few year

On the set of CBS’ legacy soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” at the Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Hollywood, two actors were caught in a fiery exchange.

“Do you want to know where Jack was last night?” actor Skyla Lynne asked with a sly grin. “He was with me.”

From behind a monitor displaying a vertically oriented feed, the director interjected: “Could you pause a bit more in between those lines? We might want to do an episode break there.”

The scene wasn’t for an episode of the famous soap opera. It was part of the 40-episode second season of “Hollywood Starlet,” a new microdrama series from “The Bold and the Beautiful” head writer Bradley Bell and his son Oliver.

“I’ve been doing soap operas my whole life, and it felt like there’s been a buzz about microdramas, and it really felt like a natural extension to the stories that we do,” Bradley Bell said. “[On soap operas] we build two cliffhangers usually on Fridays to keep the viewers over the weekend. Here, you do it every couple of minutes. It’s like speeding up the dance routine, but it’s really right in our lane of soap operas.”

Microdramas are the scrollable, cliffhanger-heavy stories built for phone screens. They are giving audiences a new way into the kind of stories that once belonged to traditional soap operas and telenovelas. The so-called vertical format originated in China a few years ago and has drawn a growing global audience thanks to its short, addictive nature. Hollywood names, including Issa Rae and Kevin Hart, are joining in.

Now, Bell is moving into the space. The 16-time Emmy winner and his son Oliver recently launched a production company called Red Flair Entertainment to capitalize on the format.

“Hollywood Starlet,” their first production, premiered Sept. 3 on aTwist, a new vertical series app founded by industry veterans Jana Winograde, former president of Showtime; Susan Rovner, former president of Warner Bros. Television; and Lloyd Braun, former chairman of WME.

Oliver Bell, founder of Red Flair Entertainment, is producing the micro series, “Hollywood Starlet,” being filmed at Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Bradley Bell says it was Oliver who hatched the idea.

“I saw this unique format and was fascinated by it,” Oliver Bell said. “I noticed some areas that we could quite easily improve on.”

Microdramas first came across Oliver’s social media feed around a year and a half ago when he was still in college. The 24-year-old said he quickly “fell down a rabbit hole” and became so obsessed with the format that he wrote his dissertation at the University of St Andrews in Scotland on soap operas and microdramas.

After he graduated in December, he and his father founded Red Flair Entertainment and started to develop “Hollywood Starlet,” with Oliver serving as an executive producer and his father as a producer.

The series — which costs about $175,000 to $220,000 a season to produce — is being financed by aTwist. Red Flair has a backend deal, allowing it to share in subscription revenue the show generates for the platform.

After filming two seasons of “Hollywood Starlet,” Red Flair plans several more vertical series across many different genres, like horror and romance, the Bells said.

Oliver grew up visiting sets and eavesdropping on writing meetings from under his father’s desk. The family’s storytelling line runs back to his grandparents, William Bell and Lee Phillip Bell, who created “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Oliver says he’s carrying on that legacy in a very Gen Z way.

“In a way, microdramas are just the natural evolution of the soap opera,” Oliver Bell said. “You could kind of trace the legacy through that and the modernization of serialized TV.”

His father, who was working on episode 9,911 of “The Bold and the Beautiful” while speaking with The Times, said the short-form stories can reach younger viewers who might be daunted by the soap’s decades of history.

“It’s like cracking open a book, and it’s hard for people to get into it to learn the history,” he said. “So having smaller, bite-sized pieces is appealing to us.”

“The Bold and the Beautiful” has aired continuously for 39 years, but it’s now one of American TV’s last soap operas. Until the 1980s, 10 to 12 soaps typically aired at once, said Elana Levine, a media professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies the genre. Today, five remain: four on broadcast TV and one, “Days of Our Lives,” is on streaming only.

“It makes sense to take this storytelling form that has been super popular and enduring in the U.S. and find a way to translate that into the mobile devices that we carry around us all of the time,” Levine said.

While soap operas historically targeted a mostly female audience, microdramas reach a much broader audience, said Michael Berry, director of UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies, who has studied the rise of vertical series.

“It gives us essentially the main beats that we would get from a soap opera format, but it’s happening in a much more compact and addictive way,” he added.

Cameramen prepare for a scene on the set of the micro series, “Hollywood Starlet,” being filmed at Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Lou Trabbie, the soap’s production designer, had never heard of a microdrama before working on “Hollywood Starlet.”

