July 13, 2017

Happy Birthday Cameron Crowe!

Thank you Cameron for sharing your amazing stories working with Ben Fong-Torres, your first editor at Rolling Stone for our documentary! The true life story behind "Almost Famous"!

January 5, 2018

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi has a new character named Rose Tico that fans are buzzing about.

The character is the first major Star Wars role played by an Asian American woman.

That woman is 29 year old Kelly Marie Tran, an actress of Vietnamese American descent from San Diego.

After filming wrapped Tran took time off to travel to South Africa where she worked in an endangered wildlife reserve without electricity, internet or running water.

Then she accompanied her family to visit her  father's village where he showed her where he slept as a homeless street kid for seven years. 

“I could have had this life,” Tran told Buzzfeed News, “and now I have this one, and it’s purely because my parents dropped everything and moved to a country where they didn’t know the language [and] didn’t have any opportunities.

I very much have felt this whole time that I’ve been living for multiple generations of life.”

Tran says, alot of “Star Wars” fans who are specifically Asian never had a character they could dress up like, or they would and people would always call them “Asian Rey” or “Asian fill-in-the-blank.”

I get very emotional when I see people who are able to identify with this character. That means a lot to me and I don’t think it will ever get old.

It feels like a big deal because it’s so rare, I wish it wasn’t. 

June 8, 2018

Its been a tough week. First Kate Spade. Then this morning the news of Anthony Bourdain. 

I never knew them personally, but they touched my life and so many of my friends. There was something about our Kate Spade handbags that made us smile, and we watched Anthony Bourdain travel the world sharing his adventures in culture and cuisine. 

Of the many tributes and articles, here is one by writer/filmmaker Kevin Pang, who met Anthony Bourdain several times. (for links to work, click to the main article) Click here to his article "What Anthony Bourdain gave us, and what he left us." 

Another notable article "Preventable Tragedies" written by The New Yorker writer Andrew Soloman discusses the factors that may be contributing to our naton's increased suicide rate.

Soloman writes in his article,"we feel both our own anguish and the world's. There is a dearth of emphathy, even of kindness, in the national conversation, and those deficits turn ordinary neurosis into actionable despair." 

Two important new documentaries on suicide are "The S Word" https://theswordmovie.com and the soon to be released "Do No Harm." "The S Word" is directed by Lisa Klein, and produced by Doug Blush who was also Supervising Editor. Filmmaker Robyn Symon, director of the soon to be relesed documentary Do No Harm DoNoHarmFilm.com about the suicide rate of doctors writes: