By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine February 2012

When writer David Milch and director Michael Mann set out to make their new HBO series, Luck, about the seedy, high-stakes world of horse racing, there was never a question about where it would be shot. “I’ve been to most of the tracks in Europe, and to me, Santa Anita is the most beautiful track in the world,” says Milch, a thoroughbred owner himself who loves how the Arcadia park “seems benign and pastoral but in fact it’s a jungle.” Mann had never been to Santa Anita until Milch took him, and he, too, was struck by the way the San Gabriel Mountains illuminate the stretch. That the series is partly about gamblers and degenerates only made the setting more perfect. “If this was My Friend Flicka or Secretariat, you would never shoot at Santa Anita,” says Mann. “It’s only because our people—and the language they use—are so not pretty that you’re able to get away with it.”

Had Grove developer Rick Caruso succeeded in building his proposed Shops at Santa Anita in the track’s parking lot, Milch and Mann’s mise-en-scène would have been dramatically different. The expansive family-oriented outdoor mall with a horse-drawn trolley wending its way past luxury retailers never materialized, leaving the 77-year-old Santa Anita (it’s on the National Register of Historic Places) in a state of degraded gentility. Of course that makes it a poignant stage for Luck’s hucksters and dreamers, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, Dennis Farina, and seemingly every other craggy-faced actor in Hollywood. Milch, whose previous series include Deadwood (talk about craggy) and the short-lived John from Cincinnati, hopes cable watchers will thrill to Santa Anita as he does (racing season began the day after Christmas). “It’s a very arcane environment,” he says. “One enters at one’s peril.”

Mann agrees, sounding like a convert. “If it’s January at 6:30 in the morning,” he says, “and you’re out there and there’s snow on the mountains and the air is crystal clear, it’s fantastic.”

As part of her plan to prepare Americans for the next “big one,” the seismologist tackles the dangerous phenomenon of denial

By Amy Wallace

Smithsonian magazine, February 2012

One of Lucy Jones’ first memories is of an earthquake. It struck north of Los Angeles, not far from her family home in Ventura, and as the ground lurched, her mother guided 2-year-old Lucy and her older brother and sister into a hallway and shielded them with her body. Add that her great-great-grandparents are buried literally in the San Andreas fault and it’s hard not to think that her fate was preordained.

Today Jones is among the world’s most influential seismologists—and perhaps the most recognizable. Her file cabinets bulge with fan letters, among them at least one marriage proposal. “The Earthquake Lady,” she’s called. A science adviser for the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Jones, 57, is an expert on foreshocks, having authored or co-authored 90 research papers, including the first to use statistical analysis to predict the likelihood that any given temblor will be followed by a bigger one.That research has been the basis for 11 earthquake advisories issued by the state of California since 1985.

Charged with improving the nation’s response to natural disaster, Jones’ specialty, increasingly, is another complex natural phenomenon: denial, that dangerous unwillingness to acknowledge the inevitable. What good is scientific knowledge, in other words, if people don’t respond to it?

You might have caught her on TV trying to help people understand earthquake risks after the Eastern Seaboard felt the 5.8 quake epicentered in Virginia this past August or after Tohoku, Japan, kept rocking and rolling after the 9.0 quake there last March. “She has the bearing of your terrific next-door neighbor who takes superb care of her window boxes. And yet she is as learned as anyone in the field,” says “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, who has interviewed Jones numerous times on television.

“I’m everybody’s mother,” she likes to joke, aware that her gender—while not an asset when she was at MIT in the ’70s—is now a plus. “Women are more reassuring after an event,” she says, recalling how moved people were years back when she conducted post-quake TV interviews holding Niels, her 1-year-old son, in her arms (he’s 21 now). That mother-and-child tableau cemented her position as the informed voice of calm in truly unsettling times.

“Lucy brings magnetism to what is normally a dull subject: preparedness,” says Paul Schulz, CEO of the American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles, whom Jones recently accompanied to Chile to study the impact of its 8.8 magnitude quake in 2010. On that trip, thousands of miles from home, a woman approached Jones and asked for her autograph.

