Would Obama's election make soccer a major league American sport?

Since he closed up Revolution Studios, Joe Roth has kept his hand in the movie business -- he's got projects at Sony, Fox and Disney, where he's producing Tim Burton's upcoming "Alice in Wonderland." But he's spending most of his time with his new love, commuting up to Seattle, where he's the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, the new Major League Soccer expansion team that begins play next spring. A lifelong sports junkie -- he spent years coaching his son's soccer team, has courtside Lakers seats and knows more obscure baseball stats than Bill James -- Roth has discovered that soccer is a great laboratory to test out both Internet community-based marketing and Hollywood-style glitz.

But when we had lunch the other day, Roth also made the tantalizing case that the new popularity of soccer in America has a lot in common with the groundswell of support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Roth is not a neutral political observer. It was Roth, along with David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who organized Obama's first major Hollywood fundraiser early last year, back when Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. Roth sees soccer as appealing to the same fast-growing demographic groups that have been at the center of Obama's campaign.

"If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you'd see an incredible overlap," he told me. "The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama -- white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball."

Before he bought the Sounders, whose minority owners include comedian Drew Carey, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Adrian Hanauer (who owned Seattle's minor league soccer franchise), Roth did a lot of homework into soccer's key areas of demographic appeal. "The way America is changing in its ethnicity -- becoming more Latino and African American -- is going to make soccer a major sport in the same way those ethnic shifts are helping Obama. Soccer's fastest growth is in liberal, better-educated cities, places like Seattle, Portland, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal and Los Angeles. All you have to do is look at the MLS crowds -- they're young, they're noisy and they're not that different from the youthful spirit you'd see at an Obama rally."

If Obama wins on Tuesday, election analysts will give much of the credit not just to the candidate, but to his enormously effective political machine, which has used the Internet to boost fundraising and create a loyal, engaged community of potential voters. Roth has been using similar techniques to launch his soccer club, which has already set an MLS record by pre-selling more than 17,000 season tickets. What has he learned about the impact of the Facebook-style spirit of the Internet that will transform the way soccer fans interact at Sounders games? Keep reading:

'Secret Life of Bees' buries the 'Bradley Effect'

Will white folks go to movie theaters to see black folks in a movie without any big white stars? That was the question some of us in the media were all asking before the release of "The Secret Life of Bees" earlier this month. Most old-fashioned movie marketers had said--not likely, based on past experience and long-held attitudes about white moviegoers. Some marketers cited the "Bradley Effect," the controversial analysis of a Tom Bradley 1982 election defeat in the California gubernatorial election where he'd led in polling before the election, prompting pundits to blame the loss on white voters who didn't tell pollsters how they really intended to vote. 

But guess what? "Bees" has quietly emerged as a minor hit, now projected to pass the $30-million mark at the box office. And as my colleague John Horn reports, it's doing even better in theaters catering to white moviegoers than in traditionally African American theaters. What gives? Here's John's report:

Fox Searchlight was confident that African American moviegoers would turn up for "The Secret Life of Bees," whose cast includes Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys. But the studio and the film's makers worried that white audiences, even after they embraced the bestselling Sue Monk Kidd novel on which the film was based, might stay away when the film premiered on Oct. 17.  After two weeks of release, it's clear that white ticket buyers are not only showing up for "Bees" but also are becoming the film's most loyal audience.

Last weekend, the film grossed more at Pacific's The Grove Stadium 14 than it did at the AMC Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15. In the rest of the country, theaters catering to black moviegoers reported strong opening weekend "Bee" sales but suffered steep declines last weekend. It's consistent with how movies with strong African American appeal--including Tyler Perry's efforts--tend to perform. For example, "Bee's" grosses at Georgia's AMC Southlake Pavilion 24 fell more than 61% last weekend, and sales at Maryland's Regal Bowie Crossing Cinema 14 collapsed almost as badly.

But in theaters that tend to cater to white audiences, support remained much stronger.  "Bee" sales at Oregon's Regal Cinemas Bridgeport Village Stadium 18 were down just 32.1%, and grosses at Northern California's Century 14 Downtown Walnut Creek dropped less than 18%. With total ticket sales of more than $21 million, "The Secret Life of Bees" will never catch "Beverly Hills Chihuahua." But "Bees" is not suffering from any "Bradley Effect" discrimination, and the very thing that scares off potential studio backing--an almost entirely black cast--has shown to be not a liability at all.

Photo of Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys in "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sidney Baldwin / Fox Searchlight

'Milk' and California politics: It's deja vu all over again

It feels like nearly every journalist I've talked to this week has just been to a screening of "Milk," Gus Van Sant's lively biopic about San Francisco's pioneering gay activist Harvey Milk. The chatter about the film -- Is it an Oscar contender? Is it too admiring? Does Sean Penn sound exactly like your Aunt Sophie from the Bronx? -- has been nonstop, which is only pouring more salt on the wounds over at the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece Monday claiming that Focus, the film's distributor, was hiding the movie.

