It’s not often that American television news figures accuse government officials, foreign or domestic, of lying. But CNN’s Anderson Cooper made up for that, big time, this week. He heaped the pejorative on Egypt’s leaders 14 times in a single “Anderson Cooper 360.”

Though the Big Picture knows of no record book for declarations of mendacity, that must have been some sort of new high -- at least for mainstream American news. Cooper's accusations of “lies” and “lying” got so thick on Wednesday’s show that the host seemed to be channeling comic (and now U.S. Sen.) Al Franken’s 2003 book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.”

(Over on Fox News, meanwhile, Glenn Beck has decided the Egyptian revolution is about the worst thing that would happen to humankind. My "On The Media" column takes a look at his rants.)

The CNN star regularly devotes a segment on his show to “Keeping Them Honest.” Some critics have noticed Cooper's pronounced shift toward more opinion-making in recent months. One theory is that CNN -- which has hewed to traditional he-said/she-said reporting in the past -- may be trying to adopt the more commentary-heavy approach of its higher-rated competitors, Fox and MSNBC.

Cooper, who had been roughed up by thugs a couple of times during his recent visit to Egypt, made no bones at the top of his Wednesday night show about the direction he would take. “A lot happening tonight,” he told viewers. “We're again devoting nearly the entire hour to Egypt, the entire hour to debunking the lies the Egyptian regime continues to try to spread about what is really happening there.”

A moment later he described the efforts of “Egyptian government efforts to hold on to power by lying to Egyptians and lying to the world.” He was off and running. By the time his show was over, Cooper also noted that the government “continues to distort or hide the truth about how many people have been killed or detained in the demonstrations.” (Nice change-ups, Anderson, but those don't get logged on our tote board, because they aren't derivations of the verb “lie.”)

Cooper cranked out another five lie-derivatives in reference to an Egyptian anchorwoman, who had quit state-run TV because she was no longer willing to fib, prevaricate and mislead. Cooper also hit now-ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak and his government with a trifecta of deceit: for saying journalists had started the unrest, for claiming the only options in Egypt were chaos or totalitarianism and for charging protesters with resorting to violence. “Lies,” “lies” and “a lie,” Cooper declared, though not all in one breath.

The anchor also nailed the nation’s foreign minister for a whopper. The minister had claimed that a state of emergency in Egypt was necessary because 17,000 prisoners had been freed to the streets. “And it sounds almost plausible at first,” Cooper rejoined, “but then you remember that the Mubarak regime has been ruling under a state of emergency for nearly 30 years.”

Cooper handled most of the extraordinary truth-squading session all by himself. Though he did offer a video of the penitent Egyptian anchor, Shahira Amin, in evidence. She talked about how she had been told by the Interior Ministry to say that the Muslim Brotherhood had instigated the protests and also to blame “foreign agents” for fomenting trouble. Amin could not stand it any more. She resigned.

The CNN anchor noted that some viewers complained via e-mail that his unforgiving tone toward the Mubarak regime was “somehow personal, because I and my team was attacked by thugs on two occasions, that somehow I've lost objectivity.”

He moved to quash that notion: “Answer to that," Cooper said, "This is not personal. This is not to insult Egypt. This is about the truth, and all the reporters on the ground, and frankly all the people in that square and most of the people around the world have seen the truth in Egypt.”

Indeed, it’s hard to find fault with what Cooper had to say, though it did begin to sound a little one-note after about the sixth or seventh "liar, liar." We got the point a few minutes into the show. And its doubtless many in the audience didn't understand, since the evidence appeared right on our TV screens all week.

“I have no problem with this point-of-view reporting because it was fully substantiated and accurate,” said Marc Cooper, a veteran journalist and professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.  “I applaud its honesty, even if motivated by commercial concerns. But it begs a monster question: Is CNN permitted to call only foreign leaders liars? How refreshing it would be to see that same piercing candor directed at American politicians when they overtly lie.”

-- James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: CNN's Anderson Cooper has had his fill of members of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. He let them have it with both barrels this week, repeatedly accusing the government of lying to its people and the world. Credit: Bryan Bedder / Getty Images

From 1936 through 1943, the motion picture academy nominated 10 movies for best picture, just as it does now. Back then, Hollywood was cranking out an unbelievable volume of movies, with some of the top studio filmmakers often directing several pictures each year. So it wasn't such a stretch to nominate 10 movies for best picture, since there were plenty of gems to go around.

One of the banner years in the business was 1939, which is being celebrated on Saturday by Turner Classic Movies -- it's airing all 10 of the year's best picture nominees. I mean, think about how much you'd like to see some of these great films -- "Rules of the Game," "Young Mr. Lincoln," "The Women," "Gunga Din," "Destry Rides Again," "Beau Geste" and "Union Pacific."

Whoops! None of those pictures even made the cut. There were 10 pictures even more worthy of honor, including such classics as "Ninotchka," "Stagecoach," "Wuthering Heights," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "The Wizard of Oz," which all lost to "Gone with the Wind." You can go here to see TCM's program listing, with all the Eastern Standard air times, so I suggest you set your TiVos and soak up some great moviemaking.

-- Patrick Goldstein  

Photo: Jimmy Stewart, in a scene from the 1939 Oscar nominated film, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Credit: Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

It's hard to imagine anyone who could arouse feelings of sympathy for Nikki Finke, who's been something of a one-woman wrecking crew during her tenure at Deadline, having alienated most of her old media pals with a slew of vituperative, vindictive antics before lapsing into her recent Garbo-esque silence. (When the Huffington Post sold this week for $315 million, a host of media types took great relish in dredging up Finke's original vitriolic story about the HuffPost launch, in which she confidently predicted that the Arianna Huffington-led enterprise would be a huge disaster.)

But when it comes to l'affaire de Nikki Finke foto, let's just say that Richard Johnson, the L.A. bureau chief of Rupert Murdoch's much-heralded new iPad-oriented publication, the Daily, has found a way to make Finke look, at least ever so briefly, like a victim (with Johnson assuming the role of the vulgar tabloid hag). Any hope of the Daily being viewed as a class act pretty much went out the window with the publication of this Johnson-penned non-story, which ran a stalker photo with the headline: "Is this Nikki Finke, the most powerful -- and elusive -- woman in Hollywood?"

Alas, no, it wasn't, with two of Finke's sometimes friends, IndieWire's Anne Thompson and the Wrap's Sharon Waxman, both answering the Daily's crude, search-engine-inspired question with an unequivocal no. But that didn't stop the Daily from running a stakeout-style photo of a middle-aged blond woman driving away from Finke's Westwood apartment complex. Finke also denied being the woman in the photo, leaving Johnson to goose up his copy with some unsourced speculation that Finke had called several News Corp. executives, having "intimated there would be reprisals in the form of negative coverage of 20th Century Fox should we publish the photo." Oh, golly, to have been a fly on Tom Rothman's wall when that call came in!

Just to make himself look like even more of a weasel, Johnson disingenuously added: "We certainly don't believe she would ever do that -- she is too good a journalist for those type of shenanigans." Which begs the question: If you don't believe Finke made the threats, then why did you say it in the first place? Either you believe it or you don't.  

