Turning the Tables
KTLA-TV Channel 5, perhaps envious over the attention KCBS-TV Channel 2 received from its recent news series on unsanitary eateries, made its rival eat a little crow.
Channel 5 led its 10 p.m. newscast on Dec. 3 with an item about a threatened shutdown of Channel 2’s commissary by county health authorities. The station reportedly failed to renew its public health license, which had expired June 30.
The cost in June would have been $469. But with late fees, it stood last week at $586.
Who’s Hungry?
While we’re on the subject, if you think getting one’s restaurant on KCBS’s “Failing 2,000” list (a compilation of restaurants with failing grades on health inspections) is bad, it can always get worse. The King Bowl restaurant on Sunset Boulevard was misspelled on the station’s Web site version of the list. It’s listed as King Bowel.
Kiss the Hall Goodbye
The location of last week’s party celebrating the soon-to-be built Staples Center, the downtown arena that will house the Kings hockey team and Lakers basketball team, was both fitting and ironic: the North Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center, which soon will be leveled to make room for the arena.
That fact was not lost on Tim Leiweke, president of the L.A. Kings. “This is the last event you will ever attend in North Hall,” Leiweke ominously told the party’s guests.
“In about three weeks, this building will start to go away,” reiterated John Semcken, a Majestic Realty Co. vice president who worked on the arena deal.
Meaty Role for ‘Roastbeef’
Hollywood producers who want to get a tough guy to play a tough guy call Johnny “Roastbeef” Williams, who is co-starring in the NBC miniseries about mob turncoat Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.
“I come from Harlem and I’ll give a true depiction of what it is like, not a Hollywood version,” said Williams, who got his latest role after playing a mobster in “Good Fellas'” where he met Robert DeNiro, who is producing the miniseries for NBC. “This is no Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney. You have to have the gutter in you, something you don’t learn in acting school.”
So how did Williams get his nom-de-mean-streets “Johnny Roastbeef”?
“I used to own a couple of delis,” he said.
