SAG/AFTRA Members: Will your dues go up or down? Now you can tell ...

There's been a lot of discussion about how dues will change if SAG and AFTRA  merge, but no one's made it easy for you to know exactly what will happen to your own. For a detailed breakdown -- and a graph that encompasses earnings from $0 to $250K, see The Hollywood Reporter. Whether you're SAG-only or a dual cardholder (or if you're AFTRA-only or even a broadcaster), the graph will show you exactly what will happen to your dues if merger passes.


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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

Snowe Rains on Republicans' Parade

Sen. Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican who's represented Maine in the Senate since 1994, announced today that she won't seek reelection in November, citing polarization in Washington as the reason. Her retirement, coming from a state where Democrats hold a registration edge, is a blow to the GOP and puts the seat in play.

What does this have to do with the subject of this blog? Nothing, but when you think up a headline too good to be true, you have to go with it.

You can read my Hollywood labor coverage at thrlabor.com.
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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

Live on Larry Mantle re SAG-AFTRA Merger

I'll be live on Larry Mantle (http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/) this morning at about 11:05 a.m. PT for a 14 minute segment on SAG-AFTRA merger. Tune in (is that still the verb?) if you have a chance. It'll probably be available archived as well.

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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

AFTRA, Networks Reach New Three Year Deal

AFTRA and the television networks reached agreement on a new three-year contract today, with the new pact featuring now-standard 2% annual wage increases and an unusually large 1% increase in employer contributions to health and retirement.

Notably, the union achieved the H&R increase without employers taking a bite out of the annual wage increase. Usually, a tradeoff between the two is required, which could have reduced one or more of the annual increases to a politically unpalatable 1-1/2% level. An AFTRA statement confirmed the issues’ importance, calling the 1% increase the union’s “primary objective” in the bargaining.

Details: The Hollywood Reporter.

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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

Health and Retirement are the Hangup in AFTRA Netcode Negotiations (Exclusive)

AFTRA’s negotiations with the networks and television producers resume this week and the big issue, according to a source close to the process, is the same one that’s bedeviled Hollywood labor for the past several years: health and retirement.

Negotiations began November 7 under a press blackout, but haven’t produced a deal yet. The contract under negotiation – AFTRA’s Network Code, colloquially referred to as the “front of book” – is the union’s largest, and generates more than $250 million a year in member earnings. It covers programs in all television day parts, except scripted network primetime and scripted basic cable.

The emphasis on health and retirement is probably heightened by the dynamic of SAG-AFTRA merger.

Details: The Hollywood Reporter.

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Check out my book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

Homeless Military Widow: “My heart is sad for my teenager”

Cindy Kureth just wants a job and a place to call home. She had both not long ago, but she got laid off, unemployment ran out, and the mortgage company took her home.

Now all the Richmond, Virginia mother has is a motel room for herself and her 16-year old son. That, and memories of her husband, former Army Major Elwood Kureth, Jr., who died eleven years ago, when his son was 5. He and Cindy had been married for nineteen years.

“Evan worshiped the ground his father walked (on),” Cindy told me in an email. “They were two peas in a pod.”

Yesterday was Veterans Day – a day for remembering people like Elwood, and also Cindy, who herself served in the military, as a First Lieutenant and flight nurse in the Air Force Reserves. But it was also the day Cindy and her son may have had to downsize again. They’ve lived in a series of motels over the last ten months, but last night they were due to begin sleeping in their van. Cindy owes the motel $90, and she won’t be receiving a military benefit check until next week.

Elwood served three tours of duty, including Desert Storm. Although he died in 2000 as a civilian – of a massive heart attack – there was nonetheless a military connection: according to Cindy, the coroner found that the attack resulted from heart disease so severe that it must have started while he was still in the service. Service members get a medical exam upon discharge, but Army doctors failed to detect the heart disease.

The reason for that, Cindy explained, was at least partially because they never asked about Elwood’s family medical history.

Elwood didn’t smoke or drink, and he stayed physically fit. He worked as a computer programmer – self-taught, Cindy noted proudly – in languages such as C++.

One day – in another sad irony, it was Memorial Day – he left the couple’s Michigan home to go dirt biking. He never came back. Cindy was at the house when she got a call and learned that ER doctors were working frantically to save her husband’s life. She told Evan only that doctors were trying to fix his daddy’s heart. He was too young to understand, and took the news matter-of-factly.