Even more embarrassing, the piece went on to contend that Focus needs to persuade senior citizens to see the movie in order for it to succeed, citing a recent Las Vegas screening where several seniors attempted to leave the movie during a brief gay love scene. Even though the seniors actually stayed -- they were trapped in a middle aisle -- the Reporter concluded that "these are the viewers Focus must woo." If Focus really needs to woo my Aunt Toots to make "Milk" a success, we're all in a heap of trouble, but I suspect that this anecdote tells us more about clueless trade reporting than an actual marketing challenge.

Focus chief James Schamus was so insulted that he fired off a cranky letter to the Reporter, slagging its story, boasting about his own marketing campaign and rattling off the names of all the California politicians who are on the film's benefit committee. He did manage to make one salient point--the "Milk" premiere arrives the week before a crucial election, "one which includes an anti-gay state proposition much like the one Harvey Milk vanquished 30 years ago."

Today the anti-gay measure is Proposition 8. Thirty years ago, it was Proposition 6, a ballot initiative masterminded by California state senator John Briggs, which would ban gays and lesbians - as well as any gay rights supporter -- from teaching in California public schools. To add insult to injury, Briggs publicly called gay-friendly San Francisco a "sexual garbage heap." Milk led the opposition to the incendiary initiative, traveling across the state engaging Briggs in a series of colorful debates. "Milk" re-creates one of their public encounters where Milk quipped: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The proposition lost by more than a million votes. It was the high water mark of Milk's political career.

The parallels between the events of 30 years ago and today are striking. My colleague Rachel Abramowitz has talked to the "Milk" filmmakers about the film's connection with today's events. Here's her report:

Are the world's money woes good for 'The Philanthropist'?

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Joaquin Phoenix: Quitting acting or just acting like he's quitting?

Since there's never been any doubt that Joaquin Phoenix was one of Hollywood's great modern-day eccentrics, it's hard to entirely take seriously the news that he has suddenly vowed to quit acting. After all, the oddball actor is always saying strange things. Working the press line at a fancy premiere for "Walk the Line," Phoenix asked a reporter, "Do I have a large frog in my hair?" When the reporter said no, Joaquin asked a new question: "Is there something crawling out of my scalp?" And how about this red-carpet story: Phoenix wrecked his car and was rescued by none other than ... Werner Herzog!

So I'm guessing the odds are pretty slim that Phoenix will stick to this pledge. Whatever has sidetracked him--playing in a cool band, learning how to cook, figuring out how to spot the moons of Jupiter without a telescope--will soon lose its appeal and he'll be back in action. But his pledge did spark the following idea: Who would make my list of the Top Ten actors we would like to see quit acting? (WARNING -- I'M JUST HAVING FUN HERE):

Click through to read my list, but please do feel free to offer your own suggestions:

Hollywood conservatives: Abandoning McCain? Part 2

Four years ago, in the days leading up to the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election, I staged a debate between a Hollywood liberal and a Hollywood conservative in one of the back rooms of the Sony commissary. As they say at the U.N., they had a frank exchange of views; the charges and countercharges were flying. And even though I'm a liberal, I have to admit that if I were scoring it like a heavyweight fight, I'd have to say--perhaps as a portent of things to come that year--that the conservative won by a knockout.

The conservative was Michael De Luca, a former production chief at New Line who's now an independent producer, having made such recent films as "Ghost Rider" and "The Love Guru." Born in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, De Luca had been a moderate Democrat until the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The muscular Republican response to terrorism won him over, prompting him to pick Bush over Kerry in 2004. He's also been a longtime admirer of John McCain. But no longer.

"I'm inching toward Obama," he told me today. "There isn't anything unique about me. If you look at what Colin Powell has said and Peggy Noonan and Christopher Hitchens, you'll see this is a bigger thing with people who believe in the ideals of the Republican party, but are disgusted by what's happened during the past four years. After the Justice Department scandal, the Katrina [mess] ups, the Plame scandal, all of the catering to the religious right, this is about the narrowing of appeal for the entire Republican party. It feels like a collapse of a conservative movement that goes all the way back to Barry Goldwater. It's a perfect storm that is driving moderates like myself out of the party."

Like producer Eric Gold, the onetime McCain supporter who announced his support for Obama this morning, De Luca isn't starry-eyed about the Democratic challenger. "But after watching the debates, I think Obama has the temperament to sit in the Oval Office, which isn't something you feel as sure about with McCain. I worry that McCain today is more in league with the lunatic fringe of the right than Obama is with the lunatic fringe of the left."

