Los Angeles magazine - July 2021

THE MANY LIVES OF MR. ALI

THE CURIOUS RISE OF A TWITTER POWER BROKER

BY PETER KIEFER

MICKEY’S MAKEOVER INSIDE DISNEYLAND’S GREAT AWOKENING

READY, JET, GO! CHEAP AND EASY WAYS TO FLY

BY JAKE FLANAGIN

BY BRAD JAPHE

G L O B A L WA R FA R E

EXCLUSIVE

WHY THE GOLDEN GLOBES BLEW UP Racial mudslinging. Whacked-out press conferences. Backroom shenanigans. Is the party finally over for Hollywood’s most hated awards show?

BY BENJAMIN SVETKEY $5.95 J U LY 2 0 2 1 L A M AG .CO M

J U LY 2 0 2 1

FIRST ANNUAL PETFEST COMPETITION

PROMOTION

The Adventures of McGruder 4J.Y\KLY [OL :L]LU @LHY 6SK :JV[[PL MYVT 7HZHKLUH >PUZ Los Angeles THNHaPUL»Z -PYZ[ (UU\HS 7L[-LZ[ *VTWL[P[PVU ,HYUPUN [OL ;P[SL VM 3 ( »Z *\[LZ[ 7L[

0 WPJR \W [OL YLTV[L OL»Z YLHK` MVY ;= ¹ When Col. Angus P. McGruder (Ret.), aka McGruder, isn’t being a polite porch watchdog, announcing his presence to strangers with a single straightforward bark, he’s watching his favorite TV shows, co-hosting dinner parties, and shopping.

“Most people have never seen a real Scottie,” says owner Catherine :OHќ LY ¸,]LY` WLYZVU OL TLL[Z PZ OPZ MYPLUK ¹ HUK OL SV]LZ WSH`PUN around with the neighborhood dogs.

(SS ISHJR HUK WLYMLJ[S` THUPJ\YLK OL Z[HUKZ ^P[O L_JLSSLU[ WVZ[\YL HUK ZOL [LSSZ OPT ¸@V\»YL H ZOV^ KVN UV[ H ^H[JOKVN ¹ /PZ TV[OLY PZ H .YHUK *OHTWPVU OPZ MH[OLY PZ H *OHTWPVU HUK OPZ ZPZ[LY PZ HU PU KLTHUK JHUPUL TVKLS· OL»Z NV[ ^OH[ `V\ JHSS [OL ¸P[¹ MHJ[VY )\[ [V :OHќ LY OL PZ Q\Z[ OLY ¸IHI` IV` ¹

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0U HKKP[PVU [V ILPUN ^LSS ILOH]LK 4J.Y\KLY PZ L_[YLTLS` ZTHY[ HUK H[ HNL VUL HSYLHK` RUL^ ^VYKZ HUK WOYHZLZ )\[ OL Z[PSS OHZ OPZ quirks. When he gets a beloved new bone, he’ll spend three days searching for the perfect hiding place, hopping on chairs, shoving WPSSV^Z ZUVVWPUN HYV\UK · HSS [OL ^OPSL ^OPTWLYPUN PU KLZWLYH[PVU MVY Z\JJLZZ ¸0 UL]LY \ZLK [OL ^VYK ZPSS` ILMVYL ¹ ZH`Z :OHќ LY ¸I\[ 0 ZH` º@V\»YL ZV ZPSS`» [V OPT HSS [OL [PTL ¹

PHOTOS BY JIM DONNELLY

4J.Y\KLY»Z UHTL ^HZ PUZWPYLK I` H MYPLUK»Z JOPSKYLU»Z IVVR JOHYHJ[LY HUK OL OHZ ZPUJL LTIVKPLK [OL JOHYHJ[LY TVYL [OHU [OL H\[OVY JV\SK OH]L PTHNPULK

PROMOTION

Presented by NutriSource, the inaugural Cutest Pet PetFest competition called for entries from all of Los Angeles’s cutest pets, ^P[O H WVY[PVU VM LU[YHU[ WYVJLLKZ [V ILULÄ [ [OL :VJPL[` MVY [OL Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles (spcaLA). Votes on over 100 of the cutest pets in Los Angeles were cast, and McGruder LHYULK [OL [P[SL :OHɈ LY HUK 4J.Y\KLY JV\SKU»[ OLSW I\[ LU[LY “Everywhere I take him people say, ‘He’s cute!’” As for entering the JVU[LZ[ :OHɈ LY ZH`Z ¸0 HT OVWPUN WLVWSL ^OV I\` Los Angeles magazine and see [McGruder] in it will show it to others and it will help people see the good work done by spcaLA and Los Angeles magazine for doing PetFest.”

:OHɈ LY»Z IPNNLZ[ Z\YWYPZL HZ H KVN TVT PZ OV^ T\JO OHWWPULZZ McGruder brings. He serves as a great role model because it doesn’t take much for him to be happy: He loves watching TV, he loves being on the porch looking for people, he loves other dogs, and he most loves being out. McGruder will go anywhere, and with his new stroller, aptly named “Grudie’s Wheels,” his world has expanded even further. “He was put on earth to be happy and make people happy, especially his mom. I got the perfect child. I’m blessed.”

Many more adventures of McGruder are ahead. Catch him walking the streets of Pasadena and rolling along the Santa Monica Promenade.

Find him on social media at linktr.ee/Mc_Scottie.

JULY 2021

L . A .’S L A DY L OW R I D E R S TA K E T H E W H E E L

In the 8-track player of Gypsy Rose, the world’s most famous custom car, is the original owner’s favorite recording— Cuando Lloran Los Hombres (When Men Cry) by José Alfredo Jiménez.

Features 62

70

Blowout at the Golden Globes

The Mysterious Mr. Ali

Racial showdowns.

Whacked-out press conferences.

Sketchy backroom deals.

Is the awards show Hollywood loves to loathe finally down for the count?

In just a few years, an eccentric, elephant-loving, gay Iranian American has become one of the most powerful journalists in the country—mobilizing his vast Twitter following to promote his famous friends and punish foes, from Sharon Osbourne to Eric Garcetti to the Church of Scientology. Can his own past survive similar scrutiny?

BY BENJAMIN SVETKEY

78

The Cruisers Lowrider culture, spawned in the 1940s, is thriving across Southern California. But as a photographer who spent five years chronicling its adherents discovered, this time the ladies are invited.

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY K R I ST I N B E D FO R D TEXT BY ERIC MERCADO

BY PETER KIEFER

4 L A M AG . C O M

P H O T O G R A P H E D BY K R I S T I N B E D F O R D

JULY 2021

Buzz DISNEYLAND’S GREAT AWOKENING

» During the lockdown, the park cleansed some attractions of cultural anachronisms. Not everyone was pleased.

BY JAKE FLANAGIN PAGE 13

THE BRIEF

» Will Kevin Spacey beat the Rapp?; the curious chair that’s got the West Side in a lather; Rao’s hits the road; the man who

double-crossed Jeff Bezos—and his own sister.

PAGE 16

STRANGER THINGS

» An auction of iconic movie relics brings out Hollywood’s highest rollers.

BY IAN SPIEGELMAN PAGE 18

Ask Chris BU R B E R RY B I NG E

Law Roach is the first Black artist to reach the top of The Hollywood Reporter’s Most Powerful Stylists list.

The Inside Guide

» Are there any lesbian bars left in the city? Why are L.A. Metro seats cloth instead of plastic? What happened to the bird sanctuary at the Westwood VA? Our resident historian answers all your burning questions.

BY CHRIS NICHOLS PAGE 104

and thoughts on the rapture from Kristin Chenoweth; the surprising interior-design trend making a big comeback; summer’s hottest shorts; how the other half does air travel; why everyone is suddenly sipping hard kombucha; and more

ON THE COVER Cover art by Justin Metz

6 L A M AG . C O M

CO U RT E SY R OAC H

» The triumphant return of the Hollywood Bowl; dating advice

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Maer Roshan

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8 L A M AG . C O M

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L A M AG . C O M 9

Editor’s Note

BY MAER ROSHAN

A F E W W E E K S AG O, I received

an enticing email from a reader named Kathryn Leigh Scott: would I like to stop by for some wine and cheese in her garden? While offers of poolside libations are always tough to turn down, this one was irresistible. Kathryn, an author, philanthropist, and actress, is a local legend with an intimate knowledge of this magazine’s history. Her husband, Geoff Miller, founded Los Angeles in 1960, when he was just 24, and remained at its helm for the next 34 years. Eight years before New York magazine made its debut, Los Angeles, under his leadership, pioneered many of the conventions— “Best Restaurants!” “Staycations!”—that became ubiquitous in the hundreds of imitators it spawned across the country.

Geoff passed away in 2011, but his wife remains fiercely proud of his legacy. As the sun set lazily over the deck of her Benedict Canyon home, she pulled out a thick sheaf of old photos and reminisced about the magazine’s first offices on Rodeo Drive, a decade before its luxe transformation. “It was this rinky-dink place next door to the Daisy. Just eight guys, a bunch of typewriters and a coffee machine,” she said. “Geoff was in love with L.A., but he didn’t mind a little controversy. He thought 10 L A M AG . C O M

“As the magazine embarks on a new chapter, we’ll be covering a city that’s also in transition . . .

While we honor the past, we’re excited for the future.”

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @MAERROSHAN

the magazine should be more than just a cheerleader; he thought we were making history.”

That history was much on my mind recently as we prepared to move our office from the home it’s occupied for the past 20 years. It’s a far cry from the mag’s “rinky-dink” origins—a sprawling suite in the same Wilshire Boulevard tower that houses the L.A. bureaus of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The walls were adorned with awards accumulated over the course of decades by hundreds of writers and photographers who’ve come through—people like Joan Didion, John Updike, Carolyn See, and Herb Ritts. Back in the ’90s, when Los Angeles was turning out 200-page issues, its then-owner confidently signed a 10-year lease, and then another.

But things didn’t turn out as expected. Just a decade ago, there were upwards of 50 people working here. Since then, an onslaught of cutbacks has dramatically reduced our head count, leaving behind rows and rows of empty cubicles and desks. When our lease finally expired, our new owners were happy to move out.

So on a dusky afternoon in May, I found myself alone in my once-bustling office, now quiet and stripped bare in preparation for the move.

The yellowing placards and citations that once lined the walls had been carefully placed in giant bins, headed for storage; a stack of oversize magazine covers gathered dust in a corner.

Frankly, it’s not hard to feel nostalgic for a more robust era in the publishing business. But the same technological advances that irrevocably transformed the media business have also enabled us to reach an audience larger and more diverse than Geoff could have ever imagined.

Rather than publishing once a month, we now produce original stories for the website every day.

In just the past two years, our traffic has quadrupled to almost 2 million visitors a month. We’re also telling stories in new and different ways. In April, a podcast based on Jason McGahan’s story about a Newport Beach plastic surgeon charged with sexually assaulting hundreds of women became the number-one series on Apple. And the frenzied reaction to stories like our recent cover on Brentwood School’s racial reckoning proves that print can still pack quite a punch.

As the magazine embarks on a new chapter , we’ll be covering a city that is also in transition— mourning the many things that have been lost to the plague. While we honor the past, we’re excited for the future. Los Angeles, both the city and the magazine, has always been in a constant state of reinvention. In the end, both have emerged better because of it.

Maer Roshan, Editor-in-Chief P H O T O G R A P H E D BY I RV I N R I V E R A

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IS ON

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07.21

During the lockdown, the happiest place on Earth purged some of its cultural anachronisms.

Not everyone is happy.

BY JA K E F L A NAG I N

Disneyland’s Great Awokening I L LU S T R AT I O N BY E D E L R O D R I GU E Z

L A M AG . C O M 13

C U LT U R E WA R S

W

“If you’d like to see those classic atreopened in April aftractions as they have been, we highly ter an unprecedented recommend that you make that trip 13-month closure in resoon,” wrote WDW Pro, a high-profile sponse to the COVID-19 blogger for Pirates & Princesses, an pandemic, visitors found a park outfitindependent news and opinion webted with hygiene-promoting exhortasite covering developments at Disney tions around every corner: handtheme parks. “Disney is convinced they sanitizing stations, self-distancing need to get rid of Br’er Rabbit and all markers, signs reminding guests to the other things they’ve deemed too stay masked at all times. controversial.”

But it’s not just the park’s toilets DisAt the opposite end of the spectrum, neyland officials thought needed cleanothers assert that Disney’s efforts to ing up. It turns out the Happiest Place promote diversity and inclusion across on Earth also spent the hiatus sanitizrace, gender, and sexuality didn’t go far ing some of its attractions to acknowlenough. In a review of Disneyland’s reedge the rapid evolution in national atvamped Snow White’s Enchanted Wish titudes toward diversity and inclusion ride for SFGate, writers Julie Tremaine in the wake of the murder of George and Katie Dowd puzzled over the atFloyd, the resurgence of Black Lives traction’s finale, which showcases the Matter protests, and an uptick in viopivotal moment in the 1937 animated lence against Asian Americans. film when Prince Charming plants a “We want our guests to see their kiss on the slumbering Snow White. own backgrounds and traditions re“Haven’t we already agreed that flected in the stories, experiences, and consent in early Disney movies is a maproducts they encounter in their injor issue? That teaching kids that kissteractions with Disney,” Josh D’Amaro, ing, when it hasn’t been established if chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences, both parties are willing to engage, is and Products, wrote on the corporate not OK?” Tremaine and Dowd wrote. website in April.

Their article set off an avalanche In practice, that has meant rethinkof outrage. “Woke ladies, let me be ing some of Disneyland’s oldest characthe first to inform you of something,” ters and longest-running wrote Republican strateattractions. Changes ingist and columnist Alicia clude removing questionPreston. “Had the prince Disney often able depictions of indignot kissed her, she would finds itself enous peoples and other be dead. You’re so woke, colonialist content from you don’t want Snow trapped in the Jungle Cruise riverWhite to awaken.” (In the middle of boat ride so that it aligns the film, Snow White is the culture with Disney’s Jungle portrayed as asleep, not wars, even as Cruise movie, to be redead.) Preston went on it desperately leased July 30, and a comto accuse activists like plete re-theming of Splash Tremaine and Dowd of tries to avoid Mountain, the popular “killing our art” to furpolarizing log-flume ride based on ther their own polarizing subjects. the controversial 1946 anipolitical agenda. mated feature Song of the Because of its promiSouth. Smaller changes innence, Disney often finds clude jettisoning elements from classic itself trapped in the middle of the culattractions, such as the “wench auction” ture wars, even as it assidiously tries to scene from Pirates of the Caribbean. avoid controversial or polarizing subThe backlash from a significant facjects. Despite its squeaky-clean family tion of Disneyland diehards—that the image, Disney was one of the earliest company had caved to political correctcompanies to recognize gay domestic ness at the expense of the park’s classic partners and has promoted “gay days” attractions—was swift. at its parks.

14 L A M AG . C O M

HEN DISNEYLAND

But the company’s record of removing visible biases at the parks hasn’t always been a priority. In the earliest years of Disneyland’s operations, Black employees were relegated exclusively to behind-the-scenes roles and were not permitted to interact with guests, a policy that wasn’t rescinded until 1968.

In 2012, a Muslim employee in one of Disneyland’s hotels sued the Walt Disney Company, alleging she was subjected to anti-Muslim harassment by colleagues and was asked not to wear a hijab because it would “negatively affect patrons’ experiences,” according to the federal complaint.

Meg Willoughby Tweedy, 58, grew up less than a mile from Disneyland in Anaheim. Both her brother and her father worked at the park. She never did. “When I was growing up, they had size limits for cast members,” she says.

“I was a size 18. Costumes didn’t go to that size. You never saw overweight people, tattoos, or beards.”

Song of the South remains one of the most deeply embedded thorns in Disney’s side when it comes to its record on racial sensitivity. Political protests of the film have persisted for as long

J E F F G R I TC H E N /O R A N G E CO U N T Y R E G I ST E R V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

BUZZ

as it has existed. An adaptation of the Uncle Remus collection of short stories compiled from Southern Black oral folklore, Song of the South’s animated animal characters employ contrived Black vernacular that critics say perpetuates negative racial stereotypes.

The original Splash Mountain ride debuted in 1989, more than 40 years after the film’s theatrical release; in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Disney announced it would redevelop the attraction based on the 2009 animated feature The Princess and the Frog, the company’s first picture to feature a predominantly Black cast of characters.

Kendra Burns-Edel, 31, a Democratic political consultant in Southern California and avid visitor, speculates that Disney’s woke reboot is more a product of economics than idealism. “Disney fans range from 90 years old to babies; but the kids these days are way more woke than previous generations. It’s a profitability decision. Disney recognizes it’s more profitable to be positive about diversity.”

A 2020 report by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA found that bringing “authentic diversity” to

AT T R AC T I ON D I ST R AC T I ON

The “wench auction” depicted in Pirates of the Caribbean got the hook in Disneyland’s woke revamp.

films can significantly improve box-office performance. The report estimated that a $159 million film lacking diversity will lose $32.2 million in first-weekend box office sales, with a potential loss of $130 million overall. Disney’s embrace of diversity-boosting measures indicates executives know which way the cultural winds are blowing, including at its parks, which account for more than 16 percent of the company’s revenues.

Disney’s film development arm has already made efforts to feature characters of color in positive roles, like Moana (Polynesian) in the 2016 film of the same name; Miguel (Mexican) in 2017’s Coco; and Raya, an amalgam of Southeast Asian cultures, in this year’s Raya and the Last Dragon. Meanwhile, Disney films with female protagonists have moved away from motivations couched in fairy-tale romance. “No one should be surprised that the rides are changing because the movies are changing,” says Burns-Edel. Referenc-

ing the female protagonist of the Frozen franchise, who many in the LGBTQ community speculate is same-sex-oriented due to her palpable disinterest in men, she adds: “Elsa’s a lesbian now!”

While the commentariat trades barbs online, Disneyland’s true diehards—a number of whom are, counterintuitively, annual-pass-holding adults, some childless, who frequent Disneyland as often as every weekend—don’t seem to take much umbrage at the changes. “I never understood why they created a ride that is based on a movie they pretend doesn’t exist,” says Kylene Kemple, 38, who lives in Las Vegas but has visited the park every other month since she was a child.

As for threats of boycotts from Disneylanders who decry the park’s perceived woke-ification, they seem unlikely given the enormous sentimental pull that Disney’s parks exert over the public. Jonathan Van Boskerck, a Republican deputy district attorney from Las Vegas, made ripples with an April 2021 op-ed in The Orlando Sentinel in which he claimed “wokeness” was ruining the overall experience at Disney parks. “That’s a mood killer,” he lamented. Van Boskerck expressed similar dissatisfaction with the relaxation of the parks’ employee dress code, allowing cast members, for the first time, to sport visible tattoos and gender-inclusive hairstyles and clothing choices.

“The problem is, I’m not traveling across the country and paying thousands of dollars to watch someone I do not know express themselves,” Van Boskerck wrote. “I am there for the immersion and the fantasy, not the reality of a stranger’s self-expression.” The op-ed launched a thousand withering memes. “This guy doesn’t want Disney World; he wants Westworld,” Twitter user @ThomBoyD tweeted at the Sentinel in response.

Burns-Edel doubts Van Boskerck’s personal boycott. “He still goes, I guarantee it,” she says. “For better or worse, Disneyland is kind of cultish. Anyone who feels as nostalgic about it as I do, those people aren’t going to stop going because they took one character out of Pirates of the Caribbean.”

L A M AG . C O M 15

N E WS & N OT E S F R O M A L L OV E R

The Brief arraignment through a crowd of reporters at his ct Court.

Distri ucket Nant at 2019, 7, ry on Janua

WE’VE GOT TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN: WILL SPACEY BEAT THE RAPP? A JUDGE DISMISSES ONE OF THE ACTOR’S ACCUSERS FOR REFUSING TO REVEAL HIS IDENTITY TO THE PUBLIC

BY IAN SPIEGELMAN

would “re-trigger” the of sexual misconPTSD he claims he suffered duct continue to as a result of the alleged pile up against assault, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan disagreed, Kevin Spacey, the disgraced Oscar winner pointing out that the plainseems to be off the hook in tiff has already revealed his a $40 million assault-andidentity to several people, battery lawsuit after a including a few reporters. judge ruled in May that “The evidence suggests Spacey’s anonymous that C.D. knowingly and accuser must either repeatedly took the risk allow himself to that any of these individbe identified or uals at one point or drop his claim. another would In a civil suit reveal his true that was moved identity in a to a federal court manner that in November, would bring BU M R A P P the plaintiff, that identity to The Star Trek actor identified as wide public attenclaims Spacey assaulted “C.D.,” alleges tion,” Kaplan him as a teen. that while he concluded. was a 14-year-old student While the judge granted in Spacey’s acting class in C.D. ten days to file the the early 1980s, the thensuit under his own name, unknown actor “attempted his attorneys said he was to sodomize” him, despite “too emotionally unable to his vocal objections. C.D.’s proceed with the action.” lawyers argued that going C.D. is not the first public with his identity Spacey accuser to give AS ALLEGATIONS

16 L A M AG . C O M

A REALLY HOT SEAT ANGELENOS OFTEN

get excited about new health and beauty trends, but a gadget that’s popped up at high-end gynecologists’ offices across town has some West Side ladies feeling especially hot and bothered. The Emsella chair—a British-made contraption that surfaced last year—purportedly helps women strengthen

G O O D V I B R AT I O NS

The Emsella chair—Viagra for women.

their pelvic floor. But not long after one of the chairs was installed at the offices of an ob-gyn in Calabasas, it began causing a commotion in the waiting room, where some surprised patients were becoming aroused against their will.

After one particularly noisy incident, the red-faced doc removed the chair to its own private room.

“That can happen in the chair because it delivers high-intensity, focused electromagnetic waves that improve vaginal sensation,” explains Dr. Avi Ishaaya of L.A.’s

C R OW D : A F P V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ; STA R T R E K /A N T H O N Y R A P P : C B S ; K E V I N S PAC E Y: E R N E STO R U S C I O/G E T T Y I M AG E S ; E M S E L L A C H A I R : I N STAG R A M .CO M / PAU L I N A P O R I Z KOV

ey wading C O U RT I NG T R O U B L E Spac

up the fight. In 2019, Massachusetts prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Spacey when another accuser refused to testify in the case. Also in 2019, a massage therapist who filed suit against the actor died just after his suit landed in court.

And author Ari Behn, who alleged that Spacey had groped him during a Nobel Prize concert, committed suicide on Christmas Day of that year, which means the actor currently faces no criminal charges here.

Spacey just signed on to his first film role since the scandals broke, playing a police detective in an indie thriller. But he shouldn’t be planning a comeback just yet. C.D. was only a coplaintiff in the suit brought against Spacey by Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp, who claims Spacey assaulted him during a party at Spacey’s home in 1984 when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 24. Spacey initially said he didn’t remember what had happened, but more recently denied that Rapp was ever at his place. He has also denied all of C.D.’s allegations.

Spacey has also been accused of misconduct by an actor and a crew member on the nowdefunct House of Cards. In London, Scotland Yard’s Child Abuse and Sexual Offences Command has presented its findings in at least six sexual assault claims made against him to the Crown Prosecution Service. Authorities there are now deciding whether to charge him.

PRICE PER PERSON FOR A FOUR-COURSE MEAL SERVED ATOP THE GROVE’S OLD-TIMEY STREETCAR AS IT CRAWLS AROUND THE MALL. THE MOVEABLE FEAST FROM BLUE RIBBON SUSHI LASTS 90 MINUTES AND WILL BE OFFERED THROUGH AUGUST 31.

R E N D E R I N G : CO U RT E SY O F T H E P O ST G R O U P A N D P LU S D E V E LO P M E N T; M I C H A E L SA N C H E Z : J O H N S C I U L L I /G E T T Y I M AG E S FO R P O L I T I CO N ; J E F F B E ZO S A N D L AU R E N SA N C H E Z : P R O D I P G U H A /G E T T Y I M AG E S

Optima medical spa. “It’s the equivalent of doing 15,000 Kegel exercises.”

Patients, fully clothed, sit in the chair for 30 minutes while the machine does its thing. The price for the treatment is about $1,800 for six sessions.

But while plenty of women are lining up for this treatment, there are some holdouts reluctant to embrace the trend. “If I’m going to spend that kind of money,” one woman said, “It’s going on my face, where more people can see it.” — S U SA N C A M P O S

it was in our best interest to negotiate the sale of our lease so that we would not have to operate during this period of redevelopment,” confirms Rao’s co-owner, Frank Pellegrino Jr. But he says his place is far from dead and buried.

“We are searching for our next home in Southern California and are energized by what the future holds.” — M E R L E G I N S B E R G

BEZOS BETRAYED BY BAE’S BEASTLY BRO H O L LY WO O D TA L E N T

manager Michael Sanchez

CIAO, RAO’S! THE L.A. OUTPOST OF

Harlem’s legendary Italian bistro Rao’s—with a history that goes back to Goodfellasstyle mobsters like John Gotti—has been jam-packed since it first opened its doors on Seward Street in 2013.

But not even its fearsome fan base could protect the celebrity-packed eatery from the Media District’s breakneck gentrification. We hear the restaurant will be shutting its doors next month to make way for a blocks-long commercial development project. “With the development of the area around us,

made headlines when it was revealed that American Media Inc.—the parent company of National Enquirer—had paid him $250,000 for info and photos exposing the affair between then-married Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and Sanchez’s own sister, Lauren. But it turns out tattling on his sister was even more lucrative than that. A new book alleges that even as he was cashing checks from the tabloid, Sanchez was on his sister’s payroll as well—collecting a $25,000 monthly stipend to help her navigate through the scandal he helped create.

According to Brad Stone’s blockbuster new book, Amazon Unbound, Bezos and Lauren—a former KTLA news anchor—went to great lengths LAST SUPPERS

Commercial development is pushing Rao’s out of the Media District.

$1,000

to keep their relationship secret while Bezos was married to his wife of 25 years, Mackenzie, and Lauren was still wed to Endeavor executive chairman Patrick Whitesell. But their efforts were allegedly undone when Sanchez approached an AMI reporter in L.A., promising a scoop about an affair between a married “Bill Gates-type” and “a B-list married actress.” Stone contends that Sanchez spent the next few months providing the Enquirer with mounds of dirt on the celebrity couple, along with texts and indelicate photos they had exchanged.

Finally, on Jan. 7, 2019, shortly before the Enquirer was set to publish the story, the tab’s editor sent Bezos a short but alarming text: “I write to request an interview with you about your love affair.”

With the cat out of the bag, Bezos turned to his top-shelf security man, Gavin de Becker, and high-profile entertainment lawyer, Marty Singer, to squelch the story. Lauren sought out her brother’s advice, which he willingly provided—for a lavish monthly fee.

After signing the hefty contract with his sister, says Stone, Sanchez reportedly phoned then-AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard to announce “that he was now acting as [Lauren’s] representative and suggested that he come to New York to review the paper’s reporting.”

But the Enquirer’s scoop didn’t go quite as planned.

