Category: media

20th Century Fox has launched an offshoot studio which will release Christian-themed films both in cinemas and on DVD. FoxFaith will attempt to capitalize on America’s growing evangelical demographic, which it calls “underserved.”

Alex Beam remembers that National Public Radio got $255 million from Joan Kroc’s estate. “So what has changed? Two hundred twenty-five million dollars later, public radio certainly hasn’t gotten worse. But I don’t hear that it has gotten any better.”

“These days, the FCC’s sterner enforcement policy makes it risky for a PBS station even to rerun a classic documentary such as the forthcoming Eyes on the Prize without purging it of potentially offensive language.”

“Game shows, once stacked end to end across the daytime grid, are no longer the staple (they’re making more money in primetime). Talk shows, with aggressively likable hosts, are all the rage.”

“Less than a week after announcing its newest initiative with Apple Computer, the Walt Disney Co. has sold more than 125,000 feature film downloads via iTunes.” Disney predicts the download business will earn the company $50 million this year.

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas, through a foundation, plans to make a blockbuster donation to USC of $175 million — the university’s biggest single gift ever — to build a new home for its prestigious film school.

“Soon after the ambitious TV movie The Great War finished shooting in Quebec last summer, the Montreal producers, Galafilm Inc., made a disheartening discovery — more than 1,000 items of largely irreplaceable First World War insignia, uniforms and equipment had walked off the set, they suspect, with some of the 150 descendents who had been hired to re-enact their great-grandfather’s bloody battles in the trenches.”

The chairman of the board of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has resigned after making comments mocking the sexual habits of Lebanese. Fournier “has increasingly lost the confidence of Canada’s new government,” Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda said in announcing the resignation in the House of Commons on Tuesday.

Everyone assumed that the Beirut Film Festival would be canceled because the of war with Israel. But “artistic director and film-maker Eliane Raheb informed guests that it would go ahead as a sign of ‘cultural resistance’. Under the circumstances, this year’s programme had to be cut down from over 100 films to just 40.”

“In the biggest commitment of its sort by a Hollywood studio, News Corp.’s Fox Filmed Entertainment is expected to unveil plans today to capture the gargantuan Christian audience that made ‘The Passion of the Christ’ a global phenomenon. The home entertainment division of Rupert Murdoch’s movie studio plans to produce as many as a dozen films a year under a banner called FoxFaith. At least six of those films will be released in theaters under an agreement with two of the nation’s largest chains, AMC Theatres and Carmike Cinemas.”