Julia Roberts’ star turn in “Three Days of Rain” was the talk of the city when it opened in April, but with two weeks left in the play’s run, ticket brokers say they are finding themselves stuck with hundreds of seats — and are now selling ducats below face value…
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Da Vinci Code racks Up Record International Box Office
The Da Vinci Code has passed $400 million at the box office overseas. “Sony forecast the film version of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel will “in the next couple of days” surpass 2002’s “Spider-Man” (overseas gross of $417.9 million) and 2004’s “Spider-Man 2″ ($410.5 million) to become the studio’s biggest international hit ever.”
The Author And The Heine Prize
“Austrian author Peter Handke was informed last week that he would receive the Heinrich Heine Prize of the City of Düsseldorf. After an outburst of public indignation and counter-indignation, the decision was blocked this week by the Düsseldorf City Council.”
Claim: Mozart Helps You See Better
Listening to Mozart helps you do better on eyesight tests. “Brazilian researchers let 30 patients listen to 10 minutes of Mozart’s sonata for two pianos, while another 30 prepared in silence. The research, in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, found the music improved performance in the tests.”
TV Pilots Flee LA
Los Angeles is losing the TV pilot business. A new study reports that filming is down “23 percent from last year’s levels, costing more than 1,000 jobs and draining up to $70 million” from the local economy. “Twenty-five other states have used tax incentives to lure away pilot production, which takes place from February through May.”
Okay To Copy? We Wanna Know
What are consumers allowed to copy and in what form? British MPs want producers to clarify. “The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.”
Tom Stoppard’s Czech Roots
Playwright Tom Stoppard left Czechoslovakia 68 years ago. “He has said that he is ‘English now’ but that at some level he has never stopped also being Czech. His mother’s death a few years ago may have subtly freed Stoppard to explore himself for traces of his origins. But no sudden self-discovery led to this play. It seems to have been prompted by reflecting on his friend Vaclav Havel’s moral and philosophical writings, and by reading about the background to the Czech ‘Chartist’ dissidents in the 1970s.”
A Device That Can “Hear” Everything
“Building a general radio that can receive and transmit, and attaching it to a software system that can fill in the gaps of what we normally think of as radio, is kind of like the Enterprise’s deflector dish: Give engineering 20 minutes and it can do anything the captain needs to move the plot along. One of Matt Ettus’ USRPs, with the right daughterboards and radio software, can capture FM, read GPS, decode HDTV, transmit over emergency bands and open garage doors.”
Free E-Books for All
Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library plan to make ‘a third of a million’ e-books available free for a month at the first World eBook Fair. Downloads will be available at the fair’s Web site from July 4, the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg’s founding, through Aug. 4. The majority of the books will be contributed by the World eBook Library. It otherwise charges $8.95 a year for access to its database of more than 250,000 e-books, documents and articles.”
Self-Interested – Bands Build Fans By Phone
These days major recording labels want to see musical acts demonstrate they have a fan base before being signed. So bands are turning to promotions for mobile phones and other fan-building ploys to build their careers…