Posts by Live Talks LA
Parking for Marie Kondo event at Barnum Hall, Santa Monica High School
We expect a big audience for our event with Marie Kondo and Jamie Lee Curtis, so plan on arriving early.
Doors to the theatre open at 7:15pm and we start at 8pm.
Parking is available in these two spaces. According to the City of Santa Monica website is $5 to park:
— Civic Center Parking Lot at the corner of 4th Street and Pico Blvd.
Access to the parking lot is via Main Street or 4th Street
— Civic Center Parking Garage, at corner of 4th Street and Civic Center Way
— There is limited parking for those with handicapped parking permits in the Olympic parking lot and Barnum parking lot.
There is a Walkway off of 4th street, next to the Double Tree Hotel that has direct access to the Santa Monica High School campus. Look for direction signs and attendants providing directions.
Felicia Day with Wil Wheaton
discussing her memoir,
You’re Never Weird on the Internet (almost)
The Bootleg Theatre
2220 Beverly Blvd,
Los Angeles, CA 90057
PURCHASE TICKETS
$40 Reserved Section seating + Book* –– SOLD OUT
$33 General Admission Seating + book*
$20 General Admission Seat
* Books will be picked up at the event when you check in, and signed immediately after the talk
Felicia Day is an actress who has appeared in numerous mainstream television shows and films, including a two-season arc on the SyFy series Eureka. She is currently recurring on The CW show Supernatural. However, Day is best known for her work in the web video world, behind and in front of the camera. She co-starred — along with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion — in Joss Whedon’s Emmy Award-winning Internet musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. She also created and starred in the hit web series The Guild, which ran for six seasons and is currently available for viewing on every major digital outlet, including Netflix. She previously appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles interviewing Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink, creators of the hit podcast, Night Vale.
In 2012, she launched a YouTube channel called Geek & Sundry. The network has garnered more than 1.3 million subscribers to date and more than 200 million views. In 2014, the company was purchased by Legendary Entertainment. Day continues to act as CCO and develop web content and television projects with Legendary as a producer, writer, and performer. She is active on social media, has over 2.3 million Twitter followers, and is the eighth most followed person on Goodreads, where she is also the founder of Vaginal Fantasy, a romance and fantasy book club with more than 13,000 members.
Her memoir is funny, smart, and inspiring about achieving extraordinary success on her own unconventional terms. It is irreverent and insightful about her unusual upbringing, her rise to internet stardom, and embracing her “weirdness” to become a leading creator in new media.
Why You Should Embrace Your Weirdness: Growing up “homeschooled for hippie reasons,” Felicia’s isolation from other kids meant she could unabashedly pursue “uncool” passions like video games, advanced calculus, and 1930s detective novels. She found a sense of community on gaming message boards—forming friendships based upon shared interests and developing the raw confidence to forge her own path.
Growing Her Geek Empire: Eight years ago, Felicia stood outside of San Diego Comic-Con handing out bookmarks for her self-made web series, The Guild, shot in her own home with a borrowed camera, unpaid actors, and scavenged props. Just recently, she presided over Geek & Sundry’s massive Comic-Con headquarters at Petco Park and spoke to a sold-out convention hall. Tales of interactions with fans both in-person and online range from hilarious to heartbreaking—and reveal how Felicia went from “oddball to odd baller” (Cosmopolitan).
When Perfection Doesn’t Pay: A violin and math whiz who started college at age sixteen and graduated as valedictorian, Felicia was used to chasing perfection for perfection’s sake. Ever candid, she opens up about the rough patches along the way, recounting battles with writer’s block, a full-blown gaming addiction, severe anxiety and depression—and how she reinvented herself when overachieving became overwhelming.
#GamerGate: In August 2014, a video game designer named Zoe Quinn was attacked by an online hate mob after her ex-boyfriend shared details of their relationship online, including erroneous implications of sexual favors in exchange for positive reviews of her game. Hackers leaked Quinn’s personal information, she received countless violent threats, and anyone coming to her defense risked becoming the next target. Felicia shares the storm of hostility she encountered after speaking out against the online bullying, how it tied into her history with negativity on the internet, and thoughts about how it changed her view of the gaming culture she has always loved.
With a success story for today’s connected culture, in which technology and entertainment are ever-evolving, Felicia Day urges everyone to celebrate what makes them different and be brave enough to share their unique point of view with the world, because anything is possible now—even for a digital misfit.
