Michael Strahan makes his Broadway debut in 'Elf'

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Strahan has tackled something few football stars have attempted — Broadway.

The gap-toothed co-host of "Live with Kelly and Michael" made three short appearances at Wednesday's matinee of "Elf" and said he has new respect for Broadway performers.

"I was surprised at how nervous you get and the adrenaline and that feedback from the audience — it really was an amazing thing," the former football player said after the show. "To see these performers who do it every day — eight or nine times a week — is really amazing. I take my hat off to them."

Fans can see a behind-the-scenes recap on Thursday's TV show.

The musical is adapted from the Will Ferrell film from 2003 about Buddy, a human raised in the North Pole who travels to New York in search of his parents.

Strahan thought making his Broadway debut would be fun and represented a new experience for a guy who holds the single season sack record. He found himself more nervous than he has been for high-stakes football games or live TV.

"It's a little nerve-wracking because so many people depend on you, you want to get your line across and you have to play to the crowd. It's a lot more intricate with everyone hitting their marks. You don't want to be the guy that messes everyone up," he said.

Strahan, 41, played both a police officer and a Salvation Army Santa in the first act and later came on as himself in a scene with the real Santa in the second act. As he waited in the wings of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, he saw the toll the musical takes on its dancers.

"Some of these performers are breathing as if they just went into a football game and played a 12-play drive," he joked. "I was tired walking up and down from my dressing room."

Strahan rehearsed for an hour in the morning with stage managers and associate director Casey Hushion. At 1 p.m., some in the cast came in early to work with him, including Jordan Gelber, who plays Buddy, and Beth Leavel, who plays Buddy's stepmother.

The audience was quiet when Strahan first appeared as an officer with another cop after Buddy gets kicked out of Macy's. But the seven-time Pro-Bowler and Super Bowl winner flashed his trademark smile and they went wild. More applause greeted him after he played a Salvation Army Santa as he and Buddy wrestled over the kettle bells.

In the second act, he waited to ask Santa for a present. Santa asked him his name, the newly minted actor said "Michael Strahan" and he then asked for a red Schwinn bicycle with a bell shaped like Miss Piggy. The crowd cheered when Strahan identified himself and he got another wide round of applause at the curtain call, where the cast gave him flowers.

Strahan was named in September as Kelly Ripa's permanent co-host aboard the morning show "Live with Kelly and Michael." A former defensive star who spent 15 years in the NFL, he is also a host of "Fox NFL Sunday."

He follows in the footsteps of Joe Namath, a quarterback nicknamed "Broadway Joe" who made an appearance on Broadway in 1983 as a replacement in a revival of "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial."

Strahan would not rule out a return to the stage. "I will take it off my bucket list, but if the opportunity came across again, I might just take it up and do it again," he said. "I had a great time."

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Online:

http://www.elfmusical.com

http://dadt.com/live

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Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs might be taken for a longer duration as well.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them are in premenopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing 10 years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots, compared with 0.4 percent in the control group.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

“They don’t feel well on them, but it’s their safety net,” said Dr. Garber, who added that the news would be welcomed by many patients who would like to stay on the drug. “I have patients who agonize about this, people who are coming to the end of their tamoxifen.”

Emily Behrend, who is a few months from finishing her five years on tamoxifen, said she would definitely consider another five years. “If it can keep the cancer away, I’m all for it,” said Ms. Behrend, 39, a single mother in Tomball, Tex. She is taking the antidepressant Effexor to help control the night sweats and hot flashes caused by tamoxifen.

Cost is not considered a huge barrier to taking tamoxifen longer because the drug can be obtained for less than $200 a year.

The results, while answering one question, raise many new ones, including whether even more than 10 years of treatment would be better still.

Perhaps the most important question is what the results mean for postmenopausal women. Even many women who are premenopausal at the time of diagnosis will pass through menopause by the time they finish their first five years of tamoxifen, or will have been pushed into menopause by chemotherapy.

Postmenopausal patients tend to take aromatase inhibitors like anastrozole or letrozole, which are more effective than tamoxifen at preventing breast cancer recurrence, though they do not work for premenopausal women.

Mr. Peto said he thought the results of the Atlas study would “apply to endocrine therapy in general,” meaning that 10 years of an aromatase inhibitor would be better than five years. Other doctors were not so sure.

The Atlas study was paid for by various organizations including the United States Army, the British government and AstraZeneca, which makes the brand-name version of tamoxifen.

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Netflix buys exclusive rights to Disney movies

Netflix Inc. has acquired exclusive U.S. rights to movies from Walt Disney Studios in a deal that catapults the Internet video-on-demand service into direct competition with pay TV giants such as HBO and Showtime.

