Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
Scott arrested after Miami Beach police say he drunkenly yelled at people on a yacht
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. | Rapper Travis Scott was arrested in Miami Beach early Thursday on misdemeanor charges of trespassing and public intoxication after officers say they found him at the city’s marina shouting obscenities at people on a yacht and disobeyed their order to leave.
Officers went to the marina shortly before 1 a.m. after receiving a call about people fighting on a yacht, according to a police report.
When they arrived, they found Scott, 33, standing on the dock yelling at people on the ship, the report says. Officers told him to sit down, but he kept standing back up and yelling. They could smell alcohol on his breath, the report says.
The man who called police did not want to press charges, so Scott was allowed to leave.
As he walked away, however, Scott kept turning to yell obscenities at people on the yacht. He left as a passenger in a waiting car, but returned five minutes later and ignored officers’ orders to again leave, the report says.
Officers say he then began yelling again, disturbing people in nearby boats and buildings. When officers asked if he had been drinking, he replied, “It’s Miami.” He was arrested.
Scott was released from Miami-Dade County Jail before noon after posting a $650 bond.
After his release, he posted on the social platform X, “Lol.”
His publicists declined comment.
Scott, one of the biggest names in hip-hop and whose birth name is Jacques Webster, has more than 100 songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 and released four singles that topped the chart: “Sicko Mode,” “Highest in the Room,” “The Scotts,” and “Franchise.”
He has two children with his former girlfriend, media personality and businesswoman Kylie Jenner.
This is not the first time Scott has been involved in a police investigation.
Ten people were killed in a crowd surge at Scott’s 2021 performance at his Astroworld Festival in his native Houston. Attendees were packed so tightly that many couldn’t breathe or move their arms. Those killed, who ranged in age from 9 to 27, died from compression asphyxia, which an expert likened to being crushed by a car.
Lawyers for the victims alleged in lawsuits that the deaths and hundreds of injuries at the concert were caused by negligent planning and a lack of concern over capacity and safety at the event.
Scott, promoter Live Nation, and the others who were sued have denied these claims, saying safety was their No. 1 concern. They said what happened could not have been foreseen.
The final lawsuit was settled last month.
After a police investigation, a grand jury declined to indict Scott, along with five others connected to the festival.
Sutherland, the towering actor whose career spanned ‘M.A.S.H.’ to ‘Hunger Games,’ dies at 88
NEW YORK | Donald Sutherland, the prolific film and television actor whose long career stretched from “M.A.S.H.” to “The Hunger Games,” has died. He was 88.
Kiefer Sutherland, the actor’s son, confirmed his father’s death Thursday. No further details were immediately available.
“I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film,” Kiefer Sutherland said on X. “Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that.”
The tall and gaunt Canadian actor with a grin that could be sweet or diabolical was known for offbeat characters like Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H.,” the hippie tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” and the stoned professor in “Animal House.”
Before transitioning into a long career as a respected character actor, Sutherland epitomized the unpredictable, antiestablishment cinema of the 1970s .
Over the decades, Sutherland showed his range in more buttoned-down — but still eccentric — parts in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” More, recently, he starred in the “Hunger Games” films. He never retired, working regularly up until his death. A memoir, “Made Up, But Still True,” was due out in November.
“I love to work. I passionately love to work,” Sutherland told Charlie Rose in 1998. “I love to feel my hand fit into the glove of some other character. I feel a huge freedom — time stops for me. I’m not as crazy as I used to be, but I’m still a little crazy.”
Born in St. John, New Brunswick, Donald McNichol Sutherland was the son of a salesman and a mathematics teacher. Raised in Nova Scotia, he was a disc jockey with his own radio station at the age of 14.
“When I was 13 or 14, I really thought everything I felt was wrong and dangerous, and that God was going to kill me for it,” Sutherland told The New York Times in 1981. “My father always said, ‘Keep your mouth shut, Donnie, and maybe people will think you have character.’”
Sutherland began as an engineering student at the University of Toronto but switched to English and started acting in school theatrical productions. While studying in Toronto, he met Lois Hardwick, an aspiring actress. They married in 1959, but divorced seven years later.