All I can say is: Yuck! It's a big black eye for Johnson, but more important, for Murdoch's ambitions of creating a credible new journalism product. For months, Murdoch has been describing the Daily as "the No. 1 most exciting project" at his company. But right now, it looks like the No. 1 most tawdry venture at News Corp., almost as comically low-brow as the garish posters for Fox's new "Big Momma's House" sequel.     

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Rupert Murdoch in New York at the unveiling of News Corp.'s new iPad publication, the Daily. Credit: Brendan McDermid / Reuters

There was a long list of actors, some of them big stars, who dropped out of the running to play one of the two lead characters in "The Fighter." But when I was having lunch with "The Fighter" producer David Hoberman the other day, he revealed something I hadn't heard: The first person who had a shot at playing Micky Ward, the film's blue-collar hero eventually portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, was ... Eminem. "We actually first developed the project for him," said Hoberman, who spent so long putting "The Fighter" together at Paramount that the studio went through four production chiefs during the film's gestation period.

Actually, for showbiz insiders, the real shocker about "The Fighter" is that the film has earned Hoberman his first Oscar best picture nomination. Now 58, Hoberman has been a Hollywood fixture for decades, working for Norman Lear and then as an agent at ICM before joining Disney in the mid- 1980s, just after Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had began their herculean efforts to reinvent the studio. Hoberman became head of production at Touchstone in the late '80s before running Disney's entire motion group for a half-dozen years in the 1990s, cranking out family movies and warmhearted comedies.

Since 1996, Hoberman has headed Mandeville Films, where he's produced dozens of movies, including such easygoing comedy fare as "George of the Jungle," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "The Shaggy Dog," "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" and "The Proposal." Many of the movies have been hits, but none of them have attracted the kind of rave reviews that get you good seats at the Oscars — much less the seven nominations garnered by "The Fighter," including a best picture nod.  

So for Hoberman (and his Mandeville producing partner Todd Leiberman), "The Fighter" is a huge first. Even though he insists he's never craved being in the Oscar game, Hoberman admits he's emotional about finally joining the elite best picture club. "Being 58, to have this movie after making more than 30 movies as a producer, it's a pretty extraordinary experience for me," he told me. "I'm really grateful for it, mostly because we put so much effort into getting the movie made."

That's an understatement. The producers tossed out the first script they commissioned when it played too much like a documentary. They brought in Lewis Colick, who penned a script that first got the project greenlighted. It was that point that the producers went to Wahlberg, who committed to playing Micky Ward. Paramount wanted to be in business with Darren Aronofsky, so he was brought in to direct. In the course of trying to find a name actor to play Ward's half brother, Dicky Eklund, the producers approached Matt Damon, who showed enough interest in the part that the producers hired an A-list screenwriter, Paul Attanasio ("Donnie Brasco"), to do a rewrite.

Hoberman isn't sure why Damon eventually passed — "maybe his schedule got nuts or maybe he didn't like the draft." But the production team moved on, zeroing in on Brad Pitt, who spent time talking to Aronofsky about the project. Hoping to reel Pitt in, the producers hired another writer, Scott Silver, to do a new draft of the script. Silver became a key player on the film, but Pitt eventually took a pass too.

To make matters worse, Aronofsky's movie "The Wrestler" became a film festival sensation and ended up being a leading contender in the 2009 Oscar race, earning the filmmaker a host of enticing studio offers. So he dropped out of the project too. "We totally understood," Hoberman says with a shrug. "He had a lot of great offers, all these people coming at him, and we still had nothing."   

Regrouping, Hoberman and Lieberman sent the Silver script out to three new directors, including David O. Russell, who won everyone over with his ideas and energy. Russell had worked with Wahlberg in the past, so the actor was eager to stay involved. The producers approached a series of new actors for the Eklund part, including Joaquin Phoenix, of all people, but after Christian Bale threw his hat in the ring, everyone eagerly embraced him as being a perfect foil for Wahlberg.

Well, everyone except for Paramount, which was happy to release the film, but didn't want to finance it. With Wahlberg's help, Hoberman went to Ari Emanuel, Wahlberg's longtime agent, who recruited Ryan Kavanaugh's Relativity Media to put up the $25-million budget. "I totally understand Paramount's reluctance," Hoberman says. "Studios really aren't in the business of making these kind of dramas. They really didn't want to do an R-rated film if it didn't have stars like Brad Pitt or Matt Damon in it."

All's well that ends well. "The Fighter" not only found itself right smack in the middle of the Oscar race, but having already made $83 million, it has easily outgrossed Paramount films like "Dinner for Schmucks" and "Morning Glory," which are the kind of comic fluff that studios are willing to bankroll. As for Hoberman, he doesn't sound like a man who's been bitten by the Oscar bug.

"I'm a product of Jeffrey Katzenberg and the Walt Disney studio," he says. "Our whole identity was about doing comedies. If you look at the people we worked with back then, from Julia Roberts to Danny De Vito and Bette Midler, you could say we made stars, not Oscar films." Hoberman knows he's no Scott Rudin, who buys bestselling Oscar-bait novels the way kids buy baseball cards. "To this day, I'm still trying to find an executive who can bring books into our company, but I'll certainly never be that guy. As a producer, I was trained in the Disney system, and it just rubs off on you in terms of your interests."

So Hoberman is enjoying the limelight, but he isn't changing his style. He and Lieberman are producing "The Muppets," which finishes shooting at Disney on Friday. "This is one of those beautiful Hollywood moments, and I'm enjoying every minute," he says. "But I'm not like Dicky Eklund, who thought it wasn't good enough to just be in the ring, that you had to win. For me, just being around all these other great Oscar movies, that's good enough for me." 

— Patrick Goldstein

Photo: David Hoberman at the Producers Guild Awards last month in Beverly Hills. Credit: Albert E. Rodriguez / Getty Images.

In late January 1991, fax machines were humming all across Hollywood, spreading the news that Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of production at Disney, had written a scalding, often self-critical 28-page memo blasting the movie industry's “tidal wave of runaway costs and mindless competition.” Hollywood's “blockbuster” mentality, he lamented, had turned films into assembly-line products with a shelf life “somewhat shorter than a supermarket tomato.”

Sound familiar?

Back then, studio chiefs were still relatively discreet about the inner workings of their business, so Katzenberg's memo (read it here) was particularly shocking because he named names — not only calling out other studios' flops but also complaining about the excessive time and energy Disney had put into “Dick Tracy,” the Warren Beatty film whose swollen budget ate up nearly all its profits. Though Beatty was still one of the biggest stars in town, Katzenberg said that the next time Beatty came to the studio with a project, we “should slap ourselves a few times, throw cold water on our faces and soberly conclude that it's not a project we should choose to get involved in.”

The memo, intended only for internal consumption, ended up being printed in full in Variety. The rest of the media quickly leaped in, with the New York Times noting that the memo inspired months of “anger, resentment, debate and jokes within Hollywood.” Bill Murray, appearing on “Larry King Live” to promote Disney's “What About Bob?,” complained about the memo's dismissive attitude toward stars. Mike Medavoy, then chairman of Tri-Star Pictures, called the memo “self-serving palaver.” Beatty, who'd been a close friend of Katzenberg's, stopped speaking to him. Disney Chairman Michael Eisner privately fumed about the leak.

