Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink with Felicia Day

Saturday, October 31, 2015
7:30pm 
 
Welcome to Night Vale
Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink
in conversation with Felicia Day
discussing their novel based on the hit podcast.

The Alex Theatre
216 North Brand Boulevard
Glendale, CA 91203

ONLINE SALES HAVE ENDED
TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR
$20 General Admission seating
$36 Reserved Section seating + signed book
$45 Premium Reserved Seating + signed book*
* Seat are in the first 6 rows and also includes a Halloween bag of treats
(Venue facility fee of $2.50 applies to all tickets)

Joseph Fink created and co-writes the Welcome to Night Vale podcast and touring live show. In his mid-twenties he started Commonplace Books, a very small publishing company, producing two collections of short works which he edited and laid out at his office job when his boss wasn’t looking. Later Jeffrey approached Joseph with the idea of writing a play about time travel. They co-wrote and performed this play in the East Village in August of 2011. Soon afterwards, Joseph started brainstorming a new project he and Jeffrey could co-write and this led to the pilot episode of Welcome to Night Vale

Jeffrey Cranor co-writes—along with Joseph Fink—the hit podcast and touring live show Welcome to Night Vale. He also makes theater and dance. He has written more than 100 short plays with the New York Neo-Futurists, co-wrote and co-performed a two-man show (What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us) with Joseph, and collaborated with choreographer (also wife) Jillian Sweeney to create three full-length dance pieces: Imaginary Lines, This could be it, and Vulture-Wally

From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves…no matter where we live.

“Hypnotic and darkly funny. . . . Belongs to a particular strain of American gothic that encompasses The Twilight Zone, Stephen King and Twin Peaks, with a bit of Tremors thrown in.”–The Guardian

Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.

Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked “KING CITY” by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can’t seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.

Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton’s son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane’s started to see her son’s father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.

Diane’s search to reconnect with her son and Jackie’s search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: “KING CITY”. It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures…if they can ever find it.

Felicia Day has appeared in numerous mainstream television shows and films, currently recurring on the CW show “Supernatural”, and recently completing a two-season arc on the SyFy series Eureka. 

However, Felicia is best known for her work in the web video world, behind and in front of the camera. She co-starred in Joss Whedon’s Internet musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which was ranked in the “Top 10 Best TV of 2008” by Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine and won an Emmy in 2009. She also created and stars in the hit web series The Guild, which is currently in its sixth season. The Guild has won numerous awards for web video excellence, most recently garnering a PGA nomination for best web series in 2011. She has expanded the brand into numerous merchandizing opportunities, including a hit comic book series with Dark Horse Comics.

Her production company Knights of Good produced the innovative web series Dragon Age in conjunction with EA/Bioware in 2011 and in 2012 she launched a funded YouTube channel called Geek & Sundry. Since launching in April 2012, the channel has garnered over one million subscribers and over 200 million views. In 2014, the company was sold to Legendary Entertainment. Felicia continues to work as creative chief officer with her company, as well as develop television and web projects for her to write, produce and star in. 

 

Patricia Cornwell with Jamie Lee Curtis

Friday, October 30, 2015
8:00pm 
 
An Evening with Patricia Cornwell
in conversation with Jamie Lee Curtis

discussing the writing life and her new novel
Depraved Heart 

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
$43 General Admission Seat + Cornwell’s book
$53 Reserved Section Seat + Cornwell’s book

Please note this event will include a dramatic reading by Jamie Lee Curtis followed by a conversation with Patricia Cornwell.

**During the evening, there will be a special performance of the song Life Is Good with American Idol Musical Director Michael Orland and singer-songwriter Staci Gruber. 

Patricia Cornwell is one of the world’s top bestselling crime authors with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d’Aventure.  Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the cutting-edge forensic technologies that inform her work. 

Depraved Heart is the  latest novel in her bestselling series featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Scarpetta is working a highly suspicious death scene in an historic home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link lands in her text messages, immediately begins playing… and seems to be from her niece Lucy. But how can it be? It’s clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago.

Cornwell launches these unforgettable characters on an intensely psychological odyssey that includes the bizarre death of a Hollywood mogul’s daughter, wreckage on the bottom of the sea in the Bermuda Triangle, a grisly gift left in the back of a crime scene truck, and videos from the past that threaten to destroy Scarpetta’s entire world and everyone she loves. The diabolical presence behind what unfolds seems obvious—but strangely, not to the FBI. Certainly that’s the message they send when they start harassing Lucy and begin building a case that could send her to prison for the rest of her life. Visit her website.

Jamie Lee Curtis made her film debut in 1978 by starring as Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween. A big hit, the film established her as a notable actress in horror, and she subsequently starred in Halloween II, The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, and Roadgames. Curtis has since compiled a body of work that spans many genres, including the cult comedy films Trading Places, for which she won a BAFTA Award; A Fish Called Wanda, and True Lies, for which she won a Golden Globe.

