Category: media

If George Lucas has his way, the Star Wars saga might soon be coming to the small screen. “The project does not include any Skywalkers or other familiar characters from the six hit films.” Lucas says that the idea for a TV version of the wildly popular film series has so far been a tough sell with Hollywood executives.

Concern for the safety of three young Afghan actors who participated in a homosexual rape scene for the film version of the hit novel, The Kite Runner, caused producers to delay the release of the movie while the actors and their families were moved to safety. The decision was controversial, but the author of the book has now come out to publicly defend the delay.

The BBC says “2,000 employees — almost a tenth of the workforce — will be sacked in an attempt to find £2 billion in budget cuts.”

“The new system is a compromise between advertisers and broadcasters after years of squabbling over the best way to measure how many people watch commercials.”

Hollywood producers have dropped demands that the Writers Guild overhaul residual payments. “The move came as the two sides returned to the bargaining table with two weeks to go before the current contract expires and rhetoric about the chances of a crippling strike against the television and film industry was running high.”

TV in Iran is changing. “Analysts say the new programs are part of the government’s bid to use television as a more effective instrument to shape public opinion. Most series still have clear political messages, though they are conveyed with much more subtlety than in the past.”

“Residual fees are at the center of labor talks underway between the Hollywood studios and the union that represents movie and TV writers. The major studios want to revamp the decades-old system, citing soaring production costs and fragmented audiences amid today’s digital revolution. But the writers say these payments help them weather Hollywood’s feast-and-famine work cycles.”

“The filtering tools are designed so the owners of copyrighted video can block their material from appearing on YouTube, which has become a pop culture phenomenon in its 2-year existence. The tools also give the owners of copyrighted video the option to sell ads around their material if they want the clips to remain available on YouTube.”

“India may be forced to withdraw its Oscar entry in the foreign film category because of alleged bias in the selection process.”

Desperate for praise, movie studios often make blurb-stars out of local movie critics. “The studios typically scour critics’ published work for favorable comments, and often seek permission to use a snippet or two in an ad. Some movie representatives ask critics for blurb-ready comments in the lobby of a theater immediately after a screening, long before the critics have published or aired their reviews.”