More First Person pieces:
*I Was Sick of L.A. Traffic. So I Took a Plane to Work
*I Rode the Entire L.A. Metro in a Single Day
*Why the San Fernando Valley Hate Needs to End Once and For All

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I read a lot of how-to books on making it in this city. Hollywood's multiple versions of How to Win Friends and Influence People could fill the shelves of the Mar Vista Library (which is really small, but still). The books are stuffed with mindless industry platitudes; in my early L.A. days, the one I always tried to follow, often against my better judgment, was "Always say yes."

Which is exactly how I ended up in handcuffs on Hollywood Boulevard. At 11 a.m. On a Tuesday.

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Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Trust

Stahl House (Case Study House #22), Hollywood Hills, Julius Shulman, 1960.

Jewish history in turn-of-the-century America usually conjures up images of deeply religious East Coast garment district workers or greased-back, penny-pinching Old Hollywood studio moguls.

The Autry National Center attempts to break down this second stereotype with its latest exhibit, "Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic."

"This was not primarily, in certain respects, an immigrant community," says W. Richard West, Jr., president and CEO of the Autry National Center. "It was a settlement community who came from elsewhere ready to roll once they hit the city. And they did. What this exhibit is about is ... an effort to figure out how those who comprise the Jewish community here in Los Angeles touched other communities and touched the great diversity of other communities here in Los Angeles."

The exhibit wouldn't be accurate without the inevitable tributes to Hollywood and includes mementos like Billy Wilder's Oscars and a "Scroll of Fame" with signatures of guests who came to the 1935 grand opening of Max Factor's cosmetic studio (Judy Garland and "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd among them). But it also highlights less-glorified or forgotten Jewish people and families who influenced the city, such as:

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Claire Danes plays a woman with bipolar disorder on Homeland

Hollywood has a checkered history of covering mental health and substance abuse, reaching bottom with Nightmare on Elm Street. A young Johnny Depp played the killer as a schizophrenic, imprinting that image of mental illness on millions.

To counteract such stigma, the Entertainment Industry Council puts on an awards show to recognize writers, producers and performers for "the accurate depiction of substance abuse and mental illness." On April 25, the 17th annual PRISM Awards were held at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with an airing of the show set for September on FX.

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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.

See also:
*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

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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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

The category in this bracket of our Great L.A. Novel challenge is "Hollywood novel." And that category is practically defined by these second-round contenders, What Makes Sammy Run? and Day of the Locust.

While Day of the Locust is set in Hollywood, and does comment on the horrors and absurdities of showbiz -- especially in its final, terrifying scene -- it's really not about Hollywood. It's about the "great mass of inland Americans," as the back-cover copy of my edition calls them, who went West in search of the good life. Author Nathanael West touches on Hollywood, but these people are his true subject.

What Makes Sammy Run?, on the other hand, is the ur Hollywood novel. Author Budd Schulberg's keen observations of the studio business came at first-hand: He was the son of motion picture executive B.P. Schulberg and he grew up in and around the industry. The titular Sammy Glick rises from lowly New York City newspaper copy boy to midlevel Hollywood studio exec by schmoozing and backstabbing, stealing ideas and passing them off as his own, and setting the template for showbiz climbers to this day.

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Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was an American film critic, screenwriter, and journalist, whose columns and reviews appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and were syndicated in more than 200 newspapers across the country.

Ebert made a name for himself in the candid and no-apology approach he had toward film review, earning him a Pulitzer Prize and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2006, Ebert suffered complications after a thyroid cancer surgery that left him unable to speak, but he continued to write, review, and participate in interviews. Ebert died Thursday morning. He was 70 years old.

Here are just a few lessons he left behind ...

See also:
- Five Favorite Nora Ephron Movie Moments
- Seven Art Lessons Learned from Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

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Randall Mills

Cast of Monster Party, winners of the Sketch Cage Match at the 1st Annual LA Scripted Comedy Festival on the iO West Theater Mainstage

See also:
*10 Best Stand-Up Comedy Shows in Los Angeles
*12 Comedy Acts to Watch in 2013

Over the weekend, Improv Olympic became a Scripted Olympic. From Thursday through Sunday, Hollywood's iO West Theater hosted its first annual L.A. Scripted Comedy Festival, featuring a collection of talent from across the country showcasing sketch, variety, storytelling, stand up and short films.

The event marked a departure from the improvised comedy that defines iO. According to James Grace, the coordinator of SFC, this venture was an organic evolution for the theater.

"iO West has had an explosion of sketch, solo, storytelling and stand up shows over the last year," explained Grace during a pre-festival interview. "So featuring all the talent at this theater in L.A., and across the country, seemed like a natural progression. The industry is always looking for product and scripted comedy is the best way to consistently showcase talent."

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Courtesy Roberts & Tilton

A view of Noah Davis' Stacked Cubicles (2013)

This week, another painted portrait of Kate Middleton debuts, an aesthetic terroist talks about fashion and tea time happens ten days in a row in Chinatown.

5. Man and the machine
Llyn Foulkes, the rash, visceral artist who has a solo show at the Hammer Museum now, also plays what he calls The Machine. It's a multi-part instrument that surrounds him when he performs, sitting amidst bass drum, symbols, xylophone and other brass and rubber horns. Filmmakers Tamar Halpern and Christopher Quilty have been making a documentary about Foulkes called One Man Band, a name inspired by the artist's Machine. They'll screen it as a work-in-progress at the Hammer and answer questions afterward. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd.; Thurs., March 21, 7:30 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

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James Franco in Oz the Great and Powerful

See also:
*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage

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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Paul T. Bradley

It takes an intrepid East Side researcher with a true flair for adventure to go exploring west of Vermont Avenue. There lie the wilds of East Hollywood, with your devil-may-care Jumbo's Clown Room crowd or the feckless faux-divers at Harvard and Stone, partying on the very knife's edge of Angeleno Civilization. Sure, there's the Undying Lands on the far West Side, but what about that region that sits in that uncivilized middle: Tourist Country, where one hears tales of flashing lights and mindless drones staring at star-like ground art?

That strip of land between Vine and Cahuenga on Hollwywood Blvd is little known to educated folks and knowledge of its residents and nomadic travelers has been lost to time. Which is why we went out on a Friday night to see who the hell goes there and why.

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