Earthquakes may be classified as foreshocks, mainshocks and aftershocks. All occur when energy in the earth’s crust is released suddenly, forcing tectonic plates to shift. What differentiates them is their relation to each other in space and time. A foreshock is only a foreshock if it happens to occur before a bigger quake on the same fault system. An aftershock occurs after a bigger quake.

A lot of people had pondered foreshocks before Jones did, but she asked a critical question: After an earthquake, is there a statistical method to predict the chances that it was a precursor to a larger jolt? The answer was yes, as Jones demonstrated in a 1985 paper and subsequent studies analyzing every quake in the region’s recorded history. She found that the probability that an earthquake will trigger a bigger one does not depend on the magnitude of the first earthquake but instead is related to its location and interaction with fault systems.

The southern San Andreas ruptures and releases energy on average every 150 years. The last time was more than 300 years ago, which means that Los Angeles and environs may be overdue for a major quake. There’s no way to predict precisely when California’s next “big one” will come, Jones says (or even that it will occur on the San Andreas), but people need to get ready, as was made painfully clear in a massive 2008 study Jones led.

More than 300 scientists and other experts took part in drafting the 308-page ShakeOut Earthquake Scenario. Geologists determined which section of the San Andreas was most likely to blow, and conceived of a 7.8 magnitude tremor. They posited 55 seconds of strong shaking in downtown L.A.—more than seven times the duration of the last big L.A.-area temblor, the 1994 Northridge quake, a magnitude 6.7 generated along a previously unknown fault. There would be landslides and liquefaction and massive damage to roads, rail lines, water conveyance tunnels and aqueducts, electrical and natural gas lines, and telecommunications cables.

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, January 2012

How do I say this? A white person’s upbringing in Los Angeles is different from a black person’s upbringing in Los Angeles. Even if both grew up in affluent neighborhoods, it’s totally different. I grew up in Windsor Hills, which is considered an affluent black neighborhood. My school was 54th Street, which was all black, but I was one of the first round of kids who were bused to make schools more integrated. I was in the fourth grade—maybe ’78 or ’79. I was bused to Castle Heights Elementary. I was in one of three busloads of black kids from different areas—we made up less than a third of the school. It freaked me out. It’s not that I didn’t want to be bused—I dug the idea of checking out different areas. But I didn’t like Castle Heights. No one was mean to us—it was clearly just strange for them that we were there. And it was strange for us.

In the ’80s, I’d been on the NBC series 227, but I still had to audition for Boyz N the Hood. I was going to USC at that time. I said to one of my girlfriends, “This guy named John Singleton is directing this movie.” And she says, “You know he goes to USC, right?” And I’m like, “No!” Maybe if I’d spent more time there, I would have known that. I read five or six lines for the casting director, and she said, “OK, I just wanted to see if you could be ghetto.” Everybody’s idea of me was Brenda from 227—a shy girl who one day will come out of her shell.

All of us who worked on Boyz N the Hood were excited to be part of a story that was told from our point of view. It’s been 20 years since that movie came out, but people still talk to me about it. People will tweet me the lines from the film. I think the reason it resonated was that it was a POV shared not just by people who lived in South-Central, but by people across the world who lived in neighborhoods like South-Central.

There’s a scene in the movie in which some bad cops are roughing up these teenagers—who are not bad kids—just because of the color of their skin and the neighborhood they’re in. For me growing up, that was our perception of cops. They were not our protectors. When things went down, there were some neighborhoods that wouldn’t even call the cops for help. One, they wouldn’t show up, or two, it would end up being a worse situation than what was already existing. I’ve been in cars with some of my black male friends in the ’90s when cops pulled us over, and the first thing my friends would do is roll down the window and stick their hands out—before the cops said anything. It was like, “Don’t accidentally shoot me and say that I had something in my hands!”

Until I started making Southland, my feeling about the LAPD still remained stuck in that era. But that’s changed as I’ve spent time with the officers who help us make the series realistic. These people are putting their lives on the line for people they don’t know. The LAPD has worked hard to clean itself up. I can see that now.

Is there friggin’ anything Matt Damon can’t do? As the action hero/leading man/activist/Oscar-winning screenwriter/sitcom revelation/Internet meme finally makes the transition to Serious Director, we’re about to find out

by Amy Wallace

Originally published in GQ, January 2012

I’m ducking Matt Damon. We’re supposed to meet at the Central Park Zoo ticket booth precisely at noon, but I’m not there. I’m thirty feet away, standing behind a huge oak tree, keeping watch.

Cameron Crowe, the director, has urged me to try to get a glimpse of the 41-year-old actor when he doesn’t know I’m there. “Matt’s fans relate to him as an older brother or a member of the family. And that’s how he relates to them,” Crowe says, recalling how during the shoot of their new movie, We Bought a Zoo, he liked to do reconnaissance on Damon as he signed autographs and interacted with his public.

The Boston native, who now calls New York home, can be reticent in interviews, reluctant to reveal too much or get too personal. I want to observe him in his natural habitat, and I imagine that my stealth will be rewarded with the kind of unguarded moment that can only be viewed in the wild. As minutes pass, however, and I don’t spot him anywhere, a thought looms: This is Jason Bourne I’m hunting—the master of evasion. What if Matt Damon is ducking me?

Stepping into the open, I sort of wave my notebook like a journalistic homing beacon, and suddenly there he is, all smiles. “Hi, I’m Matt,” he says, extending a hand. He’s in jeans, a gray waffle-y long-sleeve T-shirt, and what look to be brand-new black Puma sneakers. He has a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, which makes it easy to notice that his hat and his eyes are exactly the same blue. He’s taller than I thought he’d be and exactly a quarter inch taller than the man standing next to him: a gray-haired, bespectacled guy in pleated chinos and a baseball cap.

“This,” Damon proclaims, “is my dad.”

When Damon the younger pulls out a credit card to gain us entry to what we will all agree must be the smallest zoo on earth, Damon the elder (his name is Kent) observes wryly, “This is the first time the son buys the father a ticket to the zoo. When has that happened before?” Whereupon the son grins big and says, “There’s, like, a disturbance in the Force!”

“Come on,” Kent says. “Let’s go see the polar bears.”

As we set off, I’m immediately struck by the constant cross-generational ball-busting between father and son. For example, the story of when 12-year-old Matt announced his intent to play point guard for the Boston Celtics.

Kent: I said, “Matt, I have to tell you a little bit about the real world.”

Matt: My favorite player was Tiny Archibald, and he goes, “You know they call him Tiny because he’s six foot one.” He told me that he was the tallest Damon to ever evolve at five foot ten.

Kent: Five ten and a half, by the way.

Matt: Used to be, man.

Kent: Not that we’re sensitive about it.

I mention something Crowe has told me about Damon’s performance in the new film, in which he plays a widowed father of two who buys a ramshackle zoo. Crowe singles out a scene in which Damon talks to an ailing Siberian tiger through a chain-link fence. In the script, the tiger was supposed to be supine, but the minute Damon delivered his first line, the cat got up, snarling, and came toward him with menace. “Most people would have said, ‘This isn’t funny—put a chain on that thing!’ But Matt stays in,” Crowe told me, explaining why that first, unexpected take is the one he used in the final film. “You see him flinch but stay in.”

Hearing this, Kent gets a mischievous look: “So you were brave?”

Matt shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Cameron was telling stories about how I was brave in the face of a caged tiger,” he says. “He was working it.”

“Bunch of b.s.,” agrees Kent. Which is when I realize that we may still be talking about who’s the bigger man. Standing in front of a 90,000-gallon tank containing Gus, the zoo’s half-ton polar bear, Matt describes borrowing a bike from his elder brother, Kyle, and discovering (when he couldn’t reach the pedals) that Kyle has much longer legs. “We realized if you took his lower body and my upper body, we’d be, like, six foot three,” Matt tells his dad, who readily concedes that Matt is long of torso. “You have a neck,” he tells his son. “I don’t even have a neck.” At which point, Matt nods and says simply, “It’s true.” If you measured the smirks on their faces, I swear they’d be precisely the same size.

