Category: media

Completed movies “can linger for months, even years, trapped by marketing disagreements, creative clashes, executive shuffles, money shortfalls or the judgment that they are such surefire flops that it makes no sense to throw good money after bad and distribute them.”

“Historically, the movies have helped get the country in gear when the solution to a crisis depends at least in part on new resolve and a boost to the spirits. But the bewildering journey through a subprime lending crisis, a market collapse and federal bailouts, added to the lingering pain of chronic joblessness, appears to have left filmmakers at something of a loss.”

“The road to KCET’s headline-grabbing split from PBS began in the usually low-profile backwater of educational-TV fundraising. In 2003, KCET was seeking financial support for a series that would offer advice and training for caregivers of preschool children…”

“[A] new wave of independent films is out there, eager to bust taboos, sexual and otherwise. … These films want to poke at corners of reality and humanity that the commercial cinema has traditionally ignored.” Now there’s even Indian mumblecore.

The would-be Canadian ice-rink anthem Hockey, the Greatest Game in the Land was poised to be a breakaway hit, but instead has clanked off the crossbar. When apprised of the hockey-lore inaccuracy, the film’s director, Michael McGowan, was stunned. “Oh my God, we’re screwed,” he groaned. “He [Bobby Orr] didn’t play in ’72? Well, then, we’re idiots basically. You can write that we’re complete morons.”

“The BBC will have to cut £140m a year from its annual £3.6bn budget to meet the cost of freezing the TV licence fee for six years and new funding commitments, including the World Service.”

Says the director, “The damage inflicted on our film industry by [the actors unions] is long since done.”

“More listeners continue to find public radio and, as evidenced by a couple of developments in recent days, the network and some of its executives want to make the footprint even larger. With NPR already well established as a national and international news source, its biggest gaps are on the local front. And that happens to be where newspapers and other media have cut back.”

“Now that video stores seem just about dead — a decline, more or less, that paralleled the emergence of Netflix, and convenience with it — few are lamenting the end of video stores. Perhaps with reason.”

“In Europe, YouTube is still perceived in some circles as an illicit conduit for bootleg music. … But [YouTube owner] Google, using a carrot-and-stick approach of negotiation and music blackouts, [is beginning] to root out the legal hurdles to YouTube’s growth in Europe.”