De Luca certainly hasn't been swayed to Obama by any of his Hollywood liberal pals. Au contraire. "All they do is scream about Sarah Palin. I'm sure they'd happily embrace a socialist government. They basically have the Janeane Garofalo point of view, which seems to be that Republicans should be put in jail for being Republicans." He laughs. "I keep telling 'em, 'Shut up! If you want my vote, don't open your mouth. I'm almost there.' "

Having had a number of lively political debates with De Luca over the years, I asked him to write an essay about his anguish over this election. Call it "The Thoughts of a Conflicted Conservative." It's a good read, especially for Hollywood liberals who live in such an insular lefty world that they rarely get to hear a thoughtful conservative point of view. Here's De Luca's take on why he's having trouble sticking with the GOP ticket:

Hollywood conservatives: Abandoning McCain?

As we head into the final week of the presidential campaign, it's becoming apparent that Sarah Palin may have solidified John McCain's appeal with his GOP base, but the VP pick has wreaked havoc with McCain's support -- such as it is -- in Hollywood. I was just on the phone with manager-producer Eric Gold, who handles Jim Carrey and Ellen DeGeneres, who had been a longtime McCain supporter and contributor, going back to McCain's quixotic 2000 presidential campaign. Thing is, Gold just cast his absentee ballot -- for Barack Obama. What makes Gold's conversion especially revealing is that he is hardly an Obama admirer.

"Obama has done nothing," Gold says. "He has no real experience. I mean, being a community organizer and running for president -- who are we kidding? In the debates, he said nothing -- less than nothing. He's just selling temperament." But after McCain picked Palin as his VP, Gold, who calls himself a "disenfranchised Democrat," began to sour on his longtime political hero. (As have other McCain supporters.)

"If McCain had picked Lindsey Graham or Joe Lieberman, I'd probably be voting differently," says Gold. "But to pick someone of such lightweight proportions as Sarah Palin, that was the nail in the coffin. What he did by picking her was say: I'll do anything to win. He didn't care about the moderates or the independents, which unfortunately meant he didn't care about me. The real John McCain would never have done that. He went against his own principles."

Gold says that for years he stood up for McCain in a hostile environment -- liberal Hollywood. "Obviously this is a town that's not very sympathetic to Republicans," he says. "But his pandering, first with Palin, then with the speeches about Obama being a pal of terrorists, it wasn't worthy of McCain, the guy who was a different kind of Republican. All my liberal friends would say: This is the guy you're standing up for? I was embarrassed. I have lots of doubts about Obama, but everything John McCain has done in the past two months has just driven me back to the Democratic Party."

Gold is not the only McCain fan beginning to break ranks with the Republican candidate over his Palin pick and campaign tactics. Later today I'll be posting an essay from another prominent Hollywood McCain supporter -- who voted for George Bush in 2004 -- who's finding it hard to pull the GOP lever this time around. Stay tuned.

RELATED:

Do Republicans run dirtier campaigns than Democrats?

The 2008 Election: Casting the Hollywood movie

Gasp! Right-wing media bashes 'American Carol'!

Photo of John McCain by Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Bill Maher still hates your religion

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Why are the Oscars a comedy-free zone?

When I was at an early screening of the upcoming comedy "Role Models" the other night, I found myself thinking about the Academy Awards, wondering what I always wonder when I see a good new comedy: Why on Earth shouldn't the Oscars recognize good work in comedy the same way they do in drama, animation, cinematography, editing and all the other great movie crafts? Shockingly, comedy is so thoroughly ignored by Oscar voters that it's been more than 30 years (yes, count 'em--thirty) since a true comedy--Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"--won the Oscar for best picture.

To say this is a disgrace would be an understatement. I hate to bore you with a recitation of film history, but movies began as a comic medium. A generation of Americans grew up falling in love with the cinema, largely thanks to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and a host of other inspired silent movie comics. A second generation of moviegoers survived the Great Depression, thanks to the wonderful screwball comedies of the 1930s, from "My Man Godfrey" to "The Awful Truth" to "It Happened One Night" to "Midnight," not to mention the great Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields movies of the period.

The comedies of the '30s remain the true pillar of movie art from that era, immensely watchable even today, as many of the dramas and gangster films of the period have lost much of their thrill and allure. Comedy often tells us more about our time than the most acclaimed drama. In fact, I'd argue that if future cultural historians wanted the best window into the contemporary mores of the early 21st century, they wouldn't find much help from most of our recent Oscar winners ("Crash" aside), which tend to be set in the past, looking back in time for lessons about earlier eras. For the best analysis of people's anxieties, quirks and fears in 2008, you'd start by watching Judd Apatow movies, which have more to say about our time than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," James Bond or even thoughtful art films like "Atonement" or "There Will Be Blood."

