Category: media

“Introduced by Kodak in 1965, super 8 was the cheapest film around – each roll was about $5, and worked on cameras that started for under $30. Many families purchased super 8 cameras … and soon kids were out in the backyard, playing auteur. … [A] slew of today’s most successful filmmakers got their start shooting on super 8 film.”

“When Walter Isaacson championed Voice of America’s decision to shut down its shortwave radio broadcasts to China – and shift those funds to the Internet, cellphones and other forms of digital media – he viewed it as the sensible updating of a propaganda playbook dating from the cold war.” Then he talked to Congress …

“‘My grandfather fought in World War II. My dad was a cop in New York in the 1960s and ’70s during the riots in the Bronx,’ says TV writer Christopher Moynihan. ‘I’m in my 30s, wear Converse every day and drink nondairy hazelnut creamer’.”

“[The] first ‘digital archeology’ exhibit of the earliest websites is making its North American debut” this week in New York. “On display is an array of 28 culturally significant websites, displayed on the ‘vintage’ hardware and software of the era in which they were made.”

“I listen to students tell me how much they love the film with a certain measure of dread. … Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved.”

“Thanks to a boom in cable TV production, and cable comedies in particular, the most recent pilot season — which typically runs January through April in advance of screenings for advertisers in May — was the most productive on record, with 169 pilots produced for the 2010/2011 development season.”

“France’s audiovisual authority says that TV and radio stations that promote their sites on the two gargantuan social media services on air are actually engaging in secret — and unfair — advertising. Some French bloggers, bemoaning that their country seems out of touch with the Digital Age, pilloried what it considered an antiquated stance.”

The original, “a 2010 horror film in which a scientist stitches kidnap victims together, was proudly touted as ‘the most horrific film ever made’. Now the British Board of Film Classification has declined to certify The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as suitable even for adult audiences, effectively banning the movie from the country.

“What does the average Hollywood career look like? In the Rotten Tomatoes database, more than 19,000 actors and 2,000 directors had their first film released in 1985 or later. The average actor’s critical reception gets slightly worse over the course of his first few movies, then plateaus. The average score for an actor’s first film is about 55 percent. By his fourth movie, that score slides to about 50 percent, where it hovers for the rest of his career.”

“Over the last several years, Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert A. Iger has restructured the studio, scaling back the number of movies it produces and releases. Disney sold off its Miramax Films specialty movie label last year and consolidated the Burbank studio’s marketing and distribution operations.”