This new technology doesn’t just threaten our present discourse. Soon, AI-generated synthetic media may reach into the past and sow doubt into the authenticity of historical events, potentially destroying the credibility of records left behind in our present digital era. – Fast Company
Category: media
A Pocket History Of All The Times Hollywood Has Died
In fact, morbidity is an old habit in Hollywood. The trick is to know what is really an existential threat—this one certainly seems real—and what is just another stage death in an industry that is forever deciding the show is finally over. – Deadline
Last Straw: Movie Chain Closes All Its Theatres After James Bond Movie Postponed
Cinemark is the largest circuit in the U.K with more than 120 sites, and the second-largest in North America, where it operates roughly 540 locations under the Regal Cinemas banner. While many of its U.K. theaters had reopened at the end of July, a substantial number of its U.S. sites had remained shut after being forced to go dark because of the coronavirus pandemic. – The Hollywood Reporter
Maybe The Movie Theatre Experience Could Come Back Better?
Normal was an ecosystem where huge marketing onslaughts created conversations around massive movies at the expense of smaller, more artistically adventurous ones, with entertainment outlets forever trying to find the balance between covering big releases that would get clicks and little ones that need all the support they can get. – Wired
Analysts Warn AMC Movie Theatres Has Only Six Months Without Turnaround
The stock mostly shrugged off the news, down 0.4% to $4.63. But that’s half of where it was trading a year ago as exhibition has been the entertainment sector hardest hit by COVID-19, aside from theme parks. – Deadline
NPR Wants To Broaden Its Audience. What Could It Learn From The BBC?
“The BBC eventually had to succumb to the public’s demands to hear what it wanted, not what [BBC founder John] Reith wanted them to hear. … In the United States, public radio never attracted an audience near as diverse as NPR’s founding purposes hoped. Public radio sincerely welcomed all, but those who chose to listen represented such a narrow type that ‘NPR listener’ became a meaningful term.” – Current
World’s Biggest Film Industry Will Finally See Its Theaters Reopen
After seven months of pandemic shutdown, “India’s Ministry of Home Affairs has decreed that cinemas and multiplexes can reopen [on Oct. 15] at 50 percent of their seating capacity, a full month before the all-important Diwali holiday, which in normal times is a box office bonanza.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Hollywood Says Movie Theatres Won’t Survive Without Federal Help
“Absent a solution designed for their circumstances, theaters may not survive the impact of the pandemic,” the industry groups said in the letter. “Cinemas are an essential industry that represent the best that American talent and creativity have to offer. But now we fear for their future.” – Los Angeles Times
Open Letter From Hollywood Begs Congress To Save U.S. Cinemas
“Dozens of established filmmakers joined with the Directors Guild of America, the National Association of Theatre Owners and the Motion Picture Association to urge Congress to come to the aid of movie theaters devastated by COVID-19. ‘Absent a solution designed for their circumstances, theaters may not survive the impact of the pandemic,’ the letter warns.” (full text included) – Deadline
PBS Is About To Turn 50
These resources are especially crucial to families without access to broadband internet, and it has been a huge boon during the Covid quarantines. It’s not too much to say that PBS was “built for the pandemic,” as the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns put it in a phone interview last week. “We had the materials. We had the relationships. We didn’t have to retool.” – The New York Times