Ryan Brackin

Adam Nix (director-editor-cinematographer), left, Ben Roy (co-creator) and Evan Nix (director-editor) with Denver students from the public school where they shot the pilot for their series Those Who Can't

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*12 Comedy Acts to Watch in 2013

Amazon's new production arm, Amazon Studios, is right now breaking new ground by premiering 14 scripted pilots and having the public help decide who will get series orders. But its avant-garde development process goes deeper than that.

Amazon's original programming execs, Sarah Babineau and Joe Lewis, bought some finished scripts that had made the rounds at other networks in previous years but gone unpurchased. Others they bought from unknowns who submitted their full scripts through Amazon's call for submissions on its website. From first-time TV writers to Academy Award-nominated veterans, Amazon gave many of its creators unprecedented freedom in casting, crew, content and production.

This freedom, and perhaps the pure publicity stunt of it all, allowed Amazon to woo established creators who might not otherwise have been interested in having their work displayed at a meat market for any guy in sweatpants in his grandma's basement to vilify or exult. "At first I thought, who wants to work on troll bait?" says famed Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, creator of Amazon pilot Alpha House. "But Amazon is assessing reaction through a variety of different metrics, so whatever decisions they make will almost certainly be more informed and rational than the traditional Hollywood gut calls."

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Yung Jake

Although half of Los Angeles will decamp this weekend to the snowy hillsides of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, not everyone is going for the movies. Starry-eyed attendees relish access to the suits, the skiing and the swag, but what about the art?

Shari Frilot has curated Sundance's experimental New Frontier films and exhibitions for the past seven years, and this year, rather than pushing anyone to see James Franco's film Interior. Leather Bar, (hint: it involves sexually explicit gay BDSM), Frilot is encouraging us to notice Yung Jake, whose work blurs the lines between memes, hip hop and video art.

"He's young, green and pretty hot," Frilot said. After all, not many visual artists would mention a dislike of rapper-turned-actor Ludacris and race-conscious silhouette artist Kara Walker in the same breath. I want to know more, to talk to Yung Jake himself, but he's back in New York for the holidays. He doesn't want to talk on the phone, and he doesn't want to Skype; he says it's too impersonal. He wants to talk over text.

Well, okay.

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Topless Robot, home for "nerd news, humor and self-loathing" is looking to immediately hire a new chief blogger and editor.

Yes, really!

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L.A. likes Twilight (above). S.F. -- not as much.

L.A. likes Twilight and S.F. likes The Big Lebowski?

So says a graphic put out by the social networking site StumbleUpon, analyzing the cultural differences between the two cities.

"You can see a lot of things that actually aren't surprising," says StumbleUpon data analyst Tim Abraham, who conducted the study. "Our users were actually finding content that confirms stereotypes that we have about L.A. and S.F."

Here's the graphic:

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Cris Dobbins

L.A. Startup Club founders Daniel Hengeveld and Micki Krimmel outside of their offices at the Idyllic Nerd Commune in downtown's Arts District.

Would you contribute 10 bucks to get an adult webcomix series featuring voiceovers from real porn stars off the ground? How about $5 for a stainless steel buttplug project? Ben Tao and Eric Lai, founders of Offbeatr, an adult version of crowd-funding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, seem to think you might.

There's only one problem. Who will hold onto the money while the buttplug company waits to see whether it can raise the full amount it needs? Crowd-funding sites take donations under the condition that your credit card will be charged only if the project being funded reaches its goal, but PayPal, American Express and Amazon Payments all refuse to process orders on adult material.

What's a struggling startup to do? Why, consult and exchange information with the competition, of course!

Every other Monday evening at the Idyllic Nerd Commune (INC), a co-working loft space in the downtown Arts District, the L.A. Startup Club, a collective consisting of the leaders of seven new tech companies, gathers over take-out to vent about the challenges their businesses face, to offer each other honest feedback and goal accountability and to share tangible resources, such as the contact info for a good Java designer or a comprehensive list of deep-pocketed investors. Startups involved range from the L.A. branch of a D.C.-based solar utility company to a service that saves parents from tedious shopping trips by sending a customizable box of children's clothing every month, started by Sean Percival, featured in LA Weekly's 2009 People issue as founder of L.A. tech blog lalawag.