Curtis is returning to the small screens this fall in the new Fox series Scream Queens, a slasher series also starring Emma Roberts, Lea Michele, Abigail Breslin, Oliver Hudson, Nick Jonas and Ariana Grande.

 

Kevin Costner

Wednesday, October 28, 2015
8:00pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
 
An Evening with Kevin Costner
Jon Baird and Rick Ross


discussing their novel,

The Explorer’s Guild

Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School

Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404

PURCHASE TICKETS 
$45 Reserved Section Seats + Book
$20 General Admission Seat
$95 Includes pre-event reception, Reserved section seat +  book

Kevin Costner is an internationally recognized director, producer and actor. Costner has starred in memorable roles in films such as JFK, the Untouchables, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, No Way Out, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, The Bodyguard, and Wyatt Earp  among others. He recently starred in the dramas  Black or White and the Disney film, McFarland, USA.  

Jon Baird is a co-creator of The Explorers Guild and author/illustrator of the novels Day Job and Songs From Nowhere Near the Heart. Along with Costner, he has co-developed the Western miniseries Horizon.

Rick Ross is an illustrator and comic book artist. His credits include the graphic novelization of Spike TV’s 1000 Ways to Die, Femme Fatales (Cinemax),  the 3D motion comic, Deadtown (M2 Studios) and Urban Monsters (Image Comics). He is the creator of the weekly online graphic novel anthology, Agitainment Comics.

The Explorers Guild is a natural progression for Academy Award winner Costner since it combines his passion for history, adventure, and storytelling. It is an innovative, original illustrated adventure tale written by Costner and John Baird and illustrated by Rick Ross.  

Behind the staid rooms of an old world gentlemen’s club operates a darker, more mysterious organization, The Explorers Guild — a clandestine group of adventurers who seek out the places where light gives way to shadow and reason is usurped by myth. The secrets of this unknown world are hidden in mountain ranges and lost in deserts, sunk to the ocean floor and lodged deep beneath polar ice. The aim of the Explorers Guild: to discover the mysteries that lie beyond the boundaries of the known world.

Set against the backdrop of World War I, with western civilization spiraling into chaos, The Explorers GuildA Passage to Shambhala concerns the Guild’s quest to find the golden city of Buddhist myth.  Each member is driven toward the city for a different reason: one believes that finding it will save his brother’s life; another hopes that it will reveal a path to spiritual enlightenment. Some believe the power of the city can be used to restore peace, while others are certain that Shambhala is responsible for bringing mankind to the brink of apocalypse. The search will take readers from the Polar North to the Mongolian deserts, through the underground canals of Asia to deep into the Himalayas, before the city finally divulges its secrets and the globe-spanning journey plays out to its startling conclusion.

 

Jane Smiley

Thursday, October 22, 2015
8:00pm (Reception 6:30-7:30pm) 

An Evening with Jane Smiley 

discussing the writing life and her novel
Golden Age

William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404

PURCHASE TICKETS
$20 General Admission
$30 Reserved Section Seat
$45 Includes Smiley’s book + Seat in reserved section
$95 Pre-event reception + Reserved Section seat + book 

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Some Luck and Early Warning, the first volumes of The Last Hundred Years trilogy. She is also the author of five works of nonfiction and a series of books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.  She previously appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles for the first book in the trilogy, Some Luck; and also interviewed Dave Barry and Gary Shteyngart at Live Talks Los Angeles. Videos in the links.

Golden Age is the much-anticipated final volume, following Some Luck and Early Warning, of her acclaimed American trilogythat brings the remarkable Langdon family into our present times and beyond.
 
A lot can happen in one hundred years, as Jane Smiley shows to dazzling effect in her Last Hundred Years trilogy. But as Golden Age, its final installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of Langdons face economic, social, political—and personal—challenges unlike anything their ancestors have encountered before.

Michael and Richie, the rivalrous twin sons of World War II hero Frank, work in the high-stakes world of government and finance in Washington and New York, but they soon realize that one’s fiercest enemies can be closest to home; Charlie, the charming, recently found scion, struggles with whether he wishes to make a mark on the world; and Guthrie, once poised to take over the Langdons’ Iowa farm, is instead deployed to Iraq, leaving the land—ever the heart of this compelling saga—in the capable hands of his younger sister.

Determined to evade disaster, for the planet and her family, Felicity worries that the farm’s once-bountiful soil may be permanently imperiled, by more than the extremes of climate change. And as they enter deeper into the twenty-first century, all the Langdon women—wives, mothers, daughters—find themselves charged with carrying their storied past into an uncertain future.

Combining intimate drama, emotional suspense, and a full command of history,Golden Age brings to a magnificent conclusion the century-spanning portrait of this unforgettable family—and the dynamic times in which they’ve loved, lived, and died: a crowning literary achievement from a beloved master of American storytelling.