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, November 2011

My family’s biggest pet peeve about me is that whenever we get in the car, I tell them that wherever we’re going is 15 minutes away. Because I remember that it used to be 15 minutes away. I’m shocked that it doesn’t take 15 minutes to get from Santa Monica to West Hollywood. Shocked! If I have an appointment in West Hollywood and I’m at Ocean Avenue and Arizona, I leave 15 minutes to get there—knowing full well that crossing the 405 alone is going to take me an hour. As an L.A. native, I refuse to grow up in this one area: traffic. I’m just not going to allow L.A. to be different than it was in 1978. Otherwise I’d have to move.

I was born and spent my early childhood in Santa Monica and the Mar Vista area, so I love it there. And Beverly Hills means a lot to me, too. I lived there for quite a while, and my godmother, the actress Shelley Winters, lived within a couple of blocks of us. Chasen’s and the Beverly Hills Hotel were the meeting places for other actors with families or for Sunday brunch. It was the neighborhood, but it was also kind of fantastic. Oddly formal, but also the traditions were very of the era—the ’70s. My mom would go to the Beverly Hills Health Club, and Jack LaLanne really did give classes there. We’d walk along the empty train tracks—which actually had trains periodically—down Santa Monica Boulevard. And I watched the slow development of West Hollywood.

I remember people planting themselves here. Whether they were actors or artists or people of a particular sexual orientation, everyone was sort of finding their home, defining themselves in a city that was young in that way. No one was into glamour. There weren’t tabloids like today. Actors like my parents and my godmother didn’t really “do press” in the ’70s. If anything, if it was a big movie, maybe you’d do the cover of American Film magazine. But that was it. There was no Us Weekly. And actresses weren’t on the cover of fashion magazines; supermodels were. There were no paparazzi. It was a very naive time. More homespun. Remembering that makes me feel as if I can say “Oh, I grew up in L.A.” like someone would say they’re from Omaha.

I’m blessed to have been raised by actors, not celebrities. My mom lived in town, but my dad lived in Malibu, and it was really beat up. All dirt roads. There was one good restaurant—John’s Garden was there—and that was it. There was nowhere to go. It was funky hippies everywhere. Dad, Lou Adler, Hal Ashby, and Burgess Meredith—those were the people out there. Oh, and Robert Altman. I was hanging out with artists who were doing their own thing and who never took no for an answer. And actors studied. You didn’t stop studying acting because you were famous. Studying was part of what you did. Growing up, I felt that acting was a vocation people chose. You didn’t necessarily make a lot of money doing it. You did movies because you loved them. Everyone was in it together, and there wasn’t a lot of separation between crew and cast. It was familial.

When I’m on a set now, I expect the environment to feel like that. I just worked with Paul Thomas Anderson, who also grew up in L.A. We went to the same high school, Buckley in the Valley. On set I felt that I was working with my friend who I went to Buckley with. We were all just here, making our thing. Familial and without frills. None of the lame stuff.

Obviously I’m a fan, too, or I wouldn’t do what I do. I was really lucky to see Jimmy Stewart at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre once, which was one of the great excitements of my life. I remember also going to the premiere of Superman at Grauman’s—my mom and my godmother were close friends of Marlon Brando. It was springtime, and Shelley took me and she wore jeans because, of course, that’s what you had to wear to a premiere in 1978, with a fur coat over them. I remember walking into Grauman’s, and all the actresses were there in their jeans and mink coats. But it was also very small town.

By Phyllis Diller as told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of Los Angeles magazine

Why did I get my face done? I’ll tell you why. First of all, I didn’t touch it until I was 55. That’s when I saw myself on television, on the old Sonny & Cher show. I was playing a witch, and I threw my head back and it gave me a couple of chins. I had bags under my eyes. I’d always had irregular features. My nose was too long, and I’d broken it, which made it crooked. It was a real witch nose. I also had crooked teeth. Ugly nose, crooked teeth. Which meant I had a lot of things wrong right here in the middle. Wrong! Wrong!

Anyway, I looked terrible. So the next morning I called my skin doctor and said, “Who do I call for a face-lift?” He referred me to Franklin Ashley, the top man at UCLA. So I called him—he was the grandfather of all cosmetic surgery. You know, he did a lot of work on John Wayne.

Men have certain things they have to have done—if they care. One is their upper eye; it sometimes needs opening. And it’s OK to get the bags removed and get the chin done. But a man should never have a face-lift. All wrong! They don’t look like any man you’ve ever known. It kills at least one ball. And on some guys, two balls.

