Category: media

A recent Annenberg study was pretty depressing in terms of representation for people of color, and even white women, in Hollywood. But “how do you persuade the dream factory to dream a lot bigger than the lives of white men in the United States and Britain? The Annenberg study favours industry targets and movie contracts in which top talent would demand on-set equity from the studio bosses. Maybe this shaming will have some effect. … Giving female screenwriters and non-white screenwriters more chances seems more likely to produce a wider range of stories and different approaches to storytelling.”

Peak TV and the success of shows ranging from Empire to Transparent, added to the strong awareness of April Reign’s #OscarsSoWhite campaign, have transformed the press tour from triumphant bragging to fierce discussions and defensive moves from networks – especially the exceedingly white and male CBS – about diversity in front of and behind the camera.

Aside from Wonder Woman and a few others, this was the entire summer for Hollywood: “Now the chickens of failure have come home to roost.”

Yes, that’s James Ivory of Merchant Ivory fame. “Despite 50 years of critical acclaim and Oscar recognition, plus British actors Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis lined up to star in his production, financiers are refusing to part with their money. ‘They look at you like you’re crazy. … There is an assumption that there is no money to be made from such an investment.'”

It is, argues Will Oremus, a threat to Twitter.

Matilda a sumptuous production about the young Nicholas II’s affair with a half-Polish ballerina, has sparked more protests in Russia than any other film since the fall of the USSR. Conservative Orthodox Christians, appalled at the depiction of an illicit (but well-documented) relationship involving a monarch they consider a holy martyr, have been demanding that the film be banned.

On the surface, it looks as if Disney is adopting the dual-distribution model HBO pioneered: It wants to sell retail OTT services directly to households, while continuing to sell wholesale TV programming through pay-TV operators. That “arguably reduces the consumer value of Netflix, which remains the biggest strategic challenge to linear networks in the expanded basic bundle long-term.”

Dana Stevens: “Both Detroit and Whose Streets? move from a large-scale panoramic view of an urban community in crisis toward a more intimate portrait of a few of the individuals involved. But Whose Streets? is the more effective and emotionally powerful of the two, perhaps because it constructs its world from the ground up, not from the top down. This is another way of framing a fact that’s difficult to talk about (especially for a white critic) but important to note: The filmmaking team behind Whose Streets? is black, and the one behind Detroit is white. The question – a very live one at this moment in history – of whose story is whose to tell is raised in a stark fashion by the release of these two movies in successive weeks at a moment when the civil rights of people of color (including nonwhite immigrants) are as imperiled as they’ve been since the days of those Detroit riots.”