On January 9, 2019, Bezos himself broke the news of his affair in a surprise post on Medium. So when the Enquirer finally served up its cold dish a few days later, it was AMI that was left holding the bag. Incensed by

DOUBLE-CROSSED LOVERS

Bezos and two Sanchezes caught in a Shakespearean-style drama.

the Amazon chief’s doublecross, Howard allegedly threatened Bezos with even more embarrassing revelations, including a “belowthe-belt selfie” of Bezos.

(Unfortunately for Howard, the “selfie” in question turned out to be a random penis pic Sanchez had downloaded from the web.)

In the end, Bezos had the last laugh. Both thenCEO of AMI David Pecker and Howard were forced out of the company a few months later.

For his part, Sanchez continues to insist that he never did his sister wrong, saying in an email, “Everything I did protected Jeff, Lauren, and my family. I would never sell out anyone.” Though the siblings didn’t speak for months, we’re told they recently reached a detente.

Maybe blood is really thicker than water. — I . S .

L A M AG . C O M 17

FOR SALE

Stranger Things

$ 41.6 K

$ 4 4.8K

Michelle Pfeiffer’s 1992 Batman Returns cowl From the final scenes of the last of the great pre-Christopher Nolan caped-crusader flicks, this distressed-latex headgear features a few attached blond locks fashioned to look like Pfeiffer’s own. ESTIMATE: $8,000; FINAL BID: $41,600.

AN AUCTION OF ICONIC MOVIE MEMORABILIA BRINGS OUT HOLLYWOOD’S HIGHEST ROLLERS HY IAN SPIEGELMAN

F I L M FA NAT I C S with shekels to spare recently went to battle for some of the most iconic relics of the last 50 years of moviemaking at Julien’s Auctions’ “Hollywood Legends and Luminaries” event in Beverly Hills. Online bidders vied with in-person fans to take home pieces of silver-screen history from classics such as the James Bond franchise, Alien, Die Hard, Scarface, and the Harry Potter series. Top-selling items included Bruce Willis’s Die Hard Zippo, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s motorcycle jacket from Terminator 2, and Tom Hanks’s pingpong paddle from Forrest Gump, netting the auctioneer a small fortune for its historic haul.

Bruce Lee’s custom-made nunchucks The world’s first martial arts superstar owned these weapons from the mid-’60s until his tragic death in 1973. Lee’s student Taky Kimura certified that the master practiced with this pair to perfect the technique he made famous in Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon, and Game of Death.

ESTIMATE: $2,000; FINAL BID: $83,200.

$ 83.2 K

$ 64 K

Johnny Depp’s blades Once upon a time, Depp was only playing freaks—and loveable, misunderstood ones at that. Back then, he donned these famous bladed props for Tim Burton’s 1990 love story Edward Scissorhands, along with a tattoo that read “Winona” instead of “Wino.” ESTIMATE: $30,000; FINAL BID: $44,800.

Al Pacino’s Scarface suit While Tony Montana’s M-16 wasn’t on the block, this threepiecer from Brian De Palma’s 1983 epic made quite an impression. It’s said to be the only costume to have survived the film’s explosive climax. ESTIMATE: $60,000; FINAL BID: $83,200.

18 L A M AG . C O M

Sean Connery’s Walther P5 The original James Bond carried this sleek but deadly 9mm semiautomatic on the French Riviera in his final appearance as 007 in 1983’s Never Say Never Again. ESTIMATE: $80,000; FINAL BID: $106,250.

$ 83.2 K

Jodie Foster’s ID Genius people-eater Hannibal Lecter knew with a glance that Clarice Starling was “not real FBI,” but these are the real prototype credentials made for Foster for Silence of the Lambs before it won all five of 1991’s top Oscars.

ESTIMATE: $5,000; FINAL BID: $15,625.

$15.6K

Kevin Costner’s tractor With the power of hope and this still-working 1977 John Deere 2640, Costner brought back to life disgraced Chicago outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, along with a whole team of the damned, for his amusement in 1989’s Field of Dreams. ESTIMATE: $60,000; FINAL BID: $64,000.

$106.2K

CO U RT E SY J U L I E N ’ S AU C T I O N S ; T R AC TO R : ST E P H E N G ASS M A N P H OTO G R A P H Y

Buzz

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L A A R T S H O W.C O M

07.21 THE

Inside Guide Plus > Kristin Chenoweth hits the high notes with a new TV musical PAGE 26

> Take a trip— without a hassle PAGE 36

> Grab a great picnic en route to the beach PAGE 42

C H R I STO P H E R P O L K /G E T T Y I M AG E S FO R C B S R A D I O

HAPPENINGS

The Bowl Is Back!

LAST YEAR, COVID FORCED THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL TO CLOSE FOR THE FIRST SUMMER IN NEARLY A CENTURY. NOW THE ICONIC VENUE RETURNS WITH ONE OF ITS MOST EXCITING SEASONS YET

BY HAILEY EBER

PH O T O GR A PH BY T K T K T K T K T K T K T K T K

L A M AG . C O M 2 1

The Inside Guide

HAPPENINGS

I

Thankfully, this summer the Bowl is making a triumphant comeback. After a series of free con“The music certs for frontline workers in May and June, the goes on, official season starts Fourth of July weekend with Kool & The Gang playing both Saturday and Sunthe world day nights, ending with a traditional fireworks goes on— spectacular on Sunday. let’s “We cannot think of a better way to kick off our return to touring than the Hollywood Bowl!” celebrate says the band’s co-founder, Robert “Kool” Bell, who Kool & The Gang was first formed in Jersey that!” kept busy during the pandemic working on a new City in 1964 by Bell and his brother, Ronald “KhROBERT album, Perfect Union, due out later this year. alis” Bell, who passed away last September at 68.

“KOOL” BELL Despite the new material they’ve been workThe band’s opening weekend will be followed ing on, Bell says those in the audience at the Bowl by a number of exciting Bowl shows. Christina should expect to hear the soulful songs the band Aguilera will belt it out on July 16 and 17, acis best known for, like “Celebration,” “Jungle Boogie,” and companied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo “Ladies’ Night.”

Dudamel; Cynthia Erivo gives a friday night concert on July “This is a get up on your feet, dance, and sing-along show.

30; Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach on September 14; and James Blake Expect all Kool hits the whole time,” says Bell. “Live shows takes the stage on September 25. There will also be a numstarting again is a sign of hope. Music is a universal language, ber of nights devoted to classic film scores and soundtracks, and right now it’s saying, ‘The music goes on, the world goes from The Princess Bride on July 31 and a Sound of Music singon—let’s celebrate that!’ ” along on August 21 to Black Panther on September 10 and 11 COMING SOON

The Academy Museum

Sophie Hunter restores Skeksis Gourmand.

22 L A M AG . C O M

> The upcoming Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is set to open in September with famous movie props and costumes—from the ruby slippers featured in The Wizard of Oz to the stone tablets from The Ten Commandments—on display. Conservators Sophie Hunter and Rio Lopez have been hard at work readying one of the larger objects: the Skeksis Gourmand, a six-foottall puppet created by the Jim Henson studios for the 1982 film

The Dark Crystal.

Every inch of the creature required conservation, from the glass eyes to the pouredin-place foam skin. Hunter and Lopez used high-tech analytical equipment but also fashioned their own tools for sanding and picking, utilizing coffee stirrers and toothpicks. They kept a DVD of the original film nearby as well as original production photos shot by the late Henson. “It’s so special to see the original

object that you love from that movie,” says Hunter. “[It’s] part of the history.”

The pair introduced new high-tech materials among the crumbling original polyurethane bits. Fingers that had literally rotted off the bone were resculpted and fitted back onto the underlying armature.

“You can’t stop anything from deteriorating, but we have a lot of tools to prolong its life span,” says Hunter. ©

—CHRIS NICHOLS

KO O L A N D T H E G A N G : A N G E L A W E I SS /A F P ; AC A D E M Y: R I C H A R D H A R B AU G H / © A . M . P. A . S .

N M AY 2020, the Hollywood Bowl made a historic announcement. For the first time in 98 years, it would not have a summer season. Never in the life of the Los Angeles institution had there been more than two summer weeks without a show at the Bowl.

“It was very emotional,” says Laura Connelly, vice president of presentations and general manager at the beloved venue. “I’ve worked at the Hollywood Bowl for 22 years. To not be able to open and have live music . . . I was in a state of shock for at least a week.”

N OW P L AY I N G

MUSIC

At the Bowl 2021

We took it for granted, but after one summer without shows at the Hollywood Bowl, this L.A. institution is finally roaring back to life, and Angelenos will never sleep on the privilege again. Here’s our playlist to get you revved up for the venue’s reopening.

Kool & The Gang (July 3 and July 4), “Celebration” You’ve heard this at every wedding, birthday, and bar mitzvah since the dawn of time, but expect it to hit extra hard this Independence Day. Christina Aguilera (July 16 and 17), “Fighter” Pop stars going rock isn’t always a smooth transition, but this 2002 ripper saw Xtina doing it better than most.

T H E R E ’S A PA RT Y G OI NG ON

P L AY L I ST: G E T T Y I M AG E S

From left: Kool & The Gang’s Dennis Thomas, James “JT” Taylor, and Robert “Kool” Bell celebrated their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018 with a typically rollicking performance.

and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on September 17. Outside of the L.A. Phil’s programming, there are some rousing independent shows in the fall, such as Alanis Morissette on October 5 and New Order and the Pet Shop Boys on October 15 and 16.

“I think it’s one of the best seasons we’ve ever programmed, frankly,” says Connelly, who is most excited about movie maestro John Williams’s shows September 3, 4, and 5. “I love seeing the audience reactions to the Star Wars songs and scenes.” It’s all especially thrilling, Connelly adds, given that in December Bowl officials weren’t sure they’d be able to have a regular season this year. But in April, when Governor Newsom announced plans for the state to reopen in June, they cautiously began to put together a lineup.

“We’ve probably had, you know, six or seven different iterations of a season,” she says. “That’s been the most challenging thing.”

At press time, exactly how the Bowl will reopen in terms of masking, capacity, and proof of vaccination, is still in flux.

But Connelly says officials are committed to making things as similar to the good ol’ days as possible. Delicious food and wine from A.O.C.’s Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne will be available at concession stands, and Connelly says they’ll be encouraging more concertgoers to order ahead via an app for contactless pickup. And, of course, there will be picnicking.

“We want to make sure that coming to the Hollywood Bowl is the same experience that people have had over the years,” Connelly says. “We look forward to people being able to come with all their mountains of food and alcohol.”

2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood, hollywoodbowl.com.

Kamasi Washington (July 18), “Fists of Fury” The Angeleno touches spiritual and musical euphoria on this spectacular opener to his 2018 double album, Heaven and Earth. Even though it’s nearly ten minutes long, not a second is wasted.

H.E.R. (August 13 and 14), “Fight for You” This Oscar-winning track from the superb Judas and the Black Messiah soundtrack blends Marvin Gaye’s righteousness with Curtis Mayfield’s grooves, creating a modern soul masterpiece.

James Blake (September 25), “Atmosphere” The Brit’s chilly, electronic R&B has been transfixing us for a decade now, but his 2020 cover of this Joy Division classic is otherworldly in its beauty.

Herbie Hancock (September 26), “Chameleon” Everyone knows the ’80s MTV staple “Rockit,” but as fun as that track undoubtedly is, it can’t compete with the primo jazz-funk of this 1973 monster.

Hall & Oates (October 1), “Maneater” The Motown bass line, the sinister saxophone solo, and that chorus. Even after all these years, “Maneater” just doesn’t miss.

Alanis Morissette (October 5), “Head Over Feet” The sound of Alanis growling memorably through “You Oughta Know” will always define her to some extent, but don’t forget: Jagged Little Pill also contained this sweet little love song.

New Order (October 15 and 16), “Blue Monday” It’s known to some as the song off the new Volvo commercial, but known to most as one of the best records of all time.

Pet Shop Boys (October 15 and 16, with New Order), “West End Girls” Between “It’s a Sin” and “Career Opportunities” being revisited in cover versions and ads, the Pet Shop Boys are back in vogue. This, however, will always be their crowning achievement.

L A M AG . C O M 23

The Inside Guide

INTERIORS

Get Down

THE CONVERSATION PIT—THAT SUNKEN TREASURE FROM THE ’60S AND ’70S— HAS BEEN UNEARTHED AND MODERNIZED FOR THE POSTPANDEMIC ERA

BY OREN PELEG

D E E P D OW N

Design firm Part Office added a conversation pit to a recent Mar Vista renovation to allow for unobstructed views of the garden. A monochromatic palette makes the feature feel modern, not retro.

E A R L I E R T H I S Y E A R , Noel Fedosh and his team at Luno Design Studio in Beverlywood presented a client with renderings of his new house. Fedosh had included a sunken outdoor seating area with a fire pit dramatically surrounded by water. The client loved it. “It’s the feature that grabbed him the most,” Fedosh recalls.

After everyone spent more than a year mostly isolated, the home design trend du jour is one that makes human connection its chief objective: the conversation pit.

Examples of lowered, terraced areas in the home can be traced as far back as ancient China. In the 1950s, modernist architects began incorporating sunken seating into living rooms, and the feature exploded with popularity in the 1960s and ’70s, when it often involved shag carpeting and garishly colored pillows. Now the conversation pit has come back in vogue, an architectural antidote to our solitary, screen-centric times.

“There seems to be a desire for more intimate spaces,” says Lars Hypko, cofounder of the high-end showroom Mass Beverly in West Hollywood.

24 L A M AG . C O M

For those not doing a fresh build, adding a conversation pit to an existing home can be challenging. “It’s not a simple tack-on feature for a renovation,” cautions Fedosh. A house’s foundation must be considered, as both the subfloor and the floor need to be lowered. Such an undertaking can cost into the six figures.

Kristin Korven and Jeff Kaplan of architecture/design studio Part Office in Atwater Village included a conversation pit in a recent Mar Vista home renovation, and they say the cost—roughly $20,000—was absolutely worth it.

Given that the house was on a fairly flat lot and had a raised foundation, it wasn’t too involved.

“It was critical to eliminate visual clutter,” says Kaplan.

“Rather than looking at the back of a couch from the dining space, there are now unbroken views to the exterior.”

A simpler, less expensive option is modular furniture.

Mass Beverly sells a modular sofa from Switzerland’s De Sede that mimics the feeling of enclosed seating.

No matter how it’s achieved, a conversation pit creates a wonderful cocoon. “It gives a protected feeling,” Fedosh says, and “creates an experiential moment together.”

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The Inside Guide

S M A L L TA L K

A LWAYS ON

In June, Chenoweth hosted a Broadway boot camp for teens.

In July, she stars in Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon! (right).

You started as a pageant girl in the Miss America system. I always thought contestants go to their little town, and if they lose, they’re done. But that wasn’t the case for you? > No, I’d won Miss Oklahoma City University, so I was in the Miss Oklahoma pageant, but only got second runner- up. The people in the pageant said, “Next year will be your year.” My parents were moving to Pennsylvania the next year, so I said, “Forget that. I should have won this time.

I’m going to go to Pennsylvania and prove y’all wrong.” My mom was like, “Please don’t go to Miss Pennsylvania. You don’t need to.” I’m like, “I’m going, and I’m going to win it.” But then I got second runnerup again.

tin Chenoweth fix. She brings her otherwordly vocal range to the Lorne Michaels– produced, Apple TV+ musical comedy Schmigadoon!, debuting July 16. Before Chenoweth signed on, director Barry Sonnenfeld called her and mentioned that he wanted to shoot all 18 script pages of “Tribulation,” a showstopping number, in one continuous take.

“The challenge of that obviously piqued my interest,” says CheFor more of Andrew noweth, 52, who nailed it in three takes. “It was like, ‘I did it! I Goldman’s conversation did it!’ and then promptly took a Xanax and got on a plane.” Here, with KristIn Chenoweth, check out The Originals Chenoweth talks pageant chicanery, vocal anxiety, and dating on Apple Podcasts Jewish men.

When you made it to Broadway, the New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley fell in love with you, but not always the shows you were in. Of 1999’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, he wrote, “Sally Brown is portrayed by a small but definitely adult actress named Kristin Chenoweth, who was giving one of those breakout performances that send careers skyward.” But then he went on to trash the show. A similar thing happened with Wicked. What kind of emotions do you have after a review like that? > It was a really a cool moment, but I didn’t want to celebrate too hard because we were a family, and I didn’t want [other cast members] to be hurt. And I remember B. D. Wong saying to me, “This happened to me when I did M. Butterfly. And you are to enjoy this moment.” In fact, I have a

26 L A M AG . C O M

P H O T O G R A P H Y BY J O H N RU S S O

Bring It On WHETHER IT’S A BIG SONG IN HER NEW TV SERIES OR THE RAPTURE, KRISTIN CHENOWETH IS READY FOR IT. BUT SHE MIGHT NEED A XANAX AFTERWARD

BY ANDREW GOLDMAN

B

ROA DWA Y may only now be flickering back to life, but you can still get your Kris-

S C H M I G A D O O N ! : A P P L E T V + ; S PAC E JA M : CO U RT E SY O F WA R N E R B R O S . P I C T U R E S ; B U T T E R F L I E S : G E T T Y I M AG E S

tendency to back off from performances when it’s like that. I don’t want anyone to be hurt. After we opened on Wicked, the director, Joe Mantello, said, “Go back to doing the performance you did before.”

You’re famous for singing these crazy high notes, which actually earned a name—Chenonotes.

Everybody remembers what happened to Julie Andrews’s voice—she went in for minor throat surgery and came out unable to sing. How much anxiety do you have about your voice? > So much. I’ve always been really panicked about it, but you just Throat Coat it and warm up. And it’s worse now. Because with notoriety of any kind, you want to be better. You want to supersede people’s expectations. When I was doing my very first big Broadway show, [1997’s] Steel Pier, Kander and Ebb had written this really hard aria for me, and Julie Andrews said to me, “When you think you can give another high C, don’t do it.

Don’t give those high notes away.”

So you’ll go naked? The rapture is so much hotter than I ever imagined. > Yes, it’s sexy. I’ll leave behind my underwear and my socks. Ladies and gentlemen, he asked, we’re talking about it. He’s not to be #MeTooed; I brought it up.

“The rapture is sexy. I’ll leave behind my underwear and my socks.”

You grew up a religious Baptist but went to New York. I first interviewed you in 1999 when you were engaged to a Jewish actor, Marc Kudisch. I remember you’d told Marc that you’d never met a Jew before. > I hadn’t!

You broke up, but then you went on to have a long relationship with another Jewish guy, Aaron Sorkin.

What’s the deal with you and Jewish guys? > I don’t know, but I love it.

And what is it about you guys with us? I know that Aaron and I have such deep respect for each other and our work. That’s what I

THE TO-DO LIST WAT C H

› Humans and Looney Tunes characters again join forces on the basketball court in Space Jam: A New Legacy. It’s been 25 years since the first film, and instead of Michael Jordan, the long-awaited sequel stars LeBron James.

In theaters and on HBO Max July 16.

STREAM

think drew us together, because I’m a workaholic and so was he. He was a musictheater major from Syracuse. Nobody really remembers that.

You’re quite devout, and you and Sorkin had discussions about what would happen to him when the rapture came.

What are your current thoughts on how the rapture plays out? > We’ll be sitting here, and maybe we’ll be eating KitKats or something. And all of a sudden, I’ll be lifted up into the air and everything I have on or whatever I was doing will be left.

What’s the ticket that you need to have in order to be sucked up?

There is no ticket because God sees everything.

But the Jews aren’t going up, are they? > Yes. What? The Jews are going up in the rapture? > Yes, in fact. I believe that.

In Schmigadoon!, your character, Mildred Layton, is married to Fred Armisen’s closeted Reverend Layton. Did you ever find yourself accidentally dating a gay man? > Only once. He recognized my Louboutins. When you’re dating a man and he knows the brand of your shoes, immediately break up with him and become best friends. You know, I love my gays. I just don’t want to marry one. That’s all.

Your July cultural agenda

› Come on, get happy— and watch a heartwarming sports comedy featuring good guys, corny jokes, and shortbread cookies.

Jason Sudeikis is back for another season of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ in the role that won him an Emmy— a surprise to no one but Sudeikis himself.

July 23.

CHEER

› At press time, Tokyo was proceeding with the Summer Olympics despite calls for cancellation.

The USA’s usually dominant women’s soccer team is looking to rebound from its Rio disappointments, while tennis phenom Naomi Osaka, who has dual citizenship, will be competing for Japan.

July 23 on NBC.

LISTEN

› Where to go after that Grammy sweep?

Billie Eilish offers up an answer on her ironically named second album, Happier Than Ever. Perhaps more important, depending on your age, Prince’s never-before-heard archives album, Welcome 2 America, is finally out. Both July 30.

DO › Catch (not literally) the tropical butterflies at the South Coast Botanic Garden. The Soar exhibition runs through July 31 and allows visitors to convene with the beautiful winged creatures both inside and within the garden’s new pavilion.

— L AU R E N C AST R O L A M AG . C O M 27

The Inside Guide

BOOKS

Ready for Takeoff

AFTER 41 REJECTIONS, A FORMER FLIGHT ATTENDANT IS ASCENDING WITH A SEVEN-FIGURE BOOK DEAL AND THE SUMMER’S BUZZIEST BEACH READ

BY JOR DA N R I E F E

ON E DA R K N IGH T several years ago, on her usu-

al Virgin America red-eye between Los Angeles and New York, flight attendant T. J. Newman, 36, looked out at all the sleeping strangers who put their trust so completely in the hands of their flight captain. She had a crazy thought: what would a pilot do if someone took his family hostage and demanded he crash the plane to save them? She asked one of her colleagues, and his eyes filled with terror.

“I knew he didn’t have an answer, and I knew I didn’t have an answer, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I found out what the answer was,” she says. That nagging question became Falling, a new thriller that ignited a Hollywood bidding frenzy and has been called “Jaws at 35,000 feet.”

Newman spent years writing the book while at work flying across the country, tapping out the story on her iPad and occasionally sketching notes on airpline cocktail napkins.

A native of Phoenix, she grew up going to her local bookstore, Changing Hands, which she credits for inspiring her to become a writer. She studied musical theater at Illinois Wesleyan University and, after graduation in 2006, went to New York in pursuit of Broadway dreams. Two years of rejection sent her back to Arizona where, in 2011, like her mother and sister before her, she became a flight attendant and spent the next ten years jetting about aboard Virgin America and Alaska Airlines.

Newman wrote dozens of drafts of Falling and approached 41 literary agents with the book, all of whom rejected her. In 2019, she blindly submitted to a boutique literary agency called the Story Factory, and it decided to take a chance on her. Later that year, she and her agents sent the manuscript to just one publisher—Avid Reader Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Avid paid seven figures for a twobook deal, and the movie rights were sold in a bidding war to Universal for $1.5 million.

“To say this is a dream come true is the biggest understatement. It’s been surreal, and everything has changed,” she says. In early 2020, she took a voluntary furlough from her job to polish the book, with notes from best-selling authors Don Winslow, Adrian McKinty, and Steve Hamilton.

She’s now working on her second book.

“Kind of nothing has changed,” she says, “but also everything has changed.”

28 L A M AG . C O M

HIGHER AND HIGHER

The rights to T. J. Newman’s Falling were a hot Hollywood property. Universal snapped them up for a cool $1.5 million.

H O T OF F T H E P R E SS FROM THRILLERS TO POETRY, SUMMER’S BIGGEST BOOKS ARE READY TO HIT THE SAND

BY MALIA MENDEZ

ROMANCE

It Happened One Summer Tessa Bailey With a rom-com-ready premise—a sassy Beverly Hills debutante ends up having to manage her late father’s dive bar in the Pacific Northwest (and she likes it)—this requires only slightly more effort than applying sunscreen. But, given that it’s inspired by Schitt’s Creek and written by bestselling-author Bailey, it’s much more fun. Avon Publications, July 13.

P O RT R A I T: CO U RT E SY T. J. N E W M A N ; A F T E R PA RT I E S : STO R I E S : E CCO ; B E AC H O B J E C TS : G E T T Y I M AG E S

FANTASY

The Chosen and the Beautiful Nghi Vo This queer, magic-tinged reimagining of The Great Gatsby swirls around a Vietnamese adoptee who finds herself both desired and shunned amid the dazzling parties of the Jazz Age. Tordotcom Publishing, out now.

SUSPENSE

A Slow Fire Burning, Paula Hawkins From the author of The Girl on the Train, this slow burn of a thriller looks at three women under investigation for the gruesome murder of a young man on a London

houseboat. Riverhead Books, August 31.

POLITICAL THRILLER

The President’s Daughter Bill Clinton and James Patterson After their wildly successful The President Is Missing, the powerhouses are back with a suspense-filled novel about a former POTUS and Navy SEAL whose daughter is held hostage.

It’s an entirely new cast of characters from the duo’s first foray, but expect the same monstrous sales. Little, Brown and Company and Knopf, out now.

NONFICTION

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell Written by two Wall Street Journal reporters, this exposé on the coworking company’s downfall—and the absurd players involved—is as engrossing as Silicon Valley tales get. Bonus: it’s perfect fodder for summer barbecue chatter. Crown Publishing Group, July 20.

BIOGRAPHY

SHORT STORIES

Changes: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur, Sheldon Pearce Twenty-five years after Tupac’s death and 50 years after his birth, the New Yorker’s Pearce deftly weaves together myriad voices on the legendary rapper. Simon & Schuster, out now.

Afterparties: Stories, Anthony Veasna So Short fiction doesn’t usually get much hype, but this is one of the year’s most anticipated titles. So, who died in December at 28, paints lively portraits of young Cambodian Americans reckoning with their refugee parents’ traumas. Ecco, August 3.

YOUNG ADULT

One Last Stop Casey McQuiston McQuiston’s bestseller Red, White & Royal Blue was one of 2019’s most celebrated love stories.

In her sophomore efffort, a cynical teen falls hard for her dream girl, who happens to have been transported from the 1970s to modern-day New York City. St. Martin’s Griffin, out now.

POETRY

Goldenrod Maggie Smith This poetry collection from the writer of the viral poem “Good Bones” and best-selling book Keep Moving is full of elegant examinations of love, loss, solitude, and parenting. Atria/One Signal Publishers, July 27.

MEMOIR

The Ugly Cry Danielle Henderson The TV writer and creator of the popular Feminist Ryan Gosling blog mines her upbringing as the only Black kid in a white suburb for dark comedy. Viking, out now.

LITERARY FICTION

Animal Lisa Taddeo Taddeo’s exhaustively reported Three Women was one of 2019’s most talked about titles. With her first novel, she again portrays the rich inner life of a woman, this one coming to terms with the violence she’s witnessed.

Avid Reader Press, out now.

The Inside Guide

MIXED MEDIA

Get Back

which we sit, but something we all do together, communally, when we’re unleashed from our quarantines.

