Category: media

“Hollywood is not recession-proof or immune to the global credit crunch. Leaner times are ahead as some of the major banks and financial institutions pull back from investing in Tinsel Town. Money is short and film-makers are scrambling to find new sources of revenue.”

Documentary filmmakers have long leaned on non-profit organizations to fund and market their work in the U.S., where public broadcasting and other state-sponsored agencies provide them with little of the financial support afforded to their European counterparts. Now that British filmmakers are increasingly relying on the likes of Amnesty International for support, The Guardian expresses skepticism about the impartiality of their work.

The latest issue of the U.S. glossy, featuring French First Lady Carla Bruni on the cover and in a detailed companion piece, continues to elicit howls of indignation in Europe. The Guardian sees President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to allow a commercial photo shoot of his “rock-chick wife” inside the Elysée Palace “for the first time in the history of the Republic” as “frivolous,” tacky, and indicative of his “contempt for democracy.”

In the U.S., even the most critically lauded subtitled films rarely make a dent at the box office. But this summer, the elegant French-language thriller “Tell No One” has been inexplicably marshalling audiences to art-house theaters and yielding higher per-screen average returns than Hollywood mega-musical “Mamma Mia!” The secret? Positive word-of-mouth and the fact that “ticket buyers seem to forget they are watching a foreign-language film.”

“While the major networks struggle to create compelling content that meets the FCC’s rigid decency standards, HBO, Showtime and AMC have pumped out profitable hits that could not exist on broadcast television. And not only is the public accepting of the adult content, many people pay to watch it.”

“Between now and Labor Day, the major studios and several independent distributors will release more than half a dozen new films on a Wednesday, usually considered one of the slowest days of the week for moviegoing. ‘You get a lot of positive word of mouth going into the weekend. You have two days of people validating the movie locally’.”

“In a study published in the August issue of Pediatrics, Dartmouth Medical School researchers found that violent movies attract, on average, 12.5% of 10- to 14-year-olds in the country, with boys, minorities and children whose parents don’t restrict viewing habits seeing the most gore.”

“The terrible thing for writers at the moment is the BBC – they are such crap. But it’s not just writers – they are killing producers and production companies all over the place because they will put something into development and then sit on it for literally two years.”

People in France illegally downloaded over 13.5 million films in May, according to the study, while the National Centre for Cinematography recorded cinema ticket sales of 12.2 million for the month.

“More and more, they are taking chances on R-rated comedies that ratchet up the rawness, allowing the Sex and the City gal pals to strut their stuff, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to expose body parts in Step Brothers, or Tom Cruise to swear like a sailor.”