Giraffe In Toys R Us Ads, Films Dies at Boston ZooBOSTON (AP) – A giraffe that starred in a series of TV commercials for Toys R Us and appeared in Jim Carrey’s movie “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” has died at a Boston zoo.
American Humane, an animal welfare group that oversees animal treatment on movie sets, said Tweet the giraffe died last Friday at the Franklin Park Zoo where producers are filming the Kevin James movie “The Zookeeper.”
The 18-year-old giraffe didn’t belong to the zoo and had no known health problems.
Tweet collapsed in its enclosure while feeding and in the care of his trainer. Results of a necropsy are pending.
The animal welfare group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, alleges Tweet was mistreated and has asked for an investigation. American Humane denies mistreatment.
Robert Redford Picks Savannah for Historical Film
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) – Robert Redford has picked the city of Savannah as the location for his post-Civil War film about a woman who was hanged for aiding the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.
City officials announced the selection Friday. Redford previously filmed along the Georgia coast for “The Legend of Bagger Vance” in 1999.
Other films made in Georgia’s oldest city include “Forrest Gump,” ”Glory,” ”The General’s Daughter” and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
Last month, 16-year-old superstar Miley Cyrus finished work in Savannah on Walt Disney Pictures’ “The Last Song.”
The American Film Company production will tell the story of boarding house owner Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 after being convicted of aiding John Wilkes Booth.
More Emmy Presenters: Bacon, Sedgwick, Gervais
LOS ANGELES (AP) – The Emmy Awards are about to open a whole new set of degrees for the Kevin Bacon game.
Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, are slated to present together at Sunday’s ceremony. The “Footloose” actor is nominated for lead actor in a miniseries or movie for HBO’s “Taking Chance,” while Sedgwick is up for lead actress in a drama series for her role on “The Closer.”
Other Emmy presenters announced Tuesday include Alec Baldwin, Ricky Gervais, Cat Deeley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sigourney Weaver and Kate Walsh.
The live telecast is scheduled for 8 p.m. EDT Sunday on CBS.
The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences named its first round of presenters Monday, including Tina Fey, Kiefer Sutherland and Simon Baker.
Adobe To Buy Omniture For $1.8B, 3Q profit slidesNEW YORK (AP) – Adobe Systems Inc. said Tuesday it will buy the Web analytic software company Omniture for about $1.8 billion, giving the maker of content-creation software a way to let marketers monitor the effectiveness of such content.
San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc., which makes Flash, Acrobat and Photoshop software, said it will buy Omniture Inc. for $21.50 per share in cash, a premium of 24 percent over Omniture’s closing stock price Tuesday.
The announcement came as Adobe said it earned $136 million, or 26 cents per share, in the fiscal third quarter that ended in August, down 29 percent from the same time a year earlier.
Excluding one-time items, Adobe earned 35 cents per share, a penny above what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting.
Adobe said revenue fell 21 percent to $697.5 million, surpassing analyst expectations of $686.2 million.
Omniture, based in Orem, Utah, offers a variety of Web traffic analysis and other products for companies to improve their marketing over the Internet. The acquisition would marry Omniture’s services for figuring how to best deliver messages with Flash and other Adobe tools for creating Web sites and ads. Omniture services could then be used to monitor how effective the messages are.
France Approves Internet Piracy BillSylvie Corbert
PARIS (AP) – France’s lower house of parliament approved a pioneering bill Tuesday allowing authorities to cut off Internet access to people who download illegally, a measure that entertainment companies hope will be a powerful weapon against piracy.
Critics, meanwhile, complain the bill threatens civil liberties, and questions remain about exactly how it will be enforced. The bill has garnered attention beyond France, both from music and film industries struggling to keep up official revenue and from privacy advocates who worry about government intrusion.
The Culture Ministry has estimated that 1,000 French Internet users a day could be taken offline under the bill. Pirates who ignore e-mail warnings and a registered letter could see their Internet connections cut for up to a year, and they could also face up to ?300,000 ($435,000) in fines or jail time.
Even parents whose children download illegally could be targeted for neglecting to poli ce their online activities – after warnings, the family’s Internet service could be shut down for a month, and they could be slapped with a ?3,750 ($5,480) fine.
