MUSIC > N.W.A. business manager writes memoir

NEW YORK - When Jerry Heller met Eric "Eazy-E" Wright on March 3, 1987, he knew right away that the diminutive, Jheri-curled dude with a roll of cash stuffed into his sock would change the music world.

Eazy was the founder of Ruthless Records and creator of the prototype gangsta rap group N.W.A. Heller was a music industry veteran who had represented artists from Elton John to Van Morrison to Marvin Gaye. With Eazy running the "show" and Heller handling the "business," N.W.A. — and gangsta rap — exploded into a global force.

Now, 11 years after Eazy died of AIDS, Heller has written "Ruthless," a memoir detailing how Eazy, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and MC Ren formed N.W.A. and how an ambitious security guard named Suge Knight broke up the platinum-selling crew.

Heller, 65, spoke by phone with The Associated Press from his Los Angeles office about "the most important music since the beginning of rock 'n' roll."

AP: What kind of person was Eazy-E?

Heller: Eazy was an exceptional human being. He was a visionary. He was very Machiavellian, he understood power and how to use it. He was a good-hearted guy, a good father, just an exemplary human being. I couldn't be any prouder of him than if he had been my blood son. It's amazing that we could have this relationship because we're so different. He told me I was the first white person he ever met not in a police uniform or collecting rent. I miss him very much.

AP: With all the bad stuff Eazy boasted about in his music, how can you say he was a good person?

Heller: I have no proof that he was ever a drug dealer. I'm not sure if he was or he wasn't. I know that it was good for the Ruthless image, the Ruthless persona, so maybe that's why he adopted that.

AP: C'mon, man ...

Heller: He certainly never (dealt drugs) at Ruthless. It wasn't a part of our lives. Now, if you want to talk about how somebody who espoused this kind of brutal misogynistic music could be a good person, well, this was the voice of our inner cities that most white people had never come across. To the guys in Ruthless, this was the reality of their way of life. This is the way they grew up, the way things were.

AP: You have a lot to say in your book about Ice Cube, who talked real bad about you after he left N.W.A.

Heller: He insulted me as a man, as a person, as a Jewish person. ... (yet) he is probably the most important African-American indie filmmaker in the business today. His movies are incredible. Certainly "Friday" and "Barbershop" are important movies, he's an important guy, yet until recently, this year, I never saw an interview where he didn't talk bad about me.

AP: How did Suge Knight enter the picture?

Heller: Suge was a part-time security guard at Ruthless. He can be a very charming guy, and my initial instincts were to help him. Eazy was more perceptive, he always thought he was going to be problem. I remember walking into my office one day, and Suge was standing there staring at my chair. He didn't see me. I said to him, "What you doing, man, you think that's gonna be your chair?" I never thought anyone could come between Dre and Eazy, they were childhood friends and as close as brothers. I didn't take Suge as seriously as I should have.

AP: How do you feel today, looking at what gangsta rap has become?

Heller: Imagine me walking into Joe Smith's office, he's chairman of Capitol Records, I play him the record. ... He said, "You're trying to tell me somebody's gonna listen to this, or play it, or buy it? The day that happens I'll retire." Joe Smith remains one of the giants of the music business and I love him dearly. I said, "Joe, I remember when radio wouldn't play the Rolling Stones singing `Let's Spend the Night Together.' Times change. This is the music of the future." He says, "I love the name Ruthless. I'll give you a million dollars for the name. But as far as this other stuff, you better stop getting high."

AP: What did you think that day you first met Eazy and he played you his song "Boyz-n-the-Hood"?

Heller: It just totally blew me away. It was a combination of The Last Poets, Black Panthers, Gil Scott Heron and the Rolling Stones. If I wasn't so old I wouldn't have been able to relate to it. I thought: This is the most important music I've heard since the beginning of rock 'n' roll.

AP: You were right, although some people would still argue with you.

Heller: This was the first time that the voices of our inner city were heard. The only question in my mind was how could we water it down so white people would buy it.

AP: It turns out white folks took it straight up.

