Quick Takes - Aug. 14, 2010

QUICK TAKES

Mom: Lohan is ‘great’

Lindsay Lohan’s mom says the actress will be moving away from California and back to New York after she gets out of drug rehabilitation.

Dina Lohan, during an often tense interview with NBC “Today” show co-host Matt Lauer on Friday, said her daughter was doing “wonderfully” after 14 days in jail and lashed out at California Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel, who put the actress there.

“She’s great,” Lohan said. “She’s been through a lot. The judge played hardball. Lindsay was in with alleged murderers, and she’s become friends with a lot of them. Lindsay rolled with the punches and she’s doing wonderfully.”

Lindsay Lohan served 14 days of a 90-day jail sentence for violating her probation in a 2007 drug case. She was sent to a UCLA drug rehab facility for a court-mandated three-month treatment, and her mother said she’d be out soon.

—Associated Press

Winfrey agrees to OWN show

Oprah Winfrey agreed to host or star in a show on her new network and Discovery Communications Inc., her partner in the venture, boosted its funding by 89% after costs to start the channel rose more than anticipated.

Discovery will increase the funding commitment toward the Oprah Winfrey Network to $189 million from $100 million, through a loan and debt financing, according to a regulatory filing Friday. The channel will start on or before Jan. 1, the company said.

The new show, whose contents were not disclosed, will join a lineup of 17 programs announced by the network, which will reach about 80 million homes. Winfrey can’t host a talk show on her network until fall 2011 because of obligations to her broadcast program, which runs until Sept. 9, 2011.

—Bloomberg News

Autry Center picks new leader

Daniel M. Finley, president of the Milwaukee Public Museum, was announced Friday as the new president and chief executive officer of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park.

He’ll take the helm Aug. 30, replacing John Gray, who declared his intention to resign last March after 11 years in charge of the western history institution.

Finley, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, had headed the Milwaukee Public Museum, which has a collection of more than 4.6 million objects, since 2005. Before that he served more than a decade as the executive of Waukesha County, Wis., an elected office.

—Lee Margulies

British artist, 8,

is in demand

He’s Britain’s most talked-about young artist. His paintings fetch hefty sums, and there’s a long waiting list for his eagerly anticipated new works.

It has all happened so quickly — he’s still getting used to the spotlight — and Kieron Williamson fidgets a little when he’s asked to share his thoughts on art.

“Cows are the easiest thing to paint,” said Kieron, who has just turned 8. “You don’t have to worry about doing so much detail.”

Horses, he says, are “a lot harder. You have to get their legs right, and you have to make their back legs much bigger than their front.”

Paintbrush prodigy Kieron — dubbed “mini Monet” by the British press — is a global sensation. All 33 of the pastels, watercolors and oil paintings in his latest exhibition sold, within half an hour, for a total of $235,000. Buyers from as far away as the United States lined up overnight outside the gallery, and there is a 3,000-strong waiting list for his impressionistic landscapes of boat-dotted estuaries, snowy fields and wide marshland skies.

His parents don’t know where the talent came from. “Keith and I don’t paint, so we find it difficult to know what’s going on inside his head,” said Kieron’s mother, Michelle Williamson.

—Associated Press

Reprise books Foster, Buckley

Two Tony-winning performers — Sutton Foster and Betty Buckley — will make separate concert appearances as part of the 2010-11 season of Reprise Theatre Company.

“An Evening With Sutton Foster” will play on Oct. 4 at 8 p.m. Foster won a Tony for actress in a musical for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002.

“Betty Buckley in Concert With Seth Rudetsky” is scheduled on Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. Buckley won a Tony for featured actress in a musical for “Cats” in 1983.

Both Reprise performances will take place at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.

—David Ng

Young actress

to get transplant

An 11-year-old girl who played young Nala in “The Lion King” on Broadway is getting a potentially lifesaving procedure.

Shannon Tavarez has leukemia and will get an umbilical-cord blood transplant Tuesday. The blood-producing stem cells used in transplants can come from cord blood, bone marrow or blood.

The actress was forced to quit the show in April. Cast members held a bone marrow donor registration drive for her last month.

—Associated Press