Category: media

After Hurricane Katrina hit, Spike Lee took his cameras to New Orleans to make a four-hour HBO documentary about the disaster. “Like him or not, Mr. Lee, 49, is an artist many people feel they know. People, black and white, approached him and the ‘Levees’ crew here, he said, imploring: ‘Tell the story. Tell the story.’ ‘It becomes like an obligation we have, he said. Mr. Lee’s reputation helped get his camera crew into the city’s water-soaked homes, he said. It allowed him to stretch out a complex story, with themes of race, class and politics that, he said, have too often been sensationalized or rendered in sound bites.”

“A wealthy software executive named Shawn Hogan has vowed to fight a copyright-infringement lawsuit in court rather than settle with the Motion Picture Association of America. According to the MPAA, Hogan made the film ‘Meet the Fockers’ available for download through a BitTorrent file-sharing network. Hogan denies that he did anything of the sort. How do investigators find their targets? They join the networks.”

“We’ve seen how blogs affect politics and public opinion. In the blogosphere, Daily Kos and the Huffington Post are just as esteemed as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Newspapers, once too haughty to even acknowledge the presence of blogs (let alone the power), have carved out a respectful reciprocal relationship: Newspapers provide information, bloggers play the watchdog role, we all have the opportunity to listen, communicate and contribute to this marketplace of ideas.” And female bloggers, it turns out, often blog to build community.

Tim Goodman says it’s good to hear the new head of PBS lashing out at the FCC’s aggressive anti-obscenity rules. “What’s most important is that, by her words, she indicated that PBS would no longer be a wallflower in the culture wars… The FCC has continued to strike fear in the television industry, and none darker nor deeper than into the heart of PBS.”

“Just before Al Gore launched Current TV a year ago, there were more than a few guffaws heard throughout the industry. The idea of a young adult cable channel consisting of viewer-created video ‘pods’ and interactive ads seemed like a joke. Nobody’s laughing anymore… In the year since the 24-hour network premiered on Aug. 1, 2005, Current TV is seeing its model readily duplicated by such major cable players as MTV and VH1, and soon, the newly formed CW broadcast network.”

The introduction of digital video recorders (DVRs) into the American television landscape may have advertisers running scared, but those who produce actual programs have long assumed that the ability to automatically record dozens of programs and watch them later would lead to Americans spending more time in front of their sets. But at least one new survey suggests that viewers with DVRs actually watch less TV than those without.

“Increasingly realistic portrayals of marriage — happy and otherwise — are very much on the mind of Bollywood these days. … There are no national records available, but experts agree that divorce rates have risen significantly. Over the years much news-media coverage has been devoted to urban stress, the new empowered Indian woman, the phenomena known as DINK (double income no kids) and DINS (double income no sex), the emergence of marriage counseling and of course high-profile celebrity break-ups. ‘Beyond a point,’ said the director Rajat Kapoor, ‘we couldn’t look away from the reality of modern marriage.'”

Tom Hanks, as everyone knows, is one of Hollywood’s most bankable movie stars. But what much of the public doesn’t know is that Hanks has spent the last several years quietly putting together “one of Hollywood’s most prolific filmmaking entities… On Friday the company’s animated feature ‘The Ant Bully’ was released on 3,050 regular and Imax screens by Warner Brothers. Lined up behind it are nearly three dozen projects.”

“After months of theatre closings and speculation that repertory cinemas in Toronto are doomed, some good news for a change: The Royal Theatre, a College Street landmark, has been sold for $2.2-million to a company set on keeping the projector running — with a modern twist. The buyer is Theatre D Digital, a Toronto-based postproduction film company that plans to restore the theatre’s rickety red velvet seats and ornate moulding to their original charm. It will be used as a state-of-the-art production studio by day and movie theatre by night.”

The makers of TiVo, the original digital video recorder, is starting a research division which will analyze how its users watch TV, and sell the information to advertisers. Unlike many DVRs, TiVo keeps track of everything a user watches and reports back to the company. Advertisers are interested because the research “could help them understand how to get more people to watch recorded commercials, like changing the content of ads or running them during certain kinds of programming.”