Twenty years later, the memo makes for fascinating reading. It's clearly one of Katzenberg's first efforts to transform himself from a dogged production executive best known for a punishing work ethic into an industry strategist and spokesman, a role he has assumed in recent years as the leading proponent for 3-D movies. But what's even more compelling is how prophetic the memo looks today, especially in the way that it offers an early glimpse into the kind of risk-averse managerial thinking that has come to dominate today's movie industry.

When I called Katzenberg to ask if he'd discuss the memo, he politely declined, saying that as someone who never watches any of his old films, he viewed it as an unrewarding exercise. “Wild horses couldn't get me to do it,” he said with a laugh. “I couldn't get past the first paragraph without breaking into a cold sweat.”

At the time, the part of the memo that received the most attention was its scathing assessment of “Dick Tracy,” which cost nearly $50 million to make, more to market and sucked up hundreds of hours of Katzenberg's time in dealing with the famously indecisive Beatty, who had dinner with Katzenberg virtually every night during the film's extended production. The film barely covered its costs while “Pretty Woman,” which starred the then-unheralded (and inexpensive) Julia Roberts, was a breakout hit. It cost a modest $14 million, yet it grossed an astounding $463 million worldwide, then a record for Disney.

Katzenberg and Eisner's original model for Disney had been to make movies with low-cost stars, so it's little wonder, after “Dick Tracy,” that Katzenberg advocated reviving that strategy, warning that the studio's initial success was based on “the ability to tell good stories well,” not on “big stars and name directors.” Katzenberg stressed that the studio should be in control of its own destiny, focusing more on “stories that make us care” than on stars or production values.

Movie stars were bad for business. As Katzenberg put it: “Unreasonable salaries coupled with giant participations comprise a win/win situation for the talent and a lose/lose situation for us. It results in us getting punished for failure and having no upside in success.” His blunt assessment of the “celebrity surcharge” of dealing with movie stars has been adopted today by many studios, most notably at the fanatically disciplined 20th Century Fox.

The memo anticipates some of the biggest changes in studio thinking about making family-oriented movies, especially when you realize that the most successful family movies are animated. But Katzenberg's memo, for all its prophetic thinking, is laced with a bitter irony: He repeatedly stresses the importance of hiring a stable of in-house writers who felt they had a stake in the studio's success and could transform Disney into a quality-driven idea factory. But if you were to point to a company that exemplifies that vision of a studio, it would be Pixar.

Pixar has always been three steps ahead of the company Katzenberg went on to found, DreamWorks Animation, both in terms of commercial consistency and awards-season plaudits. And Pixar was such a creative behemoth that Disney ended up buying it for more than $7 billion.

Pixar operates much as Katzenberg envisioned his ideal studio, propelled by a collaborative cadre of brilliant creative minds, including Pete Docter (“Up”), Andrew Stanton (“Wall-E”) and Lee Unkrich (“Toy Story 3”), who've served in every capacity at the studio, from story artists, animators and voice actors to writers and directors.

DreamWorks Animation had lots of success, especially with its “Shrek” franchise, but its films are still marketed on the voices of celebrities like Eddie Murphy who, while they don't get the salaries they earn in live-action films, still often receive back-end payments. Pixar's films are sold via strong concepts. They cast to character — you rarely see a marquee actor doing a voice in a movie like “Ratatouille” and “Wall-E.”

That's not to take anything away from Katzenberg, whose thinking has ended up being a big influence on much of present-day Hollywood. But maybe he should consider re-reading the memo after all. Some of DreamWorks' recent films, notably “Monsters vs. Aliens” and “Megamind,” have felt all too much like “Dick Tracy” when it comes to a focused story and character. What Katzenberg said in 1991 is still true now — for all the appeal of new technology and special effects, the original idea is king.

 --Patrick Goldstein

 Photo: Then-Disney production chief Jeffrey Katzenberg in a file photo from 1994.

Credit: Associated Press

If there's anyone who understands the strange DNA of American guys, it's Mark Cuban, the pioneering Internet entrepreneur who now owns the Dallas Mavericks and 2929 Entertainment, which makes movies and oversees the Landmark Theaters chain. Cuban is also a co-founder of HD Net, the first high-definition satellite TV network. In other words, he's no technophobe. But as this new post on his blog makes clear, Cuban has a problem with the social elements of the development of 3D, especially when it comes to making inroads into our living rooms.

For Cuban, the Super Bowl was a huge speed bump for the arrival of 3D TV because of 3D's very absence. As he put it:

No one talked about wanting to watch in 3D. No one was upset that the game was not broadcast in 3D. There weren’t irate call ins to talk radio. In fact, I don’t think anyone realized that it wasn’t being broadcast in 3D because no one cared. It was the same thing earlier in the season when the NBA did a game in 3D. Not a single person asked me about it. No one in the media brought it up. No one talked about watching it. That is saying a lot.

In Cuban's mind, what it says is that the future of 3D will not be propelled by guys getting together, beers in hand, wanting to watch a big basketball or football game broadcast in 3D. It's the Geek Factor.  "A bunch of guys are not going to spend a lot of money on glasses to look goofy sitting next to each other," he contends. I guess there are exceptions to this rule, since after all, don't thousands of incredibly goofy looking guys hang out together at Comic-Con?

At any rate, Cuban isn't arguing that 3D doesn't have a future on TV, just that the vast majority of people who watch 3D telecasts will do it by themselves, or perhaps with their kids, but not when they're around their peers. (There is nonglasses 3D on the way, but you have to sit right in front of the TV, making it a hard sell for social occasions.) I'd especially like to hear from any female readers as to whether this is really a Guy Thing or whether it might apply to women as well.

But I think Cuban makes a valid point -- 3D TV might work best as a solitary pursuit. Cuban has considered the potential perils of exposure. As he says: "Having to buy a bunch of glasses for you and your buddies to watch the game ... too much risk that someone takes a picture of the group and posts it on Facebook. That [stuff] lives forever."

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban exhorting his team during a game in January against the Houston Rockets. Credit: Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency

AOL's $315-million purchase of the Huffington Post has produced all sorts of commentary, including my "On the Media" column on the nature of this new media giant.

Some critiques have focused elsewhere, on how the onetime king of dial-up Internet access allegedly sold its soul to the queen of the  political left.

"This proves AOL News has lost its mind," raged right-wing media commentator Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center. "AOL News is fooling only itself in thinking there is no journalistic conflict in merging with a hate-filled, vicious, radically left-wing rag."

No one in their right (or is it left?) mind would question that HuffPo is a haven for lefties, witness the withering screed that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin offered up after Sarah Palin ("phony pioneer girl" was one of his milder rebukes) conducted her televised caribou hunt for cable's TLC. That one drew more than 700,000 readers.

But anyone who visits the site regularly realizes that it's driven much more by aggregation of features, video, gossip, sports, books, movies, reality TV and all sorts of other pop culture morsels.  

It's safe to bet that Google searches bring battalions of conservatives and moderates to the site to read about, say, Christina Aguilera botching the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

Speaking to a group of marketing and PR types in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, Huffington and AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong stressed that just 15% of the Huffington Post revolves around politics. Armstrong called the charges of a left-wing media coup a "red herring."

"There is a bigger fact, which is the business fact, which is that Huffington Post is one of the fastest-growing large-scale content properties with a great brand on the Web," Armstrong said.

