Lifestyle
Where's prom? Hollywood clubs, studio lots, museums and definitely not the gym
In the mid-2010s, celebrities such as Khloe Kardashian, Rihanna and Floyd Mayweather Jr. socialized at Lure Nightclub in Hollywood, drawing TMZ photographers and star-obsessed onlookers to the venue’s curb. Inside Lure, the now-shuttered hot spot offered a menu brimming with expensive drinks like a $70,000 Champagne bottle.
But on a spring night in 2014, a vastly different clientele descended upon the rented-out, 18,000-square-foot venue: high schoolers.
“Sometimes I drive past it and I’m just like, ‘Oh, my God, my prom was there,’” said Tiffany Behnam, a Milken Community School alum, of the scene-y club.
In Los Angeles, where the yearly price of tuition can rival the cost of a new convertible, some private schools go all out when booking venues for the spring bash. While public schools sometimes splurge on prom venues too — in addition to hotel ballrooms and sprucing up their gymnasiums — some of the city’s most elite schools regularly opt for world-class museums, studio lots and nightclubs, giving teenagers only-in-L.A. prom experiences. Booking these event spaces — not including decor, DJ and other amenities — can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000. Prom ticket prices have ranged from around $115 to $175 over the years.
(Amir Mrzae / For The Times)
“I was like, ‘Of course our prom is going to be there,’ because Milken is quite a prestigious school and they always strive to give us the best,” Behnam recalled.
Immediately after the prom at Lure, Behnam and her classmates ventured to Bootsy Bellows, a velvet-roped club in West Hollywood, which Milken student organizers had booked for the Bel-Air school’s after-prom party. Bootsy Bellows is popular among celebrities like Drake, and, it turns out, some L.A. private school prom committees. Crossroads School, a Santa Monica prep school, held a prom at Bootsy Bellows a few years after the Milken event.
“It was a nightclub that no one had been to but kind of had heard lore about and people were curious about,” said Molly Cody, a Harvard-Westlake graduate whose friends attended the Crossroads prom. “People got to go inside a nightclub that they would typically never be eligible to go to.”
When Cody was a senior in 2017, her Coldwater Canyon high school held its prom at the Skirball Cultural Center. A popular prom destination for both private and public schools, the Jewish cultural institution has also been booked for weddings and galas. Cody said because her private school had nearly 300 students per class, it booked a large venue.
“It needed to be more convention center-y rather than nightclub,” she said.
In 2025, Harvard-Westlake plans to hold its prom at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Jasmine Gonzalez, the Petersen’s events director, said schools reserve dates nearly two years in advance.
Though some have a yearly tradition of holding prom at the Petersen, others book the space every two years to give students different locations for their junior and senior proms. The venue’s popularity among L.A. schools has meant big business for the museum. “We host anywhere between 15 and 20 proms a year,” Gonzalez said, adding that it can cost up to $35,000 to rent space at the museum. In 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum didn’t host any proms. The next year, it hosted a handful, including Harvard-Westlake’s, which took place outdoors. By 2022, Gonzalez said, the prom business at the museum had returned to normal levels.
With thousands of students piling into the Petersen donning sparkly outfits in April and May, springtime visitors sometimes notice remnants from prom events while trekking through the museum. “When you go into our elevators, you’ll see some sparkles and that’s because of the dresses,” she said, noting that the space now requests decor and dresses sans glitter.
Maddy Glick, a Brentwood School graduate who attended her junior prom at the Petersen in 2018, said the festivities were surrounded by “beautiful cars.”
“It was just a really cool space,” she added. The Petersen’s vast collection includes classic rides like a copper-colored 1959 Chevrolet Impala lowrider and a black-coated 1932 Ford Roadster.
Besides Brentwood School and Harvard-Westlake, private schools like Campbell Hall in Studio City, and Milken Community School have also booked proms at the Petersen.
It’s not just private schools renting cultural institutions for prom. Some public schools host their festivities at the museum as well, Gonzalez said. But the smaller private ones may opt for a catered, sit-down dinner, adding at least $4,500 to the bill if they use Someone’s in the Kitchen, one of the Petersen’s preferred catering vendors.
