Category: media

“Soaps are notorious for contriving the demise of any character played by an actor who displeases. And that displeasure can take many forms. The most obvious is a dispute over pay.”

“Is geography destiny? Or, to put it another way, why did the San Francisco Bay Area become a humming hub for so many great avant-garde film and video makers, a veritable crossroads of the alternative world?”

“As the local opinion makers revived and shuffled through the exits, I bumped into Philo Cubbage, a schmendrick I knew from the periphery of show business who surfaced intermittently over the years with some fresh scheme for achieving bankruptcy. … [We] agreed to masticate a pair of sirloins and repaired to Upchuck’s, where we could dine and disembowel the film we’d seen at leisure.”

In short, white moviegoers seem convinced that films with black stars are not made for them.

“David Jordan, the BBC’s head of editorial policy, has said he aims to ‘dial down compliance’, following complaints from programme-makers that the corporation has become too risk averse in its commissioning.”

“Over the course of a comedy career of 36 years and counting and 9 seasons of a singularly influential sitcom, Jerry Seinfeld has built a vast repository of stand-up material but was never truly master of his domain, in the online sense. That will change on Friday with the debut of his Web site, JerrySeinfeld.com, an online home for video of nearly every recorded comedy performance given by its creator and namesake”

“Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore says his government believes in the CBC as a key cultural institution and has no plans to cut its funding following his party’s recent electoral victory.”

“The Moscow film company behind some of the greatest classics of Soviet cinema on Wednesday said it had agreed to make dozens of its best-known movies freely available on YouTube. The agreement between Mosfilm and YouTube means that an initial batch of 50 films that still have legendary status in Russia but are little known outside will for the first time find a wide foreign audience.”

“The successful end of the bin Laden manhunt may signal a turning point in films about the war on terror. Since 2001, movies about the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have failed to take hold with audiences. Even with rapturous reviews, extensive marketing campaigns, and high-caliber stars, films like United 93 and Green Zone were massive box office disappointments.”

Katie Wech: “”In screenwriting, you have to cover a lot of ground with very few words … Instead of spending a half page describing a character, I have to do it in a sentence. And it better be a good sentence, specific and vivid enough to help everyone from a casting director to a costume designer bring that person to life.”