Events
Bethany Joy Lenz
Live Talks Los Angeles event:
Bethany Joy Lenz
discussing her memoir,
Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!)
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Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center
at Vista Del Mar
3200 Motor Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(Free Parking available at the venue)
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TICKETS:
$50 General Admission + signed book
$75 Two General Admission Tickets + one signed book
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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (click here)
Saturday, November 2, 2024, 3pm PT/6pm ET
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on November 2 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
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A deliciously witty and inspiring memoir by One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Lenz about her decade in a cult and her quest to break free.
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Bethany Joy Lenz starred in the hit TV series One Tree Hill. Her other acting credits include Guiding Light, Grey’s Anatomy, Charmed, Felicity, Suits, Dexter, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. She is also a recording artist who has released several albums. Lenz currently cohosts the podcast Drama Queens and is the founder/editor-in-chief of the broadsheet newspaper Modern Vintage News.
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In the early 2000s, after years of hard work and determination to breakthrough as an actor, Bethany Joy Lenz was finally cast as one of the leads on the hit drama One Tree Hill. Her career was about to take off, but her personal life was slowly beginning to unravel. What none of the show’s millions of fans knew, hidden even from her costars, was her secret double life in a cult.
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An only child who often had to fend for herself and always wanted a place to belong, Lenz found the safe haven she’d been searching for in a Bible study group with other Hollywood creatives. However, the group soon morphed into something more sinister—a slowly woven web of manipulation, abuse, and fear under the guise of a church covenant called The Big House Family. Piece by piece, Lenz began to give away her autonomy, ultimately relocating to the Family’s Pacific Northwest compound, overseen by a domineering minister who would convince Lenz to marry one of his sons and steadily drained millions of her TV income without her knowledge. Family “minders” assigned to her on set, “Maoist struggle session”–inspired meetings in the basement of a filthy house, and regular counseling with “Leadership” were just part of the tactics used to keep her loyal.
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Only when she became a mother did Lenz find the courage to leave and spare her child from a similar fate. After nearly a decade (and with the unlikely help of a One Tree Hill superfan), she finally managed to escape the family’s grip and begin to heal from the deep trauma that forever altered her relationship with God and her understanding of faith.
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Written with powerful honesty and dark humor, Dinner for Vampires is an inspiring story about the importance of identity and understanding what you believe.
Ta-Nehisi Coates with Sam Fragoso
Live Talks Los Angeles event:
Ta-Nehisi Coates
in conversation with Sam Fragoso
discussing his book,
The Message
Robert Frost Auditorium
4401 Elenda St,
Culver City, CA 90230
(Free Parking available at the venue)
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TICKETS:
$50 General Admission + book
$75 Two General Admission tickets + book
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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (click here)
Friday, November 1, 2024, 6pm PT/9pm ET
TICKETS:
$46 Virtual Admission + book (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on November 1 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
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The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer and Between the World and Me, for which he won the National Book Award in 2015. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair in English at Howard University.”
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“[Coates] is intellectually fearless . . . unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not.”—The New Yorker.
Just as Between the World and Me took the form of a letter to his son, The Message is crafted as a letter to his writing students. He bears an urgent message for them: their “task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
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Coates’s call to action is in fact a diagnosis of the political and social polarization currently sweeping the globe: the world is riven by stories. He comes to this realization not as a geopolitical wonk or a statesman, but as a journalist who has seen firsthand how stories are more powerful tools of persuasion than the assemblage of interconnected facts.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.
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Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, The Message is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
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In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Next, he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning. In the book’s longest section, he travels to Palestine, where he sees the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
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Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, writers, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting interviews with Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he founded Talk Easy in 2016. The program is currently distributed by Pushkin Industries.
Alex van Halen with Ariel Levy
Live Talks Los Angeles event:
in conversation with Ariel Levy
discussing his memoir,
Brothers
Robert Frost Auditorium
4401 Elenda St,
Culver City, CA 90230
(Free Parking available at the venue)
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TICKETS:
$55 General Admission + signed book*
$80 Two General Admission tickets + one signed book*
*book has a signed book plate
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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (click here)
Tuesday, October 29, 2024, 6pm PT/9pm ET
TICKETS:
$50 Virtual Admission + signed book* (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on October 29 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
*book has a signed book plate
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Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love.
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Alex van Halen is the co-founder of the rock band Van Halen and its original drummer. Born in Amsterdam and trained as a classical pianist, he graduated from Pasadena High School.
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Ariel Levy was Alex Van Halen’s collaborator on Brothers, and is the author of her own New York Times bestselling memoir The Rules Do Not Apply. Levy has received a National Magazine Award for her work at The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008. She is the host and co-creator of the podcast The Just Enough Family.
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Alex Van Halen wrote Brothers, a love letter to his younger brother, while still mourning Eddie‘s untimely death.
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He recounts their childhood in an 800-square foot house in Pasadena, with an itinerant musician father and proper Indonesian-born mother—how they arrived in the US from the Netherlands and struggled to fit in. He also shares stories of musical politics, infighting and bad-boy behavior. The book includes never-before-seen photos from the author’s private archives, as he sets the record straight on his brother’s life and death in the first-ever accurate account of his family and the band.
Richard Powers
Live Talks Los Angeles event:
Richard Powers
discussing the writing life and his new novel,
Playground
. Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
at New Roads School
3131 Olympic Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90404
(Free Parking available at the venue)
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TICKETS:
$50 General Admission + book with signed book plate
$25 General Admission
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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (click here)
Monday, October 28, 2024, 6pm PT/9pm ET
TICKETS:
$46 Virtual Admission + book with signed book plate (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on October 28 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
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A magisterial new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory and Bewilderment.
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Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
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“A characterful, capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative in which Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display.”― The 2024 Booker Prize Judges
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Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
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They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.
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Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.
Barry Sonnenfeld with Rob Reiner
Live Talks Los Angeles event:
in conversation with Rob Reiner
discussing his memoir,
Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time: True Stories from a Career in Hollywood
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Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
at New Roads School
3131 Olympic Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90404
(Free Parking available at the venue)
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TICKETS:
$50 General Admission + signed book
$25 General Admission ticket
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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (click here)
Sunday, October 27, 2024, 3pm PT/6pm ET
TICKETS:
$45 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on October 27 at 3pm PT/6pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
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One-of-a-kind filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld tells stories only he can tell, from his blockbuster career with iconic actors, studio execs, and producers. His humor and insight provide an inside glimpse into how Hollywood really works, or how it doesn’t.
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Barry Sonnenfeld is a filmmaker and writer who broke into the film industry as the cinematographer on the Coen Brothers’ first three films: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller’s Crossing. He also was the director of photography on Throw Mamma from the Train, Big, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery. Sonnenfeld made his directorial debut with The Addams Family in 1991, and has gone on to direct a number of films including Addams Family Values, Get Shorty, and the first three Men in Blacks. His television credits include Pushing Daisies, for which he won an Emmy, Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and most recently Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon! He is the author of Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother.
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Rob Reiner first came to fame as a two-time Emmy Award-winning actor in the landmark television series All In The Family. He went on to become an acclaimed director whose credits include the satire This is Spinal Tap to dramas Stand By Me, Misery, A Few Good Men, and Ghosts of Mississippi, to romantic comedies When Harry Met Sally and The American President, to the enduring classic, The Princess Pride. His now 20 films also include The Bucket List, Flipped, LBJ, Shock and Awe, and most recently, the documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, and a sequel to This is Spinal Tap. Reiner is also a dedicated political activist.
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Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time delivers a cavalcade of sometimes baffling, often enlightening, and always funny stories about Sonnenfeld’s many films and television shows. From battling with studio executives and producers to bad-script-solving on set to coaxing actors into finding the right light and talking faster, Sonnenfeld provides an entertaining master class in how to make commercial art in the face of constant human foible. Over four decades in Hollywood, the mega-franchises include The Addams Family and Men in Black movies; the critical favorites, Get Shorty and Pushing Daisies; and working with Will Smith, John Travolta, and Michael Jackson; and the projects that got away, Forrest Gump, Ali, and anything starring Jim Carrey.
The true stories escalate from surreal to outrageous to unbelievable. And then there’s magic hour. But you’ll never see Hollywood the same way again.
Eric Roberts with Eliza Roberts
Live Talks Los Angeles event:
in conversation with Eliza Roberts
discussing his memoir,
Runaway Train: or, The Story of My Life So Far
. Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
at New Roads School
3131 Olympic Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90404
(Free Parking available at the venue)
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TICKETS:
$50 Reserved Section Seating + signed book
$25 General Admission
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VIRTUAL EVENT TICKETS (click here)
Monday, October 21, 2024, 6pm PT/9pm ET
TICKETS:
$46 Virtual Admission + signed book (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on October 21 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
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In this brutally candid memoir, Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee Eric Roberts pulls no punches about the ups and downs of his career and his sometimes stormy relationship with his famous sister, Julia.
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Eric Roberts, during his five decade career, has appeared in over 700 films, from King of the Gypsies and The Pope of Greenwich Village to The Dark Knight, Inherent Vice and Babylon. He’s won a Golden Globe and been nominated for an Oscar, and celebrated at film festivals around the world. He’s brother to Julia Roberts and father to Emma Roberts.
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Eliza Roberts is known for National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Tasmanian Devil and My Last Best Friend. She has been married to Eric Roberts since 1992. She was born in Manhattan to an actress/director/producer/writer mom, Lila Garrett, a screen-writer biological dad, David Rayfiel and a press agent adoptive dad, Don Garrett. The family moved to Los Angeles, by way of a peace march in San Francisco, when Lila and her then-husband got jobs writing Bewitched. At sixteen she moved to England to study acting. She has two children, Keaton Simons (recording artist) and Morgan Simons (chef).
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“Compelling to read―candid, brave and full of Eric’s natural grace and good nature.” ―Christopher Walken, Academy Award-Winning Actor
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At age 17, Eric Roberts moved from Georgia to New York to pursue a career in acting. He worked and partied with future legends like Christopher Walken, Mickey Rourke, John Malkovich, Bruce Willis and Robin Williams.
After his big break in King of the Gypsies, he became one of the hottest stars of the era. But celebrity came with a dark side—an ocean of cocaine that nearly swept him away, culminating in a car accident that almost cost him his life. In Runaway Train, or, The Story of My Life So Far, Roberts confronts the seriousness of his addictions, their devastating effects on his career, and the reason for his complicated relationship with his sister, Julia, and daughter, Emma.