That does not mean, Huffington suggested, that AOL's myriad sites will be devoid of politics. She has argued for several years that the political debate has too often been characterized as right/left, when many issues don't break down that way.

She likes to note, for instance, that traditional conservatives such as Grover Norquist and George Will have questioned whether the high cost of the war in Afghanistan is worth paying.

What's more important than purging politics from AOL's websites is making it clear where writers are coming from, Huffington suggested. She noted that local editors for Patch.com, AOL's hyper-local Web presence in more than 700 communities, post biographies on the sites that outline their political views.

"The important thing is transparency," Huffington said, "to be transparent about where you are coming from as a journalist.”

-- James Rainey
Twitter / latimesrainey

Photo: Tim Armstrong, chief executive officer of AOL Inc., and Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, at AOL headquarters in New York on Monday. Credit: Jin Lee / Bloomberg

Covering Hollywood, I've learned that one of the worst things about the business is how everyone kowtows to the boss. When a big-shot filmmaker shows his pals and associates a first cut of his new film, everyone is full of praise, no matter how awful the movie actually is. The same goes inside the studio executive suite, where once a studio chief has offered unbridled excitement about a spec script, the underlings are quick to echo that enthusiasm, no matter what they might privately think.

I was thinking about all that showbiz Group Think when I was watching "The O'Reilly Factor" Monday night, knowing that the real fun wasn't so much in watching Bill O'Reilly interview President Obama on Super Sunday, but in watching Papa Bear crow about his scoop the following evening. Sure enough, O'Reilly was busting his buttons with pride, replaying a bunch of the highlights, along with some unseen interview footage, but not before boasting that his session with Obama was, as he modestly put it, "the most widely viewed interview of all time."

But what really mattered wasn't just how much O'Reilly liked the interview, but how much his cohorts at Fox News liked it as well. So O'Reilly brought in a host of Fox News staffers, all of whom--gasp!--told him what a great job he did interviewing the president. Fox contributor Juan Williams could barely contain himself, gushing "Let me say congratulations! You're the talk of the nation today." Fox analyst Mary Katharine Ham told O'Reilly his interview with Obama was marvelous, just "as it always is when you two guys talk." Even Brit Hume showed up to pat O'Reilly on the back, saying in his cozy, barroom baritone: "I thought you did fine." Bernie Goldberg, who is sort of Fox's in-house mainstream media critic, also stopped by to offer praise, at least when he wasn't taking shots at rival news interviewers who'd supposedly been condescending toward Sarah Palin.

The whole show had the same air of blissful unreality that was no doubt on display the first time James Brooks showed his friends an early cut of "How Do You Know." Not that O'Reilly did a bad job at all. He's a good interviewer, once you get used to the fact that he's not content to just ask questions about Afghanistan or the debt crisis, but needs to let us know what he thinks about the issue too. I know a lot of my liberal pals thought O'Reilly interrupted the president way too often--20 times by AOL's count, 28 times according to MSNBC.

But as O'Reilly himself noted on Monday, when he heard that he's interrupted Obama 20 times in 15 minutes, he immediately thought--"That's all? I thought it was more!" That's good reporting. When you do a live interview, you have to be willing to prevent your subject from running out the clock. And that's hardly a conservative media trait. If MSNBC wants to count interruptions, it should start with its own Chris Matthews, who's so eager to hear his own voice that if he were interviewing a Shakespearian actor trying to recite "Hamlet," the poor guy would never get past "To be or not to be," because Matthews would be stepping on his lines, barking, "Well, which one is it?"

--Patrick Goldstein    

  Photo: Fox News' top rated host, Bill O'Reilly, at his New York studio.

Credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times

Groupon, the group discount website, found itself in the unenviable position of Monday morning quarterbacking--trying to explain, one day later, how its Super Bowl ads misfired so badly.

Groupon founder Andrew Mason explained in a post on the website Monday afternoon that the online coupon company had meant to poke fun at itself and at "shameless self promotion" in most ads, not at the downtrodden Tibetan people, threatened Brazilian rain forests or endangered whales.

Many viewers thought the irony misfired and, instead, seemed to make light of causes like freedom for Tibet and the rain forests in Brazil. Several critics rated the ads--in which spokesman quickly jumped from a sociopolitical issue to a bargain available from Groupon--as the worst to air during Sunday's big game.

Mason said in his post that his company's intention had been to raise awareness for Groupon and for the causes, in hopes that people would contribute. "That’s why organizations like Greenpeace, BuildOn, the Tibet Fund and the Rainforest Action Network all decided to throw their support behind the campaign (read Greenpeace’s blog post here)," he wrote.

In fact, the nonprofit organizations approved the scripts for the spots in advance, though they did not see the final editing cuts because of the need to make the deadline for broadcast, a Groupon spokeswoman told the Big Picture.

Groupon's three ads featured celebrity spokespeople--actor Tim Hutton, model Elizabeth Hurley and actor Cuba Gooding Jr.--telling the stories, respectively of Tibet, Brazilian forests and whaling. Mid-ad the celebs then turned to pitches for the online coupon service--noting you could get a big break at a Himalayan restaurant in Chicago, a New York salon offering Brazilian bikini wax and on whale tours.

At that point, particularly in the Tibet ad, you could almost hear the needle screeching across the vinyl album. Non sequitur alert! 

"Our ads highlight the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues, making fun of Groupon," Mason wrote, by way of explanation. "Why make fun of ourselves? Because it’s different -– ads are traditionally about shameless self promotion, and we’ve always strived to have a more honest and respectful conversation with our customers."

When you have to explain a joke that costs you millions to produce, you know something went terribly wrong. The pivot from altruism to commercialism seemed earnest or awkward, at best. It failed to take clear enough aim at crass commercialism.

Mason used his message Monday to try to return the focus to the charitable organizations Groupon said it set out to help. "To that point, if the ads affected you, we hope you’ll head over to SaveTheMoney.org and make a donation (which we’ll match)," Mason wrote, "we’re hoping to raise a lot of money."

He concluded with this: "The last thing we wanted was to offend our customers -– it’s bad business and it’s not where our hearts are."

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Arianna Huffington remade the media landscape this morning when she became content leader for AOL, which purchased her 5-year-old Huffington Post website for $315 million.

That may have been the top news story at Huffington Post. But the other headlines attracting bundles of clicks there Monday were: “Kim Kardashian Loves 'W Magazine' Nude Photos,”  “Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem” and “Jennifer Aniston Wears Bra Vibrator on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show.' "

Those who know Huffington mostly from television will focus on her liberal politics, support of health care reform and opposition to America’s two wars. Conservative opinion makers quickly slammed AOL, saying its credibility as a news source would slip away thanks to its union with Huffington.

But as the previous headlines demonstrated, government and politics take a backseat at Huffington Post to the real traffic drivers -- features, celebrities, gossip and other "verticals" that are pieced together and presented with brilliant aggregation and search engine optimization (SEO).

As pioneering blogger and web designer Jason Kottke tweeted, "HuffPo sold to AOL for $315 million. Is that the biggest exit ever for an SEO company?"

Others who work in the online news and information space agreed that what AOL got, at a high premium, was an operation brilliant at creating a water hole and drawing the animals in to drink.

