The mouse didn't like this, so they banned LA Times movie reviewers from advance showings of their movies, including things like Marvel and Star Wars movies.
Several times in conversations with people in Hollywood, I heard the tech people referred to as “dumb money” — the sort of outsiders (in the past, they came from oil, then from finance) who parade through town looking to call the shots. One Hollywood executive who has worked often with tech companies told me: “I wouldn’t say we’ve looked at them with fear, no.”
Notice the Slightly Uncomfortable Audience Reaction?
The story about Harvey Weinstein's long history of harassment and assault of women in Hollywood continues to get more horrifying.
It also gets weirder. Now we have an explanation for a Seth McFarlane joke at the 2013 Oscars, and basically it's him seizing the moral high ground.
You hear heard that right, "Seth McFarlane seizing the moral high ground."
Now THERE is a phrase I never expected to write.
He had been told in confidence by a friend what had been done to them, and given those constraints, he went after Weinstein with a joke:
As allegations against disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein pile up, more and more celebrities are coming forward to either confirm or deny their own preexisting knowledge about the situation.
On Wednesday, Seth MacFarlane explained the origins of a 2013 joke he made at Harvey Weinstein's expense during the announcement of Academy Award nominations.
MacFarlane cracked his joke immediately after he listed the nominees for supporting actress. "Congratulations," he said. "You five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein," which got a considerable response from the room.
"In 2011, my friend and colleague Jessica Barth, with whom I worked on the ‘Ted’ films, confided in me regarding her encounter with Harvey Weinstein and his attempted advances," MacFarlane said in a statement on social media Wednesday. "She has since courageously come forward to speak out. It was with this account in mind that, when I hosted the Oscars in 2013, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a hard swing in his direction."
I still find it hard to believe that Seth F%$#ing McFarlane is seizing the moral high ground.
Mary Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. She was 80.
Her family said her death, at Greenwich Hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.
Ms. Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People” as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Broadcast from 1970 to 1977, it was produced by both Ms. Moore and her second husband, Grant Tinker, who later ran NBC and who died on Nov. 28.
The wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, sparked outrage on social media by performing a Holocaust-themed ice skating routine that quickly went viral. Tatiana Navka, a former Olympic figure skating champion, performed with actor Andrey Burkovsky, each wearing concentration camp uniforms and yellow Stars of David. The two skated to the song “Beautiful That Way,” by Israeli singer Achinoam “Noa” Nini. The song was featured in a 1997 Italian-language Oscar-winning Holocaust film, which Navka said was the inspiration for the performance. She also said in an Instagram post that she wanted the performance to teach children about the Holocaust.
I saw The Daily Show last night, and I was profoundly unimpressed.
I've generally been supportive of Trevor Noah in his (rather thankless) job replacing Jon Stewart, but their (for lack of a better term) Halloween special missed the mark.
It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, it ain't.
I found it boring, pedantic, and profoundly unfunny.
Half way through, I gave up, and watched Alton Brown doing Good Eats on the Cooking Channel.
AT&T Inc. is close to an agreement to acquire Time Warner Inc. for about $86 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said, a deal that would create a media behemoth that offers TV, wireless, and the content that goes with it. The bid values Time Warner at about $110 a share -- 23 percent more than where the stock closed Friday -- and is structured as an even split between cash and equity, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. If accepted, it would cement the biggest acquisition of the year, surpassing Bayer AG’s $66 billion takeover of U.S. seed giant Monsanto Co., announced in May. Buying Time Warner would give AT&T premium entertainment programming including HBO and the Cartoon Network, which it could offer its millions of pay-TV, mobile phone and Internet subscribers. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been trying to transform the Dallas-based phone company into a media and entertainment giant, and now has one of Hollywood’s top film and TV producers in his cross-hairs.
What do you get when you juxtapose the customer service cultures of the artist formerly known as Ma Bell with what was formerly the 2nd worst cable company in America?
I think that it would be fair to call this merged company the Donald Trump of communications.
Harry Shearer has launched a $125 million fraud and contract-breach lawsuit against Vivendi and StudioCanal over the 1984 rockumentary classic This Is Spinal Tap. The complaint, filed Monday in California federal court, is packed with enough nuggets to instantly make this a must-watch "Hollywood accounting" case. Through the lawsuit, Shearer also reveals he is attempting to claw back rights to the film and its continually popular soundtrack.
Shearer, perhaps best known for the 23 characters he voices on The Simpsons, co-created the semi-fake band Spinal Tap in the 1970s with Christopher Guest and Michael McKean. The film, directed by Rob Reiner and featuring Shearer as bassist Derek Smalls, was produced and released by Embassy Pictures. After a series of transactions, rights to Spinal Tap landed in the hands of Vivendi, the French conglomerate that once had the ambitious goal of becoming one of the largest studios in the industry.
Despite the film's legacy and Spinal Tap's enduring success as an actual band able to sell out arenas, Shearer's company Century of Progress Productions alleges that the four lead creatives have received just $81 in merchandising income and $98 in musical sales income in the past three decades from the franchise.
According to the complaint, the original 1982 production agreement called for Shearer, McKean, Guest and Reiner to get 40 percent of net receipts. In Hollywood, though, calculating contingent profit participation often triggers disputes that go up to 11. This one certainly did.
………
"Particularly given that Vivendi has offset fraudulent accounting for revenues from music copyrights against equally dubious revenue streams for film and merchandising rights also controlled by Vivendi subsidiaries, Shearer is concurrently filing notices of copyright termination for publishing and recording rights in Spinal Tap songs he co-wrote and co-recorded, as well as in the film itself," states the complaint.
