Fragile prints of classic Hollywood films have a new, secure home in a Cold War-era bunker in Virginia. The massive collection (6 million items strong) of audio-visual materials owned by the Library of Congress will be stored in “a radiation-hardened building once used by the Federal Reserve to store cash and emergency supplies in the event of a nuclear attack.”
Author: sbergman
Venice Goes Hollywood
“The Venice Film Festival gets serious this year with competition films about the Iraq war and its impact on U.S. society, police brutality in Egypt, big corporation corruption and the Mafia in Italy… Director Marco Mueller has assembled a Hollywood-heavy line up for this year’s festival, which opened on Wednesday.”
Obsessive Fans Go Mainstream
TV-based conventions used to be limited to Star Trek and other sci-fi programs that obsessed fans built their lives around. But these days, the culture of TV/movie obsession has broadened considerably. Does LebowskiFest sound like your thing? What about a Napoleon Dynamite convention?
Hollywood’s Anti-Piracy Fight Gets Smaller
“Forever on the prowl for the next big thing in movie piracy, the motion picture industry is zeroing in on small and increasingly-powerful mobile-phone cameras that might be trained on theater screens… Hollywood is also watching for digital cameras capable of taking video. Last week a Virginia teenager pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unlawfully filming a motion picture after being nabbed capturing 20 seconds of Transformers with a Canon Powershot camera. She’d recorded the brief action scene to show her little brother later.”
Interview With The Premature-Burning Man
“Paul Addis, the San Francisco playwright arrested Tuesday for allegedly torching Burning Man’s giant effigy five days early, won’t admit to setting the icon on fire. But he effusively praises the action — whoever did it — calling it a badly needed “reality check” for the desert art festival. Addis, 35, says Burning Man has turned into an ‘Alterna-Disney,’ while the early burn acted as a protest aimed at the event’s increasing commercialization.”
Controversy In Oz Over Osama/Jesus Art
“A print of Osama Bin Laden which morphs into Jesus, and a statue of the Virgin Mary covered in a burqa have sparked furious debate in Australia. The two pieces have gone on display at the National Art School in Sydney after being entered for the prestigious Blake Prize for Religious Art.”
Everybody Loves A Good Barge Play
New York is known for staging theatrical performances in unusual locations – think how strange Shakespeare in the Park must have sounded when first proposed – but a musical on a barge? That can’t be easy to pull off. The opening performance “will be the culmination of a yearslong odyssey from concept to performance that involved surmounting death and bureaucracy, illness and poverty, logistical challenges and timing foul-ups in steadfast dedication to a creative vision.”
Sgt. Luthier
Deciding what to do with your life after serving a tour of duty as a soldier in a war zone can be a tricky (and costly) process. Not so, though, for Sgt. Geoffrey Allison, who spent his down time in Iraq strengthening his skills as a violin maker. “Nearing retirement, Allison has begun turning his passion into his profession. He’s already sold some of his violins, and with his military pension he plans to support himself as a violin maker when he retires from the Army next spring.”
Recirculating The Classics
Despite all the talk of a classical recording glut, enthusiasts know that many of the greatest recordings from decades past are all but lost, unavailable to the public at any price. “ArkivMusic, an online retailer that launched in 2002, is out to reverse that trend and restore as much of the deep catalog as possible. In addition to stocking every classical CD in print, it now offers what it calls ArkivCDs: reissues of out-of-print CDs produced on demand for the consumer.”
Summer Of The Woman In The Berkshires
The Massachusetts-based Berkshire Theatre Festival has roots that stretch far and wide around New England, but the most striking thing about its history is how female-centered it is. “The festival has its roots in expressions of female ingenuity,” was founded by a woman looking to preserve a prized local building, and this season, is focusing squarely on plays that highlight “social aspiration and the cost of women’s advancement.”