The intimate, leaderless club is the brainchild of startup veterans Micki Krimmel and Daniel Hengeveld, who aim to find a happy medium between the superficial schmoozing of networking events and the top-down mentorship and forfeiture of equity at startup incubators and accelerators, all of which provide support and advice for fledgling companies in the newly thriving Silicon Beach tech scene in Santa Monica and Venice.

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PHOTO BY FELICITY MURPHY

Lauren Berger held 15 internships while in college.

Lauren Berger has gotten coffee at MTV. She's gotten coffee at Fox. And yes, she's done it at several other agencies that may not have as much brand recognition. She even broke the darned coffee pot once.

These days, the 28-year-old entrepreneur gets others to fetch the java for her. Her web-based business, InternQueen.com, connects top-level companies with the cream of the college-student crop.


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See our previous story, "Pinterest Makes Me Feel Like I'm Bad at Being a Woman"

Pinterest -- the latest social media craze sweeping our laptop screens -- can be many things to many people. As a virtual vision board on which you can bookmark little Internet finds that strike your fancy, it's your canvas. Whether you're into cooking, marathon-running or curating a man collection, there's a board for that. It's a little overwhelming, really. Hence, we haven't quite figured it out yet. But we're having fun trying.

Among the seemingly endless recipes, crafting instructions and home decor pins, something on Pinterest is bound to prick you. Here are the eight of most ridiculous head-scratchers we've found on Pinterest so far.

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The characters Red and Blue drive each other crazy in the web series Dick Figures, pictured in the episode entitled "Zombies & Shotguns"

Red and Blue are stick figures with a Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck type of relationship. They drive each other crazy, but somehow remain friends. Their adventures are at the center of one of the hottest shows online. In less than a year and a half, Dick Figures has become a YouTube sensation, racking up views as its central characters reference memes and wreak havoc across their town.

Produced by Six Point Harness and airing on YouTube via Mondo Media, Dick Figures is written and directed by Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, two friends with a fondness for Internet humor and dubstep. With season 4 set to premiere April 5, Dick Figures made an appearance Saturday afternoon at Los Angeles Animation Festival, with both Skudder and Keller on hand for the panel. I had the chance to speak with them after the event.

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Screenshots courtesy of Starcast

The "best performances" screen on Starcast

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

OK, fine, maybe you've got the chops and you've got the looks, but you've missed the fame boat five times over. Your clean-cut mug and obvious talent got you out of Skokie, but you're still slinging pizza shooters six nights a week at TGI Mulligans in Studio City. Why won't anyone let you become the new flash in the Hollywood frying pan? Why doesn't anyone notice your raw talent and chiseled visage? You're destined to be the modern reincarnation of Cary Grant, clearly, if only someone would notice.

Cue StarcastAuditions.com, the Internet-based casting startup that will get you noticed -- if, of course, you deserve to be. Starcast is not a bunch of guys on a couch mocking videos of your craft for their own entertainment. It is serious business.

Founded by Gary Beer, the man behind cable TV's Smithsonian Channel and Sundance Channel, Starcast takes your craft as seriously as possible. The setup is pretty simple -- you log on and pay a nominal fee (right now it's about $10 and supposedly won't go much higher [Update: it's now free]). Then you pick a professionally crafted script, videotape yourself performing it, and voilà! Your video will be seen by legitimate high-level casting agents, reviewing Starcast footage in hopes of finding the next Tom Cruise. If you're truly gifted, they may rate you as one of their "Best Performances," marking you for further attention.

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This is Pinterest

Pinterest, much like the little black dress or the Birkin bag (depending on your tax bracket), has suddenly become the new must-have for women. It's the latest social media craze -- and it's blowing Google+ out of the water, despite, or perhaps because of, what some media outlets project is a user base that skews about three-quarters female.

I don't quite remember the first time I heard of Pinterest, which is most likely because it was mentioned alongside knitting or pickling or some such activity I only half pay attention to. But once it was on my radar, I quickly developed a bad case of "red car syndrome." Suddenly Pinterest was everywhere, in particular all over my Facebook minifeed next to pretty pictures of homemade fruit tarts and hand-crocheted sweaters. I'm no expert on crafting, but I do get excited about new technology. I signed up.

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