Category: media

“This is our chance to give something back to an extraordinary city which has helped us produce an extraordinary film. We came up with it once we realised what a success the film was becoming after the Golden Globes.”

“The ads have sold for between $2.4 million and $3 million per 30-second slot this year. The network said its total of $261 million in ad revenue for all of Super Bowl day is a record, calling it an especially impressive feat in the middle of the economy’s steep downturn.”

Frozen River, Chop Shop, Ballast, and Wendy and Lucy form something of a critically-acclaimed wave of movies – “recession indies” – about poverty in America. “But will audiences respond? So far, the signs aren’t encouraging… When Americans do go to movies about the poor, they’re usually set a continent or two away.”

“That so many viewers … around the country risk losing something as basic as a free television signal is a function, at least in part, of the government’s failure to anticipate that those most affected would be among the nation’s most frail and vulnerable.”

“There’s a reason L.A. classical music fans may have had trouble listening to KUSC-FM (91.5) this week. Lightning struck both the station’s transmission line and antenna in the San Gabriel Valley on Sunday afternoon, eventually causing the station to operate with a temporary antenna at a reduced power of 2,000 watts….”

The new show, co-produced with Twentieth Television, “will use Yahoo!’s search engine to identify the top ten things for which people are searching at the time and then expands on those topics. Such a service already exists on Yahoo!’s home page.”

“John Landis has sued Michael Jackson for allegedly failing to pay profits over the last four years from Jackson’s “Thriller” video, which Landis co-wrote and directed in 1983… The action accuses Jackson of ‘fraudulent, malicious and oppressive conduct’ in failing to pay Landis 50% of the net proceeds.”

“The BBC is to put every one of the 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK on the internet as well as opening up the Arts Council’s vast film archive online as part of a range of initiatives that it has pledged will give it a ‘deeper commitment to arts and music.” The BBC is vowing expanded coverage of the arts.

“Costly state incentives to lure film production and jobs may actually be paying off, at least in New York. A study of New York’s tax breaks for movie and television production suggested that a 30 percent credit offered by the state, along with an additional 5 percent offered by New York City, could be expected to keep or create about 19,500 jobs while yielding $404 million in tax revenue, at a cost of $215 million in credits.”

Dennis Lim: “[I]t is also, by now, a movie that pre-empts debate. It comes with a built-in, catchall defense – it’s a fairy tale, and any attempt to engage with it in terms of, say, its ethics or politics gets written off as political correctness.”