Wil Wheaton began acting in commercials at the age of seven, and by the age of ten had appeared in numerous television and film roles. In 1986, his critically acclaimed role in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me put him in the public spotlight. In 1987, Wil was cast as Wesley Crusher in the hit television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Recently, Wil has appeared on Syfy’s Dark Matter and was cast in the upcoming second season of Playstation’s Powers. Wil has held recurring roles on TNT’s Leverage, SyFy’s Eureka; he currently recurs on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory and the Disney Junior animated series Miles from Tomorrowland. He played Axis of Anarchy leader Fawkes in Felicia Day’s webseries The Guild. Off-camera, he is the creator, producer, and host of the wildly successful Geek & Sundry webseries Tabletop, which is currently heading into its fourth season. Wheaton is also an author, blogger, podcaster, voice actor, widely-followed original Twitter user, and a champion of geek culture. For more on Wheaton, visit his website.
Colm Tóibín with Carolyn Kellogg
8:00pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
in conversation with Carolyn Kellog
discussing James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
and a dramatic reading by Ron Livingston
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$37 Reserved Section Seating, copy of Giovanni’s Room
$60 Reserved Section seats for two, 1 copy of Giovanni’s Room
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) Reserved Section seats, 1 copy of Giovanni’s Room
Colm Tóibín wrote the introduction to upcoming Everyman’s Library edition of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, marking the 70th anniversary of it’s publication.
New York Times, January 24, Alice Walker and Colm Tóibín on Hollywood, adaptations of their work and how life has informed their fiction.
Tóibín is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author. His novels include The Master, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Novel Award, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. The movie adaptation of Brooklyn, about a naïve Irish girl who immigrates to the United States in the 1950s, was released in November to stellar reviews and received three Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture. Tóibín lives in Dublin, Ireland
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America’s foremost writers. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews. His essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement exploring palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. His novels include Giovanni’s Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in much savage criticism from the black community. Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) provided powerful descriptions of American racism. As an openly gay man, he became increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against lesbian and gay people. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. Caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality, David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With sharp, probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Carolyn Kellogg is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. She is a recipient of the paper’s editorial award and she is a vice president of the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Kellogg has served as editor of LAist.com, web editor of Marketplace and has been widely published. She has an MFA in creative writing and a bachelor’s degree from USC.
Ron Livingston was most recently seen in Columbia Pictures “The 5th Wave” along with Chloe Grace Moretz, Live Schreiber and Maria Bello, up next is the crime thriller “Shimmer Lake,” directed by Oren Uziel and stars Wyatt Russell, Rainn Wilson and Rob Corddry.
In 2015, he co-starred in 3 films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival — the critically acclaimed “The End of the Tour,” directed by James Ponsoldt, based on Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky’s acclaimed memoir about the time he spent interviewing David Foster Wallace in the mid 1990’s; “James White,” which marked the directorial debut of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” producer Josh Mond and stars Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon; and Joe Swanberg’s “Digging for Fire.”
In November, Livingston starred in NatGeo’s “Saints & Strangers,” which was filmed in South Africa last summer. The two part series, told the story of the crossing on the Mayflower of the first settlers in Plymouth, and the trials and tribulations they endured.
Livingston recently wrapped production on “Shangri-La Suite,” in which he plays Elvis Presley in co-writer/director Eddie O’Keefe’s fictional story about a couple who meet and fall in love in a mental hospital and set out on a cross country road trip with the intent to murder Presley.
Other film credits include Lynn Shelton’s “Touchy Feely” with Rosemarie DeWitt, Allison Janney and Ellen Page; New Line’s supernatural thriller, “The Conjuring” along with Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor; “Parkland” alongside a stellar cast, which included Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton and Marcia Gay Harden; “Boardwalk Empire” where he went on to garner a SAG Award Nomination in the Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series category; Walt Disney pictures ‘The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” which starred Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton, and “Ten Year” with Channing Tatum, Rosario Dawson and Anthony Mackie; For HBO’s multiple award-winning “Game Change” along with Ed Harris, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson and Sarah Paulson; Paramount Pictures film “Dinner for Schmucks” with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, directed by Jay Roach; “Time Traveler’s Wife” with Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, and the ABC series “Defying Gravity,” a one-hour drama about a team of astronauts on a six-year billion-mile mission in outer space.
