News, analysis and opinion on the Los Angeles business scene for the past two days Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.

Downtown chronicler Ed Fuentes blogs at View from a Loft that the sign for Gorky's Russian cafe still hangs over the corner of 8th and San Julian streets. It's kind of like looking back in time at the ...

Freelance videojournalist Abraham Riesman was sent in 2012 to do a story for Punch on Paul Mazursky's morning gathering of old Hollywood hands (and a few younger ones) at Farmers Market. The table ...

The boys on Larchmont in "False Alarms," with an LA Railway yellow car passing by. What is it about non-Angelenos becoming so obsessed with old filming locations that they spend years tracking down ...

Willie Nelson, beardless and braidless, at the Palomino in 1970. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images at LA Magazine's website Before everyone forgets that LA's music lore includes North Hollywood, Los ...

There was a time — several decades actually — when cruising Van Nuys Boulevard at night to see and be seen was a major youth culture tradition in Los Angeles, and especially for teenagers (the real ...

Los Angeles car culture never saw anyone like Big Willie Robinson — or needed anyone quite so much. In the mid 1960s, when baby boomers were racing hot rods and fighting each other and the cops all ...

Ron Fineman follows up today with reporting on his scoop last week that KNBC reporter Kyung Lah and "Today in L.A." producer Jeff Soto got fired for having an affair—and 11 p.m. news producer Jim ...

Sandstone Retreat was a clothing-optional refuge in Topanga Canyon that began in the late 1960s and survived efforts by the county to shut it down. John Williamson opened the retreat with his wife, ...

KTLA 5 Morning News co-host Michaela Pereira is leaving the station at the end of May, after nine years, to join CNN in New York, the station announced. KTLA calls her "one of KTLA5’s most well-known ...

L. Ron Hubbard in 1950; crowd at Dianetics seminar in L.A. the same year. Sappell and Welkos hunted down the facts regarding Hubbard's trumped-up military record: his false claims of having received a ...

New media reporter Anne Riley-Katz's LABJ piece on Robert Scheer's venture Truthdig.com focuses less on the deposed L.A. Times columnist and more on co-founder and publisher Zuade Kaufman. With good ...