“It’s all going in a different direction. You just adapt and move forward, and that’s what we see here,” Trabbie, who’s worked in the industry for 38 years, explained. “It’s really great to see how these are done with smaller crews. I feel like this is where the business is going.”

“Hollywood Starlet” shoots on the same Sunset Las Palmas soundstage as “The Bold and the Beautiful,” filming during the soap’s monthly dark week.

The first season, 45 short episodes, was shot in six days at the start of summer with a non-union cast and crew of 45. Less than a week after its release, much of the same crew was back to start working on season two.

Oliver Bell said the series used non-union crew due to “budgetary restrictions.”

At a time when major film and TV shoots are leaving the state, microdramas are one of the few areas of production that are growing locally.

Excluding China, vertical video is expected to generate $150 billion globally in revenue this year, according to consulting firm Owl & Co. Most of that comes from TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

Sunset Las Palmas Studios, where “La La Land” and the first two seasons of “I Love Lucy” were filmed, dedicated an entire sound stage in June to standing sets for vertical series. The sets include a courtroom, a bar/restaurant, an apartment, an office and a hospital.

Paxton Fuller, left, executive producer of “Hollywood Starlet,” walks with Sean Griffin, Vice President of Sales and Business Development, for Las Palmas Studios, through a courtroom set on the stage meant specifically for microdramas.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Still, the Bells don’t think microdramas will replace soap operas. The two formats, they argue, can “coexist.”

“Coming into someone’s living room or bedroom, soap operas were almost like an extension of their family that they can count on for years and decades with the same actors. The same families that have watched since day one,” Bradley Bell said. “It’s a different type of viewer for microdramas.”

Oliver Bell added: “We’re trying to grab the scroller’s attention, not necessarily ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ viewer … Microdramas are unavoidable through social media. [It’s] conditioning our brains and how we process media.”

In an otherwise empty compartment of a regional train on its way to a small town in Germany last month, a friendly passenger asked if I was headed to Halberstadt for “the note change.” He was an Australian law professor based in Hong Kong who was traveling with his Swiss mother for the irregular ritual every few years of a new note being sounded on a decommissioned old church’s diminutive modern pipe organ in what feels like the middle of nowhere.

He was hardly alone. The audience the next day in the packed late-Romanesque St. Burchardi “John Cage Organ” Church had come from seemingly everywhere, along with international media, to witness a barely distinguishable new note added to a sustained chord in Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP.”

“ASLSP” stands for as “As Slow(ly) and Soft(ly) as Possible,” adapted from the opening line of the final paragraph in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Soft morning City! Lsp.” Cage had meant his organ piece to enjoy the indeterminacy of neither the performer nor the audience knowing how long the score, in eight parts, would last. In Halberstadt, they are stretching it out 639 years! The performance began in 2001 with the intent that each note change would be a great event.

Four years ago, Times columnist Nicolas Goldberg wrote an opinion piece about his fascination with what to him sounded like a profound project about the meaning of time. I tried to talk him out of what I believed to be a gimmicky violation of the being-in-the-moment spirit of Cage. But what mattered to Nick was the idea, not the intent, and he used me in his column as a foil. Still, Cage has been central to my practicing what some people (not me) call music criticism, and I contended wild horses couldn’t drag me to Halberstadt.

Nevertheless, early August’s “From 7 to 8,” as the note change was advertised, occurred almost exactly to the day, as when, 50 years earlier, I filed my first music review in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. This was also to be my last summer and 121st season on staff of the Los Angeles Times. I step down as music critic Friday. (I still plan to contribute to The Times on an irregular basis.)

I happened to be visiting the Salzburg Festival in August and, in a spirit of endgame, hopped on a train to Halberstadt. On the seven-hour ride, my half-century Cage-suffused career passed through my mind.

I thought about how Cage had once told me that when he was a boy in Los Angeles, he loved Grieg with no need to know why. When he studied music, reason replaced love. It was only regaining the ability to hear music as music that he could compose.

Cage described this as an example of the celebrated Zen koan about reality: First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

When I accidentally stumbled into music criticism with an academic penchant for music analysis, my crutches for writing about music were technical and of little use in a newspaper. I had to find a way to simply listen. It gave me new ears, and I was hooked.

