Category: media

The Intellectual Property Development Fund is “a one-year pilot program, retroactive to April 1 of this year, that reimburses Ontario ‘screen-based companies’ for expenses they incur in getting a feature film, TV series, video game, ‘webisode’ or Internet property off the ground.”

“The daytime faithful were still recovering from the recent departure of [72-year-old] Guiding Light when news broke on Tuesday of CBS’s decision to pull the plug on [53-year-old] As the World Turns . … [M]ore people [are] filling the daylight hours with Rachael Ray, Dr. Oz and, of course, Ellen DeGeneres. How can soapy plotlines about missing heiresses and evil twins ever compete with Ellen doing the funky chicken?”

“Recent hits like [Meryl] Streep’s ‘Julie & Julia,’ along with [Katherine] Heigl’s ‘The Ugly Truth’ and [Sandra] Bullock’s ‘The Proposal,’ … show that when it comes to star-driven films, female actresses have consistently outperformed their male counterparts. They also tend to cost less to produce and market, meaning a bigger profit margin for studios.”

“Veteran director Chris Weitz told the Sun-Times he’s dismayed about Samantha Tumpach’s arrest Nov. 28 at a Rosemont movie theater on a felony charge of illegally copying his new hit film, and he’s contacted the film’s studio about his concerns.”

“Critical Focus Exchange, a service in which critics and film reporters offer their expertise to producers and studios looking for feedback on niche and arthouse movies,” is a new source of income — $100 per screening — for out-of-work film critics in New York and Los Angeles.

Following on the success of the current Broadway musical Fela, Focus has hired African-British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (Hunger) to direct a feature on the Nigerian musician and activist. The film project has no connection with the stage production.

Casting Jennifer Hudson in the title role of a film about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela “has not gone down well in [South Africa’s] acting community. At a stormy weekend press conference, the Creative Workers Union of South Africa said that using foreign actors to tell the country’s stories undermined efforts to develop a national film industry.”

“US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner granted yesterday a request by [record] companies that she order Joel Tenenbaum to destroy the 30 songs that a federal jury found he downloaded and to not commit further copyright infringement. But she rebuffed their request to bar him from encouraging others to break the law.”

“It was pledged to sincerity and emotional truth, and it turned film-going into a profound psychological ordeal…. It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of the Method. It was full of good work, but it was above all, sincere, American, robust and manly.”

The novice filmmakers, “many of whom grew up in the shadow of civil war and political strife in their native countries, are proving to be comfortable straddling East and West. That fusion is imbuing their filmmaking aesthetic with an often intriguing mix of Arabic subject matter and cultural influences from both Hollywood and Europe.”