Faces to watch in 2010: Entertainment
In her last big role in “The Great Debaters,” Jurnee Smollett played a smart high schooler who was dedicated to improving herself by hitting the books. But now, Smollett is playing a character who is interested in another kind of hit altogether -- hits on the football field.
Smolett is one of the new additions to the cast of the football drama, which will air its fourth season this year on
“Being on this show has been better than I ever could have imagined,” said Smolett, whose past credits include several guest spots on series such as
She had been a fan of the series before being cast and was impressed with the naturalness of the dialogue and the character interactions. “It didn’t feel like I was watching a TV show,” she said. “The dialogue never seemed forced.”
-- Greg Braxton (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
Five years ago, Savannah Guthrie rolled the dice and walked away from a promising legal career to try to make it in television news. After a little more than a year at
“It’s beyond any reporter’s dream,” the 38-year-old said of her current assignment, for which she rises by 4:30 a.m. to cram information about toxic assets, Afghanistan and healthcare reform. “What’s amazing is how many people in
Had things gone differently, the graduate of
“She has the spunk of
-- Matea Gold (Chris Usher / For the Times)
Fred is annoying. Fred is a superstar.
The high-pitched 6-year-old persona of 16-year-old
This year, Cruikshank will try to become the first Web celebrity to successfully take his act to the big screen. “Fred: the Movie” is reportedly in production and targeted for a 2010 release. Though plenty of actors, particularly comedians, have broken out on
-- Ben Fritz (Frazer Harrison / Getty Images)
If music videos have a future, Rio Caraeff will have to create it.
As chief executive of the website owned by
Originally created to promote album sales on
At a time when record labels have seen $20 CDs replaced by 99-cent downloads -- for those who bother to pay at all -- every penny counts. If Caraeff can turn music videos into a real revenue generator, he might just help revive an art form and an industry.
-- Ben Fritz (Theo Wargo / Getty Images)
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How do you harness a band that sings and plays like the Carter Family -- if the pioneering country group had emerged in the Summer of Love rather than at the tail end of the Jazz Age? That’s a puzzle a lot of music-biz types in Nashville have been trying to solve for a few years since Jypsi, the group comprising siblings Lillie Mae, Scarlett, Amber-Dawn and Frank Rische, set up camp and promptly tossed aside the country-music rule book at freewheeling marathon gigs at Layla’s Bluegrass Inn downtown.
The outside world is catching on: A new track, “Lipstick,” turned up recently on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.” And audiences from Music City residents to those at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival in Indio seem to have little trouble connecting with the group’s sizzling mix of country, folk,
For their major-label debut, due sometime in 2010, the quartet has hooked up with
-- Randy Lewis (Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)
Like many L.A. musicians, the singer Ke$ha survived her lean early years in the city by snacking on the free food offered during happy hour at Echo Park’s myriad dive bars. But the singer’s situation was rather different than many of her struggling peers. She was scavenging at the same time her voice was all over the radio -- she sang the chorus hook of Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” one of the biggest pop singles of 2009.
“We were both working with (producer) Dr. Luke and it was an accident I was even on it,” said the young San Fernando Valley native, born Kesha Sebert. “I never made any money off it, that’s why I put the dollar sign in my name as a joke. But I was happy being in that bar with two dollars in change wearing clothes I found in the garbage surrounded by people who love me.”
Ke$ha should soon be able to treat her friends to a few rounds of PBR. Her fast-rising single “TiK ToK,” a rapturously dumb electro-pop banger that makes
Her debut album, “Animal,” which already is a top-5 iTunes album as a pre-order to its Jan. 5 release, tackles the evergreen topics of stalking boys who don’t like her and whether rad boots are preferable to male company. It also showcases some surprising pipes under all that Auto-Tune.
It’s all part of a master plan, she says -- winning equal rights for women to abuse boys in songs the way dudes have done for decades.
“I’m just talking about men the way they’ve talked about women for years,” she said. “If you listen to LMFAO, it’s all about how women are pieces of meat. I find that stuff funny, so I want to do it back to them.”
-- August Brown (Rob Loud / Getty Images)
