Category: media

Television is breaking its long established talent pipelines. “Network television was a strict dues-paying culture. Writers sweated it out for years on other people’s shows — earning arcane titles like ‘executive story editor’ and ‘supervising producer’ — before getting a shot at creating their own. But lately those rules are being rewritten. Networks are now clamoring for fresh voices that they otherwise would not have looked toward.”

Indecency on the TV? What about the V-chip? “Eight years after Congress adopted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, about 80 million of America’s 275 million television sets have one. But it’s not easy to find anyone, outside of trivia contestants, who knows what a V-chip is. Rarer still are those who can actually make one work.”

“For decades, Southern California was the ultimate destination for self-described ‘animation geeks’ — kids who worked from homemade flip books and cel collecting to get there. But shifts in the industry — a growing appetite for computer-generated graphics and the chronic issue of outsourcing — have eliminated 1,000 jobs in the last three years. It’s a frustrating time for animators.

A pair of Atlanta radio DJs were suspended Friday shortly after they broadcast sexually explicit talk with a porn star. The two had planned to record the explicit conversation and play it backwards over the air.

Iraq TV is getting its first post-American invasion soap opera. “During Saddam’s reign, show business was under tight state control and all actors were employed by a government ministry. Television and feature films were heavily censored. Since the fall of Saddam last year, independent film-makers have enjoyed unprecedented freedom. Ironically, as the plots of Love and War indicate, much of this new-found artistic energy is being used to criticise, subtly or not, the American and British forces who brought the freedom.”

Last year was an awful year for the Toronto film industry. “This year, the industry, weary but determined, slept with one eye open as it watched the Canadian dollar buoy to its highest level in decades. The players had to wonder, would American producers choose to make their big-money movies at home? Was this the end for Hollywood North? Hardly.”

Why do advertisers value younger consumers over older, even though older buyers have more money? “It’s complicated. First, advertisers believe that by the time you reach a certain age, you have pretty much decided which brand of dishwashing detergent you like and you’re going to stick with it. Younger viewers, on the other hand, are still trying to figure out whether they prefer Excedrin to Bufferin and whether they look better with hair dyed by L’Oreal or Clairol. Second, advertisers believe that by the time you reach a certain age, you are much less likely to buy a product just because Michael Jordan is wearing it.”

A new tax credit program for British filmmakers will help spur the industry. A government program that had given tax breaks for those who invest in UK movies is coming to an end, and the movie industry had complained that its discontinuation would kill British film investment.

Movie stars are turning up in new video games. “A-list actors have taken notice of games, and it’s not hard to see why. They’re a quick route to digital-age street cred. Appearing in a game gives an actor a sense of being on the cutting edge of technological “convergence” (whatever that is), as well as a vague whiff of indie flava. More important, it keeps a star current among young men. Any canny star—or, more likely, any star with a canny agent—eventually winds up looking enviously at a hot video game like the Grand Theft Auto series, which is objectively cooler than almost anything that’s come out of Hollywood in years.”

Kazaa Media Desktop is the leading piece of file-trading software of the moment, and as such, it is at the center of the firestorm over illegal copying and swapping of copyrighted songs and movies. But Kazaa’s legal troubles apparently don’t end with the long list of industry heavies and political bigwigs who want to shut it down: now, a Romanian man is claiming that he wrote the source code for Kazaa, and is suing the company for his share of the profits.