Robert Reich

Wednesday, October 21, 2015
8:00pm (Reception, 6:30-7:30pm)
 
An Evening with Robert Reich
in conversation with Roger McNamee

 

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404

SOLD OUT
We also have a morning event with Robert Reich, Oct 22, Downtown LA

$20 General Admission seating
$30 Reserved Section seating
$45 Reserved Section Seating + Reich’s book
$95 Includes pre-event reception, Reserved section seat + Reich’s book

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations and has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into twenty-two languages, and the best sellers Supercapitalism and Locked in the Cabinet. His articles have appeared inThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He is co-creator of the award-winning film Inequality for All. He is also chair of the national governing board of Common Cause. Read his blog.

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few is a passionate yet practical, sweeping yet minutely argued, myth-shattering breakdown of what’s wrong with our political-economic system, and what it will take to fix it.

Perhaps no one is better acquainted with the intersection of finance and politics than Robert B. Reich, and now he reveals the cycles of power and influence that have perpetuated a new American oligarchy, a shrinking middle class, and the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in eighty years. He makes clear how centrally problematic our veneration of the “free market” is, and how it has masked the power of the moneyed interests to tilt the market to their benefit. He exposes the falsehoods that have been bolstered by the corruption of our democracy by big corporations and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street– that all workers are paid what they’re “worth,” a higher minimum wage equals fewer jobs, corporations must serve shareholders before employees. Ever the pragmatist, Reich sees hope for reversing our slide toward inequality and diminished opportunity by shoring up the countervailing power of everyone else. Here is a revelatory indictment of our economic status quo and an empowering call to civic action.

Roger McNamee is a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He began his career in 1982 at T. Rowe Price Associates, where he managed the top-ranked Science & Technology Fund and co-managed the New Horizons Fund. In 1991, he launched Integral Capital Partners, the first crossover fund (combining later stage venture capital with public market investments), in partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 1999, Roger co-founded Silver Lake Partners, the first private equity fund focused on technology businesses. In 2004, Roger and his partners launched Elevation Partners, an investment partnership focused on the intersection of media and entertainment content and consumer technology. McNamee is a frequent commentator on CNBC on tech sector investing.

Roger performs more than 100 concerts a year in the bands Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System, where he plays bass and guitar. Moonalice pioneered the use of social media in music, inventing such applications as Twittercast concerts, Moonalice radio on Twitter, live MoonTunes (video) concerts, and the Moonalice Couch Tour.  Moonalice’s single, It’s “4:20 Somewhere,” has been downloaded 4.6 million times.

Roger is the author of The New Normal:The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Risk published in 2004 by Portfolio (Penguin Books), and The Moonalice Legend: Posters and Words, Volumes 1 – 5; Volume 6 will be published in time for the holidays.  

Roger is a co-founder of the Tembo Preserve and the Haight Street Art Center.  He serves on the board of directors of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

 

Terry Gilliam

Monday, October 19, 2015
8:00pm 

An Evening with Terry Gilliam
in conversation with Sam Rubin

discussing his “Pre-posthumous Memoir”
Gilliamesque

The Alex Theatre
216 North Brand Boulevard
Glendale, CA 91203

PURCHASE TICKETS
*$27.50 Balcony General Admission

*tickets include $2.50 Alex Theatre facility fee
** This is a gorgeous book from Harper Design (retail $40). Books will be pre-signed, available for pick up upon checking in at the event. 

Terry Gilliam is a screenwriter, director, animator, actor, and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. He is well-known for directing many film cult-classics, including Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Many of his films have been nominated for Academy and Golden Globe awards, and in 2009 he was given the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award for his contribution to motion picture arts. The only “Python” not born in Britain, he took British Citizenship in 1968. His latest film The Zero Theorem was released on August 19, 2014, and stars two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, David Thewlis, Matt Damon, and Tilda Swinton. Visit his website.

In Gilliamesque, his “pre-posthumous memoir,” he offers an intimate glimpse into his world in this fascinating book illustrated with hand-drawn sketches, notes, and memorabilia from his personal archive.

From his no-frills childhood in the icy wastes of Minnesota, to some of the hottest water Hollywood had to offer, via the cutting edge of 1960s and ’70s counter-culture in New York, L.A. and London, Terry Gilliam’s life has been as vivid, entertaining and unorthodox as one of his films. 

Packed with never-before-seen artwork, photographs and commentary, Gilliamesque blends the visual and the verbal with scabrous wit and fascinating insight.  Gilliam’s memoir also features a cast of amazing supporting characters—George Harrison, Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, Heath Ledger and all of the fellow Pythons—as well as cameo appearances from some of the heaviest cultural hitters of modern times, from Woody Allen to Frank Zappa, Gloria Steinem to Robert Crumb, Richard Nixon to Hunter S. Thompson. Gilliam’s encounters with the great and the not-so-good are revealing, funny, and hugely entertaining.

It’s an honor to host Terry Gilliam for the launch event of his book and a wonderful follow up to our event last Fall with fellow Pythons John Cleese interviewed by Eric Idle. Watch that video here. The book is an unrestrained look into a unique creative mind and an incomparable portrait of late twentieth-century popular culture.

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 and Garry Marshall.