Nothing to do with movie culture whatsoever but a great L.A. hiking-trail website for locals and anyone visiting…excellent. (Yeah, I’m a hiker…but not enough.)

Lauren Bacall, great actress and screen legend who unfortunately lost her concentration and stumbled while reading copy on the teleprompter last Sunday night…tough moment for a great lady.

“The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,” George Lucas has told N.Y. Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove. “Those movies can’t make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong. I think it’s great that the major Oscar nominations have gone to independent films…small movies. Is that good for the business? No — it’s bad for the business. But moviemaking isn’t about business. It’s about art! In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies. I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.” Good, straight-talking stuff from a guy who is widely seen, with some justification, as being one of the two big-time Hollywood filmmakers (along with Steven Spielberg) who did more to bring down the curtain on the golden filmmaking era of ’70s and banalicize and flatten down movie culture with the spread of CG-FX kid-friendly epics…a guy with hundreds of millions in the bank from all this, and now he’s gotten religion and is preaching the indie gospel (in the form of hard-nosed industry analysis) like a reformed whore.

“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky” — Ojibwe saying written on a small piece of paper, posted on a tile wall and captured three times by the cameras in episode #4 of the new Sopranos season, debuting 3.12 on HBO.