Category: media

“The 71-year-old star of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus said: ‘When I was growing up, we had the best television in the world. Now it’s as bad as it is everywhere else, and I don’t particularly want to participate in that.”

“Though accusations of entrenched corruption have dogged the HFPA for decades, it has always been tacitly overlooked in the industry. The 11th-hour lawsuit launched late Thursday by former HFPA publicist Michael Russell brought it all out into the open, with allegations of bribery, graft and payola routinely accepted and encouraged by members of the dubious association.”

“While the U.K. has a long cinematic tradition, world-class facilities and a glut of homegrown talent, it has yet to develop a self-sustaining domestic film industry. Instead, the sector relies on grants, lottery funding and the investment of Hollywood studios that choose to shoot in the U.K., lured by a tax break worth about £100m a year.”

“For the second year in a row, U.S. video game sales posted a decline, down 5.7% to $18.6 billion in 2010 from $19.7 billion in 2009 and $21.4 billion in 2008, according to a report released Thursday by the NPD Group.”

“Propaganda is not what it used to be. As it enters its third round of bringing nonfiction American films to underserved foreign audiences, the American Documentary Showcase, a project of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, has been full of surprises — some for the audiences, some for the filmmakers.”

“This is the most serious threat to federal funding that public broadcasting has ever faced,” says Mike Riksen, National Public Radio vice president for policy and representation.

Mark Thompson told staff on Thursday that the £400m saving was necessary so that a “reinvestment” pool could be established. The BBC had previously announced it would have to cut its budget by 16% in order to meet the cost of the recent licence fee deal.”

“Journalists can lose their privilege to shield notes and film from others’ scrutiny if they fail to maintain their independence, an appeals court said Thursday as it upheld a judge’s decision to force a filmmaker to release outtakes from his documentary about a legal dispute between energy company Chevron and Ecuadoreans.”

“On a winter afternoon Robert Hall, owner of the special-effects makeup house Almost Human, is supervising the fabrication of a neck wound for a scene in a new project. While one of his cohorts squeezes a meaty piece of silicone between his fingers, another slathers it in a viscous red liquid poured from a Karo Syrup bottle. Earlier in the day [They] had perforated the silicone by rubbing it over hard Styrofoam pellets harvested from a gutted beanbag chair.”

“The historical specifics have changed since 1971, and the language we use to describe them has changed, too. But the cultural fault lines and hot-button topics all have modern equivalents. … (In a 1972 episode, Archie delivered a pro-gun TV editorial that sounded eerily like actual proposals made after 9/11.)”