Later that afternoon, Cindy took Evan to the backyard, away from family members who had gathered and were trying to conceal their grief from the child. She pointed to the sky, and reminded him of the family pets that had died in the past, starting with the cat.

“Do you remember when God took Kimba?,” she asked. He did. “And Goldie?” Yes, he remembered the goldfish too. She told Evan that God also takes children sometimes, and even “big people.”

And then he began to understand: “Did God take my Daddy?,” he asked. Yes, she told him. A dam burst and the five-year old cried out, “Did my Daddy die?” Yes, she said. But then came the hardest question: “Are you going to get me a new Daddy?”

After three years of appeals, a Veterans Administration board held that Elwood’s death was service related. It awarded Cindy a $1,400 per month military pension. That just covers the $45 per day she’s been paying for the motel room she awkwardly shares with her now-teenage son.

Everything else – food for two, gas, insurance, doctors and dentists – has to come out of a $1,300 per month Social Security death benefit that Evan receives. That money will end in a year, when he turns 18.

Until earlier this week, even Cindy’s memories of her husband were at risk: almost everything she and Evan own is in storage, and the storage company threatened to auction the contents of her unit for non-payment. That would have been the end of her photos and mementos, Evan’s toys, the household furniture, pots and pans – and even Elwood’s uniforms.

He looked so handsome in those, Cindy told me, “but I couldn’t bear to bury them.”

To save their possessions, Cindy rented a truck and she spent six days moving them to a less-expensive unit at a different facility. The truck cost her $170. She did much of the moving herself – hard, physical work – and some of it in the rain.

She’s going to sell some of her miscellaneous possessions so they’ll have money to eat. She could sell the furniture too, but then they’d have nothing to sleep on and nowhere to sit when – if – she finally finds a new place to live. And it might mean acknowledging defeat, a prospect that agitates her.

Not Evan though. “I don’t freak out,” he told me in a disconcertingly flat tone. “It is what it is.”

Cindy and Evan had a home until nine months ago, but PHH Mortgage Services took it when she fell behind in her payments. Cindy wasn’t underwater: she owed about $142,000 on the mortgage, but PHH sold the house for $183,000.

A PHH spokesman declined to discuss foreclosure issues, calling it a “touchy subject” that he couldn’t address without consulting other company executives who were not available due to the holiday. However, PHH’s website isn’t shy about proclaiming the company’s commitment to bringing good to the world.

“The PHH Mortgage mission and values include treating everyone like family, always doing what is right, and leading by example,” PHH president Luke Hayden says on a page devoted to the company’s philanthropic efforts. “Our hope,” he adds, “is that society, in part, will be better because of PHH Mortgage leadership and contributions within the community.”

Ironically, among those contributions are care packages for the military, which “deliver the comforts of home to local troops deployed to Iraq or other locations around the world.”

Cindy said that her problems with the company started in 2009, when she began falling behind in her payments after losing her job. With a BA in nursing, she had been working at a local hospital in a cardiac support job, but lost it in 2008.

She asked PHH to modify her loan under the federal Home Affordable Modification Program. The company told her Fannie Mae rules made that impossible – but when Cindy contacted Fannie Mae, they told her the decision was PHH’s alone.

In Richmond, Cindy learned, PHH delivers foreclosure notices, not care packages.

She says that the company, which describes itself as “one of the top five originators of retail residential mortgages in the United States,” mishandled the foreclosure in various ways. Among other things, she charges, PHH strung her along by saying she was a good candidate for the HAMP program, then lowered the boom when she ran out of options.

“My mortgage company did me dirty,” Cindy told me.

The foreclosure proceeded as planned on January 6, 2011, with even the judge’s secretary in tears. Now, thanks in part to PHH, Cindy and Evan have no more “comforts of home.”

“It wasn’t a good feeling,” said Evan. “You lose a house – that’s a lot.” But he added, “I haven’t cried in forever. There’s no point.”

According to Cindy, the buyer that day was a local millionaire who trolls foreclosures for a living. He took Cindy to court and had her and Evan evicted in ten days. When he showed up at the house, Cindy begged for a month’s grace period so she could move out in an orderly fashion.

The buyer told Cindy he was a “good Christian,” but he was apparently not good enough to read Exodus 22:22 (“Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child”). So Cindy and Evan were out, and six months later the good Christian flipped the house for a good profit, selling it for $315,000, or $132,000 more than he paid for it. He no doubt put money into the place before unloading it, but I was unable to reach him for comment (which is why I’m not naming him or identifying the property).

Meanwhile, Cindy went to another financial institution, Wells Fargo, and asked for an $8,000 loan to consolidate her bills (or some of them at least). A loan officer refused, citing her shattered credit and lack of income. She pointed out that the bank and its employees had donated up to $1.5 million for disaster relief in Japan following that country’s earthquake and asked if they would help her too.

But the bank wouldn’t bite: the loan officer responded by asking, “Ma’am, don’t you know there’s a tragedy over there?” He seemed unaware of the part he was playing in a tragedy closer to home.

So Cindy went back to her motel room, where she’s spent her days using a borrowed laptop to look for jobs. She hasn’t found any, and she’s about due to return the laptop as well. Nor, she tells me, has she gotten help from the VA, social service agencies, legislators, community organizations or local churches.

The ancient Greeks said “God helps those who help themselves,” but it hasn’t worked out that way for Cindy. She enrolled in a trade school last year and told me that “receiving the President's Award for acquiring a 4.0 GPA was the epitome of my seven months of enrollment” – but the clock ran out on her schooling when her federal grant ended.

“I miss school so much,” Cindy said.

Her goal had been to “acquire certification in billing and coding in health information management so I could be more marketable and my son could have a better future in his college studies.”

“Now, sad to say, (education) is a pipe dream,” Cindy said. All she wants is to grab hold of the ladder of opportunity that once represented the American dream, but “it seems,” she told me, “like we are sinking in this country instead of having opportunities to better ourselves.”

She’d be happy just to teach herself – but at $140, even the textbook is out of reach.

So far, at least, Evan is receiving an education. After her husband died, Cindy scoured the country for good public schools in affordable neighborhoods. Evan had been labeled gifted, and – like most parents – Cindy wanted him to reach his full potential. They moved from Michigan in 2001 to suburban Richmond, where she bought the house that they lived in until PHH took it earlier this year.

Currently a junior, Evan is enrolled in an engineering studies program at his local high school. He made the honor roll and is on the Ultimate Frisbee team and in VEX Robotics club. “He’s thrived,” said Cindy, noting that Evan may qualify for a NASA internship next summer.

“I kind of want to be a chef,” Evan told me, a bit surprisingly, then added that engineering and biomedical science were his more practical choices.

“I couldn't be more proud of my son,” said Cindy, then added, “My heart is sad for my teenager. He doesn't deserve to be homeless; having friends and being able to invite them to a secure home is something he would like to do, but it isn't feasible at this time.”

Life was better once. When Elwood was still in the service, he and Cindy lived for a time in Germany. Back stateside, they traveled to Hawaii, Florida, California. Since Elwood’s death, Cindy’s son has been her focus; when she had the means, she sent him to a variety of camps (basketball, rock climbing, kayaking, Boy Scouts), got him acting classes and had him take lessons in guitar and saxophone. He became a Black Belt in karate when he was nine years old.

Now the holidays approach and, with them, Evan’s birthday (December 20) and Cindy’s as well (December 25). Gifts seem unlikely, and the larger questions are almost unbearable: where will they live? how will they eat? will Evan be able to go to college?

But more, why is this happening – not just to Cindy and Evan, but to millions of families, singles, couples, gay, straight, young, old, people of all races and religions, atheists and agnostics? It’s a question many people are asking. But perhaps not Evan.

“Sometimes you have to accept things as they are,” he told me, once again in a disturbing monotone.

Cindy tends to be more impassioned – but for all that she had shared with me, there was something she left out as well.

Elwood, as I discovered via Google, had co-authored a book a decade before he died: Reflections of a Warrior: Six Years as a Green Beret in Vietnam, by Franklin D. Miller with Elwood J. C. Kureth, Jr. The book was the autobiography of a Congressional Medal of Honor winner whom Elwood met while stationed in Seoul. Miller was a raconteur; Elwood became enchanted, and offered to help write the older soldier’s story.

The book was published in 1991 – on the day Elwood left for Desert Storm – then reprinted in 2003 with some added material: an Afterword that presented a timeline of both authors’ lives. The timeline concluded with Miller’s death on June 30, 2000 – and Elwood’s a month earlier, “of a heart attack while dirt bike racing.” Then came these words:

Elwood, you are sadly missed by your wife, Cindy, and son, Evan, and by many friends and family members. You accomplished many feats in your short life. The memories we acquired will forever be cherished. The love you gave to us will always remain in our hearts.

The Afterword was signed “Cindy Kureth.”

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You can contact Cindy at giftedoneboy@hotmail.com and on Facebook. Although she isn’t asking for charity, she needs it, and so (with her permission) I’m including her bank information for those inclined to contribute: Cindy Kureth, c/o KeyBank, 100 W. Michigan Ave., Saline, MI 48176. (She kept the account even after moving from Michigan to Virginia in 2001.)

Exclusive: WGA East and LA County AFL-CIO Endorse Occupy Wall Steet / Occupy LA

In exclusive statements to the Hollywood Reporter, the Writers Guild of America, East and the LA County Federation of Labor have endorsed the Occupy protests in NY, LA and elsewhere. The WGA East slammed a “system that has diverted capital (to) a tiny handful of people,” while the LA County Fed called out "corporate bullies, banks and investment firms."

Details: The Hollywood Reporter -- LA County Fed story; WGA East story.

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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

New York SAG Election Becoming a Tinderbox

Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin endorse USAN, while OSU issues a bill of particulars and personal attacks fly in all directions. With both factions pro-merger, members wonder why they’re fighting.

Details: The Hollywood Reporter.

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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets. 

The Laurel Canyon Goats are Leaving!

There comes a point in everyone’s life when it’s time to gather one’s herd and leave the hustle and bustle of the big city. For Elaine and Michael Fresco, that time is now. And although the herd in question numbers only two, they’re much beloved – and they’re goats.

Yes, Laurel Canyon, long a home to musicians and other entertainment industry folk, is also the home of two Mini Mancha dairy goats, Snowflake and Pumpkin.

But not for long. “I like Laurel Canyon,” says Elaine, “but not LA.” So, after about thirty years of living at the urban-wilderness interface that’s characteristic of Laurel Canyon – including three years with the goats – the Frescos are moving to a rural area near Santa Cruz, and taking their petting zoo with them.

(Check back soon for photos of the goats.)

Animals of many types are common in the canyon, particularly coyotes, hawks, owls, rats, field mice, squirrels, raccoons, skunks, lizards and snakes – a veritable menagerie – as well as dogs and cats, both of the latter best kept indoors at night and away from the coyotes. No one wants to see a pet end up as a non-alpha link in the food chain.

Not that coyotes are always the enemy, though – at least, not in Laurel Canyon. A young one showed up a couple years ago, sick, hairless and at death’s door. Rather than letting the creature succumb, residents named her Rosie, set traps, and deployed “two animal control officers, a veterinarian and an off-duty cop who was armed with tranquilizer guns and wearing camouflage, with leaves and twigs poking out of his hat,” as the LA Times described it.

The cop heroically, or stoically, spent his off-duty hours sitting motionless in a lawn chair, dressed as a bush and waiting for Rosie to appear. It was ultimately a trap, though, not a tranq, that caught the coyote. She was sent off to Valley Wildlife Care (“dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating wildlife”), where they helped her to “bloom into the beautiful coyote that she was born to be.”

A coyote with a name is unusual, but wilder things sometimes appear here too, as if briefly transported from a Maurice Sendak dreamscape: a bobcat (sighted recently), a deer (a few years ago), and even a mountain lion (in the early 1990’s). All left as mysteriously as they arrived, wandering harmlessly back into the Laurel Canyon brushland – even the mountain lion, who slipped away just before the police arrived, and probably armed with more than tranquilizer guns.

Still, barnyard animals seem a different thing altogether – almost one-of-a-kind.