It’s hard to imagine a movie better timed for celebration than Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, a remake of the specAFTER DOUR DRAMAS THAT PLAYED TO THE PANDEMIC, tacular 1961 urban musical that successfully lured audiencHOLLYWOOD IS EMBRACING A POST-VACCINATION SLATE es from their TVs the first time around. I thought remaking THAT COULD FILL THEATERS AGAIN

BY STEVE ERICKSON West Side Story was a brick-dumb idea right up to the moment I realized it was stone brilliant and that Spielberg was the perfect guy for it, with Tony Kushner (Lincoln, Angels in F T E R A Q U A R T E R C E N T U R Y living in America) writing the script and a cast of ethnically authenTopanga Canyon, I’ve moved to Hollywood tic unknowns, as opposed to, say, Natalie Wood as Maria in Boulevard. Not only that, but into a 1925 the original. If the zeitgeist proves as festive as it wants to be, gothic revival building that once housed West Side Story will be a smash in the theaters when it arAudrey Hepburn and Ronald Reagan, with the rives in December, as will Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Chinese Theatre a block away and Musso & Frank’s a tenDune—a grail for filmmakers like David Lynch, whose 1984 minute walk. Five floors below my window, tourists teem version was a failure, and The Holy Mountain weirdo Alejanand barkers in Spiderman costumes hawk guided tours dro Jodorowsky, whose elaborate, unfulfilled storyboards for over their megaphones. When I arrived six months ago, the Dune became legendary on their own. Ridley Scott brings his boulevard was quiet, its commolavish period piece The Last Duel tion still in hiding from the panwith Matt Damon, Adam Drivdemic. Now it explodes as much er, and Killing Eve femme fatale as is possible in an imperiled Jodie Comer, while wrapping up democracy, a kind of euphoria next year’s Napoleon epic with bursting at the seams.

Joaquin Phoenix in the title role In a country that—whatever and Comer as Josephine. And, those annoying French claim othcome on, you know you want to erwise—thinks of itself as having see that and will happily go to a invented movies, popular culture theater to do so. I also look forsays more about America than ward to strolling across the street politics does, and potentially the to the Chinese to finally see Danpandemic may change the movies iel Craig wrap up his run as Bond, more than anything since televiJames Bond, in No Time to Die. sion 70 years ago. We’ve just gone Every one of these movies through a year of loss, retreat, sounds like fun. Not a single one and national crisis as documentis about growing crops in Arkaned by films that dominated our sas or the ravages of dementia or mass consciousness like NomadFrances McDormand casting her land, Minari, The Father, and weary gaze across America’s meThese movies sound like fun.

Judas and the Black Messiah. Alsas of despair. The Rorschach test Not a single one is about dementia in terms of both what audiences though movies are in production even longer than pandemics, it’s want to watch and what filmor growing crops in Arkansas. not an overstatement to suggest makers want to show them may this last pandemic affected what be this summer’s Get Back, Peter was released in the 15 months we Jackson’s recut reassemblage of all spent wandering the nomadlands of our own homes. the grim 1970 music documentary Let It Be. The earlier movNow the movies are ready to party, and we’re all invited. ie displayed the disintegration of a once-notable rock band Bets split down the middle that, on the one hand, we’ve becalled the Beatles, who only defined twentieth-century Westcome addicted to streaming on HBO Max or Netflix or Hulu ern culture in a manner comparable to Louis Armstrong, or Amazon whatever we want to see at the moment from the Charlie Chaplin, and Picasso. The new version sounds less comfort of our own couches; on the other hand, the siren dour, with less footage of the Beatles bickering and more of call of the boulevard outside is irresistible. If you’ve driven them giving their last show from a London rooftop. Had they around the city at all lately, you’ve noticed billboards inlived in Hollywood, they might have performed on the roof sisting as they never have before that this or that particuof the building I live in now—though I doubt the postpanlar movie is “what theaters were made demic pandemonium could be any more triumphant than in S C R E E N S AV E R S for.” What theaters are made for means this Seize the Day Summer of 2021. If things get much crazier Timothée Chalamet in not just the size of the screen, the sonic down there on the boulevard, I may get back to self-quaranDune and Rachel Zegler in West Side Story. splendor of the sound, the Big Dark in tining. But I’m going to the movies first.

A

30 L A M AG . C O M

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY C H R I S T O P H E R H U G H E S

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The Inside Guide

STYLE

W I G G I N’ O U T

Roach dresses down for work and way up for his 700,000 Instagram followers.

Down By Law

LAW ROACH IS A SELF-DESCRIBED IMAGE ARCHITECT TO SOME OF THE WORLD’S HOTTEST STARS. BUT HIS MOST GLAM IMAGE MAY BE HIS OWN

BY MERLE GINSBERG

I

T’S GETTING HARD

to tell who’s the bigger star: celebrity stylist Law Roach, 44, or any one of the A-Listers he dresses. Right now, he’s having his own award-winning season after just seven years in the biz: he was named No. 1 on The Hollywood Reporter’s Most Powerful Stylists list, the first Black stylist to earn 3 2 L A M AG . C O M

the honor. After all, he outfitted Zendaya, Anya Taylor-Joy, Tiffany Haddish, Kerry Washington, Ariana Grande, Celine Dion, Tom Holland, Priyanka Chopra, Aldis Hodge— and that’s just in the last year. He also recently won an MTV Movie Awards nomination for his outrageousness as the “villain” judge on HBO’s Legendary. Seven years ago, he had no idea what the Most

Powerful Stylists list was, let alone The Hollywood Reporter. He didn’t even know what an agent was. Now he’s running a multimillion-dollar global company with almost no time to lounge by his pool.

“My first month in L.A., in 2014, I saw the THR issue with Lupita Nyong’o on the cover,” Roach remembers, “and it said, ‘Hollywood’s Most Powerful Stylists.’ I made mysef a promise: ‘I’m gonna be in this one day.’ And when I got my first cover with Celine Dion and Zendaya in 2017, I stumbled upon the magazine again in my bedroom.

That happened to be the day I was going to the stylist-list celebration dinner for the first time.”

The rags-to-riches story began in

PORTRAIT: EASTON SCHIRRA; INSTAGRAM: @LUXURYLAW; THR COVER: PHOTOGRAPHED BY AB + DM; MTV: PHOTO BY MATT WINKELMEYER/2021 MTV MOVIE AND TV AWARDS/GETTY IMAGES FOR MTV/VIACOMCBS

“I create these characters from the seductive women living in my head.

Any time I get the opportunity to let one out, I do.”

T H E D R E SS E R Clockwise from top left: Roach dresses Mary J. Blige in Versace at the 2018 Oscars; his THR Most Powerful Stylists cover; on the set of HBO’s Legendary; at the 2021 MTV Movie Awards; Roach morphed Kerry Washington into a 1920s-style mermaid in Etro for the SAG Awards; on the day of the 2021 Golden Globes.

Chicago. “I’m from the South Side.

I grew up poor with a single mother in a Black house and a Black neighborhood. But fashion’s always been important to me. It’s an escape. As a young child at church, I’d see these Black women and men get dressed up every Sunday with the hosiery, the hats. The tradition of going to Black churches—that was our fashion show.”

Roach started working as a stylist in music first, via a family connection. “I managed to get a few jobs in New York. When someone who wanted to hire me there asked if I was local, I said yes—I didn’t

know what ‘local’ meant. I had to fly back and forth for a few years after that.”

Roach prefers to call himself an “image architect,” not a stylist.

“There’s a lot of stylists working in Hollywood,” he explains. “I feel I’m bringing something different to the industry more aligned with what an architect does—instead of plumbing and electricity, it’s hair and makeup. I actually had that name trademarked.”

He’s also the image architect for his 700,000 Instagram followers, playing flamboyant characters like Beethoven fully made-up and lip-

synching “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a big, white wig.

“Look, I’d really rather be private and just do my work,” he says. “But you have to put yourself out there now. You can’t thrive by being behind the scenes anymore. If it gives people a laugh, great. If they hate it—hey, that’s great, too.” He adds, “Trust me, when I’m dressing clients, I don’t show up to work in a silver wig or waist-length braids.”

What gives his clients a creative edge? “I create these characters from the seductive women living in my head. Anytime I get an opportunity to let one out, I do.”

L A M AG . C O M 33

The Inside Guide

FA S H I O N

A Shorts Story DENIM CUTOFFS WITH HOLES JUST DON’T CUT IT ANYMORE. IT’S TIME TO UP YOUR SUMMER STYLE AND INVEST IN SOME MORE GROWN-UP SHORT PANTS

BY MERLE GINSBERG

S U M M E R’ S H E R E , A N D the time is right for unearthing your shorts—or acquiring new ones. After all, if we’re showing our faces by shedding our masks, it seems only right to show our legs, too. If you’ve yet to lose the dreaded COVID 19 (pounds) or acquire a tan on those sweatpants-covered gams, don’t worry: there are still lots of longer silhouettes for a touch of modesty. But this season, any style of shorts goes. The latest include chicer fabrics, more attention to cut, and a wider range of options for every body shape. They’re comfortable and stylish at the same time. And if you’re not quite prepped for bathing-suit weather, shorts move more freely than trousers for walking, biking, shopping, or sunning. And if you’re headed back to work (gasp), maybe one of those spunky new shorts-and-jacket sets will add some oomph to your office.

COOL BLUES J. Crew chino stretch shorts. $69.50 at jcrew.com.

FLOWER POWER Orlebar Brown swim shorts. $345 at orlebarbrown.com.

MEN

SOFT PANTS Giorgio Armani stretch gabardine Bermudas. $575 at armani.com.

3 4 L A M AG . C O M

FRESH CITRUS Rag & Bone terry sweatshorts. $125 at rag-bone.com. .

A L L I M AG E S CO U RT E SY B R A N DS

RECENT CONVERT Cotton linen shorts from COS zip off from long pants. $125 at cosstors.com.

MELLOW YELLOW Max Mara linen gabardine shorts. $525 at us.maxmara.com.

DIFFERENT STRIPES A.L.C. rib-knit shorts. $195 at saksfifthavenue.com.

TIMELESS DENIM Raey denim shorts. $135 at matchesfashion.com.

GOING GREEN Gucci canvas shorts. $915 at gucci.com.

WO M E N

OK, BLOOMER Boutique Moschino denim shorts. $385 at farfetch.com.

LEATHER UP Rick Owens wide-leg shorts. $302 at farfetch.com.

G FORCE Gucci multicolor canvas shorts. $1,100 at gucci.com.

JUST BANANAS Caramel Raining Bananas shorts. $125 at farmrio.com.

TROPICAL FRUIT Twenty pineapple-print color block shorts. $135 at saksfifthavenue.com.

L A M AG . C O M 3 5

The Inside Guide

T R AV E L

R E A DY F O R TA K E O F F

JSX planes typically have room for 30 passengers in single or double rows.

Putting On Airs JET-SETTING ANGELENOS ARE WAVING GOODBYE TO FLYING COMMERCIAL AND OPTING FOR LUXE—AND SOMETIMES SURPRISINGLY CHEAP —SEMIPRIVATE FLIGHTS

BY B R A D JA P H E

N O F R I L LS , B U T T H E P R I C E S T H R I L L

36 L A M AG . C O M

sivity. Earlier this year, Uber cofounder Garrett Camp launched Aero (aero.com). The company flies from Van Nuys to various resort towns with its fleet of Legacy 600s, which feature Instagram-worthy, teak-trimmed interiors and plush leather seating. Prices start at just under $1,000 each way.

Surfair (surfair.com), a platform popular with Silicon Valley commuters, lets you choose between scheduled and ondemand services. With the latter, you can fly out of Santa Monica on your own turboprop for as little as $550 an hour.

But traveling this way has a greater environmental impact, says David Colgan from the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. “If it’s two smaller jets filled to the brim versus one half-full 737, the two jets will likely emit more pollution.”

Still the convenience is hard to beat. Caruso says, “The ability to take a day trip to the Bay without going through TSA is pretty awesome.”

» The budget carrier Avelo (aveloair.com) just landed at Burbank airport, flying to leisure destinations like Sonoma and Salt Lake City. Tickets start at $19, but it’s an extra $5 to reserve a seat, $10 to check your first bag, and $35 for overhead carryons. Onboard, there’s just water and cookies, but once you’re at the winery or on the slopes, it won’t matter. —B.J.

M A I N I M AG E : CO U RT E SY J SX ; AV E LO L I V E RY

W

H E N J O E L C A RUS O , a sales executive who lives in Hancock Park, has to go to Oakland for work, he prefers to fly private—sort of.

Caruso, 37, is a big fan of JSX (jsx.com), a jet carrier that shuttles passengers from a private hangar at LAX or Hollywood Burbank Airport to Las Vegas and various Northern California cities. “Flying on JSX makes me feel like an absolute rock star,” he says.

JSX started flying out of Burbank in 2016 and recently added new routes to Reno. In the past year, the company says business has increased 55 percent. For travelers still timid about crowds and germs—or those who just want to be able to roll up 20 minutes before takeoff—semiprivate carriers are a welcome alternative to flying commercial.

And they can compete with commercial prices. JSX flights start as low as $99 each way.

Another semiprivate carrier offers an air of greater exclu-

IN A TIME WHERE EVERYTHING’S CHANGING, LISTEN TO VOICES YOU TRUST.

PROMOTION

LIST

Photo credit: Shantel VanSanten @therealshantel on IG

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American Lung Association’s SoCal Fight for Air Climb May 1 & 2

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Hundreds of Climbers took to outdoor staircases, hiking trails and walking paths throughout Los Angeles (and the world!!) to raise funds and awareness for the American Lung Association to help end COVID-19, advocate for healthier air and ensure lung health equity for all.

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The Inside Guide

W H E R E T O E AT N O W

New & Notable Soulmate

W E S T H O L LY WO O D O Summer is here, and

Beefing Up AT THE NEW BEVERLY HILLS SPOT MATŪ, IMPECCABLE SOURCING AND ULTRAPRECISE COOKING RAISE THE STEAKS ON MEAT-CENTRIC DINING B Y A N D Y WA N G

O N ’ T C A L L I T a steak house.

was unbelievably attractive to us,” Greenberg says.

Sugarfish cofounder Jerry GreenSteaks at Matu are cooked to “warm red,” berg’s new Matu in Beverly Hills which is the color of rare but the temperature of is a different kind of beef-forward medium rare. There’s a nice sear on the outside, restaurant. All of the meat is susand the inside is remarkably tender and deeply tainably raised, beautifully marbeefy. “You want to end at the tembled, omega-3-rich, grass-fed Waperature where the fat has melted gyu from First Light Farms in New but the protein structure hasn’t Zealand (which Greenberg cotightened,” says Greenberg, who owns). The main event is a a fivehas thought so intensely about the course beef tasting. science that he can explain how the “We wouldn’t do this if we fat in grass-fed Wagyu renders at a didn’t feel that this beef is more lower temperature than the fat in healthful than the alternatives grain-fed beef. “The center needs to and regenerative for the planet,” be warm, but you don’t want the “We’re putting says Greenberg, adding, “We’re edges dried and tough.” meat in a format putting it in a format that you Steaks can also be ordered à la you haven’t really carte and cooked to your preferhaven’t really had before.”

The tasting will include dishes ence—to some degree. Greenberg’s had before.” like bone broth, carpaccio, thinly Sugarfish is known for its “Trust RESTAURATEUR JERRY GREENBERG sliced filet mignon that’s been Me” menu that puts control in the quickly seared on a plancha, comhands of the chef, and Greenberg forting braised beef cheeks, and, to cap things wants diners to trust the kitchen at Matu as off, steaks cooked over a wood-burning, Argenwell. To that end, if you want a well-done steak, tinian-style grill and served family-style. you’ll have to go elsewhere.

“The idea of giving people a little bit of an ex“When we cook it a lot more,” Greenberg says, ploration of beef, where they can experience dif“it’s not something we can stand behind.” ferent cuts of meat that are cooked differently, 239 S. Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills, matusteak.com.

D

40 L A M AG . C O M

Great White LARCH MON T O The popular Venice

cafe is on an expansion tear, first with the opening of this new location and a third location on Melrose coming later in the year. The vast, eclectic menu has something for everyone—falafel wraps, smoked-salmon pizzas, chicken schnitzel—and then some. 244 N. Larchmont Blvd., greatwhitevenice.com.

KinKan E A S T H O L LY WO O D O Sold via Instagram and made in her home, Nan Yimcharoen’s beautiful bento boxes and chirashi bowls were a pandemic bright spot.

Now she’s expanding with her own brick-andmortar spot in Virgil Village, next to the bustling Courage Bagels.

She plans to offer her pristine Japanese fare for takeout only, with dine-in service coming later. 771 N. Virgil Ave., @kinkanla.

—HAILEY EBER

M A I N I M AG E : N ATA L I E G A R ST; R E STAU R A N T E U R : CO U RT E SY O F M AT Ū

S I Z Z L I NG H O T

Matū’s grass-fed Wagyu is cooked just enough to render the fat.

there’s a stunning new WeHo spot with a patio that can hold 75 attractive people, plus hours that go to 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

Starters include various jamones and spicy paella bites. Further down the menu, there’s lots of seafood options, from wood-fired octopus with charred romesco to salmon crudo. 631 N. Robertson Blvd., soulmateweho.com.

Feed your soul

Jay's Bar Silverlake 4321 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90029 (323)928-2402 www.jaysbarla.com

My Ramen Bar DTLA 321 1/4 E 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 (213)613-9888 www.myramenbar.com

The Inside Guide

OUTINGS

Shore Delights FULL DISCLOSURE: WE’VE BEEN KNOWN TO PLAN BEACH DAYS AROUND OUR FAVORITE LUNCH SPOTS. AND WHY NOT? A DAY ON THE SAND DEMANDS A DELICIOUS PICNIC. FROM MALIBU TO HERMOSA, FROM ITALIAN SUBS TO AUTHENTIC HAWAIIAN POKE, HERE ARE OUR TOP PICKS FOR DELICIOUS BEACH BITES B Y A N D Y WA N G , H A I L E Y E B E R , A N D J A S O N K E S S L E R

> Between the potential for traffic > San Buenaventura State Beach

is a chill spot for summer surfing, swimming, and, most importantly, shucking. For two decades, Mark Venus and Mark Reynolds have been sustainably farming organic shellfish, and their Jolly Oyster truck (911 San Pedro St., thejollyoyster.com) offers an ideal way to enjoy the fruits of their labor right on the sand. If your oysterknife skills are rusty (and whose aren’t?), order your bivalves grilled, fried, or on the half shell so you don’t have to open them yourself. Turn your lunch into a seafood feast by adding an uni tostada or a tray of sea urchin.

4 2 L A M AG . C O M

and parking issues, Malibu never seems like the easiest beach option, but it has its advantages: beautiful bluffs, beautiful-people watching, a dog-friendly area at Leo Carillo State Park, and the proximity to Broad Street Oyster (23359 Pacific Coast Hwy., broadstreetoyster.com). The haute clam shack offers up one of the city’s best lobster rolls, available either hot or cold and topped with uni or caviar if you’re feeling splurgy. The lengthy menu is full of sure bets, from shrimp ceviche to brussels sprouts in anchovy vinaigrette, plus there are options for vegans and those who prefer beef to seafood.

> Sure, Santa Monica’s touristy, but it’s also easy to get to, and activities like biking, rollerblading, and enjoying rides on the pier abound—as do delicious food options. Opt for a classic: before heading to the surf, go to Bay Cities Italian Deli (1517 Lincoln Blvd., baycitiesitaliandeli.com) to grab its legendary Godmother, a traditional Italian hoagie piled high with prosciutto, capicola, mortadella, ham, Genoa salami, and provolone. It’s served on crusty Italian bread that’s fluffy inside and freshly baked on-site throughout the day. Then walk a dozen or so blocks down Broadway and hit the beach.

I L LU S T R AT I O N BY J O S I E P O RT I L L O

> It’s a bit further afield than other

> At the northern end of Dockweiler

State Beach, there’s a surplus of family-oriented things to do. Kids can jump around the playground while watching airplanes land at LAX. Grown-ups can ride bicycles or play volleyball. Plus there’s plenty of perfectly executed, picnicfriendly fare at Top Chef–winner Brooke Williamson’s Playa Provisions (119 Culver Blvd., playaprovisions.com) dining complex. Try a patty melt, lobster roll, slice of banana bread, or cookie. If the aviation noise is too much, add a cold-brew coffee spiked with whiskey to your order.

> While Manhattan Beach has many lovely spots, El Porto to the north tends to be a bit less crowded and features a nice, relaxed neighborhood vibe. It’s also close to Pisces Sushi (3216 Highland Ave., 310-545-3980) the cutest little raw-fish spot you’ve ever seen.

Run by a husband-and-wife team, the tiny charmer offers all the classics, including an amazing chirashi bowl packed with fresh cuts of sashimi and costing less than $16. The restaurant feels like a tiny Tokyo takeout shop, and you can round out your picnic with the authentic Japanese sodas and candy on offer.

sandy choices, but Hermosa rewards you with an extra dose of tranquility—and the chance to savor some of the best poke around.

Jus’ Poke (501 N. Pacific Coast Hwy., juspoke.com) opened in 2013, long before there was a mediocre spot scooping raw fish in every strip mall. Although they’re native Californians, the owners have a strong Hawaiian lineage and prepare their poke the island way, marinating it for hours to give each bite a burst of flavor.

Purists opt for the Shoyu, with fresh ahi tuna and soy sauce, while the Spicy tastes like the freshest spicy tuna roll you’ve ever had. Get a Hawaiian Sun to wash it down, and pretend you’ve hopped a flight to Honolulu.

L A M AG . C O M 43

DRINKS

Healthy Buzz PUT DOWN THE WHITE CLAW. THIS SUMMER’S SURPRISINGLY HIP SIP IS HARD KOMBUCHA B Y H E AT H E R P L AT T

S

O M E T H I N G ’ S B R E W I N G . Kombucha, the

somewhat effervescent fermented tea, has long been loved for its digestive benefits.

Now it can also get you tipsy.

By adding more sugar and yeast to the fermentation process, canny entrepreneurs have been able to take the naturally slightly alcoholic beverage from .5 percent alcohol by volume to upward of 4.5 percent, roughly on par with a light beer or a hard seltzer, but with a funkier flavor. “[It] tastes great,” says Larry Hartel, who cofounded the L.A.-based Jiant Kombucha with a college pal in 2017.

“We wanted to create these nuanced flavor profiles that could really complement food,” adds Jiant cofounder Aaron Telch. The brand is sold at Whole Foods, BevMo and trendy restaurants like Highly Likely, Gracias Madre, and Broad 4 4 L A M AG . C O M

BU B B L I NG U P

Both JuneShine (above and top right) and Flying Embers (right) have recently opened stylish local tasting rooms for their boozy kombuchas.

Street Oyster Bar. On the e-commerce platform Drizly, “hard kombucha,” as the boozy ’bucha is known, was the fastest-growing category in 2020. And according to Kombucha Brewers International, hard kombucha sales grew from $1.7 million in 2017 to more than $12 million in 2019.

Another pair of college friends are behind another SoCal brand, JuneShine. Forrest Dein and his former roommate, Greg Serrano, first started brewing in 2018 in a garage in San Diego. They have two tasting rooms in that city and this past April opened an airy L.A.-area outpost (2914 Main St., Santa Monica) that’s decidedly more Goop than granola, with chic interiors, tasting flights, and charcuterie boards. Dein says he saw a need for alcoholic beverages that had the same openness about ingredients as health foods. “There were just no clean, organic, transparent products in the alcohol space.”

Yet another label, Flying Embers, also has a unique sense of style. The Ventura-based company launched in 2018. Last fall, it opened Flying Embers Brewery & Social Club (1581 Industrial St., Arts District) in a historic downtown warehouse building. And a few months back, it collaborated with local artist Dewey Saunders on a special edition can. Still, for all the attention to thoughtful design and transparency about ingredients, hard kombucha is only so wholesome. After all, it’s still alcohol.

F R O M T H E TO P : 1 , 2 : J U N E S H I N E ; 3 : CO U RT E SY O F F LY I N G E M B E R S

The Inside Guide

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L A M AG . C O M 45

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CALIFORNIA

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48 L A M AG . C O M

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L A M AG . C O M 49

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features a private outdoor lounge and dining area for the perfect place [V ILNPU `V\Y KH` ^P[O IYLHRMHZ[ HS MYLZJV VY LUK `V\Y HK]LU[\YLZ ^P[O H UPNO[JHW \UKLY H Z[HYSP[ ZR` Find your moment and rejoice in Ojai’s rare spirit.

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Business

A N DY L E W IS

MY TUNES

Universal Music Group paid Bob Dylan an estimated $300-$400 million for his 600-song catalog.

The Sound of Money ARTISTS FROM PAUL SIMON TO THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS ARE SELLING THEIR SONG CATALOGS TO FREE-SPENDING ENTREPRENEURS FOR RECORDSETTING PAYDAYS. BUT SOME THINK THE TREND COULD END ON A BUM NOTE

54 L A M AG . C O M

I N 2 01 6 , B L AC K R O C K , the world’s largest global investment fund, sank $300 million into Primary Wave, a Los Angeles–based talent and management firm with a then-unusual remit: acquiring and managing song catalogs. It was an area of the music business that hadn’t attracted much outside interest or investment because piracy, illegal streaming, and the rocky transition to digital had nearly destroyed the industry, with revenue dropping some 40 percent since 2000. But Larry Mestel, Primary Wave’s founder and the former CEO of Virgin Records, pitched opportunity. “I saw the same thing in 2016 I see today: significant marketing opportunity, streaming growth, and musictech growth.”

The next year, 2017, was also the year that streaming income overtook physical and digital sales to become the industry’s top source of revenue—the emergence of what USC Marshall School professor Joseph Nunes calls the musical “rental economy.” Projections for growth stretched to the near horizon. The music business could finally see a way forward with the revenue from subscription streaming services like Spotify and ApI L LU S T R AT I O N BY P E T E R A R K L E

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S O U N D I N V E ST M E N T

Primary Wave founder Larry Mestel buys a broad range of intellecutal property when he acquires song copyrights. “You can’t separate who the artist is from the songs they’ve created,” he says.

sales. “COVID really heated up the market,” says Mestel, “and now that some big artists like Bob Dylan have sold, others are following.”

Hipgnosis and Primary Wave have emerged as the two biggest players (though hardly the only) in the boom, and express its two main strategies.

Mercuriadis’s mantra to investors is that “the song, even more so than the artist, is

the most important component of a hit,” and he promises industry-leading returns with this song-first strategy. Mestel’s Primary Wave buys into a broader range of intellectual property than song copyrights, often in partnership with the artist. “You can’t separate who the artist is and the songs they’ve created,” he says.

When Primary Wave and Hipgnosis made their first big purchases in 2018, the New York Times was already describing the market as “frothy.” Mestel’s company dropped $50 million for 80 percent of Chris Blackwell’s stake in Bob Marley’s catalog and in Blue Mountain Music (Marianne Faithfull’s songs and Free’s “All Right Now”). The price represented an 18- to 20-times multiple of the catalogs’ annual revenues at a time when song catalogs mainly traded in the 10- to 14-times range. The same year Hipgnosis picked up a 75 percent interest in the catalog of songwriter The-Dream (Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”) for $23 million. Over the next 18 months, it added the catalogs of Timbaland (108 songs), producer/songwriter/drummer Al Jackson (songs for Al Green and Book-

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U N D E D 192

0

J E R R I T T C L A R K /G E T T Y I M AG E S FO R I S L A N D R E CO R DS

ple Music. And with a plausible business model finally in place, the untapped value of the vast song catalogs of legacy artists and those who were thriving in the new environment began attracting a new sort of entrepreneur. Mestel and Primary Wave were followed into the market by the London-based former artist manager Merck Mercuriadis and his Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which raised £200 million on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 to focus exclusively on acquiring song copyrights.