Other appearances include Off Broadway in the Neil Labute play In a Dark, Dark House; with Michael Sheen and Melissa George in the “Music Within,” and “Holly,” a film about child trafficking shot on location in Cambodia and screened at several festivals; as Captain Lewis Nixon in the 2001 HBO film “Band of Brothers,”; as Jack Berger on the ever popular HBO series “Sex and the City” opposite Sarah Jessica Parker.
Previous films include “The Cooler,” “Adaptation,” “Swingers,” “Pretty Persuasion,” “Winter Solstice,” “Little Black Book,” and he may be best known as the star of the cult hit “Office Space.”
Raised in Iowa, Livingston graduated from Marion High School and attended Yale University.
Cameron Diaz with Nancy Meyers
in conversation with Nancy Meyers
The Longevity Book:
The Science of Aging, the Biology of Strength, and the Privilege of Time
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
SOLD OUT (Video will be posted soon)
$45 General Admission + book
$50 Reserved Section Seating + book
$65 Reserved Section seats for two, 1 copy of book
$20 General Admission (on sale March 31)
Cameron Diaz made her feature-film debut at age twenty-one. Since then she has appeared in small-budget and blockbuster films alike. She supports numerous causes that advocate environmental concerns, education, and the empowerment of women and girls. Cameron grew up in Southern California and divides her time between Los Angeles and New York.
Cameron Diaz wrote The Body Book to help educate young women about how their bodies function, empowering them to make better-informed choices about their health and encouraging them to look beyond the latest health trends to understand their bodies at the cellular level. She interviewed doctors, scientists, nutritionists, and a host of other experts, and shared what she’d learned—and what she wished she’d known twenty years earlier.
Now Cameron continues the journey she began, opening a conversation with her peers on an essential topic that that for too long has been taboo in our society: the aging female body. In The Longevity Book, she shares the latest scientific research on how and why we age, synthesizing insights from top medical experts and with her own thoughts, opinions, and experiences.
The Longevity Book explores what history, biology, neuroscience, and the women’s health movement can teach us about maintaining optimal health as we transition from our thirties to midlife. From understanding how growing older impacts various bodily systems to the biological differences in the way aging effects men and women; the latest science on telomeres and slowing the rate of cognitive decline to how meditation heals us and why love, friendship, and laughter matter for health, The Longevity Book offers an all-encompassing, holistic look at how the female body ages—and what we can all do to age better.
Nancy Meyers is a trailblazing filmmaker who, as a first-rate writer, director and producer, has created a body of work focusing on the female experience with her exceptionally literate and sophisticated comedies. Tapping into the very heart of modern relationships, she chronicles women and men, at work and in love, in a singular fashion that makes each film instantly recognizable as a Nancy Meyers movie. Her latest movie, The Intern, stars Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, along with a multi-generational cast, in a comedy about a new kind of bond between men and women—friendship.
Meyers made an auspicious debut as a director—following two decades of successful screenwriting and producing—with the highly popular update of the Disney classic The Parent Trap, starring Dennis Quaid and Lindsay Lohan, which Meyers also co-wrote. Her other credits include the blockbuster romantic comedy What Women Want; Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday in which Cameron Diaz starred along with Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black; It’s Complicated and Private Benjamin.
In 2004, Meyers received the ShoWest Director of the Year Award. She is the first woman ever to receive this prestigious honor.
Andrew McCarthy with Pico Iyer
8pm
in conversation with Pico Iyer
Just Fly Away
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$35 General Admission Section Seat + a copy of Just Fly Away
$40 Reserved Section Seat + copy of Just Fly Away
$20 General Admission Seat (on sale Jan 30)
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) + Reserved Section Seat
+ copy of Just Fly Away
Andrew McCarthy is a director, an award winning travel writer, and an actor. He is an editor-at-large at National Geographic Traveler, and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Travel+Leisure, AFAR, Men’s Journal, Bon Appetit, and many others. He has received six Lowell Thomas awards, and been named Travel Journalist of the Year by The Society of American Travel Writers.
His travel memoir, The Longest Way Home, became a New York Times Best Seller, and the Financial Times named it one of the Best Books of the year. He served as guest editor for the prestigious Best American Travel series in 2015. Just Fly Away is his debut novel published by Algonquin (March 2017).
