“[They] faced discrimination and harassment from their fellow staff members. They remained in the same lowly jobs as their counterparts were promoted. They watched their pitches get ignored or rejected, only to see the same ideas warmly embraced when another writer pitched them. … Now a new survey, ‘Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writers Rooms,’ of nearly 300 women, people of color, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and people with disabilities writing for television has captured in numbers the bias they report.” – The New York Times
Category: media
PBS Launches Subscription Streaming Service On Amazon Prime
“The new streamer, [called PBS Living and] costing $2.99 per month after a seven-day free trial, will offer classic PBS series like The French Chef, This Old House and Antiques Roadshow, along with more recent series like No Passport Required and Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. The new channel will offer subscribers hundreds of episodes of PBS series across the food and cooking, home, culture and travel genres, with new content to be added each month.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Gimlet Media Becomes First Podcast Company To Unionize
“The 83-person staff of Gimlet Media, a podcasting startup acquired by music streaming service Spotify for $230 million in February, is unionizing with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). Gimlet was founded in 2014 and produces popular podcasts including Reply All, StartUp, and Crimetown.” – BuzzFeed
Netflix Agrees To Remove Footage Of Real Train Derailment From “Bird Box”
People in a Quebec town and across the province were shocked after learning in January that footage from a derailment and explosion that killed 47 people was used in the drama starring Sandra Bullock. – Toronto Star
An Attempt At An NPR For Conservatives?
The nightly two-hour show, which is carried on nearly 200 radio stations nationwide and boasts an estimated audience of 1.3 million, might not identify as ideological or political, at least not overtly. But Lee Habeeb has clearly positioned it as a right-of-center alternative to NPR, whose programs such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered also emphasize skillful story-telling, but which many conservatives perceive, rightly or not, as inhospitable to anything that isn’t progressive or politically correct. – The Daily Beast
Sexing Up Female-Female Relationships For Biopics Isn’t Enough? Now They’re Adding Fake Lesbian Lovers To Movies About Real People
“The latest sapphic storyline to get tongues a-wagging” is Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet as paleontologist Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as her entirely fictional lover. Laments Guardian writer (and lesbian) Hannah Jane Parkinson, “It is immensely damaging that LGBTQ relationships are being fetishised for entertainment – and depressing to think that the mass audiences may not be interested in women unless they’re in bed together.” – The Guardian
MoviePass Has Been Losing Even More Money Than We Thought
The service’s parent company revealed in its third-quarter financial report “that the money-losing subscription service has fewer subscribers than previously disclosed, causing the firm to restate its revenue downward by 8.2 percent [$6.6 million] and its losses upward by 7.7 percent [$6.7 million].” – The Hollywood Reporter
Why The Cis Director Of The Trans-Themed Film ‘Girl’ Says He Has The Right To Tell This Story
Last year, Lukas Dhont’s debut feature won four prizes at Cannes and a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film; Netflix bought the US rights. Then came the backlash — not only were a cis director and actor appropriating the story, but the film focused too much on the character’s body — and the US release was postponed. And then the woman on whose story the film is based spoke up — for Dhont. – The Guardian
Pakistan Has Banned Indian Movies. That May Hurt Pakistan More Than India.
The embargo was instated by Pakistan’s Association of Film Exhibitors following last month’s flare-up of armed conflict in and around Kashmir. It may seem a patriotic gesture, but there’s a real question whether Pakistan’s roughly 120 remaining cinemas can survive without Indian films to show. – BBC
The YouTube Movie Critic Who Has Become A Breakout Star
Lindsay Ellis has recently emerged as one of the medium’s breakout stars. She earns more than $10,000 a month on Patreon, the crowdfunding site that’s her primary source of revenue. It helps pay for a small staff of mostly part-time employees and allows her to turn out video series like last year’s three-part deep-dive into the Hobbit trilogy, which cost nearly $20,000. Ellis and some of her team went to New Zealand as part of the production, which she feared her supporters would find excessive; instead, the videos gave her the biggest Patreon boost ever. And in the last year, the number of her YouTube subscribers and Twitter followers has doubled. – Wired