Emily Nussbaum: “Season 6 … felt perversely relevant in this election year. It was dominated by debates about purity versus pragmatism; the struggles of female candidates in a male-run world; family dynasties with ugly histories; and assorted deals with various devils. George R. R. Martin surely didn’t intend his blockbuster series of fantasy books … to be an allegorical text for U.S. voters in 2016. But that’s what you get with modern water-cooler dramas, which so often work as an aesthetic Esperanto that lets us talk about politics without fighting about the news.”
Category: media
Female Cinematographers Talk About Making Their Way In A Very Male Profession
“Vulture spoke to [Natasha] Braier (The Neon Demon) and two other prominent female DPs, Maryse Alberti (The Wrestler, Creed) and Rachel Morrison (Fruitvale Station, Cake, Dope), about the challenges, opportunities, and absurdity of being a woman in cinematography.”
Teach Your Robot To Be More Human By Settling It In With Unlimited Netflix
“Six hundred hours of video sounds like a lot, but it’s not really that much. By the time we’re 10 years old, we’ve logged nearly 60,000 hours of waking-hours experience.”
A Dating App For Intellectual Property
“Want a peek at the buzzy new sci-fi novel? Swipe right. Curious if its movie rights have sold? Swipe again. Publishing upstart Inkshares is launching an app, dubbed Properties, to promote its content to Hollywood. It curates selections for each user, offers sample chapters and provides updates on theatrical, TV, audiobook and foreign rights.”
Public Radio’s Big New Opportunities
“One person’s existential crisis is another’s opportunity; a period of expanding audiences, creative disruption, and greeting the future. From where I sit, at the helm of New York Public Radio, the news is overwhelmingly positive and the terrain is open for anyone bold enough to embrace what is undoubtedly radio’s next incarnation.”
The Video Game Experience As Art
“What’s the mechanism through which a game can give you an artistic experience?” When we watch a movie or read a novel, he said, we consider characters’ dramatic conflicts and imagine what we’d do; he wanted to replicate that in a game, in which the player could actively participate.
Hollywood’s Sequels Barely Even Bother With The Story, They’re About Milking The Brand
“Sequels have always been a financially driven proposition, and it’s not a revelation that some of them are churned out like sausage … But for the 15 years or so of the post-Star Wars blockbuster era, the bottom-line pragmatism behind sequels did not erase another priority: narrative.” But that was then: “This summer’s sequels are not, for the most part, story continuations but brand extensions.”
What Hollywood Can Learn About Disability From ‘Finding Dory’
Alyssa Rosenberg: “Part of what’s great about a movie like Finding Dory is that there are so many characters with disabilities in it that no single character has to carry the weight of an entire community, or act as an exemplar for it.” And the expectations for the disabled characters aren’t low: “Dory and Nemo have wild, ocean-spanning, out-of-water adventures that most fish never dream of.”
How NPR Unlocked A Ton Of Data About How Its Listeners Listen
“The largest age group listening to NPR One is 25- to 34-year-olds, according to NPR, with 40 percent of listeners under 35. More than a third of users who answered NPR surveys said they never or only occasionally listen to broadcast radio.”
This Is How The TV Show Business Model Is Changing
“Network television used to deficit-finance shows and then make those expenditures back through advertising money. The shows would then generate more revenue by getting lucrative syndication deals. But now, cable shows draw in ad revenues, carriage fees, and international sales to satellite, cable, and streaming or on-demand services. When those various revenue streams add up, a show can be profitable from the get-go.”