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11 fascinating Frank Gehry buildings in Los Angeles

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11 fascinating Frank Gehry buildings in Los Angeles

Long before the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall made him a global celebrity, L.A. served as Frank Gehry’s laboratory — where he could test materials, shift building types and blur the lines between art and architecture. These projects reveal a designer learning to bend norms and shape spatial narratives, in the process shifting the cultural landscape of the city. (He died Friday at 96 at his home in Santa Monica.)

From modest homes to major cultural institutions, Gehry’s L.A. buildings capture an architect inventing a language that would eventually transform places around the world.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2003

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Dreamed up by Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian, in 1987, the project wouldn’t be completed until 2003. But it was worth the wait. Now the cultural and visual anchor of downtown Los Angeles, Disney’s riot of titanium sails reflect rippling waves of music, Gehry’s love of sailing, fish scales and other nautical themes, and the frenetic city around it. Inside, the boat-like, wood-clad hall has an intimate, vineyard-style seating arrangement, with its superb acoustics shaped by Yasuhisa Toyota. Don’t forget the 6,134-pipe organ, which resembles a box of exploding French Fries. Lillian Disney, a connoisseur of flowers, would die before the hall was finished, but its hidden rear garden is centered around the “Rose for Lilly” fountain, composed of thousands of broken blue-and-white Delft china pieces.

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Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, 1978

Frank Gehry house behind a planter.

The Santa Monica home Frank Gehry designed for himself.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Gehry’s own Santa Monica home remains one of the most influential houses of the 20th century — a modest Dutch Colonial reimagined through an envelope of chain-link fencing, gray corrugated metal, exposed wood framing and sharply tilted glass planes. It challenged the idea of domestic respectability, treating the house as an open-ended experiment rather than a finished object. The home became a keystone of Gehry’s work, and a symbol of rebellion against architectural polish and formality.

Loyola Law School, Westlake, 1978-2002

Girardi Advocacy Center at Loyola Law School.

The Girardi Advocacy Center at Loyola Law School boasts a 22-ton, 65-foot stainless steel mirrored tower.

(David Hill / Loyola Marymount University)

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Built over two decades beginning in 1978, Loyola is a playful, village-like compilation of structures clustered around a central plaza; both an internal world distinct from the car-dominated cityscape around it and a reinterpretation of stuffy academic buildings and quadrangles. Its stucco, concrete, metal and glass structures showcase Gehry’s evolving language of shifting scales, fractured forms, unpretentious materials and sculptural components. Filled with surprising patios, alleys and landings, it’s one of his forays into postmodernism: brightly colored buildings contain, among other features, gabled brick rooflines, extra-bulky columns, long cantilevers and cylindrical steel elevators.

Chiat/Day Building, Venice, 1991

Exterior view of Chiat/ Day building in Venice.

It’s understandable why the Chiat/Day Building has been nicknamed the “Binoculars Building.”

(Los Angeles Times)

Nicknamed the “Binoculars Building” and once the headquarters for advertising agency Chiat/Day, this building faces Main Street in Venice. It was, according to legend, a last-ditch effort. Struggling to please his clients, Gehry reached across his desk for a model of a theater and library created by his friends, the sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, in the shape of a pair of binoculars. The three collaborated on the matte black, three-story binoculars, clad in black rubberized paint. While mostly decorative, they serve as a pedestrian entryway and contain conical conference rooms. Behind them, Gehry designed bulky offices — one clad in dark, rough masonry, the other in irregular white stucco — but they’ve since been overshadowed by the quirky entry sculpture.

Norton Residence, Venice, 1984

Norton Residence designed by architect Frank Gehry, in Venice.

Norton Residence.

(Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times)

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This house dives headfirst into the counterculture of Venice. Its irregular volumes, pastel colors, elevated decks, jagged rooflines and collage of materials — stucco, corrugated metal, broken tile — echo the local mashup of artist studios, surf shacks and light-industrial sheds. Inside, spaces unfold with shifting geometries that privilege visual surprise over domestic convention. In front, an elevated writers’ room, perched on a narrow base, resembles a lifeguard stand, its large windows allowing the original owner (who was a writer) to survey the neighborhood while working.

