“New York has always prided itself on granting largely free access to streets, parks and other city-owned locations for TV and film productions but steep budget cuts have forced the city film office to find new sources of revenue.” The city now wants to charge a $300 fee that “would be paid just once by a movie” and once per season by TV shows.
Tag: 04.27.10
Art Dealer Pleads Guilty To Fraud In Fake Picasso Sale
“As part of the plea deal, the West Hollywood resident admitted she paid an art restorer $1,000 to create a reproduction of a work by Pablo Picasso — a 1902 pastel ‘La Femme Au Chapeau Bleu’ or ‘The Woman in the Blue Hat.'”
Marilyn Monroe’s Writings To Be Assembled In Book
“Some of the most personal correspondence that Marilyn Monroe wrote in her life, as well as the messages, both intimate and trivial, that she jotted for herself will be published for the first time in a book planned for the fall.”
Was Robert Frost A Modernist?
“On the ‘no’ side of that question, it’s true that works like ‘The Road Not Taken’ do not unsettle or revise any 19th-century notions of form or idea. … On the other hand, Frost’s greatest poems, such as ‘Directive’ and ‘The Most of It,’ do radically challenge and reimagine old conceptions of memory, culture, and ways of beholding nature.”
Corruption Galore At France’s Top Auction House
“The Hôtel Drouot is France’s oldest, largest, most storied and most profitable auction site.” This winter, “the French police exposed what is said to be an extensive art-trafficking ring within the auction house. … But perhaps more surprising than the thefts themselves is the culture of casual corruption that Justice Ministry investigators uncovered when they conducted their own investigation after the scandal broke.”
Nashville Ballet’s Artistic Director Named CEO As Well
Paul Vasterling, “who will start his 13th season with the ballet this year, will oversee the organization’s business activities while he continues directing its artistic side.”
Three Firms Vie For Chance To Design New Berkeley Museum
“Two high-profile architectural offices and a lesser-known candidate are in the running to design a new home for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, BAM officials announced Tuesday. Joining high-wattage New York firms Diller, Scofidio + Renfro and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects is Boston-based architect Ann Beha.”
Don’t Blame YouTube For Pulling All Those Ranting-Hitler Videos
One of the hottest YouTube memes of the past few years has been to post the big Hitler tantrum scene from the 2004 film Downfall with subtitles showing the Führer screaming about – oh, Kanye West cutting off Taylor Swift, or the US healthcare debate, or anything else irksome. Last week the movie’s distributor asked YouTube to remove all those videos, fair use doctrine notwithstanding. That wasn’t a wise decision.
David Hare Chats Up The Tories’ Culture Secretary
“My purpose in having coffee with Jeremy Hunt, the personable young shadow culture secretary, was to obtain reassurance, not least because mention of the arts, culture and broadcasting is entirely omitted from the 118-page Conservative party manifesto. Hunt sees nothing sinister in this.”
Wodehouse Prize Surprise: Ian McEwan Is In The Running
“In a validation of McEwan’s decision to move towards more comic writing and ‘play around at the edges of realism … [to] be slightly less sober’, the judges have selected [McEwan’s ‘Solar’] as one of the five novels of the past year that have captured the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse.”