ALERT: The California Department of Public Health has issued an alert after finding “very strong evidence” that an adult film actor became infected with HIV and infected at least one other performer during a Nevada film shoot. The alert, which recommends production houses require adult film actors to wear condoms, has reignited a debate between supporters of mandatory condom use in adult films and industry professionals who believe their testing protocols make condoms unnecessary. Measure B, an initiative approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2012, requires condom usage on adult film sets in the county, but its major proponent, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, has been unsuccessful in its quest to get a similar law passed statewide. The foundation is collecting signatures to get a ballot initiative before California voters in 2016.
SELL: In the latest chapter of the American Apparel Inc. saga, Lion Capital, a London investment firm that formerly backed the embattled downtown L.A. clothing maker, reportedly has urged the company to consider a buyout. Several news outlets reported that American Apparel’s board received a letter from Lion asking the company to form a special committee to review its options. While American Apparel declined to comment on the letter, a spokeswoman for the company did refute a New York Post report that said it was planning to slow production at its L.A. manufacturing plant as a cost-saving move. Workers have been logging overtime hours for the holiday rush, the spokeswoman said, and the postholiday hours are simply a return to business as usual.
BILLIONS: “Interstellar,” “Godzilla” and the final film in “The Hobbit” franchise drove Burbank’s Warner Bros. Entertainment past $3 billion at the international box office in 2014. The foreign box-office total includes nine films that each took in more than $100 million. “Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” and “Interstellar,” a co-production with Paramount Pictures, grossed more than $400 million each internationally. “Godzilla,” a co-production with Burbank production company Legendary Entertainment, took in $327 million overseas.
RECORD: Los Angeles International Airport has remained on pace for a record year in 2014, according to the latest figures from airport operator Los Angeles World Airports. Through November, 64.7 million passengers moved through the airport, a 6.3 percent increase over the same period last year. Assuming the airport serves more than 5 million passengers in December, as it did in the prior three years, LAX will easily surpass its previous busiest year. The airport’s passenger count peaked at 67.3 million in 2000; 2013 was the airport’s second best, with 66.7 million.
LAYOFFS: Mattress manufacturer Serta Simmons Holdings of Hoffman Estates, Ill., will close its Compton plant and lay off 94 people, beginning Jan. 5. In the fall of 2013, the company announced it was consolidating the supply chains for its two brands, Serta and Simmons, into one operation. Since then, the company has reduced the number of its domestic plants to 23 from 40.
HYPE: Culver City studio Sony Pictures Entertainment’s “The Interview” took in $18 million on its opening weekend, driven by the hype of a cyberattack that the FBI has blamed on North Korea. The film earned more than $15 million in online sales purchased through Google Inc.’s YouTube and Google Play, Microsoft Inc.’s Xbox Video and the Sony-created website SeetheInterview.com. It took in additional $2.8 million at the roughly 300 independent theaters that agreed to show the film. Typically, the country’s major theater circuits guard their right to exclusively debut movies by refusing to play films that are also debuting online. However, since all of the major theater chains in the United States had refused to show the film, following threats of Sept. 11-style attacks from Sony’s hackers, the studio had the freedom to experiment, successfully, with video on demand.
SHOW’S OVER: Sixteen months after its debut, the Long Beach Register published its final issue the weekend after Christmas and will close, marking the latest chapter in a saga of cutbacks by Freedom Communications, which also owns the Orange County Register. The closure came at the end of a rocky year for Freedom. In 2014, in addition to closing both its Long Beach and L.A. newspapers, the company made extreme cuts to staff at the Orange County Register and the Press-Enterprise in Riverside. In October, the Los Angeles Times sued Freedom, saying it had failed to pay $2.5 million it owed the newspaper for delivering its papers. Then, in November, it was revealed that the Orange County Register had offered to pay reporters and other employees to start delivering papers themselves.
EMBEZZLEMENT: Danny Ray Wooten, a former Pasadena city employee, was arrested Tuesday along with two other people suspected of using a City Hall slush fund to embezzle more than $6 million in taxpayer money. Wooten, who is a preacher, allegedly wrote nearly 300 fraudulent invoices to the city on behalf of four bogus vendors while he was a management analyst in the city’s Department of Public Works. In response to those invoices, the city issued 189 checks totaling $6.4 million. Then, Wooten allegedly removed the money from an account that funds a utility line project and funneled it through two local churches, including New Covenant Christian Fellowship Center in Pomona, where he is a senior pastor.
BEIJING: Ryan Kavanaugh’s Beverly Hills studio Relativity Media is one of the first two companies to back a new film school being developed outside Beijing, as Hollywood pushes to expand its presence in the region. Base FX, a Beijing digital effects house, is the other backer. The two companies will help design the curriculum for the Dachang Film and Media Industrial Park, now under construction. They will also form a strategic committee to attract film and media talent to the project. Relativity is supporting the venture through Relativity Education, an arm of the studio that oversees downtown L.A.’s Relativity School at Los Angeles Center Studios, which is a branch campus of Philadelphia’s Hussian School of Art.
