“DuVernay’s career has been one marked by firsts: first black woman to win Sundance’s best director prize; first black female director nominated for a Golden Globe; first black female director with a film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. So it’s not surprising that she would be the first to break the budget barrier.”
Category: media
American TV Seems More Diverse. Is It?
“There’s a prevailing notion that—in a pop culture climate ruled by Scandal and Empire and an industry flipping a middle finger to any #OscarsSoWhite malfeasance—television is in the midst of a Golden Age of diversity. But is that really the case?”
Augmented Reality: Pokémon Go Could Be The Start Of A Transformation In Children’s Games And Learning
“While electronic games have traditionally caused kids to retreat to couches, here is one that did precisely the opposite. … If done right, some say the technology Go introduced to the world could bring back the kind of outdoor, creative, and social forms of play that used to be the mainstay of childhood. Augmented reality, it stands to reason, could revitalize the role of imagination in kids’ learning and development.”
Tales Of John Waters’s First Feature-Length Talkie, ‘Multiple Maniacs’
When the film went before a board of censors 50 years ago, says Waters, “the woman cried when she saw it, and she sent it to the judge. He said, ‘My eyes were insulted for 90 minutes, but it’s not illegal,’ which was the whole point of the movie! To make something that wasn’t illegal yet.”
TV Pilot Production Down 13 Percent In LA This Year
“Out of 201 pilots, 79 projects (25 dramas and 54 comedies) were filmed in the Los Angeles area — giving the region a 39% share of total pilot production, down from 45% last year. New York was the second most-active location with 28 pilots, followed by Vancouver with 25 pilots, Atlanta with 15 and Toronto with 12.”
The Final Chapter In Billy Wilder’s Filmmaking Career (Did You Know It Lasted Into The 1980s?)
“In the last 20 years of his life, Wilder (who died in 2002) managed the unlikely feat of being both revered and ignored. … There came a point after his final two movies, Fedora (1978) and Buddy Buddy (1981), when Hollywood simply stopped financing his work. … He went every day to his office in Beverly Hills to work on projects that would never be made.”
Why It’s Hard To Adapt Philip Roth For The Screen
James Schamus, director of Indignation: “With Roth you often get it in the course of negotiating the gap between an astringent or removed voice that’s narrating on the one hand, and then the actual narrated events of the characters. There’s this weird disjunction that creates this space for him to play and work. You don’t have those tools in cinema.”
Press [W] To Waterboard: A Video Game That Lets You Torture Iraqi Prisoners
“What if there were a way to make sense of state-sanctioned torture in a more visceral way than by reading a news article or watching a documentary? Two years ago, that’s exactly what a team of Pittsburgh-based video-game designers set out to create: an experience that would bring people uncomfortably close to the abuses that took place in one particularly infamous prison camp.”
It’s Not Just Meryl Anymore: A Crop Of Older Actresses Have Become Box-Office Draws
“Streep, at 67, is no longer an outlier defying all conventional wisdom about the box-office viability of an actress north of 50; she’s part of a trend.”
Study: TV Watching Increases Risk Of Heart Attacks
“After adjusting for other factors, they found that compared with watching TV less than two and a half hours a day, watching for two and a half to five hours increased the risk for a fatal clot by 70 percent, and watching more than five hours increased the risk by 250 percent. For each extra two hours of watching, the risk of death rose 40 percent. The effect was independent of physical exercise.”