This morning let it be noted:
More than half of smartphones activated on Christmas were iPhones.
Internet Explorer may finally land on history's scrapheap if rumors of Microsoft Spartan prove true.
San Francisco grocery delivery startup Instacart raised $220 million.
Ars Technica published a list of what Google is will be working on in 2015.
@russ1mitchell
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times
Texas A&M student assistant coach Mike Richardson was not allowed back on the sideline after halftime during Monday's Liberty Bowl, in which the Aggies defeated West Virginia 45-37.
Richardson was caught on camera appearing to intentionally strike two Mountaineer players on separate plays during the first half, shoving cornerback Daryl Worley in the back of the head and hitting running back Andrew Buie's facemask with his elbow.
Buie had been dragged out of bounds while carrying the ball. Worley's momentum while defending against an incomplete pass brought him onto the Aggies' sideline.
Texas A&M Coach Kevin Sumlin said he learned of the incidents at halftime and acted swiftly.
"That's nothing we condone. There's nothing about that whole situation that's a part of who we are and what we believe in," Sumlin said of Richardson's actions. "As I said, he has already been sent home, and we'll deal with that when we get back."
Worley had some strong words for Richardson via Twitter later in the day: "to the A&M coach, assistant, trainer whatever you wanna call yaself that punched me in the head.. just know ima see you again in life!"
But Worley seemed to have cooled off by Tuesday morning, when he tweeted out this message: "I just pray that this incident will raise more NCAA sideline rules to prevent an incident like this from happening again, but to categorize me or Mr. Richardson as 'thugs' is uncalled for. It was both of us acting in the heat of the moment and I have no hard feelings against him."
Richardson signed with the Aggies as a linebacker in 2012. He suffered a career-ending neck injury in November of that year and has been a student assistant coach for the team ever since.
Twitter: @chewkiii
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesBoys basketball
Chaminade tournament
Chaminade 75, Curtis 56
Valencia 60, Menlo 39
Birmingham 62, Marshall 52
Santa Clara 39, Kennedy 35
Hart tournament
Hart 89, Camarillo 65
Righetti 60, Saugus 38
Glendale 74, South Bakersfield 58
Grant 88, Golden Valley 79
Katella tournament
Servite 58, Irvine 42
Bolsa Grande 64, Kennedy 55
Fullerton 61, Katella 38
La Salle tournament
Championship semifinals
Bishop Montgomery 74, Campbell Hall 56
De La Salle 52, Village Christian 40
Consolation
West Ranch 63, San Marcos 45
Price 66, Calabasas 61
Lakeside 55, Highland 41
Chatsworth 88, Venice 79
El Camino Real 55, Palisades 50
LB Millikan 80, Trinity 66
Malibu 90, Bernstein 82
Bell-Jeff 62, St. Bernard 43
Las Vegas tournament
Cathedral 76, Basic 49
Valley 80, Cathedral 68
Lakewood tournament
El Segundo 54, Fremont 51
MaxPreps tournament
Sierra Canyon 72, Etiwanda 53
Pebblebrook 82, Santa Ana Mater Dei 79
North 56, Olympia 51
Beverly Hills 49, Cathedral Catholic 48
Urspring 49, Gardena Serra 41
Viewpoint 66, Mission Viejo 46
Damien 60. American Fork 40
Sonora 64, Oak Park 54
Brentwood 61, Chaparral 38
Rancho Cucamonga 67, Silverado 62
Harvard-Westlake 74, Diamond Bar 47
Ponderosa 62, Edison 59
Orange tournament
Orange Lutheran 59, Foothill 45
La Mirada 61, Anaheim Canyon 56
Yorba Linda 75, Orange 22
Amador Valley 62, San Juan Hills 35
Tesoro 57, LB Jordan 56
Arroyo Grande 69, Esperanza 65
San Pedro tournament
Narbonne 52, Gardena 47
Rancho Dominguez 64, San Pedro 43
Santa Barbara tournament
Thousand Oaks 54, Glendora 53
Santa Barbara 82, Newbury Park 48
Lompoc 73, Flintridge Prep 48
Torrey Pines tournament
Fairfax 69, Corona Centennial 62
Redondo 58, St. Patrick 54
Others
Crespi 49, Lynwood 42
Sonora 64, Oak Park 54
Georgia Faith Baptist 57, Mayfair 49
Knight 64, Murrieta Valley 57
Bishops 45, St. Genevieve 40
Great Oak 79, Arizona Highland 73
Torrey Pines 45, Westchester 36
Mira Costa 67, Mission Hills 54
Aliso Niguel 54, Spanish Springs 23
Lawndale 65, Windward 62
Bellevue 80, Cantwell-Sacred Heart 43
Loyola 86, Santa Monica 67
Washington Franklin 52, Temecula Valley 48
Horizon 71, Laguna Beach 62
Tustin tournament
Burroughs 60, LB Cabrillo 58
Ventura tournament
Westlake 73, Ventura 58
Twitter:@LATSondheimer
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesBoys basketball
Chaminade tournament
Chaminade 75, Curtis 56
Valencia 60, Menlo 39
Birmingham 62, Marshall 52
Santa Clara 39, Kennedy 35
Hart tournament
Hart 89, Camarillo 65
Righetti 60, Saugus 38
Glendale 74, South Bakersfield 58
Grant 88, Golden Valley 79
Katella tournament
Servite 58, Irvine 42
Bolsa Grande 64, Kennedy 55
Fullerton 61, Katella 38
La Salle tournament
Championship semifinals
Bishop Montgomery 74, Campbell Hall 56
De La Salle 52, Village Christian 40
Consolation
West Ranch 63, San Marcos 45
Price 66, Calabasas 61
Lakeside 55, Highland 41
Chatsworth 88, Venice 79
El Camino Real 55, Palisades 50
LB Millikan 80, Trinity 66
Malibu 90, Bernstein 82
Bell-Jeff 62, St. Bernard 43
Las Vegas tournament
Cathedral 76, Basic 49
Valley 80, Cathedral 68
Lakewood tournament
El Segundo 54, Fremont 51
MaxPreps tournament
Sierra Canyon 72, Etiwanda 53
Pebblebrook 82, Santa Ana Mater Dei 79
North 56, Olympia 51
Beverly Hills 49, Cathedral Catholic 48
Urspring 49, Gardena Serra 41
Viewpoint 66, Mission Viejo 46
Damien 60. American Fork 40
Sonora 64, Oak Park 54
Brentwood 61, Chaparral 38
Rancho Cucamonga 67, Silverado 62
Harvard-Westlake 74, Diamond Bar 47
Ponderosa 62, Edison 59
Orange tournament
Orange Lutheran 59, Foothill 45
La Mirada 61, Anaheim Canyon 56
Yorba Linda 75, Orange 22
Amador Valley 62, San Juan Hills 35
Tesoro 57, LB Jordan 56
Arroyo Grande 69, Esperanza 65
San Pedro tournament
Narbonne 52, Gardena 47
Rancho Dominguez 64, San Pedro 43
Santa Barbara tournament
Thousand Oaks 54, Glendora 53
Santa Barbara 82, Newbury Park 48
Lompoc 73, Flintridge Prep 48
Torrey Pines tournament
Fairfax 69, Corona Centennial 62
Redondo 58, St. Patrick 54
Others
Crespi 49, Lynwood 42
Sonora 64, Oak Park 54
Georgia Faith Baptist 57, Mayfair 49
Knight 64, Murrieta Valley 57
Bishops 45, St. Genevieve 40
Great Oak 79, Arizona Highland 73
Torrey Pines 45, Westchester 36
Mira Costa 67, Mission Hills 54
Aliso Niguel 54, Spanish Springs 23
Lawndale 65, Windward 62
Bellevue 80, Cantwell-Sacred Heart 43
Loyola 86, Santa Monica 67
Washington Franklin 52, Temecula Valley 48
Horizon 71, Laguna Beach 62
Tustin tournament
Burroughs 60, LB Cabrillo 58
Ventura tournament
Westlake 73, Ventura 58
Twitter:@LATSondheimer
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesBoys basketball
Chaminade tournament
Chaminade 75, Curtis 56
Valencia 60, Menlo 39
Birmingham 62, Marshall 52
Santa Clara 39, Kennedy 35
Hart tournament
Hart 89, Camarillo 65
Righetti 60, Saugus 38
Glendale 74, South Bakersfield 58
Grant 88, Golden Valley 79
Katella tournament
Servite 58, Irvine 42
Bolsa Grande 64, Kennedy 55
Fullerton 61, Katella 38
La Salle tournament
Championship semifinals
Bishop Montgomery 74, Campbell Hall 56
De La Salle 52, Village Christian 40
Consolation
West Ranch 63, San Marcos 45
Price 66, Calabasas 61
Lakeside 55, Highland 41
Chatsworth 88, Venice 79
El Camino Real 55, Palisades 50
LB Millikan 80, Trinity 66
Malibu 90, Bernstein 82
Bell-Jeff 62, St. Bernard 43
Las Vegas tournament
Cathedral 76, Basic 49
Valley 80, Cathedral 68
Lakewood tournament
El Segundo 54, Fremont 51
MaxPreps tournament
Sierra Canyon 72, Etiwanda 53
Pebblebrook 82, Santa Ana Mater Dei 79
North 56, Olympia 51
Beverly Hills 49, Cathedral Catholic 48
Urspring 49, Gardena Serra 41
Viewpoint 66, Mission Viejo 46
Damien 60. American Fork 40
Sonora 64, Oak Park 54
Brentwood 61, Chaparral 38
Rancho Cucamonga 67, Silverado 62
Harvard-Westlake 74, Diamond Bar 47
Ponderosa 62, Edison 59
Orange tournament
Orange Lutheran 59, Foothill 45
La Mirada 61, Anaheim Canyon 56
Yorba Linda 75, Orange 22
Amador Valley 62, San Juan Hills 35
Tesoro 57, LB Jordan 56
Arroyo Grande 69, Esperanza 65
San Pedro tournament
Narbonne 52, Gardena 47
Rancho Dominguez 64, San Pedro 43
Santa Barbara tournament
Thousand Oaks 54, Glendora 53
Santa Barbara 82, Newbury Park 48
Lompoc 73, Flintridge Prep 48
Torrey Pines tournament
Fairfax 69, Corona Centennial 62
Redondo 58, St. Patrick 54
Others
Crespi 49, Lynwood 42
Sonora 64, Oak Park 54
Georgia Faith Baptist 57, Mayfair 49
Knight 64, Murrieta Valley 57
Bishops 45, St. Genevieve 40
Great Oak 79, Arizona Highland 73
Torrey Pines 45, Westchester 36
Mira Costa 67, Mission Hills 54
Aliso Niguel 54, Spanish Springs 23
Lawndale 65, Windward 62
Bellevue 80, Cantwell-Sacred Heart 43
Loyola 86, Santa Monica 67
Washington Franklin 52, Temecula Valley 48
Horizon 71, Laguna Beach 62
Tustin tournament
Burroughs 60, LB Cabrillo 58
Ventura tournament
Westlake 73, Ventura 58
Twitter:@LATSondheimer
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesWant to take a long road trip halfway across the country to see where the atomic bomb was born? It doesn't sound like the makings for a typical summer getaway, but the newly created Manhattan Project National Historic Park may change all that.
