James Phung saw Phone Booth before you did. What's more, he saw it for free, in the comfort of his private home-screening room. Phung isn't a movie star or a Hollywood insider; he's a junior at the University of Texas who makes $8 an hour at the campus computer lab. But many big-budget Hollywood movies have their North American premieres in his humble off-campus apartment. Like millions of other people, Phung downloads movies for ...

Visiting Jerry Seinfeld's home in the Hollywood Hills, one finds that the benefits of being a top television performer are readily apparent: even the three Porsches in his smartly tiled garage--two vintage, one a 1997 Turbo S--have a view of all Los Angeles. This is thanks to a picture window cut into the garage's wall. Yes, it's nice to be a TV star's car, just as it's nice to be a TV star . And now that even Mikhail Gorbachev ...

Michael Baze arrived at Churchill Downs with the right surname. The Baze clan is legendary in horse-racing. His second cousin Russell is the sport's all-time wins leader. His first cousin Tyler won the Eclipse Award in 2000 as top apprentice. His father Mike B. Baze was a prominent rider in the Pacific Northwest. And his uncle Gary was the career win leader at the legendary track at Longacres Park in Washington state. Young Michael didn't grow up near ...

If the U.S. economy had leaped from its worst five-month stretch in recent history to a record-breaking surge, Barack Obama could proudly announce, "The Great Recession is over." The country's finances have seen no such dramatic upturn, but in the movie business they're singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Hollywood hills are alive with the sound of money, and on this holiday weekend the cash registers were caroling with the top Memorial Day frame ever. Moviegoers ...

With the end of school around the corner, the options for summer camp have gotten endlessly niche: there's rock-star camp, circus-arts camp, Hollywood-stunt camp. But in what may be a backlash to the glitz of it all, the hippest new kid on the block is the lowly farm camp, with tilling the earth now seen as a wholesome and character-building respite from video games and texting. The American Camp Association has surveyed its members to ...

With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites. At New York University, assignments for Anthropology of the Unconscious include discussing X-rated Japanese comic books. And in Cinema and the Sex Act at the University of California, Berkeley, undergrads are required to view clips from Hollywood NC-17 releases like Showgirls and underground stag reels. It's called the porn curriculum, and it's quietly taking ...

Correction appended April 28, 2010 This time last year, Somali pirates dominated headlines in the U.S. The hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, a tanker captained by an American, led to a made-for-Hollywood intervention by sharp-shooting Navy SEALS and triggered a media frenzy about the rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa. In the months that followed, a U.S.- and E.U.-led naval task force stepped up patrols around Somalia's coastline and lessened the threat posed by pirates there. ...

The numbers say Thor won the weekend, again taking moviegoers to that Norse altar in the sky and winning the North American box office with $34.5 million, according to early studio estimates, for its second week at the top of the heap. But the snickering Bridesmaids led by Kristen Wiig may have the last laugh. The R-rated sisterhood comedy pulled in $24.4 million, nearly twice what its home studio, Universal, had cautiously predicted. Asked to pay to ...

The "all-American drug" has hit like a blizzard, with casualties rising. C17H21NO4. A derivative of Erythroxylon coca. Otherwise known as cocaine, coke, C, snow, blow, toot, leaf, flake, freeze, happy dust, nose candy, Peruvian, lady, white girl. A vegetable alkaloid derived from leaves of the coca plant. Origin: eastern slopes of the Andes mountains. Availability: Anywhere, U.S.A. Cost: $2,200 per oz., five times the price of gold. Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No ...

When it comes to TV, I'm not fussy. I just want access to all the channels and shows I pay my cable company a princely sum for each month, whenever and wherever I want to watch them, on all the gizmos I own. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Lots of us have moved on from the quaint era when TV watching was something you did in front of, well, a TV. Sure, we still ...