This 80-plus city tour offers a distinct blend of classical ballet with avant-garde circus techniques and global influences, complete with 10-foot-tall animal puppets constructed by Roger Titley. For its 33rd year on the road, the production adds a new character: Sweets the Dog, created by Barry Gordemer of the award-winning puppeteer studio Handemonium.
When/where: Nov. 22, Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena; Nov. 23, McCallum Theatre, 73000 Fred Waring Drive, Palm Desert; Dec. 20, the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; and Dec. 21, La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd.
The most important college football story in these parts is about the downtrodden program from Westwood and whether it will leave its dump of a stadium in Pasadena.
UCLA’s incompetence has overshadowed every team in this market outside of the Dodgers and Lakers, and that includes USC.
Which speaks to where USC stands right now.
The Trojans have become afterthoughts in a market they once owned, and they only have themselves to blame.
The 17th-ranked team in the country, the Trojans are by no means a bad team.
They’re something worse.
They’re stuck.
USC coach Lincoln Riley congratulates tight end Walker Lyons after a successful two-point conversion attempt against UCLA at the Coliseum on Saturday.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
USC literally can’t afford to buy out coach Lincoln Riley’s contract, which means that until further notice the Trojans will be known as the team that’s good enough to not embarrass itself but not good enough to reach the College Football Playoff.
In this particular time in this particular market, that pushes USC to the margins of Los Angeles’ congested sporting landscape.
About to complete his fourth season with the Trojans, Riley seems to be aware of the perception of his program, or at very least what this market expects of a program defined by championships.
“I understand Los Angeles is a place where people aren’t going to show up just because,” he said. “You have to win. You have to give them something. And when you do, there’s no sports town better.”
Riley pointed to the packed Coliseum on Saturday night as evidence the Trojans were doing something right. Almost 70,000 tickets were distributed for the UCLA game.
The loyalty of USC’s fans, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for excitement. In the eyes of the program’s most fervent supporters, the team has underachieved.
Riley talked up the Trojans’ 7-0 home record, which included victories over Michigan and Iowa, but the truth is that the season will be defined by the games that weren’t won.
The loss at Illinois.
The loss at Notre Dame.
The loss at Oregon, which effectively knocked USC out of CFP contention.
As a program that defines itself by championships, the Trojans measure success on a binary scale. They’re either competing for a national title or they’re not. These Trojans aren’t.
Riley made the case that this season helped establish a foundation on which future teams will be built.
“This year was better than last year, and then next year is going to be better, even better than this, just going to keep growing and growing,” he said.
USC backup quarterback Gage Roy leaps into the arms of offensive lineman Tobias Raymond after Roy completed a two-point conversion pass against UCLA at the Coliseum on Saturday.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
He’s made similar statements before, and USC’s fans are still waiting for the return to glory that he promised.
By now, words alone won’t convince many people about the program’s future. Riley will have to deliver results, and he will have to deliver them soon.
The team Riley will coach next season will look a lot like the team he coached this season but almost certainly without receiver Makai Lemon. No. 2 receiver Ja’Kobi Lane could also declare for the NFL draft.
As much as Riley spoke about USC’s improved physicality, the Trojans couldn’t stop the run in any of their three defeats, which raises legitimate concerns about whether he will be able to address the problem in the coming months.
The Trojans will welcome the country’s top-rated recruiting class, but how many freshmen could they realistically count on to produce right away?
Ryan Kartje, the Times’ USC beat reporter, wrote a story last week about a situation at quarterback involving starter Jayden Maiava and five-star freshman Husan Longstreet. Kartje raised the possibility of Longstreet entering the transfer portal if Maiava returns for his senior season.
In another time or place, this would be a major story. That’s basically Riley’s job now, to return USC’s profile to where the next quarterback controversy is front-page news. The Trojans aren’t close to that at the moment.
Amid the fusillade of terrible headlines this year, one pierced my nerdy heart.
“Enjoying this headline? You’re a rarity: Reading for pleasure is declining …” was the topper to a story by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August. Pleasure reading among American adults fell more than 40% in two decades — a continuation of a trend going back to the 1940s.
I get it. We don’t want to read for fun when we’re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online and make sense of our terrible political times. But as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” series, said, “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I’m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading — bite-size jewels of intellect, if you will. Through essays, short stories, poems and pictures, each of my suggestions will bring solace through the beauty of where we live and offer inspiration about how to double down on resisting the bad guys.
“California Southern: Writing From the Road, 1992-2025” by LAist reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.
(Gustavo Arellano / Los Angeles Times)
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s warm voice has informed Angelenos about arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long called KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3. What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn’t seem to care for them.
Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.” Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio dispatches have always had a prose-like quality often lacking among public radio reporters, whose delivery tends to be as dry as Death Valley.
In mostly English but sometimes Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., employing the type of lyrical bank shots only a poet can get away with. I especially loved his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets away/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.” Another highlight is contained in “Trucks,” where Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to L.A. and name their businesses after their hometowns.
“Say these names to praise the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to document the passage. Say these names to remember the trek.”
Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings recently with Lisa Alvarez, who published her first book, “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories,” after decades of teaching English — including to my wife back in the 1990s! — at Irvine Valley College.
The L.A. native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into made-up stories because the real world is fantastical enough: She made me not just read fiction but enjoy it.
Alvarez’s debut is a loosely tied collection centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for someone who fought during the Spanish Civil War and a resident of O.C.’s canyon country tipping off the FBI about her neighbor’s participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.
Author, activist and Irvine Valley College professor Lisa Alvarez holds a copy of her short story collection “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories.”
(Don Leach / Daily Pilot)
Most of the protagonists are women, brought to life through Alvarez’s taut, shining sentences. Memories play a key role — people loved and lost, places missed and reviled. A nephew remembers how his uncle landed in an FBI subversives file after attending a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. shortly after serving in the Navy in World War II. An L.A. mayor who seems like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa considers himself “the crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book” as he tries to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.
To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past is never dead in Southern California — it isn’t even past.
While Alvarez is a first-time author, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned important essays about L.A. history and geography for decades, has gathered some of his recent efforts in “Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire.”
A lot of his subjects — L.A.’s mother tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Hass avocado — are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. But few of us can turn a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín, he writes, “The twin cities of Los Angeles and Los Ángeles, evoked by [their] voices … may seem to be incommensurate places to the unhearing, but the borders of the two cities are porous. Sound travels.”
Man, I wish I would have written that.
“Elements of Los Angeles” is worth the purchase, if only to read “Taken by the Flood,” Waldie’s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster that killed at least 431 people — mostly Latinos — and destroyed the career of L.A.’s water godfather, William Mulholland. The author’s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s famous “There it is. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the city’s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.
But then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: “Friends, I leave you/with this sad song/and with a plea to heaven/For those taken by the flood.”
The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not the dead from the St. Francis Dam but all Angelenos for buying into the fatal folly of Mullholland’s L.A.
“Elements of Los Angeles” was published by Angel City Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that also released “Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.”
Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerhouse of a coffee table book by taking what could have easily sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the history of a community that has seen the promise and pain of Southern California like few others.
We see Japanese Americans posing in front of souped-up imports, reveling in SoCal’s kustom kulture scene of the 1960s, standing in front of a car at a World War II-era incarceration camp and loading up their gardening trucks at a time when they dominated the landscaping industry.
“One can read entire histories of American car culture and find no mention of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.
The rest is a delight that zooms by like the rest of my recs. Drop the doomscrolling for a day, make the time to read them all and become a better Southern Californian in the process. Enjoy!
Thank you, Ben Bolch. In your newsletter, an open letter to UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk, you have asked all the right questions. On the surface, the proposed move to SoFi Stadium might make some sense. But in the real world, it sure doesn’t. I was at the game vs. Washington, and the sentiment was pretty strong against a move. Also, the word was that possibly 80% of season-ticket holders will not renew if they play in SoFi Stadium. Even though I have had season tickets for more than 40 years, if they do move, I will be part of that 80%. I wonder if that figure has been factored in?
Bruce Fischer Huntington Beach
The Rose Bowl is the most storied stadium in college football. Nestled just below the San Gabriel Mountains, it is probably the most beautiful as well. It has hosted five Super Bowls (XI, XIV, XVII, XXI, XXVII), men’s and women’s World Cup finals, the Olympics and its annual namesake bowl game — “the Granddaddy of Them All.” There literally isn’t a bad seat in it. Why would UCLA even consider leaving it, especially for the glorified erector set known as SoFi Stadium?
Phillip McGraw, the genial celebrity psychologist who spent a career calling out the behavior of others and doling out zingers, found himself upbraided by a bankruptcy judge.
Merit Street Media, McGraw’s new network, had filed for bankruptcy protection in July, a little more than a year after he launched the media startup, and then sued its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network.
During a nearly three-hour hearing in Dallas last month, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Scott Everett said that he’d “never seen a case” like the Chapter 11 filing McGraw’s company was attempting.
Everett cited evidence indicating McGraw had “violated” a court order by deleting “unflattering” text messages that allegedly described his plan to use the bankruptcy to “wipe out” creditor claims.
“What makes this case unique, unfortunately, is that it has been plagued with the attempted destruction of relevant evidence and less than truthful testimony by some of the key players,” said Everett, alluding to McGraw and his associates in the case.
Everett ruled that Merit Street be liquidated.
Following the hearing, a spokesperson for McGraw’s production company vigorously denied the accusation that he destroyed evidence and said he is appealing the ruling.
“Dr. McGraw’s excellent record of integrity, success and service to millions over two decades speaks for itself,” said Chip Babcock, attorney for McGraw’s production company.
The unraveling of McGraw’s media venture was a gut punch for the celebrity therapist who has assiduously built a reputation — and tremendous personal wealth — as one of the most trusted voices on television. But his fortunes faded amid a dying market for syndicated TV and clashes with a distributor and partner.
After 21 years as host of the successful syndicated talk show “Dr. Phil,” McGraw went out on his own last year. He launched Merit Street Media in Texas, a company that he said would promote “family values” and serve as an antidote to “woke” culture, only to find that his ambitions collided with a new television reality.
Unlike “Dr. Phil,” Merit Street was untethered to the well-oiled machine of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, where it was filmed, and top-tier distribution partner CBS.
Moreover, the sheer force of McGraw’s personality could not overcome the fact that linear TV is on the wane. Syndicated daytime TV shows are no longer the cash cows they used to be as most viewers consume content through streaming and other digital outlets such as YouTube and TikTok.
“By the time he put this new company together, the ‘Dr. Phil’ era had kind of ended,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “There is a shelf life to these characters and he reached his.”
An Oprah favorite
McGraw rose from clinical psychologist to an American living room staple and self-help guru in the late 1990s after Oprah Winfrey anointed him as her protégé.
Television’s then-reigning queen hired McGraw to prepare for her libel case brought by Texas cattlemen in 1997. They claimed her comments during an episode about mad cow disease disparaged them and caused beef prices to drop.
Winfrey prevailed, but it was McGraw, a former linebacker with the commanding presence of a sheriff from an old-time western, who emerged victorious.
Oprah Winfrey launched “Dr. Phil” after he advised her during her Texas cattlemen’s libel trial in the late 1990s.
(Christopher Smith / Invision / AP)
Much like books, pajama sets and certain chocolate brands, McGraw became one of Oprah’s favorite things. Recast as “Dr. Phil,” she featured him during weekly segments on her hugely popular talk show, starting in 1998. By 2002, a “Dr. Phil” spinoff began airing five days a week, produced by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions.
The show was distributed by CBS Media Ventures and filmed on a soundstage at Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue with a live audience, and it became the de facto voice for home viewers.
McGraw quickly earned a massive following for dispensing advice to cheating spouses, drug addicts, troubled teens, meddling in-laws, infamous criminals and celebrities. He delivered his no-nonsense, often blunt assessments wrapped in folksy Southern sayings such as “No matter how flat you make a pancake, it’s still got two sides.”
For more than two decades, “Dr. Phil” was a top-rated syndicated daytime talk show — 11 of those seasons at No. 1 — garnering 31 Daytime Emmy nominations. He was catapulted to stardom, appearing everywhere from late-night talk shows to sitcom cameos, even a character on “Sesame Street,” Dr. Feel. In 2020, he received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
Dr. Phil McGraw with his wife, Robin McGraw, his son Jay McGraw and his wife, Erica Dahm, as well as their two children, London and Avery, at the ceremony celebrating Dr. Phil receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
(Getty Images)
McGraw leveraged “Dr. Phil” as a launching pad for his ever-growing empire of bestselling books and various ancillary businesses, including a virtual addiction recovery program, a telemedicine app and production company, Stage 29, with his son Jay McGraw that produced shows like daytime’s “The Doctors.”
But as McGraw’s popularity and influence grew, so did the controversies.
The family of Britney Spears criticized him after he visited the troubled pop star when she was hospitalized on a psychiatric hold and issued a news release saying she was “in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention.”
McGraw later told viewers on his show that “I definitely think if I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t make any statement at all. Period.”
Claims of conflict
Questions were also raised that McGraw used his show to promote businesses and products connected to his family and affiliates, sometimes without fully disclosing those ties.
In 2006, McGraw settled a lawsuit for $10.5 million with consumers who alleged that he defrauded them by making false claims about a line of nutritional and weight-loss supplements that he endorsed on “Dr. Phil.”
