A new paper by the Australian Film Commission says that 1,200 to 1,400 feature scripts have been developed here in the past three years. And the number that reach the screen? About 25 to 30 a year.” – Sydney Morning Herald
The Toronto International Film festival turns 25 this year – “an event that not only has grown into one of the world’s most important film markets but also has become the prime launching pad for Oscar bait.” – New York Times
It’s commonly believed that big film awards – an Oscar or a Palme d’Or – work wonders for a filmmaker’s career. Not so for Bruno Dumont whose “l’Humanité” took home best actor, best actress, and the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes. “Depending on who you listen to, ‘l’Humanité’ is stultifyingly boring/ hypnotically entrancing, intellectually intriguing/exploitatively hollow, etc. Some audience members have insulted Dumont; others have held his hand and wept.” – The Guardian
The BBC’s shift of its national newscast from 9 pm to 10 pm is calculated to get more viewers. “What surprises me about this gloomy, shifty discussion of news programming is how little people consider why it has become, over the course of a decade, such a ratings calamity. With more competition, there will be fewer viewers for any single bulletin, but Britain is the greatest newspaper-reading nation in the world, the home of Radio 5 Live and three indigenous rolling news TV stations. If people are ceasing to watch the best resources news shows of all, maybe there is something wrong with them.” – New Statesman
Ratings for the TV networks have been slipping for years, and it looked, even a year or two ago, that network TV might not be profitable again for a long time. That was then…”The networks’ parents don’t break out numbers for the properties, but analysts estimate that earnings in the second quarter were up across the board: NBC raked in $375 million; ABC, $220 million; CBS, $95 million; and Fox, $48 million.” – Inside.com
The summer movie season is officially over. “This has been one of the shabbiest movie summers in memory – a stretch as desolate as a beach closed by the Board of Health.” – The Nation
The movie theatre business is hemorrhaging money – several are on the verge of collapse, even as the movie business itself is doing just fine. So what’s the problem with theatres? Overbuilding. “It was a mass suicide. They see their competitors putting up new attractive theaters, so they think that to be competitive they have to do that, too.” – New York Times
As our diversions become more and more tied to audience numbers and popularity, can difficult or subtle art films survive? The evidence is mixed. – New York Times
An Argentine actor/director goes to the Falklands with a crew posing as tourists and without permission and films a movie covertly in nine days. The movie “tells the story of an Argentine man visiting the islands with the aim of… umm … impregnating as many British women as possible, thereby achieving the takeover that 72 days of fighting at a combined cost of 891 lives and $2 billion could not.” – Inside.com
Norman Jewison says “The Hurricane” is the best film he ever made. “It seemed to have Best Picture written all over it,” wrote the Washington Post. But the movie sank w/o much of a ripple. Jewison is angry at the way directors are treated by studios. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