The park, designated as part of a bigger defense measure signed by President Obama this month, is to include three far-apart U.S. government lab sites in Hanford, Wash.; Los Alamos, N.M.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
To visit in one trip, you would wind up driving about 2,600 miles from south to north -- one way.
"Each of the Manhattan Project sites and structures add an important piece to the multifaceted story of thousands of people working across the country at incredible speed to develop and detonate an atomic bomb in secrecy," says an online story by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The park is also to include the B Reactor at Hanford, the site of the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor. The reactor was one of the sites that produced plutonium for the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, an action that hastened the end of World War II.
The reactor, which also is a National Historic Landmark, currently is the subject of free tours that last about four hours. (Dates for 2015 haven't yet been set.) Its website says more than 40,000 people have visited since 2009.
The concept for the national park has been on the drawing board for more than a decade and is projected to take about 12 more months to design.
Officials said the National Park Service and the Department of Energy, which still operates the government labs, will figure out which buildings and features best tell the story of the Manhattan Project and then will co-manage the park once it's more well-defined.
One concern: How to provide access to visitors at high-security sites that are still in use.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesWant to take a long road trip halfway across the country to see where the atomic bomb was born? It doesn't sound like the makings for a typical summer getaway, but the newly created Manhattan Project National Historic Park may change all that.
The park, designated as part of a bigger defense measure signed by President Obama this month, is to include three far-apart U.S. government lab sites in Hanford, Wash.; Los Alamos, N.M.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
To visit in one trip, you would wind up driving about 2,600 miles from south to north -- one way.
"Each of the Manhattan Project sites and structures add an important piece to the multifaceted story of thousands of people working across the country at incredible speed to develop and detonate an atomic bomb in secrecy," says an online story by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The park is also to include the B Reactor at Hanford, the site of the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor. The reactor was one of the sites that produced plutonium for the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, an action that hastened the end of World War II.
The reactor, which also is a National Historic Landmark, currently is the subject of free tours that last about four hours. (Dates for 2015 haven't yet been set.) Its website says more than 40,000 people have visited since 2009.
The concept for the national park has been on the drawing board for more than a decade and is projected to take about 12 more months to design.
Officials said the National Park Service and the Department of Energy, which still operates the government labs, will figure out which buildings and features best tell the story of the Manhattan Project and then will co-manage the park once it's more well-defined.
One concern: How to provide access to visitors at high-security sites that are still in use.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesRex is an ex.
The New York Jets fired Coach Rex Ryan on Monday, a day after the conclusion of their worst season since 2007.
And he wasn't the only one to go. The club fired General Manager John Idzik, too, ending his two-year stint.
Ryan's six-year career as Jets coach started with great promise, as he led the team to consecutive appearances in the AFC championship game. But the team failed to make the playoffs in each of the past four seasons.
"Both Rex and John made significant contributions to the team, and they have my appreciation and gratitude for their efforts and commitment," Jets owner Woody Johnson said in a statement. "Over the years, Rex brought the Jets a bold confidence and a couple of great postseason runs, which all of us will remember."
The Jets went 12-20 during the Idzik era, capped by this season's 4-12 finish.
--
Why he got fired: Ryan was the only coach in franchise history to take the Jets to consecutive conference championship games, and for years he was largely adored by the fan base. But under him, the team couldn't shake the reputation it was a dysfunctional organization. Nor could the Jets escape the long shadow of New England in the AFC East. Ryan's teams finished 4-9 against the Patriots.
Fair or not: Jets owner Woody Johnson gave Ryan plenty of chances, including a one-year contract extension after last season's team finished 8-8 with then-rookie quarterback Geno Smith. Instead of managing expectations, Ryan typically thumped his chest, announcing, "I'm so confident that I don't care who knows it."
Replacement candidates: Ryan was a defensive specialist, so the Jets might go with an offensive mind. There are plenty of offensive coordinators to choose from, among them Denver's Adam Gase and Seattle's Darrell Bevell, who have never been head coaches, or former head coaches such as Cincinnati's Hue Jackson or Baltimore's Gary Kubiak.
What the future holds: With or without Ryan, the Jets are still looking for their answer at quarterback, although Smith played well in Sunday's 37-24 victory at Miami. As long as Tom Brady is in New England, it's going to be very tough for any coach to topple the Patriots. Ryan, meanwhile, should not have a problem landing a head coaching job in another NFL city. At worst, he would make an excellent defensive coordinator somewhere.
--
Atlanta Falcons fire Coach Mike Smith after seven seasons
Mike Smith was the winningest coach in Atlanta Falcons history.
Ultimately, though, that didn't save his job.
Smith was fired Monday after a 6-10 season and an utter collapse in a do-or-die finale against Carolina, a 34-3 home loss for the NFC South title.
Asked after the game whether Smith and his staff deserved to be retained, the coach was realistic.
"That's not my choice," he said. "This is a business about winning football games and that's how you're judged. I understand that and I'll leave it at that."
Smith was 66-46 in seven seasons. He took the reins after the tumultuous 2007 season during which quarterback Michael Vick was sent to federal prison for his role in a dog-fighting operation, and Coach Bobby Petrino quit 13 games into the season.
"Smitty's contributions to our club, team and city over the last seven years are numerous," Falcons owner Arthur Blank said in a written statement. "His accomplishments on the field made him the most successful coach in the 49-year history of the Falcons, and we are grateful for the foundation he has laid for us for the future."
--
Why he got fired: Smith's career in Atlanta got off to a great start, especially considering he was hired on the heels of the Michael Vick scandal and Bobby Petrino disaster. The franchise had never been to the playoffs in consecutive seasons until Smith arrived. His teams reached the postseason in the 2008, and 2010-2012 seasons. The bottom dropped out the past two seasons, though, as the Falcons finished 4-12 and 6-10. When his team did make the playoffs, Smith failed to make the most of it. Under him, the Falcons were 1-4 in postseason games.
Fair or not: This was a tough decision for Falcons owner Arthur Blank, whose affection for Smith is obvious. (Even in a formal press release announcing the firing, Blank refers to him as "Smitty.") In the abysmal NFC South, the Falcons were in it until the end, losing an all-or-nothing game at home Sunday against Carolina. Injuries played a big role in Atlanta's demise, particularly along the offensive line, so this doesn't all fall on Smith's shoulders.
Replacement candidates: The Falcons have retained the search firm Korn Ferry to identify coaching candidates, so they might look to go outside the box in that department. This could be a spot for Rex Ryan. Another defensive mind who will get strong consideration in these coaching vacancies is Arizona's Todd Bowles, whose Cardinals defense overcame a slew of injuries to high-profile players and didn't miss a beatdown. If the Falcons go offense, there's a deep bench of offensive coordinators around the league who will be in the mix.
What the future holds: The future is pretty bright for the Falcons, who have a top-notch quarterback in Matt Ryan. Heading into Sunday's disaster, he had one of the hottest hands in the league. The NFC South is just the second division in NFL history to be won by a team with a losing record, so there's opportunity for all four teams to make inroads next season. This will be a coveted job.
--
Chicago Bears fire Coach Marc Trestman, General Manager Phil Emery
With the Chicago Bears locked in a downward spiral during his two seasons as coach, Marc Trestman was fired Monday.
Trestman, who inherited a 10-6 team from Lovie Smith in 2012, led the Bears to finishes of 8-8 and 5-11 before he was shown the door.
The man who hired him was let go too. The Bears also dismissed General Manager Phil Emery after two seasons.
The Bears, who haven't made the playoffs since 2010, failed to beat a winning team this season and yielded 50 points or more in consecutive defeats, suffering a 51-23 loss to New England and a 55-14 loss to Green Bay.
--
Why he got fired: Since the end of the George Halas era, the Bears had never fired a coach after fewer than three seasons. That changed with Trestman, who was shown the door after two. This season was especially humiliating, with the club failing to beat a winning team, and a string of humbling defeats -- including losses of 38-17 and 55-14 to the bitter rival Green Bay Packers. Trestman, whose specialty is working with quarterbacks, failed to turn Jay Cutler into a winner, and the franchise signed the quarterback to a seven-year, $127-million deal in January.
Fair or not: The Bears had to do something dramatic to begin to right the ship, and that meant giving Trestman and General Manager Phil Emery the boot. In Trestman's two seasons, the Bears were 2-11 against teams with winning records. And the quarterback situation was an absolute circus. Trestman had clearly lost the locker room, and the whole mess had become an embarrassment. With arrows pointing up in the other three NFC North cities, the Bears needed to make a change.
Replacement candidates: If the Bears plan to stick with an offensive specialist, they could make a run at Indianapolis offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton, who was with Andrew Luck at Stanford then followed him to the Colts. If they go defense -- the historic roots of that organization -- they could take a hard look at Seattle defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, who oversees one of the most smothering units in football.
What the future holds: Much of the Bears' immediate future hinges on what they do with Cutler, who initially improved under Trestman but recently has been in a tailspin. Because their housecleaning was complete -- coach and general manager -- they will have a fresh start on becoming competitive again in a division where Green Bay and Detroit have their quarterback answers, and Minnesota is bullish on Teddy Bridgewater.
Follow Sam Farmer on Twitter @LATimesFarmer
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times7:24 a.m.: This post was updated with news of Atlanta Falcons Coach Mike Smith's firing.
7:36 a.m.: This post was updated with news the Chicago Bears fired Marc Trestman and Phil Emery.
This post was originally published at 7:18 a.m.
Rex is an ex.
The New York Jets fired Coach Rex Ryan on Monday, a day after the conclusion of their worst season since 2007.
And he wasn't the only one to go. The club fired General Manager John Idzik, too, ending his two-year stint.
Ryan's six-year career as Jets coach started with great promise, as he led the team to consecutive appearances in the AFC championship game. But the team failed to make the playoffs in each of the past four seasons.
"Both Rex and John made significant contributions to the team, and they have my appreciation and gratitude for their efforts and commitment," Jets owner Woody Johnson said in a statement. "Over the years, Rex brought the Jets a bold confidence and a couple of great postseason runs, which all of us will remember."