Heller: We did one thing. Who were the biggest acts in the world in 1987? Guns N' Roses and Metallica. Everybody who buys Guns N' Roses and Metallica. I shamelessly pandered to surfers and skateboarders, and in pictures from then you'll see Slash and those guys wearing N.W.A. stuff. If they thought it was cool, people in Kansas and Wyoming would buy it. That's how we broached the subject. Because no question this was the most important music of the second half of the 20th century.

AP: What's next for you?

Heller: We're putting together the movie version of the book. To play Eazy, I hope we get Larenz Tate. When I look in his eyes, I see Eazy inside there. I have talked to Game about playing Suge Knight. And these are just talks right now, but I've talked to Bruce Willis about playing me.

AWARDS > Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shakira in spotlight at MTV music awards

NEW YORK (AFP) - Eighties rockers The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Latin pop queen Shakira are among the stars tipped to take home the awards on Thursday when the annual MTV Video Music Awards are held in New York.

The Californian funk-punk Chili Peppers and Colombian-born Shakira are both up for seven awards, while pop diva Madonna and newcomers Panic! at the Disco, who only released their debut album last year, have five nods each.

The awards, to be hosted by actor, comedian and musician Jack Black, are to be broadcast live from New York's Radio City Music Hall.

The most sought after of more than 20 awards, the Video of the Year gong, will see the Chili Peppers face off against Madonna, Panic!, Shakira and pop pin-up Christina Aguilera.

Aguilera -- who is also nominated for three other awards including in the best female and best pop categories, in both cases against Madonna and Shakira -- is currently topping the US charts with her third album, "Back To Basics."

The MTV awards started in 1984 and were originally intended to challenge the more traditionally Grammys.

Among the more controversial episodes in its history, Madonna, the holder of 20 so-called Moon Men trophies, kissed Britney Spears and Aguilera live on stage during the 2003 show.

MOVIES > No Kid, but Robert Evans Still Stays in the Picture

The new broom swept unusually clean at Paramount Pictures over the last year or so. Gone are high executives like Sherry Lansing and Jonathan Dolgen, studio fixtures like the superstar Tom Cruise and the producer Scott Rudin, and legions of underlings, all cleared out as a new chief, the former talent manager and producer Brad Grey, took charge.

But one thing remains somehow unchanged on the company’s Hollywood lot.

Across a bright green lawn from the executive office building, under a familiar brown awning that would be at home on Park Avenue, the production company named for its owner, Robert Evans, still holds sway.

Having overcome financial misfortunes, a cocaine addiction and a series of debilitating strokes, Mr. Evans, 76, has also survived something as manageable as corporate regime change. His durability surely says something about the power of myth in the movie world. A boy wonder who ran Paramount in the early 70’s, he embarked on a personal odyssey that brought him back to the studio as a producer 15 years ago. But he was never quite as large as he became with the success of a 2002 documentary based on his autobiography, “The Kid Stays in the Picture.”

“ ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’ did more for me than all the films I’ve done since I returned to Paramount,” he said during one of a series of recent interviews at his Beverly Hills home.

Mr. Evans’s professional survival — at a time when most of Hollywood is chasing youth and trimming overhead — also speaks to the power of personal loyalty, an enduring value in moviedom. “It is important that Bob keeps his deal,” said Sumner Redstone, the 83-year-old chairman of Paramount’s corporate parent, Viacom, and a close friend of the producer. “Though I can’t guarantee it, I would like to think he would be at Paramount forever.”

Mr. Evans certainly gives that impression, though his company — the contract for which runs to 2008 — doesn’t appear to be at peak productivity. Mr. Evans’s last feature credit was “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” a 2003 film on which his role during production, said Lynda Obst, another of its producers, was to act as a cheerleader. He says he has no films in active development.

Still, his gift for self-promotion remains formidable. “I’m a vital force to be reckoned with. I still have great ideas. Call your article ‘Evans Reloaded,’ ” Mr. Evans declared at his home in August.

Mr. Grey, in a phone interview, said Mr. Evans’s personal saga had been a factor in his own decision to sign on as Paramount’s chairman. “Part of taking this job was thinking how romantic it was the way that Bob Evans did it when he was running the studio,” he said.