$179 after more than 30 years?
Clearly people downloading from the internet are responsible for this.
For almost a decade, the combination of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert made Comedy Central destination viewing for fans of late-night comedy and barbed political commentary. But over the last 12 months, the post-Stewart and post-Colbert era has not been as easy for the network. On Monday, Comedy Central announced that it was canceling “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” because of falling ratings and a distinct lack of buzz. The final episode of Mr. Wilmore’s 11:30 p.m. show — the slot formerly occupied by Mr. Colbert before he left for CBS — will be Thursday. Kent Alterman, Comedy Central’s president, said he informed Mr. Wilmore of the news late last week. The move, Mr. Alterman said in an interview, was made for a simple reason: The show “hasn’t resonated.” “Even though we’ve given it a year and a half, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to click with our audience, but it hasn’t happened, and we haven’t seen evidence of it happening,” Mr. Alterman said. The awkward timing of the cancellation, just 12 weeks before the presidential election, ultimately came down to a contract, Mr. Alterman said. Mr. Wilmore’s deal, along with those of several of the show’s other staff members, was set to expire in a few weeks and the network had to decide now whether to renew or cancel. Continue reading the main story For the time being, Comedy Central’s 12 a.m. show, “@midnight,” will replace “The Nightly Show” at 11:30 p.m. “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah remains at 11 p.m. Mr. Alterman said he hoped to name a full-time replacement for “The Nightly Show” sometime next year. ……… “The Nightly Show” has been known for a signature segment, “Keep It 100,” (slang for telling the truth, no matter the consequences) and for Mr. Wilmore’s often stinging commentary on race and this year’s election. (He called the election to find Barack Obama’s successor “The Unblackening.”) Though the late-show genre remains heavy on easygoing laughter, any one episode of “The Nightly Show” could occasionally go for prolonged stretches without a single joke, something that intrigued some critics but failed to attract a broader audience. “I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart and our fans to have had this opportunity,” Mr. Wilmore said in a statement. “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”
It wasn't getting the demographic that the network wanted, White Bros, because it attempted a meaningful dialogue on race, which is about as welcome by that demo as a turd in a punch bowl.
He thought that it was brilliant, but he had no clue where it came from:
CB: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war two great super-armies developed. Us, the Russians and the French on one side, Germany and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea being that each army would act as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war. PB: Except, this is sort of a war, isn't it? CB: That's right. There was one tiny flaw in the plan. LG: O, what was that? CB: It was bollocks.
I agreed that it was brilliant, and it seemed a bit fmailiar.
I asked it what it was from, and he looked down said, "Something called Blackadder?"
My kids have never seen any of the Blackadder series.
For “Star Trek” fans it was like finding a lost Shakespeare play — only to have it snatched away by the playwright’s heirs. Last fall an unused script for the cult 1960s television show turned up after being forgotten for years. Its author, the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, announced that it would become an episode of a popular Web series, “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II,” which features amateur actors in the classic roles of Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and other crew members of the starship Enterprise. But then another player stepped in: CBS, which said it owned the script and blocked a planned Web production of it. Trekkies were appalled. “These executives should be phasered on heavy stun,” said Harmon Fields of Manhattan, who called himself “a ‘Star Trek’ fan of galactic proportions.” ……… The story begins in 1967, after Mr. Spinrad wrote an acclaimed episode of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” “I did ‘The Doomsday Machine’ fast,” Mr. Spinrad, 71, said by phone from his home in Greenwich Village, “and then they said: ‘We’re in a hole. Can you write something in four days?’ ” The result was “He Walked Among Us,” which the producers envisioned as a dramatic vehicle for the comedian Milton Berle. His character is a well-meaning but messianic sociologist whose conduct threatens to destroy the planet Jugal. The crew of the Enterprise must remove him without disrupting the normal development of the culture. ……… Mr. Spinrad soon donated his sole copy of “He Walked Among Us” and other papers to California State University, Fullerton. With several other drafts of the script, it lay in the archives for decades. Sharon Perry, the university’s archivist and special collections librarian, said she had received only one inquiry about “He Walked Among Us” in her 27 years there. But in October, at the annual New York City Collectible Paperback and Pulp Fiction Expo, a man seeking Mr. Spinrad’s autograph showed up with a copy of the script, which he said he found at another convention. A few months later Mr. Spinrad began selling the script on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com, and the producers of “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II” learned of it. Based in Ticonderoga, N.Y., “Phase II” is one of numerous fan-generated “Star Trek” Internet series, this one named for “Star Trek Phase II,” Mr. Roddenberry’s failed 1977 attempt to revive his creation for television. This Web series is distinguished by its fidelity to the original’s sets, costumes, props, music and other elements, as well as appearances by some original cast members and new stories by writers like Ms. Fontana. Over the years CBS gained the television, online and merchandising rights to “Star Trek.” But because the “Phase II” cast and crew make no money from their work, the network usually allows them to indulge their hobby. Around the time Mr. Spinrad offered “He Walked Among Us” online (confusingly he published an unrelated novel with the same title in 2010) he arranged with the “Phase II” senior executive producer, James Cawley, who also portrays Captain Kirk, to film it. The writer said he was “blown away” by the series and planned to direct the episode himself next fall. But this month, Mr. Cawley said, CBS asked him in an e-mail to cease and desist. CBS also contacted Mr. Spinrad, who withdrew “He Walked Among Us” from the Internet. The network said it was now “considering opportunities to offer licensed copies of the work.”
