Category: media

In the Norwegian arctic, residents have built a unique drive-in movie theatre. But instead of watching in your car, patrons come in snow mobiles. And “the entire cinema is made from snow. We’ve built a snow amphitheatre, with reindeer skins to sit on, and the actual screen is also made from snow.”

A thousand movie theatres in India have been on strike for three weeks. Now the strike has ended after “cinema bosses said the state government had accepted their demand for a 10% cut in tax levied on tickets. But they said other demands including permission to convert failing cinemas into other businesses had not been met. During the shutdown cinemas lost an estimated 10m rupees (£130,000) per day – twice as much as the government.”

“The Passion of the Christ has already earned $330 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales since it opened six weeks ago, breaking all sorts of box-office records along the way.” Now there’s even speculation that it could ultimately displace Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time.

A new study says that young children exposed to television are at risk of developing attention deficit disorder. Scientists found that “every hour of TV toddlers watch per day increases by 10 percent the chance they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders by age 7.”

National Public Radio’s midday show Day to Day is growing its audience must faster than its producers expected. “The hourlong program airs midday Monday through Friday on 103 stations, as of last week. NPR had been shooting for 75 stations by Sept. 30. Between its launch July 28 and the fall ratings period, Day to Day built a weekly audience of 1,148,200. That’s the biggest audience ever for an NPR show in its first book, says Jay Kernis, NPR’s senior v.p. of programming.”

Jack Valenti is getting a send off as he retires after 38 years heading the Motion Picture Association of America. But Michael Medved says Valenti has some answering to do. “Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history’s most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million. In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation’s film fans to break the habit of movie going.”

The film magazine Empire polled film experts as to what they thought thr scariest movie monsters ever were, and King Kong leads the list. “The poll comes right up to the present day with in sixth position the spider queen Shelob, who entangled actor Elijah Wood in last year’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.”

New wireless technology allows people to download and watch movies wherever and whenever they want. “With an extended battery life that lasts about six hours, the software allows consumers to download movies at superfast speeds and then view them on a plane. It will be like having a Blockbuster video store in your laptop. You’ll be able to download your personal movie to your personal handheld video player while waiting in line for a coffee, then go home and either watch it on the small screen in bed or plug the computer cable into a large display screen in your living room.”

Michael Grade is to be named the BBC’s new chairman, replacing Greg Dyke. “Grade has immense media experience – having headed Channel 4 – and was among the favourites to take the job despite being viewed as a maverick.”

Scared that the US government might draft rules about what constitutes obscene content, 350 broadcasters meet to discuss alternatives. One idea? An industry code that broadcasters could follow. “I believe the industry could come together and craft a new code, perfectly able to pass court muster, and one that would serve the needs of businesses as well as those of concerned families.”