Tony Lovett

After a brief but successful stint as a zygote, Anthony “Tony” Lovett was born in 1961 at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where his father was director of base operations. Tony’s gig as an Air Force brat was short-lived, however, as his father soon entered the public sector as a salesman for a nascent company called Learjet. In 1966, The Lovett family settled in Dallas, where Tony attended one of the city’s more prominent private academies. There he learned he wasn’t that smart after all.

In 1979, Tony was one of a handful of freshman accepted into the prestigious USC School of Cinema, where he soon displayed an uncanny knack for making annoying films and burning important bridges. In 1981, he created Film Fascists, a small, like-minded group of counter-culture pseudo-intellectuals who used anti-establishment dogma as a smokescreen for senseless acts of vandalism. After almost being thrown out of film school, Tony ended up graduating with high honors on his birthday in 1983. He spent the remainder of the 80’s waiting for Hollywood to recognize his prodigious talents as a filmmaker. Surprisingly, the call never came.

In the interim, Tony joined the Screen Actors Guild and appeared in a few TV commercials as well as the worst movie ever made. He also dabbled in painting, photography, music, improv comedy, and writing of all stripes. As a copywriter, he came up with dozens of taglines that were inevitably better than the movies they promoted (Does anyone remember “Size Does Matter” for the mega-flop Godzilla?). As a journalist, his stories appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, L.A. Weekly, and most ignominiously, Hustler. Whether covering a swingers convention, scouring Mexican border towns for the legendary bride of the burro, or investigating America’s renewed love affair with methamphetamine, Tony demonstrated a distinctive ability to milk laughs from depressing and squalid subject matter. No wonder he went on to become one of the country’s least sought-after political speechwriters in the late 1980’s.

Tony’s wife, Randi, also doubles as his brain, remembering anything he forgets, which is just about everything. Still, Tony remembers enough to consider L.A. Bizarro his second-greatest achievement. The first is his daughter, Ivy Jade.

Matt Maranian

Matt Maranian was born and raised in Fresno, California; a Central Valley suburb distinguished for the nation’s worst air, its 2009 title as “The Drunkest City in America,” and it’s 1984 ranking as the least desirable U.S. city in which to live. Moving to Los Angeles in his late teens, he spent his formative years in pursuit of an acting career, which consisted primarily of 1980s soft drink commercials and arcane short films, and culminated with a brief recurring role costarring with a goat in the disreputable ABC sit-com “Mr. Belvedere.”

He has canvassed fringe culture for such magazines as Wired, British Esquire, Harper’s, bOING bOING, and the now defunct but once noteworthy Los Angeles Reader. He also penned his own column, “Matt Maranian’s Oddity Odyssey,” which appeared in the Los Angeles style and action magazine Glue.

In addition to L.A. Bizarro, he is the author of the critically-acclaimed PAD (Chronicle Books, 2000); a precursor to the new wave of repurposed and DIY design. Making it to #3 on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List, its success spawned a follow-up, PAD Parties (Chronicle Books, 2003) which elaborated on the theme. He became a popular return guest on shows for the Discovery Channel, HGTV, and the DIY Network, and served has a guest on several NPR programs. His design features appeared in ReadyMade magazine, Budget Living, Make, The Washington Post, and Craft magazine, for which he was a regular contributor.

After giving Los Angeles the best years of his life, he and his wife relocated to the bucolic and markedly leftist community of Brattleboro, Vermont, where they opened Boomerang, a high-style outfitter of new, used, and vintage clothing. Winning raves from The Boston Globe, The New York Post, and The Los Angeles Times, the local institution and destination hotspot celebrated its tenth anniversary in July of 2009.

He is currently sequestered among thirty acres of pristine Vermont woodlands in a groovy 1966 California redwood contemporary originally built as a model “vacation cabin” for Women’s Day magazine, although he sill finds himself in a bumper-to-bumper standstill on the 405 more often than he’d care to admit.