(Amir Mrzae / For The Times)
At the Grammy Museum, groups using the space work with its exclusive catering partner, Wolfgang Puck Catering. (Both declined to share prom catering pricing.) This year, the all-girls Marlborough School in Hancock Park plans to hold its prom on the venue’s rooftop terrace, which has views of the iconic Hollywood sign and rents for at least $10,000. Rita George, the museum’s chief program officer, said schools have increasingly turned to the museum for prom.
“We definitely do more now than ever and the first one was probably a good 10 years ago,” she said. “I think it offers a more elevated experience, maybe, when it’s at a museum.”
George said schools can also reserve the museum’s exhibits, like its Shakira showcase, giving students the chance to roam different floors during their event.
Prom planners sometimes pick production studios for the rite of passage. Last year, Chaminade College Preparatory, the Catholic private school in West Hills, held its prom on a soundstage at the Jim Henson Co. Lot in Hollywood, where shows like “Perry Mason” and “Adventures of Superman” were filmed. The company didn’t respond to requests for current pricing, but a 2015 flier showed that renting its soundstage and courtyard cost between $8,000 and $13,000 at the time.
For a change of pace, Brentwood School, whose alumni include actor Jonah Hill and Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine, hosted its senior prom in 2019 at a nondescript, indoor-outdoor space in Hollywood. But student planners added accouterments like a wood-fired pizza oven and a taco station.
For these students, their prom location mattered less than enjoying the revelry. Glick, who planned the event with four other students, said the organizers toured many locales and ended up choosing a “less fancy” space in order to spend more money on the event itself.
“Prom was really fun. People had a really good time,” she said. “Or at least they told me they had a really good time because I planned it.”
Lifestyle
In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping
Lee Byung-hun stars in No Other Choice.
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NEON
In an old Kids in the Hall comedy sketch called “Crazy Love,” two bros throatily proclaim their “love of all women” and declare their incredulity that anyone could possibly take issue with it:
Bro 1: It is in our very makeup; we cannot change who we are!
Bro 2: No! To change would mean … (beat) … to make an effort.
I thought about that particular exchange a lot, watching Park Chan-wook’s latest movie, a niftily nasty piece of work called No Other Choice. The film isn’t about the toxic lecherousness of boy-men, the way that KITH sketch is. But it is very much about men, and that last bit: the annoyed astonishment of learning that you’re expected to change something about yourself that you consider essential, and the extreme lengths you’ll go to avoid doing that hard work.
Many critics have noted No Other Choice‘s satirical, up-the-minute universality, given that it involves a faceless company screwing over a hardworking, loyal employee. As the film opens, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been working at a paper factory for 25 years; he’s got the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect family — you see where this is going, right? (If you don’t, even after the end of the first scene, when Man-su calls his family over for a group hug while sighing, “I’ve got it all,” then I envy your blithe disinterest in how movies work. Never change, you beautiful blissful Pollyanna, you.)
He gets canned, and can’t seem to find another job in his beloved paper industry, despite going on a series of dehumanizing interviews. His resourceful wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) proves a hell of a lot more adaptable than he does, making practical changes to the family’s expenses to weather Man-su’s situation. But when foreclosure threatens, he resolves to eliminate the other candidates (Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won) for the job he wants at another paper factory — and, while he’s at it, maybe even the jerk (Park Hee-soon) to whom he’d be reporting.
So yes, No Other Choice is a scathing spoof of corporate culture. But the director’s true satirical eye is trained on the interpersonal — specifically the intractability of the male ego.
Again and again, the women in the film (both Son Ye-jin as Miri and the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran, who plays the wife of one of Man-su’s potential victims) entreat their husbands to think about doing something, anything else with their lives. But these men have come to equate their years of service with a pot-committed core identity as men and breadwinners; they cling to their old lives and seek only to claw their way back into them. Man-su, for example, unthinkingly channels the energy that he could devote to personal and professional growth into planning and executing a series of ludicrously sloppy murders.
