Store Is a Gift Trove for Movie Buffs

For that hard-to-shop-for person on your Christmas list, how about giving the gift of gaffer’s tape?

The sticky stuff used by a gaffer (the head electrician on a movie set) is yours for just $12 at the newly opened MGM Studio Store in Santa Monica, in MGM’s Colorado Boulevard corporate headquarters building.

If that doesn’t work for you, how about a beeper cover with the MGM logo for $10 or a ditty bag for $60, just like the one used by movie grips to carry their tools?

These three items are hot sellers at the new store, which is designed to resemble a studio back lot, said NancyJane Goldston, vice president of licensing and merchandising for MGM/United Artists.

Other products include crew jackets, mugs, caps, leather manuscript bags, Pink Panther dolls and just about everything else one could stick a logo on.

The five Oscars on display are, alas, not for sale.

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“A” FOR EFFORT: We’ve heard of popping little pink heart-shaped pills and staying up all night to get a semester’s worth of reading done in 12 hours, but one UCLA student has been accused of taking finals frenzy a step too far.

According to the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, the student was spotted using a master key to enter his professor’s office shortly after midnight on the morning of the final exam in Economics 11.

The witness? The professor himself, who had been working late.

According to his account, the two spoke for a few minutes. Then the student went off, leaving the master key and a false name.

During the final later that day, the professor spotted the student in class and called campus police, who took him into custody and charged him with one count of burglary.

Identified as Noah Ram Balch, 19, a native of Carlsbad and a resident of the Westwood campus, he was being held at the West Hollywood sheriff’s station pending $15,000 bail.

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UNDER FIRE: Poor Brentwood. The leafy residential district, subject of a less-than-enthusiastic review in Los Angeles magazine, has now been put under the microscope by no less august a journal than the New Republic.

And found wanting.

“One sees a certain blankness in the eyes you meet on the street,” according to a cover story in the Dec. 19 issue. “It is as if personal histories--narratives--have been cashed in like frequent-flyer points that went toward unsuccessful vacations.”

There is a sense of Paradise lost, or at least misplaced, in the article by Douglas Coupland, author of the book “Generation X.”

Shallowness is all. People like to look good. And rents are cheaper south of San Vicente Boulevard.

The piece, inspired by the violent death of Nicole Brown Simpson--isn’t everything?--does not fail to summon up the tired ghost of Marilyn Monroe, who also lived and died in ZIP code 90049. Her bedroom was messy, we learn.

The late Ronald Lyle Goldman gets barely a mention.