programming

This month’s LA Jazz Festival was slated to be one of the largest concerts in Los Angeles history.

With dozens of performances spread throughout every City Council district, organizers hoped the shows would draw 250,000 attendees and inaugurate the city as a home for jazz events on par with New Orleans and Montreal.

Those hopes will have to wait, as organizers announced the cancellation and postponement of the festival on Friday, including its main show Aug. 22-23 on Dockweiler Beach.

“Due to significant, unanticipated last-minute public safety and municipal costs associated with the final permitting of the On The Beach Festival, we have reached the decision to unfortunately postpone this year’s inaugural LA Jazz Festival,” organizer Martin Ludlow said in a statement to the Times. “Although this decision was an extremely difficult one to reach, our commitment to the audiences and artists participating in the festival is to have a first-class experience worthy of the great legacy of Jazz and our great city. We were encouraged by the enthusiastic support of the artists on the bill, the fans and our sponsors for this inaugural event, and we look forward to presenting all of the components of this incredible cultural opportunity for Los Angeles and the world in 2027 and beyond.”

John Legend, Janelle Monáe, Charlie Wilson, Parliament Funkadelic and Raphael Saadiq were booked to headline the main show.

“We are so grateful to all the artists–from our headliners to our musicians in the parks, many of whom went above and beyond to make this affordable to the community,” Ludlow added. “All current ticket holders for LA Jazz Festival events will be refunded in full within 30 days. We apologize deeply for this situation and vow to make this right over time.”

LA Jazz Festival was a major project for Ludlow, a former Los Angeles City Council member turned music promoter and community activist after pleading guilty to misappropriating funds in 2006.

Ludlow announced the show in a splashy speech on the steps of City Hall in February, flanked by Mayor Karen Bass and other civic leaders. “During this journey, you can only imagine there’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows,” Ludlow said then. “When you have those lows, you want a friend that really can lift you up.”

Back in February, Ludlow described the mission of LA Jazz Festival with a civil rights-inspired fervor, saying that “This festival is intended to lift up our ancestors that came to this country in bondage, terrorized, brutalized. It’s also about celebrating the end to those last bastions of Jim Crow racism, the days we were denied access to public drinking fountains, public swimming pools and public beaches. From the beginning of this journey, we’ve been very intentional about telling the narrative of that human rights struggle called Jazz.”

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Thursday announced its inaugural film programming, which will be screened nonstop during museum hours in two dedicated 299-seat theaters. Entry to the theaters is included with each general admission ticket, and visitors can enter and exit at any time, creating a free-flowing set of ancillary exhibition spaces with a goal of furthering the museum’s mission of exploring storytelling in its many forms.

One of the theaters will play museum co-founder George Lucas’ student films, made between 1965 and 1969, among other rare offerings. A schedule of screenings will be provided to visitors as they enter so they can plan their day around what they’d like to see, and programming will be changed periodically through the year. The theaters will also be used for special events.

“The film program, like so much in the museum, is unique in its structure and content. It is an open-door program that runs continuously throughout the day, allowing people to come and go at their leisure,” Ryan Linkof, senior curator and head of the museum’s film programs, wrote in an email. The news was first revealed Thursday during a Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con. “In this way, it fits within the larger mission of the museum to allow visitors to choose their own path through the museum and discover content at their own pace. It is also a varied and diverse program that includes everything from the earliest cinema experiments to avant-garde film, documentaries and animation, providing a platform for many underrecognized and rarely seen films and filmmakers.”

Adjacent to each other on the ground floor, off the north lobby of the $1-billion museum, the theaters are named after two giants of film history: Robert J. Flaherty, whose 1922 silent film “Nanook of the North” revolutionized documentary filmmaking; and early Hollywood montagist, cinematic artist and experimental filmmaker Slavko Vorkapich, who also served as chair of the USC film department from 1948 to 1950, more than a decade before Lucas enrolled in the program.

Two 299-seat theaters will be located on the ground floor of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opens to the public Sept. 22.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

The Flaherty theater will be dedicated to documentaries, including those that chronicle the work and artistic process of many of the artists and storytellers featured in the museum’s opening exhibitions such as Norman Rockwell, Jim Lee, Charles M. Schulz, Maurice Sendak, Diego Rivera, J.C. Leyendecker and Weegee. The museum will also screen “Seeing Is Believing: The Story of Narrative Art,” a new documentary series it commissioned from Robin Dashwood. It will also show episodes of the 2024 television series “The Power of Film,” created by Howard Suber and directed by Laura Gabbert, and the 1988 Ron Mann-directed doc “Comic Book Confidential.”

