newsmakers

newsmakers

‘Hunger Games’ fills midnight craving

LOS ANGELES

Fans are eating up “The Hunger Games,” which has opened strongly with $19.7 million domestically from overnight shows that started early Friday.

That’s the seventh-best midnight total ever and puts the movie well on the way toward a blockbuster opening weekend.

The top six midnight draws come from two other teen-based franchises — three movies each from the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series.

Last year’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” leads the list with $43.5 million from midnight shows.

Newly discovered Mozart performed

VIENNA

A long-lost piano piece experts attribute to Mozart has been performed on his piano at his Salzburg home.

The Mozarteum Salzburg Foundation staged Friday’s event. It says the manuscript was found last summer as part of a 160-page book of handwritten piano music in the attic of a house in Tyrol.

The book was dated 1780 — 24 years after Mozart was born — and the manuscript played Friday bears the name “Del Signore Giovane Wolfgango Mozart.” That’s Italian for “Mr. Wolfgang Mozart Jr.”

Sugarland singer to testify in April

INDIANAPOLIS

Singer Jennifer Nettles of the country duo Sugarland has been ordered to give a deposition next month in lawsuits filed over August’s deadly Indiana State Fair stage collapse.

Attorneys for stage builder Mid-America Sound Corp. had wanted Nettles and fellow band member Kristian Bush to begin providing depositions starting Monday, but Marion Superior Court Judge Theodore Sosin on Friday approved a request by the band’s attorneys to reject that timetable.

Mid-America built the roof and rigging used to hold lights and sound equipment that collapsed Aug. 13 before the scheduled Sugarland concert. Seven people died, and dozens were injured.