Once Upon a Time in South Central LA: John Si...

Todd Berliner's Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece (U Texas Press, 2026) examines Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky with stands out in the history of Hollywood. After a troubled production, massive cost overruns, and lawsuits between May a ...  Show more

Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself ...  Show more

Topics covered include: seeing your first movie at the neighborhood theater, the pressures of live performance, the animal that is the audience, parallels between directing and motherhood, abandoning the miracle, autobiographical filmmaking, feeling like broccoli, the Pacific Oce ...  Show more

Sean and Amanda welcome author Chuck Klosterman to dive deep into two fascinating topics. The first is Adam Curtis' sprawling six-part documentary series 'Can't Get You Out of My Head,' which explores the absurdity of modern life and the intersections of power, drugs, culture, an ...  Show more

The former Los Angeles Times film critic reflects on his path from Brooklyn to Hollywood, the current state of film criticism and the LA Times, and what inspired him to spend four years writing the first dual-biography in 50 years of MGM's two most legendary executives. Learn mor ...  Show more