Crime may be eternal and exist everywhere, but in Los Angeles it tends to be spectacular, and never more so than when it involves Hollywood.

Thus, L.A. Noir, TheWrap’s new column that will look at how and where the entertainment industry, politics and our city’s criminal justice system collide.

While “noir” is sometimes regarded as a cyclical fashion in film and literature, there is -- in this town that Orson Welles dubbed “a bright and guilty place” -- a vibrant culture of corruption that never goes out of style.

The administrators of the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills must believe that silence is golden.

Why else would they keep the retirement facility’s remaining residents in the dark about a final moving day deadline? There were 78 of them left back in August, when MPTF CEO Dr. David Tillman sent them a letter stating the necessity for them to leave by year’s end, but no one has actually give an official close-date for the longterm care center.

The rumors and omens had been around for at least a week.

According to scuttlebutt, 40 Los Angeles Times staffers were about to be canned -- and, for auguries, ambulances had been spotted parked outside the newspaper’s Spring Street building on a couple of recent occasions.

In the parlance of media metaphors, the ax dropped, or the shoe fell, or the bricks were hit, on Tuesday.

The latest wrinkle in film director Roman Polanski’s legal problems is a hint from one of his French lawyers (since denied by another Polanski attorney) that the auteur is considering throwing in the towel and will stop fighting extradition to the U.S.

Polanski is being portrayed as a man who, rather than potentially spend years behind bars fighting transfer to Los Angeles, will choose to face the music now for his 1977 arrest for sexual assault on a minor.

Yesterday the trial of two Bahamians accused of attempting to extort $25 million from John Travolta ended in a shocking mistrial.

It looks as though that Oct. 2 meeting with the Justice Department and representatives of the L.A. District Attorney’s office and Roman Polanski’s American legal team did not pan out for the film director.

“There really are no good guys or bad guys in this story,” Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation CEO Ken Scherer tells TheWrap.

Scherer’s adversaries in the war of words over the planned closure of the MPTF’s acute-care hospital and long-term care home, however, feel otherwise. To them, the fund itself is an unambiguous villain for its continued transfer of elderly residents to regional nursing homes as part of the hospital and home’s imminent closure.

Samantha Geimer, who accused director Roman Polanski of rape when she was 13, has filed a motion to dismiss the case against him.

The move, filed by her lawyer on Monday in Los Angeles, could impact how a judge would choose to sentence the director, if he is extradited from Switzerland.

In a document surprisingly free of dry legal language, Santa Monica attorney Lawrence Silver’s statement on behalf of Samantha Geimer to dismiss the charges against Roman Polanski is extraordinary for its indignant tone.

The document lays out the suffering endured by Geimer every time the media spark the embers of the 32-year-old case. (Polanski admitted having sexual intercourse with Geimer in 1977, when she was 13.)

The preliminary hearing that will decide whether Anna Nicole Smith’s case is ready for primetime supposedly will wrap up this week.

This is good news for Smith’s former boyfriend and two doctors, who'll soon thereafter learn whether they will stand trial for supplying Smith with a veritable candy store of prescription opiates and downers.