Kevin Scanlon

Two of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

The first time Isaac Aptaker and his partner, Elizabeth Berger, were on a professional soundstage together, everyone kept trying to take their clothes off.

"Hair and makeup kept coming up to us," Aptaker reports, "saying, 'OK, let's get you guys in your nude cover; let's get you guys in body makeup; your scene is probably coming up!' "

"They kept thinking Isaac and I were a couple," Berger interjects.

"And we had to be, like, 'No, we're not shooting a sex scene -- we're the writers,' " he says.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

When RJ Mitte first moved to Los Angeles at 13, he never imagined he'd be an actor. "Sometimes I think about where I'd be right now if I weren't doing this," he says. "I'd be on a boat somewhere. Fishing!"

It was 2006 when Mitte's family moved here from Louisiana in order to support his younger sister's work as a print model. But a talent manager found Mitte photogenic, and Mitte agreed to work with him in the hopes that it would help him meet new friends.

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Courtesy the artist, Blum & Poe and Gladstone Gallery

Carroll Dunham's Sketches for The Alienist (1997)

Before the New York Studio Program moved from Lower Manhattan to DUMBO, art students there used to gaze from their studios into the apartment painter Carroll Dunham shared with his wife, photo artist Laurie Simmons. Sometimes they could watch the two eating dinner. Maybe they could see the artists' daughters -- Lena Dunham, who now, years later, co-writes and stars in HBO's new series Girls, and her younger sister, Grace Dunham -- but the daughters don't factor into stories I've heard. Even Simmons, who has exhibited her smart photographs of paper dolls, sex dolls and dioramas in New York since 1980, barely warrants mention.

Seeing Carroll Dunham was the coup, which makes sense. For college-age artists trekking through art's past in hopes of finding out what it means to be of the present, he's an attractive pit stop. He's the solitary, obsessive artist who kept painting even after painting had begun to seem passé, who gravitates, as if unable to help himself, toward crude, adolescent, sexual imagery -- his figures have penis-shaped noses, exposed assholes, caricatured breasts, often painted in cartoonish colors. Yet he has the confident hand and compositional savvy of an abstract expressionist, so everything he does, no matter how disturbing, feels serious.

A mini-retrospective of Dunham's drawings opened at Blum & Poe gallery in Culver City just a week after his daughter's show Girls debuted on HBO, and runs through May 26.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

There's never dead air when you're with Jessica St. Clair, who has a giant personality to go with her big blue eyes and blond hair. Taking a break from filming her new NBC sitcom Best Friends Forever at a Rampart Village studio, the Santa Monica-based comedian and actress delivers a delirious barrage of quips, observations and one-liners. "I was so flat-chested in high school," she explains, "that I thought I'd better be funny if guys were going to like me."

She is certainly that. (Funny, that is.) In fact, she's easily among the most hilarious of the rapidly expanding sphere of prominent female comedians, spurred, in part, by last year's surprise hit Bridesmaids. St. Clair had a memorable role in that film, as the bridal shop owner. (You know, the spot where the ladies lose their lunch.) "For some reason, we're having a moment," St. Clair says of her fellow Hollywood funnywomen.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Luigi Francis Rossi -- better known as Shorty, titular star of the Animal Planet "docudrama" Pit Boss -- was not, as some have said, "made for television." His recently released memoir, Four Feet Tall and Rising, is, as one fan put it, "an amazing must-read for anyone interested in showbiz, pit bull rescue, dwarfism and how to make pruno" -- aka prison wine.

Rossi, the son of dwarf parents, grew up in lily-white Reseda with two average-height older sisters. An enterprising youngster, he ran away from home, fleeing his abusive father and landing with his "second family" at Nickerson Gardens in Watts. He later joined the Bloods and served a decade behind bars for a gang-related shooting.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

If you haven't seen New Girl -- the Fox sitcom that premiered last September to stellar ratings -- you've probably seen the billboards all over town, featuring star Zooey Deschanel in lime-green vintage, grinning alongside the slogan, "Simply Adorkable."

Its almost-cringeworthy tagline may have been the work of buzzword-happy marketers, but New Girl itself is the creation of 30-year-old Liz Meriwether, who based Deschanel's character Jess -- a gorgeous but almost pathologically quirky young woman who moves into a loft shared by three dudes -- on herself.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Nobody does "jaded twentysomething" better than Aubrey Plaza. The 27-year-old NYU- and UCB-trained actress has mastered the art of the dry wit and judging stare.

And that's not just on the small screen.

Best known for playing human eye roll April Ludgate on NBC's Parks and Recreation, Plaza's deadpan humor has cracked up audiences in such films as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Funny People. It also has made her the poster child for Gen-Y apathy. (Although she cares, really she does -- in fact, she was nice enough not to cancel a phone interview despite being bedridden in a New York hotel room with food poisoning.)

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rfaust76 (Creative Commons)

See also:
*"Lauren Faust: Let's Hear It for the Girls"
*"Top 5 Lessons for Adults From My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic"

For this year's L.A. Weekly People Issue, I interviewed Lauren Faust, the fabulously talented artist and writer who has worked on top-notch shows like The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Now, though, she's best known for developing the TV series that launched the Brony phenomenon, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. More recently, Faust led the team behind the DC animated short series Super Best Friends Forever.

We talked about a lot of things in the interview that didn't make the final version of the story. Below are a few outtakes.

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© Kevin Parry for Paley Center

Ferguson at the Paley Center

The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson heads to Scotland this week, with episodes that see the host returning to his hometown and confronting some of the ghosts that have haunted him since his youth. Of course, those same episodes also feature dancing horses, gay robot skeleton Geoff Peterson ("I don't know that there's anything that makes me laugh like that fucking skeleton," he said), David Sedaris discussing colostomy bags over dinner, and Ariel Tweto being adorably clueless -- so it's all much the same mix as usual.

Thursday night was Ferguson's first evening in the spotlight at the Paley Center for Media, and in a post-screening chat with Entertainment Weekly's Lynette Rice, he was his usual self-deprecating self.

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Courtesy of Dan and Laura Dotson

Dan and Laura Dotson

Creatives is a new recurring column about creative people in L.A. following their passions.

If one man's trash is another man's treasure, then Dan and Laura Dotson are the guides who bring it all together.

The married team of licensed auctioneers owns American Auctioneers in Riverside. Dan Dotson learned the business from his grandfather, a cattle and farm auctioneer from the Ozarks. He fell in love with Laura after they exchanged smiles at -- where else -- auction houses. (She'd come to bid on restaurant equipment.) He trained her, and now they travel the country, hosting about 3,000 auctions a year. They also monitor storage auctions through their website, StorageTreasures.com.

But to reality TV aficionados, Dan and Laura, 49 and 43, respectively, are the good-natured, fast-talking folks who keep things moving on A&E's Storage Wars.

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