I didn’t have to tell Ashley that my nose was badly broken. He took one look at me and said, “Oh, God, look what I get to do!” I get goose pimples just talking about it. He shortened my nose. It gave me a little room between my nose and my mouth. I also had my teeth all done, straightened with some kind of veneer.

Oh, baby, he did such a great job on my neck. Look! This ain’t bad for 94! I had that original face-lift in 1972. I was in the hospital a whole week. I’m not one to sit at home and cringe in the corner. So everybody saw, for the first time in their lives, what it looked like: strings hanging out of me. My being open about it became a big deal. People love honesty.

There were people who were against my getting my face fixed. My publicist was sure it would be the end of my career. Bob Hope loved my old face—the one he found me in. But the thing is, my new face improved my personal life. Isn’t that amazing? Now that may be because it changed my attitude toward me.

For the first time in my life I began to have affairs. Real affairs! Oh, hot dang! With my old face I never felt that I would be worthy of any kind of an affair. I never expected anyone to be serious about taking me out in a boy-girl way. And it didn’t happen until I changed my attitude. The external affects the internal. It’s all one machine.

Later I had another eye job. I had cheek implants. Isn’t it mahvelous, dahling? Somebody insisted on giving me a forehead lift. Oh, and a peel. An old-fashioned acid peel! It was like taking your kidney out without an anesthetic. But child, it was worth it. It takes off all the freckles. See?

As told to Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in September 2011 issue of Los Angeles magazine

In case you didn’t know, I’m not that tall. I’m five feet two on a good day. Growing up here, I’ve seen a lot. I was never the right height or the right look. I was one of those kids—like on American Idol or The X Factor—who would do anything for a chance.

My first memory of being affected by a performance was seeing Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. I was four. We lived in these condominiums in North Hollywood—just off of Coldwater, right across from the Victory Drive-In. I would gather up the kids in the courtyard of our building and was directing and choreographing musicals before I even knew how to say the words. The Tower of Power horn section lived in our building, and around the corner were the Porcaro brothers, who started Toto.

I had gone to a couple of Laker games when they were beginning to have cheerleaders. I’d taught cheerleading at dance camp with a few girls who were part of the new squad. They said, “You really should try out.” I auditioned. There were close to 1,000 girls. I was 756th. When I made it as a Laker Girl, almost immediately it became my responsibility to choreograph. My whole goal was to get rid of the pom-poms and make us a dance team.

It was Magic Johnson’s second season, and all of the greats were there. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would talk to me while he was at the free-throw line. People assumed I was married to him because of my last name. Five years ago we had this reunion with all the old Lakers, and I saw Kareem. He said, “Come here.” I sat on his lap, and he goes, “Remember when they used to think we were married? You know what I get now? People saying, ‘You must be proud of your daughter!’ ” I think he was joking.

The Jacksons were season ticket holders. They saw me at a game, and suddenly, at 22, I was choreographing reunion tours and working with Michael and restructuring the Janet Jackson campaign. I started trends. I’d go to the imports section at Tower Records and buy whatever got under my skin and choreograph routines to it. I fell in love with Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science.” No one had heard it. We performed it with the Laker Girls. And the next day Rick Dees on KIIS introduced it with “As heard on the Lakers floor.” I was taking songs and making them number one. “Freak-A-Zoid” by Midnight Star and “One Thing Leads to Another” by the Fixx. We took so many songs platinum. It was like I was in A&R without even knowing it.

I told my record company I wanted to do a video homage to Gene Kelly with the song “Opposites Attract.” We dedicated it to him, and he reached out to me. We got to know each other toward the end of his life. I’d just done a successful Diet Coke campaign with Elton John, and they asked me to do a tribute to dance. They took Frank Sinatra out of a scene, and I got to dance next to an image of Gene. And he rehearsed me for it at his house. He was like a drill sergeant. It was thrilling.

A lot of amazing things happen in Los Angeles. I think I’m on my fifth reinvention. L.A.’s a tough city, but it’s a magical city.

