Allen Salkin

My 2006 article on Matthew Kenney’s notoriously awful business practices. This is how I met Sarma Melngailis. In the light of this and, 18 years later now, the New York Times article on Kenney (following the LA Times article), perhaps you should wonder, who is actually the “Bad Vegan” who stiffs employees and investors and does not pay them back? FYI, In the grips of a con-man, Sarma’s restaurant missed payroll for a month and she used the money from the Netflix show to pay them all back. To my knowledge, none of Kenney’s ex-employees have ever been paid their unpaid wages.

Festivus Interview on WJR 2023Allen SalkinFestivus: The Movie for the Rest of Us

Allen Salkin interviewed about Festivus 2023 on WJR- Detroit Talk Radio by Chris Fenwick

I’m in a new HBO / MAX doc by Erin Lee Carr about the never-before interviewed leader of The Bling Ring. Premieres Sunday October 1. I covered the group (also known at the time as “the burglar bunch” for the New York Times, largely because I attended Calabasas High School and understood the milieu. I was always bothered by a lot of the coverage of the group because these were not, in my view, a bunch of spoiled kids doing things for fun and greed, but were teenagers struggling with numerous issues who found a unique way to act out, thanks to the rise of social media coalescing with their adolescence. I have yet to see a full screener of Erin’s doc, but from today’s Vanity Fair article and the screener (where you can see yours truly in a suit that fits better than my Bad Vegan suit), it looks like she nails it.

So yeah, post, consume, enjoy, think. – Allen

P.S. since you’ll ask: I think this is my 11th documentary, depending if you count E True Hollywood Story as a doc.

Well on the 50th anniversary of M*A*S*H I am unearthing my historic cover of Suicide is Painless.

Sheraton Mexico City

These pages left blank

Unintentionally

Someone always meant to fill them

The dog’s water bowl is empty

A word of encouragement via the miracle of international cell coverage to the partner

Signature required, faucet cylinder arrived, I can’t give it

It was a gift someone gave themself

Time not included

netflix.com Sarma Melngailis Was Torn Apart by Journalists. Here’s What They Got Wrong Her public image is the kind people love to hate, but after reporting on her story for months, I know that’s not who she really is.

For Tudum, the Netflix-run website that allows viewers to go deep on their favorite shows, I wrote this opinion piece about the horrors of intimate partner abuse — and the ways in which the media was complicit in assigning guilt to Sarma Melngailis long before she’d been convicted of anything.