TV / Film News

Wall Street Touts Plans to Bet on Box Office

Source: All About Jazz
April 12, 2010

Think you're better than Hollywood at gauging whether an upcoming flick will be a box office bomb or a sleeper hit? You'd get a chance to put your money behind that under two proposals that movie studios are denouncing as legalized gambling. The proposals the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission are expected to rule on this month would let movie fans, industry executives and speculators bet on expected box office receipts. Investors profit if their predictions come true and lose ...

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Richard Zanuck a Living Film History Time Capsule

Source: Michael Ricci
April 11, 2010

Growing up with the last name Zanuck in Old Hollywood was just like real life -- only different. As a youngster, Richard D. Zanuck had to sell copies of the Saturday Evening Post to learn the value of hard work. “Of course," Zanuck said with a wink, “my dad did have a chauffeur take me to pick up the papers." And even though Zanuck says he never played “catch on the beach" with his dad, he knew his pop cared ...

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Film Productions Leaving the Coasts

Source: All About Jazz
April 11, 2010

Fewer yellow signs are popping up in Los Angeles this spring. Those placards, which direct cast and crew members to a location shoot, normally sprout like wildflowers in March and April, as pilot production reaches full bloom. But despite an uptick in broadcast pilot orders this year, Los Angeles -- and New York, too -- is increasingly losing out to a wide variety of locales across the country. The trend is most notable in drama, as a majority of pilots ...

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Lagging Libraries Shift Hollywood Mindset

Source: All About Jazz
April 11, 2010

How fitting that when “Alice in Wonderland" is the top draw so far at the box office this year, Hollywood itself is starting to feel as if it's fallen down a rabbit hole. The industry is waking up to a topsy-turvy world where everything it's gotten used to for decades has again changed -- perhaps forever. Studio libraries have lost their value, and making movies is now about how much you can make theatrically rather than banking on the kind ...

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Subprime Goes Hollywood

Source: All About Jazz
April 11, 2010

The Wall Street wizards who gave you credit default swaps want to turn the movie industry into their next casino.

If you thought the mortgage-backed securities and other complex financial instruments that crashed the economy were risky, you'll love Wall Street's latest brainwave: a new financial market in which players can gamble on whether upcoming Hollywood movies will be blockbusters or bombs. For years, Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment firm, has been operating the “Hollywood Stock Exchange," a fake-money ...

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World Premiere Words and Music...Singing the Great American Songbook Documentary Film

Source: Michael Ricci
April 10, 2010

Dear friends, I wanted to let you know our film will be making it's world wide debut and can be viewed as a live streaming event on the following dates. If any of you have any contacts or leads and referrals with your local community tv stations please let me know. I want our film to be seen by as many folks as possible. Thank you once again for your support! All love and good wishes, Ron Kaplan Words and ...

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Larry Blumenfeld on HBO's "Treme," in the Village Voice

Source: Between the Grooves with Philip Booth
April 10, 2010

Treme, the new HBO series created by David Simon (The Wire) is the subject of this weeks Village Voice cover story, penned by jazz journalist Larry Blumenfeld.

He goes deep with the long, thorough piece, examining how and why Simon seems to be getting everything right with the series, which focuses on musicians and others in the titular New Orleans neighborhood and greater NOLA, circa the days and months following Katrina.

What's the upshot of Treme?

Blumenfeld nails it here: ...

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Nicolas Cage's Bad Lieutenant Performance All Miles Davis's Fault

Source: Miles Davis Online
April 10, 2010

“I went on Dick Cavett many years ago and met Miles Davis. And I was talking about things like art synthesis and Picasso and you can do with acting what he did, or with music, and Miles came out and he got it, you know, he was looking at me, he gave me this, like--he nodded and he winked at me. Miles Davis, you know. And we were sharing the trumpet. “And ever since then, because ...

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