He faced a Federal Trade Commission investigation into false advertising and the line was eventually discontinued.
“Dr. McGraw’s career stands among the most successful in television history,” Babcock said. “His programs always have been completely transparent, with all brand integrations under full network oversight and full FCC compliance.”
The on-air promotion of McGraw’s family businesses, such as his wife Robin McGraw’s skincare line and lifestyle brand and his son Jay McGraw’s books during “integrations,” also drew scrutiny.
Dr. Phil McGraw and son Jay McGraw.
(Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic)
“Dr. Phil” episodes frequently featured guests suffering from addiction who were often offered the opportunity to check into a treatment facility at the end of the episode.
In 2017, an investigation by STAT News and the Boston Globe alleged that the show highlighted specific treatment facilities in exchange for those recovery programs purchasing various products affiliated with McGraw.
A spokesman for the show had denied the allegations, saying that “any suggestion that appearances on Dr. Phil’s show are linked to the purchase or use of this program is false.”
McGraw’s wattage remained undimmed. He continued to branch into new ventures. He launched a podcast in 2019, “Phil in the Blanks,” and prime-time TV shows like “Bull,” a legal drama on CBS based on his experiences as a trial strategist, and another CBS legal drama, “So Help Me Todd.”
The “Dr. Phil” show has said that since its premiere, it has provided $35 million in resources to its guests after they appeared.
During the last years of “Dr. Phil,” staffers and viewers noticed that programming began to shift away from advising relationships, parenting and money issues to more conservative and cultural issues such as immigration and transgender athletes.
“He took a political slant already, but once COVID hit, [the show] skewed more and more political,” said one former longtime “Dr. Phil” staffer who declined to be named out of fear of retaliation.
During an appearance on Fox News in April 2020, McGraw said that pandemic lockdowns would be more fatal than the virus, drawing a widespread backlash on social media.
McGraw later posted a video saying he supported CDC guidelines but was concerned about the mental health effects of long-term quarantine.
“He was very good about getting big stories, but we had no input, and believe me, if we ever wanted to or tried, we’d be just told ‘no,’” said a former executive at CBS, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.
Starting over in Texas
In 2023, McGraw announced that he was leaving CBS and returning to Texas to launch a new venture and broaden his audience, citing “grave concerns for the American family” and that he was “determined to help restore a clarity of purpose as well as our core values.”
Merit Street built a studio in a former AT&T call center in Fort Worth. Many of the staffers were veterans of “Dr. Phil” or had worked on McGraw-related content and relocated from Los Angeles to Texas.
Dr. Phil and President Trump at the National Day of Prayer event at the White House in May.
(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
The network, whose name was derived from meritocracy (with shades of main street), premiered in April 2024.
“Merit Street Media will be a resource of information and strategies to fight for America and its families, which are under a cultural ‘woke’ assault as never before,” McGraw said in a statement.
McGraw aired “exclusive” interviews with Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his flagship, “Dr. Phil Primetime.”
Programming consisted of a slate of news, entertainment and conservative commentary programs with former syndicated television stars Nancy Grace and Steve Harvey, whose Steve Harvey Global had a 5% stake in the company, according to Merit’s bankruptcy filings.
But Merit struggled to find an audience; only 27,000 viewers tuned into the network weekly during 2024, placing it at 130 out of 153 U.S. channels, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“It’s totally false to say Merit had bad ratings,” Babcock said. “For a startup, it was like a rocket ship; at one point it passed CNN in the first few months of its existence.”
Merit soon scrapped the live audience for “Dr. Phil Primetime” and eventually production on its original programming came to a halt.
Four months after the network’s debut, the company cut 30% of its staff, including workers who had relocated from Los Angeles.
Facing mounting debts, Merit filed for bankruptcy protection in July, listing liabilities of at least $100 million.
“You could see the writing on the wall,” said the former CBS executive. “Ratings for syndication were dropping.”
While still a household name, McGraw was part of a waning breed of TV syndication stars — Judge Judy, Maury Povich and Ellen DeGeneres among them — whose shows were fast becoming nostalgic relics.
Former McGraw staffers from his CBS days said it appeared that he thought he could simply translate his name recognition and longtime popularity to the new venture, but failed to grasp the new digital media landscape.
“The programming model that he launched in 2024 was more appropriate two decades earlier,” said Syracuse University’s Thompson.
Merit Street faced internal strife as well, according to former staffers and court filings.
Former employees described tensions between Los Angeles transplants and less experienced nonunion crews.
“It was total disorganization,” said one former field producer who had worked for the “Dr. Phil” show and then relocated to Texas to work for Merit Street, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. “Everyone kept saying this was a startup, and maybe it was. People made decisions but had no idea what they were doing,” the producer added.
A representative of McGraw’s production company conceded the startup had growing pains.
“The company thought they could produce the same quality production with less people,” he said.
Compounding matters, relations between Merit and its business and broadcast partner TBN also soured.
Merit alleged in its lawsuit that TBN provided “comically dysfunctional” technical services, with teleprompters and monitors blacked out during live programs before a studio audience.
The suit further alleged that TBN failed to pay TV distributors and had reneged on its promise to cover $100 million in production services and other costs.
McGraw, through his production company, bankrolled the struggling enterprise from December 2024 to May 2025, lending it $25 million, according to Merit’s lawsuit.
For its part, TBN accused McGraw and his production company Peteski Productions of “fraudulent inducement,” alleging in a countersuit that it had invested $100 million into Merit and that McGraw and Peteski had failed to bring in promised advertising revenue.
TBN said McGraw reached out to the company as a potential replacement for CBS as a distribution partner during the latter half of 2022.
“McGraw specifically represented to TBN that he wanted to change networks because of what he perceived to be CBS’s censorship of the content aired on the ‘Dr. Phil Show.’ As McGraw put it, ‘I don’t want snot-nose lawyers telling me what I can and can’t say on TV,’” the lawsuit states.
Instead, they claimed in their complaint, McGraw and his company engaged in a “fraudulent scheme” to fleece TBN, a not-for-profit corporation.
In a statement to Variety, a spokesperson for McGraw and his production company called TBN’s lawsuit “riddled with provable lies.”
TBN did not respond to a request for comment.
Merit also clashed with another partner: Professional Bull Riders, which in November 2024 canceled its four-year contract with Merit and pulled its content, claiming the company had failed to pay the fees it owed.
Professional Bull Riders claims Merit Street stopped paying its broadcast fees and is owed $181 million.
(Anadolu via Getty Images)
PBR, which later signed with Fox Nation and CBS, alleged in a separate lawsuit that Merit breached their contract and is seeking $181 million.
“We’re glad he’s being held accountable,” said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, parent company of PBR, in a statement to The Times.
“Merit Street agreed to work out its differences with PBR in a confidential proceeding which is ongoing. We were therefore surprised that PBR would publicly accuse us of violating our agreement when the facts are in dispute,” the company said in an earlier statement.
Two weeks after Merit filed for bankruptcy, McGraw announced the launch of another new network, Envoy Media Co., that would include live, “balanced news,” original entertainment programming and “immersive viewer experiences,” as well as original programming from friend and former Merit stakeholder Steve Harvey.
Last month, Envoy struck a distribution deal with Charter Communications.
“Dr. McGraw remains deeply proud of his past work and the millions of people it has reached. He’s now turning that same purpose and energy toward Envoy Media,” Babcock said.
But the Merit legal drama is far from over.
TBN has since alleged that Merit Street filed for bankruptcy in bad faith as a way to secure funding for Envoy.
A spokesperson for Peteski called TBN’s allegation “blatantly false” and said Envoy is independently financed.
Earlier this month, Judge Everett rejected Merit’s motion to pause the company’s liquidation while his ruling is appealed. He cited deleted texts in which McGraw described plans by Merit to file for bankruptcy protection to “wipe out” debts from its main creditors, TBN and PBR.
“Candor to the court is critical,” said Everett during his original ruling, and then declared that Merit Street Media “was as dead as a door nail when the bankruptcy was filed.”
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with an assist from Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.
L.A. City Hall is not known for making things simple for real estate developers — especially those seeking approval of large, complicated projects.
Yet earlier this year, Westwood resident Zach Sokoloff navigated the city’s bureaucratic obstacle course, winning City Council approval of a $1-billion plan to redevelop Television City, the historic studio property on Beverly Boulevard.
Now, Sokoloff is hoping to make what some might view as a baffling career change, jumping from Hackman Capital Partners, where he is senior vice president for asset management, to a job as L.A.’s next elected city controller.
For that to happen, Sokoloff would need to defeat City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who is running for another four-year term in June. That’s a tall order, given Mejia’s social media savvy, his status as an incumbent and his deft use of graphics highlighting the minutiae of city government — sometimes featuring hat-wearing corgis.
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In 2022, Mejia secured more votes than any other candidate in city history, as he and his team like to point out. Former state Sen. Isadore Hall, who is also running against Mejia, has his own track record of winning elections.
Sokoloff, by contrast, has never run for public office. He’s spent the past seven years at Hackman, which proposed the 25-acre Television City project and owns other studio properties.
A onetime grade school algebra teacher, Sokoloff promised to emphasize “leadership through listening” if he is elected, shining a light on areas where the city is struggling and working collaboratively to find solutions.
Sokoloff gave some credit to Mejia for seeking to make city government more transparent and understandable. But he argued that such efforts are only a starting point.
Mejia’s audits, he said, “just aren’t moving the needle.”
“He’s shown a preference for lobbing criticism after the fact, rather than getting involved early on to shape the outcome,” Sokoloff said in an interview.
Mejia spokesperson Jane Nguyen pushed back, saying Mejia has championed an array of policy changes, including the creation of a chief financial officer position and a move to “multi-year budgeting.”
In an email, Nguyen said public officials have been responding to Mejia’s audits by working to improve oversight of rents for affordable housing, purchases of military equipment by the Los Angeles Police Department and housing placements by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“Despite our small audit staff, this work is ‘moving the needle’ and making a difference in city policies and departments while improving the quality of life of Angelenos,” she said.
Nguyen said her boss has listened to thousands of constituents at community events and at his town hall meetings.
“All politicians ‘listen,’” she said. “The difference between Kenneth Mejia and our opponents is who we listen to. Our Office listens to the people of Los Angeles.”
If Mejia secures a majority of the vote in June, he will avoid a November 2026 runoff. Forcing Mejia into a round two will be a tough task for Hall and Sokoloff, said political science professor Fernando Guerra, who runs the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
Because city controller is a relatively low-profile position and Mejia is an incumbent, voters will likely stick with him unless there’s serious “negative publicity,” Guerra said.
“While he’s quirky, there’s nothing there that’s in any way scandalous,” Guerra added.
Sokoloff is launching his campaign at an opportune time. Television City is the subject of several lawsuits, which have been filed not just by neighborhood groups but also The Grove, the shopping mall developed by businessman and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso. Those plaintiffs have asked a judge to overturn the council’s approval of the project, saying the city failed to comply with CEQA, the state’s environmental law.
Shelley Wagers, who lives nearby and has been fighting the project, said she was surprised by Sokoloff’s decision to run for citywide office. Asked whether he is in fact good at listening, she replied: “Not in my experience, no.”
Sokoloff defended his company’s handling of the TVC project, pointing to the unanimous votes cast by the planning commission and the council.
“We built a broad and diverse coalition of supporters,” he said. “Ultimately, the results of the [city’s] entitlement process speak for themselves.”
Sokoloff has already picked up one key endorsement: Laura Chick, who was perhaps the most confrontational city controller in recent history. Chick, who served in citywide office from 2001 to 2009, took on officials at the city’s harbor, its airport agency, the city attorney’s office and many others.
Chick, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said L.A. needs a controller who will find strategies to make the city more efficient and effective.
“[Sokoloff] understands that L.A. needs an active problem solver as its chief auditor,” she said.
State of play
— CREATING A RECORD: Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and an assortment of elected officials, clergy and community activists went to a four-hour hearing this week that focused on the impact — and alleged abuses — of Trump’s immigration crackdown. “We want to establish a record, because when the political winds change, we want to hold those accountable,” Bass said.
— THANKSGIVING TEXTS: Caruso, the real estate developer now weighing a second run for mayor, offered his own message on the immigration raids this week, sending a text message blast asking for donations to help families whose lives have been upended by crackdown.
“As we get ready to sit down with family tomorrow, I’m thinking about the families across our city whose Thanksgiving will look a little different,” Caruso wrote on Wednesday. “Many are afraid to return to work after the recent workplace raids, leaving families short on food, rent, and basic necessities.”
— CONCEPT OF A PLAN: Mayoral candidate Austin Beutner said he supports “the concept” of hiking L.A.’s sales tax by a half-cent to pay for additional firefighters and fire stations. Beutner offered his take a few days after the firefighters union confirmed it is preparing ballot language for the tax, which would raise $9.8 billion by 2050. The union wants voters to take up the measure in November 2026.
— FIRE FUNDING: Even without the tax, Fire Chief Jaime Moore is asking for more than $1 billion for his department’s next annual budget, a 15% hike over the current year. Moore said the additional funds are needed to ensure the city is prepared for emergencies like the Palisades fire.
— DIALING 9-1-1: Sticking with the firefighting theme, Beutner posted an interactive graphic on his website showing how much paramedic response times have increased in most zip codes in the city. Beutner said firefighters are being asked to respond to too many non-emergency calls.
— DELAYED RESPONSE: Residents in neighborhoods near the Port of Los Angeles were not told to shelter in place until nearly six hours after a massive hazardous materials fire broke out aboard a cargo ship in the harbor. The handling of the alert, which urged residents to go inside immediately and shut their doors and windows, follows deep concerns about the region’s alert system and how it worked during the Eaton fire in January.
— KATZ OUT THE BAG: The five-member board that oversees the Department of Water and Power has lost its third commissioner in as many months. Richard Katz, a former state lawmaker and a Bass appointee, had his final meeting on Nov. 18. In his resignation letter, he said he’s stepping aside to focus on two upcoming surgeries.
— LACKING A QUORUM: Because the DWP board needs three members to hold a meeting, it won’t be able to conduct any business until the council confirms the mayor’s newest appointee: Benny Tran, who is slated to replace Mia Lehrer. Tran is a principal with Baobab Global Consulting, according to his nomination paperwork.
— IN HOT WATER: A high-ranking DWP employee has been accused of making staffers run personal errands for her on city time, including purchasing tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert, according to a filing lodged by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission’s director of enforcement. The employee’s lawyer said the claims were the product of a disgruntled subordinate.
— MONEY TROUBLES: L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing faces a $230-million financial gap in the upcoming budget year, setting the stage for cuts to key services. Officials are looking at scaling back an array of programs, including services to help homeless residents find apartments.
— BOLSTERING THE BUDGET: The council’s new Budget and Finance Advisory Committee, a five-member citizen panel looking at ways to strengthen the city’s finances, held its first meeting this week, selecting former City Controller Ron Galperin as its chairman. The committee plans to look at the city’s investment strategies, real estate portfolio, legal obligations and overall approach to annual budgets.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelessness did not launch new operations this week.
On the docket next week: The Charter Reform Commission is set to hold an outdoor town hall Saturday at Echo Park Lake. The event, which runs from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., will take place on the northeast lawn at Echo Park and Park avenues.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to [email protected]. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror we are now hurtling toward Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the New Year. December can bring stress, but it also brings the feel-good holiday shows, including “Tinselcolor,” which opens Dec. 2 at CineVita, a 15,000-square-foot double-decker Belgian spiegeltent operated by For the Record, which stages live musical revues of well-known film soundtracks.
Joey McIntyre — the youngest member of the ultra ‘90s boy band, New Kids on the Block — signed on as host of the candy-colored world-premiere extravaganza, which features an eight-piece band and 14 singers performing holiday movie music from 25 film scores including “Home Alone,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “White Christmas.”
For the Record has been putting on shows for more than 15 years, starting in a small bar and restaurant in Los Feliz and moving up to bigger venues leading to CineVita. Over the years, the company became known for attracting celebrity clientele. Quentin Tarantino and Rosario Dawson attended a performance based on Tarantino’s film scores, and Demi Moore’s daughter, Rumer Willis, once joined the troupe. Moore is now an investor.
In an email, McIntyre wrote that he saw the Tarantino show years ago and loved it.
“I knew the caliber of talent and production that this company puts up, and then I stepped foot into this unparalleled space and almost verbatim said ‘sign me up,’” he wrote. “I’m a theater kid. The venue was like Jessica Rabbit calling me in.”
The unparalleled space McIntyre is referring to contains 3,000 hand-beveled mirrors, hand-cut stained glass windows and carved wood ornamentation. It will be decorated with outsized holiday flair for “Tinselcolor,” but it will also feel cozy.
“The theater holds about 700, but it is so warm and intimate, like you’re in my living room for the holidays,” McIntyre wrote. “Our guests are going to feel that. Our director, Anderson Davis, and the creative team have been super open to making it feel authentic to me and showcasing what I bring to the table.”
Performers joining McIntyre onstage include Brian Justin Crum, who recently played the role of Annas alongside Cynthia Erivo and Adam Lambert in the Hollywood Bowl’s electrifying “Jesus Christ Superstar”; Vintage Trouble frontman Ty Taylor; Cheyenne Isabel Wells, who starred in “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” on Paramount+; and Dionne Gipson from “Found” on NBC and “Haus of Vicious” on BET.
McIntyre noted that he gets to sing the Andy Williams classic, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in full holiday regalia. His favorite holiday movie song of all time, however, is not in the show. That would be “A Brand New Christmas,” which he co-wrote for last year’s Roku Original “Jingle Bell Love.”
His favorite Christmas carol of all time? “O Holy Night.”
“It sits right in my wheelhouse vocally, and it checks all the boxes: heartfelt, classic melody with a pop bluesy accessibility. And you get to ‘fall on your knees’ when you’re performing it,” he wrote.
“Tinselcolor” runs through Dec. 30. After that, McIntyre will head back to Las Vegas to continue the New Kids on the Block residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM, which was extended through 2026 due to high demand.
“We just announced 3 more stints for 2026. We are a blessed bunch of guys. We’ve been able to keep it fresh and exciting over all these years, and the fact that we still had Vegas on the table was something we have really taken advantage of,” McIntyre wrote about the residency. “Our diehards are genuinely blown away, and Vegas is yet another hook for folks who haven’t seen us in a while. And those newbies are loving it too. It feels like a slam dunk all around.”
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt wishing you a very happy holiday season filled with love, kindness, health and hope. Here’s your arts and culture news for the week.
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On our radar
Clockwise from bottom left: Grand Kiev Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Inland Pacific Ballet.
(Los Angeles Times photo collage; illustrations by Katie Smith / For The Times; photographs from Grand Kyiv Ballet, Cheryl Mann and Marsha McNeely Photography)
Nutcracker roundup The season of Sugar Plum Fairies is upon us. In last weekend’s holiday preview, Ashley Lee did the legwork gathering intel on productions of the holiday perennial that will be dancing their way across Southern California stages in the coming weeks. From downtown L.A. to the South Bay, Orange County and the Inland Empire, the variety of imaginative interpretations offer something for almost everybody. This week alone sees the openings of Anaheim Ballet’s “Nutcracker” (Friday and Saturday. City National Grove of Anaheim, 2200 E. Katella Ave. anaheimballet.org); American Contemporary Ballet’s “The Nutcracker Suite” (Saturday through Dec. 24. Bank of America Plaza, 333 S. Hope St., downtown L.A. acbdances.com); “Bob Baker’s Nutcracker,” a marionette version of the show (Saturday through Jan. 4. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org); and Debbie Allen Dance Academy’s “The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker,” which subs Mariah Carey and other contemporary artists for Tchaikovsky (Thursday through Dec. 14. Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd. debbieallendanceacademy.com).
What the Dickens!
The cast of “A Christmas Carol” at A Noise Within.
(Craig Schwartz)
Like “The Nutcracker,” the holidays are heavy with varied interpretations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Friday night in Anaheim, Chance Theater opens Leslie Bricusse’s “Scrooge! The Musical” (Through Dec. 21. Bette Aitken Theater Arts Center, 5522 E. La Palma Ave. chancetheater.com). Saturday night, two long-standing productions of “A Christmas Carol” make their traditional returns. In Pasadena, Geoff Elliott (who also adapted and co-directs with Julia Rodriguez-Elliott) once again steps into Ebenezer’s slippers for a night of ghostly visitations (Through Dec. 4. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd. anoisewithin.org).
Richard Doyle in “A Christmas Carol” at South Coast Repertory.
(Robert Huskey)
Meanwhile, down in Orange County, South Coast Repertory celebrates the 45th anniversary of resident dramaturg Jerry Patch’s adaptation (Through Dec. 28. Emmes/Benson Theatre Center, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scr.org). And on Dec. 5, Independent Shakespeare Co.‘s David Melville plays not Scrooge, but the author himself in “A Christmas Carol With Charles Dickens,” a solo storytelling tour-de-force (Through Dec. 22. ISC Studio, Atwater Crossing, 3191 Casitas Ave., Suite 130, Atwater Village. iscla.org).
The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY Heisenberg Paul Eiding and Juls Hoover star in Simon Stephens’ drama about a middle-woman and an older man who meet in a London railway station. Directed by Cameron Watson. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 22. Additional show 8 p.m. Dec. 18. Skylight Theatre, 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. skylighttheatre.org
SATURDAY
Artist Drew Struzan signs his Oscar poster in 2008.
(Mark Mainz / Getty Images)
Drew Struzan Tribute The American Cinematheque salutes the artist, illustrator and designer who died in October with a triple-feature of films for which he designed the posters: “Back to the Future,” “The Goonies” and “E.T.” Struzan also designed iconic one-sheets for such films as “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Blade Runner.” 11 a.m. Saturday. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com
TUESDAY
Tom Morello at South by Southwest in Austin in 2025.
(Jack Plunkett / Invision / Associated Press)
The REVOLUTION(S) will be Amplified Musician/activist Tom Morello joins curator Douglas Fogle for a discussion about art, activism, creativity and resistance on the occasion of the exhibition “Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images.” 7 p.m. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd. marcianoartfoundation.org
THURSDAY Children of the Winter Kingdom Orphaned twins escape a circus and encounter a king and his dragon, a wild girl, a crow, a sorceress and an ice spider in a holiday adventure filled with music and puppetry. Written by Adam Dugas & Mary Eileen O’Donnell, directed by Adam Dugas. 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 20. The Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. theactorsgang.com
‘Die Heart’ Yippee-ki-yay, Heart lovers! Troubadour Theater Co. revives its holiday musical-comedy synergism of the 1988 Bruce Willis action movie “Die Hard” with the songs of the Wilson sisters. Don’t even think about asking if it’s really a Christmas movie. Dec. 4 to 21. Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank. troubie.com
A scene from “Putney Swope,” directed by Robert Downey Sr.
(Cinema 5 / Photofest)
Putney Swope The Academy Museum’s celebration of film preservation kicks off with the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 social satire. 7:30 p.m. Thursday Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake The Pacific Symphony and pianist Alexandra Dariescu, conducted by Tianyi Liu, perform works by Cassandra Miller, Maurice Ravel and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scfta.org/events
Dispatch: The Butterfly Effect
Liviera Lim as Vivian Fang in “The Butterfly Effect.”
(Charly Charney Cohen)
Young local theater troupe Last Call Theater specializes in interactive, participatory productions, and its latest, “The Butterfly Effect,” is an intimate affair that encourages one-to-one and small group pairings with actors. The show examines past choices and the consequences of changing them. There’s a fantastical bent, as it’s set in a cafe that promises the ability to time travel. The decade-hopping coffee shop backdrop gives the company a chance to play with multiple storylines that touch on L.A. history, from immigrant tales of a family-run business to those often overlooked by our city’s emphasis on celebrity. The production, which opened in mid-November, runs Thursday through Saturday at Stella Coffee and closes Dec 6. ticketleap.events — Todd Martens
Culture news and the SoCal scene
Robert Therrien‘s “No title (red chapel relief),” 1991, enamel on paper and wood.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
A place at the (big) table If you’ve ever visited the Broad, you’re quite familiar with the large table and chairs in its permanent collection that dwarf even the tallest viewer. Times art critic Christopher Knight (who is retiring as of today) calls the Broad’s new exhibition, “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story,” a “smashing retrospective” and one of the year’s best museum solo shows. Therrien, who died at 71 in 2019, was a unique talent who sits comfortably among the most significant L.A. artists since the ‘60s and ‘70s. “Whether he was making a 3D sculpture to stand on the floor, a 2D painting to hang on the wall, or a 3D sculpture attached to a wall like an ancient frieze,” writes Knight, “he managed the same uncanny result — objects where the purely visual and the utterly physical demand equal time.”
Maya Keleher in the national tour of the musical “Suffs.”
(Joan Marcus)
Suffragette City An all-female and nonbinary cast dramatizes the inspiring story of American women fighting for the right to vote in the musical “Suffs,” playing at the Hollywood Pantages through Dec. 7. Shaina Taub won Tony Awards for its book and score, while also starring as suffragette leader Alice Paul in the Broadway run. In L.A., the national tour’s Maya Keleher “lends alluring warmth to the role,” writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty in his review. “The teamwork of the performers honors the messy yet undeniably effective cooperation of Alice and her freedom fighters — women who changed the world by not staying silent in their prescribed place.”
Viola time Times music critic Mark Swed noted a recent “fall-harvesting viola bandwagon,” with multiple ensembles spotlighting the humble middle child of stringed instruments played with a bow. “The L.A. Phil began viola week with a Tuesday evening program, ‘Brahms Strings,’ as part of the orchestra’s chamber music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall that included the blazing early First Sextet and late, luminously serene Second Quintet,” wrote Swed. “As part of its chamber music series across the street in the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, Saturday, [the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra] coincidentally held ‘A Brahmsian Affair,’ in this case featuring both the sextets.” On Saturday, recent Colburn graduate Lan Cao and current conservatory student Ran Tae performed Korean composer Isang Yun’s 1988 “Contemplation,” for two violas, “played with gripping meditative intensity” during a day-long MOCA seminar on South Korean artist Haegue Yang.