He made his professional début at 19 in Class, and has appeared in dozens of films, including such iconic movies as Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Less Then Zero, and cult favorites Weekend At Bernie’s and Mannequin.
He has starred on Broadway and on television, most recently appearing in The Family, on ABC. McCarthy is also a highly regarded television director; having helmed Orange is the New Black, The Blacklist, Grace and Frankie, and many others.
Pico Iyer is the author of twelve books, on subjects as varied as Cuba, globalism, Graham Greene and the XIVth Dalai Lama, and writes up to 100 articles a year for magazines from The New York Review of Books to Harper’s, and Vanity Fair to Wired. He delivered popular TED talks in both 2013 and 2014—his most recent book is a small TED Original on the theme of stillness, and his talk on the nature of home attracted millions of viewers—and he has written a film script for Miramax, done many liner notes for Leonard Cohen and written introductions to more than 50 other books. Born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, he has been based, since 1987, in Western Japan, while traveling widely, everywhere from North Korea to Ethiopia and Yemen to Easter Island.
Don Cheadle with Sam Rubin
8:00 (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
in conversation with Sam Rubin
discussing the movie,
Written by Steven Baigelman & Don Cheadle
Directed by Don Cheadle
Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission Seat
$30 Reserved Section Seat-SOLD OUT
$95 Reception (6:30-7:30pm) Reserved Section seat
Join us for an hour long conversation with Don Cheadle including clips from the movie, Miles Ahead.
— Q&A with Don Cheadle on our blog on the making of Miles Ahead
— Rolling Stone, March 14, “Why Did I Have to Make the Miles Davis Biopic”
— The New York Times, March 11, “The Ensembles of Miles Davis Epitomized Cool”
Miles Ahead marks the directorial debut of Academy Award® nominee Don Cheadle. His credits include Bogie Nights, Traffic, Hotel Rwanda, Crash, Ironman 2 and 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the upcoming Captain America: Civil War. Cheadle also stars in, executive produces, and occasionally directs Showtime’s House of Lies, for which he has earned a Golden Globe.
Miles Ahead is an entertaining and moving exploration of one of 20th century music’s creative geniuses, Miles Davis, featuring a performance by Oscar nominee Don Cheadle in the title role. Working from a script he co-wrote with Steven Baigelman, Cheadle’s directorial debut is not a conventional bio-pic but rather a unique, no-holds barred portrait of a singular artist in crisis.
In the midst of a dazzling and prolific career at the forefront of modern jazz innovation, Miles Davis (Cheadle) virtually disappears from public view for a period of five years in the late 1970s. Alone and holed up in his home, he is beset by chronic pain from a deteriorating hip, his musical voice stifled and numbed by drugs and pain medications, his mind haunted by unsettling ghosts from the past. A wily music reporter, Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor) forces his way into Davis’ house and, over the next couple of days, the two men unwittingly embark on a wild and sometimes harrowing adventure to recover a stolen tape of the musician’s latest compositions. Davis’ mercurial behavior is fueled by memories of his failed marriage to the talented and beautiful dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). During their romance and subsequent marriage, Frances served as Davis’ muse. It was during this period that he released several of his signature recordings including the groundbreaking “Sketches of Spain” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
The idyll however, was short lived. The eight-year marriage was marked by infidelity and abuse, and Frances was forced to flee for her own safety as Miles’ mental and physical health deteriorated. By the late ‘70s, plagued by years of regret and loss, Davis flirts with annihilation until he once again finds salvation in his art.
Sam Rubin is the entertainment reporter for the KTLA Morning News. Rubin hosts the Emmy-nominated “Live from the Academy Awards,” syndicated nationally by Tribune Entertainment, “Sneaks,” a series of movie preview shows produced in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times, as well as a show for the Reelz Channel. He is a recipient of a Golden Mike Award for Best Entertainment Reporter from the Radio & Television News Association and, as part of the KTLA Morning News team, earned an Associated Press Television-Radio Award for Best News Broadcast.
In addition to his activities at KTLA, he also reports for Tribune’s WGN-TV in Chicago. Nationally, Rubin provides reports for “On Air With Ryan Seacrest,” “Show Buzz,” and CNN. On the radio, Rubin reports for Los Angeles’ KNX-AM. Rubin has been previously at Live Talks Los Angeles interviewing Alan Cumming, Garry Marshall, Terry Gilliam and Aasif Mandvi.