Category: media

After spending 18 years deciding on an approach to adapting the movie into a theme-park attraction, Disney turned the actual design of the ride over to three senior ‘Imagineers’ and their team of more than 100 architects, designers and technicians.

“Hollywood isn’t doing anything like this material anymore. With cable, there’s this wonderful domain that’s emerged for film directors like me who enjoy the kind of material that Hollywood finds too boring for words.”

“The difference between a commercial and an underwriting message is slight. Once upon a time, PBS staked its reputation on classy, uninterrupted programming. Now, it seems, it’s about competing with cable.”

“Even with 100,000 diaries being filled in each year, we have a population of 56 million, so there is a probability that many people will not have seen a Rajar interviewer. But wait and one day someone may knock on your door.”

A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis “discuss the lingering bias against movies that aspire to more than entertainment” – especially those that do so at a less-than-snappy pace.

Matthew Robinson “was a longtime executive producer of the British series EastEnders, now in its 26th year. Arriving in Cambodia in 2003, he applied the same formula to create three groundbreaking series for Cambodian television, with a fourth now in the works.”

But almost no one at the theaters or their corporate headquarters is willing to talk about it.

Driven by a mania to abandon celluloid in favor of digital, increasing numbers of chains are installing 3D-ready digital projectors. As everyone can tell simply by taking off their 3D glasses, the process noticeably reduces the visible light from the screen.

“When it comes to summer blockbusters, more important than actual content is audience familiarity. Summer theatergoers don’t care what the New York Times (or SlashFilm, or us) has to say about the latest Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay film: These tent-pole sequels are summer staples specifically because so much money has been poured into them to generate mass audience appeal.”

“Americans spent an estimated $280 million at the movies from Friday to Monday, surpassing the previous high of $255 million set in 2007, before the recession, and blowing by 2010’s paltry $192.7-million take.”