Category: media

The project’s “moviemakers get a whole weekend — from Friday evening to Sunday evening — to complete a four-to-seven-minute film.” Its founders “wanted to find out whether it was possible to make a movie in such a short time and if so, whether anyone could stand to watch it. The answer to both questions turns out to be, mostly, yes.”

Producers of a low-budget movie “decided to turn the cameras on themselves, using a live video stream to let viewers watch the production from beginning to end and interact with the film’s cast and crew through a chat room. For a fee of about $10, viewers can log onto the website SulSet.com and ‘see everything that happens behind the scenes on a real Hollywood movie set….'”

Matt Zoller Seitz: “That might seem an unlikely claim on first glance: Glee is a feather-light comedy at least 70 percent of the time, and a glib, mannered one at that. … What’s radical about the series … is its direct, at times nearly primordial sincerity, expressed mostly in its musical numbers.”

Aiming “to adapt to the digital revolution that is reshaping Hollywood and evolve from a provider of back-office services to the studios into a creator of content,” film processing company Technicolor, the “world’s largest producer of DVDs, is venturing into an improbable new business of producing animated TV series.”

“It’s the original films that are the wild cards. Year after year … they are the surprise hits that really drive the business. Original movies create a palpable sense of verve and excitement that not only propel themselves to box office glory, but expand the audience for films that follow in their wake.”

“The 75 movies are a real rarity — in part because early film was volatile and degraded quickly. ‘Only about 20 percent of the films produced in America during the silent era — that is the era of motion pictures before 1929 — survive today in the United States in complete form,’ says Annette Melville, director of the nonprofit Film Preservation Foundation.”

It is rare that TV studios reveal the amounts made by their most successful TV series, but at an investors’ conference late last month, execs spilled the beans about just what a moneymaker the show has been over the past 12 years.

“Hollywood’s anti-capitalism is not accidental. It stems from three sources: the rage of directors and screenwriters against their own capitalist backers, the difficulty of using a visual medium to depict the invisible hand, and an ethical framework which Hollywood shares with most of our culture that regards self-interest as inherently immoral or, at best, amoral.”

German director Wim Wenders has finished shooting a 3D film about legendary choreographer Pina Bausch and he has hailed the reborn format as “an ideal tool for documentary
makers”.

“Looking for lesson in cross-cultural psychology? Look no further than the different ways Americans and Chinese [Web users] react to good [and] bad movies.”