Category: media

Among the most interesting records of artists of the 20th Century are films of them at work and in conversation. “In this country alone [UK], there’s probably six or seven hundreds of hours of film of artists working and talking, a wonderful learning tool for children, artists and scholars, a window on a new world for the rest of us. The tragedy is that few can see it.” And much of it is in danger of disappearing forever.

Disney is preparing to release a new disposable technology: DVDs, available for sale for around the cost of a rental, which self-destruct after 48 hours. So far, the idea isn’t garnering much positive response. Viewers don’t see the point; environmentalists are furious about the unnecessary waste material; and at some point, you’ve got to figure that consumers are going to wonder why a DVD with a chemical erasing agent embedded in it is less than half as expensive as the exact same DVD without a self-destruct mechanism.

Despite good reviews, CBS’ mini-series on Hitler looks to lose plenty of money. The first installment failed to attract premium advertisers. “The lack of a major advertisers will mean that CBS will not be able to recoup anything near its costs for the miniseries. The losses could top $6 million for the two nights, according to estimates. Apparently, advertisers were scared away by the movie’s provocative subject – the early years of Hitler – and by the controversy that was sparked last year before filming even began.”

“Walking out of bad movies has been all too common for many American studio film buyers at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Even films that stirred early interest have met with a tepid response from U.S. film distributors. That’s a major disappointment for companies such as Miramax, Lions Gate, Focus Features, IFC Films and others that rely on what they can pick up from film festivals for as much as half of their total slate.”

One of the biggest complaints about the BBC has been its declining arts coverage. But the arts fortunes seem to be changing. “Eighteen months of reassessment have resulted in a stream of new programme commissions planned to 2006. Twenty projects are listed in a special BBC booklet, including films on Michelangelo, Christopher Wren and Mary Shelley and landmark series, such as The Origins of Art. BBC1 is finalising plans for a series on British culture. Another strand, Arena, is being salvaged and turned into a biographical series.”

What will media ownership deregulation mean to you, asks Howard Rosenberg? “Meaning more media control in fewer hands. Meaning more cross-promotion. Meaning less diversity. Meaning fewer independent voices in news and entertainment. Meaning less competition and fewer options for information. It’s true that what we have now is often unreliable, a fact underlined by tag-along TV’s generally feckless, ever-manipulated, go-with-the-flow, yassah-Mr. President coverage of the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Everyone would profit if the quality of today’s journalism were higher. Diverse media, however imperfect, are essential to us all, however.”

The cable news networks have ceased being anything about news – they’re reality entertainment vying desperately to hook our attention. So where is there decent non-fiction TV? “I?m sometimes ambivalent about the self-declared good intentions of public television, as I am about a culture that now gives trophies to kids for merely participating in a sport, regardless of how well they perform. And public television itself often seems ambivalent about its identity, unsure whether it wants to be a macramé plant holder or a shiny electric scooter from the Sharper Image. It often ends up somewhere in between, resorting to middle-of-the-road, commercial fare?Deepak Chopra, Suze Orman, nostalgic pop-music shows?to pull in money at fund-raising time. But, at the end of the day, I would, and do, support public television?s inclusiveness, with all its occasionally tedious shagginess.”

The US Senate is holding hearings on whether to deregulate media ownership. “When the Federal Communications Commission was debating whether it should give away or sell $70 billion worth of digital broadcast spectrum in 1996, newspaper editorial pages weighed in. Senator John McCain’s list, a consumer group survey, found that every paper favoring a giveaway was owned by a company that also owned television stations that, naturally, wanted the spectrum for free. Every paper opposing a giveaway was owned by a company with no substantial interest in television.” A coincidence, wondered senators…?

Movies are the Big Medium, right? There are no small movies, only small…. whatever. But some movie makers are wondering if the movie form is too small to express their work. So could the internet or other digital technologies be the answer? One filmmaker is testing the idea.

The movie industry is suing to block software that allows consumers to make copies of their DVDs. “The powerful Motion Picture Association of America argues that this type of software circumvents the anti-copying digital ‘locks’ that studios employ on DVDs, which would be illegal under the 1998 copyright law. There are typically no such locks on music CDs. The Motion Picture Association maintains that consumers aren’t permitted to make personal backups of DVDs, saying a movie buff whose disc becomes scratched needs to buy a new one.”