Obama's Hollywood Night

Sugar Ray Leonard and Jennifer Beals are the latest boldfaced names expected on Tuesday afternoon for Barack Obama's fund-raiser at the Los Angeles Music Center.

Also on the guest list are Dennis Quaid, Heidi Klum, Sidney Poitier, Cedric the Entertainer, Will.i.am and Kal Penn, as well as industry names like Ari Emanuel and Ron Meyer. Seal is scheduled to perform.

The big question is just how many of Hillary Clinton's high-profile fund-raisers will show up at the event, as the sting of her loss is still hardfelt in some quarters. Obama is expected to reach out to others, like media mogul Haim Saban, who raised more than $1 million for Clinton's campaign. Asked by the Los Angeles Times whether he planned to attend a meeting that Obama and Clinton are hosting on Thursday with her top money men, he sent back a terse reply: "No."

Rob Reiner, who had been publicly outspoken about her chances vis a vis Obama's, is on a family vacation and will not be at the fund raiser. but his political consultant, Chad Griffin, says that Reiner is pledging to wholeheartedly support Obama. After Obama secured the nomination, the director called campaign officials and some of his Hollywood supporters to offer congratulations, and visited the Democratic nominee-to-be's Chicago headquarters last weekend to meet with some policy officials.

Griffin, who plans to attend the Music Center event, said that he has not heard of any notable Los Angeles donors defecting to the McCain camp, and few if any are sitting on the sidelines.

But another Clinton fund-raiser, Sim Farar, planned to meet with John McCain during his visit to Santa Barbara on Tuesday, although Farar said that it was primarily as a courtesy.

Even though it is expected that Obama will vastly dominate his opponent Hollywood fund-raising, his Tuesday event is a contrast to the gala event that John Kerry held at the Music Center in June, 2004, a fete that drew comedy riffs from Billy Crystal, and Barbra Streisand performing a duet with Neil Diamond.

The Obama event was billed as a $2,300-per-person reception, not a concert, with a VIP dinner beforehand for donors who pay $28,500 per couple. The event is expected to draw from a cross section of well-heeled Angelenos, not just in entertainment, and some donors I talked to over the weekend said they were waiting for events later in the year. The three partners in DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, are hoping to host their own event, perhaps in the fall. And some of Obama's supporters say that his success at fund-raising has perhaps taken the onus off of staging a huge entertainment gala in order to lure donors.

Meanwhile, a concern among Obama's Hollywood and Los Angeles supporters is the flurry of e-mails and misinformation about the candidate's positions on Israel and the Middle East.

Last week, former Rep. Mel Levine and Rep. Howard Berman held the first organizing meeting of Obama's Los Angeles Jewish Community Leadership Committee in Beverly Hills, before a group that included such supporters as Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Lynton.

"There has been a persistent effort to undermine and distort [Obama's] record early on," Levine said. "Our goal is to get the facts out, and as they get out, his support in the community will grow."