An original, more muscular version of the bill was shot down earlier this year as unconstitutional. The Senate approved a compromise version in July, and the National Assembly followed suit Tuesday, with a 285-225 vote.
The bill must clear at least one more hurdle to become law, gaining approval from a small committee of lawmakers tasked with harmonizing the two versions.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, the husband of model-turned-singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and friend to powerful French media figures, supports the bill.
Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand applauded lawmakers, saying, “Artists will remember that we at last had the courage to break with the laissez-faire approach and protect their rights from people who want to turn the net into their libertarian utopia.”
David El Sayegh, gen eral manager of France’s National Union of Phonographic Publishing, also praised the effort, saying, “It’s extremely urgent to have regulation on the Internet to make users responsible”.
But opposition Socialists and several members of Sarkozy’s conservative party are against it, largely because of the powers it grants a new agency, called Hadopi, that would sanction those who illegally download copyrighted material.
Efforts to pass the bill have been tortuous. It was rejected in April, then adopted in May, then rejected by the Constitutional Council in June because it would have allowed the agency to cut off Internet connections of repeat offenders. The version voted on Tuesday leaves it to a judge to order Internet connections cut.
Socialist lawmaker Bruno Le Roux called the back-and-forth an “endless soap opera” that has become “grotesque.”
“This project is totally unenforceable today,” he said, echoing the concerns of some Internet experts.
Exact details about enforcement were still being worked out. Internet subscribers would be asked to install special software to enable authorities to track down and identify those suspected of illegal downloads, but skeptics say such programs are not ready to be rolled out.
Opponents also say the legislation misses the point by targeting downloads rather than illegal forms of “streaming” – an increasingly popular approach where music and videos are played over the Internet, rather than downloaded and saved onto a user’s computer.
Host Kathy Griffin Livens Up Creative Arts Emmys
Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Kathy Griffin has a history with the Creative Arts Emmys. She once gave an acceptance speech so provocative that the Catholic League condemned it.
So naturally, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences invited her back – as host.
“I’d like to think that that’s why I got the gig – that I was so offensive and shocking last year that they thought maybe I could put this thing on the map,” the comedian joked about hosting the lesser-known Emmy ceremony, which honors technical and other achievements.
During the Creative Arts Emmys telecast – taped last weekend and airing Friday – Griffin, who’s won two of the awards, maintained her tradition of irreverence.
In her opening monologue, she referred to them as “the Shmemmys.” She shared a film clip of her writhing naked in anguish after losing an Emmy. She also joked about getting intimate with Jon Gosselin and knocked “American Idol” exec (and former choreographer) Nigel L ythgoe down to the ground with her dance moves.
Producer Spike Jones Jr. said his team chose Griffin “because we wanted to rock the house.”
But not without limits.
“We do not give her free rein,” he said. “We’re very much on top of it.”
The star of “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List” said she took the hosting gig because “these are my people.”
“This is our moment to shine,” she said. “It’s the hair, makeup, lighting, editing, art directing and then categories I’ve never even heard of. This is the type of show where you’re going to see stuff you would not see on a real awards show.”
Unlike most Hollywood awards shows, the Creative Arts Primetime Emmys aren’t televised live. Saturday’s ceremony was taped as it stretched on for four hours. (An edited version is set to air Friday on E!)
“It’s a lot of non-celebrities and there are literally like 75 categories, so it goes on and on and on,” Griffin said. “You have to make it interestin g to the at-home audience. That’s where I come in. I make long awards shows fun and interesting.”
But it’s not always easy, she conceded.
“Sometimes I have to take my clothes off and pixelate my private parts to get a laugh.”
Tokyo Film Festival Decides To Show ‘The Cove’Yuri Kageyama
TOKYO (AP) – The Tokyo International Film Festival will show “The Cove,” a documentary that depicts the slaughter of dolphins in Japan. But the decision was so last-minute the movie didn’t make it into the official press package.
Tom Yoda, chairman of the annual festival, which opens Oct. 17, refused Wednesday to discuss how the decision came about, citing festival policy on screening decisions.