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Ray Ushikubo will play a rare 1741 Guarneri “del Gesù” violin at a free concert at the Colburn School on Dec. 3.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
History in his hands Ray Ushikubo of San Gabriel, a 24-year-old virtuoso musician, has been selected to play the Playfair violin, an ultra-rare model crafted by the famed luthier Guarneri “del Gesù.” “I’m only 24,” Ushikubo told reporter Emma Madden. “This instrument is from 1741. It’s older than the United States. I can barely comprehend that amount of history. But mostly I feel happiness. And honor. It sounds better than any violin that’s ever been made.” The musician will debut the instrument in a free concert at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall on Dec. 3.
East L.A. Youth Orchestra gets a reprieve “After recently announcing major cuts to its youth orchestra, the L.A. Phil has secured additional donor funding to ensure the East L.A. branch of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program will continue at full capacity until the end of the school year,” reports The Times’ Cerys Davies. The initial cuts to the programming at the Esteban E. Torres High School site included laying off teaching artists, gutting programs for younger students and reduced practices for older students. The parents of students and members of the local community responded to the cuts by organizing an Instagram campaign and town hall meeting, imploring the L.A. Phil to temporarily preserve the Torres site.
An architectural whodunit In 2013, Robert Mosher, one of San Diego’s most respected architects, called Keith York, founder of Modern San Diego, a digital archive devoted to the region’s mid-century design, asking to meet for lunch. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said. A revelation at that meeting led York and fellow architecture buff Stephen Buck to investigate the provenance of Balboa Park’s Timken Museum of Art, which opened in 1965. Did two of the biggest names in American design have a hand in it? Sam Lubell has the details on the decades-old mystery.
— Kevin Crust
And last but not least
I give you the 2025 Times holiday gift guide. Even if you don’t see anything on these carefully curated lists that you like, it’s a great inspiration starter.
Periodically, the Latinx Files will feature guest writers. Filling in this week is film reporter extraordinaire Carlos Aguilar.
With the explicit goal of making people laugh, the endearingly foul-mouthed Mexican American filmmaker Alejandro Montoya Marin is building an unpretentious body of work.
“There are far smarter people than me to make ‘Parasite’ or to make Yorgos [Lanthimos’] movies,” says Montoya Marin, 42, laughing during a recent video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I want to entertain you for 88 minutes and have you come out and be like, ‘I’m going to recommend that to a friend.’ That’s it.”
It’s not that he lacks ambition.Montoya Marin, whose T-shirt is emblazoned with Hong Kong action film legend John Woo, feels secure in the type of storytelling that best suits his interest and abilities. And he’s taken a DIY approach to making films and promoting them so that they can reach audiences directly.
“Their job is to tell you no,” he says of decision makers in the entertainment industry. “But you have the ability to say, ‘F— you, I’m going to be creative. You’re not going to tell me when I can be creative.’ And that was always the mentality that I had.”
His third feature, “The Unexpecteds,” now available on streaming platforms, features a mostly Latino cast: Chelsea Rendon (“Vida”), Francisco Ramos (“Gentefied”) and Alejandro De Hoyos (“The Man From Toronto”) — as well as actor Matt Walsh in the lead role. Executive produced by independent cinema legend Kevin Smith of “Clerks” fame, the action comedy follows a group of everyday working people who take justice into their own hands after an online financial guru, Metal Mike (John Kaler), scams them out of their savings.
“I love underdog stories because I feel like I am one and there are so many people like that,” Montoya Marin says about “The Unexpecteds” and his other films. “Maybe there could be movies that can inspire them or make them feel good about themselves for a little bit.”
Born in Laredo, Texas, to parents from Yucatán and Mexico City, Montoya Marin owes his cinematic awakening to a disparate double feature that introduced him to the gritty dystopia of “RoboCop” and the heart-rending sentimentality of “Cinema Paradiso.”
He was about 7 years old and had tagged along with his uncle, who was taking a date to the movies, in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo. “I didn’t understand [“Cinema Paradiso”] because it was in Italian and subtitled in Spanish. My Spanish wasn’t amazing then,” says Montoya Marin. “But I understood a lot of it, and that double feature did it for me.”
You’re reading Latinx Files
Fidel Martinez delves into the latest stories that capture the multitudes within the American Latinx community.
And thus, his topsy-turvy, multicity trail to the triumphs and pitfalls of moviemaking began. At 12, Montoya Marin moved from the U.S. to Merida, Yucatán, where he then made his first amateur short film inspired by the “Star Wars” universe.
He later studied marketing in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. To supplement his income during those days, Montoya Marin opened his own video store, which he called Quick Stop Video, in honor of Quick Stop Groceries, the convenience store in Smith’s “Clerks.” One day, an office opened across the street that had a sign that read “Go study in Canada.” Intrigued, Montoya Marin inquired about film schools, and was immediately enticed by Vancouver Film School, mainly because a young Smith had briefly attended there. He sold all his movies and, as an American citizen, got a student loan and moved to Canada.
Though they now have a close relationship, Montoya Marin’s father, a successful businessman, did not initially support his artistic aspirations, which caused conflict.
“My dad would go, ‘Bring those dreams down because the fall will be less hard,’ and I’d go, ‘F— that. Why?’” he recalls. “He told me, ‘If you go there I don’t want to see you. You’re not seeing the family.’ I was like, ‘OK, that’s a risk I have to take.’”
After graduating, Montoya Marin couldn’t afford to live in Los Angeles and instead moved to Albuquerque, N.M., where he worked for 13 years as a production assistant and as a commercial director. During that time, a career-altering opportunity came his way.
While in Europe shooting a project, Montoya Marin finished the screenplay for his first feature, “Monday.” The script earned him a spot in Robert Rodriguez’s reality show “Rebel Without a Crew,” which aired in 2018 on El Rey Network. Each participant had to produce their feature film with a budget of $7,000, the same amount of money Rodriguez made his debut, “El Mariachi,” for.
“It was a dream come true. Robert is very down to earth. You could tell he’s not bulls—. He doesn’t play the game,” he says. “We would be filming at three in the morning, y ahí lo veías trabajando.”
“I was honored to mentor Alejandro as he directed his very first feature film,” Rodriguez said in an email. “He had the true indie filmmaking spirit within him and inspired me right back! He’s a great representation of what audiences desire: authenticity and passion.”
After “Monday,” an action comedy centered on a man down on his luck who gets caught in a cartel war, Montoya Marin raised $60,000 via crowdfunding to make his sophomore effort, “Millennium Bugs,” a Y2K-set tale about two people coming of age as the world anticipates chaos. And while neither of those films had the impact he’d hoped for, that outcome did not deter him in the slightest.
“There’s no Plan B, compadre,” he said, laughing. “That’s why I can firmly just go headfirst because if I die on set, I will be a happy man.”
Montoya Marin met Walsh while shooting Eva Longoria’s “Flamin’ Hot,” where they both had acting parts. A friendship developed between them, and eventually the filmmaker offered Walsh the part in “The Unexpecteds.” Although he shot the film in 15 days, like his previous features, this time he had a more sizable budget (still under $1 million).
As part of its 2024 festival run, “The Unexpecteds” screened at Smith’s Smodcastle Film Festival in New Jersey, where it won the Best Comedy Award. It was there that Montoya Marin first connected with one of his heroes.
“Giving a platform to fledgling filmmakers with the Smodcastle Film Festival is meaningful to an old film fest kid, and if my name can help them open a single door, I’m happy to help,” Smith said. “But being involved with ‘The Unexpecteds’ does me more good than them. Attaching myself to a talent like Alejandro is a sure way to ensure I get to stick around in a business I’m getting too old for.”
The first time Montoya Marin met Smith in person was right before going on a news show where the two were supposed to have a joint interview to promote the film. It was there that Montoya Marin witnessed his hero’s walk-the-walk allyship in action.
Before going on air, the production informed Montoya Marin that they wouldn’t be able to have him do the interview. Only Smith would be on camera. “But to make it up to you guys, we’re going to make this a Hispanic Heritage Month themed segment,” the team told them.
That’s when Smith stepped in. “You’re going to put the white guy to come and promote Hispanic Heritage Month,” he said, according to Montoya Marin. “Kevin goes, ‘That’s stupid. I’m not doing that. Mic him up, because the filmmaker is the best salesman of a film.’” Smith was shocked at what the TV folks had tried to pull. “I told Kevin, ‘You were just witness of what they do to us without saying an insult. It’s just polite,’” Montoya Marin recalls.
Thanks to Smith’s intervention, Montoya Marin ultimately did the interview. “I fell in love with him even more,” he added.
Now that his most ambitious project yet is out in the world, Montoya Marin has multiple projects in the works, from a thriller to a comedy set in the ‘90s, and even a project that would allow him to shoot in Mexico. Like a good salesman, he has perfected his pitch.
“I’m dying to make a movie in Spanish. I already have the concept and some producers. I just need $1.5 million and I will give you one of the best comedies in Mexican cinema,” he declares. “And I’m not saying just to be m—, but I know I’m funnier in Spanish.”
Speaking with Montoya Marin, one gets the sense that he’s consistently trying to disarm you into rooting for him. It’s not manipulative but refreshingly sincere — and a bit brash. Getting behind him is a vote of confidence for independent cinema that doesn’t take itself so seriously. His humorous conviction and rousing spiel make one eager to believe him.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This week I spoke to James L. Brooks, whose legendary career includes “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News” and “The Simpsons,” about his new film “Ella McCay,” which opens in theaters Dec. 12.
The film stars Emma Mackey as a classic Brooksian heroine: a lieutenant governor of a small, unnamed state with a genuine desire to make other people’s lives better who unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the job of governor.
Albert Brooks and Emma Mackey in the movie “Ella McCay.”
(Claire Folger / 20th Century Studios)
Warm and affectionate toward its characters while also clear-eyed about their all-too-human imperfections, the film is the kind of made-for-adults dramedy that is currently out-of-favor with Hollywood.
“I don’t believe people don’t want comedy,” Brooks said. “Obviously, I hope that you have meat on the bone and that doesn’t mean you can’t do a real scene about real difficulty, especially with this picture.”
Matt Brennan spoke to Renate Reinsve, star of Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” while the two of them toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. Carlos Aguilar spent time with Amy Madigan, the veteran actor enjoying renewed career energy thanks to her role as Aunt Gladys in “Weapons.”
Among the movies’ new releases, Amy Nicholson reviewed Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc story, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” calling it the “darkest, funniest and best installment yet.”
Mila Kunis, Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor in the movie “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”
(Netflix)
Amy also reviewed Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) as they grapple with the death of their young son Hamnet, a grief that results in the play “Hamlet.”
If you are really looking to get away from family this week, consider Julia Loktev’s five-and-a-half-hour documentary “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” which chronicles the fall of one of the last independent news channels in Russia, largely run by women, during the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Loktev and one of the film’s subjects, Ksenia Mironova, will be at the Laemmle Royal for Q&As after certain shows on the 28th and 29th.
As Tim Grierson put it in his review, “During a year in which the worst-case scenarios of a second Trump presidency have come to fruition, ‘My Undesirable Friends’ contains plenty of echoes with our national news. The canceling of comedy shows, the baseless imprisonment of innocent people, the rampant transphobia: The Putin playbook is now this country’s day-to-day. Some may wish to avoid Loktev’s film because of those despairing parallels. But that’s only more reason to embrace ‘My Undesirable Friends.’ Loktev didn’t set out to be a witness to history, but what she’s emerged with is an indispensable record and a rallying cry.”
Also opening this week is another of the year’s most boldly unconventional films, Kahlil Joseph’s “BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions,” a dense, collage-like exploration of Black identity and history, playing at the Lumiere Music Hall. Anyone who saw the recent blockbuster exhibition of artworks by Joseph’s brother, the late Noah Davis, at the Hammer Museum will also find “BLKNWS” a worthwhile experience.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins on the future of the Coen brothers
Cinematographer Roger Deakins photographed at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Roger Deakins is among the most celebrated and best-known cinematographers of his era. A two-time Oscar winner, he has worked with filmmakers such as Joel and Ethan Coen, Sam Mandes, Denis Villeneuve and many more, on films including “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Skyfall,” “Sicario,” “Blade Runner 2049” and “1917.”
Deakins, 76, who often works in collaboration with his wife James Ellis Deakins, has for the past few years been hosting a podcast, “Team Deakins,” interviewing filmmakers. He has recently published “Reflections: On Cinematography,” which is part memoir and part how-to, drawing from his personal archives to explore his work on so many contemporary classics.
They recently got on a video call from their home in Santa Monica to talk about the book, their relationship and whether to expect another movie from the Coen brothers.
Javier Bardem in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 movie “No Country for Old Men.”
(Miramax Films)
One of the things that’s so striking about the book is that it is very much a memoir, the story of your life, but it is told through these movies and an exploration of your artistic practice.
Roger Deakins: Well, that was the balance. We didn’t want it to be a technical manual and we didn’t want it to be a sort of tell-all or just recounting old stories.
James Deakins: When you work in the film business, it’s so intense. Your work is your life.
Roger Deakins: Especially when I started out, shooting in documentaries for a few years, that was the life experience that opened the world to me. I didn’t see the world other than my experiences shooting films, whether it was documentaries or later fiction films, like going together to Morocco to shoot “Kundun.” The life experience actually has always been as important to me as the actual work.
Can you tell me a little bit more about just the relationship between the two of you, traveling together, working on all these different movies? What has that meant to you?
Roger Deakins: It’s all very weird. That is so not me.
