Shortly after Osama bin Laden was killed, Brad Burlingame, chief executive of Visit West Hollywood, received a small but meaningful gift: a CIA shot glass. It had to do with the fact that Burlingame’s brother, Charles, was one of the pilots of the jet that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

That glass was given to him by his friend, Monterey restaurateur Ted Balestreri, who had jokingly challenged his customer and longtime pal, Leon Panetta, a sip of the restaurant’s most expensive wine if Panetta, then the CIA chief, captured bin Laden.

Burlingame, 62, said one quirk in the story was how the two men finally drank the $10,000 bottle of wine.

“(Balestreri) called me up and said, ‘What people don’t know is we didn’t drink the bottle out of wine glasses. We drank the wine out of CIA shot glasses,’” Burlingame said. “A week later he sent me the glass and said, ‘I want you to have one of the shot glasses.’”

Hip-Hop Spin

When Stephen Housden was producing “Welcome to Death Row: The Rise and Fall of Death Row Records,” a 2001 documentary chronicling Suge Knight’s record label during the 1990s, he got pushback from the very subjects he was covering.

“Suge wouldn’t talk to us,” said Housden, the 51-year-old chief operating officer of Hawthorne’s Xenon Pictures Inc. “He said we’re snitches and rats.”

Still, Housden, director Leigh Savidge and producer Jeff Scheftel gained unprecedented access to Michael Harris, a convicted drug dealer whose money initially financed the record label, while he was behind bars. By the time the documentary was being done, Knight and Harris had had a falling out.

“Suge probably thinks we are somehow in cahoots with Michael Harris, but we just wanted an objective journalistic story,” Housden said.

In addition to derision from Knight, Xenon received phoned-in death threats.

“They called me Mr. Hous-dead,” Housden said. “I took different routes home at night. It was a surreal time.”

Now that “Straight Outta Compton,” which was informed by the documentary, has made box-office gold, some have changed their tune, enough that the notion of reshooting the documentary as a feature is being shopped around as a sequel to “Compton.”

Housden even got a nod from an N.W.A member.

“At the premiere of ‘Compton,’ Ice Cube said, ‘That is a tight doc,’ which I think means he likes it,” Housden said.

Staff reporters Subrina Hudson and Hannah Miet contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].