What came next is a boom far greater than Mestel could have imagined. Legends like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon as well as younger artists like Shakira and Ryan Tedder sold their song copyrights (and sometimes other intellectual property) for jaw-dropping prices, with each week seeming to bring yet another huge deal. The combination of artists, especially older ones, seeking the financial security of a big payday after watching live-touring revenue vanish in the pandemic, and investors re-evaluating song publishing as an undervalued asset, has produced a tidal wave of

er T. & the MGs), and the 1,000-song Eldridge Capital, former owner of The catalog of the Eurythmics’ Dave StewHollywood Reporter and Dick Clark art to its portfolio. Meanwhile, PrimaProductions, bought alt-rockers the ry Wave added a 50 percent share of Killers’ catalog. Iconic Music, newly Whitney Houston’s catafounded by industry leglog and a majority stake end Irving Azoff, nabbed in Ray Charles’s pre-1964 David Crosby, Linda The flood catalog.

Ronstadt, and a controlof outside Last year alone, Hipling interest in the Beach investors gnosis acquired Richie Boys. Wall Street investpicking off Sambora’s 200-song catment firm KKR scooped their crown alog (Bon Jovi, plus three up songwriter Tedder solo albums and songs for (Adele, Beyonce) for a rejewels did not Cher and LeAnn Rimes), ported $200 million. sit well with the catalog of Blondie’s And in just the first traditional Debbie Harry and Chris five months of 2021, Pripublishers Stein, and Barry Mamary Wave invested in like Sony and nilow’s 917-song catalog, Mark Morrison and songUniversal. among other deals. Priwriter Patrick Leonard mary Wave paid $100 mil(Madonna and others) lion to Stevie Nicks for 80 and bought 6,000 master percent of her songs and bought stakes recordings from Sun Records, includin the catalogs of Olivia Newton-John, ing hits by Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, hard rocker Disturbed, and New Wave and Jerry Lee Lewis, for $30 million. legend Devo. The frenzy attracted new Hipgnosis added songs by Fleetwood players: Vine Alternative Investments Mac’s Lindsay Buckingham, producbought the catalog of songwriter Caler Jimmy Iovine’s 259-song catalog vin Harris (Rihanna, Mary J. Blige); (including work from Bruce Springs-

teen, Eminem, and Tom Petty), and a 50-percent stake in Neil Young’s 1,100song catalog for a reported $150 million. In May, it paid the Red Hot Chili Peppers $140 million for their songs at a 23- to 28-times multiple, an indication of how much the value of catalogs has jumped recently.

The flood of outside investors picking off the crown jewels of traditional music publishers did not sit well with legacy titans like Sony Music and Universal Music Group. In what were widely viewed as preemptive strikes, Universal paid Bob Dylan more than $300 million to keep the copyrights to his 600-song catalog. Sony paid Paul Simon an estimated $250 million for his, equaling a hefty multiple of nearly 30 times annual revenue. The overflow of capital sloshing around the financial system fueled by historic low interest rates has led to investment funds bursting with money—and making attractive once-arcane instruments like song funds. “I think people have discovered what we’ve been saying for 15 years, which is music copy-

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L A M AG . C O M 57

58 L A M AG . C O M

A RT I ST I C L I C E NS E

Take the Money and Run

I

f veteran music manager and Hipgnosis founder Merck Mercuriadis happens to catch someone streaming Booker T. & the MGs on their phone, he may be hearing “Green Onions” but he’s thinking green cabbage, as in moolah.

Specialty investors like Hipgnosis and Primary Wave, as well as traditional music publishers Universal Music and Sony Music, have been snapping up copyrights or publishing rights to songs by everyone from Paul Simon and Bob Marley to Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift. Here are some notable deals and estimated price tags. —A . L .

$300-400M

$250M

Bob Dylan

Paul Simon

$150M Neil Young

$100M Imagine Dragons

$300M Taylor Swift

$100M Stevie Nicks

$200M

$140M

Ryan Tedder*

Red Hot Chili Peppers

$10M

$50M

Carole Bayer Sager

Bob Marley

*Includes songs sung by Adele and Beyoncé

Biden’s proposal to raise the capital gains tax to as high as 39.6 percent is undoubtedly driving part of the rush to cash in—an eight- or nine-figure catalog sale before the higher rate goes into effect could save millions. A one-time sale also avoids the prospect of a dispute with the IRS over the value of the catalog as an inheritable asset and getting socked with penalties. Prince’s estate was hit with a $6.4 million “accuracy-related penalty” in January for lowballing the value of his catalog by about 70 percent, according to the IRS. Selling a catalog also greatly simplifies estate planning; dividing $100 million is easier than divvying up the rights to 100 songs. Consider Dylan, who turned 80 in May and has six children from two marriages to divide his estate among. Or the fight between the late Tom Petty’s second wife and his two children over how to execute Petty’s long-held wish to release the original double-album version of his classic Wildflowers. Many heirs would rather take the money as well. Some don’t want the hassle of administering rights or have their life defined primarily as the caretaker of a parent’s work rather than their own. Songwriter Patrick Leonard, who sold a stake in his catalog to Primary Wave in April, understands the impulse. “Some of the deals, the hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, like, what’s there to talk about?” he says.

Investors, meanwhile, are being lured with the promise of not just predictable returns but also even greater growth. Goldman Sachs predicts that the worldwide streaming user base will grow from 341 million in 2019 to 1.2 billion by the end of this decade and calculates that global revenue will double to more than $140 billion in the same period. Paid subscribers to streaming services in the U.S. alone jumped 15 million from 2019 to 2020. Licensing a catalog’s “synch” rights to film, TV, video games—even to TikTok and exercise services like Peloton—is expected to increase substantially.

Mestel, for one, is skeptical of the smaller players and late entrants chasing a fast buck. “I think what people are promising—most of them are full of shit.” He believes that many are instead looking to flip their purchases for a quick profit.

“Where is the ceiling?” wonders veteran music executive Olivier Chastan, who has participated in numerous cata-

G E T T Y I M AG E S

rights are a great alternative investment,” says Mestel.

Comparing these deals is not apples to apples because not everyone is buying or selling the same thing. Hipgnosis’s “pure play” strategy is focused solely on copyrights—that is, the actual musical composition and lyrics as opposed to the performance rights—who sings it—or the sound recording (the actual master recording of that performance, usually owned by the music label). Song copyrights earn six cents out of every dollar of streaming service revenue. Performance nets another six cents. Sound-recording owners get about 58 cents, and the streaming services collect 29 cents. Copyright owners get a fee whenever someone plays the song, so covers, sampling, and commercial use all generate revenue. Primary Wave’s broader strategy often involves partnering with artists on name and brand as well. Through its deal with Whitney Houston’s estate, it is developing a biographical movie and a Las Vegas stage show. Similarly, the Iconic Artist Group’s Beach Boys deal was done with an eye to developing everything from restaurants to Broadway shows.

For legacy artists, the decision to sell turns on a combination of financial need, tax considerations, and estate planning, exacerbated by the pandemic, which has exposed the fragile state of their finances absent live-touring income. David Crosby explained his thinking to the New York Times on the eve of his April catalog sale: “I don’t have savings. I don’t have any retirement program. But I did have my publishing. It’s the only option that’s open to me to take care of myself and my family.”

Longtime music-business manager Tina Fasbender says, “I was one of those business managers cautioning my clients to never let go of their copyrights because it was a life annuity.” But as the market changed, so has her advice.

“I think some older writers, who have been through the ringer from watching a music industry change, are just looking at securing their financial future.”

Regardless, a sale can mean not only a big lump-sum payment but also a smaller tax bill. Royalties are taxed as income, currently topping out at 37 percent for the feds, plus any state taxes and a 3.8 percent net investment income tax. A catalog sale, on the other hand, would be taxed at the capital gains rate of just 20 percent. President

log sales, adding that “it is hard to tell” if prices have peaked. For him, future increases hinge on two factors: how optimistic investors remain about the growth of streaming and whether the cost of capital remains cheap. Chastan sees potential for some artists who have kept their material out of the synch market—Neil Young, for example—to see quick gains, but in general he thinks it will be more about rearranging the pie slices than growing a much bigger pie. “You are really going to double that? It’s totally fallacy,” he says.

Mestel remains optimistic because the number of major catalogs that could still be acquired is huge. For every Diane Warren, who said on a Rolling Stone podcast that selling her catalog “would be like selling my soul, and that’s not for sale,” there’s a Dolly Parton who freely admitted in December, “I’ve often thought about [selling] for business reasons, estate planning, and family things.”

Pressure from tech conglomerates like Apple and Google, whose size and power dwarf even the biggest music label, is another hurdle. “One of the things that’s going to become a potential issue is what if they decide to bundle?” Chasten says, about a potential disruption that could diminish a pricy catalog’s value overnight. “What if Amazon decided that everything’s going to be $19.99 a month for video, Prime shipping, music, and Twitch gaming?”

USC’s Nunes wonders whether Hipgnosis, even having grown to more than 60,000 songs at the end of 2020 and with more acquisitions coming every month, will ever be large enough to stand on its own. The size of the major labels, with catalogs in the millions, have the reach to weather shifting musical tastes of the market. He speculates that the new entrants will get just big enough to become an attractive takeover target. Fasbender agrees. “I believe that there are players out there whose eye has always been toward not staying in, but ‘I’m going to acquire the biggest, fattest, most sexy set of catalogs I can, and then I’m going to roll them up and sell them.’ ” Chastan is already looking to the next big tech innovations that could upend the market. Imagine putting on a VR headset to attend the Beatles’ 1965 Shea Stadium concert or Woodstock recreated in a way that makes you feel like you are actually there.

“Nobody,” he says, “has a methodology for pricing that.”

L A M AG . C O M 59

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L A M AG . C O M 61

» MEN FROM U.N.C.L.E. David McCallum and Robert Vaughn mug it up at the 1966 Globes.

62 L A M AG . C O M

Prize Fight

RACIAL SHOWDOWNS. WHACKED-OUT PRESS CONFERENCES. SKETCHY BACKROOM DEALS. IS THE GOLDEN GLOBES, THE AWARDS SHOW HOLLYWOOD LOVES TO LOATHE, FINALLY DOWN FOR THE COUNT? B Y B E N JA M I N S V E T K E Y

Globes scandal of 1982? When a then-totally-unknown 27-yearold actress named Pia Zadora stunned Hollywood by winning Best New Star. How her turn as teen nymphet in a trashy incest drama called Butterfly miraculously beat Kathleen Turner’s performance in Body Heat and Elizabeth McGovern’s in Ragtime despite the fact that hardly anybody seated in the Beverly Hilton’s ballroom that night had actually seen Zadora’s film. Because it hadn’t even come out yet.

Turned out Zadora’s Svengali-like husband, Israeli billionaire Meshulam Riklis, had rigged the award for his wife by flying Globes voters—esteemed members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—to Las Vegas for parties and private screenings and entertained them with lavish dinners at his Beverly Hills estate. Zadora’s win turned the Globes into a national punch line, the butt of countless late-night talk-show jokes, and made the HFPA look so sleazy that CBS dropped the awards show the following year. The Globes spent the next 14 years exiled from broadcast airwaves—banished to syndication and cable—until NBC finally picked them up again in 1996.

Of course, compared to the mess the Globes currently finds themselves in, the Zadora affair seems positively quaint. The accusations that have landed the HFPA in hot water this time—with NBC announcing in May that it was dropping the show for at least a year following boycott threats from such companies as Netflix, Amazon, and Warner Media, as well as top Holly» wood publicists and a slew of stars (like GOLD DIGGERS Clockwise from left: Tom Cruise, who went so far as to box up Pia Zadora at the and return his three Globes trophies)—are 1982 Globes; Ricky Gervais in 2011; Mafar more incendiary than a statuette suspidonna, Harvey Weinciously going to a “spectacularly inept” acstein, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltress (as Vincent Canby zinged Zadora in his trow in 1998. OppoButterfly review). Among the charges that site: Sam Mendes, Steven Spielberg, have surfaced over the past several months: Jessica Bovers, and self-dealing financial shenanigans, wideTom Cruise at a 2000 Globes party. spread misogyny among the ranks, and systemic racism baked into the organization at its deepest levels, this last assertion klieg-lit by a recent Los Angeles Times exposé revealing that, of the HFPA’s 86 voting members, precisely zero are Black.

64 L A M AG . C O M

Some of these allegations are obviously true. Some can be quibbled over. All are wrapped in enough gobsmacking Hollywood hypocrisy and A-list virtue-signaling to leave even Ricky Gervais speechless. But none fully explain what’s actually going on here, the true reasons the Globes finds themselves in the midst of an existential crisis graver than any they’ve faced before—including 2016’s Shuttlegate, when all of Hollywood was united in righteous fury over the slow bus service from the parking lots to the show’s afterparties—that not only threatens the Globes’ long-term future but could also spell disaster for the entire awardsseason ecosystem, which, by the way, generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues for Los Angeles and creates countless jobs, from parking valets to C-suite awards consultants.

“There are a lot of people in Hollywood who can’t stand the Globes,” says one of those consultants. “They hate the press conferences. They hate the insulting questions. They

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EMEMBER THE GOLDEN

hate having to bow to these people. The racial equity stuff is real—it’s a problem—but, in some ways, it’s also a smokescreen for what’s really going on. Which is that some people in Hollywood really hate the HFPA.”

IT’D BE ALL TOO EASY

to dismiss the Golden Globes as a sham awards show run by a bunch of freeloading nobodies with zilch credibility and only tenuous connections to the entertainment industry. So let’s do some of that for a bit.

From the very beginning, in 1943, when eight overseas reporters in L.A. formed the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association (as it was called back then) and started giving their favorite stars trophies, there was a whiff of the rinky-dink about the proceedings. Unlike the Oscars or the Emmys or even the trade association awards, which at least get voted upon by people who actually have a hand in the making of entertainment, these accolades were bestowed by mere journalists, and in some cases barely even that. In the past, HFPA members have included such cinematic experts as an “auto referral service” manager and an appliance salesman.

Membership requirements have been firmed up since those days—although it’s hard to say how much since the identities of HFPA members aren’t made public—but it’s still a motley crew, a mix of well-established international journalists who’ve been around forever along with an eclectic and sometimes eccentric group of freelancers who write for little-known publications in far-flung places most industry types seldom even fly over.

Not surprisingly, it’s been fertile ground for scandal, starting in 1958, when thenHFPA president Henry Gris resigned after he realized nearly all the winners of that year’s show were represented by just one public relations firm. “Certain awards are being given more or less as favors,” he noted. Ten years later, in 1968, it was revealed that favors were still being traded, with stars being offered what amounted to bribes to attend the ceremony—which NBC had started broadcasting nationally in 1964—with promises that they’d win something just for showing up. The FCC got involved, charging that NBC had “misled the public,” and threatened to pull the license of the network’s L.A. affiliate. And that’s how the Globes got dropped by a network for the first but not the last time and stayed off the air until 1978, when NBC brought them back.

Of course, it’s precisely the Globes’ loosey-goosey, anythinggoes attitude that makes the show so much fun. That and the fact that alcohol is served at the ceremony. You never know what’s going to happen at the Beverly Hilton, and usually something outrageous does. Who could forget Bette Midler mockfellating her statuette when she won for 1980’s The Rose? Or Jack Nicholson mooning the audience (he kept his pants on)

when he won for 1998’s As Good As It Gets? Or Angelina Jolie diving into the hotel’s pool (she kept her gown on) after winning for 1999’s Gia? “The reason people enjoyed themselves at the Globes was that nobody took it seriously,” says a longtime, high-level marketing exec. “It was ridiculous that we were there in the first place, getting awards from this weird little group. It was silly. It was a joke. So people were like, ‘Let’s just drink.’” As Gervais put it when he hosted the ceremonies in 2012, “The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton. A bit louder. A bit trashier. A bit drunker. And more easily bought.”

In the mid-1990s, though, the Globes became a much more serious, if no less rowdy, cog in the industrial-entertainment complex. It was around this time that Harvey Weinstein hit on the brilliant idea of weaponizing the Globes, which conveniently take place around the time Academy members are casting their nomination votes, to increase his films’ Oscar chances.

“Harvey knew that the Globes were the start of the awards cadence, and he used them to tee up his campaigns,” explains an A-list publicist who’s been dealing with the HFPA for years (and who, like everybody interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified). “He made sure that HFPA members were massaged and taken care of. He made sure that whoever was in his films wrote holiday cards and sent HFPA members gifts. It was Harvey who was the one who emboldened the HFPA. He’s the one who gave them power. And everybody else in Hollywood just fell in line.”

Suddenly, the Globes weren’t just a glamorous joke anymore but a critical staging ground for every studio’s Oscar campaign (and soon every network’s Emmy campaign). In some ways, it was a stroke of strategic genius: the film and TV academies have thousands of voting members—an impossible number of people to bribe. But the HFPA had fewer than 100, and most of them were suckers for a gift bag. Toward the end of the ’90s, HFPA had become stricter about emoluments—in 1999, mem-

It’s the Globes’ loosey-goosey attitude that makes the show so much fun. And the fact that alcohol is served at the ceremony.

L A M AG . C O M 65

bers were ordered to return the $400 Coach wristwatches that Sharon Stone had sent as “for your consideration” gifts to help prime her chances for The Muse— but they kept the power Weinstein had given them. Up until a few months ago, all of Hollywood continued to genuflect before this shaggy group of largely irrelevant foreign scribblers. As one publicist puts it, it was “galling.”

Just about every studio and network (and, now, every streaming service) has entire publicity teams devoted to gladhanding the HFPA. They arrange special screenings for members. Fly dozens of them at a time to their film and TV sets and put them up in five-star hotels. According to multiple sources, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos even invited a bunch of them to his home last Christmas. Most galling of all, stars are paraded on stage for the HFPA’s notorious group press conferences, which tend to unfold with all the decorum of the food-fight scene from Animal House.

“They interrupt each other, shout at each other to sit down, they ask inappropriate questions or just weird ones—like ‘What kind of toothbrush do you use?’—and they walk out in the middle of an answer,” says the marketing exec. “It’s not like the editorial board of the New York Times. You’re not dealing with Maggie Haberman here. It’s craziness.”

“When you go to a luncheon press conference with the HFPA,” recalls a veteran director who has been to a bunch, “they all file into the room, this panoply of stringers from Israel or the Caribbean or wherever. Most of them are really old, a lot of them in wheelchairs or walkers, like they’ve just emptied out a Ventura rest home. And then they ask these inane questions. It’s just surreal. It’s like, what planet are these people from? And after that, they all line up for pictures with you, so you have to pose with each one of them—all 80 of them—and it takes forever. When you finally leave, you think, ‘What the hell was that all about?’”

At times, the proceedings cross the line from inane to outright offensive. Some filmmakers claim that HFPA members have a habit of skipping events for movies and TV shows made

by Black creators (Queen & Slim director Melina Matsoukas told Variety that she held three screenings for the HFPA and only four members showed up). Others point to a history of sexual harassment at Globes festivities, and not just against women. Brendan Fraser recounted to GQ in 2018 a harrowing ordeal at a 2003 HFPA luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. According to the Mummy actor, a handshake with former HFPA president Philip Berk, then 70, devolved into a mortifying groping. “His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around,” Fraser told the magazine. “I felt like a little kid.

I thought I was going to cry.” Berk’s response to the accusation was that he had “pinched” Fraser as a joke. The HFPA launched an investigation and concluded that the taint-groping had in-

After a year of Black Lives Matter marches and other racial reckonings, Hollywood was shocked, shocked, to find that there were no Black people in the HFPA.

6 6 L A M AG . C O M

deed been intended as a joke. No action was taken against Berk. “I don’t get the joke,” Fraser told GQ.

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T H E F A C T T H AT T H E R E

are no Black members of the HFPA is hardly a secret. It’s been obvious for years to anybody paying attention (like three-time winner Denzel Washington, who has pointed out the dearth of Black faces at HFPA press conferences). But timing is everything, and when the Los Angeles Times published its report in February—after a year of Black Lives Matter marches and other racial reckonings—it set off a firestorm. Hollywood was shocked, shocked, to find that there were no Black people in the HFPA. Time’s Up, the movement originally established in response to the Weinstein sexual assault scandal, was the first to jump into the fray. On February 26, two days before the Globes broadcast, the group launched an online protest—shared on social media by Kerry Washington, Amber Tamblyn, Amy Schumer, Busy Phillips, and scores of other famous people—and a few weeks later followed up with a list of demands, starting with a call for the resignation of the entire HFPA membership. Mem-

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bers could reapply, Time’s Up allowed, after the establishment of a new application criteria, which should include at least five years of “credible” journalism experience. The group also called for the HFPA to expand its membership to at least 300, publicly disclose members’ names, end lifetime memberships, and move the Globes’ airdate outside the Oscar-nominationvoting window so as to curtail its “outsize influence on later awards.” Oh, and one more thing: “The HFPA will forgo exclusive HFPA press conferences.”

The HFPA took a minute during the 2021 awards broadcast—actually more like 40 seconds—to admit it had a problem, with current president Ali Sar taking to the stage and

promising to “create an environment where a diverse membership is the norm.” And hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler acknowledged the controversy in their own way. “The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is made up of around 90 international, no-Black journalists,” Fey cracked. “We say ‘around 90’ because a couple of them might be ghosts and it’s rumored that the German member is just a sausage that somebody drew a little face on.” But a week later, on March 6, the HFPA took a more serious stab at a mea culpa, promising to hire independent diversity experts and take other steps within two months. A few days later, on March 9, the HFPA brought on Shaun Harper, a USC professor and diversity consultant, and announced that the law firm Ropes & Gray would be serving as outside counsel to help update the association’s bylaws and practices. Then, on March 15, it made one more promise, vowing to add at least 13 Black members by the end of the year.

Nobody was impressed. One the contrary, that very same day, 104 top Hollywood publicity agencies—including ID-PR, 42West, and Rogers & Cowan PMK— all but declared war, sending an open letter to the HFPA pressing for more » reforms and threatening to withhold TROPHY WISE Clockwise from left: their stars from the Globes if they Shonda Rhimes at the didn’t comply. “The eyes of the in64th Globes; HFPA dustry and those who support it are president Philip Berk,in 2006—Berk was fired watching,” warned the flacks. in April amid allegations In truth, not all of Hollywood’s of sexual misconduct and racially insensitive publicists were on board with the comments; artifact letter. On one side of town, personal from HBO’s 2019 Globes afterparty; publicists—the ones who represent HFPA headquarters in individual stars and accompany them West Hollywood; Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong’o, to the HFPA press conferences—are Michael B. Jordan, Ava all but united in their antipathy to the DuVernay, and Peter Ramsey celebrating HFPA. But on the other, studio and Black Panther’s win at network publicists—and especially the 2019 Globes party. awards consultants (who can pocket bonuses of up to $30,000 when their clients take home trophies)—are considerably less strident. “The HFPA members, they’re just human,” says one of them. “They have a problem, but they’re making efforts to fix it. And it’s not like they’re the only ones with this problem. Pretty much everybody in Hollywood has a diversity issue. I mean, how many Black publicists do you know?”

It’s a fair point. There are probably just as few Black publicists working in Hollywood as there are Black overseas correspondents. As the veteran director puts it, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” adding, “most of the publicists I’ve dealt with have been Jewish.” Agencies that signed the Globes boycott letter are quick to concede that they have work of their own to do in diversifying their staffs, but then trot out statistics affirming that some firms are made up of more than 30 percent people of color (a group that includes Asians, Latinos, and other minorities, if not necessarily Blacks).

Ironically, a source close to the Globes wheels out nearly identical numbers in defending the HFPA, pointing out that it’s also made up of at least 30 percent people of color, as well as L A M AG . C O M 67

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(just months after sending the HFPA a thank-you video for his I Know This Much Is True nomination in which he professed “great respect” for how the organization had “moved forward as a group.”) As well-intentioned as these online protestations may have been, it is perhaps worth noting that not one of these actors has ever worked with a Black film director (although Ruffalo did shoot 2014’s Infinitely Polar Bear with Maya Forbes, who is half Black).

“They’re just trying to look hip,” says the consultant. “It’s the equivalent of putting a Black Lives Matter poster on your lawn.”

Be that as it may, on May 10, NBC pushed the Destruct button, canceling the show, at least for a year. “We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform,” the network said in a statement. “However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right.”

AT T H I S W R I T I N G , members of the HFPA are still hoping

to save their show. They’re working with the lawyers at Ropes & Gray to cobble together a new set of reforms, including a training program to teach members how to behave like normal human beings at press conferences. They’re talking about eliminating the Southern California residency requirement to make outreach to Black foreign journalists less of a unicorn hunt. They’re even considering putting the names and credentials of all HFPA members up on its website. Whether any of it will make a difference, though, is highly questionable. “The bloom is off the rose,” says the director. “I don’t see how the Globes can survive this.”

For Hollywood’s anti-Globes contingent, it may prove to be something of a pyrrhic victory. After all, for all its many,

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LBGQT and disabled members. The truth is, DRUNK HISTORY The bar is always open nobody in Hollywood is at the Globes. (Left to in any position to throw right) Gossip legend Louella Parsons with stones. Which is mayDesi Arnaz and Lucille be why the town’s talent Ball in 1956; Jack Nicholson’s studied reaction agencies have been so conafter receiving the spicuously quiet throughCecil B. De Mille Award in 1999; Alan Cumming out the controversy—like and Entertainment the one the L.A. Times reTonight’s Carly Steel slam splits of Moet on cently exposed as having the red carpet at the disguised Black interns 73rd Globes, 2016. as agents in PR photos to make the agency appear more inclusive than it was. (That’d be ICM).

“The hypocrisy makes me sick,” says the marketing exec. “I mean, nobody was returning their tickets to the Globes after Brendan Fraser got attacked. But now all of a sudden, people are outraged? Come on.”

All these nuances, though, were lost when, on April 18, the taint-touching Berk struck again, sending an email to HFPA members describing Black Lives Matter as a “racist hate movement” and calling BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors a “trained Marxist.” Even NBC took offense, demanding the former president’s immediate expulsion. “[S] wift action on this front is an essential element,” the network wrote in a statement. Others close to the Globes were also rattled by Berk’s outburst. The diversity expert from USC promptly quit, as did the crisis communications firm—Smith & Company, headed by Judy Smith, the inspiration for Olivia Pope on Scandal—that the HFPA had hired in March to help steer them out of their mess. This time, the HFPA didn’t bother with an investigation; within two days, Berk was out.

By the time the Globes rolled out more reforms—on May 3— few of the show’s critics were in any mood to hear them. The HFPA now said it would add at least 20, not 13, diverse members by the end of the year and promised to increase its total membership by 50 percent over the next 18 months, recruiting underrepresented groups to fill many of the new slots. It was an ambitious goal considering the paltry number of Black foreign correspondents in Los Angeles covering the entertainment business (current HFPA rules require that members live in Southern California). “They don’t exist,” insists an awards consultant. “I deal with 300 international press from countries all over the world, and not one of them is Black. What the publicists and others are demanding is a unicorn.”