Temporary Contemporary (Now Geffen Contemporary at MOCA), Downtown, 1983

By converting a police vehicle warehouse into the Temporary Contemporary in 1983, Gehry helped popularize the reuse of industrial buildings in the museum world. Instead of overwriting the building’s industrial character, he retained exposed trusses, concrete floors and vast, column-free volumes, ideal for contemporary art. Strategic interventions — mechanicals, skylights, entrances and ramps — were surprisingly understated, considering Gehry’s track record. The result was both monumental and flexible, capable of supporting installations that MOCA itself couldn’t.

Exterior of the Air and Space Gallery at the California Science Center.

The Air and Space Gallery at the California Science Center was Frank Gehry’s first major public work.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

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This project in Exposition Park allowed Gehry for the first time to translate his sensibilities into a larger public building. Completed in 1984, the hangar-like space blended industrial materials — metal cladding, stucco, exposed structure and utilitarian forms — with folded, sculptural masses and cheeky artistic moments. Most notably, a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter jet is suspended from the facade in takeoff, angled upwards from the south wall. It distilled his concept for the museum of “frozen explosion,” rupturing the idea that architecture and artifact should be distinct.

Gemini G.E.L. Studios, West Hollywood, 1976 onward

Gehry’s work for Gemini G.E.L. — one of the most important printmaking workshops in the country — is reflective of his deep engagement with L.A.’s art community. Completed between 1976 and later phases, the project transformed industrial sheds into light-filled studios where artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg produced major works. Gehry introduced clerestory windows, skylights, large exposed trusses, raw concrete floors and metal cladding, elevating the utilitarian spaces without erasing their industrial character.

Edgemar Center, Santa Monica, 1988

The Edgemar Center in Santa Monica is a thriving shopping plaza.

The Edgemar Center in Santa Monica is a thriving shopping plaza.

(Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times)

This project transforms a 1920s industrial complex (the Edgemar Dairy and Ice Company buildings) in Santa Monica into a cultural and retail hub. Gehry respected the industrial bones while adding sculptural flourishes — punctured facades, angled walls, stepping rooflines, and strange material contrasts, such as lime green tiles next to raw steel columns. “I interviewed 16 designers, and the best were all already influenced by Frank,” said Edgemar’s founder, Abby Sher. “So I thought why not get the real one?” All is organized rather classically, with human-scaled plazas and passages punctuated by quirky campaniles. It’s a good example of how public space emerges not only from buildings but from the gaps between them. The Santa Monica Museum of Art eventually left the center, but the shopping plaza is still thriving.

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Hopper Compound, Venice, 1983

Designed for artist and actor Dennis Hopper, the house is part residence, part creative compound — an ensemble of buildings arranged around a private courtyard. Gehry contributed studios and additional structures that reflect the neighborhood’s industrial roots: corrugated metal siding, simple boxlike volumes and subtle geometric twists. The project, which blurs boundaries between living and making, captured both Hopper’s renegade spirit and Gehry’s evolving architectural language.

Schnabel House, Brentwood, 1989

Jon Platt chatting with Frank Gehry inside the Schnabel House in 2010.

Frank Gehry chats with then-owner Jon Platt inside the Schnabel House in 2010.

(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)

Completed for Rockwell and Marna Schnabel, the home represents a moment when Gehry translated his experimental vocabulary into a more refined domestic language, producing a residence that’s equally serene and expressive. It consists of shifting, interlocking pavilions organized around courtyards, gardens and a large rear reflecting pool. Gehry combines stucco, tile, metal and glass into a composition that feels sculptural and elegant, punctuated by the interiors’ dramatic heights and angled volumes, which open onto the landscape. Neighbors were at first suspicious, said Marna Schnabel, but soon they embraced the home. “It’s amazing how people react to something that’s not ‘normal,’” she said.

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Movie Reviews

Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it.  The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.

Roll on 18 Wheleer

Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.

I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

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In The End

In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.

The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.

Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026

 

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

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As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.” 

Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?

I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.

The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic. 

FINAL STATEMENT

You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.

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