Robert Towne is seventy-one and a legend, notably for his classic 1974 screenplay for the Los Angeles-based Chinatown. As writer and director, Towne returns to that turf in his arid adaptation of John Fante's autobiographical 1939 novel about Arturo Bandini (a miscast Colin Farrell), an Italian writer struggling to make it in Depression-era L.A. Arturo is attracted to Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican waitress he alienates with racial epithets and sexual rejection. The virginal Arturo does bed Vera (a vivid Idina Menzel), a married Jew whose lower body is badly scarred. Though these three have all experienced prejudice, they fail to heal one another's wounds. The film, which is literary to a fault, includes an earthquake, but if the earth moves at all, thank Hayek, who gives the tale a smoldering life that finally lifts it from the page.

“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"