Huffington Post has led most other sites by smoothly incorporating social media so that friends can use Facebook and Twitter to find out what friends are reading. It’s not uncommon to find stories replayed on HuffPo getting far more traffic than they did at the originating site, though links connect back to the source.

“I watch the way they put it together and they are just way ahead of the pack,” said an executive at another Web operator, who asked not to be named because his owners prohibit talking about rivals.

It’s not uncommon for posts to draw thousands of comments. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s withering takedown of Sarah Palin (who he dubbed a “phony pioneer girl”) and her TV hunting expedition lured in more than 700,000 readers, was "liked" more than 100,000 times on Facebook and drew 7,800 comments.

Other sites only dream about that kind of traffic. And much of the content comes from friends of Arianna. Like Sorkin, they don’t get paid.

The charming HuffPost doyenne is herself one of the most valuable assets AOL has acquired. At every one of her myriad media appearances, she’ll now be introduced as the guru of content for AOL and all its sites — which include TechCrunch, Engadget and many others.

That sort of buzz and relevance has escaped AOL in recent years. It will be invaluable to an operation that thrived in what now seems like a long-ago time — when most computer users relied on dial-up connection for Internet access.

But what about making money?

Huffington has made only a little so far. Her operation has mostly been propped up by venture capital. It reportedly brought in $30 million in revenue in 2010, breaking into profitability for the first time. In its announcement Monday, the company said it hopes to increase that to $50 million this year and to lure more premium advertising as the AOL-Huffington Post combo expects to attract 117 million unique visitors a month.

That may all happen. But there are many skeptics. Among the questions: Can Huffington, known as a storyteller and promotional whiz, manage a complicated business amalgam? Some of those who have worked for her question her organizational abilities.

Do ad “synergies” really emerge, or is this just another Web deal that is not greater than the sum of its parts? Steve Case, the former AOL chief executive involved in the famously unsuccessful merger with Time Warner, was among the immediate skeptics of the new deal.

 "Tim Armstrong says 1 + 1 will equal 11. Really? That wasn't my experience," Case tweeted.

-- James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: The Huffington Post website draws a lot of traffic with celebrity titillation, such as a headline about nude photos of the pictured Kim Kardashian. AOL bought the website for $315 million, hoping to benefit from its aggregation and search engine optimization. Credit: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

There was hardly any real mention of it on Fox during the hours and hours of hype that accompanied that national holiday that is Super Bowl Sunday, but the NFL is girding for a horrific labor clash over a new collective bargaining agreement that could put the coming NFL season in jeopardy. So I guess it was no surprise that the NFL, which sees itself as a national institution that's too big to fail, put some serious muscle into presenting itself in the best possible light before the game began, running an astounding faux patriotic ad for itself, narrated by Michael Douglas, that cast the league as a hallmark of American values, second only to, well, maybe Clint Eastwood.

Called "The Journey," the short film put together by Fox Sports was a more effective propaganda vehicle than any of the much heralded car, beer and movie ads that normally grab our attention during the Super Bowl broadcast. It opened with a series of Americana images guaranteed to stir our souls, all symbolizing the perilous odyssey our country has traveled -- immigrants streaming past the Statue of Liberty, soldiers landing on Omaha Beach, the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting at his father's funeral, Martin Luther King Jr. orating at the March on Washington and rescue workers raising a flag at Ground Zero.

Then, oh, so gently, aided by a celestial choir, the visual images melted into a series of scenes of football triumphs, as Douglas cannily linked the pride we take in our nation's accomplishments with the rugged glory of the two football teams prepared to do battle. Or as he said: "Tonight, here we are, united, to see their journey. Two storied franchises, one founded by a shipping clerk ... the other named after the proud steel mills that forged this nation. Green Bay and Pittsburgh, where the game of football is in their blood. This is so much bigger than a football game. These two teams have given us the chance, for one night, not only to dream, but to believe."

OMG! If it had been a McDonald's commercial, we'd all be quietly appalled by the shamelessness of it all. If it were an ad for a Disney movie, we'd be insulted by the studio's chutzpah. But because it was the hallowed NFL, and we were all revved up for a brutal football clash, everyone in front of my TV set was raising a beer to the sky in a triumphant salute. I don't know exactly who came up with the brilliant idea for the ad, but I'm guessing that more than one GOP presidential aspirant who was watching turned to an aide and said, "Find out who cut that spot. Let's get them locked up for 2012."

The NBA finds better singers to do the National Anthem, Major League Baseball casts its World Series in a more nostalgic light, but when it comes to making itself feel like an irreplaceable part of the national fabric, no one casts a hypnotic spell like the NFL. Green Bay may have won the game, but it was the NFL, hand in glove with Fox Sports, that did the best job of burnishing its image.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers celebrates after winning Super Bowl XLV 31-25 against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Arlington, Texas. Credit: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images

 Super Bowl ads will be the highlight of choice for millions of viewers Sunday. You’ll see a lot of high production and fevered story-making crammed into 30 or 60 seconds. Some of it’s pretty good, but the one that will really grab you is one of the simplest--a little boy in a Darth Vader costume trying desperately to make the force his own.

Bucking the tradition of trying to wow 'em only on game day, Volkswagen posted the Vader ad on YouTube at mid-week. By Saturday night it had already rung up more than 11 million views, and it seemed to be gaining momentum as kickoff approached.

Several other car makers will also show spots Sunday, but the ad for the 2012 Volkswagen Passat will get inside people’s heads and stay there because it combines the iconic “Star Wars” character and a classic sentiment—a child’s desire to be larger than life. Somehow a simple sedan parked in the family driveway makes his wish come true.

The spot is one of two Volkswagen of America will show during the game. The other features an animated beetle, the creature, to highlight the Beetle, the car. On YouTube, where viewers vote with their clicks, the Beetle ad also drew a crowd, about 1.1 million by Saturday, but not nearly the throngs viewing the Darth Vader ad. The ad agency Deutsch Inc. gets credit for the great spots.

In contrast to the VW ads, other car makers will be laboring profusely to make their point--like summer blockbusters taking on a charming little indie pic. They meet varying degrees of success.

El Segundo-based David & Goliath has come up with a clever take for the Kia, with everyone from a cop to a billionaire, to a sea god to, well, you’ll see, going to extreme length to try to snatch possession of the Kia Optima.

PMK BNC offers an elaborate story to try to burst the bubble of one luxury brand, Mercedes-Benz, in favor of another, Audi. The 60-second spot has a couple of wealthy swells trapped in a prison of convention. When they make their jail break (they take their stuffed Dodo with them) the greatest threat is their starchy old habits.

That sets up a fun little kicker to the spot, involving Kenny G. But good luck getting viewers to pick up all the subtle details (in prison, the rich clink crystal; no tin cups raking across the prison bars) while they're pounding brew and dip at a Super Bowl party.

Kethcum, in contrast, tries to spread it’s message for Hyundai’s Sonata across three 30-second ads. The conceit is that we have been hypnotized into thinking compact cars can’t be special (part 1)  wowed with some graphics that show the unexpected can happen (part 2) and then showing that old, anachronistic  technology (a giant cellphone, a phonograph worn around the neck like an iPod) doesn’t have to be accepted.

All of the efforts are worthy. But the one you’ll actually want to see again is Volkswagen's, powered by the force of a tiny Darth Vader who tells a simple story, with a little body language and nary a word.