Nevertheless, Time’s Up rejected the HFPA’s reform proposals as too little too late. And then the rest of Hollywood began piling on. Netflix announced in a letter (signed by Sarandos, just months after hosting that Christmas party) that it would be joining the Globes boycott. Warner Media (owner of HBOMax) and Amazon followed suit. Then some movie stars got in on the act. Cruise announced he was boxing up his old Globes trophies while Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo posted their outrage at the HFPA on social media.

“As a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award,” Ruffalo wrote

C E N T E R I M AG E : P H OTO BY B O B R I H A J R . /G E T T Y I M AG E S ; R I G H T I M AG E : P H OTO BY J O E S C A R N I C I /G E T T Y I M AG E S FO R M O E T & C H A N D O N

many flaws, the Globes do serve a purpose in the awardsseason biome. If it weren’t for them, long-shot contenders like, say, The Crying Game, might never have had a shot at the Academy Awards. Then again, Saving Private Ryan might not have lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love. The point here is that when the Globes aren’t bestowing accolades on the likes of Pia Zadora, they can be a useful disrupter, shaking up the odds to give worthy outsiders a shot at a real trophy. That’s a role it’s hard to imagine any other show filling, although it looks like the Critics Choice Awards, which next year airs on the CW, is going to give it a go, wasting no time in moving into the Globes’ early-January calendar slot.

And then there’s the money. A lot’s been written about the HFPA’s funky finances— how members are paid to serve on committees as part of a self-dealing scheme that cycles some of the broadcast fees the Globes earn from NBC (reportedly $27 million this year) back through the ranks. That’s not something the Academy or any other awards organizations do, but then, to be fair, the HFPA doesn’t have a paid staff and it’s not like anyone’s getting rich; members of the HFPA’s foreign film viewing committee, for instance, only take in about $3,400 a month, according to the L. A. Times, and the total payments to all members serving on committees was less than $2 million last year. That’s just a third of the nearly $6 million the HFPA donated last year to film-restoration charities, film school scholarships, and a slew of other programs.

More to the point, the Globes generate truckloads of cash for L.A. and the entertainment-adjacent industries that service them.

Wardrobe, hair and makeup, catering, carpentry, party planning, hotels, transportation, billboard and trade advertising, screenings—it all adds up. Nobody’s done a recent study, but back in 2008, when the writers’ strike canceled the show, it was estimated to have cost the city about $70 million. In today’s dollars— and with deep-pocketed streamers now joining the spending spree—we’re probably talking closer to $100 million.

Also—and this should send a chill down Oscar’s little golden spine—it’s entirely possible that the war over the Globes is actually a symptom of a much deeper problem with the entire awardsshow industry, one that has nothing to do with racism or misogyny or Brendan Fraser’s butt: boredom. Enthusiasm for red-carpet events has been waning for a decade and, thanks only in part to the pandemic, viewership sunk to shocking new lows this year, with both the Globes and Oscar ratings down more than 50 percent from 2020. Younger viewers, in particular, seem to be abandoning the awards-show genre in droves. In other words, it’s beginning to look like the party is finally over.

“I think people need to ask themselves if this whole controversy is really all about the HFPA or a bigger issue—the death of the awards-show culture,” suggests the marketing exec. “All awards shows are in the sick ward right now. The Globes may be close to death, but the Academy Awards aren’t looking so hot either. I think people need to start thinking about this differently. They need to realize this could be the end.”

Younger viewers seem to be abandoning the awardsshow genre in droves. In other words, it’s beginning to look like the party is finally over.

L A M AG . C O M 6 9

WINGMAN Ali (far left) with then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennnifer Siebel, in 2009. Despite a thin political portfolio, Ali parlayed fundraising for Hillary Clinton into a job as Newsom’s chief of staff.

In just a few years, an eccentric, elephant-loving, gay Iranian American has become one SJ XLI QSWX JIEVWSQI QIHME Ƽ K ures in the country—mobilizing his vast Twitter following to promote his famous friends and punish foes, from Sharon Osbourne to Eric Garcetti to the Church of Scientology. Can his own past survive similar scrutiny?

BY PE TER KIEFER I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y R O B E R T C A R T E R

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The Talented Mr. Ali

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’M E X T R E M E LY U P S E T.”

Yashar Ali delivers this news as he settles into a booth in the lobby of Santa Monica’s Proper Hotel. His eyes are red and puffy—he’s clearly been crying—and his voice cracks with emotion when he speaks. Something terrible has happened, the death of a beloved friend, and Ali can’t help but spill his grief into my tape recorder as we start our interview. “He was just so resilient,” he says, sighing deeply.

The deceased, it turns out, is an orphaned elephant named Luggard, who, before he succumbed to a deadly infection, lived in a wildlife refuge in Kenya that Ali has been raising money for through his extremely influential Twitter account. “You can get people to care about animals if you help them realize that they’re just like us,” he says.

To his 800,000 Twitter followers, Ali’s aching sentimentality won’t come as a surprise. The 41-year-old scourge of the internet—the ruthless-political-operative-turned-social-media-muckraker who took down Sharon Osbourne, hobbled the cabinet chances of L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti, canceled food writer Alison Roman, and helped crush Harvey Weinstein—is actually a big softy. Particularly when it comes to elephants. And orangutans. To everybody else—A-list celebrities, media bosses, and politicians (especially the ones he’s become intertwined with personally and financially)—he’s a force to be reckoned with, emerging over the last five years as one of the most feared and powerful voices on the web.

Part investigative journalist, part gossip columnist, and part trusted confidante, Ali is a uniquely twenty-first-century media personality—an openly gay Iranian American convert to Catholicism who claims he attends Mass three times a week.

He sends out an average of 60 tweets a day—a manic jumble of jokes, news bites, and gossipy commentary about politics, media, aviation safety, the royal family, Scientology, gay heartthrobs, wildlife preservation, and bath linens.

But it’s not all fun and games. His tweets helped topple not one but two Fox News anchors—Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric Bolling (the latter was fired after Ali reported that he was sending dick pics to a colleague). His Twitter bombshells during the Mueller investigation made even Jared Kushner sweat. He’s so well-connected, he could reveal what former president George W. Bush really thought about Donald Trump’s inaugural speech (“That was some weird shit”). His scoops have brought him some serious cred: In 2019, he joined former President Trump, Cardi B, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Time magazine’s list of the most influential people on the internet. Last year, he was invited by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself to give suggestions to Twitter’s C-suite on how to improve the platform.

Though he’s a contributor to New York magazine and Huff Post, his byline shows up infrequently. Instead, he breaks his biggest stories on Twitter and in his Substack newsletter, unencumbered by the fact-checking and legal vetting required by many news organizations. And while some of his methods may seem suspect to traditionalists, he has nonetheless won the admiration of the biggest stars in the media business. I asked him 72 L A M AG . C O M

to suggest a few acquaintances who might comment about him, and he replied by sending a spreadsheet of more than 40 boldface names, including actresses Busy Phillips, Mandy Moore, and Kristin Davis, along with Piers Morgan, Axios’s Mike Allen, Politico’s Sam Stein, and talk show hosts Meghan McCain, Abby Huntsman, and Irena Briganti, the much-feared head of communications at Fox News.

CNN president Jeff Zucker, No. 6 on Ali’s list of referrals, is usually a difficult guy to reach but he quickly jumped on the phone to talk about his friend. “Yashar has this incredible Twitter feed with several personalities within it,” he said. “He’s not just an investigative reporter, he’s not just an animal lover, he’s not just a bon vivant and a man about town—he’s all of those things, and that’s actually what makes him so interesting.”

When we finally meet, the exuberant Renaissance man described by Zucker and others is only partly in evidence. In person he is funny, self-deprecating, and disarmingly intimate—full of generous compliments and world-class dish. During our chat, he texts with a former high-level Obama aide, then deftly deconstructs the online-bullying scandal that has enveloped his good friend Chrissy Teigen—No. 30 on his list. He loves suspense, gossip, and high-stakes intrigue. But the combination of the pandemic and the sudden death of Luggard has taken a toll.

He’s emotional. On several occasions, when discussing his relationship with his family, he breaks down in tears.

Today he’s dressed in an oversized gray T-shirt, blue sweatpants, and the same San Francisco 49ers cap he sports in his youthful Twitter profile photo, which looks like it might have been snapped for his high school yearbook. (He swears that it was taken just before the pandemic.) He looks about as doleful as a one-eyed dog in a Sarah McLachlan ASPCA ad. He may be on a first-name basis with a platoon of A-list stars but at the moment he’s feeling underappreciated. “I’m a caretaker for many people,” he says, taking a sip of his water. “Something that frustrates me is that people don’t take care of people like me.”

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T’S A S T R A N G E C O M M E N T, coming from him. In fact, a full accounting of Ali’s impressive ascent over the past two decades—his humble beginnings as a Hollywood production assistant; his transformation into a powerful political aide to then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom; his tangled relationships with a slew of celebrities; his stunning reinvention as a social media star—are a testament to his uncanny ability to get some very important people to care for him.

Interviews with former colleagues, friends, and fellow reporters paint a portrait of a highly intelligent and empathetic operator who, despite his knack for exposing the indiscretions of others, has managed to obscure a rather checkered history of his own.

On Twitter, Yashar often shares very personal, often moving details about his family, his friends, and his constantly shifting state of mind. But for a journalist who puts so much of his private life into the public sphere, he is extraordinarily resistant to scrutiny. He rarely consents to interviews and ignored several requests before reluctantly consenting to this one. He firmly rejected a photo shoot, claiming he didn’t want to be recognized by Scientologists. There are very few photos of him on-

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1. Ali’s reporting is credited with killing Mayor Garcetti’s chances for a Biden administration cabinet post. 2. Les Moonves’s career was fatally damaged by Ali’s reporting on #MeToo allegations. 3. The Twitter-centric journalist also helped bring down Harvey Weinstein. 4. Ali is a fixture on MSNBC news shows. 5. He’s also been a guest on CBS’s The Talk, with Sharon Osbourne (left) and Julie Chen.

His media fans are at a loss to explain how Ali came into their lives. “Suddenly, he was a presence,” says CNN’s Jake Tapper.

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line, and he darkens his silhouette during TV “I couldn’t tell you how, but suddenly he was interviews. He required that all of his on-thea presence in my life—a wonderful one,” he record quotes be pre-approved. Several years says. “It just feels like he’s always been in my He’s always ago, when he transitioned out of working in life. But I don’t know that I’ve ever met him politics, he stopped going by his birth name attached himself in person.” and switched to Yashar Ali, a move he says he According to Ruby Cramer, a writer for to rich, powerful Politico made to protect his family. who has been a close friend of Ali’s “There’s a little bit of the Talented Mr. Rippeople and made since 2012, “Yashar has a way of immediley in him,” says a former colleague. Though ately becoming close to people, but not as a himself appear he has insinuated in public and in various strategic tactic. You immediately become a indispensable. profiles that he’s the scion of a wealthy Irapart of his world and he becomes a part of nian family, public records show that he’s yours. People have questions about Yashar —FORMER COLLEAGUE encountered a slew of financial hardships in because he doesn’t fit into your concept of recent years. He’s been evicted multiple times, what a reporter or a political operative looks defaulted on several loans, and has racked up tens of thousands like. There’s something mysterious about him that people have of dollars in tax liens. He seems to have no fixed address, pretried to diagnose—but those questions miss the point.” ferring to live in the homes of friends. (He’s currently installed Ali grew up in Oak Park, an upper-middle-class Chicago in the West Hollywood home of an entertainment-industry suburb. His father is a respected professor of mathematics at power broker.) But sometimes he overstays his welcome. He’s the University of Illinois at Chicago; his mother worked in the been sued by a member of the Getty family over a financial disschool’s public health department. He attended Oak Park High pute and fallen out with several other powerful members of San School for a year before transferring to Holy Cross, subsequently Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s entertainment and political elite. converting from Shi‘ite Islam to Catholicism. He has written “He’s always attached himself to rich, powerful people and about being bullied over his Iranian heritage and says that he to elected officials and made himself appear indispensable,” redidn’t have a single friend until he turned 15. He’s revealed that calls a former colleague who worked alongside Ali in Newsom’s relations with his family have been strained due to his sexual San Francisco office. Like many people interviewed for this arorientation and that he didn’t speak with his older sister for ticle, he declined to speak for attribution out of concern that Ali years. He says he suffers from crippling ADHD and bouts of might somehow retaliate. “I don’t exactly fear him, but he can depression, which have afflicted his life and his finances. be vengeful and very vindictive.”

Hoping to break into television, Ali skipped college after How Ali acquired so many powerful supporters remains a graduating from high school and moved to L.A. He found work bit of a mystery. Even his closest allies seem a bit fuzzy about as a production assistant on ER and Chicago Hope before pivothow they met. “I don’t remember how we became friends,” says ing to politics in 2002, first as a volunteer for Kevin Feldman’s New York Times Washington correspondent Maggie Haberman. unsuccessful run to unseat Congressman Henry Waxman and Zucker has a hard time recalling, too. “That’s a really good questhen on Steve Westly’s gubernatorial campaign. After reading tion. How do I know Yashar?” So does CNN anchor Jake Tapper. an article about Iranian-born businessman Hassan Nemazee, L A M AG . C O M 73

Ali reached out, and the two struck up a friendship. In 2010, Nemazee pleaded guilty to bank fraud and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but not before he introduced Ali to Clintonworld fixture Terry McAuliffe. The former DNC chair recruited Ali for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and he wound up organizing a series of successful fundraisers, including an event at the Hollywood home 1 of director Roland Emmerich that raised $200,000.

Ali’s political career really took off when he decamped from L.A. to San Francisco in 2008. occasionally crashing at her pentHis Clinton connections helped him land a staff job on Newsom’s house in Pacific Heights. first gubernatorial campaign in 2008. Newsom, then mayor of By then, Ali had also befriended 2 San Francisco, made an early exit from the race, but Ali was heiress Ariadne Getty, a member able to secure an endorsement from Bill Clinton. That coup led of the oil dynasty that has backed to his appointment in 2009 as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff.

Newsom throughout his political Within Newsom’s inner circle, Ali’s scant political experience career. An extremely private person who in recent years has raised questions. “Yashar didn’t even have a goddamn resumé,” been a major donor to LGBTQ causes, she and Ali became close. says one former aide, who recalled the team struggling to creBut sources say their relationship began to sour in early 2012, ate a press bio for the new hire due to his conspicuous lack of when Ali began borrowing large sums of money from her. In experience. a civil complaint Getty filed against Ali in 2017, she claims the Former colleagues from that era remember him as a moody loans eventually totaled $179,000. The former friends reached and sometimes impulsive presence who zealously guarded his an agreement under which Ali promised to pay the heiress back privileged perch within the City Hall hierarchy. He left a bad in monthly installments. He made just two of those payments taste in a lot of people’s mouths,” one source before defaulting, according to court docusaid. He wielded total control over Newsom’s ments. Getty then sued him in 2019, and the social media channels and was reluctant to case is currently in collections. share any of the passwords. Drama seemed Starting around 2013, members of Buell’s to follow him; several of his former coworkinner circle began growing suspicious of her Within Newsom’s ever-present new friend. Ali persuaded Buell ers remember him bringing a gun to the ofinner circle, Ali’s to auction off a world-class collection of midfices of SCN Strategies, a powerful political consulting firm, setting off a minor panic. (Ali century photographs, bringing in a sevenlimited political claims he just brought along a magazine—not figure sum and pocketing a hefty commission experience a gun—to display while working on a gunfor himself. Soon after, a source says, he began safety ballot initiative.) urging Buell to unload additional collections, raised questions.

Over time, Ali became less concerned with with the implicit understanding that he’d ‘Yashar didn’t City Hall minutiae than with building his reearn a fee for his assistance. He sat in on filationships with the Bay Area’s power elite. nancial meetings with Buell’s accountant and even have His job with Newsom brought him into frefamily members, to the discomfort of some a goddamn quent contact with the city’s wealthy and wellwho attended. Former colleagues remember connected donors—none more impressive Ali being in possession of a large cache of resumé.’ than Susie Tompkins Buell. The billionaire Buell’s sensitive financial documents.

—N E WSOM AIDE cofounder of apparel brands Esprit and The Ali’s relationship with Buell went comNorth Face is one of the Democratic Party’s pletely south around 2018. Reached for comtop donors. She’s given tens of millions to supment, Buell would say only, “I cared about port the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Yashar until I couldn’t anymore because he was doing things Kerry, and her close friend Hillary Clinton. that were unacceptable. He did a lot of good things for me, but Ali and Buell first met at a political dinner around 2008 and he doesn’t understand boundaries. It’s painful to think about.” soon became friendly, trading small talk at political events and She hasn’t spoken to Ali in a year. gossip over drinks. As their relationship deepened, he advised By then, Ali had found a new friend. In the spring of 2017, her on art purchases, helped her recoup a valuable book that comedian Kathy Griffin’s life was quickly unraveling following had been stolen, and organized an auction of her furniture. Ali a photo shoot in which she posed holding a prop resembling started referring to Buell as his “godmother” and she grew fond Donald Trump’s decapitated head. Death threats poured in of the young man, telling friends how sensitive and gentle he by the thousands. Griffin was promptly fired from her gig at could be. Eventually, he moved into one of her houses in Bolinas, CNN, venues canceled her upcoming comedy tour, and lucrative 74 L A M AG . C O M

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endorsement deals disappeared overnight. The Secret Service launched an investigation. Griffin was as radioactive as a celebrity could get. Desperate, she turned to an unlikely savior—one of her favorite Twitter personalities, who’d often been complimentary about her on the platform.

She DM’ed Ali, and as fate would have it, they discovered a connection: they’d both attended the same high school in Chicago, and Ali recalled attending a party at her house. Initially, they discussed simply doing an interview to clear up the Trump matter. But as their relationship grew closer, Ali morphed into an unofficial advisor and shadow publicist. He introduced Griffin to sympathetic journalists, schooled her in the intricacies of social media, and strategized about which publications and late-night talk shows would best serve her career rehabilitation. Eventually, Ali took an even more active role in her comeback, writing a glowing profile of Griffin for New York. They became so close that he joined the 60-year-old on the American leg of her world tour. When Ali said he was coming to L.A. in the spring of 2018, Griffin invited him to stay at her 13,000-squarefoot Bel-Air mansion. According to Griffin, he ended up staying for nine months. (Ali insists he stayed less than six.)

Playing a similar role for Griffin that he’d played for Newsom and Buell, Ali became a confidante-slash-executive assistant, though he was never on her payroll. He took an active role in managing Griffin’s social media accounts, helped her set up a merchandise company, and came to her defense in a property dispute by posting an embarrassing audio clip of a wealthy neighbor screaming expletives. He made a brief cameo in a Keeping Up With the Kardashians Christmas special, which he attended as Griffin’s guest. He did Griffin’s grocery shopping and cooking, jobs that usually fell to Griffin’s paid staff. In exchange, she let him live in her home rent-free and lent him one of her cars. But as the months wore on, Ali became increasingly reclusive, holing up in his bedroom and rarely leaving the house. Staff members assumed he was busy writing, but people around Griffin grew concerned when he started receiving official government mail at her home address.

One evening in the fall of 2018, Griffin invited journalist Joan Walsh, the national affairs correspondent for The Nation and a former political analyst for CNN and MSNBC, to join her for dinner. After Ali made an appearance, Walsh began probing Griffin about the nature of her relationship with him. Walsh

1. Fox News hosts Kimberly Guilfoyle (left) and Eric Bolling (center) were fired after Ali broke scoops about them. 2. Heiress Ariadne Getty sued Ali to recover $179,000 she loaned him. 3.

Democratic donor Susie Tompkins Buell (left) guaranteed a loan for Ali and let him crash in her penthouse. 4. Ali lived rent-free at Kathy Griffin’s Bel-Air mansion for nine months. “Kathy, you’ve got a grifter,” warned an acquaintance. 5. Roland Emmerich (right) hosted Ali’s fundraiser that raised $200,000 for Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

says she got the sense that Griffin wanted Ali to leave but was too intimidated to force the issue. “I completely believed that she was uncomfortable and maybe even afraid, and I sympathized with her,” says Walsh. After listening to Griffin’s story and seeing her evident anxiety, she told her host, “Kathy, you got yourself a grifter. You have to get him out of here.”

It would take several more months, but Griffin finally asked Ali to leave in early 2019, enlisting two part-time male assistants to help oversee the packing of his belongings. Then they ordered him an Uber and sent him on his way. (Ali says he only stayed with Griffin at her urging, and left of his own volition.) Griffin declined to speak about Ali on the record. However, a representative for the comedian offered a statement on her behalf: “Sometimes you make a new friend and that friend turns out to be quite a different person than you thought they were.”

Asked about this trail of tarnished relationships, Ali says that NDAs he has signed limit his response. “I have grappled a lot with entering into codependent relationships of all sorts over the past decade,” he explains in an email. “Wanting to fix things and wanting to fix too much was one of my dysfunctional behaviors. It’s something I’ve talked about in therapy at length.”

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H R O U G H I T A L L , Ali was carefully constructing his own media brand, building an exalted perch in the tangled hierarchies of Twitter, and amassing an audience that included some of the most recognizable names in entertainment and media. Gradually, he became one of the most effective users on the platform, deploying his account not merely to make famous friends but to promote his political ideas, castigate his enemies, and, of course, break news.

He’s been front and center in the ongoing culture wars amplified by Donald Trump’s presidency and the subsequent #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. And he’s used his social meL A M AG . C O M 75

dia muscle to help expose some of the most infamous malefacficulties. In 2001, he was evicted from an apartment on Wilshire tors of our times. Harvey Weinstein? Ali landed an early scoop Boulevard and, starting in 2006, was hit with a series of liens from accuser Lauren Sivan. Les Moonves? Ali reported that the due to unpaid taxes. In 2008, a credit company servicing Toyota disgraced former CEO and chairman of CBS harbored a nasty Motors sued Ali for defaulting on car payments, and creditors vendetta against Janet Jackson. At Fox News, he broke embarare still trying to recoup almost $30,000. He’s also been sued rassing scoops about several hosts, including Kimberly Guilfoyle by two real estate development companies—in San Francisco and Eric Bolling. Weinstein now sits in prison in upstate New and Los Angeles—for unpaid rent. So eyebrows were raised York while Moonves and Bolling were fired and promptly exiled in March of last year when Ali announced his latest COVIDfrom public life. Ali, meanwhile, has been busily collecting accorelief crowdfunding effort, which involved simply retweeting lades: he made National Journal’s 2020 NJ50 list, which honors requests for funds from needy Twitter followers or offering those who are “changing the game in Washington.” to collect money himself and parcel it out.

Last October, he was more focused on local politics, training “If you want to give to the folks who lost their jobs and are his sights on Mayor Garcetti. It’s widely acknowledged within replying with their @CashApp or @Venmo, but don’t want political circles that Ali’s series of blog posts accusing Garcetti’s the hassle of figuring out who to give money to, you can send longtime aide Rick Jacobs of sexual misconduct helped foil me the money and I will distribute 100% of it in a transparent Garcetti’s chances of landing a spot in the Biden administration. fashion,” Ali tweeted on March 22, 2020.

(Ali accused Jacobs of inappropriately kissing him on the lips at This fundraising methodology was a departure for Ali. dinner parties and embracing him for uncomfortable periods In the past, he’s worked in partnership with two nonprofof time. He also accused Garcetti of condoning the behavior.) its—Robin Hood in New York City and Tipping Point in San The mayor, an early supporter of Biden and a Francisco—using the donation site Gomember of his vice-presidential vetting team, FundMe, which has built-in transparency was reportedly on the short list for several tools. According to experts in philanthropy, key jobs, including leading the Department of moving from GoFundMe to a private Venmo Transportation. When Axios reported in May account raises red flags. A spokesman for I share things that Garcetti was in the running to become the IRS told Los Angeles that someone usthat I care about ing a peer-to-peer payment app like Venmo ambassador to India, Ali promptly reposted his thread about Jacobs and warned he had and also the stuff to create a donation campaign was a “bit “more reporting to share,” though so far he’s of a gray area.” The FBI has a warning on people would been quiet. its website urging people against wiring Sharon Osbourne also found herself in money to Venmo and CashApp, calling it “a consider to be Ali’s crosshairs in March, when he reported favorite scammer tactic.” messy. on allegations that Osbourne had directed To be sure, there’s no evidence that Ali has racist language at some of her cohosts and done anything illegal with the funds. Indeed —YASHAR ALI used bullying tactics on the set of The Talk.

Venmo, which usually discourages freelance Days later, Osbourne was fired after more fundraising, raised his spending limit in supthan a decade on the show. port of his effort. He does seem to be doling out at least some But, of course, not all of Ali’s postings—some 200,000 tweets of the money he collected, though how much he has raised and in total so far—are journalistic in nature. He has also detailed how much has been distributed is unclear. Ali says he raised his experiences as a gay Catholic Iranian American, ruminated around $7,000 to his Venmo account and gave it all away in $100 on ear-lavage procedures, and even spoken eloquently on the and $200 gifts. He claims he donated $150,000 of his own money menstrual cycles of Orcas. “I’m vulnerable on Twitter, and that during the pandemic to people in need. creates trust,” he says. “I share things that I care about personAli’s own struggles with the pandemic were abundantly ally, and I also share the stuff that people would consider to be evident last April, when we met up at the Four Seasons in messy. Somebody I’ve never met tweeted at me the other day, Beverly Hills. He claimed I was only the second person he’d ‘We refer to you by your first name in our household.’ As in, seen since L.A.’s lockdowns began, and though he had been ‘Today Yashar said this, and today Yashar said that.’ Whatever vaccinated, was skittish about being in public. He said he’s that is, reporters don’t have that. I don’t know any reporters been contending with several health issues and rarely leaves who have that, which is fine. I’m unusual.” his house other than to see his therapist. He spends most of his day tweeting and talking to sources. >>> Taking stock of Ali’s journalistic accomplishments is tricky. His major scoops have all held up, including one—the H E N H E ’ S N OT working as a journalist, Ali news that Jared Kushner was a “significant person of interfinds time to raise money for a wide array of est” in the Russia investigation—that was served up simply causes. In addition to elephant conservation, as a tweet reply. And the range of topics on which he’s had he’s mounted drives for the rehabilitation of an impact is impressive. In a recent profile of Endeavor CEO Black churches and helped raise more than $1 Ari Emanuel in The New Yorker, Connie Bruck cited previmillion for COVID victims. Through the years, ous reporting by Ali. He chalks up his successes to a mix of he has often alluded to a vast family fortune, and pledged monhard work, hyper focus, and crack research skills that he ey to various candidates and causes, but recipients complained sharpened as a political operative. “When the Trump era that his donations arrived late or never at all. started, there was a hunger for more and more stuff, and At the same time, he has faced his fair share of financial difpeople were more in tune with the news,” he says. “I don’t

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7 6 L A M AG . C O M

MTV AWARDS: CHRISTOPHER POLK/MTV1415/GETTY IMAGES; ALISON ROMAN: CLINT SPAULDING/GETTY IMAGES

‘‘

think I would’ve had as much attention in 2012.”

