Screen People | Hollywood – Tourists get knockout photo of Stallone atop ‘Rocky’ steps

     A group of tourists who ran up the “Rocky” steps in Philadelphia got a knockout photo at the top — a selfie with Rocky himself.
Peter Rowe said he and two friends had just finished racing up the staircase at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last weekend when they saw Sylvester Stallone.
“He said to us, ‘Man, you guys are fast. You’re making me look bad!’” Rowe said on Tuesday.
Stallone then posed for a selfie with the trio, putting up one fist. “Look tough, guys!” he said, according to Rowe.
Stallone made the art museum’s steps famous in his first turn as fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, who used them as part of his training regimen. Thousands of people now visit the steps each year to re-create the run and to take pictures with a Rocky statue, which originally was a prop in “Rocky III.”
Rowe’s friends, Jacob Kerstan and Andrew Wright, were visiting him from Azusa Pacific University in greater Los Angeles.

DRAMA – Anne Hathaway heading to the stage this spring

Anne Hathaway will be playing something a little different this spring — an Air Force fighter pilot in a one-woman stage show.
The Public Theater said yesterday that the Academy Award-winner will star in George Brant’s play “Grounded” starting April 7. It’s about a pilot who is reassigned to operate a military drone.
Visionary director Julie Taymor, behind the beauty of “The Lion King,” will direct.
Hathaway, who won an Oscar in Tom Hooper’s “Les Miserables,” returns to the Public for the first time since she played Viola in a 2009 Shakespeare in the Park production.

CRIME – Man shot by police was actor Mark Wahlberg’s hometown friend

A man fatally shot in an armed domestic confrontation with police was a hometown friend of actor Mark Wahlberg, who helped him get small movie roles.
Wahlberg and Paul Campbell, whose mother was found dead, had been friends in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, The Boston Globe reported. Campbell had a scene in “The Fighter” as a crack addict acting out a legendary boxer’s moves in the ring. He had bit roles in “Ted” and “American Hustle.”
Police said they were called Monday to the Weymouth house Campbell shared with his mother and fired shots when they found him in an agitated state, holding at least one knife. They found his mother’s body on the steps, apparently stabbed.
The Globe said court records showed that Campbell, 49, had a history of arrests for drug possession, drunken driving and assault and that his defense attorney said in a 1997 filing he had a heroin addiction.

NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK – New boy bands can learn from us
New Kids on the Block are ready to take new boy bands on the block to school.
The Boston-based veteran group, which announced a summer tour with TLC and Nelly this week, said contemporary boy bands should check out their live concerts to learn from the experts.
“As far as boy bands, you know, we dance, we perform. I mean, I hate to sound like an old fogey, but these kids don’t know what they’re missing nowadays because we got to sing and dance for our supper, you know what I mean, and we love to do that,” Joey McIntyre, 42, said in an interview Tuesday at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
“So maybe a few kids could come to the show and see how it’s done.” The Main Event tour kicks off May 1 in Las Vegas. Tickets go on sale Jan. 31.

ART – Supreme Court won’t take up looted art at Norton Simon

A New York woman who has been fighting for years over ownership of two Renaissance masterpieces seized by the Nazis during World War II won a legal round this week when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a hearing on a California museum’s effort to keep her lawsuit from proceeding to trial.
At the center of the fight is “Adam and Eve,” a pair of life-sized oil paintings by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. They have hung in Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum for more than 30 years and were appraised at USD24 million in 2006.
In court papers dating to 2007, Marei Von Saher says the paintings were seized by the Nazis after her Jewish relatives fled Holland during the Holocaust. The Norton Simon says it legally acquired the works in the 1970s from the descendant of Russian aristocrats who had them wrongly taken by the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
“The Norton Simon Art Foundation remains confident that it holds complete and proper title to ‘Adam and Eve,’ and will continue to pursue, consistent with its fiduciary duties, all appropriate legal options,” the museum said in a statement.

TUTANKHAMUN – Beard of Egypt’s King Tut hastily glued back on with epoxy

The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said this week.
The museum is one of the city’s main tourist sites, but in some areas, ancient wooden sarcophagi lay unprotected from the public, while pharaonic burial shrouds, mounted on walls, crumble from behind open panels of glass. Tutankhamun’s mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits.
Three of the museum’s conservators reached by telephone gave differing accounts of when the incident occurred last year, and whether the beard was knocked off by accident while the mask’s case was being cleaned, or was removed because it was loose.
They agree however that orders came from above to fix it quickly and that an inappropriate adhesive was used. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.
“Unfortunately he used a very irreversible material — epoxy has a very high property for attaching and is used on metal or stone but I think it wasn’t suitable for an outstanding object like Tutankhamun’s golden mask,” one conservator said. MDT/Agencies