Seconding the notion that Mr. Evans can stay as long as he chooses, Mr. Grey, who said Mr. Evans’s presence improved his own morale, noted that Paramount also had deals with the producers David Brown, who is 90, and A. C. Lyles, who is 88. “Evans isn’t the oldest producer on the lot,” he said.

Mr. Evans for his part strongly rejected the idea that he was being coddled because he knows so many of the movie industry’s secrets. “I’ve been back at Paramount since 1991. The only ones back then who could have cared about buried bodies are dead and buried themselves,” he said.

A significant preoccupation of late has been “The Fat Lady Sang,” a second memoir that he says he has submitted, unsuccessfully, to three publishers in the last several years. The latest version of the manuscript is chock full of bedside scenes of him lying near death after his stroke in 1998 and being comforted by Mr. Redstone, who Mr. Evans says was one of three key participants in his rehabilitation.

The others who were vital to his recovery were Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, who was also a producer of the “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” and Brett Ratner, a film director half Mr. Evans’s age who is a frequent visitor to his home.

Mr. Redstone said his own loyalty to Mr. Evans grew from a time when the producer took Mr. Redstone under wing. “In 1967 I owned a lot of movie theaters in the Northeast, but I didn’t know anyone in Hollywood,” he explained. “When I came out here, the only one who took the time to explain the Hollywood side of the business was Bob. He asked for nothing in return.”

Mr. Carter said in a phone interview that he got to know many associates of Mr. Evans while producing the documentary. When Mr. Evans returned to the film business in 1991, “he had an enormous reservoir of good will,” Mr. Carter said. “Even his competitors were happy to see him back. I challenge you to find someone who would say that Bob did anything below the belt while he was running Paramount.”

(When asked why his magazine did not publish an excerpt of the original memoir, Mr. Carter paid tribute to Mr. Evans’s ability as a myth builder: “We were offered the chance, but I declined because Bob’s work defies fact-checking. If you’re going to publish him, it’s best to go with the unvarnished Bob rather than the unvarnished truth.”)

While “The Kid” chronicled how Mr. Evans made his bones by backing young writers like Robert Towne and directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski and Hal Ashby, “Fat Lady” laments his forced pairing with the director William Friedkin , a movie veteran, on the box-office bomb “Jade” in 1995. But Mr. Evans also goes to great lengths to describe his friendship with and admiration for Mr. Ratner, a well-known figure on the industry party circuit who’s had mixed success since he hit the radar with “Money Talks” and the “Rush Hour” series almost 10 years ago.

Mr. Ratner returned Mr. Evans’s flattery in a phone interview last week. “ ‘The Fat Lady Sang’ will be made into a film with me directing,” Mr. Ratner said. “I want either Johnny Depp or Hugh Jackman to play Bob, who I consider not only one of the greatest producers of our time, but one of the greatest philosophers. ‘The Fat Lady Sang’ will be my Oscar picture.”

Stuart Fischoff, a psychology professor who recently retired from teaching at California State University, Los Angeles, and who has written about and for Hollywood, said that Mr. Evans may be serving a purpose far beyond his utility as a producer at Paramount: he is becoming the town’s institutional memory.

“No one becomes a legend unless people need the legend and legendary figures to explain why what happened once isn’t happening anymore,” Dr. Fischoff explained.

Even so, Dr. Fischoff said he found the extraordinary attention Mr. Evans has garnered in his later years a bit of a puzzlement. “Anyone who would identify Evans more than Coppola with ‘The Godfather’ is like a golf-ball manufacturer focusing on the ball rather than on Tiger Woods to explain Woods’s success.”

It was getting dark in Beverly Hills as Mr. Evans, whose gait still bears the traces of those strokes, shuffled to a dining room window that offers a handsome view of his pool and tennis court. (His fabled backyard screening room was gutted in a 2003 electrical fire.) Mr. Evans has been angry all day — and energized — about the previous night’s episode of the HBO series “Entourage.”

Portions of the episode had been filmed at Mr. Evans’s home. He was paid $30,000 for a location fee, but said he was not present during shooting, nor was he aware of the content of the scenes to be shot. So he was surprised when he watched those scenes to find the actor Martin Landau playing an aging, forgetful and washed-up producer named Bob Ryan with a butler named Alan in the scenes shot at his home. For years, Alan Selka has been Mr. Evans’s butler. (A spokeswoman for HBO said that the Bob Ryan character was not based on Mr. Evans.)