The three-year agreement takes effect in 2016 and is a blow to the pay channel Starz, which currently has the rights to broadcast Disney movies, including its Pixar animated films and Marvel superhero pictures, about eight months after they are released in theaters.

Starz's sole remaining movie provider is now Sony Pictures. That partnership ends in 2016.

VIDEO: Disney buys Lucasfilm - Mickey meet Darth Maul

Disney has also agreed to give Netflix nonexclusive streaming rights to more of its older titles — including "Dumbo," "Pocahontas" and "Alice in Wonderland" — starting immediately.

Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, called the deal "a bold leap forward for Internet television."

"We are incredibly pleased and proud this iconic family brand is teaming with Netflix to make it happen," he said.

Netflix stock soared on the news, rising $10.65, or 14%, to $85.65.

Shares in Starz's parent company, Liberty Media Corp., fell $5.49, or 5%, to $105.56.

Currently, Netflix has nonexclusive rights to movies from Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer via a deal with pay channel Epix, as well as an array of library titles from other studios. Its only exclusive movie rights come from independent studios such as Relativity Media and DreamWorks Animation. It also has a wide variety of television reruns.

Sarandos and Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings have long said the company wanted to get exclusive pay TV rights to films from one of Hollywood's six major studios to boost its online entertainment service.

PHOTOS: Disney without Pixar

However, Hastings has also at times downplayed the importance of new movies. Netflix previously had streaming rights to Disney and Sony movies via a deal with Starz. In January, investors expressed their concerns that the pending disappearance of those movies would hurt the service. Hastings said in a letter to investors that Disney films accounted for only 2% of domestic streaming and the loss would not be felt.

Since then, though, the Disney movie slate has become more attractive. At that time, Netflix did not have access to movies from Disney's Marvel superhero unit or the "Star Wars" titles from its pending acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd.

The end of the Starz agreement accelerated a trend that has seen Netflix evolve into a television company, with reruns of shows such as "Mad Men" accounting for about two-thirds of the content streamed by users.

With several original programs launching next year, including the Kevin Spacey political drama "House of Cards," and a direct connection to a growing number of Internet-enabled televisions, Netflix is on the verge of standing on par with many TV networks.

Netflix charges $8 a month for its streaming service, while premium cable networks such as HBO cost $13 to $18 a month, and that's on top of a monthly bill for other channels that typically exceeds $50. It remains to be seen whether the addition of Disney products and more original programming could lead Netflix to increase its price.

PHOTOS: Hollywood back lot moments

The Netflix spending spree could continue, with Sarandos telling Bloomberg News on Monday that his company would bid for rights to Sony movies when its Starz deal expires.

Netflix might have a tougher time wresting away the rights to Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox or Universal Pictures releases from their current deals with HBO, which like Warner is part of Time Warner Inc. Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM are almost certain to stick with Epix, of which the trio are co-owners.

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Debut of repainted sign is Hollywood event

If there's anything Tinseltown excels at, it's turning a ho-hum event into a made-for-TV spectacle. Witness the fanfare that unfolds each time the Hollywood sign gets a fresh coat of paint.

It's not written off as routine maintenance. No, it's a civic event.

A media scrum gathers. Elected officials gush. Someone cracks jokes about face-lifts. (In 1995, nipped-and-tucked actress Phyllis Diller did the honors.)

PHOTOS: Hollywood sign history

So it was on Tuesday, when reporters were whisked to just below the nearly 90-year-old sign, one of the few landmarks in the crazy quilt of neighborhoods that is Los Angeles.

In a clearing, VIPs fidgeted on white folding chairs. At least a dozen cameras were trained on Chris Baumgart, chairman of the nonprofit Hollywood Sign Trust, who wore a dark suit and sneakers. Behind him loomed the nine 45-foot-tall letters that together, he said, cost about $175,000 to gussy up.

Beginning in October, workers stripped the letters of weathered paint, smeared them with 105 gallons of primer and coated them with 255 gallons of new paint (color: No. 7757, high-reflective white). It's made by Sherwin-Williams, which picked up most of the sign restoration bill.

Baumgart, a veritable encyclopedia of sign knowledge, joked with reporters that its face had been pancaked with two tons of makeup. "A lot was done to her backside, but we're leaving that secret," he said, tongue firmly in cheek.

When it was erected in 1923 with the aid of mule teams, the sign touted a high-end real estate development named Hollywoodland. Its creators expected to take it down after a year, according to the Hollywood Sign Trust, but tourists flocked to the hillside and its stunning view of Los Angeles. In the 1940s, the city folded the sign into Griffith Park and truncated it to hype, simply, "Hollywood."

