Respect Yourself: Interview with the Web Sheriff
STORY BY: Duncan Cooper

This is a pretty long interview but Britain’s Web Sheriff is a pretty weird thing: an artist-hired, sometimes clandestine but always incredibly personable copyright enforcement agency that continues to leave a very real mark on art on the internet, probably differently than forces before them. The dumbest way of looking at the world is like it’s not changing, and the practices of the Web Sheriff reflect a really smart way of dealing with that: in the words of John Giacobbi, the company’s founder, they engage illegal-file-uploading music fans directly “to turn the perceived negative of anti-piracy to the positive function of viral marketing.” Leveraging essentially well-intentioned criminals for unpaid advertising is incredibly creative and maybe scary, but definitely something that we find, as people who download a ton of stuff, worth thinking about.

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It’s not often that a movie premiere party goes until after 1 a.m., but the fete for The Source Code — held at Boulevard3 in Hollywood earlier this week — was still going into the morning.

“The DJ played a lot of house-y, upbeat music — more than you’d normally hear at a premiere party, because of the feel of the film — so people were actually on the dance floor until 1 a.m. on a Monday night!” event planner Chad Hudson (of his eponymous company) told The Hollywood Reporter today, the day the movie hits theaters. The film has received mixed reviews; read THR’s here.

The overall theme of the party? “The movie had an industrial feel to it, and it was also a love story… well, not a love story, but a romance story that’s intertwined within the movie more so than the masculine films out there right now,” says Hudson, referring to Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan’s relationship in the thriller sci-fi film, in which Gyllenhaal wakes up in the body of another man and realizes he’s on a mission to stop the bombing of a Chicago train.

Hudson and his team decorated the indoor-outdoor space with steel, brushed metal, succulent florals, “pretty lighting and gorgeous metallic linens to make it masculine with a touch of a feminine side,” he tells THR. Also projected on the walls: a graphic of the sonic wave-like “source code” that Gyllenhaal steps through.

Food was an homage to Chicago, and included deep-dish pizza, chicken parmesan and Sprinkles cupcakes.

The stars seemed to enjoy it. “The cast stayed a long time, which is always a good sign that they like it!” Hudson says.

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NEW ORLEANS — For Mardi Gras, Bourbon Pub and Parade owner Sandy Sachs hosted a Celebrity Brunch benefiting The Trevor Project. It raised over $5,000 for their suicide prevention hot lines, which help save the lives of LGBT and questioning youth nationwide.

Joining the celebrity brunch with Sachs were, (l-r) actor Jonathan Silverman, and his wife Jennifer Finnigan (star of the new ABC TV series “Better with You”); Sachs; Executive Director of The Trevor Project, Charles Robbins; Mardi Gras Krewe of Orpheus Celebrity Monarch Jennifer Coolidge and actor, author and speaker Reichen Lehmkuhl. Recording artist Taylor Dayne also attended the brunch and performed at the Bourbon Pub that night.

Leeza Gibbons hosts the Dare 2 Care Pre-Oscar party at Boa, produced by Chad Hudson Events. It was a star-studded night honoring Jamie Lee Curtis, with a special performance by LeAnn Rimes.

Inside Sheryl Crow’s beautiful Hollywood Hills home, the music star decorates her living room with a Ginebra sectional sofa and a vintage cocktail table, both from hip L.A. furniture boutique 22 BOND ST.

Photo Credit: Architectural Digest