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© St. Petersburg Times, published June 5, 2002
Youth orchestra to perform at Yankee Stadium
If you watch the New York Yankees vs. San Francisco Giants game on TV Saturday afternoon, you may see some familiar faces.
Members of the Tampa Bay Youth Orchestra are scheduled to perform the national anthem at Yankee Stadium before the game, which starts at 1:15 p.m. and is airing on WTVT-Ch. 13. Sixty-one students from the orchestra will be in New York primarily to perform a program of American music at Carnegie Hall on Monday. The orchestra, which operates under the auspices of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, is open to all school age students in the Tampa Bay area.
Winona Ryder broke her right arm outside a Beverly Hills, Calif., courtroom Monday after the Girl, Interrupted star was ordered to face trial on felony counts of shoplifting, vandalism and illegal possession of prescription painkillers, reports People magazine.
The hearing, stemming from Ryder's Dec. 12 arrest outside the Beverly Hills branch of Saks Fifth Avenue for allegedly stealing nearly $5,000 worth of store merchandise (as well as, say police records, possession of the painkillers), already had been postponed four times.
With the injury, which reportedly came when press photographers shoved the actor as they jockeyed for a better shot of her, the case has been postponed for a fifth time, until Thursday.
Luc Besson, a top French movie director and producer who made The Big Blue and The Fifth Element, is the subject of a manslaughter investigation by a judge examining the 1999 death of a cameraman filming a stunt that went wrong, reports Agence France-Press.
The investigation against him is one step short of criminal charges and could result in a trial.
The judge is looking into the circumstances around a spectacular car chase that was filmed on Aug. 16, 1999, for the movie Taxi 2, which was produced by Besson's company.
During the sequence, the stunt car, a Peugeot 406 fitted with special airfoils, came speeding out of a Paris tunnel and became briefly airborne.
The car sailed past its mark and hit a cameraman, Alain Dutartre, 41, who died later of massive head injuries.
Dueling blockbusters Spider-Man and Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones teamed up to lead the movie industry to a historic month of May at the box office, with revenues hovering at the rarefied $1-billion mark.
The two titans of the megaplex generated nearly $600-million in combined grosses last month, helping the industry's top 10 films in May gross a whopping $785.9-million, a 46.6 percent jump from last year. The top 10 films alone surpassed the record of $748.2-million for May set in 2000.
In May, Spider-Man passed the $300-million milestone faster than any film before it while Clones passed the $200-million mark in just 12 days. Spider-Man, released May 3, had a record-shattering opening weekend of $114.8-million. It has barely slowed since, despite strong head-to-head competition from Clones.
By next weekend, Spider-Man will likely have passed Jurassic Park to become the fifth highest-grossing movie of all time.