Over the years, the sign has needed numerous touch-ups. In the 1970s, the termite-weakened O cartwheeled away from the rest of its kin and an L was set ablaze. A who's-who of Hollywood helped raise money to rebuild the sign completely, including Alice Cooper, Gene Autry and Hugh Hefner, who threw a fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion.

When the retooled landmark was unveiled in 1978 on live TV, the trust said, 60 million people watched. After that, it seemed, Los Angeles celebrated its every milestone with a dose of stagecraft.

In 1995, during the media event with Diller, black tarps fell to reveal gleaming letters. In 2005, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, in the words of the trust, "rappelled down the hillside and applied the final strokes of coating himself."

Tuesday's event was comparatively sedate. But as Baumgart fielded questions, a handful of people crept along the sign's base — cameramen shooting video of painters.

"They're supposed to be painting the last brush strokes on the sign," Baumgart said, "but it's for show."

He shrugged.

"Hey, it's Hollywood."

ashley.powers@latimes.com

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'Dr. Phil"s stolen classic Chevy recovered

BURBANK, Calif. (AP) — Los Angeles police say they've recovered a stolen 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible that belongs to talk-show host Phil McGraw.

Detective Jess Corral said Tuesday that investigators recovered McGraw's classic car, along with 13 others, after law enforcement began targeting auto theft rings.

McGraw is known as television's "Dr. Phil. His car was stolen from the RODZ shop in Burbank in August, and was found with minor damage.

The car is worth at least $80,000.

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Generic Drug Makers Facing Squeeze on Revenue

They call it the patent cliff.

Brand-name drug makers have feared it for years. And now the makers of generic drugs fear it, too.

This year, more than 40 brand-name drugs — valued at $35 billion in annual sales — lost their patent protection, meaning that generic companies were permitted to make their own lower-priced versions of well-known drugs like Plavix, Lexapro and Seroquel — and share in the profits that had exclusively belonged to the brands.

Next year, the value of drugs scheduled to lose their patents and be sold as generics is expected to decline by more than half, to about $17 billion, according to an analysis by Crédit Agricole Securities.“The patent cliff is over,” said Kim Vukhac, an analyst for Crédit Agricole. “That’s great for large pharma, but that also means the opportunities theoretically have dried up for generics.”

In response, many generic drug makers are scrambling to redefine themselves, whether by specializing in hard-to-make drugs, selling branded products or making large acquisitions. The large generics company Watson acquired a European competitor, Actavis, in October, vaulting it from the fifth- to the third-largest generic drug maker worldwide.

“They are certainly saying either I need to get bigger, or I need to get ‘specialer,’ ” said Michael Kleinrock, director of research development at the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a health industry research group. “They all want to be special.”

As one consequence of the approaching cliff, executives for generic drug companies say, they will no longer be able to rely as much on the lucrative six-month exclusivity periods that follow the patent expirations of many drugs. During those periods, companies that are the first to file an application with the Food and Drug Administration, successfully challenge a patent and show they can make the drug win the right to sell their version exclusively or with limited competition.

The exclusivity windows can give a quick jolt to companies. During the first nine months of 2012, sales of generic drugs increased by 19 percent over the same period in 2011, to $39.1 billion from $32.8 billion, according to Michael Faerm, an analyst for Credit Suisse. Sales of branded drugs, by contrast, fell 4 percent during the same period, to $174.2 billion from $181.3 billion.

But those exclusive periods also make generic drug makers vulnerable to the fickle cycle of patent expiration. “The only issue is it’s a bubble, too,” said Mr. Kleinrock. He said next year, the generic industry would enter a drought that was expected to last about two years.  Of the drugs that are becoming generic, fewer have exclusivity periods dedicated to a single drug maker.

In 2013, for example, the antidepressant Cymbalta, sold by Eli Lilly, is scheduled to be available in generic form. But more than five companies are expected to share in sales during the first six months, according to a report by Ms. Vukhac.

Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan, the second-largest generics company in the United States, said Wall Street analysts were obsessed with the issue. “I can’t go anywhere without being asked about the patent cliff, the patent cliff, the patent cliff,” she said. “The patent cliff is one aspect of a complex, multilayered landscape, and I think each company is going to face it differently.”

Jeremy M. Levin, the chief executive of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest global maker of generic drugs, agreed. “The concept of exclusivity — where only one generic player could actually make money out of the unique moment — has diminished,” he said. “In the absence of that, many companies have had to really ask the question, ‘How do I really play in the generics world?’ ”

For Teva, Mr. Levin said, he believes the answer will be both its reach  — it sells 1,400 products, and one in six generic prescriptions in the United States is filled with a Teva product  — and what he says is a reputation for making quality products. That focus will be increasingly important, he said, given recent statements by the F.D.A. that it intends to take a closer look at the quality of generic drugs. Mr. Levin also said he planned to cut costs, announcing last week that he intended to trim from $1.5 to $2 billion in expenses over the next five years.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2012

An article on Tuesday about business strategies of generic drug makers in the face of fewer drug patent expirations misidentified the country in which the pharmaceutical company Endo is based. It is in the United States, not Japan.