As the day wore on, Mr. Evans’s displeasure with Mr. Landau’s “Entourage” character lessened, as did his stamina. Though he says he’s still asked to play roles of men in their 50’s, Mr. Evans looks his age as his wobbly right foot slows his gait.

Asked if he might write something new about his seven wives (he’s been divorced from six of them; the seventh marriage was annulled) he replied curtly, “I don’t want to talk about them.”

The financial success of “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” the 1991 memoir by the producer Julia Phillips, is mentioned.

“I thought Julia was a very good writer,” Mr. Evans said, “but writing that kind of stuff is not good for your mental health. Besides, no one would read my book if I did what Julia did,” he added, smiling wanly. “If I wrote the truth of what I know, the book would be 10,000 pages.”

MUSIC > David Byrne shares "Perspectives" in New York

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has unveiled the lineup for his Perspectives series, which will he curate at New York's Carnegie Hall next February.

On opening night, February 1, Byrne will stage the first performance since 1992 of "The Knee Plays," a 1985 musical theater project created in tandem with Robert Wilson. The next evening, he will host an evening of experimental folk with Adem, Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan, CocoRosie and Vetiver.

On February 3, Byrne and his band will unveil songs from "Here Lies Love," his "multimedia song cycle" with Fatboy Slim, which centers on the life of former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos.

The series will close on February 4 with performances by Alarm Will Sound, Camille, Haale and other artists to be announced.

Byrne performed last week at a New York benefit for the 826 Writing Centers founded by author Dave Eggers. The show featured Byrne's collaboration with Sufjan Stevens on Lefty Frizzell's "Saginaw Michigan."

INTERVIEWS > David Lynch Wades Into Deep Waters

The director talks about business, meditation, happiness, and how to make a good movie that withstands the test of time. Lend an ear.

David Lynch has never broken box office records, but that's fine with him. Since 1978, the iconoclastic director of such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, and TV series Twin Peaks, has persuaded studios, networks, and investors to provide backing for over 15 very un-Hollywood projects -- and come back for more.

Along the way, he has earned three Academy Award nominations for best director, a Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival, worldwide critical acclaim, and a devoted following. In 1990, Time magazine proclaimed him a genius on its cover. Artistically uncompromising, Lynch, 60, is one of the few Hollywood directors who insist on -- and receive -- final cut on all films. He has developed one of the most unique and recognizable styles in world cinema.

To get his projects financed and distributed, Lynch has had to innovate in business as well as in filmmaking. As a graduate student at the American Film Institute in the late 1970s, he took a paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal to help fund the completion of his first feature film, Eraserhead. During that period, he discovered transcendental meditation, which has become integral to his creative process.

In 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-based Education & World Peace, which is dedicated to teaching transcendental meditation in U.S. classrooms. Lynch frequently lectures on using meditation to enhance creativity and decision-making in business. BusinessWeek correspondent Justin Hibbard spoke with Lynch at the TiEcon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Most people don't associate meditation with business. Why are you talking to businesspeople about meditation?
For business, you need ideas. If your consciousness starts expanding, you've got a better chance of catching more ideas, bigger ideas. The analogy is fishing. The little fish are on the surface. Then you go deeper, and they get bigger and bigger down there. Big fish, big ideas.

You recommend that businesses offer meditation to employees in the workplace. Why would a company invest in that?
There are businesses that are run on fear. And then on the other side, there are businesses that are run in a much more humane way. Businesses that are run on fear are the theater of the absurd. You go to an office filled with fear, you begin to hate your work, hate turns to anger, you begin to be angry at your work, and your life is like a hell. You don't go the extra mile for that business. And it affects your home life, it affects everything.

Now, if I was running a big business, I would say to every employee, "You have a chance to learn to dive within." And within a couple of months, you start seeing people come to work brighter, happier, with way more eagerness to go the extra mile for you. It would become like a family. And the ideas would flow. For businesses, it's money in the bank.

