chronicle, but to promote Boyle's upcoming film, Trance, a psychological thriller starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson.

We were lucky enough to sneak in a quickie one-on-one interview with Boyle prior to the event -- our time made even shorter by one particularly nervous and enthusiastic theater worker who followed us into the manager's office for Boyle to autograph a photo of the two of them together from the 2009 Directors Guild Awards (when Boyle won for Slumdog Millionaire). Apparently he predicted correctly that Boyle would win. (He probably wasn't the only one who did so.)

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James Franco in Oz the Great and Powerful

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James Franco: actor, director, screenwriter, poet, painter and now professor.

In the fall, the man with many talents decided to take his gifts and share them with the students of UCLA. Franco was still teaching at UCLA for the winter quarter and will move on to USC. Before that he taught at NYU and Columbia.

The fall quarter is over now, but just before it ended we got a chance to talk to Nicolas Curcio, one of the students who scored a golden ticket into Franco's screenplay-writing class and spent three hours a week for 10 weeks with the man.

Since it's James Franco week at the movies, with Oz the Great and Powerful out last week and Spring Breakers opening today, we thought it would be a good time to bring you Curcio's inside scoop on the experience:

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Distinctive Assets

The goodies in the gift bag for the "losers"

Each golden Oscar statuette costs about $500 to make, although of course its monetary value ends up being more than that. But for those nominees who don't get that particular golden ticket, Los Angeles-based marketing firm Distinctive Assets will give them something pleasant to wake up to -- a swag bag worth $45,000 will be waiting on their doorsteps Monday morning. (This is in addition, of course, to the scores of "gifting suites" that take place in fancy hotels in the days before the Oscar ceremony, in which celebrities -- or their handlers -- can pick up thousands of dollars worth of free goodies...just because.)

"This is designed to be the ultimate consolation prize for those who don't go home with an Oscar Sunday night," says Lash Fary, founder and president of Distinctive, which has been crafting the "Everyone Wins" gift bag for 11 years. Twenty nominees (the four losing nominees in the best actor/actress, supporting actor/actress and director categories), plus the host of the show, will receive the goodies (sorry, sound mixers).

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Jonathan Pierce

Jessica Chastain should always be preceded with a sign that reads: "May cause seizures."

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Last night, men and women who are more used to working at home in their pajamas donned black tie attire for the 2013 Writers Guild Awards at the J.W. Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live -- and it seemed like a surprisingly number of media didn't really care. (Except us, of course.)

With a red carpet that could probably fit into the SAG awards' setup over a hundred times over, a handful of nominees and presenters made their way through this cordoned-off section of the Diamond Ball foyer. Don't be fooled by the photos; everything took place inside. There were even fake hedges with a large Writers Guild Award statuette to add to this illusion that we were outdoors. And within this area that is probably smaller than most people's living rooms, we all crammed ourselves on the three-tiered stands and attempted to stay in our designated positions. Or, as one of our fellow press members joked, "We're called 'press' because we're pressed together."

Lucky for us, our immediate neighbors decided not to show up, so we actually were able to breathe and not receive a head contusion from an errant camera battery pack. Actually, we felt pretty damn special that we even got a fixed spot and didn't have to resort to a temper tantrum -- as a few did -- to find space to park their equipment and themselves.

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