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A downtown Los Angeles building made famous as the setting of an album cover photo for the legendary rock band the Doors was heavily damaged after fire broke out Thursday morning.

The building that was once home to a transient hotel known as the Morrison Hotel was the setting for cover photo for the band’s fifth album, titled “Morrison Hotel,” given the nod to the surname of Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison. The photo, snapped by famed rock photographer Henry Diltz, was taken on the fly in December 1969. The album was released by Elektra in February 1970. Morrison died at age 27 in July 1971.

“On this day, December 17th, 1969, we were out taking photos for the Morrison Hotel album cover,” Diltz wrote on Facebook. “We were at a transient hotel in Downtown LA on Hope Street. The Doors didn’t have permission to take pictures, so when the lobby was empty, they...

The Los Angeles Fire Department knocked down a fire Thursday in a vacant downtown building that was formerly the home of the Morrison Hotel, which became famous after it was photographed as the cover art for the 1970 album by seminal L.A. band The Doors.

The structure fire was located on the top floor of the vacant four-story building located at 1246 S Hope St. A total of 17 fire companies and more than 100 firefighters, knocked down the blaze in 1 hour and 37 minutes, the Lafd said. The fire forced the closure of eastbound and westbound traffic on Pico.

No injuries were reported, but crews had to use ground ladders to reach fire escapes and assist unhoused persons that were exiting the vacant structure.

The property had been acquired by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation last year with plans to turn it into 111 units of low-income housing after battling with a developer looking to...

Kerem Bürsin never planned to be a Turkish megastar.

Though he was born in Istanbul, he spent his formative years living internationally and attended high school in Texas, where he began acting in theater productions. He then set off for L.A., where he worked with the legendary Roger Corman, but still “kept coming across the matter of my nationality,” as he tells Variety.

“Some agents were telling me, ‘I have to change your name,'” he says. “I would ask them why, and they would say: ‘Because you don’t look Turkish, you don’t sound Turkish and you’re pretty much American. So it’s just not going to work.'”

Eventually he returned to his home country — which turned out to be the right decision, as lead roles in globally exported TV shows “Waiting for the Sun” and “Love Is in the Air” have made him one...

In the early days of her career, Joan Didion had a taste of what some music and arts journalists have had to endure over the years: the monotony of record-making. It was 1968, and Didion, working on a story, visited an L.A. recording studio to watch the Doors tinker with Waiting for the Sun. According to Tracy Daugherty’s Didion bio The Last Love Song, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also wanted to scope out Jim Morrison as the lead in The Panic in Needle Park, the junkie love-story movie they’d written.

If you’re the kind of band merch enthusiast who frames and hangs your favorite classic vinyls on the wall, you’re going to want to check out Funko’s latest vinyl figure collection, which get the bands back together in miniature form.

These “Deluxe Pop! Albums” are quite literally box sets, with a new line of premium figures portraying some of the greatest rock and pop groups from the past few decades — and their iconic album covers, too.

Funko’s Deluxe Pop! Albums give both collectors and fans the...

Just like his previous movie, I, Tonya, director Craig Gillespie’s new interpretation of Cruella and the 101 Dalmatians mythos treats its soundtrack almost like a character—a Greek chorus of sorts. The origin story of the designer villainess who first was introduced to the world in the classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians is peppered with a non-stop river of classic pop, rock, and punk anthems from the 1960s and ‘70s, quite fitting for the chaotic backdrop of London’s fast-changing fashion and music scene of that era.

Gillespie says that the way the soundtrack was used in I, Tonya was an element that Sean Bailey, Disney president of production, wanted to deploy in similar fashion for Cruella.

“When Sean pitched it to me, he talked about the tracks from I, Tonya and how they wanted to really embrace music with this,” Gillespie explains. “So I warned them up front...