James Deakins: The reason why we work so well together is Roger’s very intent on what he is doing and doesn’t particularly want to talk to other people during that time period. And I do — I love to talk to people. I love to solve problems. I love to do all that. So together we kind of make this whole. But we also have a lot of people come up to us and ask us for relationship advice.
Roger Deakins: When we met, I think I was 41 or something. We were both fairly kind of, not lonely, but we were loners, both of us. And we connected on a film. We met on a film together. James was script supervisor on a film that I was shooting. And after that film, it just seemed obvious to me that we should be together. And it’s been wonderful. We’ve just shared these life experiences together. I couldn’t really understand other relationships, which seemed to work well, where one person goes away and works on a movie for like six months and then comes back home and tries to step back into a relationship like nothing had happened. I don’t see that. So we’ve always shared things together. Doing the podcast was very much James’ idea, but I’ve kind of warmed to it.
James Ellis Deakins, left, and Roger Deakins at the 95th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in 2023.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
When people ask for relationship advice, what do they want to know?
James Deakins: They’re saying, “I’ve got to travel so much. How do I keep it together?” Or: How do we work together? Just, will this work? Is it possible? It’s very strange, because we’ve just done a very technical Q&A and my head’s there, and then someone comes up to me — and I can always kind of tell because they’re bearing down on me — and they go, “I just want to ask you…”
Roger, in the book you talk about how, when you were starting out and in film school, you thought of yourself as a director. As you started shooting more for other people, did that create a sense of a path not taken?
Roger Deakins: I would be lying if I was saying there wasn’t a little bit way down deep inside of me that was saying: What if I had tried to become a director instead? But on the other hand, I’ve been part of so many movies with so many really nice, intelligent people. And I really do have a confidence problem. We did try and get together a couple of projects a number of years ago and I just don’t have the confidence. I’m terrible going into a studio and pitching a project.
I’m just not that political person. I love nothing more than being on a set with a whole group of people. I love just working with the camera crew and electricians and the grips and the painters and everybody else. I love that collaboration. And often a director is in a much more lonely place.
Do you feel like you have a signature? What is it that you bring to a project?
Roger Deakins: I hope I don’t have a signature. I hope I just have a way of relating to a story and something in front of me. Maybe there’s some sort of personal perspective.
James Deakins: Well, I think you bring a commitment to the project. And you also are so committed to creating the director’s vision as opposed to you coming in and saying, “Well, let’s make it the way that I always do it.” And so I think you allow what the director has in his head to come out.
Roger Deakins: It’s also really important that you’re not just there to create pretty pictures. Oh, that’s a great sunset, but what the hell does it have to do with this story? Or: Let’s put up five cameras and get a lot of material and we’ll cut something out of it later. That’s the extreme version of something that’s anathema to me.
You say that people confuse pretty cinematography with good cinematography. How do you define good cinematography?
Roger Deakins: Cinematography that’s not noticed. Not noticed because people are too absorbed in the story. When you go to a premiere or any screening and you come out and somebody comes out and says, “Oh, I love that shot where such and such” — that was a mistake because not one shot should stand out. Somebody said, “Oh, wasn’t that a lovely sunset?” Then you’ve taken the audience out of the film. You’ve just drawn attention to the image.
Ryan Gosling in the movie “Blade Runner 2049.”
(Stephen Vaughan / Warner Bros. Pictures)
So even for all the astonishing images you’ve created, you still think that they shouldn’t be noticed?
Roger Deakins: In a way. I mean, obviously on some films you’ve got more license than others. Obviously I could have more fun on “Skyfall” in certain instances, or “Blade Runner,” more than I could on “No Country for Old Men.” “Blade Runner,” I could do these kind of lighting things in the Wallace building because that was part of the character, that was part of his creation, not mine. So it kind of felt integral to the character. But in another situation, I’m never going to do that kind of lighting.
You haven’t shot anything for a few years now. Are you hoping to find something?
Roger Deakins: Kind of. It depends which day you ask me, really.
James Deakins: Really depends on the project. And we haven’t seen anything, really.
A lot of people are very eager for Joel and Ethan Coen to work together again. Have you had any conversations with them?
Roger Deakins: Well, Joel’s just been directing a film in Scotland, his own film. I’ve talked to Joel on and off lately and, well, actually Ethan not that long ago, but I’m not sure what their plans are now. So that’s all talk. That’s like talking about my football team, Manchester United. What’s the next player they’re going to buy? Who knows?
Points of interest
‘Coming Home’
Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in the movie “Coming Home.”
(Herbert Dorfman / Corbis via Getty Images)
On Monday, the Frida Cinema will show Hal Ashby’s 1978 “Coming Home,” starring Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern. Fonda and Voight both won Academy Awards for their performances and the film was named best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.
“Coming Home” is an exploration of the costs of war at home and also about learning to live with disability. Voight plays a Vietnam veteran who returns a paraplegic, struggling to adjust to his new life. Fonda is a woman whose husband (Dern) is deployed to Vietnam. When she begins to volunteer at the local VA hospital, she reconnects with Voight’s Luke, a friend from high school. As the two begin an affair, all three of their lives are upended.
Critic Kristen Lopez will be there to introduce the screening, as well as sign copies of her new book, “Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies.”
Via email, Lopez explained her selection of “Coming Home,” saying “it’s one of the few movies that, I think, even though it’s not cast authentically, does illustrate the disabled experience in an authentic way. Director Hal Ashby, producer Jane Fonda and star Jon Voight did deep research into disabled veterans, specifically wheelchair users, and it’s the first movie I remember seeing that got the little bits of disabled business correct. It’s also a movie that, even today, is remarkably progressive in how it portrays disability. Luke Martin has a home and a car, he’s self-sufficient, and too often we don’t see how disabled people live.”
‘Putney Swope’
An image from “Putney Swope,” directed by Robert Downey Sr.
(Cinema 5 / Photofest)
Opening the series “Present Past 2025: A Celebration of Film Preservation” at the Academy Museum will be the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 “Putney Swope.” A biting satire of how corporate culture handles race, the film stars Arnold Johnson as the title character, who is unexpectedly made president of a major advertising firm and proceeds to upend all of its messaging. Paul Thomas Anderson has often spoken of Downey as an influence — an influence that can be clearly seen in the anti-authoritarian “One Battle After Another.”
In his original January 1970 review, Charles Champlin wrote, “‘Putney Swope’ is not so much a movie as a cartoon with real people. … ‘Putney Swope’ is not for anyone who demands good taste in movies, or restraint, or a presumption of dignity in the human character. But in its youthful, irreverent and uninhibited but medicinal way, ‘Putney Swope’ is shocking good fun.”
Also playing as part of the Academy’s preservation series, which runs through Dec. 22, will be world premiere restorations of William Wyler’s 1934 “Glamour,” John M. Stahl’s 1933 “Only Yesterday,” Lloyd Corrigan’s 1931 “Daughter of the Dragon” and George Marshall’s 1945 “Incendiary Blonde.” Other titles in the series include North American restoration premieres of Konrad Wolf’s 1980 “Solo Sunny” and Mikio Naruse’s 1955 “Floating Clouds,” plus the U.S. restoration premieres of Howard Hughes’ 1930 “Hell’s Angels” and Pedro Almodóvar’s 1986 “Matador.”
‘While You Were Sleeping’
Peter Gallagher and Sandra Bullock in the romantic comedy “While You Were Sleeping.”
(Michael P. Weinstein / Hollywood Pictures)
On Dec. 5, the New Beverly will screen a matinee of John Turteltaub’s 1995 “While You Were Sleeping.” (Take that extra long lunch or just knock off work early. It’s the holidays.) This winsome, utterly charming romantic comedy really helped cement Sandra Bullock’s screen persona and stardom, and deservedly so. A lonely woman (Bullock) who works in a ticket booth for the Chicago Transit Authority quietly pines for a handsome man (Peter Gallagher) she sees every day. After she helps save him from an accident, a misunderstanding at the hospital leads his family to believe she is his fiancée while he is in a coma. Then she meets his brother (Bill Pullman) and the complications really ensue.
In his original review of the film, Peter Rainer wrote, “Bullock is a genuinely engaging performer, which at least gives the treacle some minty freshness. Her scenes with Pullman are amiable approach-avoidance duets that really convince you something is going on between them. Like Marisa Tomei, Bullock has a sky-high likability factor with audiences. She can draw us into her spunky loneliness — you want to see her smile.”
Twenty-five years ago (25!), I was talking with John Cusack about his movie “High Fidelity,” the one where he played Rob Gordon, a record store owner and compulsive list maker. We were batting around top-fives — Rob’s top five movies: “Blade Runner,” “Cool Hand Luke,” the two “Godfather” films and “The Shining” are as good a list as any — and I asked Cusack if he, like Rob, had a funeral music top five.
“‘Many Rivers to Cross’ feels like the perfect choice at No. 1,” Cusack answered, citing the great Jimmy Cliff’s enduring anthem of perseverance.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, thankful I can see clearly now the rain is gone. Let’s look at how box-office success is all relative these days when it comes to awards season.
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With Oscar voters, box-office perception is reality
Misato Morita and Brendan Fraser in the movie “Rental Family.”
(James Lisle / Searchlight Pictures)
What movies are you seeing this Thanksgiving weekend? If you’re pushing aside the pie and leftovers, chances are you might be buying a ticket for “Wicked: For Good” or “Zootopia 2.” The “Wicked” sequel opened to an estimated $150 million last weekend, besting the original and making my optimistic forecast for its Oscar prospects look a little rosier.
Meanwhile, “Rental Family,” a sweet, superficial drama starring Brendan Fraser looking to savage your heartstrings once again, opened to just $3.3 million from nearly 2,000 screens. Even in a lead actor field that isn’t particularly deep this year, Fraser’s chances of returning to the Oscars are now pretty much nil.
“Rental Family” is the latest fall film festival awards contender starring an A-list (or A-list-adjacent) actor to disappear at the box office. The list includes “The Smashing Machine” (Dwayne Johnson), “Christy” (Sydney Sweeney), “After the Hunt” (Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield) and “Die My Love” (Jennifer Lawrence).
Going through these titles, you could make a case that moviegoers are simply showing discernment. None of the movies worked. Critics shrugged, and audiences responded in kind. Good on Johnson and Sweeney for using their star power to stretch, but when people are questioning if they can afford to eat out at McDonald’s, they’re going to need a reason to buy a ticket beyond mere curiosity.
The dead-on-arrival opening weekends of these movies have recast the lead actor and actress Oscar races, boosting anyone not stained by perception of outright failure.
But in this post-pandemic age of moviegoing, what constitutes success? Pushing through to December when the critics groups (as well as “critics” groups) start handing out awards and nominations, the goal is to convey an impression of success and hope that financial windfall might follow.
For example: Joachim Trier’s decidedly unsentimental family drama “Sentimental Value” has parlayed its strong word of mouth and critical acclaim to decent-enough ticket sales in its limited engagement the last two weeks. No one expects a Norwegian-language movie to burn up the box office. Doing fine is a victory.
Then there’s Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” a modest, moving portrait of legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, which opened last month in five theaters, quickly expanded to nearly 700 screens before retreating to a few dozen. It didn’t flame out commercially but has grossed a mere $2 million. That’s … OK. The strong reviews for the film and its lead, Ethan Hawke, have kept Hawke in the conversation for his first lead actor Oscar nomination.
Is it fair that Hawke lives while Lawrence, Sweeney, Roberts and Johnson, whose movies opened wide to disastrous results, feel finished?
“Oscar voters aren’t going to watch a movie that has been deemed a failure,” says a veteran awards publicist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly. “When people read those scary headlines opening weekend, they don’t forget.”
Oscar Isaac in “Frankenstein.”
(Ken Woroner / Netflix)
Netflix, which opens its contending films in qualifying releases before they land on the streaming platform, is mostly immune to this kind of negative publicity as it doesn’t report box-office numbers. But it will release the number of “views” its films rack up. Guillermo del Toro’s monster movie “Frankenstein” accumulated nearly 63 million views in its first 10 days; Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting thriller “A House of Dynamite” totaled 31.6 million in its first two weeks. (The company defines a view as the total time spent watching a movie divided by the running time.)
The movie to watch this weekend then, in more ways than one, is Chloé Zhao’s celebrated drama “Hamnet,” which has piled up audience awards at film festivals the last several weeks. Focus Features is platforming it in 100-plus theaters, and if you live in Southern California, you won’t have to drive too far to see this beautiful story of love and loss and transcendent catharsis.
What narrative will emerge? I’ll write more about “Hamnet” on Monday. For now, get thee to a theater and let me know what you think.
A crescendo is building, and the Rams might be best to ignore it.
So much can happen from week to week in the NFL — check out Philadelphia’s loss to Dallas — that the Rams can’t get too comfortable, even with the way they’re playing.
In the last five games, culminating with their 27-point stomping of Tampa Bay on Sunday night, the Rams have outscored opponents in the opening quarter, 63-3.
Matthew Stafford has thrown 27 touchdown passes without an interception.
In four of the games in this six-game winning streak, the Rams defense has allowed 10 points or fewer.
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Gary Klein breaks down what went right for the Rams in their 34-7 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at SoFi Stadium on Sunday night.
But it’s uncomfortably early for anyone in the organization to be thinking about Santa Clara in February. The Rams need to play with blinders on. Yes, they’ve secured the NFC’s No. 1 seed for the moment, but they have a one-game lead over the Eagles, who beat them earlier this season and therefore have the tiebreaker. There’s no wiggle room.