But he acknowledged there had been views against showing the film, as well as nervousness about “an unexpected controversy.”
Details of the film’s showing have not been not decided, and it is not among the 15 films chosen for the competition part of the festival, Yoda said.
It was clear the festival took its time to come to a decision. A brief description of “The Cove” was printed on a separate piece of paper as an “additional screening,” and was not part of the 42-page booklet handed out to the press Wednesday.
“The Cove,” which has won more than a dozen awards, documents the killing of dolphins in the seaside town of Taiji, which sells some of the captured dolphins to aquariums but kills the rest to be sold as meat.
“The Cove,” directed by National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, premiered in the U.S. earlier this year. But it had not yet been scheduled to be shown in Japan.
Iran’s Women Tell Their Story; Director Lands Silver Lion
MUNICH — Women Without Men, the first feature film by photographer and video artist Shirin Neshat, has won the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival.
The film, which is based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, also received two other awards the same week – the UNICEF film prize and Italy’s Premio Mimmo Rotella. The feature was produced in cooperation with Essential Filmproduktion, coop99, Parisienne de Production and Schweizer Brandung Film Produktion.
Schweizer Brandung was founded in November 2008 by producer and branded-entertainment specialist Joerg E. Schweizer. Women Without Men is his first foray as Associate Producer for a feature-length movie and is an illustration of just how high his standards of cinematic quality are. http://www.schweizerbrandung.com
Danish Tourism Ad Pulled From Web for PromiscuityJan M. Olsen
COPENHAGEN (AP) – Denmark’s tourism agency has removed an advertisement from YouTube after complaints that it promoted promiscuity in the liberal Scandinavian country.
The video clip, nearly 3 minutes long, shows a young, blond woman cradling a dark-skinned infant called “August” and saying he is the result of a brief fling with a foreign tourist.
Speaking English in the video, she says she is “trying to find August’s father” through Google’s YouTube site. Danish TV2 has clarified that the scene was staged and the woman is an actress.
Since being posted Thursday by VisitDenmark, the ad received more than 800,000 hits on YouTube. VisitDenmark removed the clip Monday, but it can be still viewed as it has been copied and posted elsewhere on the Internet.
Sociologist Karen Sjoerup said the ad suggested “you can lure fast, blonde Danish women home without a condom.”
Economy Minister Lene Espersen said the video presented “a not very w ell-thought-out picture of the country.” Espersen also holds the government’s tourism portfolio.
“I regret that the film has offended so many people,” VisitDenmark manager Dorte Kiilerich said, explaining that intent had been to tell “a nice and sweet story about a grown-up woman who lives in a free society and accepts the consequences of her actions.”
Variety Trade Newspaper To Charge For Online Site
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Ending a three-year flirtation with free online content, Variety newspaper plans to put some of its Web site content behind a “pay wall” that will require a paid annual subscription, its publisher said Thursday.
The changes at the Hollywood trade publication will take place early next year and come with new online features such as a better archive, publisher Brian Gott said.
While there might be some reduction in the number of Web site visitors, currently about 2.5 million per month, the switch will help preserve paying subscribers even if readers eventually switch to reading online only, he said.
“It’s getting ahead of something that inevitably will happen and creating a business strategy around maintaining the viability of being a paid product,” Gott said.
Many news publications are taking another look at charging for online access as revenue from Internet ads fails to offset losses from print ads and subscriptions .
Subscriptions to Variety, a unit of London and Amsterdam-based Reed Elsevier Group PLC, are currently $329 a year for either the daily or the weekly print edition, or a digital, PDF version that looks just like one for print. The daily print edition gets about 26,000 paying subscribers, and the weekly version another 31,000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The Web site was almost entirely reserved for paid subscribers until October 2006, when it lifted that restriction to boost traffic. How much of the new site will be reserved for paying customers has yet to be finalized.
While the newspaper still makes more revenue from advertising than it does from paid subscriptions, the marginal benefit from driving more traffic to its Web site was small, Gott said.
“The more traffic you get, the lower (rates) an ad buyer can demand and it’s diminishing returns,” he said.