How has meditation helped your ideas flow?
I'll give you an example from [my 2001 film] Mulholland Drive. It was built for an open-ended TV pilot. ABC hated it. So I got the opportunity to make it into a feature. Now an open-ended pilot needed to be closed suddenly. I sat down to meditate one night, and literally, like a string of pearls, all the ideas came. Normally, you meditate, and then you think after meditation. But this just happened to zip up, and I wrote those bad boys down as soon as I finished meditating, and that was it.

Is it unusual for ideas to come during meditation like that?
Yeah, it is. Your meditation is to go within, transcend, and experience pure consciousness. You come out refreshed, wide awake, and energetic. You can now focus on those problems, focus on your business, focus on your film. It's easier to focus, and it's a more intense focus.

Do ideas often come to you completely developed as they did in the Mulholland Drive example?
Yes, a lot of times they do. But a lot of other times you get a fragment. You get like a Rosetta Stone idea. And you fall in love with this fragment, and it is now the little idea that attracts all the other ideas to it. It's like bait at the end of the hook. It may end up being part of one scene, or it sets a tone for the whole film. Then you begin to focus on that, and more fish swim in and connect to it, and now you've got two or three scenes.

The more you have, the more easily the rest swim in. It's like there's more bait. And then one day, it's complete in script form. Then you go out and make the film, being true to those ideas.Now some other fish can swim in. You never turn down a good idea, or a good fish, but you don't want to take a bad idea, or a bad fish. So you go back and see how everything is progressing based on those original ideas. And if new ideas come in, you see if they really and truly marry to what has gone before.

How do you know whether an idea is good or bad?
Intuition. There's emotion and intellect, and then there's intuition, which is kind of emotion and intellect together. In business, you might not be able to explain an intuitive feeling to others, but you say, "I know that is the right way to go for me. I know that feels right. That is intuitively right." And you go that way. And maybe everybody else is telling you you're crazy, but you've got to take a risk.

You also say meditation helps with making decisions. Can you give an example from your work?
One night while we were making Lost Highway, we had a scene underneath a covering at an indoor-outdoor '50s kind of diner with a parking lot in the background. Everyone in the scene was dressed in dry clothes and didn't have wet hair. We came there and it started raining. We had already established a dry look. Now the parking lot in the back was wet.

There was a real indication that we were going to all go home. We would have lost a night and lost a lot of money. I decided to continue to shoot. I pictured the scene shot by shot and thought, what would make that parking lot wet other than rain? And so I put kids in the background shooting garden hoses, and therefore the rain looked like it came from that. The hoses idea saved the day.

So you used visualization?
Yeah, a lot of times it's that. You needed a solution, and solutions come more easily with the more consciousness you have. If consciousness is pure gold, all you need is the key to open up that big vault door, and all that gold is yours.

Your films have a unique and recognizable style. Do you do anything deliberate to avoid the obvious and clichéd?
No, because that's a false overlay. I'm just true to those ideas that thrill me. There is some thought to the audience toward the end of the process. You see a film with many people and you can learn a lot. You just sit with them. You can feel all the places where it's slow or there's no understanding or a reaction you didn't expect.

That's fine-tuning the whole thing near the end. But to do some false thing that's not really part of the idea is wrong. A film will live throughout time, and a lot of these false things are done for today's audience right now to make money, and they don't hold up. If you're true to the idea, then it will hold up.

Uri Geller sues over Elvis pad

Cutlery molester Uri Geller and two partners are hitting the US courts in an attempt to claim ownership of Elvis Presley's former Memphis home, which they bought on eBay for $905,100, Reuters reports.

Geller and his chums have filed a federal lawsuit "seeking to rescind the sale of the property to Nashville record producer Mike Curb", to whom owners Cindy Hazen and Mike Freeman later sold the property for $1m. Their opportunity to do so came through a change in the real estate contract which allowed them 60 days to vacate the property after they said they were unable to offer immediate vacant possession. Geller and partners claim breach of contract.

Mike Curb, meanwhile, is negotiating with a nameless Memphis college to "operate a music education centre" in the house. Curb is top dog at Curb Records and heads the Mike Curb Family Foundation - a "philanthropic organisation dedicated to preserving music history and promoting music business education".

