Category: media

“The generous subsidies given to Hollywood productions have to be paid for by either cuts in government services or higher taxes on other groups and individuals. ‘They don’t pay for themselves.'”

“Ending a television show is not like ending a movie. The creator hasn’t asked the audience to join in on their world for two or three hours, they have brought that audience along with them to the finishing line for years.”

“MPAA ratings administrators have always resisted strict rules and regulations when determining what instances and degrees of rough language, nudity and violence can lead to a PG, or PG-13, or R, or the supremely rare NC-17. Narrowing this to the language question, these variances nonetheless are chaotic at best.”

“In a last-minute compromise reached Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown said he would approve legislation that would more than triple the annual tax credits available for movies and TV shows produced in California. The bill is aimed at reversing the loss of location shoots to other states that offer rich incentives to studios and producers.”

The Oscar- and Emmy-winner “will star in and direct Bathing Flo, … a New York-set story that centers on a man in need of a place to live, who’s given the chance to house-sit in exchange for free rent. He discovers the house is occupied by the man’s elderly mother Flo, who is part of the deal.”

The now-notorious Vox article “resurrected a feverish debate among fans of one of the more beloved TV shows in history. … [This] can also tell us something important about human psychology: Uncertainty drives us crazy.”

That’s certainly what Martha P. Nochimson and her editors at Vox think. And so an essay of nearly 5,000 words – many of them, from both Nochimson and Chase himself, erudite and insightful – get boiled down (not least by Vox itself) into a seemingly unambiguous answer to what is actually quite an ambiguous question. (What does it really mean to say, “Tony Soprano lives!”?)

A publicist for the Sopranos showrunner said in a statement: “To simply quote David as saying, ‘Tony Soprano is not dead,’ is inaccurate. There is a much larger context for that statement and as such, it is not true.” The statement goes on to remind us what Chase has said about the subject many times, and Vox culture editor Todd VanDerWerff offers a defense of the article.

“I won’t take anyone’s interpretation away from anybody – not because I feel that certain interpretations are more provable than others, but because if you’re trying to ‘prove’ a particular theory about the ending of a consciously ambiguous and at times tactically frustrating work of popular art, you’re watching it wrong.”