Category: media

Screen Actors Guild National President Alan Rosenberg is protesting a plan for FCC legislation that would fine actors for obscenity on TV. “SAG members work primarily on scripted projects – we are hired to perform a role. To be threatened with half a million dollars in fines for doing our jobs is incomprehensible,” he said during the committee’s Jan. 19 hearing on decency in Washington D.C.

More than a year ago, ABC Television began production for a new reality show featuring a gay couple and their adopted son moving into an exclusive neighborhood in Austin, Texas. The show wound up being, by all reports, a fascinating look at American society and the ability of neighbors to change and adapt to the people around them. But ABC yanked the program off its fall schedule and has yet to announce whether it will air. Now, there is speculation that ABC pulled the show to avoid offending four major “religious right” groups which recently lifted their boycott of the Disney-owned ABC.

A little over a year ago, Minnesota Public Radio bought a competing classical music station in the Twin Cities and changed its format, much to the consternation of some classical music fans in the area. But in the year since MPR launched the station now known as The Current, it has been the talk of the local radio scene. With its DJs picking the songs they play, focusing on local rock bands and national acts that don’t get the time of day on most corporate-controlled FM stations, the station has cultivated a seriously loyal following, and affected nearly everything about the music scene in the Cities.

“The festival, celebrating its 25th year as a champion of independent cinema, has certainly helped launched the careers of several top directors (Steven Soderbergh, for one) and marked the debut of numerous hit films (“Napoleon Dynamite” and “The Blair Witch Project”). But over that time span, only a handful of Grand Jury Prize winners have parlayed their honors into fame and fortune.”

The two companies have had a tense business relationship, and their distribution deal is coming to an end. “Citing unnamed people familiar with the plan, the Wall Street Journal said Disney would pay a nominal premium to Pixar’s current market value of $6.7 billion under the deal being discussed in a stock transaction that would make Pixar chief executive Steve Jobs the largest individual shareholder in Disney.”

“It’s been a good year for British-made movies such as Batman Begins and Harry Potter. They’ve made 34% of the takings at the UK box office, the best for many years. But many of these big British hits are still part of the Hollywood machine.”

The Sundance Festival opens today in Park City, Utah, with 120 feature films and 73 shorts on the schedule. And as usual, the “true indie” filmmakers will complain that the fest has forgotten its roots and become a pawn of the major studios. These detractors certainly have a point, but Manohla Dargis says that “despite the hype and the frigid climes Sundance remains invaluable – wildly annoying, but invaluable. The American independent film movement may be a fiction, but it is the fiction we now live by.”

You don’t have to look very hard these days to find positive portrayals of gay characters in Hollywood films and TV series. But Nell Minow writes that, in entertainment aimed at kids, homosexuality (or the mistaken perception of it) is still a standard issue insult or an occasion for ridicule, and nobody in the industry seems to consider this a problem.

A new study says that, despite all the lawsuits and threats being propagated by the recording industry, illegal downloading of music is continuing at roughly the same level as before the anti-piracy efforts began. However, the number of tracks being made available for illegal file-swapping appears to have fallen somewhat. The industry also points out that “global sales of legal downloads [have] passed $1bn and music downloaded onto mobile phones [is] now worth $400m per year.”

Nominations are out for the Baftas (Britain’s answer to the Oscars,) and there aren’t many surprises on the shortlist. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is up for nine awards, and political thriller The Constant Gardener scored ten nominations. The other films nominated for best picture are Crash, Capote, and Good Night and Good Luck. The Baftas will be handed out on February 19.