Presley bought his pad in 1956 with the royalties from Heartbreak Hotel, the eBay auction blurb explained. It boasts some of the finest musically-themed 1950s decor to be seen anywhere, including "the original music note themed wallpaper from 1956!", as the vendors enthused.

EBAY > Elvis' first house hits $450k on eBay

Any reader with a spare $450k+ burning a hole in his pocket and interested in acquiring Elvis Presley's first house should make his way down to eBay and get busy with the bidding:

Presley bought this Memphis des-res in 1956 with the royalties from Heartbreak Hotel, according to the blurb. It comes with all the expected trappings of musical success, including swimming pool, soundproofed recording area and "the original music note themed wallpaper from 1956!"

Interestingly, it appears cutlery-molesting Israeli mystic Uri Geller has made a number of bids topping out at $351,000, but is currently trumped by a top offer of $450,100.

Potential buyers should note that "all bidders will need to be prequalified before placing a bid in order to ensure financial means as well as seriousness of the bid". They'll also need a strong stomach for 1950s interior design, as this snap demonstrates.

YACHTS > "Pelorus"; Owner: Roman Abramovich

Length: 377 ft., 3 in. (115 m.)

The Russian oil billionaire and owner of the Chelsea Football soccer team in London docked his super-yacht in Hamburg while he caught some of the World Cup matches. Abramovich, whose estimated £11 billion fortune ($21 billion) makes him Britain's second-richest man after steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, has two helipads on board the Pelorus, which was built in 2003. It can accommodate about 22 guests and has a built-in elevator to speed them between levels. Abramovich also owns the 282-ft. Ecstasea, 370-ft. Le Grand Bleu, and 162-ft. Sussurro.

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CRIME > Grace Jones on flat trash rap

Long before Naomi Campbell had even considered deploying a PDA as a weapon with which to thrash her staff, model-turned-singer Grace Jones was showing wannabe "don't-you-know-who-I-ams?" exactly how it's done when she famously piled into chat show host Russell Harty.

For the record, Jones required no hi-tech weaponry with which to administer the hapless Harty a righteous ear-bashing, and as far as we are aware no mobile phones or BlackBerrys were harmed during the unfolding of her latest alleged escapade, viz: inflicting over £10k's damage to a rented flat and then fleeing the scene leaving the landlords substantially out of pocket.

According to The Evening Standard, Jones has been slapped (well, almost, because she's sort of gone awol) with a writ for £16,737.26 for damage to a £1.5m flat in Chelsea Crescent - "part of the prestigious Chelsea Harbour development", as the paper explains.

Ms Jones, 58, took up residence in the flat in November 2003 at a rent of about £40k per annum. When she moved out, owners John and Rosalind Preston say she owed £5,600 rent and had caused damage totalling more than £10,000. The latter rather splendidly included cutlery abuse - including 168 quids' worth of spoons which "had been blackened" on the underside, "apparently on account of having been held in a flame", according to The Standard.

The rest of the writ is made up of £1,762 in legal fees and £118.50 for a change of locks because Jones made off with the keys. To date, it has not been served because the plaintiffs have "failed to track down the singer". Her agent Michael Schweiger, cornered by The Evening Standard in New York, declared: "It sounds like rubbish to me. She would have mentioned it to me.

"I have never heard of any problems with that flat. She would not have left it in a mess...as far as I know she left there in good standing."

Further quizzed about the mystery blackened spoons, Schweiger said: "That all sounds a little bit weird, that sounds a bit strange to me. If a spoon was dirty you would just put it in a dishwasher."

Grace Jones is currently engaged to Viscount Wimborne. Wimbourne inherited £30m back in 1993, enough to keep even the most demanding diva in spoons for a lifetime.

MEDIA > New free evening paper for London

Associated Newspapers has confirmed plans to discontinue Standard Lite, its lunchtime freesheet in London, and launch a free evening title called London Lite, setting the stage for a battle with News International's new free evening tabloid, thelondonpaper.

Associated is owned by Daily Mail & General Trust.

More:
London's coming great newspaper war
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_6527.asp

MOVIES > Bruno Kirby R.I.P.

