Category: media

Two years ago a coalition of American minority groups banded together to press TV networks to diversify. The group claims some limited successes, but its supporters are criticizing some of its efforts, and “two of the four networks – NBC and Fox – have bluntly challenged the group’s credibility, calling it misguided, unwieldy and unfocused.”

The government of North Korea is demanding that the latest James Bond film (which portrays North Koreans as the bad guys) be pulled from screens around the world. “It is a dirty and cursed burlesque aimed to slander North Korea and insult the Korean nation.”

Turn 30 in Hollywood, and your career is all but over. And we’re not just talking actors and actresses. Writers too. “Hollywood once had a notorious blacklist of political radicals; today it has a greylist of ‘oldies’. A producer of the ABC sitcom Spin City is on the record as saying that writers over 29 were deliberately not hired. Some writers complain they cannot find an agent once they pass 50, making it almost impossible to present scripts.”

Eight major studios have joined to sue companies that edit parts of movies they find objectionable out the original versions and make them available to consumers. The movie studios charge that the companies are violating copyright laws. “The studios also allege the companies violate trademark law when they rent or sell an altered movie in the original packaging.”

In what can only be termed a devastating blow to an already-staggering industry, petroleum giant ExxonMobil has informed Boston public TV station WGBH that it will be terminating its support of PBS mainstay ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ after 2004. The company has bankrolled the program for more than three decades, and the pullout comes as PBS is discussing a controversial proposal to allow corporate sponsors to air 30-second ads on its supposedly commercial-free network of stations.

Traditional museum experience had the viewer moving in front of art. “With video art seizing more territory, the paradigm is reversed. Viewers stand still while images move before their eyes. Nothing short of a reinvention of the language of art has transpired. This means viewers must learn to translate this language, based on pictures that flow by in fast or slow-motion.”

“If Hollywood is merely America’s most idealized projection of itself — and if no country has culturally institutionalized the creative and infinite reinvention of oneself quite so deeply as the United States — it should come as no surprise that nothing would love a liar more than a movie would.”

While music, plays and visual art has taken on the task of depicting stories about 9/11, the movies have generally stayed away so far. “Part of it is sensitivity. Cinema is so powerful that maybe those images on a 50-foot screen or talk of 9/11 in a theatrical film isn’t perceived to have entertainment value.”

“According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the average film budget in 2000 was $54.8 million, up from $9.4 million in 1980.” Digital technology can cut costs dramatically, but many “directors and cinematographers, who have built their reputations on their skilled use of film, dread the idea of being marginalized by punks with digital camcorders.”

Over the past year Boston public radio station WBUR has lost about $2 million in underwriting grants, the station says, because of underwriters charging that the station’s news coverage of the Middle East has been anti-Israel. Monday there was a protest on Harvard Square outside a large independent bookstore that had pulled its funding over the issue. Activists handed out leaflets reading “Sells Words but Suppresses Words.”