Category: media

“So important are endings that some filmmakers can’t help but revisit their films, changing endings over and over again to get it just right. But what about the endings that were scrapped before release in favor of something completely different?”

“The Oscar landscape is chock full of actors and actresses who reach the pinnacle of their profession when they capture the golden statuette — and then find themselves faced with a unique dilemma: They’re expected to follow that up with an equally brilliant performance. And public opinion can be swift — and cruel — when that doesn’t happen.”

“TV Guide as a brand had to change” to match the realities of the consumer marketplace, said Ian Birch, the editor in chief of TV Guide magazine. He said that some consumers and industry analysts still have an antiquated “sepia-toned perception” of the publication. “The new TV Guide is about the fans, about the passionate viewers — it’s not about somebody who looks at railway timetables,” he said.

Fifty years ago, “a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem ‘Howl’ was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.”

National Public Radio is no one’s idea of a cutting edge broadcaster, but in recent years, the network has been making a distinct push to draw in listeners younger than the baby boomers who make up the vast majority of its audience. A new morning show launched this week along those lines, but it may be a tough sell to get stations to carry it, and younger listeners are unlikely to give it a long time to find its stride.

“Arabs and Arab Americans in Hollywood live in an interesting time. The appetite for Middle Eastern stories and themes boomed after 9/11 and grew again with the ongoing grind of the war in Iraq. But the roles suddenly being created for Arab-heritage actors often are limited to those of terrorists or are otherwise so poorly drawn that actors must swallow their pride to take them. And that’s if they even get offered the parts.”

“Their films are rarely show in Tunisia’s 17 movie theaters. They are hard to find even in cinemas or video stores throughout the Arab world. But the productions of a group of pioneering female moviemakers have drawn international acclaim to film in Tunisia, where most are oblivious to their home-grown version of Hollywood.”

“The studio distributing The Kite Runner, a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul — perhaps permanently — in response to fears that they could be attacked for their enactment of a culturally inflammatory rape scene. The boys and their relatives are now accusing the filmmakers of mistreatment, and warnings have been relayed to the studio from Afghan and American officials and aid workers that the movie could aggravate simmering enmities.”

Ofcom, the UK’s broadcasting regulator, has “called for a ‘national debate’ on the future of children’s television after publishing research that found that a generation of young teenagers felt disenfranchised by broadcasters.”

“With Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. scrabbling over a suitable co-production arrangement, director Martin Scorsese’s next potential project, The Wolf of Wall Street, remains stuck in its cage.” At the heart of the dispute is a series of insider arguments over the proper way to share production costs and revenues, and there may not be an easy way out.