AMC Santa Monica 7 Hanna Monday, 5/9/11, 7:35 pm Price: $11.75 Concessions: None Audience: seven people, in a theater that seats about 225. Trailers/advertising: AMC’s First Look stuff, with ads for Gatorade, Coke, a Sprint “no talking ad” featuring a clip from The Notebook, and two ads for live transmission events from Fathom: “Their Eyes […]

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Laemmle Monica 4 Win Win Sunday, 5/8/11, 4:55 pm Price: $11.00 Concessions: None Audience: 40-50 people, which I thought was a not-bad showing. Trailers/advertising: Trailers for Midnight in Paris, Tree of Life, The Double Hour, The Arbor, and The Big Uneasy. Projection: 35mm platter, with no issues This theater is new to me. I always […]

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Arclight Sherman Oaks Fast Five Saturday, 5/7/11, 8:00 pm Price: $13.50 (and that’s with a dollar off for buying the ticket using the Arclight iPhone app) Concessions: None Audience: The approximately 200-seat theater was mostly full on this Saturday night. Trailers/advertising: as with all Arclight theaters, no ads, a godsend. Trailers for X-Men First Class, […]

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Los Feliz 3 Bill Cunningham New York Friday, 5/6/11, 7:00 pm Price: $9.50 Concessions: None Audience: About 30, out of 60 seats total. Trailers/advertising: trailers for Hanna (already showing on another screen in this theater) and Green Lantern, which got universal laughter, which was probably not its intent. Projection 35mm, with the right side in […]

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Mann Grauman’s Chinese Paul Thursday, 5/5/11, 8:00 pm Price: $11.75 Concessions: None Audience: In an auditorium that seats about 1,500, I counted eight of us. Trailers/advertising: A ton. Ads for The L. A. Times, Movietickets.com, Mountain Dew, Orville Redenbacher, Caesar’s Palace, a Pirates of the Caribbean app, Ford, Rihanna’s perfume, an Allstate ad with Liz […]

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It all had to come to an end sometime, right? My third game of the day brought two new and formidable opponents, and once again, I felt the same during this game as I did during the others: out-gunned. I don’t know if I just never got the hang of it, or if I was […]

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Once again, I did not expect to be running back to the dressing room between shows as the Jeopardy! champion, but I excitedly changed into another dress shirt and headed back out on stage. I was up against two more formidable opponents, and once again felt somewhat out-gunned on the buzzer. Watching the show tonight, […]

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My first two games taped on a Friday, but the crew wasn’t due to return to taping until more than a week later, on that next Tuesday. I think it was related to the IBM Challenge; either way, it gave me ten days of being the reigning Jeopardy! champion, without of course being able to […]

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I began my second game, the last game to be taped that day, happy that I had won once and aware that I should be satisfied with that outcome. Of course, once you win once, you start thinking “Hey, I like this, I can keep this up,” and you don’t want to the feeling to […]

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On the morning of the big day, Aimee and Grace dropped me off at the Sony Studios lot at 8:30, just after we saw the Radisson shuttle pull in bringing out-of-town contestants from the hotel. I was glad to have been to a taping before, having seen how the process works and gotten some of […]

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I’m going to be on Jeopardy! tomorrow night. This is the story of how that happened. I wasn’t a huge Jeopardy! watcher as a kid, and watched even less of it as an adult, but I’ve always enjoyed playing along at home, and it’s hard not to be amazed at the show’s longevity. At various […]

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Now that we’re home for awhile, we had a chance to venture out to explore another Los ANgeles “small town,” after our trips to Calabasas and Montrose. This time, it was another spot we’d previously visited, but one we hadn’t really explored: South Pasadena. It’s a beautiful spot, with lot of independent businesses, picturesque neighborhoods, […]

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One last report from our European trip: the night I spent playing arcade games and taking photobooth photos in a house packed full of mid-century American amusement machines in superb condition in a suburb of Amsterdam. It sounds a little unlikely, but it’s true. I’d been in touch with Peter and Ina about their beautiful […]

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I’d never been to Amsterdam before, and was very excited to spend some time in this city I’d heard so much about. It lived up to all of the hype, and I fell in love with the place as soon as we arrived. A compact city center, beautiful canals and streets everywhere you look, vibrant […]

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When it seemed like spending time in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam would be a little too ambitious for the time we had, we cut out Brussels as an overnight stay. Instead, I made plans for a day trip from Paris in order to visit my holy grail, the Musée Hergé in Louvain-la-Neuve, about an hour […]

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