Category: media

Hollywood is starting to wonder what happened to its audience. It’s been “11 weeks in a row of declining movie attendance and revenue compared with last year, adding up to the longest slump since 2000 and raising an uncomfortable question: Are people turning away from lackluster movies, or turning their backs on the whole business of going to theaters?”

“Can Australia save Hollywood? Hollywood studios are suffering their longest box office slump in five years with attendance at American cinemas diving eight per cent and revenues down almost five per cent so far in 2005. Tinseltown has its fingers crossed that Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Heath Ledger, Julian McMahon, Miranda Otto, Simon Baker, Richard Roxburgh and director Robert Luketic can help stop the rot.”

The UK’s media regulator says the BBC’s airing of Jerry Springer the Opera did not violate broadcast standards. “More than 7,940 people complained to Ofcom before the hit stage show was broadcast on BBC Two in January, followed by a further 8,860 afterwards. ‘Ofcom recognises that a large number of people were deeply offended by the transmission.’ But it said the show was ‘an important work and commentary on modern TV.”

A prominent British film producer says the UK’s film industry is in dire shape. “He said that many of the established routes for getting funding were disappearing or were dependent on tax regimes, leaving less available equity for film-makers. ‘So the hour is dark. Darker I think than most years in my lifetime’.”

Michael Booth is angry at PBS. “Public-TV programming, in Colorado and around the nation, has become a parody of itself. Reading the program guide alone is enough to put one sound asleep, let alone watching the actual shows themselves – nearly every one stuck in a 1970s time warp of blandly earnest irrelevance. A lineup this dull and out of touch no longer deserves our federal tax money.”

“PBS is a special resource, valuable in a democracy that depends on well-informed citizens … well, you know the rap. That said, public TV needs an extreme makeover. PBS has bungled at every turn. The system still can’t decide whether to embrace commercials (“enhanced underwriting” is the euphemism). The convoluted bureaucracy doesn’t work. While preaching “localism,” the service has kept a few strong stations in charge (Boston, New York, Los Angeles) while others idle.”

“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed a Federal Communications Commission order that required makers of consumer-electronics devices capable of receiving broadcast digital TV signals to recognize a “broadcast flag,” which is code that allows content owners to place limits on redistribution of digital content streams. The rule was to apply to devices manufactured on or after July 1, 2005. Specifically, the court admonished the FCC for exceeding what’s known as its “ancillary authority” over some reception devices (consumer-electronics products) by trying to regulate a function not directly related to the actual transmissions themselves.”

Piracy of Indian films in Pakistan is woven deeply into the country’s culture. “To crack down on pirated Indian DVDs now would be a massive undertaking. Pakistani cinema houses lost their clientele years ago. The decade of the 1980s saw the video rental business mushroom into one of the largest retail businesses in the country, employing an estimated half-a-million people. Not just that: Pakistan’s fashion and modelling industry has come to be deeply dependent on the Indian film culture.”

The Cannes Festival has chosen a film made by a British civil servant with no formal training and cost only £400 for this year’s competition. It is the only British film included in this year’s festival. “This is just a fairytale for us. None of us have ever been to film school. We just decided to make it when Ben sold his mandolin to raise money to buy his camera. It’s about the doppelganger myth, what happens when a person comes across their own doppelganger.”

There’s a growing perception that pressure groups advocating censorship are having a disproportionate impact on what TV broadcasters are willing to program. So a new group, TV Watch, is coming out swinging in opposition to the suppressionists…