Directed by David Wain, who did 2001's "Wet Hot American Summer," "Role Models," which is being released by Universal Pictures Nov. 7, has no weighty message to deliver. It's simply loaded with shrewd comedy writing and slyly funny performances. Penned by a quartet of writers, including Wain, the film's costar Paul Rudd, Ken Marino (who plays a comically clueless stepdad in the film) and original writer Timothy Dowling, it follows the misadventures of two mismatched young guys--Rudd and Seann William Scott--who find themselves forced to become mentors to a pair of unhappy young boys in a Big Brothers-style community service program.

The Apatow influence is inescapable, since the film is populated with various actors, starting with Rudd and costar Elizabeth Banks, who are best known for their work in Apatow films. The project has an intriguing history. It was originally at Fox, which put it in turnaround. Producer Mary Parent, now MGM's  production chief but then a producing partner with Scott Stuber, picked it up, believing it was a timely comic premise. "I loved the concept of these two guys--one of them totally cynical, the other completely living in his imagination--who were forced to learn how to step out of themselves and help other people."

How did "Role Models" survive the loss of its director, its title and still make it to the finish line? And will the motion picture academy ever create a comedy category to honor all the great comedies being made? Keep reading:

Brett Ratner asks out the wrong babe!

I like Brett Ratner, so whenever I see him I give him the same advice: Stop chasing women and gabbing to the press and start making some serious movies. At the risk of sounding like his Jewish mother, all I can say is--but does he listen? No. The 39-year-old filmmaker (best known for helming the "Rush Hour" franchise) is this week's cover boy in the Jewish Journal, which you'd think would happily deliver the kind of fawning celebrity profiles we get in most magazines and newspapers these days, especially since the yeshiva-educated Ratner is what Hollywood calls a Big Jew, giving generously to Jewish causes and serving on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's board of trustees.

It's one thing to knocked around by Defamer, which has dubbed Ratner a "fauxteur," but the Jewish Journal? Oy vey! The profile, written by Danielle Berrin, skewers Brett like a Passover brisket. As if it weren't tacky enough for Brett to brag about his celebrity pals and boast about his book collection ("This is like $100,000 in books right here," he tells Berrin as he gives her a tour of his sprawling Benedict Canyon home), Ratner made the disastrous decision to hit on the journalist, asking her out on a date and generally treating her as if she were an aspiring actress in the thrall of a famous filmmaker.

"I really want to pursue you," he tells her in what Berrin describes as a "soft, almost effeminate" voice. "When are we going? I like you. Are you gonna make me wait? Don't make me wait!" Later that evening, when he screens a film at the house, Berrin writes that Ratner insists she sit next to him, where he proceeds to "drape his arm around me and tries to hold my hand." When the advances increase, Berrin eventually leaves, writing "I'm sensing the interview is over--and if I don't want my shoes winding up in the 'ex-girlfriend' section of his mahogany walk-in closet, it's time to go."

I know Brett well enough to suspect that he was probably trying to impress Berrin more than pick her up, but nonetheless, it was at best a clumsy, if not offensive, performance. Being a journalist, Berrin gets her revenge. Though she allows Ratner to earnestly muse about his filmmaking aspirations and the perils of success, she dissects his every weakness, largely by simply reporting every juicy snippet of dialogue. When she finds herself seated on a couch between Ratner and filmmaker James Toback, a regular visitor to Ratner's home, Berrin writes that Ratner "turns to Toback and talks about me as if I weren't there: 'I saw her today, and I wanted to chase her down the street.' "

Berrin tells him it's impolite to chase after girls. She quotes him as replying, " 'You I would chase 'cause you look like a WASP,' Ratner says, as if that were supposed to flatter me." Ratner and Toback then discuss what Toback calls the "diminishing of Jews in power" in Hollywood, with Toback rattling off the names of the powerful moguls, like Rupert Murdoch, who are not Jewish, with Ratner occasionally chiming in, reminding Toback that "Walt Disney hated Jews." When Berrin notes that Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal is Jewish, Toback scoffs: "I'm talking about the corporate control. Amy Pascal is an employee--[I'm talking about] the people who can fire Amy Pascal."

The one person who comes out looking good is Ratner's mom, who was in town, visiting from New York, when Ratner was interviewed. She seems especially proud of her son's accomplishments, happily pointing out pictures of him with all his famous friends. But when she shows off a photo of Ratner's girlfriend, Ratner corrects her. "We broke up!" he says. "I can't marry her. She's not Jewish."

Ratner has been on the receiving end of a lot of snarky press over the years, but what made this startling was that it ran in the Jewish Journal. I couldn't help but wonder what Brett's reaction was to being painted as a Lothario in L.A.'s leading Jewish newspaper. What did he think?