LOS ANGELES - Bruno Kirby, a veteran character actor known for playing the best friend in two of Billy Crystal's biggest comedies "When Harry Met Sally" and "City Slickers," has died. He was 57.

Kirby died Monday in Los Angeles from complications related to leukemia, his wife Lynn Sellers said in a statement Tuesday. He had been recently diagnosed with the disease.

"We are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support we have received from Bruno's fans and colleagues who have admired and respected his work over the past 30 years," his wife said. "Bruno's spirit will continue to live on not only in his rich body of film and television work but also through the lives of individuals he has touched throughout his life."

Born Bruno Giovanni Quidaciolu in 1949 in New York City, he was the son of actor Bruce Kirby. His early work included the 1971 film "Young Graduates," as well as appearances on the television show "Room 222" and the made-for-TV movie "The Summer Without Boys."

In 1974, he scored a role in "The Godfather: Part II," which won several Academy Awards, including best picture. In the film, Kirby played young "Pete Clemenza," following Richard S. Castellano's role in the first installment.

Over the next few years, Kirby made various TV appearances, including "Fame" and "Hill Street Blues," before landing the role of "2nd Lt. Steven Hauk" in Robin William's "Good Morning, Vietnam."

That was followed two years later by the romantic comedy "When Harry Met Sally," in which Kirby played Crystal's best friend. In 1991, Kirby once again appeared as Crystal's cheery friend in "City Slickers," — along for a mid-life adventure driving cattle on a dude ranch.

He also appeared in 1997's "Donnie Brasco," and recently in an episode of the HBO hit series "Entourage."

Along with his wife and father, Kirby is survived by his stepmother Roz Kirby, brother John Kirby and stepbrother Brad Sullivan.

No information on funeral arrangements was immediately available.

ARCHITECTURE > First Eco Football Stadium

The UK’s first sustainable football stadium is almost finished, built for Dartford Football Club in Kent. With ongoing drought conditions and a desperate need for high quality grass on the field, the architect, Urban Edge Studio, has created two lakes nearby to store rainwater for watering the grass. The average football field needs a staggering 20,000 litres of water a day to keep it looking good. The rainwater will be collected from the large flat open areas such as the plaza, artificial turf community pitch, the stadium and clubhouse roofs, and piped directly to the ponds. In an average year the ground staff should not need to take any water from the main supply to water the pitch. In a complete drought the ponds will be able to supply water for almost two months without being topped up. The lakes will make the stadium self-sufficient, look pretty, and attract local wildlife.

Because of the small size of the stadium, the architects could use sustainable building materials. The gently curving roof structure incorporates renewable, laminated timber beams, exposed timber decking and a green sedum roof cover so that it appears to merge with the surrounding landscape. Solar panels on the clubhouse roof and extensive insulation add to the overall energy efficiency. The base of the clubhouse is built in flint and brick and the upper level is clad in Siberian Larch supplied from a sustainable source. The Larch will be left untreated allowing the colour to fade and soften with age. The team is known as the “Darts” and their colours are red and white. As an added touch, white flowering cherry trees have been planted to reflect this as has a plant with the name Spirea “Darts Red”.

GADGETS > New Segways--leaner and meaner

The Segway i2 Personal Transport is geared toward commuting and running errands in an urban envronment. Both the i2 and x2 models have a new technology called LeanSteer which allows the driver to turn left or right by just leaning in that direction. The i2 will cost $4,995.

DIGITAL > Korean social-networking site hopes to nab U.S. fans

DIGITAL > Live Nation, BurnLounge duet

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Event management firm Live Nation has entered into an exclusive deal with digital music service BurnLounge that will give the service's VIP members special privileges at multiple Live Nation venues.

Under the partnership, BurnLounge members will have preferential access to amenities at select Live Nation amphitheaters, clubs and VIP rooms across the nation as well as to live data feeds providing event information and links to purchase concert tickets.

Bruce Eskowitz, Live Nation's president and CEO of global venues and alliances, said the company looks forward to welcoming members of the BurnLounge community into Live Nation venues, while BurnLounge president Ryan Dadd called the partnership a natural fit.

"It not only benefits our community but provides BurnLounge with incredible visibility to thousands of concertgoers in key markets," Dadd said.

