LOS ANGELES – Zsa Zsa Gabor’s celebrity was always more about winning attention than winning film roles. But now, the ailing 94-year-old diva’s final fade is being upstaged by a real-life Hollywood soap opera featuring a family fractured by fame, fortune, deceit and just plain weirdness.
As the former socialite and actress lies motionless — unable to eat, barely able to communicate, hardly knowing where she is — tensions seethe between the two people closest to Gabor: Her husband of 25 years, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, and her only daughter, Francesca Hilton.
Von Anhalt and Hilton are at odds on almost everything regarding Gabor. They fight over her will, each rewriting it without telling the other. They fight over her house: Von Anhalt sued Hilton in 2005 for refinancing the property, which she says she did to protect her mother’s investments. Now, Hilton is disputing von Anhalt’s right to sell the place.
They argue over her image: Hilton detests von Anhalt for publishing photos of Gabor in her hospital gown; he says it allows her fans to see that she’s happy and not “half dead.” They argue over visiting Gabor: Von Anhalt says that because Hilton is “crazy,” she can only come when accompanied by a doctor. Hilton says she hasn’t been allowed to see her mother in more than two months.
And the bizarre he-said, she-said battle continues, with von Anhalt talking openly to the press, Hilton typically hiding from the press, and the woman who pioneered the art of being famous for being famous lying helplessly in between.
Almost weekly, Von Anhalt alerts the media to another Zsa Zsa Gabor medical crisis: A broken hip, a leg amputated because of gangrene, the other leg nearly amputated, blood clots, infections, pneumonia. Last week, she underwent surgery to reposition her feeding tube. Since last summer, Gabor has been admitted to UCLA Medical Center nearly two dozen times.
Then there are von Anhalt’s own news flashes: In 2007 he declared that he might be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby after Smith died in Florida. A DNA test proved him wrong. Later that year, he called police to report he’d been mugged, and they found the 67-year-old naked in his Rolls Royce. Last year, von Anhalt briefly joined California’s race for governor. He also says he’s considering running for mayor of Los Angeles in 2013.
Von Anhalt, who claims to be a German prince, now says he wants to have a baby with an egg donor and a surrogate, because after his wife dies, “I will be very alone.”
The prince also wants to ditch Gabor’s sprawling Bel-Air mansion for $ 15 million and auction off her vast collection of antiques and designer clothing, sometimes plugging the planned sales around medical reports on his wife.
“My wife, even when she is at home, she doesn’t know where she is,” he says. “She doesn’t know if she’s in hospital or at home, so it doesn’t make any sense to keep the house.”
Hilton says von Anhalt has no right to sell the house. He claims he has power of attorney over Gabor’s affairs and that the pre-nuptial agreement signed by the couple in 1986 shows the mansion belongs to Gabor alone.
Von Anhalt insists everything he does is in his wife’s best interest and her care and well-being are his priorities. He says he is constantly by her side and is often the only person she trusts.
He met Gabor in 1984 while on vacation in Los Angeles from Germany. Then 40, he checked into the Beverly Hilton and went looking for a real Hollywood party. He found one at author Sidney Sheldon’s gated estate.
“I didn’t have an invitation, and I forced myself into it,” he recalls.
He dressed in a royal uniform, rented a Rolls Royce convertible, paid two college students 100 bucks each to pose as his bodyguards and crashed the party. Inside, he was introduced as the Duke of Saxony and Gabor was immediately taken. Twenty-seven years his senior, she made him her lover. He came often from Germany to see her, and after two years, over a meeting with a press agent, it was determined they would be married on Aug. 14, 1986.
Von Anhalt told the story recently during a lengthy interview with The Associated Press at a popular Sunset Strip restaurant. Wearing a fitted shirt, Diesel jeans, and a diamond watch and wedding ring, he came with a publicist and chose a patio table right next to the sidewalk.
Francesca Hilton — whose father is hotel scion Conrad Hilton, Gabor’s second husband — refused to meet with the AP for this story, saying she does not want to perpetuate von Anhalt’s publicity. Instead, she sent her publicist, Edward Lozzi, who spoke carefully about Gabor and Hilton, both of whom he has known for more than 30 years. Halfway through the interview, Hilton called him on his cell and he convinced her to speak briefly to this reporter on the phone.
Hilton says she and her mother were always very close, talking on the phone “10 times a day.” Gabor supported her various careers, as Hilton pursued photography, opened her own publicity firm and took the stage as a stand-up comic.

“He’s the one who tried to separate us,” Hilton says of von Anhalt. “I have no idea why he hates me.”

One thing the two agree on is that their troubles began in 2002 after a car accident that left Gabor paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. She became dependent on von Anhalt’s care, and he and Hilton began butting heads.

Hilton says through Lozzi that after the accident, von Anhalt started pushing her away and behaving oddly. Von Anhalt says Hilton is simply threatened by his relationship with Gabor.