In fact, though, the Frescos are not alone in their love of goats. Not far from them lives a neighbor who also harbors a pair of the plant-munching animals. And that’s nothing compared to a resident who lived a ridge or two away – a stuntman who keeps, or kept, a goat, a sheep, a chicken and a peacock, as well as a monkey, of all things, in a two-story enclosure.

Then there was the case of the agonized apiarist: “My bees have swarmed away from their hive,” he or she wrote on a Laurel Canyon email list. “Has anyone seen them?” Somebody had. It took a Master Beekeeper to coax them back, but the story ended well.

Like the bees, the Frescos’ animals have a quasi-public profile. Elaine advertised a while back on the same email list for someone to do “goat chores.” The only pay offered was in-kind – “some fresh goat milk or cheese” – which may be why she found few takers. City folk don’t know what they’re missing.

Her 2009 email message also noted that the couple had “more milk and cheese than we can consume.” That was at a time when she was milking only one of the pair: “we will start milking the other in a few months,” she said – guaranteeing an even greater oversupply – “when her kids are big enough to wean.”

As if two adult animals weren’t enough? There’s really no choice in the matter: females have to be bred every year so they continue to give milk.

“I especially enjoy helping them birth,” said Elaine – previously a midwife by profession – “and I love the little kids. The saddest thing is finding homes for the babies.” That’s probably the hardest thing too. I imagine few city dwellers want goats, and even fewer neighborhoods would be hospitable.

That’s a pity though. The two Mini Manchas are quite charming. On a recent visit, Snowflake, pure white, was sociable, while Pumpkin – tawny brown, like pumpkin pie – was just slightly skittish. They come from San Diego; go figure.

I wondered why someone would decide to acquire goats in the city. Elaine’s initial motivation was to try her hand at making goat cheese – “fun to make, though time-consuming,” as it turns out – but now the little scamps are their own reward: “most of all, the goats are fun and I've grown very attached to them. I feel very peaceful when I milk or hang out with them.”

It does have to be “them,” Elaine told me. Goats are herd animals, so two adults is the minimum one should consider. Just so you know.

Mini Manchas, as the name implies, are conveniently small goats, which led one website to tout them as “simply the best choice for household milk production.” For grocery shoppers tired of crowded aisles and endless checkout lines, that’s advice worth remembering.

The Frescos’ companions are strictly residential, by the way, and shouldn’t be confused with municipal and non-profit goats employed to clear fire-prone brush by the likes of the cities of Los Angeles and Laguna Beach and the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve. Those ruminants are probably some McMansion-size breed in any case.

And do local authorities seek to maintain a monopoly on goats? It seems not. Asked whether the city had ever protested the Frescos’ unusual household – which also includes a dog and a cat, both of whom get on well with the goats – Elaine said that City Hall had never sent anyone to pay a call.

Good thing too. In addition to having the run of the Frescos’ hillside compound, the goats roam the neighborhood too. What would Traffic Enforcement think of that? During my visit, they went loping up the street past several parked cars and clambered onto the Frescos’ guesthouse roof, where they lay down amid the solar panels and relaxed in the hot Los Angeles sun.

In any case, the other goat owners down the street did have a run-in with the law after a local – some malcontent, no doubt – dropped a dime on them. Confounding the complainant, the city sent an animal control officer rather than a zoning inspector, and he turned out to be satisfied with the goats’ living conditions, and with the fact that there were only two in residence.

On the animal control maps, the neighborhood of single-family homes is apparently zoned G2 – no more than two goats per household.

Whether the zoning commission would agree is unknown. However, there is precedent for unusual land use regulations in Los Angeles: a couple years ago, in response to noise complaints, the City Council was forced to confront the issue of people keeping roosters that crow at all hours – and this in some of the city’s more urban neighborhoods. The Council’s response was a decisive compromise: by a 12-0 vote, the lawmakers decided that the limit would henceforth be one of the red-wattled birds per address.

“Roosters have their place in this city,” said Councilwoman (now Congresswoman) Janice Hahn – without explaining precisely what that place is – “but we think having more than one per property causes problems.” Yes indeed! The council nonetheless grandfathered existing multi-rooster households, leaving little but a moral victory for those aggrieved.

