Adrian Grenier Defends Paparazzi as Storytellers, and Other Revelations From Getty Panel

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Zócalo Public Square/Flickr
From left: Carla Hall, Carol Squiers, Adrian Grenier, Carolyn Davis and Galo Ramirez
I just emailed my photo to Adrian Grenier. He asked me to. Me, and about 200 others in the audience last night at Zócalo Public Square's event, "Are We All Paparazzi Now?" at the Getty Center.

It was an experiment, so he said. More like a little trick. Per his instruction, we all had our phones out ready to shoot -- him, we assumed -- but at the last second he told us to turn the cameras on ourselves. Send him the photo, he said, and he'll post it on his production company's website. "You're all part of this collective experience," he said.

Are we? Perhaps he was just trying to make us feel important. Or perhaps he was trying to illustrate how simultaneously voyeuristic and exhibitionist we all are. Either way, it was one of the many ambiguous answers provided last night to the panel's title question.

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10 Things We Didn't Know About Mad Men's Jessica Paré (Megan Draper) Until Now

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Jessica Paré, left, as Megan Draper, with Jon Hamm as Don Draper.
Jessica Paré is having the best day ever.

After last night's season 5 premiere of Mad Men, the utter marvelousness of her character Megan Draper became the only thing anyone could talk about, mostly due to a hot, twisted floor sex scene with hubby Don, and a coquettish rendition of '60s hit "Zou Bisou Bisou." (Now available on iTunes. Because...of course.) Like Harry Crane, 3.5 million viewers who tuned in last night were officially seduced.

And everyone at AMC knows it, because they finagled a spur-of-the-moment conference call this afternoon with Paré so she could give we Mad Men piranhas the insider Draper info we so desperately desired. Turn the page for the top 10 most interesting things we learned about Megan Draper and Mad Men's fifth season.

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Justice League: Doom at the Paley Center: Why DC's Direct-to-DVD Movies Are Better Than Most Superhero Films

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The Paley Center for Media
The faces behind Justice League: Doom, which screened at the Paley Center last night
Nearly every seat was filled inside the Paley Center for Thursday night's screening of Justice League: Doom. The latest in DC's string of direct-to-DVD releases, Doom will hit the streets on Feb. 28. Fans can also catch it on-demand beginning Feb. 21.

Loosely based on Mark Waid's JLA story Tower of Babel, Doom is significant in that it is the final script from Dwayne McDuffie, the comic book and television writer who died last year at age 49. McDuffie previously scripted All-Star Superman and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. He also wrote for the animated series Justice League, among many other projects.

During the panel following the film, voice director Andrea Romano commented on McDuffie's work, stressing that he made comic books "actable," that he had a gift for turning "thoughts into dialogue." It's a special ability to turn comic books into scripts, she added.

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Art in the Parking Space: Performance Art Partying in the Standard Hollywood's Garage

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Tova Carlin, Ania Diakoff and Katerina Llanes' Sub-Standard installation
If Los Angeles is a car culture, then the parking garage of the Standard Hollywood represents that beastly reality's bowels.

Art in the Parking Space, a project by Warren Neidich and Elena Bajo held in the parking garage of the Standard Hotel Hollywood as part of Pacific Standard Time's Performance and Public Art Festival on Tuesday night, was a mash-up of video, dance, walking tours and installations.

Neidich and Bajo's statement for Art in the Parking Space, the third installation of a yearlong project on the intersection of these two concepts, reflects their interest in "different environments and sets of cultural parameters that define the Los Angeles basin" -- and parking garages are a bigger part of that environment than we'd often like.

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Is This the Golden Age of Television? A Zocalo Event Asks the Question

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MTV.com
Snooki and Deena on Jersey Shore
Considering the airwaves are cluttered with dejected bachelorettes, fist-pumping and wars over things as trivial as cupcakes, it's difficult to imagine this as a time when television should be revered.

Or is it?

That was the prompt at hand during last night's Zocalo Public Square event: "Is This the Golden Age of Television?" -- a panel that hosted both industry insiders and media critics who, if ever so politely, battled that very question.

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Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: Bravo to Bravo

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bravotv.com
Paul Nassif "recovering" from a colonoscopy.
Holy Jeebus, Paul Nassif, are you dying? You have to be dying. Has anything more horrifying than your post-colonoscopy fart festival ever happened on reality TV? Why in the name of Andy Cohen would you allow cameras to follow you into an up-the-butt medical procedure?

Not that we weren't laughing -- we were laughing our asses off. (Pardon the pun.)

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Portlandia the Tour: Nerdy Fan Love at the Echoplex

Armisen and Brownstein on Portlandia on IFC
The top groupies in the audience for Portlandia the Tour have been a gay couple from Napa that attended the Los Angeles show last night dressed in matching "Put a Bird on It" t-shirts. They've been to every show on the tour so far. Portlandia actors/creators Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are apparently so chummy with their fans that Brownstein proudly announced that the Napa couple has been together for a whole 14 years.

Portlandia, a sketch comedy on IFC that skewers the various liberal social groups known for populating Portland, Ore., has attracted a loyal cult following of comedy nerds since it first aired last year. Even people from Portland reportedly like watching their town be mocked.

But how does a television show go on tour? The show at the Echoplex in Echo Park had new live sketches, live performances of songs made famous from the episodes, video clips from upcoming episodes, a question-and-answer period, and then a short concert with The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs at the end, all totaling in at about 90 minutes. Armisen said it was the first show they had ever done at a venue that doesn't have seats. Concerned, he asked the crowd if they felt comfortable. Most people said no.

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Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: Lisa Vanderpump's SUR-prise! Party

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bravotv.com
The only way Lisa Vanderpump could get through her party was by drinking heavily.
Was it just us, or did Lisa Vanderpump's launch of SUR Lounge feel less like an upscale restaurant opening and more like a sorority formal afterparty gone wrong? There were ex-bffs at the door, "the other woman" serving drinks, girls getting drunk and tormenting friends with vibrators then locking themselves in the bathroom for no reason (so Kappa Kappa Gamma) and of course, sisters fighting.

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Napoleon Dynamite Animated Series Panel at the Paley Center: Does the Show Make Fun of Ugly, Weird People?

Image courtesy of Fox
In 2004 when Napoleon Dynamite -- a low-budget indie film about the strange and awkward characters in a small Idaho town -- took mainstream America by storm, were we laughing at Napoleon, or with him? It's an interesting question to ponder as a viewer, but one even more fun to pose to Jerusha and Jared Hess, the film's writers.

Mike White, who's worked with the Hesses on Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos, moderated a panel at the Paley Center last night that focused on Fox's new Napoleon Dynamite animated series premiering this Sunday, and began by musing on this very idea. "Are Jared and Jerusha just making fun of ugly weird people?" he wondered aloud, though eventually concluded that once you get to know the pair, you realize that "ugly weird people are their people."

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Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: Mauricio Umansky Truths All Over Kim Richards

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Mauricio Umansky, not having any of K-Squared's lies.
Don't you just love when double standards are disproved? Case in point: that persistent belief that when men speak their minds, they're "assertive," but when women do it, they're "bitchy."

Well, last night, Kyle Richard's husband, the ever-dreamy Mauricio Umansky, decided to speak up on the subject of sister-in-law Kim Richard's selfish, erratic and downright troubling behavior, and it was pretty much the bitchiest catfight we've seen all season.

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