Category: media

The plan for the upcoming Current TV series Bar Karma is that participants “would be able to submit story ideas, create storyboards based on the rough outlines from professional producers, and vote for the ideas that are submitted. The storyboard with the most votes will be adapted, produced and edited.”

“If both the NFL and the academy get their way, then, the Oscars would be placed squarely in the path of one of the NFL’s playoff weekends — a clear ratings pitfall for any broadly targeted show.”

“If these guys think they can make a big studio film without looking like whores or compromising their vision, they are all pretty eager to jump at the chance. The sad truth is that there isn’t much of an indie marketplace anymore, so it’s not like they have a lot of other places to go.”

“Television production never, in fact, merited a stand-alone department at Murrow, but for more than a generation of students who took the sequence of courses called TERM, or Television at Edward R. Murrow, to train for television careers, it might have seemed like one.”

“The putative radio and TV watchdogs of yesteryear have been pushed to the margins. They work for commercial interests or operate in obscure niches, fighting to build even modest audiences. Welcome to the Great Beyond of broadcast consumer reporting in L.A., 2010.”

“The British film industry is haemorrhaging so much money that it will not survive unless it changes its ways. Vast sums are being frittered away on needless production costs and most films recoup only a fraction of their multimillion-pound budgets.”

“The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986.” He is Rajinikanth. “Or, as his films are contractually obligated to credit him, ‘SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!'”

A new joint initiative of the Institute and the US government “selects a curated group of ten contemporary independent films, five American and five international, and invites the filmmakers to screen their work in selected locations in the U.S. and at American embassies and other locations around the world.”

“Coming soon to theaters near you (all right, mostly Kazakh ones): My Brother, Borat, a film that seeks to portray today’s Kazakhstan with some curious narrative devices. Like an amorous donkey. Which somehow has its way with Borat’s loopy brother. Who then gets pregnant. And the two get married.”

In 2007, there were 16,237 video-rental stores in the country, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, down from 23,036 in 1997.