And yet to many, there’s also something unsettling about his journalistic approach. In focusing on the overlapping worlds of media, politics, and the entertainment industry— where the stakes are extremely high and personal grudges abound—he relies heavily on anonymous sources, sometimes by the dozens. For example, in June 2020, Ali published a story about Barbara Fedida, a former veteran ABC News executive in charge of talent, in which he alleged that Fedida had made racist comments to her staff.

Ali claimed to have interviewed 34 sources over the course of six months—all strictly on background—and his reporting mostly checked out. Fedida was fired five days later, after ABC launched an internal investigation confirming that she’d made “racially insensitive comments.”

But in the network’s statement, ABC also knocked down Ali’s assertion that Fedida had been the subject of dozens of human resource complaints and had caused millions of dollars to be paid out in confidential settlements. That part, ABC noted, Ali got wrong.

A relationship with Ali can cut both ways, and often does.

Before he took her down, Fedida had been a source of Ali’s as well as a budding acquaintance. But his friendship can also lead to benefits. For years, Leah Remini (No. 5 on Ali’s list) blamed Sharon Osbourne for orchestrating her departure from The View in 2011 when The King of Queens actressturned-activist was fired. Remini then seemingly buried the hatchet in a 2015 interview with Howard Stern only to return to her original accusations that Osbourne had used racist language during their tenure cohosting the show. Remini aired these accusations as the only on-the-record source in a Substack post authored by Ali, in which he cites 11 other anonymous sources. Before Ali published the story that upended Rick Jacobs’s life, the two were also on good terms.

Over the course of a friendship dating back to 2005, Ali had attended at least a half dozen events hosted by Jacobs at his home. According to a source who was present at several of these events and witnessed the behavior in question, the kisses had seemed like a running gag, and many of their acquaintances were shocked when Ali framed them as sexual harassment.

In any case, Ali’s pieces tend to be highly reductive, and not only because they’re often published on Twitter. Most have clearly identifiable villains and victims and a crusading hero in the person of Ali himself. While no one can doubt he’s helped expose serious malfeasance, the public fallout that often results from his crusades has at times been hurtful and troublingly lacking in nuance.

I asked if he ever feels any remorse publishing damaging articles about people with whom he’s had a personal relationship. “Never,” he says. “It doesn’t bring me down because I’ve been getting results. If I wasn’t getting results, it might.

There’s no story I’ve ever done where it was a mistake.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that Ali has amassed his power and influence just as traditional journalism outlets have been suffering through a death spiral. Between 2008 and 2019, newsroom employment has dropped by more than 23 percent. The bleeding out of the industry has led to new levels of desperation. Every day Ali is inundated with pleas

F R I E N D LY F I R E

New York Times food writer Alison Roman (left) parted ways with the paper after Ali posted unflattering remarks she’d made about his friend Chrissy Teigen (above left).

from journalists to retweet their stories, which can result in significant traffic boosts. A top editor at Insider (formerly known as Business Insider) recently circulated an internal memo urging staffers to seek out retweets from Ali to optimize the impact of their stories. Ten years ago, it was a link on The Drudge Report that prompted newsroom backslapping. Now it’s a retweet from @Yashar. “[Ali’s ascent] says something good about the media—that it can still be a meritocracy, and if you’re smart and resourceful and industrious enough and you righteously stand up for the causes you believe in, and if you break a lot of stories, you can rise,” says Tapper. “He’s out there doing what journalists are supposed to do—providing comfort to the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

The fact is, like it or not, Ali’s feed is impossible to ignore, and traditional newsrooms are struggling to keep up. After Ali published his Rick Jacobs piece, the L.A. Times ran a string of follow-ups. Or take the case of Alison Roman, formerly a star food writer and personality for the New York Times. In May, Roman gave an interview in which she criticized Teigen as well as Marie Kondo. The comments might well have gone unnoticed had Ali not screenshotted the interview. Roman’s comments—while clumsy—took aim at excessive consumerism and celebrity branding, but many thought her remarks smacked of racism. The Times promptly suspended Roman, who issued an apology. Ali then resurfaced an old Halloween photo of Roman in what he deemed a “chola” outfit, accusing her of cultural insensitivity. Roman explained she was actually dressed up as Amy Winehouse, but the Times reported on the incident anyway. She left the paper in December and, according to a source close to Roman, is furious with Ali and her former employer.

Back at the Four Seasons, I turn off my recorder and get up to leave. (I later discover Ali’s been recording me as well.)

He tells me he’d be happy to sit and chat for several more hours, but it’s getting late. I affix my mask and we exchange pleasantries, bump fists, and make plans to talk again. It’s now dusk, and the snarled traffic on Doheny is an unwelcome sign that the world—after a truly horrific year—is finally getting back to normal.

As I exit the driveway, I steal one last glance over my shoulder and notice that Ali is still seated at our table, alone, scrolling through his phone.

L A M AG . C O M 77

H HIGHCLASS CAR CLUB CY P R E SS PA R K , J U N E 1 3 , 2 01 5 LU P I TA -----------------------O Sitting low and pretty at the wheel while waiting for her husband, Lupita smokes a cigarette and creates a dreamy mise-enscène for the photographer.

RU

LOWRIDER CULTURE, SPAWNED IN THE 1940S, IS THRIVING ACROSS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. BUT AS A PHOTOGRAPHER WHO SPENT FIVE YEARS CHRONICLING ITS ADHERENTS DISCOVERED,

I U

THIS TIME THE LADIES ARE INVITED P H O T O G R A P H S BY KRISTIN BEDFORD T E X T BY ERIC MERCADO

R

L

owrider culture is usually linked to the defiant machismo of L.A.'s Mexican American pachucos during the city's racial unrest during World War II, who, faced with aggressive discrimination, donned cartoon-like zoot suits to flaunt their contempt for their Anglo tormentors.

They also modded their rides to hover inches above the pavement; the mantra was "low and slow," and a phalanx of lowriders creeping down a boulevard was both entrancing and intimidating.

As the hot-rod craze— elevated chassis, revved-up engines—grew during the ’50s, the pachucos of East L.A. went right on dropping and chopping while festooning their Impalas with fantastical pinstripes, vainglorious personal oaths, and lifelike renderings of familia— Facebook profiles before the internet. But as photographer Kristin Bedford discovered while spending five years with today's lowriders, the subculture is now populated with a substantial number of women who are just as passionate about their rides and what they represent, both as larger cultural signifiers and as empowering accessories of their feminism.

In this excerpt from Bedford's new book, Cruise Night, we feature some of their Kandycolored chariots.

80 L A M AG . C O M

OUR STYLE CAR CLUB LOS A N G E L E S , J U LY 2 2 , 2 01 8 P U R P L E RA I N

O This homage to the palette of the artist formerly known for immortalizing hot cars sports a neon sign comemmorating his biggest hit.

L A M AG . C O M 81

V I N TAG E LADIES CAR CLUB W H I T T I E R , J U N E 2 2 , 2 01 8 N O SOY D E T I / I D O N ' T B E LO N G TO YO U -----------------------O Bedford considered naming her book I Don't Belong to You, in appreciation of the defiant message tattooed across this woman's chest. The tableau of female independence was snapped in the backseat of her cherry 1952 Chevrolet Deluxe.

82 L A M AG . C O M

L O S A NG E L E S CAR CLUB H AWA I I A N G A R D E N S , J U LY 1 2 , 2 01 5 LOS A N G E L E S -----------------------ODodger-blue back-seat upholstery highlights this car club's name.

H E AT WAV E CAR CLUB E AST L . A . , S E P T E M B E R 3 , 2 01 6 W H I T T I E R B O U L E VA R D ------------------------

O Many lowriders are derived from hopped-up Detroit iron that transported the middle class to all points of the compass in the 1960s and '70s. This humble Chevy Monte Carlo has been tricked out into a rolling zoot suit with opera windows, lime-green metallic paint, pinstripe filligree, and prim whitewalls mounted on comically aggressive rims—plus the compulsory suspension drop.

L A M AG . C O M 83

MILLENIUM CAR CLUB LOS A N G E L E S , D E C E M B E R 27, 2 01 5 YA H A I RA

AT I T AG A I N C A R C L U B E LYS I A N PA R K , M AY 7, 2 01 7 SAMANTHA ----------------------O Top: Under the Sixth Street Bridge before it was demolished; Yahaira's hairstyle and adorning flower are nods to the pachuco lifestyle. "There's a lot of symbolism to crossing the bridge, leaving the neighborhood, and stepping into another culture," Bedford says. Below: Samantha sits in her father's car.

Car club gatherings usually take place on Sundays because Saturdays are dedicated to washing the car and polishing the chrome, which can take an entire day.

84 L A M AG . C O M

L O N E WO L F C I T Y O F I N D U ST RY, AU G U ST 24 , 2 01 5 I M PA L A D R I V E- I N ------------------------

Sixties car signifiers—skinny sterring wheels, tuck-and-roll upholstery, no cup holders or headrests, and a drivein locale—are on display with this glorious turquoise time machine.

O

L A M AG . C O M 85

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Karen Bloch )SVJO >LSSULZZ :WVY[Z 4LKPJPUL 3VUN )LHJO 562-493-5600 Charles Blum +Y *OHYSLZ 3 )S\T Santa Monica 310-392-9795 David Boghossian )VNOVZZPHU HUK 4HY[PRPHU *OPYVWYHJ[PJ .SLUKHSL 818-242-5023 Tibor Bokor ;3* /LHS[O *LU[LY =HU 5\`Z 818-780-7779

Jeremy Brook ;OL 3PML *LU[LY *OPYVWYHJ[PJ 3VZ (UNLSLZ 310-392-5456 Lance Brooks 3HUJL , )YVVRZ +* +V^UL` 562-862-7262 Arin Broosan ,TWV^LYLK >LSSULZZ *OPYVWYHJ[PJ .SLUKHSL 818-937-9431 Michael Budincich )\KPUJPJO *OPYVWYHJ[PJ *SPUPJ 7HZHKLUH 626-792-3390 L A M AG . C O M 89

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9 0 L A M AG . C O M

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9HÄ /V]HULZZPHU Hovanessian Chiropractic, Inc. Glendale 818-552-5025

Matthew Gloin Live Well Chiropractic and Pilates Center Los Angeles 323-930-9355 Eric Gofnung Edward Phillips MD & Robert Stivelman Los Angeles 323-933-2444 Niveen Gorgy Soma Wellness Weight Loss Center Culver City 310-574-0077 Diane Grant Chiropractic, Massage & Nutrition Inc. Lakewood 562-461-3998 *HYVS`U .YPɉU Back To Health Chiropractic Santa Clarita 661-250-1517 Alice Grob Alice's Chiropractic Wonderland El Segundo 310-546-6863 Hana Hadawar Back to Life Family Chiropractic Santa Ana 714-541-5433 Andrew Haig The Joint Chiropractic Glendale North Glendale 818-668-3299 3PZH /HUUPÄU Back In Balance Chiropractic Chatsworth 818-437-5337 Thomas Harvey Spinal Solutions Toluca Lake 818-506-3040 4LOYUV\ZO /HZZPK Jebeli Hassid Chiropractic Los Angeles 310-277-1022

Michelle Itskovich Advanced Healthcare & Chiropractic Center Los Angeles 818-605-5472 Gary Jacobs Gary Alan Jacob Chiropractic, Inc. 7HJPÄJ 7HSPZHKLZ 310-339-6009 Farahnaz Jalali Farahnaz Jalali Chiropractic Reseda 818-668-8136 Jess James Spinewise Chiropractic Beverly Hills 310-957-9065 Kian Javid South Bay Wellness Center Inglewood 310-347-0932 Valerie Johnson VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System - West Los Angeles Medical Center Los Angeles 310-478-3711 Michael Kaliko Body of Beverly Hills Wellness Los Angeles 310-652-2099 Scott Katz Katz Chiropractic Los Angeles 323-653-7519 Alex Kaykov Dr. Alex Kaykov, DC Valley Village 818-927-3777

LEA KELLEY, DC, LAc The Dragon and Phoenix Healer 3215 Highland Ave. Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 310-545-6528 drleakelley.com info@drleakelley.com

Ash Khodabakhsh The Chiro Guy Los Angeles 323-287-5323 Andre Khoury Active Chiro Center Sherman Oaks 818-784-2278 Robert Kilroy Westside Therapeutics Los Angeles 310-826-2021 Adrian Korol Center For Holistic Health Redondo Beach 310-374-7482 Kristen Kozasky Kozasky Chiropractic Inc. Lawndale 424-247-7227 Mayya Kravchenko Edward Phillips MD & Robert Stivelman Los Angeles 323-933-2444 David Kuo Chiro Pain Care Center Alhambra 626-872-2030 Joseph Kurnik Dr. Joseph Kurnik D.C. Chiropractor Torrance 310-326-0122 3LZSPL 3H\[LYIHJO Davis Kentwood Chiropractic Los Angeles 310-215-9061 Peter Le Spinal Stenosis and Disc Center Santa Monica 310-451-5851

Jason Kelberman Westside Wellness Center Los Angeles 855-362-3857

Ryan Lee Ryan Lee Chiropractic Center Los Angeles 213-389-1083

Lea Kelley Dr. Lea Kelley, DC, LAc Manhattan Beach 310-545-6528

Marvin Lee SoCal Back Doctor Los Angeles 323-800-4428

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION Fred Lerner Fred Lerner, D.C., Ph.D. Beverly Hills 310-423-9603 Benjamin Liang Dr. Benjamin E. Liang, D.C. Los Angeles 310-853-0143 Michelle Lim Dr. Lim Chiropractic )LSSÅV^LY 714-315-7723 Michele Longoria Michele Longoria, DC, CSP Toluca Lake 818-760-4044 Brenda Malka Dr. Brenda Malka Encino 818-783-2888 Chett Mallett Elements of Wellness Los Angeles 323-968-3535 George Mariella Body Structure Los Angeles 323-469-8062 Ted Marriott Stay Well Chiropractic Pasadena Pasadena 626-808-1515 Ronald Maugeri Malibu Wellness Malibu 310-579-5949 Kevin McNamee California Health Institute Woodland Hills 818-999-4747 Hiwot Melka Southern California University of Health Science Whittier 562-947-8755 Joanne Miceli Miceli Chiropractic Center Montebello 323-721-3797

Alon Naor Advanced NeuroMusculoSkeletal Center Beverly Hills 310-888-8815

Won Park Totalcare ONE Chiropractic & Acupuncture Monterey Park 626-280-2818

Daniel Navas Marina Sports Medicine Clinic Carson 424-536-3027

Louis Pastis Pastis Chiropractic San Marino 626-888-1287

Victor Nazarian IHS Medical Group Los Angeles 424-266-7986 Rochelle Neally Bloch Wellness and Sports Medicine Long Beach 562-493-5600 Eric Nepomnaschy Bay Chiropractic & Rehabilitation Santa Monica 310-993-8482 Arbi Nersissian Nersissian Chiropractic Glendale 818-548-4668 Brian Nishimoto >LZ[^VVK =PSSHNL Chiropractic Los Angeles 310-475-0444 Golan Nissim Performance Care Sports Medicine & Rehabilitation Center 5VY[O /VSS`^VVK 818-766-4307 Arash Noor BodyPro Chiropractic and Sports Medicine Los Angeles 424-269-5371 Richard Ochsmann Rhino Chiropractic Northridge 818-998-2929

Sai-Ling Michael Evertruth Healing Burbank 818-760-7847

Andy Oh Dr. Oh Chiropractic & Acupuncture 5VY^HSR 310-635-0270

Michael Miller Michael Miller, D.C. Pasadena 626-578-1433

Omid Okhowat 6ROV^H[ *OPYVWYHJ[PJ Los Angeles 323-933-3357

John Mora DOT Physicals Santa Fe Springs 562-360-5466

Edward Pan Chiropractic Care Center Los Angeles 213-627-0287

Ricardo Morelli Dr. Ricardo Morelli, Chiropractor Burbank 818-507-5253 Rick Morris Spinal Stenosis and Disc Center Santa Monica 310-451-5851

Marine Papazian Marine Papazian Chiropractic Clinic =HU 5\`Z 818-779-7877 1LɈYL` 7HYLU[ 1LќYL` 9 7HYLU[ +* =HSSL` =PSSHNL 818-752-2257

Steven Perry Dr. Steven B. Perry, Chiropractor Tarzana 818-881-2225 Robert Pomahac Dr. Robert Pomahac, DC >LZ[ /VSS`^VVK 310-659-8500 1LɈYL` 7[HR Ptak Family Chiropractic Santa Monica 310-473-7991 Morris Rashtian Morris Rashtian Chiropractic Corp.

Beverly Hills 310-659-3389 Justine Rhee Innate Chiropractic and Children's Wellness South Pasadena 626-219-6999 Brian Ross Brian Ross, D.C. Calabasas 818-451-5700 Yariv Rothman =P[HSP[` /LHS[O *LU[LY Santa Monica 310-396-3635 Daniel Rude Wellness Source Chiropractic Los Angeles 310-280-0600 Jeanne Russell =V`HNLY 4LK 5VY[O /VSS`^VVK 818-760-2059

Ronald Saltman Universal Chiropractic and Nutrition Center Toluca Lake 818-508-6188

Susan Starler 7HJPÄJ *VHZ[ :WVY[Z Medicine Los Angeles 310-571-1212

Dao Tran South Bay Pain and Rehab Center 3H^UKHSL 310-263-7246

Khaleed Samuels Weymouth Corners Integrated Wellness San Pedro 310-684-1807

Richard Stewart +Y 9PJOHYK :[L^HY[ Chiropractic Beverly Hills 310-562-5524

Don Trepany Trepany Chiropractic Los Angeles 310-301-4204

David Schlute Dr. David Schlute, D.C. Long Beach 714-791-3183

Todd Stockwell PIH Health Los Alamitos 562-597-4181

1LɈYL` ;\JRLY +Y 1LќYL` ;\JRLY Los Angeles 310-444-9393

Blair Schoolhouse Schoolhouse Chiropractic Culver City 310-613-3835

Skyler Talamantes Goodlife Physical Medicine Redondo Beach 310-543-7779

Jeri Ulberg Ulberg Healing Choices & Chiropractic, Inc. Los Angeles 818-266-7599

Troy Schott The Joint Chiropractic Sunset Galleria Los Angeles 323-736-4029 Carrie Schwartz Concierge Chiropractic Los Angeles 323-872-7363 Michael Shahbazian Flintridge Family Chiropractic La Canada 818-952-0172 Ben Shamoiel The LA Chiropractor Los Angeles 310-957-3394 Michael Sheps Dr. Sheps, Inc. Los Angeles 310-873-4422 Gregory Siegel Gregory S. Siegel, D.C. Whittier 562-945-1310 James Silbar James R. Silbar DC Woodland Hills 818-225-0013 David Simmons David W. Simmons, D.C. Arcadia 626-446-4066 Stephen Smith /LHS[O^H`Z *OPYVWYHJ[PJ La Mirada 562-902-0050

Haven Postural Chiropractic 24007 Ventura Blvd., Suite 134 Calabasas, CA 91302 818-451-5700 drbrianross.com

Bruce Warder Bruce A. Warder, D.C. Woodland Hills 818-225-1255

DAVID TANNENBAUM, DC Tannenbaum Chiropractic Wilshire Palm Wellness 9150 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 250 Beverly Hills, CA 90212 310-271-9968 drdavidtannenbaum. com

David Tannenbaum Tannenbaum Chiropractic Beverly Hills 310-271-9968 Theresa Tarcha Dr. Theresa Tarcha, D.C. Manhattan Beach 310-318-9543 Arman Tchoukadarian Pasadena Chiropractic Clinic Pasadena 626-585-1616

Shannon Watson =P[HS -VYJL *OPYVWYHJ[PJ 7HJPÄJ 7HSPZHKLZ 310-454-3311 Ben Weitz Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Santa Monica 310-395-3111 Sommer Whaite Dr. Sommer Whaite, D.C. Beverly Hills 310-274-0022 Patrick Wilbur HealthCare Partners Arcadia 626-462-1884 Iris Williams Halo Chiropractic Los Angeles 323-874-2225 Kenneth Winer Winer Chiropractic Center Canoga Park 818-888-7227

William Thomas Thomas Chiropractic and Massage Therapy La Mirada 562-694-2225

Anthony Yanagihara Yanagihara Chiropractic South Gate 323-569-2727

Merrick Tomlinson Goodlife Physical Medicine Redondo Beach 310-543-7779

Ruth Ziemba Integral Wisdom Healing Arts Santa Monica 310-820-2400

Daniel Sovetky Sovetky Chiropractic Granada Hills 818-360-1967

Juan Torres Bloch Chiropractic Wellness & Sports Medicine Long Beach 562-493-5600

Rion Zimmerman Flintridge Family Chiropractic La Canada 818-952-0172

Neal Springer Springer Chiropractic /VSS`^VVK 323-661-1183

Christopher Tosh *OPYVWYHJ[PJ )VK`^VYR Studio City 818-981-2639

Dan Zucker Dr. Dan Zucker Sherman Oaks 818-990-9345

Steven Smith Smith Chiropractic Clinic Pasadena 626-792-1221

BRIAN ROSS, DC

Aaron Van Dyck =HU +`JR -HTPS` Chiropractic La Crescenta 818-249-4226

Isaac Song Goodlife Physical Medicine El Segundo 310-543-7779

L A M AG . C O M 91

Wine and the tuna crudo melt from Eszett

THE HOT LIST L.A. MAGAZINE

+++ho

OUR MONTHLY LIST OF L.A.’S MOST ESSENTIAL RESTAURANTS E D I T E D

H A I L E Y

E B E R

WEST

Birdie G’s

SANTA MONICA » American $$

James Beard Award–nominated chef Jeremy Fox gets personal with a sunny spot dedicated to comfort food and named after his young daughter. The high-low menu is full of playful riffs on comfort food, from a decadent stufffed latke called the Goldbar to a matzo ball soup with carrot miso to a next-level relish tray.

Don’t miss the jiggly Rose Petal pie for dessert.

2421 Michigan Ave., 310-310-3616, or birdiegsla.com.

Full bar.

Broad Street Oyster Co. MALIBU » Seafood $$ If ever there was a car picnic scene, it’s at this openair spot overlooking Malibu Lagoon State Beach (and across from a SoulCycle, if we’re being honest). You can grab a great lobster roll (topped with uni or caviar if you’re feeling extra fancy), towers of raw seafood, great clam chowder, and a burger sprinkled with shio kombu (dried kelp) that shouldn’t be overlooked.

23359 Pacific Coast Hwy., 424-644-0131, or broad streetoyster.com. Beer and wine.

Cassia

SANTA MONICA » Southeast Asian $$$

Bryant Ng mines his Chinese Singaporean heritage, honors wife Kim’s Vietnamese background, and works in the wood-grilling technique he honed at Mozza at this grand Southeast Asian brasserie. Hunker down at a table on the patio—or treat yourself to some great takeout—to devour turmeric-marinated ocean trout or chickpea curry with scallion clay-oven bread. Wherever and however you enjoy Ng’s cooking, you won’t be disappointed. 1314 7th St., 310-3936699, or cassiala.com. Full bar.

Colapasta

SANTA MONICA » Italian $

It’s equally pleasant to grab and go or eat at this quiet, affordable spot that features fresh pastas topped with farmers’ market fare. The colorful, poppy-seed-sprinkled beet ravioli is delicate and deli-

92 L A M AG . C O M

BY

T H E B R E A K D OW N W EST

EAST

Includes Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Century City, Culver City, Malibu, Marina del Rey, Mar Vista, Palms, Santa Monica, Venice, West L.A., Westwood

Includes Atwater Village, Eagle Rock, East L.A., Echo Park, Glendale, Los Feliz, Pasadena, San Gabriel Valley, Silver Lake

T H E VALLEY DOWNTOWN Includes Arts District, Bunker Hill, Chinatown, Historic Core, Little Tokyo, South Park

Includes Agoura Hills, Burbank, Calabasas, Encino, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Toluca Lake, Van Nuys

CENT RAL CENTRAL

SOUT H

Includes Beverly Grove, East Hollywood, Fairfax District, Hancock Park, Hollywood, Koreatown, West Hollywood

Includes Bell, Compton, Gardena, Hermosa Beach, Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, Torrance, Watts

Denotes restaurants with outdoor seating $ $$ $$$ $$$$

I N E X P E N S I V E (Meals under $10) M O D E R A T E (Mostly under $20) E X P E N S I V E (Mostly under $30) V E R Y E X P E N S I V E ($30 and above)

Price classifications are approximate and based on the cost of a typical main course that serves one.

For restaurants primarily offering multicourse family meals, the cost per person of such a meal is used.

In the current climate, restaurant hours are changing frequently. Check websites or social media accounts for the most current information

2021

cious, while the gramigna with pesto and ricotta is hearty and satisfying. 1241 5th St., 310-310-8336, or colapasta.com. Beer and wine.

Crudo e Nudo

SANTA MONICA » Seafood $$

Brian Bornemann, the 31-year-old former executive chef at Michael’s Santa Monica, has gone his own way. He and his girlfriend, Leena Culhane, have launched a sustainable neighborhood joint that’s by turns a coffee shop, a seafood market, and a casual restaurant where you can nibble impeccably prepared crudo, tuna tartare toasts, and vegan Caesar salads on the patio while sipping a thoughtfully selected natural wine. Though the project began as a pandemic pop-up, it’s now an exciting brick-and-mortar spot from one of the city’s most promising young toques.

2724 Main St., crudoenudo.com, or @crudo_e_nudo.

Beer and wine.

Dear John’s

CULVER CITY » Steak House $$$

There’s still good times and great food to be had at this former Sinatra hang stylishly revamped by Josiah Citrin and Hans Röckenwagner. Steak-house classics— crab Louie, oysters Rockefeller, thick prime steaks— pay homage to the lounge’s Rat Pack past and can be enjoyed on a sunny new patio or to go. 11208 Culver Blvd., 310-881-9288, or dearjohnsbar.com. Full bar.

Felix

VENICE » Italian $$$

At Evan Funke’s clubby, floral-patterned trattoria, the rigorous dedication to tradition makes for superb focaccia and pastas. The rigatoni cacio e pepe—tubes of pasta adorned only with Pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper—nods to Roman shepherds who used the spice to keep warm, while the rigatoni all’Amatriciana with cured pork cheek sings brilliantly alongside Italian country wines. 1023 Abbot Kinney Blvd., 424-387-8622, or felixla.com. Full bar.

Kato

SAWTELLE » Cal-Asian $$$

Jon Yao is now serving his acclaimed Taiwanese tasting menu outdoors. Dishes like 3 Cup Abalone and

DY L A N + J E N I

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PAGE 94

Dungeness crab soup are just as revelatory alfresco.

At $118 for more than a dozen courses, Yao’s prix fixe menu is one of the best deals in town. 11925 Santa Monica Blvd., 424-535-3041, or katorestaurant.com.

Mírame

burger for dinner, or various Middle Eastern dips for any time of day. The culinary team includes h.wood’s Michael Teich and David Johns, along with Burt Bakman of the beloved barbecue joint Slab. 9876 Wilshire Blvd., 310-285-1260, santolinabh.com, or@santolinabh.

Full bar.

