Category: media

“The producers of the new Indiana Jones movie have settled a lawsuit against an actor accused of breaching a confidentiality agreement by revealing the film’s plot in a newspaper interview… Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.”

“The merger of record giants Sony Music and BMG has once again been approved by European competition regulators – after a reassessment of the case. The European Commission cleared the deal to join the two firms’ music units in 2004, but a court overturned this. A new inquiry ruled the merger would not ‘create or strengthen a dominant position in the music markets.'”

“A group of record companies says Jammie Thomas has illegally shared music files including Enya and Swedish death metal online. Today, she will become the first of 26,000 people who have been sued by the recording industry to take the case to trial.”

“Race relations are taking a starring role in several new culturally-tinged series this fall. … In one respect, the new shows are different from series already on the air, such as ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ that take place in a ‘colorblind’ world, in that they will confront race, cultural pride and conflict directly. But with all five shows, it’s not a person of color who will be steering that vision — as with much of network television, the series have white male show runners.”

“The publication famous for its television-centric editorial and show listings will launch at TVGuide.com on Tuesday its Online Video Guide, a search service that will attempt to filter out the junk and leave users with the best of Internet video that is related to television.”

The TV ratings system is “undergoing one of its most sweeping overhauls since the advent 20 years ago of Nielsen ‘people meters,’ a then-state-of-the-art audience measurement tool that offered more precision than the viewing diaries that participants had filled out for decades. This fall, homes with DVRs make up nearly 20% (compared with 9% last fall) of Nielsen’s national sample of TV viewers — the cohort whose closely scrutinized behavioral patterns are the most important single factor in deciding whether programs live or die.”

“In the last few years, two American filmmakers, Vincent Gallo and John Cameron Mitchell, have depicted actual sex in their films — and have not been shy about admitting it. Recently, the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee earned an NC-17 rating for his ‘Lust, Caution.’ These films and (HBO show ‘Tell Me You Love Me’) fall under ‘hard-core art,’ said Linda Williams, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of books on both pornography and cinema.”

“This week’s Raindance Film festival in London claims to be the first simultaneously to show its movies via the web. Elliot Grove, its director, claims online distribution gives aspiring filmmakers “an opportunity to find an audience without having to go through the traditional Hollywood system”. It is quite likely that tomorrow’s film directors will emerge from sites such as these without having been through film school at all.”

RFD-TV, which bills itself as “rural America’s most important network, features “livestock auctions, polka music and tractor pulls. CNN it’s not. Or MTV. Or ESPN.”

“The NC-17 rating has long been the movie industry’s equivalent of the scarlet letter. Slap the label on a movie and audiences would shun it, many theater owners would refuse to show it and the film certainly would be a long shot for an Academy Award. But some in Hollywood are hoping the latest film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee will change the way American audiences perceive the NC-17 label.”