The experience will be more avant-garde in the Vorkapich theater, which will contain programming “showcasing cinematic innovation and imagination through experimental and formally inventive short films that speak to the essence of cinema: the magic of seeing still images come to life,” wrote Linkof.

Offerings include Lucas’ student films, as well as montage sequences by Vorkapich for movies like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”; silent films by Georges Méliès, Émile Cohl, W.K.L. Dickson, Edwin S. Porter and more; early animations by Winsor McCay; experimental films created by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy; early sound animations by Walt Disney and Fleischer Studios; experimental films by Canadian animator Norman McLaren; Looney Tunes cartoons; abstract “visual music” works by Mary Ellen Bute, Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson and others; excerpts from Busby Berkeley musicals; experimental films from the 1960s by Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger; experimental animation by Vince Collins; “Cowboy Bebop”; and an episode of “Star Wars: Visions.”

The Lucas Museum opens Sept. 22. Tickets went on sale Tuesday and were going briskly, with digital wait times reported of more than four hours in queues with as many as 13,000 guests. Museum representatives declined to comment on how many sold that first day, noting, “We’re grateful for the response and early enthusiasm from our Founding Member community and first wave of visitors. We look forward to welcoming them in September.”

Veteran MS NOW anchor Alex Witt is leaving the news network, which is moving away from live programming on the weekends.

The new weekend programming strategy announced Friday is a cost-saving measure that will give parent company Versant more resources for a new direct-to-consumer streaming offering that makes MS NOW available to consumers without a pay-TV subscription. The company is also looking to expand its live event business.

According to a memo from MS NOW President Rebecca Kutler, “The Weekend: Primetime,” a live discussion program launched last year, will have its final airing Saturday.

One of the program’s co-hosts, Antonia Hylton, will take over Witt’s midday shifts later this year. Hylton’s co-hosts Ayman Mohyeldin, Catherine Rampell, and Elise Jordan, will remain with MS NOW and continue to appear on other programs.

Kutler said job losses from the moves are minimal and encouraged staffers who lose their current roles to apply for 40 current job openings at the company with more on the way. MS NOW has been staffing up its news operation since separating from NBC News last year.

MS NOW changed its name from MSNBC in November. The network, along with other Comcast-owned cable channels, were spun off into Versant in January.

Weekends have long been a ratings weak spot for MS NOW, which while a distant second to Fox News, has seen audience growth in 2026 and remains ahead of CNN. The network has started to rely on podcasts such as “Pod Save America, from Crooked Media to fill some hours. The episodes have performed strongly enough for MS NOW to try similar deals with outside podcast producers.

“Throughout the summer, we will expand our taped strategy and announce new content partnerships,” Kutler said in her memo.

With the changes, MS NOW will still have 20 hours of live programming each weekend and will be staffed to handle breaking news.

Witt joined the network formerly known as MSNBC in 1999, long before it began its strong tilt toward progressive political commentary. Over the years, Witt’s weekend newscast became one of the few programs on the network that delivered straight news without opinion.

Kutler called Witt “a beloved longtime member of our MS NOW family” and “a continued, trusted, and steady presence for our audiences.”

While Witt works through the summer, Hylton will anchor the 11 a.m. weekday time period, which will eventually be handled by former NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander.

Snowboarding made its Winter Olympics debut in Nagano 1998 with halfpipe and giant slalom.

Riders competed against the clock before the head-to-head parallel giant slalom version on identical, side-by-side courses was introduced four years later in Salt Lake City.

Three-time Winter Olympian Alex Payer said: “PGS is one of the only formats where everything is truly equal – same course, same conditions, same start, same chance. That fairness is rare in sport.

“If you take it out of the Olympic programme, you take away one of the purest expressions of competition we have.”

Among the sports bidding to replace them in the programme for the Games, which are scheduled for 1-17 February 2030, are freeriding and ice climbing.

Freeriding allows skiers and snowboarders to choose their own off-piste course from top to bottom and also perform tricks as they descend.

They are judged on elements of their descent including the difficulty of the course, jumps and performance.

In ice climbing, competitors climb up a frozen waterfall or glaciers with a speed version favourite for inclusion.

There had been speculation that cyclo-cross would be also be aiming for inclusion but last month IOC president Kirsty Coventry said that “no summer sports and no seasonal crossover events” would be part of the programme.