The Jets went 12-20 during the Idzik era, capped by this season's 4-12 finish.
--
Why he got fired: Ryan was the only coach in franchise history to take the Jets to consecutive conference championship games, and for years he was largely adored by the fan base. But under him, the team couldn't shake the reputation it was a dysfunctional organization. Nor could the Jets escape the long shadow of New England in the AFC East. Ryan's teams finished 4-9 against the Patriots.
Fair or not: Jets owner Woody Johnson gave Ryan plenty of chances, including a one-year contract extension after last season's team finished 8-8 with then-rookie quarterback Geno Smith. Instead of managing expectations, Ryan typically thumped his chest, announcing, "I'm so confident that I don't care who knows it."
Replacement candidates: Ryan was a defensive specialist, so the Jets might go with an offensive mind. There are plenty of offensive coordinators to choose from, among them Denver's Adam Gase and Seattle's Darrell Bevell, who have never been head coaches, or former head coaches such as Cincinnati's Hue Jackson or Baltimore's Gary Kubiak.
What the future holds: With or without Ryan, the Jets are still looking for their answer at quarterback, although Smith played well in Sunday's 37-24 victory at Miami. As long as Tom Brady is in New England, it's going to be very tough for any coach to topple the Patriots. Ryan, meanwhile, should not have a problem landing a head coaching job in another NFL city. At worst, he would make an excellent defensive coordinator somewhere.
--
Atlanta Falcons fire Coach Mike Smith after seven seasons
Mike Smith was the winningest coach in Atlanta Falcons history.
Ultimately, though, that didn't save his job.
Smith was fired Monday after a 6-10 season and an utter collapse in a do-or-die finale against Carolina, a 34-3 home loss for the NFC South title.
Asked after the game whether Smith and his staff deserved to be retained, the coach was realistic.
"That's not my choice," he said. "This is a business about winning football games and that's how you're judged. I understand that and I'll leave it at that."
Smith was 66-46 in seven seasons. He took the reins after the tumultuous 2007 season during which quarterback Michael Vick was sent to federal prison for his role in a dog-fighting operation, and Coach Bobby Petrino quit 13 games into the season.
"Smitty's contributions to our club, team and city over the last seven years are numerous," Falcons owner Arthur Blank said in a written statement. "His accomplishments on the field made him the most successful coach in the 49-year history of the Falcons, and we are grateful for the foundation he has laid for us for the future."
--
Why he got fired: Smith's career in Atlanta got off to a great start, especially considering he was hired on the heels of the Michael Vick scandal and Bobby Petrino disaster. The franchise had never been to the playoffs in consecutive seasons until Smith arrived. His teams reached the postseason in the 2008, and 2010-2012 seasons. The bottom dropped out the past two seasons, though, as the Falcons finished 4-12 and 6-10. When his team did make the playoffs, Smith failed to make the most of it. Under him, the Falcons were 1-4 in postseason games.
Fair or not: This was a tough decision for Falcons owner Arthur Blank, whose affection for Smith is obvious. (Even in a formal press release announcing the firing, Blank refers to him as "Smitty.") In the abysmal NFC South, the Falcons were in it until the end, losing an all-or-nothing game at home Sunday against Carolina. Injuries played a big role in Atlanta's demise, particularly along the offensive line, so this doesn't all fall on Smith's shoulders.
Replacement candidates: The Falcons have retained the search firm Korn Ferry to identify coaching candidates, so they might look to go outside the box in that department. This could be a spot for Rex Ryan. Another defensive mind who will get strong consideration in these coaching vacancies is Arizona's Todd Bowles, whose Cardinals defense overcame a slew of injuries to high-profile players and didn't miss a beatdown. If the Falcons go offense, there's a deep bench of offensive coordinators around the league who will be in the mix.
What the future holds: The future is pretty bright for the Falcons, who have a top-notch quarterback in Matt Ryan. Heading into Sunday's disaster, he had one of the hottest hands in the league. The NFC South is just the second division in NFL history to be won by a team with a losing record, so there's opportunity for all four teams to make inroads next season. This will be a coveted job.
--
Chicago Bears fire Coach Marc Trestman, General Manager Phil Emery
With the Chicago Bears locked in a downward spiral during his two seasons as coach, Marc Trestman was fired Monday.
Trestman, who inherited a 10-6 team from Lovie Smith in 2012, led the Bears to finishes of 8-8 and 5-11 before he was shown the door.
The man who hired him was let go too. The Bears also dismissed General Manager Phil Emery after two seasons.
The Bears, who haven't made the playoffs since 2010, failed to beat a winning team this season and yielded 50 points or more in consecutive defeats, suffering a 51-23 loss to New England and a 55-14 loss to Green Bay.
--
Why he got fired: Since the end of the George Halas era, the Bears had never fired a coach after fewer than three seasons. That changed with Trestman, who was shown the door after two. This season was especially humiliating, with the club failing to beat a winning team, and a string of humbling defeats -- including losses of 38-17 and 55-14 to the bitter rival Green Bay Packers. Trestman, whose specialty is working with quarterbacks, failed to turn Jay Cutler into a winner, and the franchise signed the quarterback to a seven-year, $127-million deal in January.
Fair or not: The Bears had to do something dramatic to begin to right the ship, and that meant giving Trestman and General Manager Phil Emery the boot. In Trestman's two seasons, the Bears were 2-11 against teams with winning records. And the quarterback situation was an absolute circus. Trestman had clearly lost the locker room, and the whole mess had become an embarrassment. With arrows pointing up in the other three NFC North cities, the Bears needed to make a change.
Replacement candidates: If the Bears plan to stick with an offensive specialist, they could make a run at Indianapolis offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton, who was with Andrew Luck at Stanford then followed him to the Colts. If they go defense -- the historic roots of that organization -- they could take a hard look at Seattle defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, who oversees one of the most smothering units in football.
What the future holds: Much of the Bears' immediate future hinges on what they do with Cutler, who initially improved under Trestman but recently has been in a tailspin. Because their housecleaning was complete -- coach and general manager -- they will have a fresh start on becoming competitive again in a division where Green Bay and Detroit have their quarterback answers, and Minnesota is bullish on Teddy Bridgewater.
Follow Sam Farmer on Twitter @LATimesFarmer
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times7:24 a.m.: This post was updated with news of Atlanta Falcons Coach Mike Smith's firing.
7:36 a.m.: This post was updated with news the Chicago Bears fired Marc Trestman and Phil Emery.
This post was originally published at 7:18 a.m.
What exactly is the appropriate punishment for someone who commits a low-level, nonviolent crime? Should a conviction for minor drug possession, shoplifting or writing a bad check result in a lifetime of stigma and denied opportunities, or do people with criminal records deserve a second chance?
In November, California voters took a clear stand on these issues when they passed Proposition 47 and reclassified eight nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors for people without prior serious convictions. Proposition 47 allows for the resentencing of many who have been convicted of such crimes, reducing the amount of time they serve, lowering state and county incarceration costs and chipping away at decades of overly punitive criminal-justice policies. But this common sense reform alone won't necessarily change the lifelong punishment experienced by many people with a criminal record.
Today, a criminal record — even for a low-level misdemeanor or infraction — acts like an indelible scarlet letter. Until relatively recently, employers, landlords and others rarely requested criminal records, which could be accessed only by sifting through physical files in a local courthouse. With the post-9/11 push for more background checks, the advent of online databases and the steep increase in the number of people with convictions, criminal records have become a serious barrier to employment, housing, education and other forms of civic participation for millions of Californians.
New fair-chance hiring laws help reduce discrimination against people with criminal records by removing conviction history questions from initial job applications and postponing background checks until later in the process. But California has an additional remedy. Laws long on the books allow judges to dismiss old convictions, a recognition that people who have successfully completed their sentences should be free to rejoin society without disabling consequences. The dismissal remedy doesn't erase the record completely, and it is not available in all cases, but it can restore rights and reduce barriers for many people.
These dismissal laws, however, are obscure and complex. The process can require a lot of paperwork and a court appearance, or even multiple appearances in more than one county. As a result, far too many Californians remain saddled with convictions that are otherwise eligible for dismissal.
The East Bay Community Law Center, a teaching law office affiliated with UC Berkeley School of Law, tries to address these problems. Since establishing its Clean Slate Clinic a decade ago, the center has helped several thousand people obtain record-clearing remedies with the aim of reducing the collateral consequences of convictions and lowering the risk of recidivism.
Under the supervision of attorneys, law students interview the clinic's clients, draft their declarations, prepare them for court hearings and, if necessary, later represent them in civil and administrative proceedings to redress unlawful discrimination in employment, housing and professional licensing. The process can be long and emotional. People with criminal records are grappling with painful episodes from the past and hopeful aspirations for the future. But the results can be equally rewarding.
While Berkeley law students have been serving clean-slate clients, University of California researchers have been studying the results. We already know that clean-slate interventions increase a person's ability to get a job and provide him or her with a profound sense of relief: No more skeletons in the closet.
But the benefits go far beyond that: In surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews, people who've had their records cleared express a sense of accomplishment (increased confidence and self-esteem), a sense of hope (a focus on the future) and a sense of agency (control over their lives). Significantly, the clean-slate process itself — not just the outcome — appears to create a kind of status enhancement ritual, or rite of passage, helping people move from their old life into a new one.
Proposition 47 takes an important step toward addressing the consequences of mass incarceration in California. Tens of thousands of people will benefit from it. The Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that the state and counties will each save hundreds of millions of dollars annually as a result of lower incarceration rates.
But rebuilding lives and communities will not flow automatically from the new law. As we take additional measures to reverse the most damaging effects of our tough-on-crime policies, we will need to invest time and resources in clean-slate programs that help people with criminal records go through the challenging process of re-integrating into our families, communities and society.
Keramet Reiter is an assistant professor in the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology and the School of Law. Jeffrey Selbin is a clinical professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and faculty director of the East Bay Community Law Center. Eliza Hersh is director of the East Bay Community Law Center's Clean Slate Clinic.
Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesA Wi-Fi war has broken out among the nation's biggest hotel chains.
Marriott International, the Maryland-based hospitality giant with more than 4,000 hotels worldwide, threw down the gauntlet last month by announcing that it was offering free wireless Internet to guests who join its loyalty rewards program. The offer begins in January.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., the Connecticut-based company with more than 1,200 properties, matched Marriott's offer earlier this month. Under Starwood's deal, guests must be members of the loyalty program and book a room through the Starwood website or the SBG app to get the free Wi-Fi. The program starts in February.
Now Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp. is entering the fray, offering free standard Wi-Fi for all guests – even those who don't join its loyalty rewards program.
"Travelers shouldn't have to remember which brands or locations offer it free or the strings attached to get it," said Kristine Rose, vice president of brands for Hyatt, which operates nearly 600 hotels worldwide. The free service begins in February.
There is one catch: If Hyatt guests want to upgrade to a premium Wi-Fi service, they must pay a fee, which has yet to be announced. Elite members of Hyatt's loyalty rewards program get the faster Wi-Fi free.
To read more about travel, tourism and the airline industry, follow me on Twitter at @hugomartin.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesThe Lakers (9-21) look to avoid a three-game losing streak on Sunday night, hosting the Phoenix Suns (17-14) at Staples Center.
The Suns have already beaten the Lakers twice this season, a particularly difficult matchup with guards Eric Bledsoe, Goran Dragic and Isaiah Thomas taking turns running their offense.
Kobe Bryant might return from a three-game absence, resting his 36-year-old, aching body. The Lakers lost two of three without him.
The Lakers are still down Xavier Henry (Achilles'), Ryan Kelly (hamstring), Steve Nash (back) and Julius Randle (leg). The Kings will be without Andrew Bogut (knee).
Key matchup
The Suns blew out the Lakers early in the season (119-99), getting 23 points off the bench from Thomas, who made nine of 11 shots.
Dragic (18 points) and Bledsoe (16) were also problems.
Soon after, the Lakers gave the Suns a more competitive effort, falling 112-106. Thomas had 22 points and nine assists. Dragic managed 16 points while Bledsoe scored six.
Thomas has been the biggest trouble-maker so far, giving the Lakers fits with his quickness.
If he continues to carve up the Lakers' defense on Sunday, it could be another long night for the home team.
The Lakers need Ronnie Price and Jeremy Lin to keep up with Thomas. Jordan Clarkson could be an option as well -- the rookie forward has gotten some playing time with Bryant out of the lineup. While he's still raw, Clarkson's length and athleticism could come in handy against Thomas.
X-factor
In both games, a Phoenix shooter had a big night. The first was Marcus Morris, with 21 points on five-for-nine shooting from behind the three-point arc.
In the second battle, Gerald Green was hot, making five of his eight three-pointers to finish with 22 points.
The Suns are hard enough to defend, but if they're also converting perimeter shots, the Lakers could be in trouble.
Wesley Johnson, Nick Young and Wayne Ellington will be charged with slowing the shooting guards and small forwards. Add Bryant to that list if he plays.
In two games, Bryant has averaged 35 points against Phoenix.
Outlook
The Suns recovered from a recent slump to win five in a row. Their particular brand of basketball, with quick guards, shooters and athletes make Phoenix a particularly difficult matchup for the Lakers.
Twitter: @EricPincus
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesThe Lakers (9-21) look to avoid a three-game losing streak on Sunday night, hosting the Phoenix Suns (17-14) at Staples Center.
The Suns have already beaten the Lakers twice this season, a particularly difficult matchup with guards Eric Bledsoe, Goran Dragic and Isaiah Thomas taking turns running their offense.
Kobe Bryant might return from a three-game absence, resting his 36-year-old, aching body. The Lakers lost two of three without him.
The Lakers are still down Xavier Henry (Achilles'), Ryan Kelly (hamstring), Steve Nash (back) and Julius Randle (leg). The Kings will be without Andrew Bogut (knee).
Key matchup
The Suns blew out the Lakers early in the season (119-99), getting 23 points off the bench from Thomas, who made nine of 11 shots.
Dragic (18 points) and Bledsoe (16) were also problems.
Soon after, the Lakers gave the Suns a more competitive effort, falling 112-106. Thomas had 22 points and nine assists. Dragic managed 16 points while Bledsoe scored six.
Thomas has been the biggest trouble-maker so far, giving the Lakers fits with his quickness.
If he continues to carve up the Lakers' defense on Sunday, it could be another long night for the home team.
The Lakers need Ronnie Price and Jeremy Lin to keep up with Thomas. Jordan Clarkson could be an option as well -- the rookie forward has gotten some playing time with Bryant out of the lineup. While he's still raw, Clarkson's length and athleticism could come in handy against Thomas.
X-factor
In both games, a Phoenix shooter had a big night. The first was Marcus Morris, with 21 points on five-for-nine shooting from behind the three-point arc.
In the second battle, Gerald Green was hot, making five of his eight three-pointers to finish with 22 points.
The Suns are hard enough to defend, but if they're also converting perimeter shots, the Lakers could be in trouble.
Wesley Johnson, Nick Young and Wayne Ellington will be charged with slowing the shooting guards and small forwards. Add Bryant to that list if he plays.
In two games, Bryant has averaged 35 points against Phoenix.
Outlook
The Suns recovered from a recent slump to win five in a row. Their particular brand of basketball, with quick guards, shooters and athletes make Phoenix a particularly difficult matchup for the Lakers.
Twitter: @EricPincus
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesCould this app be the Tinder of travel?
Name: Tripnary
Available: iOS
Cost: Free
What it does: Lets you discover new places and create travel bucket lists based on photos from those who have gone before you. Then Skyscanner compares flight prices to your destinations. Your list is organized into a map ready for you to use.
What's hot: I was surprised by the number of destinations and attractions the app introduced me to that I hadn't heard of or considered important. When you're looking at images, it's fast and easy to "heart" the ones you like. The app keeps track for you and groups them by destination. Next, click over to the "Flights" section and see how the airfares to your destinations stack up against one another. I thought I wanted to go to New York or Hawaii, but flights to Austin, Texas, were less expensive. I'd "hearted" so many things I wanted to do and see there that I might consider a trip soon. The more pins you collect, the better your map to the city is.
What's not: I struggled with the app's "Plan" feature. The search bar wasn't great for a city I didn't know, so here's the best way I found to hunt for points of interest. Use the funnel tool in the upper right, then type in, for example, "coffee house" in "Austin." You'll get a list of suggestions with their addresses. Click on those to get a picture you can "heart," and it will be automatically added to your list organized by city in the funnel feature.
travel@latimes.com
The Ducks improvised Saturday night. Through no practice. Through a fluke loss.
On any other night, they likely would've fumed at the circumstances of a loss to a Pacific Division rival, but two days after Christmas, a 2-1 shootout loss to the Arizona Coyotes was met with something of a shoulder shrug.
Here's what we learned:
Watch that stick blade
Ducks goalie Frederik Andersen was a stalwart in net Saturday night, stopping 28 shots through overtime, and then denying the Coyotes in the shootout with two left leg pad saves while clutching another shot to his gut.
On the Coyotes' fourth try, forward Shane Doan let rip a shot with such fury the black blade cover slipped off, grabbing Andersen's attention more so than the smaller puck, which skidded to the net to the goalie's left.
That decided the outcome.
"Apparently, I have been using [the stick] in a lot ... [of] regular games," Doan said afterward. "It's one of those things that you hope it can get some bounces going your way. I was trying to go five-hole, and shoot it a little bit quicker before I get it too close because, obviously, he's a big goalie and he covers up a lot of space."
Andersen had a great post-game line, "Too bad you don't get a save for saving a blade," he said, adding he wasn't crushed leaving town with the point of an overtime loss.
"It looked like he was going to shoot that way, and then the puck … before I realized, it was too late," he said.
Practice matters
The Ducks muddled through one of their most lethargic periods of the season while getting blanked in the second.
The visitors had minimal scoring chances, were fortunate Andersen had the opportunity to get a good, long look at 11 of the Coyotes' first 18 shots being sent in by defensemen, and showed the effects of four full days without being on the ice.
"The pace was indicative of not skating," Ducks Coach Bruce Boudreau said. "The sharpness, passing wasn't quite on. Fatigue set in sooner rather than later, in regard to shift length."
The Ducks also lost 22 of their first 35 faceoffs.
The injury spell is not over yet
Boudreau said forward Kyle Palmieri (shoulder) will be sidelined one-to-two more weeks after being injured last week in Toronto.
Forward Tim Jackman, who was subjected to a cheap hit to the head Monday against San Jose, will require further evaluation before he can return, Boudreau said.
Meanwhile, right wing Corey Perry could return as soon as Sunday against Vancouver after his Dec. 5 knee sprain.
Call these sparks of life
Forward Rene Bourque, who'd been goal-less in seven games on 12 shots, contributed a first-period goal.
Forward Dany Heatley, who remains goal-less this season, played more than 11 minutes and was elected by Boudreau as the first Duck in the shootout. He missed, but it was a vote of confidence that the veteran has been lacking.
And defenseman Francois Beauchemin played his first game since late November, when he suffered a broken finger, taking three shots with two hits and a blocked shot in 22:45 of ice time.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesWhen you see galloping metal mustangs jumping over California Highway 79 in Temecula, stop the car and turn around. The horses are a startling roadside site that will lead you to the man who made them.
I pulled off the two-lane winding highway in late November while driving from Temecula to the Anza Borrego Desert. Earlier I had seen a stagecoach pulled by horses and a T. Rex with signs inviting all to come visit Ricardo Breceda's studio.
Enter the Vail Lake Resort RV Park (they give you an hour of free parking if you tell them you're visiting Breceda's studio) and follow the signs to see the metal menagerie the artist keeps here. In a quiet oak grove below the highway sits a warehouse surrounded by animals, real and imagined.
Marlins and dinosaurs share space with scorpions and bears; figures are mostly Old West types of cowboys, and Native Americans that seem to fit in the woodland setting. But you'll also find a polo player or a buxom mermaid.
Inside are small sculptures of motorcycles, radiantly polished suns and musicians with ant bodies.
Breceda, originally from Durango, Mexico, says he's a self-taught artist. His first work was a 20-foot-tall T. Rex, and now horses are his favorite subjects. They have curly metal manes that seem to bristle in the wind.
One of his more notable sculptures stands in Borrego Springs: a 350-foot serpent whose head and body pop out of the desert sand.
Everything here is for sale with small sculptures starting at $100, and big dinosaurs $700 and up. Mostly it's fun to see the sculptures, snap selfies and talk with the artist who says folks may visit whether or not he's there.
Info: Ricardo Breceda, (951) 236-5896; studio at Vail Lake Resort, 38000 Highway 79, Temecula.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesRetailers are girding themselves for the second busiest shopping day of the year, but the day after Christmas is also known for something less beneficial to the bottom line: hordes of returns.
Americans are expected to throng stores to give back unwanted holiday gifts, hoping to exchange the duds for cash, gift cards, store credit or other products.
The crowds will be intensified by deep, inventory-clearing discounts meant to lure shoppers and encourage returners to stay in stores. Only the Saturday before Christmas will have had more foot traffic, according to retail analytics firm ShopperTrak.
The hectic atmosphere, however, will likely encourage criminals to try their luck, according to experts.
Return fraud is expected to cost retailers $3.6 billion this holiday season, up from $3.4 billion last year and $2.9 billion in 2012, according to the National Retail Federation.
Over the full year, the practice costs companies nearly $11 billion.
This winter, one in every 20 returns is dubious, according to the trade group – a hefty figure considering that the average person returned nearly four gifts last year.
Several strategies are common. Perpetrators purchase items at a discount online or in a store and then return it at a competing retailer's brick-and-mortar store for full value.
More retailers are allowing consumers to return merchandise in person that was bought on the Internet, according to the National Retail Federation. But more – 18.2% this year compared with 15.5% last year – are also saying that they have endured return fraud with e-receipts.
Some 3.5% of online purchases returned to stores are fraudulent, according to the group.
Other fraud perpetrators recruit store associates, using their employee discounts to score a deal on the product before returning it for the original price. More than eight in 10 companies said they have been victims of employee collusion.
Some use counterfeit receipts – a practice reported by a quarter of retailers. Others buy electronics, take out the valuable components inside, refill the hollowed-out technology with weights and then return it in the original packaging.
The switch is an offshoot of a common tactic known as wardrobing, in which customers return clothing that they have already worn. This year, nearly three-quarters of retailers said they fell victim to the strategy, up from 62% last year.
For the most part, retail experts don't suspect average consumers. Instead, they finger organized retail crime groups, which tend to steal merchandise en masse and then resell it.
Such groups cost retailers nearly $30 billion a year, according to the trade group. Criminals are most active in Los Angeles, followed by Miami and then Chicago.
The National Retail Federation surveyed loss-prevention executives at 60 retailers – nearly 93% of respondents said their companies experienced returns of stolen merchandise in the past year.
"These knuckleheads know when to come in – they practice this and they're good at it," said Bob Moraca, vice president of loss prevention for the National Retail Federation.
Twitter: @tiffhsulatimes
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesPatrick Nickell's new sculptures at Rosamund Felsen Gallery are pet-sized playthings: jungle gyms for the imagination that fuse Dr. Seuss goofiness with arts-and-crafts scrappiness to deliver loads more whimsy than their dimensions suggest.
In "Fly Your Flag," the L.A. artist has packed a front gallery with 11 lumpy sculptures, each made of plaster, chicken wire and burlap. Most have been painted a single color, like orange, yellow, pink, brown or blue. Two remain unpainted, their raw plaster and bare burlap fully visible.
Nickell has placed some on small tables, hung some from the walls and left the rest on the floor, where they seem to be scrambling, stumbling and galumphing their way across the concrete.
None looks like an actual animal. But most call to mind real creatures, transforming the cloying cuteness of stuffed animals — piglets, billy goats, flying squirrels and unicorns — into a kind of spunky unloveliness that goes hand-in-glove with their underdog appeal.
Many seem to be misfits, twice over. First, they stand out from the crowd because they are oddballs, sore thumbs, eccentrics. Second, their limbs, torsos and heads, or wings, tails and horns, do not form unified wholes so much as they seem to pull each abstract figure in different directions.
Nickell's savvy sculptures are 3-D versions of what we mean when we say we are of two minds about something: not just undecided but physically tugged in two directions, usually for good reason.
In an adjoining gallery, six other sculptures are generally bigger — the size of adults, not pets or children. All are abstract. The only colors are plaster white, burlap brown and chicken-wire silver. They evoke human bodies indirectly, even discreetly, by first referring to clothing, furniture, appliances and architecture — and only then suggesting flesh.
Discretion may be the better part of valor, but in Nickell's hands it's also a big part of art.
Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, (310) 828-8488, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesWhen you see galloping metal mustangs jumping over California Highway 79 in Temecula, stop the car and turn around. The horses are a startling roadside site that will lead you to the man who made them.
I pulled off the two-lane winding highway in late November while driving from Temecula to the Anza Borrego Desert. Earlier I had seen a stagecoach pulled by horses and a T. Rex with signs inviting all to come visit Ricardo Breceda's studio.
Enter the Vail Lake Resort RV Park (they give you an hour of free parking if you tell them you're visiting Breceda's studio) and follow the signs to see the metal menagerie the artist keeps here. In a quiet oak grove below the highway sits a warehouse surrounded by animals, real and imagined.
Marlins and dinosaurs share space with scorpions and bears; figures are mostly Old West types of cowboys, and Native Americans that seem to fit in the woodland setting. But you'll also find a polo player or a buxom mermaid.
Inside are small sculptures of motorcycles, radiantly polished suns and musicians with ant bodies.
Breceda, originally from Durango, Mexico, says he's a self-taught artist. His first work was a 20-foot-tall T. Rex, and now horses are his favorite subjects. They have curly metal manes that seem to bristle in the wind.
One of his more notable sculptures stands in Borrego Springs: a 350-foot serpent whose head and body pop out of the desert sand.
Everything here is for sale with small sculptures starting at $100, and big dinosaurs $700 and up. Mostly it's fun to see the sculptures, snap selfies and talk with the artist who says folks may visit whether or not he's there.
Info: Ricardo Breceda, (951) 236-5896; studio at Vail Lake Resort, 38000 Highway 79, Temecula.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesRetailers are girding themselves for the second busiest shopping day of the year, but the day after Christmas is also known for something less beneficial to the bottom line: hordes of returns.
Americans are expected to throng stores to give back unwanted holiday gifts, hoping to exchange the duds for cash, gift cards, store credit or other products.
The crowds will be intensified by deep, inventory-clearing discounts meant to lure shoppers and encourage returners to stay in stores. Only the Saturday before Christmas will have had more foot traffic, according to retail analytics firm ShopperTrak.
The hectic atmosphere, however, will likely encourage criminals to try their luck, according to experts.
Return fraud is expected to cost retailers $3.6 billion this holiday season, up from $3.4 billion last year and $2.9 billion in 2012, according to the National Retail Federation.
Over the full year, the practice costs companies nearly $11 billion.
This winter, one in every 20 returns is dubious, according to the trade group – a hefty figure considering that the average person returned nearly four gifts last year.
Several strategies are common. Perpetrators purchase items at a discount online or in a store and then return it at a competing retailer's brick-and-mortar store for full value.
More retailers are allowing consumers to return merchandise in person that was bought on the Internet, according to the National Retail Federation. But more – 18.2% this year compared with 15.5% last year – are also saying that they have endured return fraud with e-receipts.
Some 3.5% of online purchases returned to stores are fraudulent, according to the group.
Other fraud perpetrators recruit store associates, using their employee discounts to score a deal on the product before returning it for the original price. More than eight in 10 companies said they have been victims of employee collusion.
Some use counterfeit receipts – a practice reported by a quarter of retailers. Others buy electronics, take out the valuable components inside, refill the hollowed-out technology with weights and then return it in the original packaging.
The switch is an offshoot of a common tactic known as wardrobing, in which customers return clothing that they have already worn. This year, nearly three-quarters of retailers said they fell victim to the strategy, up from 62% last year.
For the most part, retail experts don't suspect average consumers. Instead, they finger organized retail crime groups, which tend to steal merchandise en masse and then resell it.
Such groups cost retailers nearly $30 billion a year, according to the trade group. Criminals are most active in Los Angeles, followed by Miami and then Chicago.
The National Retail Federation surveyed loss-prevention executives at 60 retailers – nearly 93% of respondents said their companies experienced returns of stolen merchandise in the past year.
"These knuckleheads know when to come in – they practice this and they're good at it," said Bob Moraca, vice president of loss prevention for the National Retail Federation.
Twitter: @tiffhsulatimes
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesJason Hall had just turned in his first draft of a script about Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. Bradley Cooper, who was producing the film and had agreed to star, was at a screening of "Silver Linings Playbook" for a group of veterans in Washington.
Kyle himself, still acclimating to life in Midlothian, Texas, after his fourth and final Iraq war tour, had just texted Hall an "LOL" in response to a raunchy joke.
It was Feb. 2, 2013, and their project together, "American Sniper," was lurching along in development at Warner Bros. Cooper and Hall had pitched it as a western with Kyle pitted against an equally gifted enemy sniper in the sandstorms of Iraq. But Kyle's story took a bizarre and devastating turn when he was killed that day at a gun range near his home, allegedly by a veteran he was trying to help.
"The gears just went off for a second," Cooper said, recalling the moment he learned about Kyle's death. "Everything just kind of stopped. Your brain takes in the information, but your body hasn't quite caught up. Chris and I, we're the same age, the same height, the same shoe size. You're just reminded anything's possible in life."
Less than two years later, "American Sniper" arrived in theaters Christmas Day. Instead of a straightforward tale about an elite warrior, it became, by necessity, a complex story about the heavy burdens a veteran carries home.
Clint Eastwood, perhaps Hollywood's greatest chronicler of male stoicism and its side effects, directs the film, which Hall adapted loosely from Kyle's bestselling autobiography written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. Hall's script deliberately borrows from Eastwood's "Unforgiven": The 1992 western's line, "It's a hell of a thing to kill a man" becomes, in a hunting scene in "American Sniper," "It's a hell of a thing to stop a beating heart."
The story toggles between the intensity of the battlefield, where Kyle earned the nickname "The Legend" for his 160 confirmed kills, and the bittersweetness of the home front, where his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), emerges as the audience's proxy, both charmed by and worried for her husband as she feels him emotionally disengaging with each tour.
Even before Kyle's death, a contemporary war movie was not going to be an easy sell, particularly for Hall, whose two previous screenplays, the 2013 thriller "Paranoia" and 2009 sex comedy "Spread," cover very different thematic terrain. Hall had met Kyle through hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and established a relationship with the marksman on a hunting trip.
He wasn't having any luck with his pitch to studios until he reached out to Cooper, a friend who had established a box office track record as the Wolf Pack's chief charmer in the "Hangover" movies and was about to collect his first of two Oscar nominations for a vulnerable role as a bipolar man in "Silver Linings Playbook." That performance and another as permed FBI agent Richie DiMaso in "American Hustle" proved that he could handle neurotic, East Coast oddballs, but a drawling, Texas-born Navy SEAL was another kind of man entirely.
Still, Hall approached Cooper on a hunch, knowing he loved the 1978 Vietnam War movie "The Deer Hunter."
"The first question Bradley asked me about Chris was, 'Did [the war] mess him up?'" Hall said.
'Tremendous empathy'
Earlier this month, two days after he had opened on Broadway in a profoundly different but just as physically demanding role, "The Elephant Man," Cooper arrived at an interview in a pair of Merrell hiking boots of the type Kyle had worn in Iraq. He said that, since he'd started talking about the film to journalists, he had begun dreaming that he was Kyle, walking around his house in Midlothian.
"I always feel like I carry the character with me," Cooper said. "I just found tremendous empathy for him; I admired the sacrifice he made, his strength."
After Kyle's death gave his story a third act that was sadder than fiction, Cooper and Hall put the project on hold.
"Nobody wants to make an Iraq war movie," Hall said. "Nobody. ... But we didn't question so much whether the movie would go on as whether it should go on. For us to just continue like nothing had happened, it felt gross. It was heavy. It just didn't seem fair that someone could go through all that he did and come home and be murdered in his own backyard."
Cooper declined to define the politics of the film, which takes place between 2004 and 2008 but still feels current as ISIS has begun the process of undoing the democratic gains that U.S. troops painfully wrought.
"The whole reason we wanted to tell the story was to be as specific as possible about this guy and not make a comment about anything else," Cooper said. "That's for people to do who are watching the movie. I'm not saying this is a pro-war movie or an antiwar movie or a war movie, even. It's a character study about a soldier having to go from family life to battle and back."
With Taya's blessing and participation, Cooper and Hall resumed the project in the months after Kyle's death, but with a determination to get deeper under the layers of his character. Taya and Hall talked daily for hours, and she shared details of her husband's gentler side that had been omitted from the memoir, like how she knew Kyle was feeling better when he started ironing a crease in his jeans and wearing a flashy belt buckle.
"If you want to know who a man is, don't ask the man, ask his wife," Hall said. "Taya said, 'If you're still gonna do this, do it right. Cause this is how my kids are gonna know their father,' which sucker-punched me."
Steven Spielberg came aboard briefly to direct in the months after Kyle's death, before dropping out over budget concerns, but his interested stoked the studio's. Greg Silverman, Warner's president of creative and worldwide development, suggested Eastwood, who was making "Jersey Boys" for them, his latest in a nearly 40-year relationship with the studio.
"I had done war stories before, but this was more of a cross between his romantic life and his exploits in combat," Eastwood said in an email interview. "'American Sniper' is set in a war that is still fresh in the minds of the public and opinions are still divided. But regardless of how you feel about the war, we should appreciate the people who serve in the military and the families that support them. That's another thing that attracted me to the film."
Prepping to be Kyle
With Eastwood aboard, Cooper, who was about to earn his Oscar nomination for "American Hustle," began to prepare in earnest. He worked out while listening to Kyle's adrenalized playlist of Linkin Park and Staind songs, ate 6,000 calories a day to gain the 35 pounds of muscle that separated them and enlisted a dialect coach to perfect a particular West Texas accent. He watched videos of Kyle, adopted his habit of breathing loudly through his nose and learned a ridiculous amount of information about guns.
"At that time [before Kyle died] I felt I wasn't right for the role. Look at me, I'm from Philadelphia, I weigh 185 pounds. He was a huge [guy] from Texas. I thought maybe Chris Pratt. But in order to get WB to buy, I had to agree to star. I loved the story, though."
"I was fearful," Cooper added. "There's nothing worse than seeing an actor pretend he's from Texas, doing an accent. You're like, oh, shut the ... up. The hope is, two minutes into the movie you forget it's me."
This spring Eastwood shot the film in Rabat, Morocco, and in Southern California, where the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita stood in for urban Iraq and the Imperial Valley town of El Centro provided the setting for a climactic battle scene.
Cooper, Eastwood and Hall discussed multiple endings before deciding against actually showing Kyle's killing for reasons of both storytelling and taste.
"I considered ending the film at the shooting range," Eastwood said. "But that would have shifted the focus to his death and made it a different movie. We were telling the story of Chris Kyle's life and wanted to keep the focus there."
Instead, the movie ends with moving real-life footage from Kyle's funeral, some of which Hall recorded on his iPhone, as thousands of Texans waved at the procession from roadsides and overpasses.
Most critics agree that "American Sniper's" strengths lie in the naturalness of Cooper's performance and the immediacy of the battle scenes, but they tend to disagree on its political stripes. The Times' Kenneth Turan praised the film for showing that "heroism and being on the right side do not solve all problems for men in combat." LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson dismissed the movie as "unexamined jingoism." And the Hollywood Reporter's Tom McCarthy said, "The politics of the war are completely off the table here."
Hall said the movie's politics are deliberately as impenetrable as a dust storm.
"We went into Afghanistan and I got it," Hall said. "We went into Iraq and I was, like, I don't totally get it. But as soon as we had boots on the ground, I supported those guys. There are humans fighting this war, and the effect on them is singular and personal."
Cooper said he will be screening the film for veterans groups and hopes that, as with audiences who saw themselves in his bipolar character in "Silver Linings Playbook," soldiers take some solace in his portrayal of Kyle.
"I just want to show the movie to vets and hope they don't feel so alone," Cooper said. "Maybe people will relate to and empathize with Chris' story and maybe people like me and you, the next time we see a soldier in an airport we'll think for a minute about where they're coming from and what they've been through and have more understanding."
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesThe very first issue of the Los Angeles Times — then the Los Angeles Daily Times — came off the presses three weeks before Christmas, 1881. It was a different world then. And a much different Los Angeles.
Nationally, Chester Arthur was president — the third U.S. president that year. Rutherford B. Hayes had turned over the office to James Garfield in March; Garfield was shot on July 2 by Charles Guiteau, who was upset that Garfield had turned him down for a job. Garfield survived until an aneurysm — which developed in part from one of the bullets lodged in his abdomen — killed him on Sept. 19. So Arthur, elevated from his vice presidency, had just three months on the job by the time Christmas rolled around. (Guiteau's trial in Washington continued over the holidays; he was hanged the next June.)
It was the Wild West then. The gunfight at the OK Corral occurred in October in a place — Arizona — that wasn't even a state yet. In fact, California was something of a statehood island. Oregon to the north was a state, but Nevada and Arizona were territories. To the south, Mexico was an independent nation under the heavy hand of Porfirio Diaz.
Los Angeles — then a village, really — had a population of 11,200. The University of Southern California was founded the year before, and the outlying areas around the city center were in the midst of transformation from ranchland to fruit orchards (mostly oranges to be shipped to eastern markets in refrigerated cars on the new intercontintental railroad) to real estate development.
But that building boom would come later. On this day in 1881, Los Angeles was just a village with ambitions, and one that celebrated Christmas. The Times, of course, was in favor of the holiday:
"Christmas is probably the best observed of all the holidays in Christendom. This year it will get a double dose of observing as the 25th comes on Sunday, and Monday is legally set aside for the festivities of the day. Christmas presents many attractions to the old and the young. It is hallowed in every memory. To the young it is an occasion of gift receiving, candy cramming and colic. To the old it recalls childhood's days, and many a pain from over-indulgence in the sweets and pleasures of its festivities. But Christmas is here. We welcome it as joyfully as the veriest infant, and we extend as hearty a 'Merry Christmas' this morning, as the noisest [sic] lad who wakes up his parents with the glad shout, four hours earlier than the usual time."
There was Christmas week news to report that day, as well:
"The week, as usual before the holidays, has been very dull except for the shop-keepers. They have done an immense trade, and the gifts of Santa Claus throughout the State must be numerous. Even crime has been less flourishing than usual, as though the enterprising burglar and the accomplished murderer had resolved to take a holiday and retire form active business during the Christmas times. The Santiago Gardens, which gained such notoriety from the brutal Italian murder there last week, were again the scene of an outrage a few nights ago, an old woman being knocked down and cruelly beaten by some unknown miscreant. She lay for four or five hours unconscious, and her recovery is dubious."
In other news, "Mrs. Scoville," a witness in the Guiteau trial, "has left Washington," "Freight rates from Chicago east are down to 12 1/2 cents," and "A flattering revival in business is reported in Sonora, Mexico."
So there you have it — a glimpse, with apologies to Charles Dickens, of Christmas past.
Follow Scott Martelle on Twitter @smartelle.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesJason Hall had just turned in his first draft of a script about Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. Bradley Cooper, who was producing the film and had agreed to star, was at a screening of "Silver Linings Playbook" for a group of veterans in Washington.
Kyle himself, still acclimating to life in Midlothian, Texas, after his fourth and final Iraq war tour, had just texted Hall an "LOL" in response to a raunchy joke.
It was Feb. 2, 2013, and their project together, "American Sniper," was lurching along in development at Warner Bros. Cooper and Hall had pitched it as a western with Kyle pitted against an equally gifted enemy sniper in the sandstorms of Iraq. But Kyle's story took a bizarre and devastating turn when he was killed that day at a gun range near his home, allegedly by a veteran he was trying to help.
"The gears just went off for a second," Cooper said, recalling the moment he learned about Kyle's death. "Everything just kind of stopped. Your brain takes in the information, but your body hasn't quite caught up. Chris and I, we're the same age, the same height, the same shoe size. You're just reminded anything's possible in life."
Less than two years later, "American Sniper" arrived in theaters Christmas Day. Instead of a straightforward tale about an elite warrior, it became, by necessity, a complex story about the heavy burdens a veteran carries home.
Clint Eastwood, perhaps Hollywood's greatest chronicler of male stoicism and its side effects, directs the film, which Hall adapted loosely from Kyle's bestselling autobiography written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. Hall's script deliberately borrows from Eastwood's "Unforgiven": The 1992 western's line, "It's a hell of a thing to kill a man" becomes, in a hunting scene in "American Sniper," "It's a hell of a thing to stop a beating heart."
The story toggles between the intensity of the battlefield, where Kyle earned the nickname "The Legend" for his 160 confirmed kills, and the bittersweetness of the home front, where his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), emerges as the audience's proxy, both charmed by and worried for her husband as she feels him emotionally disengaging with each tour.
Even before Kyle's death, a contemporary war movie was not going to be an easy sell, particularly for Hall, whose two previous screenplays, the 2013 thriller "Paranoia" and 2009 sex comedy "Spread," cover very different thematic terrain. Hall had met Kyle through hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and established a relationship with the marksman on a hunting trip.
He wasn't having any luck with his pitch to studios until he reached out to Cooper, a friend who had established a box office track record as the Wolf Pack's chief charmer in the "Hangover" movies and was about to collect his first of two Oscar nominations for a vulnerable role as a bipolar man in "Silver Linings Playbook." That performance and another as permed FBI agent Richie DiMaso in "American Hustle" proved that he could handle neurotic, East Coast oddballs, but a drawling, Texas-born Navy SEAL was another kind of man entirely.
Still, Hall approached Cooper on a hunch, knowing he loved the 1978 Vietnam War movie "The Deer Hunter."
"The first question Bradley asked me about Chris was, 'Did [the war] mess him up?'" Hall said.
'Tremendous empathy'
Earlier this month, two days after he had opened on Broadway in a profoundly different but just as physically demanding role, "The Elephant Man," Cooper arrived at an interview in a pair of Merrell hiking boots of the type Kyle had worn in Iraq. He said that, since he'd started talking about the film to journalists, he had begun dreaming that he was Kyle, walking around his house in Midlothian.
"I always feel like I carry the character with me," Cooper said. "I just found tremendous empathy for him; I admired the sacrifice he made, his strength."
After Kyle's death gave his story a third act that was sadder than fiction, Cooper and Hall put the project on hold.
"Nobody wants to make an Iraq war movie," Hall said. "Nobody. ... But we didn't question so much whether the movie would go on as whether it should go on. For us to just continue like nothing had happened, it felt gross. It was heavy. It just didn't seem fair that someone could go through all that he did and come home and be murdered in his own backyard."
Cooper declined to define the politics of the film, which takes place between 2004 and 2008 but still feels current as ISIS has begun the process of undoing the democratic gains that U.S. troops painfully wrought.
"The whole reason we wanted to tell the story was to be as specific as possible about this guy and not make a comment about anything else," Cooper said. "That's for people to do who are watching the movie. I'm not saying this is a pro-war movie or an antiwar movie or a war movie, even. It's a character study about a soldier having to go from family life to battle and back."
With Taya's blessing and participation, Cooper and Hall resumed the project in the months after Kyle's death, but with a determination to get deeper under the layers of his character. Taya and Hall talked daily for hours, and she shared details of her husband's gentler side that had been omitted from the memoir, like how she knew Kyle was feeling better when he started ironing a crease in his jeans and wearing a flashy belt buckle.
"If you want to know who a man is, don't ask the man, ask his wife," Hall said. "Taya said, 'If you're still gonna do this, do it right. Cause this is how my kids are gonna know their father,' which sucker-punched me."
Steven Spielberg came aboard briefly to direct in the months after Kyle's death, before dropping out over budget concerns, but his interested stoked the studio's. Greg Silverman, Warner's president of creative and worldwide development, suggested Eastwood, who was making "Jersey Boys" for them, his latest in a nearly 40-year relationship with the studio.
"I had done war stories before, but this was more of a cross between his romantic life and his exploits in combat," Eastwood said in an email interview. "'American Sniper' is set in a war that is still fresh in the minds of the public and opinions are still divided. But regardless of how you feel about the war, we should appreciate the people who serve in the military and the families that support them. That's another thing that attracted me to the film."
Prepping to be Kyle
With Eastwood aboard, Cooper, who was about to earn his Oscar nomination for "American Hustle," began to prepare in earnest. He worked out while listening to Kyle's adrenalized playlist of Linkin Park and Staind songs, ate 6,000 calories a day to gain the 35 pounds of muscle that separated them and enlisted a dialect coach to perfect a particular West Texas accent. He watched videos of Kyle, adopted his habit of breathing loudly through his nose and learned a ridiculous amount of information about guns.
"At that time [before Kyle died] I felt I wasn't right for the role. Look at me, I'm from Philadelphia, I weigh 185 pounds. He was a huge [guy] from Texas. I thought maybe Chris Pratt. But in order to get WB to buy, I had to agree to star. I loved the story, though."
"I was fearful," Cooper added. "There's nothing worse than seeing an actor pretend he's from Texas, doing an accent. You're like, oh, shut the ... up. The hope is, two minutes into the movie you forget it's me."
This spring Eastwood shot the film in Rabat, Morocco, and in Southern California, where the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita stood in for urban Iraq and the Imperial Valley town of El Centro provided the setting for a climactic battle scene.
Cooper, Eastwood and Hall discussed multiple endings before deciding against actually showing Kyle's killing for reasons of both storytelling and taste.
"I considered ending the film at the shooting range," Eastwood said. "But that would have shifted the focus to his death and made it a different movie. We were telling the story of Chris Kyle's life and wanted to keep the focus there."
Instead, the movie ends with moving real-life footage from Kyle's funeral, some of which Hall recorded on his iPhone, as thousands of Texans waved at the procession from roadsides and overpasses.
Most critics agree that "American Sniper's" strengths lie in the naturalness of Cooper's performance and the immediacy of the battle scenes, but they tend to disagree on its political stripes. The Times' Kenneth Turan praised the film for showing that "heroism and being on the right side do not solve all problems for men in combat." LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson dismissed the movie as "unexamined jingoism." And the Hollywood Reporter's Tom McCarthy said, "The politics of the war are completely off the table here."
Hall said the movie's politics are deliberately as impenetrable as a dust storm.
"We went into Afghanistan and I got it," Hall said. "We went into Iraq and I was, like, I don't totally get it. But as soon as we had boots on the ground, I supported those guys. There are humans fighting this war, and the effect on them is singular and personal."
Cooper said he will be screening the film for veterans groups and hopes that, as with audiences who saw themselves in his bipolar character in "Silver Linings Playbook," soldiers take some solace in his portrayal of Kyle.
"I just want to show the movie to vets and hope they don't feel so alone," Cooper said. "Maybe people will relate to and empathize with Chris' story and maybe people like me and you, the next time we see a soldier in an airport we'll think for a minute about where they're coming from and what they've been through and have more understanding."
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesJason Hall had just turned in his first draft of a script about Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. Bradley Cooper, who was producing the film and had agreed to star, was at a screening of "Silver Linings Playbook" for a group of veterans in Washington.
Kyle himself, still acclimating to life in Midlothian, Texas, after his fourth and final Iraq war tour, had just texted Hall an "LOL" in response to a raunchy joke.
It was Feb. 2, 2013, and their project together, "American Sniper," was lurching along in development at Warner Bros. Cooper and Hall had pitched it as a western with Kyle pitted against an equally gifted enemy sniper in the sandstorms of Iraq. But Kyle's story took a bizarre and devastating turn when he was killed that day at a gun range near his home, allegedly by a veteran he was trying to help.
"The gears just went off for a second," Cooper said, recalling the moment he learned about Kyle's death. "Everything just kind of stopped. Your brain takes in the information, but your body hasn't quite caught up. Chris and I, we're the same age, the same height, the same shoe size. You're just reminded anything's possible in life."
Less than two years later, "American Sniper" arrived in theaters Christmas Day. Instead of a straightforward tale about an elite warrior, it became, by necessity, a complex story about the heavy burdens a veteran carries home.
Clint Eastwood, perhaps Hollywood's greatest chronicler of male stoicism and its side effects, directs the film, which Hall adapted loosely from Kyle's bestselling autobiography written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. Hall's script deliberately borrows from Eastwood's "Unforgiven": The 1992 western's line, "It's a hell of a thing to kill a man" becomes, in a hunting scene in "American Sniper," "It's a hell of a thing to stop a beating heart."
The story toggles between the intensity of the battlefield, where Kyle earned the nickname "The Legend" for his 160 confirmed kills, and the bittersweetness of the home front, where his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), emerges as the audience's proxy, both charmed by and worried for her husband as she feels him emotionally disengaging with each tour.
Even before Kyle's death, a contemporary war movie was not going to be an easy sell, particularly for Hall, whose two previous screenplays, the 2013 thriller "Paranoia" and 2009 sex comedy "Spread," cover very different thematic terrain. Hall had met Kyle through hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and established a relationship with the marksman on a hunting trip.
He wasn't having any luck with his pitch to studios until he reached out to Cooper, a friend who had established a box office track record as the Wolf Pack's chief charmer in the "Hangover" movies and was about to collect his first of two Oscar nominations for a vulnerable role as a bipolar man in "Silver Linings Playbook." That performance and another as permed FBI agent Richie DiMaso in "American Hustle" proved that he could handle neurotic, East Coast oddballs, but a drawling, Texas-born Navy SEAL was another kind of man entirely.
Still, Hall approached Cooper on a hunch, knowing he loved the 1978 Vietnam War movie "The Deer Hunter."
"The first question Bradley asked me about Chris was, 'Did [the war] mess him up?'" Hall said.
'Tremendous empathy'
Earlier this month, two days after he had opened on Broadway in a profoundly different but just as physically demanding role, "The Elephant Man," Cooper arrived at an interview in a pair of Merrell hiking boots of the type Kyle had worn in Iraq. He said that, since he'd started talking about the film to journalists, he had begun dreaming that he was Kyle, walking around his house in Midlothian.
"I always feel like I carry the character with me," Cooper said. "I just found tremendous empathy for him; I admired the sacrifice he made, his strength."
After Kyle's death gave his story a third act that was sadder than fiction, Cooper and Hall put the project on hold.
"Nobody wants to make an Iraq war movie," Hall said. "Nobody. ... But we didn't question so much whether the movie would go on as whether it should go on. For us to just continue like nothing had happened, it felt gross. It was heavy. It just didn't seem fair that someone could go through all that he did and come home and be murdered in his own backyard."
Cooper declined to define the politics of the film, which takes place between 2004 and 2008 but still feels current as ISIS has begun the process of undoing the democratic gains that U.S. troops painfully wrought.
"The whole reason we wanted to tell the story was to be as specific as possible about this guy and not make a comment about anything else," Cooper said. "That's for people to do who are watching the movie. I'm not saying this is a pro-war movie or an antiwar movie or a war movie, even. It's a character study about a soldier having to go from family life to battle and back."
With Taya's blessing and participation, Cooper and Hall resumed the project in the months after Kyle's death, but with a determination to get deeper under the layers of his character. Taya and Hall talked daily for hours, and she shared details of her husband's gentler side that had been omitted from the memoir, like how she knew Kyle was feeling better when he started ironing a crease in his jeans and wearing a flashy belt buckle.
"If you want to know who a man is, don't ask the man, ask his wife," Hall said. "Taya said, 'If you're still gonna do this, do it right. Cause this is how my kids are gonna know their father,' which sucker-punched me."
Steven Spielberg came aboard briefly to direct in the months after Kyle's death, before dropping out over budget concerns, but his interested stoked the studio's. Greg Silverman, Warner's president of creative and worldwide development, suggested Eastwood, who was making "Jersey Boys" for them, his latest in a nearly 40-year relationship with the studio.
"I had done war stories before, but this was more of a cross between his romantic life and his exploits in combat," Eastwood said in an email interview. "'American Sniper' is set in a war that is still fresh in the minds of the public and opinions are still divided. But regardless of how you feel about the war, we should appreciate the people who serve in the military and the families that support them. That's another thing that attracted me to the film."
Prepping to be Kyle
With Eastwood aboard, Cooper, who was about to earn his Oscar nomination for "American Hustle," began to prepare in earnest. He worked out while listening to Kyle's adrenalized playlist of Linkin Park and Staind songs, ate 6,000 calories a day to gain the 35 pounds of muscle that separated them and enlisted a dialect coach to perfect a particular West Texas accent. He watched videos of Kyle, adopted his habit of breathing loudly through his nose and learned a ridiculous amount of information about guns.
"At that time [before Kyle died] I felt I wasn't right for the role. Look at me, I'm from Philadelphia, I weigh 185 pounds. He was a huge [guy] from Texas. I thought maybe Chris Pratt. But in order to get WB to buy, I had to agree to star. I loved the story, though."
"I was fearful," Cooper added. "There's nothing worse than seeing an actor pretend he's from Texas, doing an accent. You're like, oh, shut the ... up. The hope is, two minutes into the movie you forget it's me."
This spring Eastwood shot the film in Rabat, Morocco, and in Southern California, where the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita stood in for urban Iraq and the Imperial Valley town of El Centro provided the setting for a climactic battle scene.
Cooper, Eastwood and Hall discussed multiple endings before deciding against actually showing Kyle's killing for reasons of both storytelling and taste.
"I considered ending the film at the shooting range," Eastwood said. "But that would have shifted the focus to his death and made it a different movie. We were telling the story of Chris Kyle's life and wanted to keep the focus there."
Instead, the movie ends with moving real-life footage from Kyle's funeral, some of which Hall recorded on his iPhone, as thousands of Texans waved at the procession from roadsides and overpasses.
Most critics agree that "American Sniper's" strengths lie in the naturalness of Cooper's performance and the immediacy of the battle scenes, but they tend to disagree on its political stripes. The Times' Kenneth Turan praised the film for showing that "heroism and being on the right side do not solve all problems for men in combat." LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson dismissed the movie as "unexamined jingoism." And the Hollywood Reporter's Tom McCarthy said, "The politics of the war are completely off the table here."
Hall said the movie's politics are deliberately as impenetrable as a dust storm.
"We went into Afghanistan and I got it," Hall said. "We went into Iraq and I was, like, I don't totally get it. But as soon as we had boots on the ground, I supported those guys. There are humans fighting this war, and the effect on them is singular and personal."
Cooper said he will be screening the film for veterans groups and hopes that, as with audiences who saw themselves in his bipolar character in "Silver Linings Playbook," soldiers take some solace in his portrayal of Kyle.
"I just want to show the movie to vets and hope they don't feel so alone," Cooper said. "Maybe people will relate to and empathize with Chris' story and maybe people like me and you, the next time we see a soldier in an airport we'll think for a minute about where they're coming from and what they've been through and have more understanding."
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles TimesJason Hall had just turned in his first draft of a script about Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. Bradley Cooper, who was producing the film and had agreed to star, was at a screening of "Silver Linings Playbook" for a group of veterans in Washington.
Kyle himself, still acclimating to life in Midlothian, Texas, after his fourth and final Iraq war tour, had just texted Hall an "LOL" in response to a raunchy joke.
It was Feb. 2, 2013, and their project together, "American Sniper," was lurching along in development at Warner Bros. Cooper and Hall had pitched it as a western with Kyle pitted against an equally gifted enemy sniper in the sandstorms of Iraq. But Kyle's story took a bizarre and devastating turn when he was killed that day at a gun range near his home, allegedly by a veteran he was trying to help.
"The gears just went off for a second," Cooper said, recalling the moment he learned about Kyle's death. "Everything just kind of stopped. Your brain takes in the information, but your body hasn't quite caught up. Chris and I, we're the same age, the same height, the same shoe size. You're just reminded anything's possible in life."
Less than two years later, "American Sniper" arrived in theaters Christmas Day. Instead of a straightforward tale about an elite warrior, it became, by necessity, a complex story about the heavy burdens a veteran carries home.
Clint Eastwood, perhaps Hollywood's greatest chronicler of male stoicism and its side effects, directs the film, which Hall adapted loosely from Kyle's bestselling autobiography written with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. Hall's script deliberately borrows from Eastwood's "Unforgiven": The 1992 western's line, "It's a hell of a thing to kill a man" becomes, in a hunting scene in "American Sniper," "It's a hell of a thing to stop a beating heart."
The story toggles between the intensity of the battlefield, where Kyle earned the nickname "The Legend" for his 160 confirmed kills, and the bittersweetness of the home front, where his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), emerges as the audience's proxy, both charmed by and worried for her husband as she feels him emotionally disengaging with each tour.
Even before Kyle's death, a contemporary war movie was not going to be an easy sell, particularly for Hall, whose two previous screenplays, the 2013 thriller "Paranoia" and 2009 sex comedy "Spread," cover very different thematic terrain. Hall had met Kyle through hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and established a relationship with the marksman on a hunting trip.
He wasn't having any luck with his pitch to studios until he reached out to Cooper, a friend who had established a box office track record as the Wolf Pack's chief charmer in the "Hangover" movies and was about to collect his first of two Oscar nominations for a vulnerable role as a bipolar man in "Silver Linings Playbook." That performance and another as permed FBI agent Richie DiMaso in "American Hustle" proved that he could handle neurotic, East Coast oddballs, but a drawling, Texas-born Navy SEAL was another kind of man entirely.
Still, Hall approached Cooper on a hunch, knowing he loved the 1978 Vietnam War movie "The Deer Hunter."
"The first question Bradley asked me about Chris was, 'Did [the war] mess him up?'" Hall said.
'Tremendous empathy'
Earlier this month, two days after he had opened on Broadway in a profoundly different but just as physically demanding role, "The Elephant Man," Cooper arrived at an interview in a pair of Merrell hiking boots of the type Kyle had worn in Iraq. He said that, since he'd started talking about the film to journalists, he had begun dreaming that he was Kyle, walking around his house in Midlothian.
"I always feel like I carry the character with me," Cooper said. "I just found tremendous empathy for him; I admired the sacrifice he made, his strength."
After Kyle's death gave his story a third act that was sadder than fiction, Cooper and Hall put the project on hold.
"Nobody wants to make an Iraq war movie," Hall said. "Nobody. ... But we didn't question so much whether the movie would go on as whether it should go on. For us to just continue like nothing had happened, it felt gross. It was heavy. It just didn't seem fair that someone could go through all that he did and come home and be murdered in his own backyard."
Cooper declined to define the politics of the film, which takes place between 2004 and 2008 but still feels current as ISIS has begun the process of undoing the democratic gains that U.S. troops painfully wrought.
"The whole reason we wanted to tell the story was to be as specific as possible about this guy and not make a comment about anything else," Cooper said. "That's for people to do who are watching the movie. I'm not saying this is a pro-war movie or an antiwar movie or a war movie, even. It's a character study about a soldier having to go from family life to battle and back."
With Taya's blessing and participation, Cooper and Hall resumed the project in the months after Kyle's death, but with a determination to get deeper under the layers of his character. Taya and Hall talked daily for hours, and she shared details of her husband's gentler side that had been omitted from the memoir, like how she knew Kyle was feeling better when he started ironing a crease in his jeans and wearing a flashy belt buckle.
"If you want to know who a man is, don't ask the man, ask his wife," Hall said. "Taya said, 'If you're still gonna do this, do it right. Cause this is how my kids are gonna know their father,' which sucker-punched me."
Steven Spielberg came aboard briefly to direct in the months after Kyle's death, before dropping out over budget concerns, but his interested stoked the studio's. Greg Silverman, Warner's president of creative and worldwide development, suggested Eastwood, who was making "Jersey Boys" for them, his latest in a nearly 40-year relationship with the studio.
"I had done war stories before, but this was more of a cross between his romantic life and his exploits in combat," Eastwood said in an email interview. "'American Sniper' is set in a war that is still fresh in the minds of the public and opinions are still divided. But regardless of how you feel about the war, we should appreciate the people who serve in the military and the families that support them. That's another thing that attracted me to the film."
Prepping to be Kyle
With Eastwood aboard, Cooper, who was about to earn his Oscar nomination for "American Hustle," began to prepare in earnest. He worked out while listening to Kyle's adrenalized playlist of Linkin Park and Staind songs, ate 6,000 calories a day to gain the 35 pounds of muscle that separated them and enlisted a dialect coach to perfect a particular West Texas accent. He watched videos of Kyle, adopted his habit of breathing loudly through his nose and learned a ridiculous amount of information about guns.
"At that time [before Kyle died] I felt I wasn't right for the role. Look at me, I'm from Philadelphia, I weigh 185 pounds. He was a huge [guy] from Texas. I thought maybe Chris Pratt. But in order to get WB to buy, I had to agree to star. I loved the story, though."
"I was fearful," Cooper added. "There's nothing worse than seeing an actor pretend he's from Texas, doing an accent. You're like, oh, shut the ... up. The hope is, two minutes into the movie you forget it's me."
This spring Eastwood shot the film in Rabat, Morocco, and in Southern California, where the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita stood in for urban Iraq and the Imperial Valley town of El Centro provided the setting for a climactic battle scene.
Cooper, Eastwood and Hall discussed multiple endings before deciding against actually showing Kyle's killing for reasons of both storytelling and taste.
"I considered ending the film at the shooting range," Eastwood said. "But that would have shifted the focus to his death and made it a different movie. We were telling the story of Chris Kyle's life and wanted to keep the focus there."
Instead, the movie ends with moving real-life footage from Kyle's funeral, some of which Hall recorded on his iPhone, as thousands of Texans waved at the procession from roadsides and overpasses.
Most critics agree that "American Sniper's" strengths lie in the naturalness of Cooper's performance and the immediacy of the battle scenes, but they tend to disagree on its political stripes. The Times' Kenneth Turan praised the film for showing that "heroism and being on the right side do not solve all problems for men in combat." LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson dismissed the movie as "unexamined jingoism." And the Hollywood Reporter's Tom McCarthy said, "The politics of the war are completely off the table here."
Hall said the movie's politics are deliberately as impenetrable as a dust storm.
"We went into Afghanistan and I got it," Hall said. "We went into Iraq and I was, like, I don't totally get it. But as soon as we had boots on the ground, I supported those guys. There are humans fighting this war, and the effect on them is singular and personal."
Cooper said he will be screening the film for veterans groups and hopes that, as with audiences who saw themselves in his bipolar character in "Silver Linings Playbook," soldiers take some solace in his portrayal of Kyle.
"I just want to show the movie to vets and hope they don't feel so alone," Cooper said. "Maybe people will relate to and empathize with Chris' story and maybe people like me and you, the next time we see a soldier in an airport we'll think for a minute about where they're coming from and what they've been through and have more understanding."
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times
