“Sonia Nassery Cole knew that shooting a movie on location in Afghanistan could get her killed. The most vivid reminder came a few weeks before filming, she said, when militants located her leading actress and cut off both of her feet.”
Category: media
DreamWorks Prevails in Disturbia/Rear Window Copyright Suit
“Director Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks movie studio on Tuesday won the dismissal of a copyright infringement lawsuit that claimed their 2007 thriller Disturbia stole the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window.”
Defying Clear Channel, Rock Radio’s Evil Empire
Broadcasting out of a tiny storefront on lower First Avenue in Manhattan, East Village Radio “deftly leverag[es] street cred, an easy relationship with artists, and the identity of a bohemian counterculture neighborhood into a burgeoning Internet audience” of about one million listeners per month – and no transmitter.
The Big Con – Do We Believe “Reality” Anymore?
“When it comes to entertainment, we in the media are sticklers for attributable facts. But in Hollywood, the truth is seen as being much more elastic, in part because film and TV writers create drama for a living, in part because people in showbiz tell so many white lies every day that the notion of a bigger truth often eludes them.”
The World’s Second Largest Producer Of Movies? Nigeria
“Nollywood makes about 2,400 films per year, putting it ahead of the US, but behind India, according to a Unesco report last year. Nigerian film-makers tend to operate in a fast and furious manner; shoots rarely last longer than two weeks, cheap digital equipment is almost always used and the average budget is about $15,000 (£9,664).”
The Hidden Messages in One TV Producer’s Credits
“Typically, TV producers display their personal production logos at the end of a show’s credits – famous examples include Gary David Goldberg’s ‘Sit, Ubu, sit!’ or Joss Whedon’s ‘Grr! Argh!’ monster.” Not producer Chuck Lorre …
So Can Video Games Be Art?
“They certainly incorporate many artistic elements: painting, architecture, music, sculpture, acting, writing, animation and dance. The games that feel more like art tend to have qualities in common.”
Guggenheim Curates First YouTube Biennial
”YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video,” is the first curated search for videos of a higher brow on the popular Google Inc.-owned website. From among more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, 125 videos were shortlisted for the inaugural biennial.
Music And Movie Websites Attacked By Activists
“The assault temporarily knocked the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) offline. The attacks were declared on notorious message-board 4chan and were reportedly in retaliation for anti-piracy efforts against file-sharing websites.”
“King’s Speech” Wins Toronto Film Fest Prize
Set in England between the wars, “The King’s Speech,” the favored middlebrow “prestige” selection of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival entries, won the audience award Sunday.