Cage solved my next problem by insisting that the way to discover new things is to overcome our dependence on our likes and dislikes, those supposed pillars of criticism. College taught me to investigate the “great” composers who mattered and disdain those of no value. Consequently, I had never paid attention to the likes of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich but discovered that they moved listeners deeply. Again, for me, so-called criticism proved a pathway to opening the mind, and writing about discovery is an ancient pleasure. Cage put it this way: “It’s not what I don’t know that scares me, it’s what I do know.”

The great enticement to return to L.A. after spending nine years in New York (and periodically reporting on Cage from the East Coast and Europe for The Times) was the prospect of Walt Disney Concert Hall. Construction hadn’t yet begun and fundraising was iffy; the community was scared about what it didn’t know. I came armed with another Cage-ism: Every seat is the best seat in the house.

I tried to get the Music Center to make that the motto of the hall. After all, Cage was born at Good Samaritan Hospital about a mile from Disney. That didn’t fly. Still, thanks to Frank Gehry, every seat meant every view inside and out was the best. Every way of seeing also meant every way of hearing. Disney taught L.A. the joy of architecture in a way many of us had never known in this haphazardly built town. Once it was built, there was no choice but to embark on an ongoing love letter to L.A.

Such thoughts on the Cage train poorly suited arriving in the heart of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. One of the first things to catch my eye was a campaign billboard for a far-right Alternative for Germany candidate. A month later AfD would win a landslide victory, dividing Germany and alarming much of Europe.

The streets were mostly deserted. There wasn’t much open, giving the handsome and well-preserved Halberstadt a “Twilight Zone” aura.

In the St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, “The Cage Organ Project” is to be played for 639 years.

(Mark Swed/Los Angeles Times)

Dawn, though, attracted life. “The Cage Organ Project” proved marvelous, to use one of Cage’s favorite words. Whether they were 200-euro ticket holders who had journeyed long and far to be in the church for the note change or the hundreds on complimentary folding chairs outside on the lawn, unshaded in the hot sun watching on large video screens and listening with the assist of a fine amplification system, the aura was now calmness, grace and gratitude.

Nick had been right all along. Time became grounded. The note change is a marker, but the organ, in which air is electronically blown through the pipes day and night for all to hear, has become an endearing sound that connects you to your being. Here and now and hear and now are the same.

ASLSP, moreover, reflects the magical unhurriedness the world craves, be it the slowing down of AI or turning down the volume on social media and politicians’ bully pulpits. None of this may have been on Cage’s mind when “Organ2/ASLSP” had its premiere in Metz, France, in 1987, five years before Cage’s death. That performance lasted a half hour. But Cage is no longer with us, and “Organ2/ASLSP” now has a marvelous life of its own.

One of my most memorable interviews at The Times was with the Dalai Lama in 1999. He had never given one about music and appeared at first sorry he had agreed to. Every question about music got a negative response. The only need he expressed for it was as a fundraising tool for his Tibetan government in exile.

Noting my distress, he explained the problem with music is how easily we get attached to it, and at the heart of Buddhism is nonattachment. Then, breaking the tension with his trademark belly laugh, he admitted his problem was attachment to Buddhism.

At Halberstadt, I may have found my way of letting go. But I also leave The Times with the gratitude not only for the freedom it allowed me to champion causes but also to be part of a very long, quirky process that makes this newspaper unique.

Going back to 1925, there have only been four Times classical music critics in 101 years, and arriving here in 1996, I immediately discovered my roots in Isabel Morse Jones. A violinist who covered music from 1925 to 1947, she was a modernist with her finger on the pulse of the times and stood in refreshing contrast to the fussy East Coast male critics.

She was said to have provided an intellectual awakening of music on the West Coast. She put the Hollywood Bowl on the map. She championed new music and not just the stellar locals, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but also the avant-garde and world music no one else gave the time of day. After leaving The Times, Jones founded the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara originally modeled after the Salzburg Festival.

She threw her lot in with the society page editor, who covered women’s clubs. Together they became a power duo who campaigned to build a home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which three decades later led to the Music Center. That society editor — who chronicled and illuminated the social, political and artistic issues in L.A. in the 1930s from the women’s perspective — was Crete Cage. John Cage’s mother was a must-read for all women in L.A.

We cannot hold on to Cage, but we can’t escape him either. Times look bad. L.A. feels in the dumps. It was like that, as well, when I arrived at The Times in 1996. The city was still recovering from the 1992 riots — the beating of Rodney King had caused a profound social reckoning — and the 1994 earthquake. There was a recession. The L.A. Phil, now the model arts institution in the country if not the world, was millions of dollars in the hole.