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Ma Barker's infamous Florida hide-out for sale

The Ma Barker hide-out, site of the longest shootout in FBI history, drew more international publicity than solid offers when it was recently scheduled for auction, and it is now being listed for sale.

The two-story house in Ocklawaha, Fla., was slated to be auctioned Oct. 5, but the event was canceled when real estate agents said their clients were cool to the $1-million starting bid, said Roger Soderstrom, broker for listing agent Stirling Sotheby's International Realty.

"We had a group of eight owners, and they were back and forth on what they thought it was worth," he said. The sale of the 10-acre property includes the lakefront, two-story frame house and its furnishings, which include some original pieces. It is now listed at $889,000.

When plans for an auction were first reported in August, news of the proposed sale was reported by publications around the world. The story was propelled by the sale's inclusion of certain artifacts, such as FBI documents, maps of agents' positions during the shootout, and black-and-white photographs showing the gunned-down bodies of Barker and one of her four sons, Fred Barker.

Ma Barker, leader of the Barker-Karpis gang, was labeled Public Enemy No. 1 by the federal government for a spree of slayings, kidnappings and robberies throughout the Midwest in the early 1930s. She rented the retreat as a hide-out, and federal agents learned of it when they found clues during a raid of the Chicago home of another son, Arthur "Doc" Barker.

A hand-drawn sketch from federal authorities shows an overview of the Ocklawaha house, with the names and positions of the agents who surrounded it starting at 6 a.m. Jan. 16, 1935, armed with three machine guns, two rifles, two shotguns, gas canisters and other equipment, including bulletproof vests.

An FBI memo says that agents initiated the encounter by throwing two or three canisters of tear gas into the house at 7:15 a.m. Then the shooting began, with rounds fired by the agents and the Barkers, who were using what sounded like a Thompson submachine gun.

By 10 a.m., agents stationed at the rear of the house began running out of ammunition and needed to be resupplied. By 11:30 a.m., the shooting had ceased. Agents, none of whom were killed, persuaded Willie Woodbury, a handyman on the estate, to check inside and make certain Ma Barker and her son Fred were dead. They were.

mshanklin@tribune.com

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Two Mexican nationals charged in killing of U.S. Coast Guardsman

Federal prosecutors charged two Mexican nationals in connection with killing U.S. Coast Guardsmen Terrell Horne III after they allegedly rammed his vessel with a drug-smuggling panga boat.

The two men, boat captain Jose Mejia-Leyva and Manuel Beltra-Higuera, are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon to face charges that they killed a federal officer.

Horne, 34, of Redondo Beach, was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers in a panga rammed his vessel off the Ventura County coast. He died of severe head trauma, officials said.

The Redondo Beach resident was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had come under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat, a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

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Additional copies of 'Lincoln' headed to theaters

LOS ANGELES (AP) — "Lincoln" is marching to more movie theaters.

Disney, which distributed the DreamWorks film, is making additional prints of director Steven Spielberg's historical saga starring Daniel Day-Lewis to meet an unexpected demand that has left some moviegoers in Alaska out in the cold.

"To say that we're encouraged by the results to date or that they've exceeded our expectations is an understatement," said Dave Hollis, head of distribution at the Walt Disney Co. "We're in the midst of making additional prints to accommodate demand and will have them available to our partners in exhibition by mid-December for what we hope will be a great run through the holiday and awards corridor."

The film, which opened in wide release Nov. 9 and has earned $83.6 million in North America so far, has been unavailable at some smaller venues, such as the Gross Alaska theaters in Juneau.

But the extra prints are coming a little too late to fit the movie into the five-screen Glacier Cinemas theater during the holiday season, said Kenny Solomon-Gross, general manager of the Gross Alaska, which runs two theaters in Juneau and one in Ketchikan, Alaska.

"When we had the room for 'Lincoln,' Disney didn't have a copy for us," Solomon-Gross said Monday.

His film lineup is pretty booked through the end of the year, and he probably can't screen "Lincoln" until after the first of the new year. Yes, the excitement over the film will have dimmed, but then the Academy Awards season will be stirring up, he said. That should kick up the buzz.

In the meantime, Solomon-Gross plans to head to Las Vegas this week and catch the film there.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang . Associated Press writer Rachel D'Oro in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

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Online:

http://www.thelincolnmovie.com

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Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

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