Category: media

“The video-hosting platform, which is owned by Google, announced the changes in a Thursday blog post, saying the new view count threshold gives YouTube enough information to ensure creators that reap money from their content are following the site’s guidelines and advertising policies.”

“There’s a lot of strain when working without a script because you can lose track of where you are,” he recently told an audience in D.C. “It’s very hard to coordinate with others who are working on the film. Production designers and location managers arrive in the morning and don’t know what we’re going to shoot or where we’re going to shoot. The reason we did it was to try and get moments that are spontaneous and free.”

“A glance at the balance sheet for the year to date would cement the view that the blockbuster is in rude health. … Dig a little deeper though and the foundations that blockbusters are built on start to look shaky.”

“The French government raised eyebrows recently when it decided to back the creation of a large-scale international drama fest in Northern France’s Lille, which it wants to become the TV counterpart of the iconic Cannes Film Festival. The announcement came as city officials in Cannes itself said they would create their own rival international drama festival to run alongside MipTV.”

“Public broadcasting makes our nation smarter, stronger and, yes, safer. It’s a small public investment that pays huge dividends for Americans. And it shouldn’t be pitted against spending more on improving our military. That’s a false choice. This might seem like an unlikely position for me, a 34-year combat veteran. But it’s a view that has been shaped by my career leading brave men and women who thrive and win when they are both strong and smart.”

Using criticism of Jessica Chastain’s use of a Polish accent in The Zookeeper’s Wife as a jumping-off point, three writers debate whether actors should use an accent from the country the characters are from, their own accents, or some form of a British accent. Each writer has a different answer, and they all have good points.

“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales … Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up.”

“This should be a golden age for writers as peak TV has made television a genuine competitor with film in terms of prestige. But with new contract negotiations in the offing, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the production bosses have spent much of the past month acting like Truman and Stalin at the outset of the cold war.”

“‘The spirit of it was, ‘Let’s just screw around,” recalls Adam McKay, the onetime SNL head writer and Oscar-winning writer-director (The Big Short) who cofounded the site … ‘We thought we’d tell our friends about it, and maybe it would be a little comedy clubhouse’ … As the site enters the age of Trump, we asked its founders and fans to reveal the smashes, near crashes, and highfalutin fart jokes that helped it become one of the sharpest, funniest forces in pop culture.

“The original Serial first season took seven weeks to reach 10 million downloads, setting a record at the time in reaching that milestone.” S-Town passed the 10 million mark in four days.