BEVERLY HILLS » Mexican $$$

Joshua Gil is cooking exciting, contemporary Mexican fare with market-driven ingredients and serving them on a stunning patio. Dishes are imaginative but not overly contrived—salmon-skin chicharrón with fermented garlic aioli; a divine slow-cooked Heritage Farms pork shoulder served with a black-lime gastrique, celtuce, and hearty, richly flavorful frijoles charros cooked with a pig’s head. The latter is available as part of Mírame’s to-go family meal, which includes house-made tortillas; a memorable riff on Caesar salad with pork chicharrón, roasted vegetables and goat cheese; chocolate flan; and an adorable little bottle of margaritas. At just $105 for two people, it’s an amazingly affordable way to sample Gil’s cooking.

419 N. Canon Dr. , 310-230-5035, mirame.la, or @mirame.la. Full bar.

Ospi VENICE » Italian $$$ Jackson Kalb’s sprawling new Italian joint brings bustle and outdoor tables to a corner on an otherwise quiet stretch. Pastas, including a spicy rigatoni alla vodka and raschiatelli with a pork rib ragù, are sublime, and most travel remarkably well if you’re looking to takeout, which is the only option for lunch. Roman-style pizzas boast a uniquely crispy, cracker-thin crust; to get the full crunch, have a slice as you drive your takeout home. 2025 Pacific Ave., 424-443-5007, ospivenice.com, or @ospiveni. Full bar.

Pasjoli SANTA MONICA » French $$$$

Dave Beran’s à la carte spot bucks the trends and eschews bistro clichés in favor of old-fashioned thrills— an elaborate pressed duck prepared just as Escoffier would have and served with potatoes au gratin dauphinois—and modern French fare. The showy duck must be reserved in advance as only a limited number of birds are available each night. But there are plenty of other exciting dishes on the menu, such as the chicken liver in brioche and a complex lobster, mussel, and clam bisque with shaved fennel and tarragon.

2732 Main St., 424-330-0020, or pasjoli.com. Full bar.

Pizzana BRENTWOOD » Italian $$

It’s not easy to make over the local pie joint, but 35-year-old chef Daniele Uditi has reimagined an urban standby with equal parts purism and playfulness that has become a neighborhood favorite in the process. Most impressive is the open-mindedness that has him deftly transforming the Roman pasta dish cacio e pepe into a pizza or putting a hearty short rib ragù on the Pignatiello pie. And in a real twist, appetizers and seasonal salads aren’t afterthoughts but highlights. Don’t miss specials, like an insane chicken parm sandwich. 11712 San Vicente Blvd., 310-481-7108, pizzana.com, or @pizzana. Also at 460 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, 310-657-4662.

Sant’olina BEVERLY HILLS » Mediterranean $$S

The buzzy h.wood Group has taken over the rooftop at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to launch this breezy pop-up that’s likely to become a permanent fixture. Tables with views are topped with blue-and-white linens, and the menu is full of crowd-pleasing dishes: babka french toast for brunch, harissa-cured salmon, a lamb

BOOK IT » Shake up some variations on the

beloved summer sipper with Matt Hranek’s The Negroni: A Love Affair With a Classic Cocktail (Artisan).

DOWNTOWN

over the 20 years he’s been cooking in his native city.

Setting up shop in the deconsecrated St. Vibiana Cathedral offered an opportunity to add theatrics to a space that’s contemporary and classically plush and now boasts three distinct outdoor dining areas. A delicate curried carrot broth and beluga lentils transform slices of smoked tofu from wholesome to haute, while lamb belly spins on a spit in the former rectory.

114 E. 2nd St., 213-788-1191, or redbird.la. Full bar.

Sonoratown Angry Egret Dinette CHINATOWN » Sandwiches $$ Wes Avila has left Guerrilla Tacos and is focusing on torta-esque sandwiches at this heartfelt new venture.

Standouts include the Whittier Blvd: beef belly braised in star anise-laced lard for eight hours, then stuffed in a roll with horseradish cream, avocado, queso fresco, serrano chile, and red pepper escabeche. It’s hearty and decadent—especially if you opt to add a duck egg, which you should— but also wonderfully nuanced. There’s ample outdoor seating, but sandwiches with fried ingredients, like a veggie number, with squash blossom tempura, miraculously manage to remain crispy and travel well. 970 N. Broadway, Ste. 114, 213-278-0987, aedinette.com, or @angryegretdinette.

Badmaash HISTORIC CORE » Indian $$

This Indian gastropub concept comes from the father-and-sons team of Pawan, Nakul, and Arjun Mahendro, who are all well versed in the culinary techniques of East and West. The menu features contemporary mash-ups, like a version of poutine smothered in chicken tikka, tandoori chicken wings, and a spicy lamb burger. If tradition’s your thing, you’ll be comforted by spice-stewed chickpeas, potato and pea samosas, and what they call Good Ol’ Saag Paneer.

Wash it all down with carefully curated, reasonably priced natural wines. 108 W. 2nd St., 213-221-7466, bad maashla.com, or @badmaashla. Beer and wine to go.

Also at 418 N. Fairfax Ave., Fairfax District, 213-281-5185.

Gamboge LINCOLN HEIGHTS

» Cambodian $

The Cambodian sandwiches known as numpang, which are somewhat similar to Vietnamese banh mi, are the speciality at this charming new deli. Crusty bolillo bread is a vessel for proteins like lemongrassmarinated pork shoulder or grilled trumpet mushrooms, along with condiments like Maggi mayo, chili jam, and carrot-and-papaya slaw. The menu is full of delights beyond sandwiches, including rice bowls; a great shredded chicken salad with cabbage, peanuts, and a citrus-and-fish-sauce dressing; and a memorable braised-sardines-and-tomato dish. Order food to go, or enjoy it on the sunny, succulent-dotted back patio. 1822 N. Broadway, gambogela.com, or @gambogela. Beer and wine.

Guerrilla Cafecito ARTS DISTRICT » Breakfast $-$$

This newish breakfast offshoot around the corner from Guerilla Tacos makes a perfectly balanced brekkie burrito that rivals the city’s long-established best.

The doughnuts are wonderfully not-too-sweet: a doughnut even a non-doughnut lover can love.

No wonder they often sell out. 704 Mateo St., 213-3753300, or guerrillacafecito.com.

Pearl River Deli CHINATOWN » Chinese $

Chef Johnny Lee has gained a reputation as a poultry wizard, and his succulent Hainan chicken is a highly sought-after dish. Sadly, he’s serving it only as an occasional weekend special at his tiny Far East Plaza takeout spot. But don’t despair: the ever-changing menu is full of winners, from a pork chop sandwich on a pineapple bun to a beefy, memorable rendition of mapo tofu. 727 N. Broadway, Ste. 130, 626-6889507, pearlriverdeli.com, or @prd_la.

Redbird HISTORIC CORE

» New American $$$$

Neal Fraser has defined his own kind of L.A. elegance

FASHION DISTRICT » Mexican $

At this downtown spot known for its flour tortillas, you can order à la carte or opt for affordable familystyle takeout options to make your own tacos, burritos, or chimichangas filled with chorizo, carne asada, or mesquite-grilled chicken. Wash it all down with a six-pack of Tecate or seasonal aguas frescas. 208 E. 8th St., 213-628-3710, sonoratown.com, or @sonora townla. Beer.

Superfine Pizza FASHION DISTRICT » Pizza $

Get a quick taste of Rossoblu chef Steve Samson’s Italian-food mastery at his casual pizzeria, which serves both thin-crust slices and whole pies. The pepperoni always pleases, but the honey—with spicy salami, provolone, and Grana Padano—really thrills.

1101 S. San Pedro St., Ste. F, 323-698-5677, superfinepizza.com, or @super finepizza.

CENTRAL Alta Adams WEST ADAMS » California Soul Food $$

Riffing on his grandmother’s recipes, Watts native Keith Corbin loads up his gumbo with market veggies and enlivens his collard greens with a smoked oil.

Soul food in this city is too often associated with Styrofoam containers, but this verdant patio, which reopened March 18, is a lovely place to linger. Hot sauce splashed onto skillet-fried chicken is pure pleasure, enhanced by a bourbon drink the bar tints with roasted peanuts and huckleberries. Finish the night by taking on a heroic wedge of coconut cake. 5359 W. Adams Blvd., 323-571-4999, or altaadams.com. Full bar.

Antico LARCHMONT VILLAGE » Italian $$

Chef Chad Colby smartly converted his East Larchmont Italian restaurant into a takeout spot for foccacia pizzas and ice cream, fashioning a makeshift pizza oven with the plancha top that used to sit on the restaurant’s hearth. The ice cream has a wonderfully smooth texture, and the flavors are spot-on. The honeycomb and strawberry have garnered a lot of praise since the restaurant opened in 2019—and rightly so— but Colby has regularly been introduing new flavors like cookies-and-cream and pistachio. 4653 Beverly Blvd., 323-510-3093, antico-la.com, or antico_la.

Wine to go.

A.O.C. BEVERLY GROVE » California $$$

Unforced and driven by culinary excellence, A.O.C. is anchored by a courtyard with soft sunlight and laurel trees. Caroline Styne’s wine list doesn’t shy away from the ecology of vineyards, while Suzanne Goin’s cooking has become indispensable. Carefully constructed salads showcase vegetables at their best, and the roasted chicken with panzanella is both an homage to San Francisco’s Zuni Café and a classic in and of itself. 8700 W. 3rd St., 310-859-9859, or aocwine bar.com. Full bar.

Brandoni Pepperoni WEST HOLLYWOOD » Pizza $$ Six nights a week, Brandon Gray turns out some of L.A.’s most exciting pizzas. Gray, a veteran of Navy kitchens and top local restaurants like Providence, brings boundless imagination to his pies. They’re topped with premium ingredients—Jidori chicken, Sungold tomatoes, Spanish octopus—in exciting combinations. A curry-Dijonnaise dressing renders a side

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Gigi’s HOLLYWOOD MEDIA DISTRICT » French $$$

With its sceney Sycamore Avenue location and gorgeous, illustration-lined interiors, Gigi’s could easily succeed with subpar fare. But chef Matt Bollinger’s bistro classics—like curry mussels, steak tartare, and roasted chicken—are done quite well, if priced rather high. The wine list from beverage director Kristin Olszewski, an Osteria Mozza alum, is surprisingly interesting, with various natural and biodynamic options on offer. 904. N. Sycamore Ave., gigis.la, or @gigis_la. Full bar.

parking lot that’s been transformed into a piazza where you can spend an evening nibbling on pastas, pizzas, and thoughtful salads from Mozza, Chi Spacca, and Pizzeria Mozza. Mozza2Go’s expansive menu is heavy on the pizzas, with an $85 five-pizza package that’s a steal. Don’t miss the Spacca burgers, offered only on the weekends, for takeout and delivery only.

Osteria: 6602 Melrose Ave., 323-297-0100, or osteria mozza.com. Full bar. Pizzeria: 641 N. Highland Ave., 323-297-0101, or pizzeriamozza.com. Beer and wine.

République HANCOCK PARK » Cal-French $$$

République may be devoted to French food, but its soul is firmly rooted in Californian cuisine. Walter Manzke is as skilled at making potato and leek beignets as he is at roasting cauliflower and local dates.

Hanchic

Harold & Belle’s JEFFERSON PARK » Southern Creole $$ For Creole-style food—a mélange of French, African, and Native American flavors—Harold & Belle’s is as close to the Dirty Coast as you’ll come on the West Coast. The crawfish étouffée in spicy gravy will have you humming zydeco, while the bourbon bread pudding will leave you with a Sazerac-worthy buzz.

2920 W. Jefferson Blvd., 323-735-9023, or haroldand belles.com. Full bar.

Lalibela FAIRFAX DISTRICT » Ethiopian $-$$

The strip of Fairfax known as Little Ethiopia has long been dominated by the same handful of restaurants. Chef-owner Tenagne Belachew worked in a few of them before opening her own sophisticated haven, which invites with the swirling aromas of berbere and burning sage. Stretchy disks of injera— the sour, teff-flour pancake that doubles as a utensil for scooping up food by hand—arrive piled with uniquely pungent delights. There are wots, or stews, made with chicken or spiced legumes or lamb sautéed in a creamy sauce. 1025 S. Fairfax Ave., 323-965-1025, or lalibelala.com. Beer and wine.

Luv2Eat Thai Bistro HOLLYWOOD » Thai $$ Vibrant flavors and spices abound at this strip-mall favorite from two Phuket natives. The crab curry, with a whole crustacean swimming in a creamy pool of deliciousness, is not to be missed (it travels surprisingly well), but the expansive menu is full of winners, from the massaman curry to the Thai fried chicken with sticky rice and sweet pepper sauce.

6660 W. Sunset Blvd., 323-498-5835, luv2eatthai .com, or @luv2eat.thaibistro.

n/soto WEST ADAMS » Japanese $$$$

N/naka chefs Niki Nakayama and Carol IidaNakayama have expanded. To start, n/soto was focused on offering elaborate bento boxes from a to-go window, but the duo have plans to turn it into a bustling izakaya with indoor and outdoor seating as the city opens up. For now, the bento boxes make for takeout that is both delicious and high-minded. The first box on offer was called A Taste of Home and told the story of Japanese immigrants coming to America via nearly two dozen dishes, from beef sukiyaki to pressed-mackerel sushi. It makes for a special evening in, if you’re lucky enough to score one.

Preorders go live on Tock every Friday at noon and tend to sell out quickly. 4566 W. Washington Blvd., 323-879-9455 , n-soto.com.

Osteria Mozza/Mozza2Go HANCOCK PARK » Italian $$$

Nancy Silverton aims for end-times elegance with a

94 L A M AG . C O M

Ronan FAIRFAX DISTRICT » Cal-Italian $$

At Daniel and Caitlin Cutler’s chic pizzeria, the pies—especially the How ‘Nduja Like It? with spicy sausage, gorgonzola crema, green onion, and celery—are the clear stars, but it’s a big mistake not to explore the entire menu. It’s filled with delicious delights, from cacio e pepe risotto to a sea bass served with an ever-changing assortment of banchan. 7315 Melrose Ave., 323-917-5100, ronanla.com, or @ronan_la. Full bar.

Slab

KOREATOWN » Korean $$

This new K-town spot infuses Korean dishes with Italian elements to create uniquely craveable dishes.

Tagliatelle is tossed with kimchi and pork. A decadent spin on mac ’n’ cheese features both Korean rice cakes and elbow pasta coated in tangy Mornay sauce that’s been infused with fermented soybean paste.

2500 W. 8th St., Ste. 103, hanchic.com or hanchic.la.

Meanwhile, Margarita Manzke’s breads and pastries are always spot-on. Like a fine wine, this classic L.A. restaurant just gets better and better. 624 S. La Brea Ave., 310-362-6115, or republiquela.com. Full bar.

BEVERLY GROVE » Barbecue $$

C H E F FAVO R I T E S K U N I K O YAG I PIKUNICO

HAM & RACLETTE CROISSANTS GJUSTA They’re the best. I get them at 7:30 a.m. when they’re right out of the oven. They’re always crispy on the outside and super chewy and moist inside. They also use nice ham and grill the cheese. $5.50, 320 Sunset Ave., Venice, gjusta.com.

RAW OYSTERS RAPPAHANNOCK OYSTER BAR The quality is impeccable. The oysters come directly from Rappahannock Bay to the restaurant. There’s no middle man, so they’re

really fresh. $3.00 each., 777 S. Alameda St., Ste. 154, DTLA, rroysters.com.

DAKOS SALAD KIFF KAFE It’s a simple salad with feta cheese, cucumber, and heirloom tomato, but the kitchen puts particular care into finely dicing the red onions.

Also, you can really taste the fresh parsley and oregano, and they use a very nice Greek olive oil. They put a sourdough toast at the bottom that soaks up all the juice from the tomatos and the dressing. $12.30, 12229 W. Pico Blvd., West L.A., kiffkafe.com.

—JULIETTE COR NET

Hungry diners used to line up in the driveway of Burt Bakman’s home, desperate for a taste of his famous smoked barbecue meats. In 2018, Bakman came up from the underground, opening a sleek storefront that’s now filling to-go orders for hearty fare, from perfectly marbled brisket to pulled-pork sandwiches and collard greens. You can even get a six-pack of Bud Light. 8136 W. 3rd. St., 310-855-7184, slabbarbecue.com, or @slab. Beer and wine.

Son of a Gun BEVERLY GROVE » Seafood $$

Florida-raised chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo deliver a certain brand of sun-drenched seashore nostalgia. Dropping into the nautically themed dining room for chilled peel-and-eat shrimp and a hurricane feels as effortless as dipping your toes in the sand. There are buttery lobster rolls and fried-chicken sandwiches alongside artfully plated crudos.

8370 W. 3rd St., 323-782-9033, or sonofagun restaurant.com. Full bar.

EAST All Day Baby » Eclectic $$

SILVER LAKE

Jonathan Whitener’s Here’s Looking At You is, sadly, closed, but his thrilling cooking continues on a bustling Eastside corner. Whether you opt for smoked spare ribs, a hot catfish sandwich, or a breakfast sandwich on pastry chef Thessa Diadem’s sublime biscuits, it’s all great. 3200 W. Sunset Blvd., 323-741-0082, alldaybabyla.com, or @alldaybabyla.

Bar Restaurant SILVER LAKE » French $$$

Chef Douglas Rankin, who worked under Ludo Lefebvre for years, struck out on his own with this charming “neo bistro” in the old Malo space in Sunset Junction. The menu features playful Gallic-ish fare, like curly fries and plump mussels Dijon atop milk toast; classic cocktails; and plenty of funky wines available by the glass. A large parking-lot seating area has huge plants, twinkling lights, and good vibes. Somehow it manages to feel both festive and safe. 4326 W. Sunset Blvd., 323-347-5557.

Full bar.

Daybird WESTLAKE » Fried Chicken $

This long-anticipated casual chicken concept from Top Chef winner and Nightshade toque Mei Lin is finally open, and it was worth the wait. Lin separates her hot poultry sandwich from the flock of others in the city, thanks to uniquely crispy fried chicken that’s dusted with a memorable, Sichuan-peppercorn- heavy spice blend. A spicy slaw and habanero ranch dipping sauce add to the fun. 240 N. Virgil Ave., Ste. 5, daybirdla.com, or @daybirdla.

Eszett SILVER LAKE » Eclectic $$

This stylish, cozy wine bar brings warm hospitality to the strip-mall space formerly occupied by Trois Familia. Chef Spencer Bezaire’s menu deftly brings

R OW DT L A

salad surprisingly memorable. 5881 Saturn St., Faircrest Heights, 323-306-4968, or brandonipepperoni.com. Wine to go.

in flavors from around the globe without feeling overly contrived. Chicken wings are accompanied by salsa macha, grilled Broccolini is dusted with furikake. Don’t miss the big fries. 3510 W. Sunset Blvd., 323-522-6323, or eszettla.com. Wine and beer.

Found Oyster EAST HOLLYWOOD » Seafood $$$

This tiny oyster bar was a pre-pandemic favorite, and chef Ari Kolender’s seafood dishes still thrill when taken to go or enjoyed on the restaurant’s “boat deck.” The scallop tostada with yuzu kosho and basil is a must-order, and a bisque sauce takes the basic lobster roll to new heights. Interesting, affordable wines add to the fun. 4880 Fountain Ave., 323-486-7920, foundoyster.com, or @foundoyster. Wine and beer.

Hippo HIGHLAND PARK » Cal-Italian $$

Hidden in a wood-trussed dining room behind Triple Beam Pizza, this Cal-Ital restaurant from Mozza vet Matt Molina balances casual and refined. Snappy wax beans are sluiced with vinaigrette for a picnic-worthy salad. Great pastas and juicy grilled chicken thighs deliver the unfussy pleasure found at the best neighborhood spots. Eclectic regular specials like haute corn dogs add to the fun.

5916 ½ N. Figueroa St., 323-545-3536, or hippo restaurant.com. Full bar.

Maury’s Bagels SILVER LAKE » Bagels $ East Coast transplant Jason Kaplan spent a decade in L.A. before deciding he had to take matters into his own hands if he wanted a great bagel in this town. He started out as a pop-up at farmers’ markets and coffee shops, but his appropriately modestly sized, delightfully chewy bagels and quality smoked fish now have a brick-and-mortar location. On a quiet Eastside corner next door to Psychic Wines, it’s quite charming. 2829 Bellevue Ave., 323- 380-9380, maurysbagels.com, or @maurys_losangeles.

Northern Thai Food Club EAST HOLLYWOOD » Thai $ Offering specialty dishes unique to northern Thailand, this family-run favorite doesn’t skimp on flavor, spice, or authenticity. Tasty takeout meals include the khao soi gai (curry egg noodle with chicken), laab moo kua (minced pork), tam kha noon (jackfruit salad), and pla salid tod (fried gourami fish).

For those unfamiliar with the region’s distinct cuisine, the illustrious sticky rice is still a reliable bet.

Need more incentive? Everything on the menu is less than $10. 5301 Sunset Blvd., 323-474-7212, or amphainorthernthaifood.com.

Spoon & Pork SILVER LAKE » Filipino $$

The go-to for Filipino comfort food offers a variety of dishes, all featuring one shared ingredient: deliciousness. Spoon & Pork puts an innovative spin on some Filipino favorites—just try its adobo pork belly, pork belly banh mi, or lechón kawali. The dishes, which can be ordered at the counter to enjoy on the patio or for takeout and delivery, elegantly mix decadence with some authentic soul. 3131 W. Sunset Blvd., 323-922-6061, spoonandpork.com, or @spoonandporkla. Beer and wine.

NATALE E T H A I

C U I S I N E

Sunset Sushi SILVER LAKE » Japanese $$$ With omakase boxes priced from $30 to $85, this new sushi place in the old Ma’am Sir space strikes the sweet spot between affordable and indulgent and is another exciting addition to the Eastside’s growing number of quality sushi options. It’s a sister spot to Highland Park’s Ichijiku, but with a more luxe vibe and a larger menu, tailor-made for takeout. 4330 W. Sunset Blvd., 323-741-8371, sunsetsushila.com, or @sunsetsushi. Beer and sake to go.

Union PASADENA

» Italian $$$

The food shines at this cozy trattoria just off Pasadena’s main drag. Chef Chris Keyser, an acolyte of Philadelphia pasta maestro Marc Vetri, joined in 2019, keeping classics, like a great cacio e pepe, on the menu while adding his own dishes, such as a thrilling crispy octopus appetizer. Most of the eat-in menu is also available to go, and family-style meals for four are also available. The pastas all impress, but don’t miss the wild mushrooms and polenta with a sublimely delicious sherry vinegar and truffle butter sauce. 37 E. Union St., 626-795-5841, unionpasadena .com, or @unionpasadena. Wine.

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nataleethai.com

THE VALLEY Black Market Liquor Bar » New American $$

STUDIO CITY

Some nights it seems as if half the Valley is here, enjoying the colorful patio. Top Chef graduate Antonia Lofaso’s Italian chops are visible in the buxom ricotta gnudi with brown butter and pistachios. The deepfried fluffernutter sandwich is a reminder that food, like life, should not be taken too seriously.

11915 Ventura Blvd., 818-446-2533, or blackmarketliquorbar.com. Full bar.

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H A L L O F FA M E 1 9 9 6 - 2 0 2 0

The Brothers Sushi » Sushi $$$

WOODLAND HILLS

Saso PASADENA

» Spanish $$$

The arrival of this splashy new spot suggests that the good times might soon be here again. It shares a charming, sprawling courtyard with the Pasadena Playhouse, and the seafood-heavy menu from chef Dominique Crisp, who previously worked at L&E Oyster Bar, begs for reuniting with friends on nice summer nights. Orange zest enlivens jamon iberico crudite, while miso butter takes grilled oysters to new heights. 37 S. El Molino Ave., 626-808-4976, sasobistro.com, or @sasobistro. Full bar.

Sōgo Roll Bar » Sushi $$

LOS FELIZ

So- go is hardly the only concept in town devoted to rolls, but it has mastered the form. Rice is cooked with the same careful consideration and seasoning that sushi master Kiminobu Saito uses at the highend Sushi Note, and it manages to maintain a great temperature and texture, even when being delivered. Fish is not just fresh but also flavorful, each type thoughtfully paired with ideal accompaniments, from a tangy yuzu-pepper sauce that makes salmon sing to brandy-soaked albacore with garlicginger ponzu and crispy onions.

4634 Hollywood Blvd., 323-741-0088, sogoroll bar. com, or @sogorollbar. Beer and sake.

This hidden gem, reinvigorated when chef Mark Okuda took the helm in 2018, is worth traveling for.

Keep spirits up with the Hand-Roll Party home kits (there’s even one for kids), or splurge on an omakase that can be enjoyed on the patio or to go. You can also order à la carte or get non-sushi items like soyglazed grilled chicken. 21418 Ventura Blvd., 818-456-4509, thebrotherssushi.com, or @thebrotherssushila. Beer, wine, and sake.

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» Mexican $

The Vega family’s 64-year-old institution has put up a massive tent in its parking lot to keep the margaritas flowing amidst COVID-19 restrictions.

And if you prefer takeout, there’s a drive-through setup that makes it easy to pick up a plate of enchiladas or a hulking “oven-style” burrito topped with

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L A M AG . C O M 95

enchilada sauce and melted cheese. The expansive menu has a great selection of hearty crowd-pleasers, cocktails, and tequilas. You might leave tipsy, but you’ll never go hungry. 13301 Ventura Blvd., 818-788-4868, or casavega.com. Full bar.

Hank’s BURBANK

» Bagels $

The L.A. bagel revolution continues at this stylish spot in the Valley that serves up carefully constructed sandwiches. Tomato, aioli, and maple-glazed bacon elevate a simple bacon, egg, and cheese, while a classic salmon-and-lox construction has thoughtful touches like salted cucumbers and pickled onions.

Sammies shine with plain cream cheese, but it’s worth grabbing a tub of Hank’s “angry” spread—a spicy, slightly sweet concoction—to have in your fridge. And no cream cheese is needed for Hank’s everything jalapeno-cheddar bagel, a stunning gut bomb. 4315 Riverside Dr., 818-588-3693, hanksbagels .com, or @hanksbagels. Also at 13545 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

SOUTH Ali’i Fish Company » Seafood $$

EL SEGUNDO

This small, unassuming spot shames all of the glossy poke purveyors popping up around town to serve mediocre versions of the Hawaiian dish. Glistening cubes of tuna, flown in fresh from the islands daily, remind you how great poke can be. Even a vegan poke, with tofu and sea asparagus, manages to satisfy. If you’re not looking to go raw, there are various salmon and tuna burgers to choose from, and the smoked-ahi dip with house-made potato chips is not to be missed. Perfect for picking up a beach picnic. 409 E. Grand Ave., 310-616-3484, or aliifishco.com.

Fishing With Dynamite » Seafood $$$

Little Sister

MANHATTAN BEACH

REDONDO BEACH » Asian Fusion $$

A premium raw bar near the beach shouldn’t be unusual, but it is. The same goes for velvety clam chowder. Here, it achieves smoky richness—you can thank the Nueske’s bacon for that—without any of the floury glop. On the menu, you’ll find several kinds of oysters from across the country, Peruvian scallops, and Alaskan king crab legs.