One is tempted to say “only in Los Angeles,” but the city’s fauna seem tame – literally – when compared to the 400-pound Bengal tiger found living in a New York high-rise apartment about eight years ago. Subduing the beast required the combined efforts of a police sniper, who rappelled down the side of the building and fired tranquilizer darts through an open window – this was received quite poorly by the tiger, who all but leapt out the window at the shaken officer – and of three Bronx Zoo employees, who entered the apartment with police a while later to ensure that the tiger was in fact fully sedated. A zoo curator verified this by poking the animal several times with a long stick, a procedure best reserved to professionals.

The big cat – whose name was “Ming” – turned out to be adequately drugged, so he was hustled down the elevator (just imagine it) and trundled away, shipped off to a conservancy in Ohio. A five-foot caiman crocodile was removed from the residence as well, and sent to Indiana. Unsurprisingly, the tiger got the lion’s share of the press during the whole affair. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for instance, was quoted as saying, “Clearly this tiger should not have been anyplace in New York City outside of a zoo.”

That might have been obvious to the mayor – and it applies equally well to the crocodile – but some New Yorkers seem to consider their city as wildlife friendly as, well, Los Angeles. Ming’s human neighbors, for instance, were reportedly not particularly alarmed by the presence of the tiger, let alone the toothy caiman or the hyenas, monkeys and snakes that they said had previously lived in the five-bedroom apartment.

And the Bengal in a bestiary wasn’t an isolated incident. Six months later, the city’s animal control agency seized six monkeys and a tarantula from a studio apartment where they lived – conveniently enough – with a veterinary assistant.

Helluva city, New York.

But back to Laurel Canyon and its more manageable farm animals. One wonders, have the canyon’s barnyards previously escaped notice?

Apparently so. If pigs could fly, Laurel Canyon porkers would do so under the radar. The literature about the neighborhood includes two histories, both of which focus largely on the legends who lived here in the area’s musical heyday, and a 2002 movie about troubled relationships between humans. It’s unlikely any of those address the issue of goats in the ’hood. And although there’s supposedly a character named Laurel Canyon in the recently-published novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, that story is set in post-apocalyptic Melbourne, not Los Angeles.

Equally unpromising as a chronicle of urban goat tending is a 1979 Steve Krantz potboiler called, simply, Laurel Canyon, the back cover of which describes the locale as a place where “it’s always hotter after the sun goes down” and where “depravity is its own reward.” This sounds less a tale of animal husbandry than of animalistic husbandry (and wifery).

Perhaps it’s just that times have changed since the days of free love: nowadays, “hotter after the sun goes down” might mean that the air conditioning gave out just before dusk. And at the Frescos’, I was rewarded with goat milk and cheese rather than depravity. (It was a welcome tradeoff.) The milk tasted much like cows’, but creamier, and the ash-encrusted cheese like cream cheese with a mild tang.

In any case, the Krantz book’s cover ends by warning breathlessly that “one beautiful, clever woman holds the power to bring the whole damned canyon down – on everybody!”

Even without plowing through 350 crumbling pages of an old paperback, it’s a safe bet that this novel has nothing to do with a woman who keeps goats. In real life, no one except fire marshals and building inspectors hold the power to bring the whole damned canyon down on anybody.

Not that Elaine Fresco has any interest in trying. On the contrary, in a recent canyon email, she said, “I am thankful for all my neighbors who have been so patient and tolerant of my goats. I will miss you all.”

And, no doubt, vice versa.

How to Settle the Viacom iPad Lawsuits Now

Back in April, Viacom and Time Warner Cable sued each other; then last month Viacom sued Cablevision. Interestingly, that came just a day after Viacom and TWC filed a standstill agreement so that they could negotiate without the pressure of ongoing court deadlines.

In both sets of suits, the issue is the same: under license and distribution agreements, can cable companies allow their customers to add another screen to their home viewing options: an iPad?

One way or another, the answer will ultimately be yes, because that's what paying customers want. With Viacom, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision mired in litigation over the issue, there is a possible path to resolving the disputes. It involves understanding just why these disputes arise in the first place, and what courts do when the cases don't settle.

Details: The Hollywood Reporter.

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Check out my new book “Hollywood on Strike!,” available on Amazon (also in a Kindle edition). Subscribe to my blog (jhandel.com) for more about entertainment law and digital media law. Check out my residuals chart there too. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Forbes.com or Huffington Post articles. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets.