Quick Takes: Jim Ladd lands Sirius gig

Longtime Los Angeles DJ Jim Ladd will move to satellite radio in mid-January with a new show he’ll be hosting nightly on Sirius XM Radio, officials at the service announced Thursday. It gives Ladd’s daily show a national audience for the first time in his career.

Ladd was fired from his post at KLOS-FM (95.5) in October during a round of cost cutting at the station after a change in ownership. Ladd had been a regular presence on the Southern California airwaves for more than 40 years, and was considered the last DJ at a major market commercial station with complete freedom to choose the music he plays.

“Traditional FM radio has turned its back on the very thing that made rock radio the magical experience it was intended to be,” Ladd said in a statement. His SiriusXM show will be carried on the satellite service’s Deep Cuts channel 27.

— Randy Lewis

Ebert show will go on hiatus

Roger Ebert says he’s putting “Ebert Presents at the Movies” on hiatus at the end of December.

The film critic made the announcement in a blog post Wednesday titled “So long for awhile.” He wrote that the revamped movie review program that launched on public television in January of 2011 has been struggling to find financial support and will go dark for a period while Ebert and his wife (and executive producer), Chaz, speak to “top executives of several channels and film distributors, charitable foundations, Web delivery services, potential corporate sponsors, and crowd-funding sources.”

Ebert said the program would go dark “to allow the public television stations that carry our show to plan their programs for the beginning of the new year.”

In early November, Ebert revealed that he and Chaz had been essentially paying for the entire show (minus a contribution from the Kanbar Charitable Trust) and that they could no longer afford to do so.

Although there have been options to explore, the end-of-the-year timing forced the Eberts to take the show on hiatus.

“Please have faith in us as we sort through the possibilities,” he wrote.

— Patrick Kevin Day

Producer’s killer to be sentenced

The killer of Bennett Bradley, a longtime director and producer at Hollywood’s Fountain Theatre, faces a possible sentence of 16 years to life after his conviction last week for second-degree murder.

The three-week trial in Los Angeles Superior Court did not yield the first-degree murder conviction that the district attorney’s office had sought against Jose Fructuoso, 27. Jurors deliberated for a day and a half before convicting him of the lesser charge on Nov. 23, district attorney’s spokeswoman Shiara Davila-Morales said Wednesday. Judge Dennis Landin set sentencing for Jan. 3. Fructuoso stabbed Bradley, 60, to death Jan. 1, 2010 in the director’s mid-Wilshire apartment. Besides producing and directing plays during his 17 years with the Fountain — including acclaimed stagings of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (2006) and “Gem of the Ocean” (2008) — Bradley ran its box office and greeted audiences, making him, according to Fountain producing director Simon Levy, “our public face in many ways.”

— Mike Boehm