Read the whole hot breaking news

ROCHESTER, N.Y. – At Image City Photography Gallery, Gary Thompson delights in pointing out qualities of light, contrast and clarity in one of his best-selling prints — a winter-sunset view of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan peak shot with a hefty Pentax film camera he bought in 1999 for $ 1,700.
His wife, Phyllis, a latecomer to fine-art photography after they retired from teaching in the 1990s, favors a Hasselblad X-Pan for panoramic landscapes, such as a time-lapse shot of a harbor in Nova Scotia.
Of 11 partners and resident artists at the private gallery in Rochester — the western New York city where George Eastman transformed photography from an arcane hobby into a mass commodity with his $ 1 Brownie in 1900 — the Thompsons are the only ones left who haven’t switched to filmless digital cameras.
But that time may be near.
“I like the color we get in film, the natural light,” says Phyllis Thompson, 70, who married her high-school sweetheart 50 years ago. “But digital cameras are getting much better all the time, and there will come a time when we probably won’t be able to get film anymore. And then we’ll have to change.”
At the turn of the 21st century, American shutterbugs were buying close to a billion rolls of film per year. This year, they might buy a mere 20 million, plus 31 million single-use cameras — the beach-resort staple vacationers turn to in a pinch, according to the Photo Marketing Association.
Eastman Kodak Co. marketed the world’s first flexible roll film in 1888. By 1999, more than 800 million rolls were sold in the United States alone. The next year marked the apex for combined U.S. sales of rolls of film (upward of 786 million) and single-use cameras (162 million).
Equally startling has been the plunge in film camera sales over the last decade. Domestic purchases have tumbled from 19.7 million cameras in 2000 to 280,000 in 2009 and might dip below 100,000 this year, says Yukihiko Matsumoto, the Jackson, Mich.-based association’s chief researcher.
For InfoTrends imaging analyst Ed Lee, film’s fade-out is moving sharply into focus: “If I extrapolate the trend for film sales and retirements of film cameras, it looks like film will be mostly gone in the U.S. by the end of the decade.”
Just who are the die-hards, holdouts and hangers-on?
Among those who still rely on film — at least part of the time — are advanced amateurs and a smattering of professionals who specialize in nature, travel, scientific, documentary, museum, fine art and forensic photography, market surveys show.
Regular point-and-shoot adherents who haven’t made the switch tend be poorer or older — 55 and up.
But there’s also a swelling band of new devotees who grew up in the digital age and may have gotten hooked from spending a magical hour in the darkroom during a high school or college class.
Others are simply drawn to its strengths over digital and are even venturing into retro-photo careers.
“In everything from wedding to portrait to commercial photography, young professionals are finding digital so prevalent that they’re looking for a sense of differentiation,” says Kayce Baker, a marketing director at Fujifilm North America. “That artistic look is something their high-end clients want to see.”
Kodak remains the world’s biggest film manufacturer, with Japan’s Fuji right on its tail. But the consumer and professional films they make have dwindled to a precious few dozen film stocks in a handful of formats, becoming one more factor in the mammoth drop-off in film processing.
Scott’s Photo in Rochester finally switched this year stopped daily processing of color print film because fewer than one in 20 customers are dropping off film. A decade ago, “we could process 300 rolls on a good day, and now we see maybe 8 or 10 rolls on the few days we actually process,” owner Scott Sims says.
For the hustling masses, there’s no turning back the clock.

“There’s so many digital images taken every day, especially with mobile media, that never will hit a piece of paper,” says Therese Mulligan, administrative chair of the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Even at major photography schools, film is an elective specialty.

“Our entire first two years’ curriculum is digital in orientation,” Mulligan says. “Those that follow a fine-art option are the first to gravitate toward film. Other genres we teach — photojournalism or advertising or biomedical — have a stronger digital emphasis because of the industry itself.”

Read the whole hot breaking news

LOS ANGELES – Writer-director Christopher Nolan has called “Action!” on his latest Batman film.
Warner Bros. Pictures says principal photography began this week on “The Dark Knight Rises,” the conclusion to Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
The film will be shot in India, England, Scotland and the American cities of New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
Christian Bale returns as Bruce Wayne and Batman. Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman are also returning to the cast. Newcomers for the third installment in the franchise include Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Gordon-Levitt, Hardy and Cotillard also appeared in Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception.”
“The Dark Knight Rises” is slated for release on July 20, 2012.

CAPTREE STATE PARK, N.Y. – Killers have long chosen isolated locations to secretly dump their victims: Gary Ridgway got the Green River Killer moniker for leaving women he murdered along the waterway near Seattle, some of New York serial killer Joel Rifkin’s 17 victims were found in shallow graves on eastern Long Island or in creeks in Brooklyn, and in 2008 the FBI found the body of a slain mobster buried in a Long Island industrial park.

Authorities on Long Island suspect a serial killer may be responsible for the deaths of four prostitutes found in December dumped just steps from an isolated beach highway, but news this week that other killers have used the same strip of Ocean Parkway near Jones Beach as a dumping ground of death ratcheted up an already intense investigation.

“It is clear that the area in and around Gilgo Beach has been used to discard human remains for some period of time,” Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota said.

Read the whole hot breaking news

SAN FRANCISCO – The images are bloody, grotesque and convincing: Osama bin Laden lies dead, the left side of his head blasted away. But the pictures are fakes.

Doctored photos purporting to show bin Laden’s corpse rocketed around the world on television, online via social media and in print almost as soon as his death was announced.

The pictures have spread without regard for their origin or whether the images are real. Meanwhile, scammers have piggybacked on the popularity of the images and spiked supposed online links with computer viruses.

Read the whole hot breaking news