Entertainment
Heavy new investments in the arts promise to lift Bunker Hill
With two major expansions of downtown Los Angeles cultural institutions in the works, Bunker Hill is primed to elevate its status as the region’s leading arts center even as the area around it struggles with persistent homelessness and post-pandemic losses of office tenants.
Bunker Hill will soon have the largest concentration of buildings designed by Frank Gehry in the world and promises to become a cultural center “like no other place,” the architect told the Los Angeles Times.
The Broad recently announced a $100-million project that will increase gallery space at one of the city’s most popular museums by 70%, and the Colburn School for performing arts just broke ground on a $335-million expansion that will include a mid-size concert hall — designed by Gehry — that is expected to be in near-constant use for events put on by students, professional artists and academics.
Gehry has been a key player in the decades-long comeback of Bunker Hill, a former residential neighborhood that is now home to cultural institutions, office skyscrapers, apartment towers and hotels. With the coming additions, Gehry said, Bunker Hill stands to surpass the vision he, museum founder Eli Broad and other civic leaders had in the 1990s when work got underway on Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of the government-led Grand Avenue Project to revitalize the neighborhood.
Planners at the time hoped to build on the appeal of the Music Center, which was built in the 1960s and served as a popular destination for arts patrons who typically drove in and out without stepping outside its boundaries.
A rendering of the future Broad expansion as viewed from Hope Street.
(Courtesy of the Broad. © Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R))
“We have come a long way since the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the other Music Center venues opened,” Gehry said. “So much great energy has come to the fore.”
Bunker Hill is still unlikely to feel similar to cultural centers in other big cities, he acknowledged, and laughed off a reminder that Broad had suggested Grand Avenue could become L.A.’s version of Paris’ Champs-Elysees.
“Los Angeles cannot be compared to anywhere else in the world. It’s different than other cities,” Gehry said.
Bunker Hill is slightly removed from the homelessness and safety concerns that trouble the financial district just south of it, said John Sischo, who has worked in the real estate business downtown since the 1980s.
“Homelessness is a big problem that keeps office tenants from coming downtown,” he said. Safety issues are both “real and perceived.”
In the two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, civic leaders and landlords pushed to elevate the financial district that Sischo recalled as a “doughnut hole” between Bunker Hill — with its highbrow cultural scene — and the booming new neighborhood of South Park near Crypto.com Arena and L.A. Live, where sports and entertainment ruled.
Thousands of apartments and condominiums were added to the financial district — followed by bars, restaurants and stores that thrived on the residents and office workers whose bosses took advantage of comparatively low rents in gleaming towers that were being upgraded by their owners.
The drop in street life from workers staying at home during the pandemic and continuing to work remotely has been a drain on the vibrancy and sense of security in the financial district, which is depressing office leasing and hampering the neighborhood’s comeback, Sischo said.
Falling office values have led to foreclosures on some prominent office towers, including 444 S. Flower St., which was owned by Sischo’s company, Coretrust Capital Partners.
Acclaimed architect Frank Gehry stands in an outdoor lounge area of the bar Sed, part of Conrad Los Angeles, a luxury hotel across from Walt Disney Concert Hall, which Gehry also designed.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
“Pre-COVID, it was really jelling,” he said of the financial district.
The most transformative addition to Bunker Hill in recent years was the Grand, a $1-billion hotel, apartment and retail complex designed by Gehry that stands across Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Concert hall, which he also designed.
“Now Disney has context,” Gehry said in 2022 on a balcony at the Grand overlooking the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “For me, it all fits now. Disney Hall doesn’t look like an outlier.”
In the nearly two years since the Grand opened, its 45-story apartment tower has been nearly fully leased, owner Related Cos. said.
The Conrad Los Angeles hotel there is “outperforming the market,” Nicholas Vanderboom, chief operating officer of Related California, said, in part by “catering to growing interest in L.A’.s arts institutions.”
Spanish chef José Andrés operates restaurants at the Grand and more places to eat are coming in a part of the complex that has been dark since it opened, to the dismay of neighbors who have been waiting for long-promised retail venues on Grand Avenue. One of the features Gehry designed was space for stores and restaurants on the avenue and on terraces above that overlook the Disney Concert Hall, but it’s still mostly unoccupied.
Later this year, Andrés will open a Bazaar Meat, his high-end steakhouse that originated in Las Vegas, on the second level. Santa Monica Italian, French and & Moroccan restaurant Massilia will also open a branch on Grand Avenue this year, and other tenants will be announced in 2024, Related said.
The additions to the Broad and the Colburn promise to boost foot traffic on Grand Avenue, said Sel Kardan, president of the Colburn School, which opened on Bunker Hill in 1998 and has around 2,000 students.
The Broad Museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles in April 2019.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Construction began recently on the expansion of the Colburn School that includes a mid-size concert hall Kardan expects to be in near-constant use for events put on by students, professional artists and academics. It is the third Gehry-designed building on Bunker Hill, which gives downtown L.A. the highest concentration of Gehry buildings anywhere, his firm said.
Colburn Center, as the addition will be called, will include a 1,000-seat concert hall with an in-the-round design meant to create intimacy between the performers and the audience. The hall will have an orchestra pit and a stage large enough to accommodate “the grandest works,” Kardan said, making it suitable for orchestra, opera and dance.
