Category: media

“Telephone carriers see offering television service as a way to better compete against cable companies, which are vying for more customers with new voice and high-speed Internet services. The FCC sees the move as a way to spur more competition.”

This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared that awards ballots would go out on Dec. 26, the earliest date yet, with a return deadline of Jan. 13. “Those tweaks have turned what once was the film industry’s holiday hiatus into a kind of cinematic hell week for the academy’s approximately 5,800 ballot-casting members and the operatives who want their votes.”

At a time when many major record labels have been cutting back, CBS announced this week that it is reviving long-defunct CBS Records, “through which the company plans to release music and promote artists on its networks’ stable of television shows… Outside of television, CBS Records will release music online through its own Web site and retailers such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store. The label has completed a deal with Apple to sell music, videos and other content, and expects to seal similar agreements with other online music services.”

” How much should actors get paid for appearing on iPod screens instead of television? The [Screen Actors Guild] maintains that studios should pay actors for digital content. Studio bosses, saying that Webisodes are promotional material, want actors to appear for less than their usual fee… Actors still regret agreeing to a low pay scale during the advent of VHS; they have been stuck with the same rate since the 1980s.”

“The Smithsonian Institution has agreed to develop a system to document and explain its decisions about why television and film producers are granted or denied access to its collections outside of a widely criticized contract the institution entered into with Showtime Networks.”

“A study released Thursday by the Parents Television Council, a frequent critic of the TV industry over such issues as broadcast indecency, found that prime-time shows in the last year dealt with religion half as much as the year before. When they did, the Los Angeles-based group said, religion was cast in negative light more than one-third of the time.” The study points to the Fox network as an egregious mocker of religion.

Artistic society tends to celebrate the young prodigy above the experienced craftsman. But a look around Hollywood reveals that many of the top directors of both our era and those past were in their 70s and beyond when they began turning out their best work.

This year’s Golden Globe Award nominees seem to have a decidedly British flavor. Among other UK-born nominees, “three British actresses will vie for the Golden Globe award for best actress in next month’s ceremony,” and one of them, Helen Mirren, will also be up for awards for her television work.

Grabbing the most nominations was the complex “Babel.” “In a first for the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s Golden Globe nominations, there were double nominations in the same category for Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio.”

The venerable Hollywood Reporter, which has been covering the entertainment business for 75 years, is cutting ten staff positions in what is being described as a significant overhaul. “Seven of the cuts were from the editorial side of the trade publication; three from the business side. Several lower-level editors received promotions and reassignments in the shuffle.”