Studio

LOS ANGELES - Soon after Peter Berg signed on to direct a big-screen version of the board game Battleship, he was summoned to meet with the new heads of Universal Pictures. The filmmaker best known for his work on Friday Night Lights and Hancock had reason to be nervous. Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley were inheriting a risky, expensive project green-lighted by their predecessors during rampant cost-cutting in Hollywood. But the executives had a surprising message: They wanted to increase the budget for Battleship and add a multimillion-dollar sequence set in Hong Kong.

The installation of 21st-century studio crafts in the 17th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Craft, "CraftForms 2011," at Wayne Art Center suggests to this observer that there's a paradoxical "homelessness" about the craft art of our century. In some ways, it's inescapable. For, amid the routines of daily life, we furnish our homes with craft items of some sort - also our business surroundings, and even our vacation spots - with these handmade or mass-produced craft objects.

At every turn, Bruce Metcalf's "Venus Adorned" at Snyderman holds agreeable surprises. For one thing, this jeweler and longtime University of the Arts teacher, known for challenging conventional thinking in the craft field while looking into craft's role in broader cultural contexts, has devised a surprising installation for the show: He has painted on the gallery walls 21 life-size, sharply characterized gray silhouettes of people he knows. Shown as if conversing, each silhouetted figure wears one of Metcalf's actual creations, either a neckpiece or brooch (two of them wear two brooches)

For a long-ago architecture class at the Rhode Island School of Design, Jeff Carpenter designed a plan to convert an abandoned boathouse into a home. Though he decided to pursue painting, not architecture, the project always stuck with him. Carpenter drew on this experience two years ago when he and his then-partner, artist Sallie Ketcham, renovated an oversized carriage house in the Art Museum area into a nautically inspired home. Carpenter, a representational abstract painter whose work has appeared in museums like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, was living in Massachusetts in 2009.

BEST KNOWN as the surrealist auteur behind "Eraserhead," "Twin Peaks" and "Blue Velvet," David Lynch is one of America's most acclaimed film directors. Having long written and performed music for his films - often in collaboration with others, most notably composer Angelo Badalamenti and Polish pianist Marek Zebrowski - this fall sees the three-time Academy Award nominee make his debut as a solo recording artist. With the release yesterday of his debut studio album, "Crazy Clown Time," on Sunday Best Recordings/PIAS, Lynch talks to Billboard.

SIGMA SOUND Studios' chief engineer and former co-owner Joe Tarsia remembers Billy Joel's radio concert debut being quite the event. Tarsia had been behind the board for a bunch of the record label-sponsored, "WMMR @ Sigma" shows, a series he recalls as "the first of its kind in the nation" and "a great way to promote a new act. " The series also brought wider attention to Sigma, then noted primarily as home to the sophisti-soul Philadelphia International...

To appreciate Meaghan Dunn's perspective on business, you must accept that the world of Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network has as much to do with medicine, eyewear, tsunami preparedness, and frozen yogurt as it does with Yogi Bear and the Powerpuff Girls. Not that that was always obvious to Dunn. Certainly not when she was an adopted young girl from South Korea growing up in Doylestown. Back then, she was "very fascinated" by Wonder Woman, an avid collector of Archie comic books, and "very passionate" about drawing - so much so that she took private art lessons.

DwellStudio founder Christiane Lemieux spends her days designing, writing, and tweeting her latest musings on design to her customers. To the delight of her 15,000 Twitter followers, this year came two Lemieux firsts: Her book Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design (Clarkson Potter, 2011) was published (it has already sold out of two printings), and her DwellStudio furniture collection debuted at 200 stores nationwide. She traveled to Philadelphia recently for a party at Dane Decor to celebrate the new 62-piece DwellStudio furniture collection that hit stores this month.

John Calley, 81, who ran three Hollywood studios that made such hits as The Exorcist and Spider-Man, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles after a lengthy illness, Sony Pictures Entertainment said. Among the other varied and influential films produced under his tenure as a studio head were All the President's Men, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange , and The Da Vinci Code. His career spanned more than 50 years, and he most recently served as Sony's chairman and chief executive officer.

YOU'VE SEEN Wally Neibart's art. You just don't realize it. Over a span of some 60 years, his illustrations appeared in numerous magazines, from Playboy and Philadelphia magazine, to the National Wild Turkey Federation publication, in local newspapers, including the Daily News, in books, in countless advertisements, on billboards, and, if you happened to be at the Shore at certain times, on your raft. Some of the drawings that he did for fun couldn't be reprinted in a family newspaper.