TV / Film News

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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Blu-Ray Review: "Fantastic Mr. Fox"

Source: Pop Dose
April 8, 2010

I know this is absolute heresy for a guy in my line of work, but Ive never been a big fan of Wes Andersons filmmaking. There's a difference between developing real, honest characters with believable flaws and simply loading up the screen with quirk for quirks sake, and I think Anderson too often falls back on the latter. Hes the kind of guy who cant just have someone enter the room they have to enter wearing a vintage tracksuit, sporting ...

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Doors Documentary Won't Light Your Fire

Source: All About Jazz
April 5, 2010

Tom DiCillo's “When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors" means to answer the more loony flights of fancy taken by Oliver Stone in his 1991 Doors biopic, but, in the process, creates a formal exercise in redundancy, offering no new insights into the much mythologized rock band. The documentary does boast unseen archival footage of Doors band members Jim Morrison, Robbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore rehearsing, performing, hanging out backstage and, in the case of singer Morrison, ...

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