He expects the new hall will host more than 200 events a year at various times of day. The Colburn Center will also more than double facilities for the school’s Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, creating what the school called “one of the most comprehensive dance education complexes in Southern California.” The dance facilities will include a 100-seat theater for dance and four professional-size studios for dance instruction and rehearsal.
With the new addition, “there could be three or four performances going on on our campus on any given night,” Kardan said, a combination of educational performances, guest artists and events put on by local arts organizations.
The Colburn Center is set for completion in 2027. The Broad expansion should open a year later, museum President Joanne Heyler said, and add to street life on Grand Avenue.
A model of architect Frank Gehry’s design of an addition for Colburn School, a private performing arts school in downtown Los Angeles, which will make Bunker Hill the only place with three Gehry-designed buildings in close proximity, on January 31, 2024.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Attendance at the Broad returned to pre-pandemic highs of more than 900,000 annual visitors, she said, with a new daily record of more than 6,000 visitors set in March.
With the expansion,”we’re simply responding to the tremendous enthusiasm of our audience that is now consistent with pre-pandemic levels and and seemingly growing,” she said.
“I am under no illusion that downtown in general is free of challenges,” Heyler said. “We in the entire area have a lot to work on, but as a meeting point, a place to enjoy a cultural destination, our experience with the Broad is that things are vibrant. And I know that goes against the typical narrative of downtown.”
The Grand was “the next-to-the-last piece of the puzzle” for Bunker Hill, said landlord Christopher Rising, whose firm Rising Realty Partners owns two office buildings there. The final piece will be Angels Landing, he said, a $1.6-billion hotel-housing-retail complex set to rise next to Bunker Hill’s historic Angels Flight railway in time for the 2028 Olympics.
Rising laments that office attendance is still below pre-pandemic levels, especially among nearby government buildings that were packed with public employees who helped bring a sense of activity to Grand Avenue and other downtown streets.
“There are years of vision that are coming to fruition” on Bunker Hill, Rising said, “but the vision was heavily dependent on synergies with government workers. Without them, it’s slowing things down.”
More can be done to improve Bunker Hill, Gehry said, and the streets near Grand Avenue that are thick with parking lots are now ripe for development. The Colburn addition is going up next to the existing school on a former asphalt lot at 2nd and Olive streets.
“To keep upping the ante, we still have work to do,” Gehry said, such as “fixing” the Chandler Pavilion to make it a better venue for opera performances.
“There are also opportunities to connect down to the arts district, the civic center, and Little Tokyo on the east-west streets,” he said. “That is very exciting to me.”
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
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First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Several private equity firms and Hollywood power players, including United Talent Agency and longtime agent Patrick Whitesell, have expressed interest in buying parts of Casey Wasserman’s music and sports management firm after it abruptly went up for sale.
Wasserman became ensnared in controversy earlier this year after his salacious decades-old emails to Ghislaine Maxwell, an accomplice of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were released as part of the U.S. Justice Department’s trove of Epstein files.
The agency auction is in the early stages, according to three people close to the process but not authorized to comment.
Earlier this week, several interested parties submitted proposals to meet a preliminary deadline in the auction, two of the sources said.
The company, which changed its name to the Team last month, is expected to be valued at around $3 billion.
Providence Equity Partners holds the majority stake. The private equity firm has discussed selling the entire company or carving off Wasserman’s minority interest. Providence also has considered selling the bulk of the firm and staying on as a minority investor, one of the sources said. Another scenario could involve separating, then selling the individual business units that make up the Team.
Wasserman and Providence’s company boasts an enviable roster of music artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. Its sports marketing practice is viewed as particularly lucrative and has potential to grow in value as big dollars flow into sports that draw large crowds.
Wasserman, who declined to comment, has a veto right over any sale of the company that he has spent a quarter of a century building.
UTA, which also declined to comment, is among the most aggressive suitors, the sources said. The Team’s sports marketing and music representation divisions would dramatically boost the Beverly Hills agency’s profile and client roster.
Whitesell, former executive chairman of Endeavor, separately has been motivated to make investments in sports, media and entertainment since last year when he left the talent agency that he and Ari Emanuel built. Whitesell launched a new firm with seed money from private equity firm Silver Lake, and last spring he started WIN Sports Group to represent professional football players.
Whitesell wasn’t immediately available for comment.
European investment firm Permira also has expressed interest, according to a knowledgeable source. Permira declined to comment.
The New York Times first reported that Permira, UTA and Whitesell had expressed interest.
The sales process is expected to stretch into summer, the knowledgeable people said. The auction could become complicated particularly if Providence decides to unwind the business.
For example, UTA could not buy the entire company because of the Brillstein television unit. The agency is bound by an agreement with the Writers Guild of America that prevents it from owning television production.
Investment bank Moelis & Company is managing the sale. A representative of the firm declined comment.
Wasserman also is the chairman of LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years.
Following revelations of Wasserman’s 2003 emails with Maxwell, several musicians and athletes — led by pop artist Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach — said that, to stay true to their values, they would leave the agency then known as Wasserman.
Wasserman apologized to his staff for “past personal mistakes” and said he would sell the agency.
He had limited dealings with Epstein, flying on the financier’s jet along with former President Clinton for a September 2002 humanitarian trip through Africa.
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose legendary grandfather, Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman, helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein, Maxwell — who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2021 — and others, including security agents.
The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, citing his “strong leadership” of the Games.
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