After graduating in 1956, Sutherland attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts to study acting. Sutherland began appearing in West End plays and British television. After a move to Los Angeles, he continued to bounce around until a series of war films changed his trajectory.
His first American film was “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played Vernon Pinkley, the officer-impersonating psychopathic. 1970 saw the release of both the World War II yarn “Kelly’s Heroes” and “M.A.S.H.,” an acclaimed smash hit that catapulted Sutherland to stardom.
“There is more challenge in character roles,” Sutherland told The Washington Post in 1970. “There’s longevity. A good character actor can show a different face in every film and not bore the public.”
If Sutherland had had his way, Altman would have been fired from “M.A.S.H.” He and co-star Elliott Gould were unhappy with the director’s unorthodox, improvisational style and fought to have him replaced. But the film caught on beyond anyone’s expectations and Sutherland identified personally with its anti-war message. Outspoken against the Vietnam War, Sutherland, actress Jane Fonda and others founded the Free Theater Associates in 1971. Banned by the Army because of their political views, they performed in venues near military bases in Southeast Asia in 1973.
Sutherland career as a leading man peaked in the 1970s, when he starred in films by the era’s top directors — even if they didn’t always do their best work with him. Sutherland, who frequently said he considered himself at the service of a director’s vision, worked with Federico Fellini (1976’s “Fellini’s Casanova”), Bernardo Bertolucci (1976’s “1900”), Claude Chabrol (1978’s “Blood Relatives”) and John Schlesinger (1975’s “The Day of the Locust”).
One of his finest performances came as a detective in Alan Pakula’s “Klute” (1971). It was during filming on “Klute” that he met Fonda, with whom he had a three-year-long relationship that began at the end of his second marriage to actor Shirley Douglas. Having been married in 1966, he and Douglas divorced in 1971.
Sutherland had twins with Douglas in 1966: Rachel and Kiefer, who was named after Warren Kiefer, the writer of Sutherland’s first film, “Castle of the Living Dead.”
In 1974, the actor began living with actress Francine Racette, with whom he remained ever after. They had three children: Roeg, born in 1974 and named after the director Nicolas Roeg (“Don’t Look Now”); Rossif, born in 1978 and named after the director Frederick Rossif; and Angus Redford, born in 1979 and named after Robert Redford.
It was Redford who, to the surprise of some, cast Sutherland as the father in his directorial debut, 1980’s “Ordinary People.” Redford’s drama about a handsome suburban family destroyed by tragedy won four Oscars, including best picture.
Sutherland was overlooked by the academy throughout most of his career. He was never nominated but was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2017. He did, though, win an Emmy in 1995 for the TV film “Citizen X” and was nominated for seven Golden Globes (including for his performances in “M.A.S.H.” and “Ordinary People”), winning two — again for “Citizen X” and for the 2003 TV film “Path to War.”
“Ordinary People” also presaged a shift in Sutherland’s career toward more mature and sometimes less offbeat characters.
His New York stage debut in 1981, though, went terribly. He played Humbert Humbert in Edward Albee’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” and the reviews were merciless; it closed after a dozen performances.
A down period in the ‘80s followed, thanks to failures like the 1981 satire “Gas” and the 1984 comedy “Crackers.”
But Sutherland continued to work steadily. He had a brief but memorable role in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991). He again played a patriarch for Redford in his 1993 movie “Six Degrees of Separation.” He played track coach Bill Bowerman in 1998’s “Without Limits.”
In the last decade, Sutherland increasingly worked in television, most memorably in HBO’s “Path to War,” in which he played President Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. For a career launched by “M.A.S.H.” it was a fitting, if ironic bookend.
Judy Garland’s hometown is raising funds to purchase stolen ‘Wizard of Oz’ ruby slippers
GRAND RAPIDS, Minn. | The Minnesota hometown of Judy Garland, the actress who wore a pair of ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz,” is raising money to purchase the prized footwear after it was stolen from a local museum and then later turned over to an auction company.
Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where the late actress was born in 1922, is fundraising at its annual Judy Garland festival, which kicks off Thursday. The north Minnesota town is soliciting donations to bring the slippers back after an auction company takes them on an international tour before offering them up to prospective buyers in December.