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

As my blogmate Jim Rainey has frequently pointed out, Fox News has its own unique view of the world, where the facts rarely get in the way, most recently in the way Fox pollster Frank Luntz used a strange brand of faux science to find a panel of people unimpressed by President Obama's recent State of the Union address. But when it comes to seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, no one tops Bill O'Reilly, who has been the butt of a thousand jokes after confronting an atheist on his show with irrefutable evidence of the existence of God--using as his evidence the fact that the tides come in and the tides go out. I mean, O'Reilly said with great certainty, who else could possibly be controlling that?

As any scientist could tell you, it's the moon that controls the tides. So Papa Bear has taken to the airwaves again to pursue a new wrinkle in his faux science agenda. He now acknowledges that the tides might indeed be controlled by the moon. But so what? As he says: "How'd the moon get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that? And Mars doesn't have it. Venus doesn't have it. How come?"

Actually, as any amateur astronomer knows, Jupiter has lots of moons, 63 in all, several of which you can see through a good pair of binoculars. One of them, Ganymede, is actually larger than Mercury. Saturn has 62 moons. Uranus has 27 moons. And hey, Bill, Mars actually has two moons of its own, that were discovered in 1877, long before even Roger Ailes was born. As far as I know, there's no evidence that either of them are made of green cheese either. I'm beginning to think that O'Reilly might have slept through quite a few of his fifth-grade science classes. But he sure is certain in his beliefs. Here, watch for yourself:

 --Patrick Goldstein

It seems pretty clear by now that "The Social Network," which was supposed to be a PR disaster for Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, has turned out to be something of a godsend for his media reputation. Like most people in the press, after I saw an early screening of the film, I thought it was curtains for Zuckerberg, who, as portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, came off as an icy, girl-crazed social misfit. Instead, the film has done wonders for his public image, with Zuckerberg appearing hipper than ever, not only turning up on "Saturday Night Live" last weekend but earning the imprimatur of being TIme magazine's Person of the Year, complete with the kind of gushily laudatory profile that's usually reserved for, ahem, hot young movie stars.

What happened? Danielle Berrin offers a shrewd take on Zuckerberg's turnaround in a new blog post at her Hollywood Jew blog in the Jewish Journal, arguing that the change was inspired by our annual outburst of Oscar mania. Here's part of what she has to say:

Oh what a difference an awards season makes. In the five months since opening, the film has lapped up box office success and critical acclaim, and, along the way, Zuckerberg’s image has undergone elaborate transformation. The once Machiavellian Harvard student has become the philanthropic humanitarian.... What began as a negative spin on Zuckerberg and his haughty conquer-the-world attitude had transformed into the most celebratory and useful publicity both Zuckerberg and his company have seen since Facebook’s founding. And to think, all it took was a little Oscar buzz. OK, a lot of Oscar buzz. The past few months of award-winning and Oscar campaigning have done more than cement the genius of the film’s cast and creators. Because of the spotlight cast on Zuckerberg, the young entrepreneur has had a chance to prove he isn’t the socially inept anti-hero portrayed by Eisenberg, but, rather, a benevolent titan of the digital age.

As Berrin also notes, by the time Aaron Sorkin was making his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, the sharp-tongued writer sounded like, well, someone polishing off a showbiz magazine puff job. As Sorkin breathlessly put it: “I want to say to Mark Zuckerberg tonight. Rooney Mara’s character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie. She was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary and an incredible altruist.”

My theory is that all this kumbaya tub-thumping wasn't just a spontaneous outpouring of awards-season good cheer. It was more likely the product of shrewd Oscar-season strategizing. Sorkin and "Social Network" producer Scott Rudin were forging this rapprochement for one reason and one reason only--they believe that having an appearance of harmony between the film and its subject will help "Social Network's" Oscar chances. If Zuckerberg was still running around, bitching and moaning about his portrayal, as he was doing around the time of the film's release last fall, it would inspire a new round of inflammatory media hit pieces about the film's veracity, stories that could only do damage to the film's Oscar chances.

As long as Zuckerberg looks like he's made his peace with the filmmakers, the media has little cause to churn out more stories wondering why the character in the film bears so little resemblance to the real Zuckerberg. Oscar controversies about Hollywood taking license with its portrayal of real-life characters are always driven by media gadflies. The only reason anyone is buzzing about "The King's Speech" romanticizing its depiction of King George VI is because Christopher Hitchens wrote a barbed piece in Slate slagging the film for airbrushing the royal family's unfortunate fondness for Nazi Germany.

Rudin, who is, next to Harvey Weinstein, the shrewdest of Oscar tummlers, has quieted the "Social Network" media storm by killing Zuckerberg with kindness. If Zuckerberg remains silent, basking in all this acclaim, the media will leave "Social Network" and find a new target to pester. As the old proverb goes, the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.   

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, left, with Jesse Eisenberg, appearing on "Saturday Night Live."  Credit: Dana Edelson / NBC 

It’s hard to go anywhere these days, especially if you’re a parent with young kids, where the conversation doesn’t eventually turn to Amy Chua’s red-hot childrearing memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” It offers a provocative depiction of Chinese-style extreme parenting -- her daughters are not allowed to watch TV, have playdates or get any grade below an A, all as preparation for success in life, beginning with getting into an Ivy League school, like their Tiger Mom, who went to Harvard and now teaches at Yale Law School.

But of all the heated reaction to Chua's parenting strategy, none was as compelling as what former Harvard president Larry Summers had to say when he discussed parenting with Chua at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Summers made a striking point, arguing that the two Harvard students who’d had the most transformative impact on the world in the past 25 years were Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, yet neither had, ahem, graduated from college. If they had been brought up by a Tiger Mom, Summers imagined, she would've been bitterly disappointed.

I have no beef with Chua's parenting code, which hardly seems any more extreme than the neurotic ambitions of mothers and fathers I'm exposed to living on the Westside of Los Angeles. But if Chua wants a radically different perspective on the relationship between higher education and career achievement, she should spend some time in Hollywood, a place that's been run for nearly a century by men who never made it through or even to college. The original moguls were famously uneducated, often having started as peddlers and furriers before finding their perches atop the studio dream factories. But even today, the industry is still dominated by titanic figures, both on the creative and on the business side, who never got anywhere near Harvard Yard.

A short list of the industry leaders who never finished or even attended college would include Steve Jobs, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, James Cameron, Clint Eastwood, Barry Diller, Ron Meyer, Peter Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin and Quentin Tarantino. Some of this is clearly a generational thing, since everyone on that list is over 40. On the other hand, the younger new media icons seem as likely to be degree free as their Hollywood brethren, whether it's Zuckerberg or the founders of Twitter, who didn't graduate from college either. (Though it’s true that Zuckerberg might not have even thought of Facebook if he hadn’t been in the sexually charged freshman swirl at Harvard.)

But in showbiz, you learn by doing. If there is a common denominator to all of those success stories, it's that they were all men in a hurry, impatient with book learning, which could only take them so far in the rough 'n tumble world of Hollywood. Ron Meyer, a founder of Creative Artists Agency and now president of Universal Studios, dropped out of high school, served in the Marines and proudly notes on his resume that his first job was as a messenger boy for the Paul Kohner Agency.