It’s all satisfyingly pulpy stuff, loaded with showy, cinematic homages to old-school suspense cinematography and editing — cross-fades, reverse-angles and jump cuts that are deliberately and unapologetically Hitchcockian. That deliberateness turns out to be reassuring and crowd-pleasing; if you’re tired of tidy visual austerity, of films that look like TV, the lushness on display here will have you leaning back in your seat thinking, “This right here is cinema, goddammit.”
Narratively, the film is loaded with winking jokes and callbacks that reward repeat viewing. Count the number of times that various characters attempt to dodge personal responsibility by sprinkling the movie’s title into their dialogue. Wonder why one character invokes the peculiar image of a madwoman screaming in the woods and then, only a few scenes later, finds herself chasing someone through the woods, screaming. Marvel at Man-su’s family home, a beautifully ugly blend of traditional French-style architecture with lumpy Brutalist touches like exposed concrete balconies jutting out from every wall.
There’s a lot that’s charming about No Other Choice, which might seem an odd thing to note about such a blistering anti-capitalist screed. But the director is careful to remind us at all turns where the responsibility truly lies; say what you will about systemic economic pressure, the blood stays resolutely on Man-su’s hands (and face, and shirt, and pants, and shoes). The film repeatedly offers him the ability to opt out of the system, to abandon his resolve that he must return to the life he once knew, exactly as he knew it.
Man-su could do that, but he won’t, because to change would mean to make an effort — and ultimately men would rather embark upon a bloody murder spree than go to therapy.
Lifestyle
Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade
AUSTIN, Texas – Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will nearly double in size over the next decade.
The airport currently has 34 gates. With the expansion projects, it will increase by another 32 gates.
What they’re saying:
Southwest, Delta, United, American, Alaska, FedEx, and UPS have signed 10-year use-and lease agreements, which outline how they operate at the airport, including with the expansion.
“This provides the financial foundation that will support our day-to-day operations and help us fund the expansion program that will reshape how millions of travelers experience AUS for decades to come,” Ghizlane Badawi, CEO of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, said.
Concourse B, which is in the design phase, will have 26 gates, estimated to open in the 2030s. Southwest Airlines will be the main tenant with 18 gates, United Airlines will have five gates, and three gates will be for common use. There will be a tunnel that connects to Concourse B.
“If you give us the gates, we will bring the planes,” Adam Decaire, senior VP of Network Planning & Network Operations Control at Southwest Airlines said.
“As part of growing the airport, you see that it’s not just us that’s bragging about the success we’re having. It’s the airlines that want to use this airport, and they see advantage in their business model of being part of this airport, and that’s why they’re growing the number of gates they’re using,” Mayor Kirk Watson said.
Dig deeper:
The airport will also redevelop the existing Barbara Jordan Terminal, including the ticket counters, security checkpoints, and baggage claim. Concourse A will be home to Delta Air Lines with 15 gates. American Airlines will have nine gates, and Alaska Airlines will have one gate. There will be eight common-use gates.
“Delta is making a long-term investment in Austin-Bergstrom that will transform travel for years to come,” Holden Shannon, senior VP for Corporate Real Estate at Delta Air Lines said.
The airport will also build Concourse M — six additional gates to increase capacity as early as 2027. There will be a shuttle between that and the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Concourse M will help with capacity during phases of construction.
There will also be a new Arrivals and Departures Hall, with more concessions and amenities. They’re also working to bring rideshare pickup closer to the terminal.
City officials say these projects will bring more jobs.
The expansion is estimated to cost $5 billion — none of which comes from taxpayer dollars. This comes from airport revenue, possible proceeds, and FAA grants.
“We’re seeing airlines really step up to ensure they are sharing in the infrastructure costs at no cost to Austin taxpayers, and so we’re very excited about that as well,” Council Member Vanessa Fuentes (District 2) said.
The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin’s Angela Shen
Lifestyle
After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’
Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.
Hear The Original Interview
Television
After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’
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