The glide path is far different than 2021, when the Rams wound up winning the Super Bowl on their home field. That season, they went 0-3 in November games.
This bears a closer resemblance to 2018, Sean McVay’s second season, when the last game before Thanksgiving was an instant classic at the Coliseum, Jared Goff and the Rams beating Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, 54-51.
There’s no ignoring that we’re watching something special in Stafford, who takes the snap, scans the field and delivers a laser with remarkable reliability. He processes with the speed of AI.
It was 10 years ago at Levi’s Stadium that Denver’s Peyton Manning, quarterbacking his second franchise, won his second Super Bowl ring and decided to retire.
Could that be Stafford? Second franchise. Potential for a second ring. Then again, Manning’s body was breaking down on him and he wasn’t at the top of his game. Those Broncos ran the ball and had a great defense.
Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford warms up before a 34-7 win over the Buccaneers at SoFi Stadium on Sunday.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
At the moment, Stafford is playing as well as anyone who has ever played the position. He looks nothing like a 37-year-old guy who sat out training camp with back problems.
His streak of 27 touchdown passes without a pick is, according to Elias, the longest such streak by any player since play-by-play was first tracked in 1978.
“It’s hard to conceptualize the fact that you can throw — put the ball in the end zone that much,” said Rams receiver Davante Adams, who has 12 touchdown receptions this season. “Most quarterbacks can’t throw 27 passes without throwing a pick.”
Stafford’s the leading most valuable player candidate, and this could be the season that secures him a bronze bust in Canton.
As for the poetry of him walking off the biggest stage the way Manning did, that’s all fantasy football now, especially with more than a quarter of the regular season remaining.
(A little more premature conjecture: It’s not inconceivable that the Rams and New England Patriots could meet in the Super Bowl for a third time.)
What is irrefutable is the Rams are continually deepening their foothold on the Los Angeles market. They set their regular-season attendance record Sunday night (75,545 tickets distributed), surpassing the mark they set a week earlier with a home game against Seattle.
This is what Rams owner Stan Kroenke was talking about when he brought the team back in 2016, and when he built SoFi Stadium with the idea of making the nearly-300-acre campus a center of gravity on the West Coast.
It’s not just home to the Rams and Chargers, but it’s the integral role the stadium will play in the World Cup, the 2028 Olympics, and in early 2027, the second Super Bowl it will host. No matter how you feel about UCLA trying to wriggle out of its Rose Bowl deal, there’s a reason the school has turned its attention to SoFi.
Kroenke always told his development team that undershooting L.A. would be a huge mistake, that the opportunity here was immeasurable.
“Sometimes when you’re a real estate developer, I think you have to be tremendously optimistic,” Kroenke told the Los Angeles Times. “You encounter so many issues. … With the NFL, you saw how difficult that whole thing was. So you had to be the optimist.
“Then you get a night like tonight, and it’s just awesome.”
Rams defensive end Kobie Turner reacts during player introductions before facing the Buccaneers on Sunday at SoFi Stadium.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
The stadium was loud and overwhelmingly blue, with only a sprinkling of Tampa Bay fans. That’s progress.
The peril for the Rams now is letting down their guard. They travel across the country next weekend to play at Carolina, a team that won four of five not so long ago, including an upset of Green Bay.
In his postgame news conference, cornerback Cobie Durant was asked how it feels to have the No. 1 seed in the conference.
“I didn’t know that,” he said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “I don’t keep up with that.”
It is a conspicuously indulgent place, where epicureans can fill their glasses with cabernet and sink into the carefully restored mezzanine’s dark velvet lounges for a tasting of fine caviar and artisan chocolates resembling museum pieces.
One vibe this nook of luxury does not give off is that of a community in distress. Its neighbor in the ornate 1920s Italianate edifice known as the Gordon Building is an Anthropologie store.
The redevelopment of the building, damaged in an earthquake, was bankrolled using a tax shelter created in 2017 for the wealthiest Americans on the promise it would bring opportunity to the most downtrodden places.
Billions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks for the wealthy are being generated by the Opportunity Zone program, often in pursuit of luxury high-rises, high-end hotels and swank office space. It has subsidized hulking self-storage units nestled alongside freeways and upmarket apartments for employees of the hottest Bay Area tech firms.
One thing the tax break has fallen short on: creating opportunities in low-income communities.
Opportunity zones were supposed to encourage investment in low-income communities. But billionaires are building luxury hotels and high-rises, instead.
“This has been perverted into a huge gift for people who did not need it,” said Aaron Seybert, managing director of social investment at the Kresge Foundation, which has found it difficult to put the tax break to work toward its effort to bring opportunity to America’s struggling communities.
“They are spending my money and yours. They said they would do that because these low-income areas are falling behind and they want to help people who live there,” Seybert said.
“The places I work in every day have raised virtually nothing” through the program, he said.
The same grievance can be heard from mayors of struggling towns throughout the nation. Among those declaring the program a bust is the East Baltimore pastor who went to the White House in 2018 to help President Trump unveil it. His community has been passed over as investors chase the double-digit returns that accompany the tax shelter in upscale markets.
The story of how this all happened has deep California roots, sprouting from the vision of a Silicon Valley billionaire who inserted himself into the machinations of federal policymaking.
The Opportunity Zone program was the vision of Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker, shown here in 2018.
(Michael Brochstein / Getty Images)
Sean Parker — founder of Napster, Facebook’s first president and the Silicon Valley bad boy depicted in the film “The Social Network” — seemed a stretch for this role.
Parker began working the Washington circuit late in the Obama era, when it was still hospitable to super-rich tech innovators but few had the patience or humility to navigate it. Washington is not about moving quickly and breaking things. Long, slow insider games of horse-trading precede almost every big new federal policy.
Yet Parker’s plan had bipartisan appeal. It focused on the wealth of Americans loath to reinvest their stock market, real estate and other capital gains profits because of the hefty tax bills that come when that money is moved. The idea was to give them a break on those taxes if they steered the money to communities desperate for investment.
“He really went to school on how Washington works,” said David Wessel, author of “Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age,” which chronicles Parker’s quest and what became of the program he championed. “He hired a couple of Washington insiders, one a Democrat and one a Republican, and they created this think tank with the goal of getting Opportunity Zones into law…. They laid the foundation by making the case that we have a problem with geographic inequality in the United States, and it is not just incremental.”
Parker held private dinners with lawmakers of competing ideological loyalties, and he donated generously across the aisle.
“The idea initially sounded great,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley Democrat who had been approached by Parker to run the think tank, called the Economic Innovation Group. “I was quite enthusiastic about it.” Khanna passed on the job offer, as he was gearing up for a congressional run at the time, but once elected, he would join the push behind the tax break.
Downtown Napa’s Opportunity Zone.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
The historic Franklin Station postal building, a site proposed for a boutique hotel, is in downtown Napa’s Opportunity Zone.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
It allows investors to park their capital gains in Opportunity Zone projects. When they do, they can put off paying taxes on those gains for years, and cut that tax bill by as much as 15% when it does come due. The bigger draw: If they keep their money in the Opportunity Zone project for a decade, they don’t pay any taxes at all on the potentially large profits they make off that investment. The cumulative cost of the incentive is $1.6 billion in foregone tax revenue per year, which the Urban Institute says makes it one of the largest federal programs for steering investment into distressed places.
It seemed a price worth paying for even some progressive Democrats like Khanna if the end result was a flourishing of opportunity in the nation’s economic deserts.
But the California dreaming was disrupted by Washington deal-making. There was no hearing or any public vetting of the measure by lawmakers before it got quietly tucked into the Trump tax cut package of 2017. The final regulations were astoundingly permissive, full of provisions that allowed census districts in some of the nation’s wealthiest places to qualify as Opportunity Zones.
“It has not been used in ways that actually ended up creating jobs,” Khanna said. “It has been gamed.”
The money often has flowed to projects promising big financial returns that analysts — including those on then-President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors — conclude would have happened without the tax break.
While Parker and his think tank remain bullish that with some tweaks Opportunity Zones will be the “Marshall Plan for the heartland” they promised, many erstwhile backers are angry about what the program has become.
Angel Barajas, a Yolo County supervisor, walks through an Opportunity Zone in Woodland, west of Sacramento, that he says has been left behind by the program.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
“Woodland needs housing, it needs infill development,” said Enrique Fernandez, the former mayor of the heavily Latino city west of Sacramento, which persuaded the state to designate two of its census tracts as Opportunity Zones. The tax break has drawn none of it.
“I am really skeptical about the true intentions of this law and how it was implemented,” Fernandez said.
The city of Woodland’s Opportunity Zone district is only an hour’s drive from Napa’s Gordon Building but is in a different universe economically, riddled with vacant lots and litter. It could be a ripe canvas for development as the nearby main street comes alive with new small businesses bolstered by home buyers and renters moving to the town in search of a cheaper alternative to Sacramento, but the tax break is doing nothing to speed that transition.
Jose Ahumada Ruelas gathers recyclables to help his daughter, who collects them for income, at Yolano Village, a low-income housing development in Woodland’s Opportunity Zone.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
On a recent tour of the area, local officials said the investment needed to revitalize the blighted swaths of their community might have come if lawmakers had made good on their promise to steer the incentives only to struggling communities.
There are 8,764 census tracts designated as Opportunity Zones nationwide. Only 16% of them attracted any projects in the gold rush for rich investors in the program’s first year, when the tax breaks were most lucrative, according to an April 2021 UC Berkeley report based on aggregate data from the IRS.
Nearly half the cash invested went to the richest 1% of Opportunity Zones — places that rarely fit the conventional definition of distressed. Data from the consulting firm Novogradac reveal California cities are getting more of that cash than anyplace else.
In Oakland, Opportunity Zone tax breaks are being used to build high-rise apartments on the waterfront; they’ll rent at market rate, far out of reach for most locals. The situation is the same in downtown Long Beach and in Los Angeles neighborhoods like Koreatown and Little Tokyo. In Portland, Ore., the tax break was used to build a Ritz Carlton hotel.
In January, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) launched an investigation into several of these projects, including one in Palm Beach, Fla., where the incentive is being used to build a marina for “super-yachts.”
Todd Zapolski used the Opportunity Zone program to draw investors to his renovation of the Gordon Building in downtown Napa, which is now home to an Anthropologie store and a wine bar.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
The Gordon Building developer said its renovation was possible because downtown Napa qualified as economically distressed under the Opportunity Zone program.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Back in Napa, the developer of the Gordon Building said the project will spur growth in a part of Northern California where underlying challenges of joblessness and housing affordability are obscured by the influx of wine vacationers. “We have some of the wealthiest in the country, and we have some of the poorest in the country,” Todd Zapolski said.
The landmark building was badly damaged in the 2014 South Napa earthquake, and Zapolski said repairing it was possible only because of the Opportunity Zone sweetener.
“We couldn’t make it work unless we had that incentive,” he said. “That gave us the extra oomph for investors to say, all right … we’ll take the risk.”
Parker declined to be interviewed, but the leader of the think tank he created took issue with scathing reviews of the program from community leaders, advocates and lawmakers who once saw promise in it. John Lettieri, president and chief executive of the Economic Innovation Group, said layering too many rules and restrictions onto the incentive would chase away investors.
“The trick is to get them to redeploy their capital without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops that would make it hard to access and leave communities in the same place they have been,” he said. “We were trying to create an incentive that can be relevant enough to a wide array of communities nationwide.”
States had broad authority on where to locate their Opportunity Zones, Lettieri said, and some were not judicious in drawing the maps. He said California, which drew the zones into some of the nation’s most wealthy enclaves, was one of the worst offenders.
California officials were not particularly invested in the federal program, which the Trump administration gave states scant time to shape or vet before they had to draw maps. The administration of then-Gov. Jerry Brown initially proposed an expedient process involving an algorithm. The federal rules were so permissive that the state’s draft maps included the campus of Stanford as an Opportunity Zone.
The downtown San Jose Opportunity Zone sits adjacent to the mega campus Google is building in the city.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Stanford and some others were removed from the program, but other pricey ZIP Codes stayed in amid lobbying by local politicians, economic development agencies and builders.
But the state’s ambivalence about Opportunity Zones is clear in its refusal to match the federal tax break with a credit investors in the projects can also claim on their state taxes. Officials in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration signaled to developers they believe the tax break is a giveaway. New York lawmakers gave their own vote of no confidence after the tax break was put to use for luxury projects in some of New York City’s most expensive ZIP Codes. The tax shelter last year was stripped from New York’s tax code.
Even so, there are cases of truly distressed communities making use of the credit.
An organization called SoLa Impact says it is leveraging the incentive to buy run-down residential properties in underserved neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and rehabilitate them for low-income tenants.
No state has had a bigger impact on the direction of the United States than California, a prolific incubator and exporter of outside-the-box policies and ideas. This occasional series examines what that has meant for the state and the country, and how far Washington is willing to go to spread California’s agenda as the state’s own struggles threaten its standing as the nation’s think tank.
Before he was slain, Los Angeles rap star Nipsey Hussle had plans to use it to invest in businesses in Crenshaw. The Central Valley city of Merced is looking to the tax break to bring its downtown back to life.
