'Berenstain Bears' co-creator dies
PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Stan Berenstain, who with his wife created the popular children's books about the Berenstain Bears, has died.
He died in Pennsylvania on Saturday, said Audra Boltion, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins Children's Books in New York. He was 82. In more than 200 books, the Berenstain Bears, written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain, helped children for 40 years cope with trips to the dentist, babysitters, eating junk food and cleaning their messy rooms.
The first Berenstain Bears book, The Big Honey Hunt, was published in 1962. The couple developed the series with children's author Theodor Geisel - better known as Dr. Seuss, then head of children's publishing at Random House - with the goal of teaching children to read while entertaining them.
The books show children - and parents - how to deal with a long list of childhood challenges, from finding ways to share and watch less TV to overcoming the "gimmies" and not succumbing to the "in-crowd."
Despite changes in society in the last four decades, little has changed in "Bears Country."
"Kids still tell fibs and they mess up their rooms and they still throw tantrums in the supermarket," Stan Berenstain told The Associated Press in 2002. "Nobody gets shot. No violence. There are problems, but they're the kind of typical family problems everyone goes through."
Stan and Jan Berenstain began drawing together when they met at Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1941.
The two married soon after he got out of Second World War-era army service and began submitting cartoons to magazines. They became contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, McCalls and Collier's.
In their early years of collaboration, the couple wrote the All in the Family cartoon series for McCall's and Good Housekeeping. In 1962, they began an association with Geisel, who suggested that they write for the juvenile market.
Their sons Leo and Michael joined them, and many of the recent books are credited collectively to "The Berenstains."
The characters are the subject of their own public television program, DVDs and a Christmas musical.
In addition to his wife, Berenstain is survived by his two sons. A private memorial service was scheduled for Wednesday.
Stones Roll to Super Bowl
The British have always been better at that whole propriety thing.
Maybe that's why, for the second post-Janet year in a row, the NFL has chosen across-the-Pond entertainers to headline TV's most watched event of the year.
The Rolling Stones have been tapped to headline the Super Bowl XL Halftime Show, it was announced Tuesday by the NFL and ABC, which is broadcasting the big game Feb. 5 at Detroit's Ford Field.
"We are thrilled to perform for millions of fans at one of the most exciting and highly anticipated sporting events of the year," the band says in a statement.
The sentiment was echoed by the Super Bowl brain trust.
"We are excited to welcome one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands in history to the Super Bowl," says Steve Bornstein, the NFL's executive vice president of media, and the man in charge of the event. "As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Super Bowl this season, it is fitting we work with the Rolling Stones whose music has thrilled audiences around the world for years."
The performance will cap the Stones' season-long promotional deal with the NFL and ABC. The band had earlier created multiple segments and intros for the entire 2005-06 season of Monday Night Football.
Sir Mick and his mates will follow in the footsteps of fellow knight Paul McCartney. The ex-Beatle's halftime extravaganza, though watched in part by more than 133 million viewers in the U.S., generated more headlines for its lack of headline- (and breast-) grabbing theatrics than for its entertainment value.
The NFL went with the decidedly uncontroversial McCartney as part of the damage control from the previous year's highly scrutinized, fine-inducing, wardrobe-malfunctioning Janet Jackson show.
News of their Super Bowl duties marked the second big announcement of the day for the Stones, who earlier revealed plans for a European summer tour, kicking off May 27 in Barcelona.
The Rolling Stones: A Bigger Bang tour is set to hit more than 20 countries in 30 days, and like its North American counterpart, several hundred audience seats are expected to be built into the stage for each performance.
The seemingly unstoppable group just released Rarities: 1971-2003, a collection of hard-to-find B-sides, live recordings and remixes jointly put out by Virgin Records and Starbucks' Hear Music. The Stones' also recently made available a limited edition version of their current album, A Bigger Bang, with expanded audio and video content.
Meanwhile, the band continues on the North American leg of its latest road show, which runs through Dec. 3 in Memphis.
'Squid and the Whale' Leads Indie Nominees
LOS ANGELES - The divorce tale "The Squid and the Whale" led contenders Tuesday for the Independent Spirit Awards with six nominations, including best-picture and honors for director Noah Baumbach and actors Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney.
The other best-picture nominees were the cowboy tales "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and the film biographies "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck." Those four movies all had four nominations each for the awards, which honor films whose financing comes at least partly from independent sources outside the Hollywood studio system.
Daniels was nominated for lead actor and Linney for lead actress as parents going through a caustic divorce in "The Squid and the Whale," inspired by writer-director Baumbach's own parents' breakup in the 1980s.
Jesse Eisenberg scored a supporting-actor nomination as Daniels and Linney's son, while Baumbach was nominated for directing and his screenplay.
Other lead-actor nominees were Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in "Capote," a chronicle of the author's years creating the true-crime novel "In Cold Blood"; Terrence Howard as a pimp and drug dealer trying to build a rap career in "Hustle & Flow"; Heath Ledger as a family man carrying on a gay affair with an old ranch buddy in "Brokeback Mountain"; and David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck," an account of the newsman's battle against the communist witch hunt in the 1950s.
Also among lead-actress contenders were Felicity Huffman in a gender-bending role in "Transamerica," a road-trip tale about a man preparing for the final surgical procedures to become a woman; Dina Korzun as a Russian woman married to a rock 'n' roll legend who becomes involved with her husband's son in "Forty Shades of Blue"; S. Epatha Merkerson as proprietor of a boarding house who takes in an outcast teen in "Lackawanna Blues"; and Cyndi Williams in "Room," about a Texas woman who goes in search of a mysterious place she sees in visions.
The nonprofit group Film Independent, which sponsors the awards, will announce winners March 4, the night before the Academy Awards.
Along with Eisenberg, supporting-actor nominees were Firdous Bamji for "The War Within," about a Middle Eastern man involved in a terrorist plot in New York City; Matt Dillon as a bigoted cop in the ensemble drama "Crash"; Barry Pepper as a Border Patrol agent who kills a Mexican immigrant and is forced by the victim's friend to dig up the body for reburial in Mexico in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"; and Jeffrey Wright as a man who sends his neighbor on a quest to find the son he never knew in "Broken Flowers."
The lead actors in the latter two movies — Tommy Lee Jones in "Three Burials" and Bill Murray in "Broken Flowers" — were shut out of the nominations. Jones also directed "Three Burials" but missed out in the directing category, too.
Supporting-actress picks were Amy Adams as a Southern waif captivated by her new sister-in-law from up north in "Junebug"; Maggie Gyllenhaal as a gold-digger pursuing an older man in "Happy Endings"; Allison Janney as a mom trying to hold her crumbling family together in "Our Very Own"; Michelle Williams as a wife stung by revelations her husband is carrying on with another man in "Brokeback Mountain"; and Robin Wright Penn as a married woman thrown into turmoil by a chance encounter with an old lover in "Nine Lives."
Joining Baumbach in the directing category were Gregg Araki for the teen drama "Mysterious Skin"; George Clooney for "Good Night, and Good Luck"; Rodrigo Garcia for "Nine Lives"; and Ang Lee for "Brokeback Mountain.