“The truth is that if you have a particular talent and the will to succeed, you don't really need a great education,” Meyer told me this week. “In showbiz, your real college experience is working in a talent agency mailroom. That's the one place where you can get the most complete understanding of the arena you're playing in and how to deal with the complicated situations you'll come across in your career.”

There are plenty of successful lawyers and MBAs in Hollywood, but the raw spirit of can-do invention and inspiration will take people farther than the ability to read a complex profit and loss statement. Years ago, David Geffen, who dropped out of night school at Brooklyn College before eventually landing a job in the William Morris mailroom, once told me that his early success was rooted in the ability to develop relationships. “It's not about where you went to college or how good-looking you are or whether you could play football--it's about whether you can create a relationship.”

To produce a film or create a TV show or found a company requires the same kind of raw entrepreneurial zeal that it must have taken the ‘49ers who came West in search of gold. “You often feel like you’re surrounded by a do-it-yourself ethic, almost a pioneer spirit,” says Michael De Luca, producer of “The Social Network,” who dropped out of NYU four credits short of graduation to take a job at New Line Cinema, where he rose to become head of production. “All those successful guys you're talking about--they had an intense desire to create something big, new and different. They didn't need to wait around for the instruction manual.”

In David Rensin’s wonderful oral history, “The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up,” survivors of the Mike Ovitz-era CAA experience tell war stories about how, as mailroom flunkies, they had to replenish Ovitz's candy dishes, stock his jars with raw cashews and fill his water jar with Evian. It seemed like hellish drudgery, but as the agents recalled, it prepared you for all the craziness of later Hollywood life, where multi-million dollar movie star deals could fall apart if someone's excercise trainer or make-up specialist wasn't provided for.

Even today, people in Hollywood are far more impressed by, say, your knack for finding new talent, than by what your grades were like. “Show business is all about instinct and intuition,” says Sam Gores, head of the Paradigm Agency, who went to acting school, but never to college, having joined a meat-cutter's union by the time he was 18. “To succeed, you need to have a strong point of view and a lot of confidence. Sometimes being the most well-informed person in your circle can almost get in your way.”

In show business, charm, hustle and guile are the aces in the deck. When New York Times columnist David Brooks was dissecting Chua's book recently, he argued that “managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group” imposed the kind of cognitive demands that far exceed what’s required of students in a class at Yale. He probably picked that up reading a fancy sociology text, but it was a letter-perfect description of the skill set for a gifted filmmaker, agent or producer.

In Hollywood, whether you were a C student or Summa Cum Laude, it's a level playing field. “When you're working on a movie set, you've got 50 film professors to learn from, from the sound man to the cinematographer,” says producer David Permut, who dropped out of UCLA to work for Roger Corman. “I've never needed a resume in my whole career. All you need is a 110-page script that someone is dying to make and you're in business.”

--Patrick Goldstein  

Photo: Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," at a book festival in Austin, Texas.

Credit: Larry D. Moore/Associated Press 

Talk about having mixed emotions: No one's a bigger fan of Robert Rodriguez than me, so I was thrilled to hear that he was doing a lavish, six-minute Nike commercial ... well, until I heard that he was doing it to promote Kobe Bryant's new line of Black Mamba basketball sneakers. Kobe doesn't get a lot of love in my household, especially from my 12-year-old, who felt like Santa brought an extra Christmas present when the Heat demolished the Lakers on Christmas Day and was even happier to see our beloved Celtics thoroughly dominate the lackluster Lakers last weekend.

That said, I like the trailer for Rodriguez's new commercial that's already up on the Web. It's presented like an old grindhouse trailer, with an announcer booming: "He thought he was on a road trip to Dallas, but he was on a freeway to hell!" The footage features Kobe doing his thing on a rooftop basketball court, with cameo appearances from Rodriguez stock company veterans like Danny Trejo and Bruce WIllis, who gets to glower at us in front of a flaming basketball backboard. Rodriguez transforms Kobe into a hoops-style action hero, defying gravity at every turn. He even works in some comic relief -- I'm sure gym rats everywhere will get a laugh at the shot from the pickup game where one of Kobe's opponents tosses the referee off the roof. 

As for it improving Kobe's image, all I can say is that in the trailer that's up now, we see Kobe stealing the ball, making a nice spin move and going up for a ferocious dunk, but as in most real Lakers games, we still don't see him actually passing the ball. I guess if Rodriguez could do a 90-minute feature, there'd be time to fit in one assist. If you're interested in the backstory about how Kobe and Rodriguez got together to make the commercial, check out this post over at our Lakers blog. The ad is scheduled to surface sometime during the NBA all-star game weekend. Here's the trailer:

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Kobe Bryant being fouled while shooting by Boston Celtics center Shaquille O'Neal in a game at Staples Center where the Celtics defeated the Lakers, 109-96. Credit: Jeff Gross / AFP/Getty Images

I had lost track of Joe Frank, the groundbreaking storyteller who created dozens of riveting radio dramas for KCRW-FM (89.9) in the 1980s and '90s. That changed when I got an invitation from the station to see Frank perform at the Village, the  legendary West L.A. recording studio.

Although no one announced that the show would be a departure, it was. Never before had the mysterious performer so directly addressed his family life, particularly his relationship with a difficult mother, who died some years ago.

The crowd seemed to lap up the performance, which centered partly on how people disintegrate with age. But when I met him this week, Frank surprised me with his take on the show. He said he had been persuaded by a couple of friends to deal with the more personal material, but he ended up hating the piece.

“In live performance you always make mistakes. What you do is imperfect," he said. "Usually I wear shades and a hat. But that seemed entirely inappropriate given the kind of material I was doing, which was very honest, very open. Which I also hated. What I do is usually surreal.

“I like going further out, expanding the imaginations of people. There are lots of people who tell stories about themselves.”

Although he intends to keep his own story out of future performances, Frank had decided he would share more about himself in our interview, which I also detailed in my On the Media column. He talked at length about his own aging.

“Suddenly I find myself an old man with a cane,” said Frank, 72, who has struggled through a series of illnesses and recently recovered from pneumonia.  “And in my interior life I feel so much younger. There seems to be a real disconnect with this old, deteriorating, decrepit body ... which is carrying my brain and heart around in it.”

Franks said he hates when people defer to him, offering an arm or holding open a door, even if he knows they mean well. His hands shake as a result of medication he takes. The need to hold a glass aloft for a toast at a party, or to eat with people he doesn't know well, can cause a moment of panic.

But then Frank wonders if he simply needs to embrace the changes.

“Maybe I can transcend it by taking advantage of it, by making it into a persona,” he said. He muses about chucking the cane he bought for $8 at CVS. “I could have a cane with a wolf’s head and ruby eyes. I could wear a white suit or some bizarre getup, a hip-hop kind of hat and always a pair of sunglasses. And then instead of me being invisible maybe they would see this old man and I would, as you say, own it.”

In some of his old radio pieces that conveyed a good dose of anxiety and despair, Frank would edit in a teacher speaking about equanimity, a respite from the prevailing darkness. I wondered if he had ever tried meditation, a break from “the monkey mind.”

“I once had a friend come over to my house and urged me to meditate with him,” Frank said. “He kneeled down on the floor of my house and I kneeled down beside him and focused my mind on a word or something. And I was there for maybe 30 seconds when I felt so ridiculous and so stupid and thought it was so absurd that I got up.”

I couldn’t resist: “So you gave him a full 30 seconds?”

“I did,” Frank said, laughing. “I might have even given him a minute or a minute and a half. But certainly not more than that.”

I told Frank he sounded a little like Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall.” Alvy Singer memorably celebrated the fact that most people are only “miserable,” knowing they could be among the “horrible,” those who are crippled or dying.

But Frank told me he really does have a little more perspective than that. “I can’t say I am miserable because I have a body of work behind me. I have a considerable following,” he said, adding: “You can’t be unhappy. It’s not fair under these circumstances. So even though I may be depressed a fair amount of the time I am still grateful for what I’ve got.”

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Joe Frank made more than 200 radio dramas over a couple of decades at KCRW-FM. He recently has expanded to Facebook and done a limited number of live performances. Credit: joefrank.com

I guess it's no surprise that the New York Post is eagerly dumping on Keith Olbermann in the wake of his messy departure from MSNBC. But leave it to columnist Andrea Peyser (whom New York magazine once dubbed "the Madame DeFarge of the New York Post") to blame Olbermann's flame out on -- are you sitting down? -- Ben Affleck.

In a lengthy column that is almost entirely populated with anonymous sources, Peyser claims that the beginning of the end for Olbermann was in 2009, when MSNBC's Rachel Maddow booked Affleck to appear on her show. Peyser quotes a former MSNBC colleague as saying that Olbermann was so unhappy that "in protest, he refused to go on the air." She adds that Olbermann staged a three-day sickout after the episode, claiming that Olbermann's stated reason for missing airtime--he was mourning the death of his mother--was a lot of hooey. Who knows what really happened, but the alleged Affleck booking dispute gave the Post a convenient hook to run the headline "Why Olbermann's Gone Baby Gone," a reference to Affleck's critically praised 2007 film.  

The rest of the piece is loaded with anonymous sniping about Olbermann's supposed prima donna antics, including the time he supposedly had a meltdown when he discovered that his new office door had a built-in window. Peyser is so determined to bash Olbermann that she quotes anonymous ESPN sources about Olbermann's behavior there way, way back in the 1990s when he was a "Sports Center" anchor. I gather this is typical spiteful behavior from Peyser, who once famously described Christiane Amanpour as the "CNN war slut," which caused such an uproar that her boss of bosses, Rupert Murdoch, was forced to issue an apology.

Peyser has hardly cleaned up her act. No Olbermann misstep is too petty for her not to describe dismissively in the column. She even attempts to dig into Olbermann's personal life, getting huffy when a former girlfriend of his, whom Peyser describes as a "newsblonde," doesn't respond to an e-mail request for a comment. Peyser harrumphs: "One diva deserves another." As for Olbermann, he tweeted his own response to the piece, saying that it "rehashes old lie about shows I didn't do after my mother's death... Andrea Peyser is a swine."

I don't know about swine, but if you ever saw Olbermann and Peyser under the same roof, you'd have to say there was more than one diva in the room.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Keith Olbermann on his final appearance on "Countdown" on Jan. 21, 2011.

Credit: Associated Press/MSNBC

Whenever a film gets snubbed at Oscar time, the conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork with madcap theories about what dark, mysterious forces were responsible for its disappointing showing. Hence the arrival of this Oliver Stone-style opinion piece from the New York Post's Kyle Smith, who claims that Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman," despite being easily the most celebrated documentary of the year, failed to get a best documentary Oscar nomination because the film endorses a conservative cause -- allowing the proliferation of charter schools as a means of saving our battered public school system. 

As Smith put it: "Welcome to reverse McCarthyism. Not only are conservatives unwelcome (bordering on unemployable) in Hollywood, but even fully paid-up and lionized liberals like Guggenheim must be shunned for making a case that conservatives agree with." He added in a blog post that the film's snub was "an excellent example of what happens when the Party Line of liberalism comes head to head with the supposed reason for existence of the Democratic Party -- concern for the downtrodden, particularly black and brown people."

I happen to be a fan of Smith's writing, but in this case, he seems unaware of the fact that when it comes to the arcane realm of Oscar voting, politics is about 14th on the list of truly dark and mysterious forces at work. It is especially hard to make the case that liberals had it in for "Waiting for Superman," since the film critics of America --w ho are probably even more overwhelmingly liberal than the Academy -- were the first to champion the "Waiting For Superman," giving it almost unanimously rave reviews.

So if liberal film critics were willing to put aside their supposed ideological blinders and praise the film, why wouldn't the Academy's documentary film branch do the same? If Smith had delved just a little into Oscar history, he would have realized what a creaky limb he'd crawled out on. As it turns out, the Academy has given the cold shoulder to all sorts of wildly popular documentaries in the past, including "Hoop Dreams," "The Thin Blue Line," "Grizzly Man," "Roger & Me" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," which was declared ineligible because of an obscure technicality. The fact that the Academy has snubbed films made by all sorts of liberal filmmakers, most notably the famously left-wing Michael Moore, makes it hard to cite politics as a key rationale for the omission.

This wouldn't be the first time the documentary branch has punished a documentary for being hugely popular or for benefiting from the kind of ostentatious Oscar campaign "Superman" had. There are enough examples of liberal documentaries losing out to less partisan efforts -- such as when Moore's 2007 film "Sicko" and that year's "No End in Sight" lost to "Taxi to the Dark Side" -- that it seems plausible that bias against conservatism seems hardly a major force at work here. Smith and I agree that "Superman" deserved an Oscar nod, but it's a huge stretch to blame the snub on a liberal plot. The only politics at work here were the usual kind -- office politics. 

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Davis Guggenheim accepts the award for best documentary feature at the Critic's Choice Movie Awards in Hollywood. Credit: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

Gimme a break, ABC. 

Just as Sunday's Lakers-Celtics showdown at Staples Center was getting to the nitty-gritty, ABC tossed the game into a split screen so we could get a court-side interview with a critical participant.

Or, wait, was that just Adam Sandler, one of the covey of court-side celebrities at Staples Center who help make the Lakers the team a lot of America loves to hate?

Not content with the typical wink-and-wave shot of Sandler, though, ABC sent its court-side reporter in for a couple of minutes of Q & A, right in the middle of the action. It threw the game into a side picture so we could hear all about Sandler's fab new movie with Jennifer Aniston, "Just Go With It."

I can't think of any better way for Columbia Pictures to alienate basketball fans than to make them sit through some inane repartee with Sandler. Especially as the game already had Lakers fans in a foul mood, with their team struggling with the hated Celtics. And would any of the Boston faithful really want a cutaway from their glory? Not a chance.  (The Lakers ended up losing 109-96.)

Since "Just Go With It" ads already filled up much of the break time during the game, you had to wonder what kind of deal the producers had cut to have Sandler miraculously appear for a promotional spot right in the middle of one of the biggest regular season games of the year.

Next time ABC, spare us the advertorial. Just give us the game. And if you must linger for a second on one of the sideline stars, give us Sandler co-star and movie rookie Brooklyn Decker, who was also at the game. That would be cheap and cheesy, sure. But at least it would be quick and much nicer to look at than Sandler.

In the end, we really tuned in to watch the game.

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston and Brooklyn Decker star in "Just Go With It." Credit: Columbia Pictures