The place boosters point to most often is across the country in Erie, Pa., a city that is emblematic of the Rust Belt’s economic collapse. Community leaders say the incentive is crucial to the development of 12 residential and retail projects that will reshape the downtown.
But for every dollar the federal government is investing in Erie through the tax break, it is spending several more in downtown San Jose, a place hardly hurting for capital. The Opportunity Zone there sits adjacent to the future home of a sprawling Google campus that is so big it will reshape the footprint of the downtown, bringing in thousands of highly paid tech workers.
They will be able to stroll to a glistening residential tower getting built with the incentive, where 1,000-square-foot apartments will rent for $4,250 per month. The developer, Urban Catalyst, is not required to set aside anything for affordable housing beyond what the city requires for any other project. The building will have an infinity pool.
The Fountain Alley development in downtown San Jose’s Opportunity Zone will feature “the largest rooftop restaurant and bar in Silicon Valley.”
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Erik Hayden, founder, of Urban Catalyst.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
On a tour of San Jose’s Opportunity Zone building boom, Urban Catalyst founder Erik Hayden walked journalists through the construction of another stylish structure getting renovated with the tax break, with soaring ceilings and windows the size of movie screens. It will be home to a swank indoor miniature golf course and cocktail bar inspired by Burning Man. The complex will also house a venue for ax throwing and craft beer drinking.
Asked how such projects fit into the program’s goal of uplifting left-behind communities, Hayden points to properties downtown that remain vacant and boarded up, as the rapid gentrification and flood of investment in this community hopscotches across blocks. “It feels to me like a left-behind community,” he said. “We’re building a variety of different things, all of which are needed by downtown.”
It is hard to reconcile these luxury buildings in San Jose with the stated vision of Parker and that of the lawmaker who was the lead champion for the tax break, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican.
When Scott was invited to the White House in 2017 and asked by Trump how to make amends for the president’s remark that “there were very fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Scott secured Trump’s endorsement for Opportunity Zones.
The senator recounts in his book, “Opportunity Knocks,” how he made the pitch, telling Trump “that we must find fresh ways to alleviate the terrible poverty that is the source of so many of our ills — including the plague of racism.” Scott remains a proponent of the program, saying in a House hearing in November that the tens of billions invested in Opportunity Zone projects are, by the program’s definition, going to “low-income, high-poverty, racially diverse areas.”
The Paseo, a tech office space and retail building in downtown San Jose’s Opportunity Zone, will feature an indoor miniature golf course inspired by Burning Man.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
He pointed to new businesses in Columbia, S.C., an affordable housing development in Rockhill, N.C., and local enthusiasm for the program in Stockton. He acknowledged, though, that accurately measuring the tax shelter’s success is impossible, because there are no disclosure rules that allow taxpayers to learn “exactly what people are doing with the resources and the benefits and the incentives.” Scott says he wants more disclosure.
Those who have soured on the tax break say they have seen enough to know it is doing little to bring the country closer to Scott’s lofty goal of alleviating poverty and racism. But it is, they say, helping a lot of wealthy investors and developers of luxury properties.
One need only peruse the Lake Tahoe real estate ads for evidence.
Among the listings is an 8-acre property directly across the street from Heavenly Mountain Resort ski area. The price tag is $52 million. One selling point: The city has already greenlighted the property for a hotel or condos, shops and a large event space.
Another selling point: It is in an Opportunity Zone.
From Thuc Nhi Nguyen: During parts of Sunday’s game in Utah, LeBron James desperately motioned toward the Lakers bench for a sub. When asked after the game about a particularly labored stretch during the second quarter, James quipped that it wasn’t just that moment.
“First, second, third and fourth,” James joked Sunday in Utah. “Come get me.”
Two days later, James looked almost back to normal as he had season-high 25 points, showing he had no trouble pushing the pace in transition while the team was plus-18 with him on the court.
“It will get better every game,” James said Tuesday of his conditioning. “Today was another … testament to that. So great win for us, but I’m starting to feel better and better.”
Coach JJ Redick said the Lakers will be tracking James’ three-point shooting, play-making and transition points as indicators of how he is progressing in his return from sciatica that sidelined him for 14 games.
Chad Baker-Mazara scored 23 points, Jaden Brownell added 16 points, and USC claimed the Maui Invitational championship with an 88-75 victory over Arizona State on Wednesday.
Baker-Mazara won the tournament championship for the second consecutive year after scoring 14 points in Auburn’s 90-76 victory over Memphis last season. Baker-Mazara made nine of 16 shots from the field against Arizona State with four three-pointers.
USC took the first double-digit lead of the game at 77-66 with 5:14 remaining on a basket by Ezra Ausar. The Trojans drew an offensive foul under the ASU basket and Jordan Marsh sank a jumper from the free-throw line to make it 81-69.
On Wednesday, the Rams designated receiver Tutu Atwell and cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon to return from injured reserve. Both could play Sunday against the Carolina Panthers in Charlotte, N.C., coach Sean McVay said.
The Rams also placed cornerback Roger McCreary on injured reserve, claimed cornerback Derion Kendrick off waivers from the Seattle Seahawks and signed veteran tight end Nick Vannett to the roster.
Max Sasson and Drew O’Connor scored in a late 2:10 span, Nikita Tolopilo made 37 saves in his first NHL appearance of the season and the Vancouver Canucks beat the Ducks 5-4 on Wednesday night.
Sasson gave Vancouver the lead with 4:02 remaining on a tip, and O’Connor followed with 1:52 to go on a wrist shot. Cutter Gauthier got one back for the Ducks with seven seconds left, his 14th of the season.
Jackson LaCombe, Leo Carlsson and Mason McTavish added goals for the Ducks, who have three victories in the first five games of a six-game homestand.
1913 — Notre Dame and Texas meet for the first time in a Thanksgiving showdown. Both carry perfect records into the game, with Notre Dame not losing a game in three years and the Longhorns on a 12-game winning streak. The Fighting Irish build on a 10-7 halftime lead, scoring 20 unanswered points for a 30-7 win at Austin, Texas. The win gives Notre Dame a 7-0 season for rookie coach Jesse Harper.
1947 — Howie Dallmar of the Philadelphia Warriors sets an NBA record for the most field-goal attempts with none made (15) in an 81-59 loss to the New York Knicks.
1949 — Steve Van Buren of the Philadelphia Eagles becomes the second NFL player, the first in 16 years, to rush over 200 yards. He runs for 205 yards in a 34-17 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
1960 — Trailing 38-7, the Denver Broncos score 31 points to salvage a 38-38 tie with the Buffalo Bills.
1960 — Detroit’s Gordie Howe scores his 1,000th point with an assist, and the Red Wings beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 2-0. It’s Howe’s 938th NHL game.
1961 — Detroit’s Gordie Howe becomes the first to play 1,000 NHL games.
1965 — Gordie Howe becomes the first NHL player to score 600 goals. The milestone comes in Detroit’s 3-2 loss to the Montreal Canadiens.
1966 — The Washington Redskins set an NFL regular-season record for most points in a 72-41 victory over the New York Giants. Both teams also set records with 16 TDs and 113 total points.
1980 — Dave Williams returns Eddie Murray’s opening kickoff in overtime 95 yards to give the Chicago Bears a 23-17 victory over the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day. The Bears tied the score with no time remaining in regulation.
1994 — Joe Montana of the Kansas City Chiefs becomes the fifth quarterback to surpass 40,000 passing yards in a 10-9 loss at Seattle.
1998 — Texas’ Ricky Williams becomes the leading rusher in Division I-A history, breaking Tony Dorsett’s record set 22 years earlier.
2009 — Graham Gano kicks a 33-yard field goal in overtime to give the Las Vegas Locomotives a 20-17 victory over the Florida Tuskers in the inaugural UFL championship game.
2011 — The Connecticut women’s basketball team wins its 89th straight at home to set an NCAA record, beating Dayton 78-38 behind freshman Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis’ 23 points.
2015 — James Harden scores 50 points to lead Houston past Philadelphia 116-114 for the 76ers’ 27th straight loss dating to last season, the longest losing streak in major U.S. pro sports. The previous record was set by the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1976-77 and matched by the 76ers in 2013-14.
2016 — Justin Tucker makes all four of his field-goal attempts, including ones from 52, 54 and 57 yards, in Baltimore’s 19-14 victory over Cincinnati. Tucker has made 34 field goals in a row, including 27 this season, and has connected on all 15 conversion. It is Tucker’s 11th game with at least four field goals since entering the NFL in 2012.
Compiled by the Associated Press
Until next time…
That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at [email protected]. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.
NEW YORK — After President Trump’s reported intervention, Paramount Pictures is set to distribute Brett Ratner’s “Rush Hour 4,” a project that Hollywood had eschewed after earlier sexual misconduct allegations against the director.
Paramount Pictures on Tuesday was in closing talks to distribute the film, according to a person close to the negotiations who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to announce a deal. Paramount would be stepping in to take a distribution fee on the film, not finance it.
In 2017, during the #MeToo movement, six women said Ratner sexually harassed them in a Los Angeles Times report. Warner Bros., which had a $450-million co-financing deal with his production company, severed ties with Ratner. Ratner, who denied the allegations, hasn’t produced a film this decade.
But on Sunday, Semafor reported that Trump personally requested Paramount take on “Rush Hour 4.” Paramount recently merged with Skydance in an $8-billion deal that required regulatory approval from the Trump administration. Trump has praised the studio’s new chair and chief executive, David Ellison, the son of Oracle executive chair and prominent Trump supporter Larry Ellison.
The White House didn’t immediately comment Wednesday.
Ratner had been shopping “Rush Hour 4” after Warner Bros., which released the three previous films in the franchise, passed on the project. The movie would reteam Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in the action-comedy series launched in 1998, with sequels in 2001 and 2007.
Ratner has managed to get one other film made: a documentary on First Lady Melania Trump. Earlier this year, Amazon MGM Studios acquired the film for a reported $40 million. It’s set to open in theaters Jan. 30.
From Broderick Turner: Luka Doncic drilled a three-pointer right in front of the Clippers’ bench late in the first quarter and then glared at them, shaking his head as he ran back down court to play defense for the Lakers, just one of the many piercing stares he sent their way after delivering one of his three-point bombs.
It seems as if Doncic has his own personal rivalry against the Clippers and it just simply folded into the inter-city rivalry.
And once again, Doncic overwhelmed the Clippers in directing the Lakers to a 135-118 win Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena.
He came up one rebound shy of a triple-double, with 43 points, 13 assists and nine rebounds. He was 14 for 28 from the field, seven for 12 from three-point range and eight for 11 from the free-throw line.
In leading the Lakers to their fifth straight win, Doncic now has recorded 39 double-double games of at least 40 points, which moved him past Anthony Davis for the fourth most among active players and tying Magic Johnson for the sixth most 40-point double-doubles as a Laker.
From Ben Bolch: It was the sort of showing that left Mick Cronin with plenty to criticize, and he didn’t hold back.
In a somewhat subdued monologue after a loss that will probably knock his team out of the national rankings, the UCLA basketball coach lamented his team’s attitude, lack of toughness, inability to make free throws and shortage of savvy despite being filled with veterans.
His harshest verbal jab? Cronin saved that for himself.
“Look, I’m not happy with our performance,” Cronin said after the No. 18 Bruins’ 80-72 setback against California on Tuesday night at the Chase Center, “but I’ll take the blame. You guys can read the stat sheet, you saw the game, you make your own assessments, [but] when it comes to the game, how we play is my responsibility.”
From Ryan Kartje: When Lindsay Gottlieb put together a nonconference schedule she believed to be the hardest in the country, USC’s coach knew it would be an uphill climb. But that was the point. She wanted her team to be tested nightly, to play on “the biggest stages.”
“It’s not a schedule designed to win every nonconference game by an average of 40 points,” Gottlieb said earlier this month.
But after losing twice through a five-game gauntlet to start the season, a blowout nonconference win was precisely what the doctor ordered for USC.
Ezra Ausar and Chad Baker-Mazara combined for 31 of USC’s second-half points to rally the Trojans to an 83-81 victory over Seton Hall on Tuesday after losing leading scorer Rodney Rice to an injury in a Maui Invitational semifinal.
Ausur finished with a season-high 25 points, hitting 15 of 19 free throws, and Baker-Mazara scored 18 for the Trojans (6-0).
Adam Clark scored 18 points, AJ Staton-McCray 17, Mike Williams III 13 and Elijah Fisher 10 for the Pirates (6-1).
Rice brought the Trojans back from a 13-point deficit to get them within four at halftime, scoring 13 points, but left early in the second half with an apparent upper arm/shoulder injury and trailing 46-44. Baker-Mazara stepped up, scoring 12 points over the next five minutes with his 3 finishing a 10-0 run and putting the Trojans ahead 63-57 with 12 minutes to go.
From Sam Farmer: Rams defensive end Kobie Turner, a 294-pound man strong enough to carry a piano on his back, can also tap out a tune.
The country saw that Sunday night when, on two occasions, NBC aired video footage of Turner expertly playing a complex version of the “Sunday Night Football” theme song. He learned it by ear, then set up his phone to capture the clip.
The song was written by legendary composer John Williams and originally was called “Wide Receiver,” although NBC never adopted that name.
“He listened to it a couple of times and was able to play it and add his own flair,” NBC coordinating producer Rob Hyland said of Turner, who majored in music theory and composition at University of Richmond.
