Category: media

A US film industry group has filed a trade complaint against Canadian subsidies for film production. The group “claims the U.S. has lost 47,000 jobs per year and an estimated $23 billion US in economic benefits in feature filmmaking since 2000, citing data from the Center for Entertainment Industry Data.”

“There are some fundamental truths in the universe. We cannot travel faster than light, and we cannot make a copy protection system that is uncrackable.” Here’s why software locks on music and movies don’t work.

“Last year, Variety’s annual roundup listed 467 festivals. Will the total break 500 this year? What began as an effort to make the gondolas run on time – or at least more profitably – has become a cultural juggernaut that’s as indispensable a part of the movie industry as DVD revenues and awards shows. (Cannes has a worldwide profile that must rival that of the Oscars.)”

“The movie industry had its first $4 billion summer and will finish with a haul of about $4.15 billion from the first weekend in May through Labor Day, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers. That was up 8 percent from last summer and surpassed the previous high of $3.95 billion in summer 2004.”

“NBC Universal notified Apple late Thursday that it would not renew its contract to sell digital downloads of its television shows through iTunes when the agreement expires in December. Apple retaliated by saying Friday that it wouldn’t sell any shows from the fall season.”

There was a time when calling a sho “amateur hour” was an insult. “But the slur has lost its punch. Any given evening, on any broadcast or cable network, could be amateur night now, and suffer no more for it than high ratings and crowds of commercials.”

In a sign of how fearful TV execs have become in the face of an FCC crackdown on foul language, PBS has announced that it will distribute two versions of Ken Burns’s upcoming documentary on World War II. Stations will have the option of airing either the original version of the film, or an edited version in which four words of profanity (in a 14-1/2 hour documentary) have been “bleeped.”

The movie industry had a great summer of ’07, despite critical complaints about the quality of many blockbusters. “By parsing out high-profile movies every week, including through most of August – a throwaway month in past years – the overall box office soared to a record $4 billion… Another record was broken when four movies hauled in more than $300 million apiece. A fifth is close to crossing that threshold by the end of Labor Day weekend.”

Fragile prints of classic Hollywood films have a new, secure home in a Cold War-era bunker in Virginia. The massive collection (6 million items strong) of audio-visual materials owned by the Library of Congress will be stored in “a radiation-hardened building once used by the Federal Reserve to store cash and emergency supplies in the event of a nuclear attack.”

“The Venice Film Festival gets serious this year with competition films about the Iraq war and its impact on U.S. society, police brutality in Egypt, big corporation corruption and the Mafia in Italy… Director Marco Mueller has assembled a Hollywood-heavy line up for this year’s festival, which opened on Wednesday.”