Category: media

The Oscars are getting their own museum in LA, and “an architect who helped raise a bustling new quarter from the industrial mess of southeast Paris” has been tapped to design it. Christian de Portzamparc’s movie museum will rise just south of Hollywood Boulevard, and is expected to cost $200m.

“The problem, Eisner said, is that the Writer’s Guild is lobbying for a bigger cut of the profits from digital distribution–and according to the former Disney chief, those profits simply aren’t there.”

So Tinsel Town takes aim. “With minimal publicity and with fewer than 50 prints, the box-office receipts and screen averages of a big Bollywood film outstrip by far any of their other foreign-language counterparts – and sometimes even Hollywood blockbusters.”

“It’s a tremendous loss not to have Letterman, Leno and these other shows as an opportunity to promote a project. Those shows are an integral part of promotion for a film, TV show, album or book.”

Hollywood studios won’t be seeing any relief from the writers’ strike arriving from the north. “The Writers Guild of Canada is telling its members not to accept work from U.S. producers looking to replace striking American writers.”

Television producers who also serve as writers on prime-time shows are in a tricky position with the Writers’ Guild on strike. Many are siding with the guild, and refusing to work. As of Tuesday night, there were still no plans for talks between the guild and the major studios to resume.

Fans of the game Warhammer made a movie based on the game. It “cost more than 10,000 euros, took months to film, employs 11 principal actors, dozens of extras and sophisticated post-production special effects.” One problem? Owners of the game won’t allow the film to be shown.

The nominations are out for the European Film Awards, with the Oscar-winning biopic, The Queen topping the list. “The Queen faces stiff competition in the best film category from Romanian drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Other films shortlisted in this category include The Last King of Scotland and La Vie en Rose, also known as La Mome.” The awards will be handed out December 1 in Berlin.

The Canadian government has appointed “Hubert T. Lacroix, a Montreal corporate lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions who has a background acquiring radio stations and other media assets,” to run the CBC, replacing Robert Rabinovitch. “Some observers are surprised that neither Richard Stursberg, the head of CBC English television, nor his French counterpart, Sylvain Lafrance, got the job, and it’s unclear whether they were even in the running.”

One of the tricky parts of the Hollywood writers’ strike is that many of the prime time TV shows that are being struck will be able to continue airing for as long as a couple of months, thanks to a backlog of episodes already filmed. “If a strike extends into January, however, viewers should expect some shake-ups in prime-time line-ups.” That would likely mean a lot more dreaded (but popular) reality TV shows.