Category: media

A day after a federal report excoriated Hollywood for marketing violent content to children, the FCC urged the television industry to adopt a voluntary code to ensure children’s programming is age-appropriate during the hours they’re likely to watch. On Thursday the FCC will discuss advertising practices during children’s programming. – Yahoo! News (Reuters)

The 19-week strike by actors against commercial producers has cost the Los Angeles economy $200 million, says an economist. – Variety

“Other events may have made their mark by being snobbish, elitist, difficult. Not Toronto. Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and generally considered the top festival in North America and the most important in the world after Cannes, Toronto has become the destination of choice for filmmakers and journalists largely by being appreciative, hospitable and sane.” – Los Angeles Times

“This Big Tobacco-type drubbing comes from the Clinton-Gore administration just 28 days – long enough for the checks to clear? – after the same entertainment industry whooped the city of Los Angeles into one, huge week-long fund-raising party for Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and the Democratic Party.” – Inside.com

• NEXT UP – CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS: “Wednesday, Lynne Cheney, wife of GOP vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney and a longtime leading figure in the culture wars, will be called to testify. And she is only the latest high-profile figure from both parties eager to take part in what is shaping up to be such a congressional gangbang that representatives from the entertainment industry have decided to pull out of the hearings.” – Salon
  
  
• LIKELY OUTCOMES: Expect protests from the entertainment industry and a lot of grandstanding from politicians, but don’t expect any legislation. The entertainment industry will remain self-regulated, but it will be encouraged to get a lot better at that self-regulation. If it doesn’t, it will face a full-on assault, much like the tobacco industry has faced in the last several years. – Inside.com
  
  
• HOLLYWOOD PONDERS DAMNING REPORT: Hollywood was busy digesting Monday’s report by the US Federal Trade Commission on violence which concluded that “the movie, music and video game industries undermined their own rating systems by advertising to audiences for which the content is deemed inappropriate.” – Variety

“The proliferation of new theaters was supposed to usher in a golden new era of moviegoing, with screens available for new hits, the classics and indie films. In 1995 there were 27,805 screens in the United States. By last year the number had jumped 34 percent to 37,185.” Now some chains are going out of business because of the overbuilding. – Newsweek/MSNBC

“West Wing” wins. List of winners. – New York Times

An Iranian film wins the Venice Film Festival. ” ‘The Circle’ tells the story of eight Iranian women struggling with the restrictions their society places on them because they are women.” – The Age (Melbourne)

It seems like recording companies and the entertainment industry are winning their battles with the new digital cowboys. But it’s not so: “What’s happening to the entertainment industry is the same thing that happened to the brokerage business when on-line stock trading appeared: An industry built on one business model feels fear when something new appears that threatens that way of doing business. The New Economy word for this kind of thing is ‘disintermediation’, and it’s breaking out all over thanks to the Internet.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Canadian film production houses are hurting, despite an abundance of work. The reason is an ongoing scandal at production house Cinar, which is “under investigation for taking illegal tax credits, allegedly by using Canadians to cover for American writers who didn’t qualify under Canadian content rules, and misappropriating $86 million (U.S.) in unauthorized investments.” – Inside.com

“The posh literary film (or PLF) is one of the relatively new petit-bourgeois enjoyments. Since the 1980s, indeed, we’ve had nearly all of EM Forster, a good deal of Henry James, more than half of Jane Austen, a bit of Orwell and Wilde and Graham Greene and, any minute now, no doubt, a Technicolor account of Pope’s Dunciad, starring every British actor who ever failed O-level English – which would make it a cast of thousands.” – The Telegraph (UK)