Category: media

Once, rock music was the dominant format of American radio. Not any more. “With baby boomers switching to other formats and younger listeners increasingly bypassing radio altogether, once-dominant rock stations are withering and in some cities dying.”

Morocco now boasts the biggest film studio in the world. “Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis and Rome’s famed Cinecitta Studios have teamed up to create CLA Studios, which stretches over 371 acres with two shooting stages of 19,380 square feet each. Bigger than any studio in Hollywood or Europe, the site will be able to accommodate two major movies a year.”

A German movie about Turkish immigrants has become a hit in Germany. “As the first ethnic film to be both a box-office and critical success in Germany, it signals new acceptance of multiculturalism. On screen, at least, Germans are now ready to meet immigrants they have long walked past on the street.”

HBO has offered the free use of three recent documentaries it aired to PBS, in an effort to get the films in front of viewers who do not subscribe to premium cable/satellite channels. But PBS is an over-the-air network, making it subject to FCC regulation, and the network is planning to err on the side of caution, removing a few scattered curse words and non-sexual nude scenes in films about terrorist attacks and Nazi death camps.

Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator, and the surprise art house hit, Sideways, were the big winners at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards. Clint Eastwood took home the best director award for Million Dollar Baby, and Clive Owen and Natalie Portman took home supporting actor awards for Mike Nichols’ Closer. On the TV side of the ledger, ABC’s Desperate Housewives won for best comedy series, and a bizarre and edge F/X show about plastic surgeons won for best dramatic series.

For nearly a year, broadcasters have been wailing about the FCC’s harsh and occasionally confusing crackdown on what it views as indecent content, and many programmers are still not entirely sure of what type of content will or will not pass muster. On the other side of the screen, conservative “family” groups have been considerably emboldened by their successes in the past year, and are becoming more overt than ever in their attempts to make television safe for innocent eyes.

Thanks to the advent of digital video technology, it’s cheaper than ever to produce and shoot a film, and wannabes across the U.S. are taking their shot. But so few of these films will ever actually be seen by a paying audience that it often seems a terrible waste of talent and resources. “[Even] if you successfully navigate Hollywood’s gauntlet and your movie is made and released, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see real money from it. A studio movie costs on average $64 million to produce and $62 million to market, for a total average investment of $128 million per film… and, after the theaters take their share, only about 50 percent of the box-office gross revenue comes back to the studio.”

Michael Moore and Mel Gibson may be on opposite sides of the American socio-political divide, but both men made movies that transformed the Hollywood landscape in 2004. “Both generated the kinds of complicated discussions mainstream Hollywood normally tries to avoid… You could literally feel the audiences at these screenings connecting with these films… and the resulting theater-lobby conversations, while heated, were not nearly as simplistic or confrontational as the films’ attackers predicted.”

Ontario’s decision to bail out its floundering film industry with a new round of tax credits and incentives has put the rest of Canada’s movie-hungry cities in a tight spot. On the other end of the country, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell is planning to get personally involved in attempts to rescue his province’s Hollywood fortunes.

Why was movie attendance down in 2004? Desmond Ryan thinks it might just have something to do with the insulting and infuriating decision of the nation’s multiplexes to preface films with up to a half hour of over-loud commercials and horrid previews. “Taking in a movie used to provide an oasis from the avalanche of hucksterism in our daily lives. If you pay your own good money for a movie or, for that matter, Internet service, nobody should be allowed to intrude on it with ads.”