1148 Manhattan Ave., 310-893-6299, or eatfwd .com. Full bar.

Chef and co-owner Tin Vuong deftly translates the flavors of Vietnam for a casual drinking scene. Nibble on fresh spring rolls with shrimp, pork, and a peanut dipping sauce, then wash it all down with a craft beer or three. 247 Avenida del Norte, 424-3980237, or dinelittlesister.com. Beer, wine, and sake.

M.B. Post MANHATTAN BEACH » New American $$

Hotville BALDWIN HILLS CRENSHAW

» Fried chicken $

After three years of running a pop-up, Kim Prince has opened a brick-and-mortar that does her family’s legacy justice—she’s the niece of André Prince Jeffries, owner of Nashville legend Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, where hot fried chicken is said to have originated. Prince adds spice at every step in the cooking process to produce a complex, layered flavor. The sides ($5 and up), like spicy mac and cheese and kale coleslaw, are also winners. 4070 Marlton Ave., 323-792-4835, or hotvillechicken.com. No alcohol.

Little Coyote LONG BEACH » Pizza $ That most amazing slice of pizza you had that one, very drunken, late night in your early twenties in New York lives on . . . in Long Beach. The crust, made with dough cold-fermented for 48 to 72 hours, is carby perfection: tangy, crispy, thin but with a healthy puff. The concise menu doesn’t offer any revelations about what should be atop pizza, but instead perfects the usual suspects: pepperoni comes in generous quantities, tiny porky cups glistening with grease; a veggie supreme transcends the usual half-cooked-produce mediocrity of the form. This is pizza worth driving south for. 2118 E. 4th St., 562-434-2009, littlecoyotelbc.com, or @littlecoyotelbc.

David LeFevre (the Arthur J, Fishing With Dynamite) cuts a swath through genres and latitudes with the gusto of someone who’s clearly pleased to be at the stove. He sears Scottish salmon with roasted garlic puree, sugar snap peas, truffle vinaigrette, and charred scallions. There’s plenty of wordplay on the menu (“Meat Me Later”), but no pun can do justice to his bacon-cheddar biscuits with maple butter. 1142 Manhattan Ave., 310-5455405, or eatmbpost.com. Full bar.

Tamales Elena Y Antojitos BELL GARDENS

» Afro-Mexican $

This small spot, with counter service, a drivethrough window, and a patio purports to be the only Afro-Mexican restaurant in the area. It focuses on a distinct cuisine from a part of Guerrero to which former slaves fled. Pozoles are rich and slightly thick, and the memorable pork tamales with red sauce are wrapped in fire-tinged banana leaves that impart a hint of smoke. 81801 Garfield Ave., 562-0674-3043, ordertamaleselenayanto jitos.com, or @tamaleselenayantojitos.

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OUR PATENTED SELECTION PROCESS

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NOMINATIONS

The Super Lawyers selection process involves the steps outlined in the graphic (at right).

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visit SuperLawyers.com Search for an attorney by practice area and location, and read features on attorneys selected to our lists.

DISCLAIMER: The information presented in Super Lawyers Magazine is not legal advice, nor is Super Lawyers a legal referral service. We strive to maintain a high degree of accuracy in the information provided, but make no claim, promise or guarantee about the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of the information contained in this magazine or linked to SuperLawyers.com and its associated sites. The hiring of an attorney is an important decision that should not be solely based upon advertising or the listings in this magazine. No representation is made that the quality of the legal services performed by the attorneys listed in this magazine will be greater than that of other licensed attorneys. Super Lawyers is an independent magazine publisher that has developed its own selection methodology. Super Lawyers is not affiliated with any state or regulatory body, and its listings do not certify or designate an attorney as a specialist.

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SUPER LAWYERS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA / RISING STARS 2021

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UP-AND-COMING 100

AN ALPHABETICAL LISTING OF THE LAWYERS WHO RANKED TOP OF THE LIST IN THE 2021 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RISING STARS NOMINATION, RESEARCH AND BLUE RIBBON REVIEW PROCESS.

Aidikoff, Jeff, Aidikoff Law, Los Angeles

Hinojosa, Kelly L., Hinojosa & Forer, Los Angeles

Aizman, Diana Weiss, Aizman Law Firm, Encino

Holmquist, Marc A., Holmquist Law, Valencia

Alwill, Julian F., Rothschild & Alwill, Santa Barbara

Ikuta, Benjamin, Hodes Milman Ikuta, Irvine

Andrews, Ryan M., Venable, Los Angeles Antoine, Heather A., Stubbs Alderton & Markiles, Sherman Oaks Argos, Jason, Burke | Argos, Irvine Bazikyan, Arminé, Bazikyan Law Group, Glendale Bekas, Zoe J., Akerman, Los Angeles Benowitz, Louis, Smith & Benowitz, Sherman Oaks Bonholtzer, Eric C., Ball Bonholtzer & Evans, Pasadena Bontrager, Nicholas J., Martin & Bontrager, North Hollywood Braun, Nathaniel S.G., Sinclair Braun, Encino Bui, Thy B., Constangy Brooks Smith & Prophete, Los Angeles

Jass, Jeremy, Jass Law, Newport Beach Johnson, Arwen, King & Spalding, Los Angeles Jurkowitz, Nicholas D., Fenton Law Group, Los Angeles Kaba, Moez M., Hueston Hennigan, Los Angeles Katz, Corinne B., Katz Law Firm, Los Angeles Khalili, Dalia, Matern Law Group, Manhattan Beach Kim, Helen U., Helen Kim Law, Los Angeles King, Tessa, Law Offices of Reisner & King, Sherman Oaks Kleindienst, Katherine, Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump, Santa Monica Kramer, Daniel K., Kramer Trial Lawyers, Los Angeles

Passman, Josh, Law Office of Josh Passman, Los Angeles Perkins, Rebecca, Law Offices of Rebecca Perkins, Rancho Cucamonga Poulter, Brian L., Stalwart Law Group, Los Angeles Proctor, Amy E., Irell & Manella, Los Angeles Rayfield, (Ashley) Taylor, Manly Stewart & Finaldi, Irvine Riccobono, Santo, Ellis Riccobono, Thousand Oaks Rothberg, Joseph M., Brutzkus Gubner Rozansky Seror Weber, Woodland Hills Samani, Michelle, Samani Law Firm, West Hollywood Savin, Adam J., Savin Bursk, Encino Sbardellati, Elizabeth M., Greenberg Glusker, Los Angeles Schulman, Allison M., Law Offices of Allison M. Schulman, Los Angeles

Carson, Rebecca, Irell & Manella, Newport Beach

Leventhal, Andrew B., The Leventhal Firm, Pasadena

Seropian, Jacob H., Seropian Law, Pasadena

Chen, Stephen, The Law Office of Stephen Chen, Los Angeles

Liang, Jason L., Liang Ly, Los Angeles

Shahriari, Cyrus, Pietz & Shahriari, Beverly Hills

Lucich, Clare H., Bentley & More, Newport Beach

Shapiro, Louis J., Law Offices of Louis J. Shapiro, Los Angeles

Chung, Tiffany, Law Offices of Tiffany Chung, Los Angeles Cole, Marshall R., Nemecek & Cole, Encino Cronin, Justin, Jamison Empting Cronin, Los Angeles Crosner, Zachary, Crosner Legal, Beverly Hills Davis, Michael W., DTO Law, Los Angeles DeSantis, Daniel S., Wilshire Law Firm, Los Angeles DuVan-Clarke, Barbara, Hennig Kramer Ruiz & Singh, Los Angeles Easton, Matthew D., Easton & Easton, Costa Mesa Eison, Owili, BD&J, Beverly Hills Elsea, Zachary, Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump, Santa Monica

Ly, John, Liang Ly, Los Angeles Mahoney, Patrick R., The Law Offices of Patrick R. Mahoney, Beverly Hills McAllister, Aaron P., Law Office of Aaron P. McAllister, Los Angeles McArthur, Stephen C., The McArthur Law Firm, Beverly Hills McCall, Lisa R., Law Offices of Lisa R. McCall, Santa Ana McKibben, Molly M., Greene Broillet & Wheeler, Santa Monica Mirzaie, Reza, Russ August & Kabat, Los Angeles Moradi-Brovia, Roksana D., Resnik Hayes Moradi, Encino

Feher, Thomas S., Feher Law, Gardena

Morrison, Lauren, Kesluk Silverstein Jacob & Morrison, Los Angeles

Fisher, Alexander J., Law Offices of Howard S. Fisher, Beverly Hills

Mossavar, Miranda, Littler Mendelson, Los Angeles

Fund, Cathryn G., JML Law, Woodland Hills

Mouradian, Maggie, Weinstock Manion, Los Angeles

Gehlawat, Neil K., Taylor & Ring, Manhattan Beach Gharibian, Art, Gharibian Law, Glendale Granberry, Vincent, Lavi & Ebrahimian, Beverly Hills Grant, Gali, Glaser Weil, Los Angeles Gunning, Patrick, Panish Shea & Boyle, Los Angeles Gusdorff, Janet R., Gusdorff Law, Westlake Village Hanasab, Michael B., Jamra & Jamra, Beverly Hills Hinman, John S., Hinman Law Group, Long Beach

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SUPERLAWYERS.COM

Nguyen, Anthony, Shegerian & Associates, Los Angeles Nickerson, Christian, Greene Broillet & Wheeler, Santa Monica Nielson, Samuel P., Sessions & Kimball, Mission Viejo Nogle, Megan F., Greenberg Glusker, Los Angeles Omofoma, Ese, The Omofoma Law Firm, Los Angeles Ortiz-Beljajev, Neyleen S., Beljajev Law Group, Seal Beach

Shirvanian, Narbeh, The Shirvanian Law Firm, Glendale Sinclair, Kevin S., Sinclair Braun, Encino Smith, Gregory M., The Maloney Firm, El Segundo Solmer, Lilit, Solmer, Huntington Beach Soltman, Nicholas, Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump, Santa Monica Subramaniam, Tagore O., Matern Law Group, Manhattan Beach Vartanian, Lucy A., Hahn & Hahn, Pasadena Vashistha, Anish, Law Firm of Anish Vashistha, Los Angeles Vilendrer, Ellie K., Vilendrer Law, Irvine Wagner, Lindsey, Scott Wagner and Associates, Burbank Wallin, Taylor B., Meyer Olson Lowy & Meyers, Los Angeles Wang, Philip X., Russ August & Kabat, Los Angeles Weatherford, Natalie, Taylor & Ring, Manhattan Beach Wegman, Atticus N., Aitken • Aitken • Cohn, Santa Ana Weiss, Jonathan M., KTBS Law, Los Angeles Wisner, R. Brent, Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman, Los Angeles Zitney, Jonathon, Rancho Family Law Group, Rancho Cucamonga

ATTORNEYS SELECTED TO SUPER LAWYERS AND RISING STARS WERE CHOSEN IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROCESS ON PAGE S-2.

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SUPER LAWYERS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA / RISING STARS 2021

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SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

UP-AND-COMING 50 WOMEN

AN ALPHABETICAL LISTING OF THE WOMEN LAWYERS WHO RANKED TOP OF THE LIST IN THE 2021 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RISING STARS NOMINATION, RESEARCH AND BLUE RIBBON REVIEW PROCESS.

Aizman, Diana Weiss, Aizman Law Firm, Encino

Hinojosa, Kelly L., Hinojosa & Forer, Los Angeles

Nogle, Megan F., Greenberg Glusker, Los Angeles

Antoine, Heather A., Stubbs Alderton & Markiles, Sherman Oaks

Hobbs, Kristin E., Shernoff Bidart Echeverria, Claremont

Nowels, Sarah Jane, SJN Law, Santa Ana

Bazikyan, Arminé, Bazikyan Law Group, Glendale

Johnson, Arwen, King & Spalding, Los Angeles

Bekas, Zoe J., Akerman, Los Angeles

Katz, Corinne B., Katz Law Firm, Los Angeles

Bissett, Katherine, Cox Castle & Nicholson, Los Angeles

Khalili, Dalia, Matern Law Group, Manhattan Beach

Bui, Thy B., Constangy Brooks Smith & Prophete, Los Angeles

Kim, Helen U., Helen Kim Law, Los Angeles

Carson, Rebecca, Irell & Manella, Newport Beach

King, Tessa, Law Offices of Reisner & King, Sherman Oaks

Ricketts, Morgan E., Ricketts Law, Pasadena

Castro, Antonella A., Antonella A. Castro Esq., Corona Del Mar

Kleindienst, Katherine, Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump, Santa Monica

Samani, Michelle, Samani Law Firm, West Hollywood

Chung, Tiffany, Law Offices of Tiffany Chung, Los Angeles

Lucich, Clare H., Bentley & More, Newport Beach

Cohen, Ellen E., Jackson Lewis, Los Angeles

McCall, Lisa R., Law Offices of Lisa R. McCall, Santa Ana

Sbardellati, Elizabeth M., Greenberg Glusker, Los Angeles

D'Agostino, Elisabeth M., Selman Breitman, Los Angeles Duel, Jasmine A., Berokim & Duel, Beverly Hills DuVan-Clarke, Barbara, Hennig Kramer Ruiz & Singh, Los Angeles Esmaili, Sheila, Law Offices of Sheila Esmaili, Los Angeles Ezra, Erin (Mindoro), Berger Kahn, Irvine Fund, Cathryn G., JML Law, Woodland Hills

McKibben, Molly M., Greene Broillet & Wheeler, Santa Monica Moradi-Brovia, Roksana D., Resnik Hayes Moradi, Encino Morrison, Lauren, Kesluk Silverstein Jacob & Morrison, Los Angeles Mossavar, Miranda, Littler Mendelson, Los Angeles Mouradian, Maggie, Weinstock Manion, Los Angeles

Grant, Gali, Glaser Weil, Los Angeles Gusdorff, Janet R., Gusdorff Law, Westlake Village

Moynihan, Kerry A., Moynihan Law Office, Huntington Beach

Ortiz-Beljajev, Neyleen S., Beljajev Law Group, Seal Beach Perkins, Rebecca, Law Offices of Rebecca Perkins, Rancho Cucamonga Proctor, Amy E., Irell & Manella, Los Angeles Rayfield, (Ashley) Taylor, Manly Stewart & Finaldi, Irvine

Schulman, Allison M., Law Offices of Allison M. Schulman, Los Angeles Solmer, Lilit, Solmer, Huntington Beach Vartanian, Lucy A., Hahn & Hahn, Pasadena Vilendrer, Ellie K., Vilendrer Law, Irvine Wagner, Lindsey, Scott Wagner and Associates, Burbank Wallin, Taylor B., Meyer Olson Lowy & Meyers, Los Angeles Weatherford, Natalie, Taylor & Ring, Manhattan Beach

UP-AND-COMING 25 ORANGE COUNTY AN ALPHABETICAL LISTING OF THE LAWYERS WHO RANKED TOP OF THE LIST IN THE 2021 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RISING STARS NOMINATION, RESEARCH AND BLUE RIBBON REVIEW PROCESS.

Argos, Jason, Burke | Argos, Irvine

Ikuta, Benjamin, Hodes Milman Ikuta, Irvine

Nowels, Sarah Jane, SJN Law, Santa Ana

Bardwell, Eric R., Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, Irvine

Jamal, Suliman, Jamal Injury Law, Huntington Beach

Ortiz-Beljajev, Neyleen S., Beljajev Law Group, Seal Beach

Brooks, Samuel G., Call & Jensen, Newport Beach

Jass, Jeremy, Jass Law, Newport Beach

Carson, Rebecca, Irell & Manella, Newport Beach

Kahf, Usama, Fisher & Phillips, Irvine

Polischuk, Wesley K., Robinson Calcagnie, Newport Beach

Castro, Antonella A., Antonella A. Castro Esq., Corona Del Mar Easton, Matthew D., Easton & Easton, Costa Mesa Ezra, Erin (Mindoro), Berger Kahn, Irvine Gutenplan, Daniel R., Enenstein Pham & Glass, Costa Mesa Ibey, Jason, Kazerouni Law Group, Costa Mesa

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SUPERLAWYERS.COM

Lucich, Clare H., Bentley & More, Newport Beach McCall, Lisa R., Law Offices of Lisa R. McCall, Santa Ana Miller, Adam, Pivotal Law Firm, Costa Mesa Moynihan, Kerry A., Moynihan Law Office, Huntington Beach Nielson, Samuel P., Sessions & Kimball, Mission Viejo

Simon, Brandon J., The Simon Law Group, Santa Ana Solmer, Lilit, Solmer, Huntington Beach Vilendrer, Ellie K., Vilendrer Law, Irvine Wegman, Atticus N., Aitken • Aitken • Cohn, Santa Ana

ATTORNEYS SELECTED TO SUPER LAWYERS AND RISING STARS WERE CHOSEN IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROCESS ON PAGE S-2.

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RISING STARS 2021

SORTED ALPHABETICALLY Selected to Rising Stars

Selected to Rising Stars

JACQUELYNN L. HANSEN

LAW OFFICE OF JACQUELYNN L. HANSEN, APC 12424 Wilshire Boulevard Suite 720 Los Angeles, CA 90025 Tel: 310-504-1106 Fax: 424-522-1370 jacq@jrlfamilylaw.com www.jrlfamilylaw.com

Selected to Rising Stars

DESIREE MEGUERDITCHIAN

SERGIO J. PUCHE

230 East Foothill Boulevard #C Arcadia, CA 91006 Tel: 626-239-6135 Fax: 626-226-5545 desiree@foothill.legal www.foothill.legal

136 East Lemon Avenue Monrovia, CA 91016 Tel: 626-856-5856 spuche@fiorelegal.com www.fiorelegal.com

LAW OFFICES OF MAURO FIORE, JR.

FOOTHILL LAW GROUP

FAMILY LAW

FAMILY LAW

EMPLOYMENT LITIGATION: PLAINTIFF PERSONAL INJURY GENERAL: PLAINTIFF

Jacquelynn L. Hansen (“Jacq”), a Los Angeles native, is an attorney who has practiced family law exclusively for over 12 years and established her own boutique family law firm in 2015 in West LA. Jacq is dedicated to serving clients who are navigating complex family law matters and understands the decisions one makes during a family law proceeding will have long-lasting implications for their life, their families and their finances. Therefore, at the Law Office of Jacquelynn L. Hansen, clients are guided and informed each step of the way so that they can make the best decision possible to achieve their case goals and bring their family law matter to an expedient close.

Ms. Meguerditchian is a Managing Attorney of Foothill Law Group in Arcadia, CA that serves the Greater Los Angeles area. Her practice focuses on litigation in family law, focusing on divorces and child custody matters. She is also certified as Minor’s Counsel and is routinely appointed by the Los Angeles Superior Court to represent minor children in highly contested custody and visitation disputes between parents. These cases are some of the hardest, as they involve extreme parental conflict and include issues surrounding child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, reunification, and substance abuse.

Ms. Meguerditchian utilizes her knowledge of different family dynamics and successfully guides parents who are represented

by Foothill Law Group to navigate their family law cases.

Sergio J. Puche is a litigation and trial attorney representing individuals against corporations in employment and personal injury cases at the Law Offices of Mauro Fiore, Jr. Mr. Puche is a frequent speaker at continuing legal education programs for CAALA, TBI Med Legal and California Western School of Law. He proudly serves on the Board of Governors of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Charities and CAALA committees.

Mr. Puche graduated from the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles’, Plaintiff Trial Academy in 2017. He is a Founding 50 Member of Justice HQ. Mr. Puche has been selected as The National Trial Lawyers: Top 40 Under 40 since 2019, and to Rising Stars since 2020. He practices in state and federal courts throughout California.

Selected to Rising Stars

Selected to Rising Stars

Selected to Rising Stars

KRYSTALE ROSAL

RACHEL M. SPOSATO

AMY L. SULAHIAN

136 East Lemon Avenue Monrovia, CA 91016 Tel: 626-856-5856 krosal@fiorelegal.com www.fiorelegal.com

21257 Hawthorne Boulevard Floor 2 Torrance, CA 90503 Tel: 310-316-0500 Fax: 310-792-5977 rsposato@hindslawgroup.com www.hindslawgroup.com

810 East Walnut Street Pasadena, CA 91101 Tel: 626-584-9710 Fax: 626-584-9574 amy@sulahianlaw.com www.sulahianlaw.com

LAW OFFICES OF MAURO FIORE, JR.

THE HINDS LAW GROUP, APC

SULAHIAN LAW

PERSONAL INJURY GENERAL: PLAINTIFF

BANKRUPTCY: BUSINESS BUSINESS LITIGATION CREDITOR DEBTOR RIGHTS

BUSINESS/CORPORATE TAX

Krystale L. Rosal manages the injury litigation department at her firm since 2011 and has extensive litigation experience in premises liability, wrongful death, dog bite and auto collision matters. Ms. Rosal also has extensive trial experience and in dealing with insurance companies. She routinely obtains top dollar settlements for her clients and is familiar with the tactics used to undervalue the pain and suffering accident victims are forced to endure. She is a proud member of CAALA, LACBA and CAOC. She is active in charitable causes involving children and is an honorary board member of the LATLC and serves on the advisory committee of the Brain Society of Southern California, a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of brain injured victims.

Rachel M. Sposato is an associate attorney at The Hinds Law Group, APC. Her practice areas include business bankruptcy litigation, unsecured and secured creditors’ rights, and civil business and commercial litigation. Prior to joining Hinds & Shankman, (now The Hinds Law Group) Ms. Sposato practiced consumer bankruptcy and bankruptcy litigation in Boston, MA. Ms. Sposato is admitted to practice in Massachusetts, California and New York, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the Central, Northern and Eastern Districts of California, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Ms. Sulahian founded Sulahian Law, a firm focusing on business, corporate, tax and civil litigation. Whether it’s guidance or a strong advocate in court, each client is given the highest attention. Her clients comprise from individuals to large corporations. She has extensive experience in negotiating major business contracts, tax compliance and handling complex litigation issues. Among notable honors and awards, Ms. Sulahian received; 2021 Lawyers of Distinction, 2021 Rising Stars, Pasadena Weekly’s “Reader’s Choice 2020,” and editorial features in the Arroyo Magazine, August 2020 and “Gems of Pasadena”, December 2020. Graduating from CSULA with a bachelor’s in business, she pursued law at Glendale University College of Law, receiving her J.D. Selected to Rising Stars

DOMINIQUE N. WESTMORELAND

THE WESTMORELAND LAW FIRM, P.C.

Where do I start my search for an attorney?

The Super list is comprised of the top 5% of attorneys in each state selected via a patented process that includes independent research, peer nominations, and evaluation.

955 Deep Valley Drive, Suite 3216 Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA 90274 Tel: 424-285-5362 Fax: 424-285-5825 dwestmoreland@wml-law.com www.wml-law.com EMPLOYMENT & LABOR

Lawyers®

The answer is SuperLawyers.com © 2020 Thomson Reuters TR1229162/09-20

Dominique N. Westmoreland is the principal at The Westmoreland Law Firm, P.C., a full-service law firm, recognized for its interdisciplinary, practical approach to providing legal solutions for clients. Dominique manages the firm’s Labor and Employment, General Liability, Commercial Litigation and Criminal Defense practice groups. Dominique’s practice focuses on litigating cases that have a high a probability of being tried. His trial experience includes claims arising under the Fair Employment and Housing Act violations, including discrimination, harassment and retaliation, wrongful termination, wage and hour claims, felonies, and other civil trials. Dominique’s values include hard-work and dedication– these values lead to proven results for his client goals.

SUPER LAWYERS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA / RISING STARS 2021

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Q

E MAI L YOUR BURNI NG QUEST IONS ABOUT L.A. TO ASKCH RIS@LAMAG.COM

Are there any lesbian bars left in the city?

treated to decades of easily vandalized, moisture-retaining cloth seats. But vinyl is now back. Earlier this year, new orange, purple, and blue vinyl seats debuted on the city’s buses. A Metro executive compared the bright new pattern to the green digital rainfall in The Matrix. As a bonus, the new seats are equipped with a discreet hole in the bottom to drain out any fluids that passengers may leave behind.

Q: What happened to the bird sanctuary at the Westwood VA? A: In 2005, a VA psychologist named Lorin Lindner convinced her bosses that caring for birds could be therapeutic for veterans struggling with PTSD and other disorders. Soon after, she brought a huge flock of abused and abandoned parrots, macaws, and cockatoos to the VA’s sprawling Westwood campus,

naming her menagerie Serenity Park.

But the project took an unpleasant turn.

Three years ago, after a dispute over finances, the VA evicted Lindner and her boyfriend, Matt Simmons, a troubled vet she met through the program. The couple relocated their aviaries to a wolf rescue they run in a forest north of L.A., where they’ve since encountered more turbulence. A few months ago, Simmons was arrested at the compound with a decidedly unserene array of sawed-off shotguns and semi-automatic weapons. He flew the coop and is now facing gun-trafficking charges. But we hear the birds are doing just fine.

O With a click of his

G R E E N D O O R P H OTO CO U RT E SY T H E J U N E L . M A Z E R L E S B I A N A R C H I V E S

A:

104 L A M AG . C O M

THE PHOTO THAT EPITOMIZES L.A.

ST R I K E A P OS E

Queer patrons inside the Green Door bar in North Hollywood, 1955.

L.A. has been home to dozens of sapphic-watering holes, but in the past decade almost all of them have evaporated due to gentrification and economic hardship. The Palm in West Hollywood, once the city’s most famous lesbian landmark, was shuttered in 2013, replaced by a Sprouts. The last lesbian bar in L.A. County, the Valley’s Oxwood Inn, shut down in 2017. A handful of bars still host lesbian nights, including the Abbey in WeHo and Executive Suite in Long Beach. But while the pandemic claimed umpteen gay bars, one lesbian bar recently made a miraculous comeback. Redz Angelz, formerly the Redhead Tavern, which first opened in Boyle Heights in 1953, was resurrected earlier this year.

Q: Why are L.A.’s Metro seats cloth instead of plastic like those in San Francisco and New York?

A: Public transport accommodations in L.A. have cycled through wood planks, wicker, leather, and zebra-striped mohair before settling into a long vinyl era. In the ’90s, Metro decided that the plasticized inserts on fiberglass seats looked too industrial, so bus riders were instead

CHRIS’S PICK

Art House

shutter in 1960, Julius Shulman captured an image that has come to define Los Angeles. His photograph of two glamorous young women lost in conversation in a glass box above the city has enchanted generations. The Stahl House: Case Study House #22, published by Chronicle Chroma, is the story of the landmark and the Stahl family, which has occupied it for six decades.

Architect Pierre Koenig’s masterpiece has popped up everywhere from Armani ads to The Simpsons as a symbol of the Hollywood good life.

Koenig remarked that the workingclass Stahls had “champagne tastes and a beer budget,” but they pulled it off—and continue to open the house for tours. “Simplicity,” Koenig said, “is the essence of beauty.”

VOLUME 66, NUMBER 7. LOS ANGELES (ISSN 1522-9149) is published monthly by Los Angeles Magazine, LLC. Principal office: 10100 Venice Blvd., Culver City, , CA 90232. Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA, and additional mailing offices. The one-year domestic subscription price is $14.95. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to LOS ANGELES, 1965 E. Avis Dr., Madison Heights, MI 48071. Not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or other materials, which must be accompanied by return postage. SUBSCRIBERS: If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year.

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