Category: media

Canada has always been concerned about the risk to its homegrown culture from the American pop culture juggernaut. But these days, the situation, particularly in the television realm, seems dire: the public funding upon which Canadian TV writers and producers rely is at record low levels, and Canadians seem increasingly willing to abandon homegrown product for American shows. With most Canadians now able to receive all the major American broadcast networks on cable, and many additional American programs being rebroadcast on Canadian channels, Canada’s TV industry is at a loss as to how to recapture its audience.

Global peace may sound like an awfully lofty goal, especially for a group of artists with little to no political clout, but no one has ever accused filmmakers of allowing harsh reality to stand in the way of idealism. “This week through Sunday, Orlando is host to a cultural event that would seem much more happily scheduled in the 1960s, and maybe better in Woodstock, N.Y.: the first Global Peace Film Festival. It’s the creation of Shaikh Abdul Alishtari, a genuine Moroccan sheik and founder and CEO of the Orlando-based GlobalProtector.net Web filter company, who came up with the idea just before the latest Iraq war.”

Video games have fast become the recreation of choice. “Figures for the overall size of the industry in 2003 will not emerge until March but, in 2002, the UK leisure software market value topped £1bn for the first time, compared with cinema box-office income of £755m and video/DVD rental worth £500m.”

Hollywood’s top movie producers are teaming up with computer gamer producers to collaborate on projects. Why? “Nothing grabs Hollywood’s attention more than money. And with video-game sales topping Hollywood box office receipts for the second year in a row (games raked in $30 billion in global sales versus the movie industry’s $20.4 billion in 2002), Hollywood agencies have gone virtual.”

BBC4 is where most of the BBC’s cultural program now ends up. It is a popular target of critics from all sides. “It does not like to describe itself as highbrow – ‘We always try and avoid that word,’ says a BBC press officer – but it is pitched squarely at the class Keynes referred to as ‘the educated bourgeoisie’.”

Is Michael Eisner vulnerable as head of Disney? After Roy Disney quit Disney’s board last week, more public criticism of Eisner has surfaced. “Despite a charm offensive by Mr. Eisner in response to the board uprising last year – wooing anxious or skeptical directors, institutional investors, partners and members of the news media over cocktails and in interviews – many say he has just papered over a lack of substantive change at the company.”

“Over the weekend, half a dozen or so NBC stations refused to show “Saturday Night Live” because Al Sharpton, a presidential candidate, was hosting. They objected either because of the equal time rules or out of fear the 90-minute program would embarrass them by amounting to more political coverage than most TV stations offer in six months.”

Hollywood studios’ latest attempts to combat piracy seem to be a miserable failure. “A major source of movies online is an underground network of groups that specialize in bootlegging films, piracy experts say. These “ripping crews” – which recruit members around the world to obtain, edit, transfer and store films – compete with one another to be the first to obtain a movie, the experts say. They frequently are assisted by people connected to the movie industry, whose numbers include cinema employees, workers at post-production houses and friends of Academy members.”

A federal judge has overturned a ban on independent producers sending out screener DVDs to awards judges. The Motion Picture Association of America had instituted the ban as a way to cut down piracy. But the judge ruled that: “the screener ban will significantly harm independent films, thereby reducing the competition these films pose to major studio releases.”

This fall a New York University student proposed making a film in which there would be pornography. University officials have forbidden her to and say they would “issue a written policy requiring student films and videos to follow the ratings guidelines of the Motion Picture Association of America, with nothing racier than R-rated fare allowed.” Is this a threat to academic freedom?