FRANK Sinatra may have called L.A. "a lady," but I think the fabled crooner and longtime Southland resident had it all wrong. Los Angeles' essence is not that of some elegant female but her scheming opposite, a male on the make. This...

Paul Schrader is probably more famous for his scripts (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) than directing (American Gigolo, Cat People, Affliction) but he throws himself into both. He once observed that Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle was "me, without any brains". If so, Julian Kaye, the...

Freddie Fields, the Hollywood agent, producer and studio executive who helped make stars of Mel Gibson, Richard Gere and others, has died. He was 84.Fields died Tuesday at his Beverly Hills home, said publicist Warren Cowan, a longtime friend. The cause of death was lung...

A court issued arrest warrants for Hollywood actor Richard Gere and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty on Thursday, saying their kiss at a public function "transgressed all limits of vulgarity," media reports said.Judge Dinesh Gupta issued the warrants in the northwestern city of Jaipur after a...

In "American Gigolo," Julian Kay (Richard Gere) skims around the Southern California freeways in a shiny black Mercedes 450-SL convertible, often with the top down, so that we can study his narrow eyes behind his tortoiseshell shades, his expensively cut hair, and his extraordinary but uninteresting good looks. When he alights, we see him buying expensive clothes at Juschi's boutique, on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (or, rather, being bought clothes: a woman is paying the bill); or havi...

With American Gigolo, Paul Schrader seems to have found his footing as a director—and achieved a measure of distance from (might one say transcended?) his obsessions as a writer. Not that he has really relaxed his Calvinist grip on the plot mechanism: characters are stuffed willy-nilly down a determinist tunnel, and one feels a tortured Providence-as-dramatist—rather than any inner necessity or logic—behind their every move and utterance. The hero of American Gigolo is more fortunate th...

[American Gigolo is] the most elegant of Schrader's directorial exercises, and there are never any lapses of tone. What's lacking, as always, are narrative flow, dramatic development, and psychological coherence…. [Up to now Schrader's] style has seemed either too obviously derivative, or too disruptive in terms of the very lurid material with which he has chosen to work. It is as if Bresson were trying to direct a [Luis] Bunuel script. Curiously, American Gigolo is less lurid th...