I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I’m a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called ‘Fame L.A.’ The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn’t very funny, so they asked me, ‘What else can you do?’ So I played a singer.
Los Angeles doesn’t have as vital a theatre as New York does. And that’s something that really interests me.
I normally live in Los Angeles, if you can call it normally living.
I like Los Angeles. So many artistic people, and I just love the weather.
I spend a fair bit of time in Los Angeles, and there is much I love about the place – the weather, the food, the beaches and the golf. And a few things I don’t. Like the way an enormous number of mentally ill people seem to be forced to live on the streets with little or nothing in the way of government assistance.
Los Angeles is a good city in which to be a reporter. Always entertaining, always an incubator.
I’m starting to teach now: I teach in the graduate film program at NYU and next year I’m going to be teaching at Los Angeles at the film program and English program at UCLA.
The highlight of my day is figuring out where I’m going to order dinner from in Los Angeles. As horrible as everything is, it’s the golden age of takeout. Restaurants are not splitting their focus between serving customers in-store and delivery and takeout.
I was reading an article with Stevie Ray Vaughan a long time ago, and the number ‘1959’ stuck out to me for some reason. So I started searching those out as the band got more popular and I could actually afford one. And I found this one in Los Angeles. That’s what introduced me to the whole world of 1959s.
I’ve actually changed my view of Los Angeles. When I was younger, I hated it, because I thought it was fake and superficial. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that to be absolutely true, but I don’t care.
I operated a professional football team in L.A. By no means was it the NFL, but I understand what it takes on some level to build and operate a professional sports enterprise in Los Angeles.
Half of my family is in Los Angeles, so my cousin was the first person to play me, like, Snoop Dogg, and I would always feel like, ‘OMG, I shouldn’t be listening to this,’ and my other cousin was the first to introduce me to Aaliyah, so every time I’d go to the West Coast, I’d get those West Coast vibes.
Food was always a big part of my life. My grandfather was one of 14 kids, and his parents had a pasta factory, so as a kid, he and his siblings would sell pasta door to door. After he became a movie producer, he opened up De Laurentiis Food Stores – one in Los Angeles and one in New York.
My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week.
I’m all in on the Los Angeles Clippers. We’re moving forward. We’ve got to work to be the best we can be to take advantage of all the assets in the community.
I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn’t know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.
I always had the fantasy of Hollywood and Los Angeles and the beach, not realizing that Hollywood was so very far from the beach.
We tried to act trendy. We took one of our songs and tried to make a dance mix. They put it on the turntables, unannounced, in Los Angeles and New York the same weekend, where they had a big dance crowd going wild. It cleared the floor on both coasts.
I’ve always wanted to sing and to be an entertainer. After high school, I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and started songwriting. But I didn’t really get serious until then.
Because I direct films, I have to live in a major English-speaking production center. That narrows it down to three places: Los Angeles, New York and London. I like New York, but it’s inferior to London as a production center. Hollywood is best, but I don’t like living there.
I have sort of a life in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.
I would fly to Los Angeles just for a cheeseburger with pickles and extra tomatoes from In-N-Out.
I confess I’ve got a yearning to go to Los Angeles, but I can’t work out if it is because a lot of British actors seem to go or because there’s this perception that the bottom has fallen out of British drama, so therefore, it’s the place to head for.
When I was 23, I went to work for Jack Nicholson reading scripts. Later, I was married to a production designer named Richard Sylbert. So I lived in Los Angeles for ten years.
I really did graduate at 14, and I go to college in the Los Angeles area near where I live.
I had this crazy job, though, when I first got to Los Angeles… I answered this ad in the back of the newspaper to be a telephone psychic, and I did that for two days.
I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.
I originally was more into baseball and football, but being in Los Angeles, you just couldn’t help but to fall in love with the game of basketball because they had such a winning tradition.
I love the fact that I get to play against the Los Angeles Lakers in a Game 7 on the road.
New York reminds me a little bit of Canada and my upbringing. Los Angeles is like living in a vacation, and you have to pinch yourself every once and a while.
There were the phone calls and Elvis had asked me to visit him in Los Angeles. This was in 1962.
Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
It’s impossible to walk a block in Miami, in Los Angeles, San Antonio without running into someone who is being deeply impacted by a broken legal immigration system.
After we finished filming ‘Sinbad,’ I went out to Los Angeles for meetings and was invited to a pre-Oscars party. I met Victoria Beckham, Kenneth Branagh, and Gary Oldman. That was quite a leap for me.
In 1978, the tradition of running from village to village with a message was revived. that first run was from Davis to Los Angeles, a distance of 500 miles.
I think there’s a part when you sign your soul to the devil and start working in Los Angeles that you also sign away that you could be a human being in anyone’s eye. You’re like a robot!
I’d read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: ‘I want to be part of that.’
I acted when I was young, but at 19, I had my own theater company where I acted but also directed. I also did some theater in Los Angeles. So I was always wanting to direct, even before I became an established actor.
There wasn’t very much going on in London about five years ago, and I just took a ticket on spec and went to Los Angeles. I think it was in my second week that I auditioned for ‘Battlestar.’
Los Angeles is much like Mumbai, the film industry rules the city over most other professions, so it feels like home.
At first I moved from Sydney to Melbourne, because most of the comedy was shot in Melbourne, and then from Melbourne to Los Angeles – and you have to sacrifice stuff.
When you say you grew up in Los Angeles, a lot of people think the west side: they think the glitz and all this stuff that I actually had no relationship to growing up.
I think I’m the only 65-year-old actress in Los Angeles who hasn’t had plastic surgery, so somebody’s gotta play the old-lady parts!
I’ve actually done three pilots for Disney. I met with the network when I was 16 years old and had just started acting. I would fly to Los Angeles to film pilots, then fly back to Dallas, where I grew up.
I had a dream, as young people have quite idealistic dreams and goals, of, ‘I’m going to go to Los Angeles, and I’m going to become a star!’ I did get this huge record deal, and I recorded this music under Xavier. That didn’t really work out.
I graduated from Second City Los Angeles. It helped me tremendously, not only in my roles in films but in helping shape me into a writer as well. In improv, you will fail sometimes, so it teaches you to be brave and try anything. The worst that can happen is nobody laughs.
There is a pool of references in New York and Los Angeles that are almost exclusively drawn from the media, from the world of television and advertising.
I just never did buy this idea that you have to live in Los Angeles to be an actor. I didn’t see that as a requirement in my job description.
Even in Los Angeles, where we lived, when we would date somebody or go out with them, if we went out with somebody else the next night, we often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women!
When I was 13 years old, my mom had me start getting facials in my hometown of Los Angeles.
When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn’t setting the terms of the competition.
