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Long on classic Mission-style Spanish charm, a four-bedroom home originally built in 1932 for Bobby Connolly, the choreographer of The Wizard of Oz, has come up for sale in Encino. Listed at 4.995 million and known as the Woodley Estate, it includes a 3,674-square-foot main house with four bedrooms, a one-bedroom guest house and a pool on a generously sized 27,000 square foot corner lot (nearly 2/3 of an acre.)

Original owner Connolly was nominated four times for the short-lived Academy Award category of best dance direction in the 1930s (including for the Marion Davies-Clark Gable romantic comedy Cain and Mabel). Since then, the home has also been owned by such figures as Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, pedal-steel-guitar pioneer Alvino Rey, and, per the L.A. Times, actor Gary Crosby, a son of Bing Crosby.

“It’s completely private and it has a storied history,” says listing...

Johnny Mandel, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning songwriter of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Emily” and the theme from “Mash,” has died. He was 94.

“I was so sad to learn that a hero of mine, Johnny Mandel, passed away,” wrote Michael Buble on Twitter. “He was a genius and one of my favorite writers, arrangers, and personalities. He was a beast.”

“A dear friend and extraordinary composer arranger and all-around brilliant talent, Johnny Mandel, just passed away,” wrote Michael Feinstein on Facebook. “The world will never be quite the same without his humor, wit and wry view of life and the human condition. He was truly beyond compare, and nobody could write or arrange the way he did. Lord will we miss him. Let’s celebrate him with his music! He would like that.”

Mandel was considered one of the finest arrangers of the second half of the 20th century, providing...

Legendary trumpet player Uan Rasey, whose brassy tones could be heard during solos on soundtracks for films like Chinatown, and West Side Story, has died in Woodland Hills, California. He was 90.

Rasey's trumpet could also be heard in movies like An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, Spartacus and Ben-Hur.

He died of complications from a heart condition last Monday.

A childhood polio sufferer, Rasey began his career with bandleaders like Sonny Dunham and Alvino Rey and he became a regular on U.S. radio shows throughout the 1940s, during which he featured on programmes hosted by Jack Benny and Bing Crosby.

He joined the MGM studio orchestra in 1949 and made his mark as a TV show musician behind the scenes of hits like Bonanza and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Trade magazine Variety reports he played on as many as 3,000 film and television shows in his career.

He is perhaps best known for his jazz trumpet in 1974's Chinatown score.

Rasey also performed with Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Doris Day and the Monkees.

With a No 1 album on both sides of the Atlantic, Arcade Fire are on the verge of U2-scale stardom. But, ever the provocateurs, they are fairly nonplussed by the prospect

The other day, Win Butler and Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire were redecorating their home in Montreal and listening to In Utero, the album Nirvana recorded amid the vertigo induced by sudden and confounding success. They got to thinking about how they were now headlining some of the same huge venues that Nirvana played after Nevermind, which Chassagne finds a "head trip".

"There's definitely three songs on In Utero that are like, 'Hey jocks! Stop listening to our music! Go away!'" Butler says.

Does he ever feel like that?

"Yeah, of course. You want to be able to relate to what you're doing. But," he says with a tentative smile, "so far, so good."

Arcade Fire haven't yet...

P.S. After seeing ‘The Bat’ 7 out of 8 people will get cold feet tonight!

Okay, I’ve gotta be honest. I don’t even know what that tagline for the 1959, murder mystery, ‘The Bat,’ means, but evidently it’s supposed to be menacing. Much like a majority of the film. It’s supposed to be foreboding and full of danger. It’s not. In the end, fun as it might be for the sheer entertainment value, ‘The Bat’ is nothing more than a stagy, hokey version of a story that had been twice before in the film world.

Based on the stage play from the 1920s, ‘The Bat’ tells the story of a masked killer who strikes his victims with steel claws. Throw into a large mansion, a missing, million dollars,a mystery novelist, and about 84 secondary characters who serve one of two purposes (suspect or victim) and you’ve...