Category: media

Six years of shooting in dozens of locations, famous film auteurs playing versions of themselves, the cast and crew posing as film students to get a cheap rental rate for the MGM backlot (they smuggled Welles in a van), half a dozen or so different kinds of film stock — and that’s only the beginning of the story.

OK, it’s not actually super-secret, and it’s not a vault – it’s the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, “a silent, temperature-controlled labyrinth that underlines Disney’s zealous protection of its past and huge ambitions for its future.”

A new study from USC Annenberg says that “immigrant characters on television are still underrepresented and largely one-dimensional.”

Maybe! “The U.S. box office has made roughly $9.3 billion in 2018 so far, nearly a 9% increase from last year.” (And it’s not all from Black Panther.)

Low-budget horror movies have made Blumhouse an awful lot of money. Can its film formula work in a much more crowded TV market? If they do, it won’t be because of jump scares. “Blumhouse executives explained that only 20 percent of the studio’s television projects will be traditional horror fare.”

It’s all thanks to a cab driver from the Bronx, who drove Muppeteer Carol Spinney to his first meeting with Jim Henson.

The makers of Making a Murderer created a second series, but a fair amount of it is about what changed after their documentary series exploded onto Netflix in 2015.

She’s ready for films to change, a lot. “Davis says she wants to play the sort of roles Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep have had. ‘I would love to have a black female Klute, or Kramer, or Unmarried Woman, or Annie Hall. But who’s gonna write it, who’s gonna produce it, who’s gonna see it, again and again and again?'”

The Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, great-great-granddaughter of Czar Nicholas II (she lives in Spain) isn’t impressed, or so said her people. “The chancellery would not have issued the release at all if The Romanoffs were simply dull, the release went on. ‘Dullness may be disagreeable, but it seldom causes offense or insult. … Alas, to the series creator’s great discredit, The Romanoffs manages to do both.'”

“MoviePass’ business model was not sustainable because there was no reasonable basis to believe MoviePass could monetize the model to a degree that could be maintained before being too buried in debt to survive,” shareholder Jeffrey Braxton argued in his suit, which seeks class action status. A significant turning point for the company came on July 27, when Helios disclosed in a regulatory filing that it couldn’t make payments to its merchants, and that resulted in a service interruption. The company’s stock plummeted, losing 96% of its value since that SEC filing.