“They could sell for $1 million, they could sell for $10 million. They’re priceless,” Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions executive vice president, told Minnesota Public Radio. “Once they’re gone, all the money in the world can’t buy them back.”
The funds will supplement the $100,000 set aside this year by Minnesota lawmakers to purchase the slippers.
Dallas-based Heritage Auctions received the slippers from Michael Shaw, the memorabilia collector who originally owned the iconic shoes. Shaw had loaned them in 2005 to the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
That summer, someone smashed through a display case and stole the sequins-and-beads-bedazzled slippers. Their whereabouts remained a mystery until the FBI recovered them in 2018.
The man who stole the slippers, Terry Jon Martin, 76, pleaded guilty in October to theft of a major artwork, admitting to using a hammer to smash the glass of the museum’s door and display case in what his attorney said was an attempt to pull off “one last score” after turning away from a life of crime. He was sentenced in January to time served because of his poor health.
In March, a second man, 76-year-old Jerry Hal Saliterman, was charged in connection with the theft.
The ruby slippers were at the heart of “The Wizard of Oz,” a beloved 1939 musical. Garland’s character, Dorothy, danced down the Yellow Brick Road in her shiny shoes, joined by the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.
Garland, who died in 1969, wore several pairs during filming. Only four remain.
Maddalena, with Heritage Auctions, says he sold two other pairs of ruby slippers. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and a group of the actor’s friends purchased one set for the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.
Advance notice could help venues like the Judy Garland Museum secure the slippers that will be auctioned in December, he said. The museum which includes the house where Garland lived, says it has the world’s largest collection of Garland and “Wizard of Oz” memorabilia.
“We wanted to enable places that might not normally be able to raise the funds so quickly to have plenty of time to think about it and work out ways to do that,” Maddalena said. “That’d be an amazing story. I mean, if they ended up back there, that’d be a fantastic story.”
‘Verzuz’ will return after Swizz Beatz, Timbaland lock in new distribution partnership with X
LOS ANGELES | Swizz Beatz and Timbaland are bringing the “Verzuz” series back with a new major platform for viewers to watch musicians face off in a song-against-song battle.
The legendary producers announced Wednesday that Verzuz cemented an exclusive partnership for independent distribution with the social media site X.
Swizz Beatz said he’s looking forward to the new chapter for Verzuz, which became popular during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Not only are we excited to have Verzuz on X, we’re excited to help X build the biggest entertainment company in the world,” he said in statement before he thanked several X executives including owner Elon Musk for believing in their vision. “We can’t wait to get back to work.”
Both companies agreed on a “mutually beneficial alliance” where Swizz Beatz and Timbaland maintain full ownership and creative control, while X receives exclusive distribution rights.
Timbaland said he’s thrilled to expand their viewership through X, which has more than 300 millions monthly active users. Viewers will be able to watch “Verzuz” for free.
“Our goal has always been to bring Verzuz to the world which we can now do bigger than ever,” he said.
“Verzuz” came to life in 2020 after a friendly competition between Swizz Beatz and Timbaland on social media started off to entertain homebound fans during the pandemic. But their platform eventually evolved into a place where some of music’s biggest stars competed against each other in the same fashion.
The series had grown from a novel event to bridging music’s past and present. It began on Instagram Live to having in-person battles in front of an audience.
Some of the most epic battles have included John Legend vs. Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott, Gladys Knight vs. Patti LaBelle, Gucci Mane vs. Jeezy, Brandy vs. Monica and Snoop Dogg vs. DMX. An April battle between Babyface vs. Teddy Riley ended abruptly due to audio issues but was completed another night.
The series was acquired by Triller in 2021, but Swizz Beatz and Timbaland sued the social video platform company for breach of contract. The producers settled with Triller in 2022.
“Our platform stands at the forefront of innovation, and Verzuz defines the essence of an innovative content experience,” said X CEO Linda Yaccarino. “As we continue to work with the most exciting voices to bring premium content to X, there is no better fit than this series.”
—From AP reports