“I was completely blown away. Kobie has so much talent on the football field and just as much with musical instruments. His nickname, `The Conductor,’ is very fitting.”
From Kevin Baxter: Steve Cherundolo’s first season at LAFC ended in a penalty-kick shootout that decided one of the most compelling playoff games in MLS history. His final season ended in the same way last Saturday.
In between, Cherundolo proved to be one of the best coaches in league history, winning an MLS Cup, a U.S. Open Cup and more than 100 games in all competition in his short four-year stay. He took LAFC to a CONCACAF Champions League final and to the first round of the FIFA Club World Cup, compiling a resume no coach in MLS history can match.
And while his departure will clearly hurt, the club he leaves is in good shape with the core of its roster signed for next season. Of the 16 players Cherundolo used Saturday, just five — goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, defenders Nkosi Tafari and Ryan Raposo and midfielders Andrew Moran and Frankie Amaya — are out of contract.
1917 — The NHL is formed with five charter members: Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Maroons, Toronto Arenas, Ottawa Senators, Quebec Bulldogs. Frank Calder is elected president.
1949 — Boston College beats Holy Cross 76-0, with Al Cannava rushing for 229 yards.
1956 — In the Melbourne Olympics, Vyacheslav Ivanov of the Soviet Union wins the single sculls. After receiving the gold medal, he jumps up and down and accidentally drops it through the slats in the float and it sinks to the bottom of the lake.
1961 — Jerry Norton of St. Louis becomes the only NFL player to have four interceptions in a game twice. He picks off four, two for touchdowns, in the Cardinals’ 30-27 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
1988 — For the first time in their long rivalry, Notre Dame and USC enter the game undefeated and ranked Nos. 1-2. The top-ranked Fighting Irish win 27-10.
1989 — Willie “Flipper” Anderson of the Rams sets an NFL game record with 336 yards receiving. Anderson has 15 catches, one for a touchdown, in the Rams’ 20-17 overtime victory over the New Orleans Saints.
1994 — The Cleveland Cavaliers sets an NBA record by attempting just two free throws, during a 101-87 home victory over Golden State. John Williams and Tony Campbell go 1-for-1 from the line.
1995 — Dolphins QB Dan Marino sets NFL record with 343rd touchdown pass.
1997 — Charles Jones scores a school-record 53 points and Long Island University beats Division III Medgar Evers 179-62, breaking the NCAA record for margin of victory. The 117-point difference eclipses the mark of 97 set by Southern in a 154-57 victory over Patten in 1993.
1999 — Detroit’s Steve Yzerman scores his 600th career goal in the Red Wings’ 4-2 win against the Edmonton Oilers at Joe Louis Arena. He’s the 11th player in NHL history to reach 600 goals.
2005 — Defenseman Marek Malik ends the NHL’s longest shootout in the 15th round, fooling goalie Olie Kolzig with a trick shot to give the New York a 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals. Malik wins it by taking a shot with his stick between his skates.
2005 — Florida International ties an NCAA record by returning four interceptions for touchdowns in a 52-6 rout of rival Florida Atlantic.
2010 — UConn defeats Howard 86-25 to win its 82nd straight game, setting an NCAA women’s basketball record for consecutive victories.
2010 — Cam Newton passes for three touchdowns and runs for another, rallying No. 2 Auburn from a 24-point for a 28-27 victory over No. 9 Alabama that kept the Tigers on course for a shot at the national championship.
2011 — Illinois finishes the season with its sixth straight loss, 27-7 at Minnesota. The Illini become the first FBS team to open the regular-season with six straight wins and close it with six losses in a row.
2013 — Jordan Lynch breaks his single-game rushing record for quarterbacks with 321 yards, and No. 18 Northern Illinois completes its first unbeaten regular season in 50 years with a 33-14 victory over Western Michigan.
2016 — Nate Peterman throws for 251 yards and four TDs and runs for another score to lead Pittsburgh past Syracuse 76-61 — the most combined points for a regulation FBS game.
2016 — Will Worth accounts for four touchdowns while becoming the first Navy quarterback with more than 100 yards rushing and 100 yards passing in three consecutive games when the Midshipmen rout SMU 75-31. The Midshipmen, who beat East Carolina 66-31 the previous week, have consecutive 60-point games for the first time since 1917.
2017 — Julio Jones finishes with 12 receptions for 253 yards and two touchdowns in Atlanta’s 34-20 victory against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It’s Jones’ third career game with at least 250 yards receiving; no other player has more than one.
Compiled by the Associated Press
Until next time…
That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at [email protected]. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.
As the Liberty Van rolled into the Home Depot, its driver slowed, lowered the window and waved at day laborers standing around the parking lot.
It had rained all morning and the overcast clouds trapped a chill in the air. Still, on a recent Friday, day laborers milled around even as it began to drizzle again. A pastor, a Navy veteran, an immigration lawyer and cameraman got out of the Liberty Van — camioneta de la libertad in Spanish — and greeted the day laborers while offering them water and snacks.
Since June in Los Angeles, federal immigration agents have destabilized daily life by raiding neighborhoods, worksites and Home Depots — popular gathering spots for day laborers who often lack U.S. citizenship. In turn, several “rapid-response” organizations have surged into action to aid those targeted in the raids, and document their treatment.
One of these organizations is the Save America Movement, which runs the Liberty Vans and includes a bipartisan leadership that is far more politically connected than that of many grassroots organizations. The group was founded by Steve Schmidt, a former top aide to Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Mary Corcoran, a longtime public relations specialist, with a steering committee that includes law professors, pastors and strategists.
On this particular Friday, Fabian Núñez — a member of that steering committee who previously served as speaker of the California Assembly — was one of those who hopped out of the Liberty Van. He chatted with a day laborer who stopped by to grab a snack, and explained they were there to film any interactions with federal agents, as part of their national rapid-response effort.
The day laborer said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have previously detained other workers at the Panorama City Home Depot and have returned frequently. “Many times,” he said. “Five or six.”
Despite the repeated raids, the laborer said workers like himself have little choice but to keep showing up.
“They have to keep coming,” he said. “One has to pay the bills.”
The Save America Movement launched the vans first in L.A. and then in Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., where federal immigration agents were raiding heavily Latino areas. The motivation behind the project was to provide support and help people understand the impact of the daily immigration raids, Corcoran said in an interview. Outside California, she said, many people don’t get it.
“If they did, I believe there would be much more urgency around what’s happening,” she said.
The teams that run the vans document and record video, with the footage published online so the public can watch the enforcement actions and hear testimonies from affected local residents, she said.
Fabian Núñez, a Save America Movement steering committee member who previously served as speaker of the California Assembly, talks with a laborer who stopped by the Liberty Van for some snacks in the parking lot of a Panorama City Home Depot on Nov. 21, 2025.
City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez — whose district spans from Highland Park, Chinatown and south to Pico-Union — welcomed the group’s effort, which she described as a tool in a movement of resistance.
Alejandro Maciel, the L.A. bureau chief for the organization and a former Los Angeles Times journalist, takes the van out roughly five times a week, starting around 6 a.m. and wrapping up late into the afternoon. Maciel and volunteers drive to Home Depots across Southern California, going north to Ventura County, east to the Inland Empire and south to Orange County.
On Friday, the van ride included the Rev. Madison Jones McAleese, Navy veteran Brian Kelly and immigration lawyer Juan Jose Gutierrez, who can offer legal support to families or offer “know your right” basics to laborers. And to capture it all was cameraman René Miranda, who started covering raids when a large protest broke out in Paramount, where he lives.
For McAleese, she said she felt it was her duty to be part of the effort to stand against the raids because of what she views as unlawful actions being taken by ICE enforcement. McAleese carries holy water and offers to pray with any one who seeks prayer.
“I don’t feel like I have a choice,” she said. “God is reflected in the face of every immigrant, documented and undocumented.”
As they headed to the next location, Maciel pulled up on his phone StopIce.Net, a website on which people submit reports of ICE activity. Just the day before, there was a raid in Long Beach, later confirmed by local media reports, and nine people were detained by masked agents, an L.A. County official said.
The San Fernando Valley was quiet that Friday, but Maciel said it has been important to establish and maintain relationships with both workers and organizers who have created rapid response networks. When he drives the van to a site, he said, he greets such organizers and makes sure the laborers understand they are there to help.
Ernesto Ayala, the site coordinator at the Van Nuys Day Labor Center in the Home Depot parking lot, said ICE agents have been to the site several times, as recently as a few weeks ago. At the Van Nuys Home Depot, volunteers monitor each entry point of the parking lot and alert the center of any suspicious vehicles that could contain federal agents.
“It’s very traumatic,” Ayala said of the continuing raids. Ayala himself was detained and sprayed with an irritant by agents after they held him down and accused him of interfering. He was arrested but never charged with any crime, he said.
Organizations such as the Save America Movement help with videos and other documentation that could be used in potential litigation against ICE in the future, Ayala said. He said his arrest was recorded from a distance by a witness.
In October, the organization said video by a Save America Movement photojournalist in Chicago recorded federal agents deploying tear gas against protesters and pointing weapons at journalists, which at the time violated a federal court order. The organization made that footage available online with time stamps and annotations.
Along with documenting interactions, Núñez said, the group hopes to remind ICE agents of the human impact and make them question their actions, and to move viewers. Such footage, he said, could help Americans see “that these Gestapo-like tactics are happening and they’re being utilized with our tax dollars.”
“We think we can convince them to move, to think more compassionately about people and think: Is this the America I signed up for?”
California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids this year in Los Angeles and across the nation, according to a new poll.
Just over half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% are against deporting everyone in the nation who doesn’t have legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.
But there is an acute difference in opinions based on political leanings.
Nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% are against deporting everyone in the country who is undocumented, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 5% are against reducing the entries and 10% don’t believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave.
“The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “On these perspectives, they fall pretty clearly along party lines. While there’s some variation within the parties by things like age and race, really, the big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”
While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely mirrored the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.
One remarkable finding was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or were acquainted with someone in their family or friend groups directly affected by the deportation efforts, Lerman said.
“That’s a really substantial proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are concerned enough about deportation efforts that they’re not sending their kids to school, not shopping in local stores, not going to work,” not seeking medical care or attending church services.
The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to cast ballots because they are not citizens.
A little more than 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the secretary of state’s office.
“So if we think about the California population generally, this is a really significant underestimate of the effects, even though we’re seeing really substantial effects on communities,” she said.
Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that spiked in June, creating both fear and outrage in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to, federal officials said, protect federal immigration officials.
The months since have been chaotic, with masked, armed agents randomly pulling people — most of whom are Latino — off the streets and out of their workplaces and sending many to detention facilities, where some have died. Some deportees were flown to an El Salvador prison. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by state officials and civil rights groups.
In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued a ruling temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal and lifted that order, while the case moves forward.
More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the Los Angeles area by federal authorities since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids that have taken place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House’s oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document misconduct and abuse during ICE raids.
While Republican voters largely aligned with Trump’s actions on deportations, 16% said that they believed that the deportations will worsen the state’s economy.
Lerman said the university planned to study whether these numbers changed as the impacts on the economy are felt more greatly.
“If it continues to affect people, particularly, as we see really high rates of effects on the workforce, so construction, agriculture, all of the places where we’re as an economy really reliant [on immigrant labor], I can imagine some of these starting to shift even among Republicans,” she said.
Among Latinos, whose support of Trump grew in the 2024 election, there are multiple indications of growing dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.
Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies have harmed their community, compared to 69% in 2019 during his first term, according to a national poll of adults in the United States released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on Monday. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts had gone too far, an increase from 56% in March. And it was the first time in the two decades that Pew has conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their standing in the United States had worsened increased, with more than two-thirds expressing the sentiment.
Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that one-third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump rue their decision, according to a national poll.
Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among the Latino voters who supported Trump in November because of financial struggles.
“I was tired of struggling, I was tired of seeing my friends closing businesses,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years we just had’ … I was sad and I was heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s the reason why I went that way.”
The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”
He grew disgusted watching the raids that unfolded in Los Angeles earlier this year.
“They’re taking fruit vendors, day laborers, that’s the worst of the worst to you?” he remembered thinking.
Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East L.A., Gavidia recounted being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello tow yard. Agents shoved him against a metal gate, demanding to know what hospital he was born at after he said he was an American citizen, according to video of the incident.
After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.
“At that moment, I was the criminal, at that moment I was the worst of the worst, which is crazy because I went to go see who they were getting — the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But turns out when I got there, I was the worst of the worst.”
The Lakers made two announcements Tuesday, saying that center Deandre Ayton was out for the game against the Clippers at Cyrpto.com Arena because of a bruised right knee and that they had signed forward Drew Timme to a two-way contract.
The team also announced that it had waived two-way center Christian Koloko.
Timme had played for the Lakers’ G League team, the South Bay Lakers, and posted averages of 25.5 points, 7.5 rebounds and 4.0 assists in 25.5 minutes during six games.
The 6-10 Timme played his college basketball at Gonzaga.
“I talked to [Lakers president of basketball operations] Rob [Pelinka] and everyone yesterday, last night and they told me,” Timme said after the Lakers’ shootaround Tuesday. “I was just super excited. It’s super cool.”
Jaxson Hayes will start at center in place of Ayton in the NBA Cup game.