Today, catastrophe is wherever you look. The Olympics, the environment, the damn developers, self-driving cars, LAX. The news business isn’t so hot either.

But let history — and John Cage — remind us that opening our ears can be the conduit to opening our minds. We have a wealth of new artistic leadership on the way at the L.A. Phil, L.A. Opera, L.A. Chamber orchestra and Pacific Symphony; new management at the L.A. Master Chorale and the Wallis and Long Beach Opera. And new ideas all around us.

Just as Disney Hall spread joy when we needed it most, one of Gehry’s final masterpieces is taking shape, the Colburn Center on 2nd Street a block from Disney. I took a hard-hat tour after returning home from Halberstadt and experienced the same combination of awe and promise. When it opens next year, it will be a game changer.

And even here, Cage the connector can’t keep out. At the press opening of Peter Zumthor’s new LACMA building, I buttonholed the architect, telling him I see John Cage all over the place. He looked startled for a moment and then with an uncharacteristic grin replied that he considered that a welcome compliment. Chance, he said, is very important.

Across town, one of MOCA’s most successful exhibitions was its 1993 Cage celebration, “Rolywholyover A Circus.” Cage asked for natural light, so that paintings would always look different whenever you saw them. He wanted the surprise of artwork hung in an unpredictable fashion. He wanted to let the outdoors in and the indoors out.

It is no coincidence that this describes aspects of the new LACMA. “Rolywholyover” traveled to the Guggenheim in New York’s SoHo district the next year, and the young curator in charge was Michael Govan, LACMA’s visionary head behind the Zumthor galleries.

Along with the new LACMA building we have a new Metro D Line stop nearby. Now a direct connector between LACMA and the Colburn Center passes almost directly under Good Samaritan Hospital.

Let me make my last suggestion as “music critic.” How about naming the new D Line connection between LACMA and the Colburn Center the John Cage Express?

Not everything has to be as slow as possible.

With a boisterous laugh, Giselle Bonilla recalls her introduction to Hollywood at the age of 12: on the set of “Freedom Writers,” the 2007 drama about at-risk high school students in Long Beach. She played a young version of Eva, one of the film’s main characters.

“I remember the first thing we shot was an initiation scene where I get the s— beat out of me,” she tells De Los, sitting at a coffee shop in Silver Lake on Sept. 11 (more on this date later). “They put this candy blood in my mouth, and I thought it was so fun.”

In retrospect, Bonilla, 31, finds great irony in how that initial foray into professional acting fictionally materialized her Mexican immigrant parents’ worst nightmare.

“We don’t come from money. They hustled all their lives and put my sister and I in private education, because they had this irrational fear that I would join a gang … then the first thing I ended up booking as an actor was getting initiated into a gang,” she says grinning.

Since that unique formative experience, Bonilla has traveled a winding path in and out of the industry, which ultimately led her to direct her first feature: the dark comedy “The Musical,” in theaters Friday.

The movie’s antihero, Doug (Will Brill), is a middle school theater teacher plotting his revenge against his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), also a teacher — and her new boyfriend, the more charming Principal Brady (Rob Lowe).

Doug’s plan? To secretly persuade his young students to put on a musical about the horrors of 9/11 and its aftermath that’s certain to cause controversy and get the principal in trouble.

“I feel like you can be more honest with comedy,” says Bonilla about why this genre appeals to her. “You can get away with everything that you’re angry about and want to yell about. If you make them laugh first, people tend to listen.”

Left to right, back row: Alex Heller (screenwriter), Will Brill (center row) Gillian Jacobs, Giselle Bonilla (director) and Rob Lowe (on the floor) from “The Musical” at the Los Angeles Times 2026 Sundance Film Festival studio presented by Chase Sapphire in Park City, Utah on Jan. 24.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Though the actual show is only a small element of the narrative, it turned off distributors, who argued they wouldn’t be able to market a comedy that involved such a delicate subject.

Still, “The Musical” is making it to the big screen as a self-released title thanks to its executive producers, who believed in the film enough to put in more money for a release.

“I’m going to make sure people watch it regardless,” Bonilla says about being very involved in the marketing. “Even though it didn’t sell at Sundance, we still found a way, which is how we made the whole movie. It was nonstop fighting against the universe just to make a comedy.”

