An Oscar-winning actress and lifestyle entrepreneur collides with a retired optometrist on a Utah ski slope. The optometrist sues, claiming a life-altering brain injury. Not so fast, says the starlet; it was his fault, and she countersues, seeking damages of… one dollar. The media, not surprisingly, laps it up, covering …
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Dawn Porter looks for stories of people who made history without asking. By following congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis in John Lewis: Good Trouble, or President Obama’s White House photographer Pete Souza in The Way I See It, she says she hopes to shade in between the lines …
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For filmmaker Denny Tedesco, making the 2015 film The Wrecking Crew, about a renowned group of L.A. session musicians that backed everyone from The Mamas & the Papas to The Beach Boys, was personal. He’s the son of Tommy Tedesco, after all — a Wrecking Crew guitarist and one of …
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A monster can be a green, scaly lizard that towers over buildings. Or a bloodsucking fiend in a black cape. Or an equivocating, self-pitying old man who refuses to own up to the lives he has destroyed and hides behind the blinkered assurance that God will forgive him for his …
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The tale begins with a crime that left everyone baffled. In July 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children (and one driver) was hijacked in the sleepy Central California town of Chowchilla. The kidnap victims were taken to two vans, driven to an abandoned rock quarry, led off the bus, …
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When Amy Carlson’s mummified body was found in April 2021, it looked like a blue skeleton. It was also in a sleeping bag wrapped in Christmas lights. Her followers in the Love Has Won cult were apparently still waiting for the Galactics, a group of dead luminaries led by Robin …
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It’s hard to keep track of all the ethical violations depicted in Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, the new three-part Netflix docuseries whose title suggests a straight-to-cable Nineties TV movie. Some of the sins here on display are, literally, mortal: Paolo Macchiarini, an apparent sociopath, a definite conman, and, …
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There have been a number of eye-opening Beatles documentaries through the years, from the Beatlemania doc Eight Days a Week; a tribute to the Fab Four’s loyal secretary, Good Ol’ Freda; Martin Scorsese’s poignant George Harrison: Living in the Material World; and last but certainly not least, Peter Jackson’s recent …
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Sports fans tend to feel proprietary about their heroes, as if stars owed us more than the heroics and physical sacrifice they provide on the field or court. The better the athlete, the more we expect and demand. So, when all-world Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders announced his retirement …
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My first act toward shedding myself of fucks to give was sharing my abortion story on Comedy Central back in 1992. That was the first and last time I was asked to do that on television. That’s when I learned that corporate media, no matter how open-minded, is not a …
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