When discussing the body, always go to the top. We’re talking cha-chas, ta-tas, wah-wahs, chihuahuas. L.A. loves ‘em—so we got ourselves some

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Los Angeles magazine, January 2002

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY BREASTS TODAY. First, I spilled a latte all over them at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. The lid on my cup wasn’t tight, so when I went to take a sip, milk foam poured and then puddled on my sweater. Stooping to wipe up what I presumed would be a mess on the floor, I found that little coffee had gotten past me. For the first time ever, my breasts were too grande for my latte.

Later, I took my breasts out to lunch at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where they promptly attracted the attention of, well, everybody.

Here’s the link to read the rest!

Condé Nast Portfolio’s Amy Wallace—writer of a definitive profile of the former Variety editor—looks at what his departure means for Hollywood.

Originally appeared on Portfolio.com April 08, 2009

Eight years ago, I wrote a lengthy profile of Peter Bart, the long-standing and powerful editor of the entertainment trade paper Variety, for Los Angeles Magazine. In it, I quoted the movie producer and former studio chief Peter Guber saying something that bears repeating today, as Bart’s reign ends.

“Peter is riding in the general’s car—Variety is the general’s car. And you salute the general’s car even when the general’s not in it,” Guber said of his friend Bart. “I say to him, ‘Never let go of this job, because the wolves will attack. People are kept at bay by your power.’”

On Sunday, Variety’s owners, Reed Business Information, quietly announced that Bart, 76, would no longer be riding in the general’s car. Effective immediately, he is being replaced by his No. 2, Timothy M. Gray. But here’s what occurred to me as I read that news: The end of Bart’s tenure says more about the 104-year-old vehicle he piloted for two decades than it does about him.

Bart’s influence was greatest in an age when print ruled. Now that ad revenues are faltering and bloggers are chipping away at Variety’s readership, Bart’s skills—reportedly he still types on a typewriter and reads emails on paper—are not suited to the digital age.

Variety changed. Bart stayed the same.

When I wrote about Bart—a piece that resulted in him being suspended without pay for three weeks from his job—he was at the top of his game. A former studio executive at Paramount Pictures, he knew everybody in Hollywood and had done business with many of the people Variety covered. My piece (which can be read here) showed him to be alternately charming and bullying, at once whip-smart and strangely blind to his own conflicts.

Bart’s bosses never said exactly what in my piece made them suspend him. Many have assumed that Bart was being punished for making what the Los Angeles Times yesterday called “a series of inflammatory statements that were interpreted as racist, sexist and homophobic.” But there was also the fact, revealed in the story, that Bart had shopped a script that he wrote to some of the very studio executives that Variety covered.

Bart returned to his job after an internal investigation by his bosses rapped him on the knuckles for creating “the appearance of a conflict of interest” with his script. But to many people in Hollywood, Bart’s behavior had long raised eyebrows.

While at a movie premiere after-party in New York City about a month after my story was published, I spotted a studio chief I knew, who appeared to be making a beeline straight for me. “I have to tell you a story,” the studio boss said, launching into a tale about a lunch with Bart the previous December. It wasn’t the first lunch the two had shared, but this one was memorable.

According to this studio chief, before they’d even looked at their menus, Bart announced: “Your studio has not been advertising enough in Variety. That has affected my Christmas bonus.” Bart said there would be repercussions, the studio chief told me: “For the next six months, you won’t catch a break in Variety.”

I asked if Bart made good on his threat. “Oh yes,” the studio chief said, noting that even on the weekends the studio came in No. 1 at the box-office, the story in Variety would start off with a dig—something like, “Despite a string of flops…” So what did you do, I asked. The studio chief didn’t hesitate: “We upped our ad buy.”

Before I had this conversation, I hadn’t known how to answer the many people who asked why I thought Bart had been suspended, then reinstated. After this conversation, I felt I knew. Bart did his job: He made Reed Business Information boatloads of money.

Which is why it’s no surprise that he’s being pushed aside now. Through no fault of Bart’s, the money isn’t flowing like it used to.

Other than being quoted in the initial press coverage about Bart’s brief suspension in 2001, I have never talked about the feedback I received to the piece. It was extensive and—as the studio chief’s story shows—revealing.