Less than a week before production started, Bonilla lost the actors who were originally playing Principal Brady and Abigail. As her film fell apart, she reached out to the industry contacts she had made after working as an assistant for a few years. Miraculously, the screenplay piqued Lowe’s interest. He came on board, essentially saving the project.

Will Brill and Rob Lowe star in “The Musical.”

(Blue Harbor Entertainment)

As a student at the AFI Conservatory, Bonilla had directed a short film version of “The Musical” that writer Alexander Heller, aware of her affinity for comedy, had conceived for Bonilla to direct. The core group of artists who made the short also worked on the feature.

And though she has always pushed for diversity on screen — including in her short films “Virgencita” and “Bullfighter” — for “The Musical,” Bonilla believed the adults had to be white.

“It would be way more damaging if I had pinned a brown person to be behind the staging of a musical about 9/11,” she explains. “It was very clear to me that this was a comedy about white liberalism and how people weaponize tragedy for their own agenda.”

When it came to the kids in Doug’s class, Bonilla wanted to reflect the multicultural mosaic that is the Los Angeles Unified School District. To be able to see herself in “The Musical,” Bonilla wanted a Latina girl as the child with the most ambition to succeed in the arts. That character became Lata: played in the feature by Melanie Herrera in her first acting credit.

“She’s a dancer. But she’s very precocious and has a really confident, type-A personality,” Bonilla says of the young actor. “Melanie gives Reese Witherspoon in ‘Election,’ like, ‘I will do whatever I have to do for the part,’ and I recognized that in myself as a kid.”

Filmmaker Giselle Bonilla on the set of “The Musical.”

(Peter McCollough)

An L.A. native raised in North Hollywood, Bonilla started doing improv at a young age encouraged by her father, Art Bonilla, who grew up in Tijuana and has worked as an actor in the U.S. for over 40 years.

Her mother, originally from Sinaloa, does workers’ compensation insurance, which provided a stable income and allowed her partner to pursue acting.

“It was tough seeing him struggle and not have any agency over work,” Bonilla says of her father. “He’s such a great actor and he’s really funny, but he’s always getting cast in these very small bit parts as a gardener or an immigrant crossing on the border.”

Unsurprisingly, when Bonilla began auditioning for roles as a teenager, similarly one-dimensional and stereotypical characters from a “troubling perspective” came her way.

“They always make the main character in those stories a white person,” she says. “And then we’re painted as these puppies that just keep getting beat up. I didn’t want to contribute to that.”

Bonilla’s interest in being on the other side of the camera solidified after playing an illiterate South Central high school student in the Byron Allen sitcom “Mr. Box Office.” She attended Pasadena City College, where she studied film production, then used the residuals from the show to help pay for her tuition at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Attending film school on the East Coast was, as she puts it, a necessary experience, because she grew up rather sheltered.

“I’m a first-gen Mexican American woman and I was supposed to live at home until I get married,” she explains; but it also exposed her to the concept of impostor syndrome.

“I always had this impostor syndrome at NYU, because that was where I first really confronted wealthy people,” she explains. “I had never been in a predominantly white institution before. And that was really eye-opening.”

It was only when COVID restrictions were lifted that Bonilla decided to apply to the AFI Conservatory, where she regained her confidence and met her now close collaborators.

She has, however, never forgotten her biggest and earliest supporters. Since she started directing, Bonilla has cast her father in many of her short films. And in “The Musical,” you can see both of her parents in the audience during the culminating school show.

“My dad is the one that yells at Rob Lowe at the end in slow motion. He’s pissed that I cut his line, but it was a union film, and we couldn’t afford to give my dad a line,” she says. “But he will be the first one to tell you that he’s not an extra. He did a ‘cameo!’”

“The Musical” director Gisella Bonilla poses at the Los Angeles Times 2026 Sundance Film Festival studio presented by Chase Sapphire in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 24.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Bonilla’s next project takes inspiration from her memories attending a Catholic school run by nuns in Sun Valley, where a teacher was discovered to be a pedophile. She describes it as “an erotic thriller told from the perspective of virgins.”

Once again, she’ll tackle an unsavory topic and figure out how to bring it to fruition; then distribute it come what may, because she refuses to be boxed in by the industry’s expectations.

“Identity stories are very important. If someone wants to do that, they should be able to do that,” Bonilla says. “But I don’t think our opportunity as Latinos should be limited to painting ourselves as victims against the supremacists.”