Category: media

Not many in the film world have stepped forward to defend the companies being sued by Hollywood for marketing “clean” versions of movies with all the sex, violence, and foul language removed. But one critic thinks the Directors’Guild, which initiated the lawsuit, is being awfully hypocritical, since its members have been releasing edited versions of their work for decades: “Those alternates are used not just on airplanes, but also for broadcast television and overseas release. If the DGA is so concerned about artistic integrity, it should work to make those personally supervised versions available to families who want to see them.”

Britain’s Channel 4 is being criticized for its plans to air a controversial documentary on Chinese performance artists. Among the controversial scenes are one “showing a performance artist eating the flesh of a dead baby” and “a man drinking wine that has had an amputated penis marinaded in it.” The station defends its plans: “The programme will be controversial and will shock some viewers but a warning will be given before it goes out on air.”

It seemed like an interesting experiment – a radio drama with an all-star cast broadcast daily for a week to a national American audience. But reaction to National Public Radio’s radio play “I’d Rather Eat Pants” was swift – and negative. Of the 1,000 e-mails the network received, about 75 percent were negative, and execs are trying figure out why. Cast member Ed Asner is disappointed. “It’s a shame that intellectual newshawks who occupy NPR – or think they are intellectual newshawks – have to be so grouchy.”

Growth in the American TV audience is being driven by Hispanic Americans. “Hispanics, it turns out, are driving the overall growth of the country’s television audience, and according to the latest Nielsen research, account for 18 percent of viewers who are 18 to 34, and 15 percent of those 18 to 49, the most desirable groups for advertisers.”

“More than $9 billion worth of tickets were sold in North America in 2002, up about 10 percent over last year’s record. Even with higher prices, actual attendance was up at least 5 percent, reaching levels not seen since Eisenhower was in the White House. But let’s not pop those Champagne corks just yet. There are plenty of reasons for concern and doubt amid the hype and hyperventilating.”

Since OJ’s low-speed freeway chase, the car chase has been a staple of LA’s TV news shows. Local stations often devote large chunks of their shows to police car pursuits. But the LA Police Department is “considering asking television stations to eliminate or significantly reduce their coverage of live police chases. The broadcast of police pursuits is more entertainment than informative, [police chief William] Bratton has said publicly and in informal discussions with local news executives, and could be interpreted as encouraging criminal activity. Such a change would mark a distinct shift for local TV stations.”

A proposed movie studio complex, to be built in New York’s Staten Island, has been been killed. “A year after then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave Aiello’s firm, Stapleton Studios, a permit to build on the old Staten Island Homeport, the deal has collapsed amid charges of incompetence and fraud. The city evicted the studio owners; the group refused to go and is suing.”

More people went to the movies this year in the US than any year since 1959. “By some estimates, admissions could climb more than 10% over last year’s record levels, with folks flocking to theaters more than 1.5 billion times.” Why? Paricularly with all the competition for the entertainment dollar from DVD’s TV etc….? “The real world is probably more terrifying than Americans have ever known. It’s the same kind of desire for escape we also saw during the Depression in the ’30s.”

Did the director of the agency set up to facilitate filming projects in Los Angeles “defraud the city and county by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal expenses and political donations, some to members of the board that oversees the agency?” That’s what an investigation of the agency currently underay, hopes to find out.

French movies are enjoying a record year, and look likely to eclipse the record 37.4 million admissions set last year. “The past two years ‘have been the best that French films have had for at least 10 years’ in foreign theatres.”