Category: media

You get paid extra for bringing props, driving your own car, and – if you’re lucky – getting membership in a professional union. Now, of course, the industry needs more extras than ever: “As streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon double down on original programming, filming for television shows is no longer relegated to a standard nine-month network television schedule—meaning jobs like mine can be available year-round.”

The news isn’t exactly scintillating. “The continued rise of streaming services, and their need for a constantly renewed library of content, means that informational documentaries will continue to be made. … They demand little of the viewer and are easy to digest, not to mention relatively cheap to produce. But at the same time, in the case of literature, they reduce their subject to a series of outworn clichés, where the lives of all writers begin to resemble each other.”

You’d think it was 1811 at the movies, at least for women and their enjoyment of sex. “Female characters who have sex as casually as men have long been punished in popular culture, but a few decades ago things looked as if they were changing for the better.” (Spoiler: They didn’t.)

The territory now ranks among the most financially attractive locations for shooting movies. The benefits extend to feature films, documentaries, animation projects and TV series. To qualify, a film’s minimum spend should be 1 million euros, or about $1.2 million, and the minimum budget must be 2 million euros, or approximately $2.3 million.

Shiraz Higgins used the false name Sid Mohammed when he announced a so-called justice-pricing model to charge white men as much as $20, while others would pay $10 based on the purchasing power of individual groups and “price discrimination.”

It’s still not clear what the entertainment systems in driverless cars will look like. The women have seen mockup designs that are very preliminary. “We don’t know if we’re essentially going to be presented with a platform from car companies where they’ll say, like, ‘Here’s your screen. Put what you want to put on it’ and now we’re competing with Netflix and Hulu,” said Muller. “Or is there a way to be part of the conversation, help shape what the entertainment experience is like for people?”

“Whatever arrogance you have – is the past lesser or greater? It’s all the same. And loss is loss is loss. And so wars are united, because they are big loss machines. They drive families apart and then some people don’t come home. … And that’s why they’re so instructive, because they remind us again and again of the worst of us. And we hope in some ways that by studying it you might mitigate it, but it won’t. There will always be wars and everybody feels it the same.” (podcast plus transcript)

“When the Taliban charged in to Afghanistan’s state-run film company in the mid-1990s intent on destroying all the movies, Habibullah Ali risked everything to save them. He hid thousands of reels of footage showcasing Afghanistan’s rich cultural history … Two decades later those reels, which include long-lost movies and documentary images of Afghanistan before it was ravaged by violence, are being made available to watch again through digitisation.”

“Burns has long worked with multiple teams; these different squads of writers and producers mean that he can sometimes release as many as two ambitious films in a single year. Among these collaborators, Novick stands out. She is one of the few people who have shared directing credit with Burns more than once, collaborating with him on Frank Lloyd Wright, Prohibition, The Tenth Inning (an update to Baseball), The War, and now The Vietnam War. Novick, not Burns, now conducts most of the interviews for the films they make together. And the movies that result are a product of a unique alchemy: Novick’s penchant for obsessive research blended with Burns’s eye for narrative arc.”