Category: media

“CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox together had the fewest prime-time viewers last week in two decades of record-keeping, the Nielsen Co. said. Given the dominance of the big broadcasters before then, you’d probably have to go back to the early days of television to find such a collective shrug.”

“Los Angeles billionaire Ronald Tutor and his partners Morgan Creek, Colony Capital and David Bergstein have reached agreement to buy Miramax from The Walt Disney Company … The sale price is believed to be $675 million.”

The collaborative website Lost-films.eu has a database of more than 4,000 missing movies, “from an actual jazz-era version of The Great Gatsby (1926) to a re-enactment of The Battle of Gettysburg (1913) staged while the veterans were still alive. But even more curious is the site’s ‘Identify’ section – an open call to other museums and the public to I.D. films that sometimes survive without title cards, without canister labels, without so much as a cast or director or country of origin.”

“Much like the corporate names KFC or AT&T, the initials now stand for the initials. NPR says it’s abbreviating the name it has used since its debut in 1971 because it’s more than radio these days. Its news, music and informational programming is heard over a variety of digital devices that aren’t radios; it also operates news and music Web sites.”

“Kickstarter is a concept: a Web site that puts together creative types seeking money with backers willing to chip in micro- and macro-payments, a way to crowd-source the financing of ideas.” This weekend, the company presents the first Kickstarter Film Festival, which “will present some of the projects that patrons of the site have financed, from features and animation to quirkier stuff like a video of a dance anthropology performance piece.”

“The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria [Queens] will open its expanded and redesigned home – featuring a new glass entrance, grand staircase and lobby video wall – on January 15. … The $67 million renovation, designed by architect Thomas Leeser, added three stories – nearly doubling the square footage to 97,700 from 50,000.”

“Currently, RightNetwork has just three shows. One of them is a stand-up comedy series taped at a club in Los Angeles called Right 2 Laugh.” In the series’ trailer, a comedian “jokes that he’s ordering one of those coins with President Obama’s face on it because, he says, ‘any collector will tell you a coin is worth a lot more when there’s an obvious mistake on it.'”

“Stephen Hawking … [has] suggested that we should be wary of contact with extraterrestrials, citing what happened to Native Americans when Europeans landed on their shores. … [But it’s] manifestly too late. We have been inadvertently betraying our presence for 60 years with our television, radio and radar transmissions. The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day.”

Among them: “Sherlock Holmes’s first screen appearance in 1914’s A Study in Scarlet; the first HG Wells science fiction film, The First Men in the Moon (1919); and The Last Post, made by Dinah Shurey…, who sued Film Weekly over a column suggesting the movie made it ‘pathetically obvious’ that women could not direct (she was awarded £500 damages).”

“Shortly after the release of And Then Came Lola, unauthorized copies of the film began to appear on web sites that specialize in pirated movies and TV. That was frustrating enough,” but then the filmmaker “saw the ads surrounding the movie on the websites” — ads for “legit companies like Sony, Radio Shack, Porsche, AT&T, Chase, Auto-Zone and even Netflix.”