Live Nation owns, operates and has booking rights to 153 venues worldwide. The company purchased a majority of interest in Musictoday this month -- a month after acquiring House of Blues Entertainment for $350 million.

BurnLounge, which officially went live in June, is designed to harness the power of social networking as a legal system for everyday fans to make money by selling commercially released music from their own online stores.

The service offers songs from the major label groups as well as from independent artists and established aggregators.

CRIME > Boy George reports for NYC trash duty

NEW YORK - With a city-issued broom in his hand, Boy George started his court-ordered community service early Monday, sweeping leaves and trash off the sidewalks of New York.

It took less than an hour for the former Culture Club frontman to get into a spat with the media.

"You think you're better than me?" he yelled. "Go home. Let me do my community service."

Boy George took to the streets of Manhattan as a Department of Sanitation worker wearing an orange vest, dark capri pants, shoes without socks, and without the wild makeup and androgynous style that made him so recognizable as the '80s icon who sang "Karma Chameleon" and "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?"

"This is supposed to be making me humble. Let me do this," he said. "I just want to do my job."

The singer, born George O'Dowd, was ordered to spend five days working for the Department of Sanitation after pleading guilty in March to falsely reporting a burglary at his lower Manhattan apartment. The officers who responded found cocaine instead.

At 7 a.m. Monday, a sport utility vehicle pulled up at a Lower East Side sanitation depot. The agency planned to issue the singer a shovel, broom, plastic bags and gloves for the job of picking up trash on the city's streets.

In June, Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Anthony Ferrara issued a warrant for O'Dowd's arrest after he initially failed to complete the requirements of his plea deal. When O'Dowd appeared in court 10 days later, Ferrara called off the warrant but warned the singer he could not escape his community service commitment.

"It's up to you whether you make it an exercise in humiliation or in humility," Ferrara told O'Dowd.

O'Dowd, 45, initially envisioned a service project more in line with his status as an '80s icon.

He petitioned to spend the time helping teenagers make a public service announcement. Among his other proposals to the court: holding a fashion and makeup workshop, serving as a DJ at an HIV/ AIDS benefit or doing telephone outreach.

Boy George's manager, Jeremy Pearce, told reporters shortly after the singer arrived for his first day on the job: "He doesn't show any kind of emotion about these things. He takes it in his stride."

"He doesn't need to be humiliated," Pearce said. "He's a humble person."

"Things outside in the street were a little chaotic," said Sanitation spokesman Keith Mellis. "We'll see if there's some cleaning that can be done inside."

The sweeping later resumed in a gated Sanitation parking lot.

"This is for everyone's safety," Deputy Sanitation Chief Albert Durrell said as photographers crowded outside the gate. He said the day's work also might include mopping inside the depot.

TELEVISION > "Sopranos" DVD set coming out in hi-def

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "The Sopranos" is poised to become the first TV series to be released on high-definition video discs.

HBO Video said Wednesday that its first release on the nascent HD-DVD format will be "The Sopranos: Season 6, Part 1," arriving in stores November 7, the same day as the standard DVD.

The high-definition edition will cost $129.99, $30 more than the standard DVD version.

HBO said a Blu-ray Disc version is on tap for next year.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray are the rival next-generation optical-disc formats vying to succeed DVD as the nation shifts toward high-definition TV sets. By year's end, there will be 25 million-28 million HDTV households in the U.S., according to Warner Bros. research. Both formats offer a clearer picture -- 1,080 lines of resolution compared with 480 for DVD -- and hold three to five times as much data as standard DVDs.

At an HD-DVD panel Monday during the Entertainment Media Expo in University City, representatives from the three studios supporting the format -- Universal, Warner Bros. and Paramount -- promised more than 150 HD-DVD titles in stores by year's end.

Warner has 21 titles on the market and will release as many as 50 more; Universal, the only studio to support only HD-DVD, will have released 60 titles by year's end. And Paramount, which has just 10 titles in the market, will release another 10 by year's end.

Only two HD-DVD players are in the market, both of them from Toshiba. The electronics giant's marketing vp, Jodi Sally, would only say there are "tens of thousands" of players in consumer homes.