Category: media

“Just think about it: most of the pieces of art are on screen for less than a second, yet each one had to be carefully selected or commissioned from scratch. It’s all a day’s work for under-praised production designers.”

“‘Most people would agree that a person who jumps into a black hole is doomed,’ says Columbia University cosmologist and best-selling author Brian Greene, ‘but if the black hole is big enough, you wouldn’t get spaghettified right away.'”

“Predictably, the most watched negative ads of today borrow popular tropes and visual cues from mass market fiction; witness the hazmat-and-corpse heavy spot (shades of Outbreak, Walking Dead) about how Republican budget cuts will get you killed by Ebola, which has collected hundreds of thousands of YouTube views.”

“Atlanta’s public radio battle is about to get interesting as WABE 90.1 FM, which for years has relied on a heavy rotation of daytime classical music, plans to expand its news programming in part to compete with Georgia Public Broadcasting.”

“Aereo, which put its [re-streaming of broadcast TV] service on hold after it lost a Supreme Court ruling in June, is laying off a majority of its staff, including employees in New York and Boston, although the company says that it is continuing to ‘chart our path forward’.”

“Under the new rules, drones can be used only on sets that are closed to the public and cannot be operated at night. Operators must have private pilot certificates, keep the drones within their line of sight and below an altitude of 400 feet.”

“[Mark Woollen is the] 43-year-old shaggy-haired hipster introvert who makes indelible spots for Hollywood’s highbrow one percent. Terrence Malick, David Fincher, Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier, the Coen brothers, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson … One studio executive calls his body of work ‘the Criterion Collection of trailers’.”

“Many of the issues that were both so consuming and combustible back in 2004 seem largely absent from [today’s] political terrain. … But, perhaps, nowhere is the gulf between then and now more evident than in the way we talk about America’s place in the world.” On the other hand, “a good part of what has changed is exactly what made the America of then, both left and right, so worthy of satire.”

“In all, markets outside the United States accounted for roughly $25 billion of $35.9 billion in worldwide box-office sales last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Precisely what share of international sales was captured by American-based companies is unclear, but they remained dominant.”

“There will be consequences for the entertainment industry, not just on issues that activate progressives, like climate change and immigration, but on industry-centric concerns over net neutrality and media consolidation.”