Elvis Costello Drops By To Help Launch The Levon Helm Midnight Ramble Book
NEW YORK – Monday night at New York’s City Winery Backbeat Books celebrated the official launch of Paul LaRaia’s beautiful photo book “The Levon Helm Midnight Ramble.” The book is a chronicle of the weekly jam sessions Levon hosts his barn outside of Woodstock, NY. The Midnight Ramble is famous for the guest musicians that pop up unexpectedly and Monday’s show was no different.
Though Levon himself could not attend members of his band as well as numerous guests played for over two and a half hours, digging deep into the roots of American music and peeling off classics from The Band and Bob Dylan along with Southern rock, blues, bluegrass, country, R&B, gospel, and rock’n’roll staples. The show culminated with guest vocalist Elvis Costello who dropped by to sing some songs.
Scorsese Earns DeMille Lifetime Honor at Globes
By Michael Cidoni
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Director Martin Scorsese is receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the Golden Globes.
The award will be presented to Scorsese at the 67th annual Globes on Jan. 17.
Scorsese turns 67 next week and is an Academy Award winner for directing “The Departed” and a two-time Golden Globe winner for that film and “Gangs of New York.” He also was nominated for Oscars and Globes for such films as “Raging Bull,” ”Goodfellas” and “The Aviator.”
Actress Vera Farmiga, who appeared in “The Departed,” made the announcement Thursday at a press conference in Beverly Hills. For Scorsese, filmmaking is “a holy experience,” she said.
“He has the power to rouse a crowd and bring them along on his holy mission,” Farmiga said. “He considers it holy work, and cinema is his shrine. And he instills in the actors, in the crew, and everybody around him just what a powerful tool it is.”
Past winners of the DeMille award include last year’s recipient, Steven Spielberg, along with Warren Beatty, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Douglas.
Nominations come out Dec. 15 for the Globes, Hollywood’s second-biggest film honors after the Oscars.
Oscars Get Record 20 Animated Submissions
LOS ANGELES (AP) – A record 20 films have been submitted for best animated feature at the Academy Awards.
As long as at least 16 films qualify, there will be five nominees in the feature-length animation category.
Most years, the category has had only three nominees, but 2009 has been a prolific year for animation. The only previous year when there were five nominees came in 2002, when 17 animated films were submitted.
Submissions include a wide variety of styles, including computer animation of such hits as “Up,” ”Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” and “Monsters vs. Aliens.” There’s also the stop-motion animation of “Coraline,” ”Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Mary and Max”; and the hand-drawn animation of “The Princess and the Frog” and “Ponyo.”
Talent Agency Acquires Michigan-focused Competitor
BINGHAM FARMS, Mich. (AP) – A talent management agency with offices in Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles has acquired a Michigan-focused competitor and plans to expand its film division following the deal.
Productions Plus Inc. announced Monday it’s buying The Talent Shop. Terms weren’t released. It will lead to creation of a new company called Productions Plus — The Talent Shop.
Productions Plus provides talent for auto shows, trade shows, marketing and other events. Owner and chief executive Margery Krevsky will lead the combined company.
Both privately held companies are based in the Detroit suburb of Bingham Farms, where the expanded company will remain.
Michigan has been drawing more moviemakers since generous tax incentives began last year.
Another Disney Studio Executive ExitsLOS ANGELES (AP) – Another executive at The Walt Disney Co.’s movie studio is exiting hurriedly as the company’s troubles continue at the box office with a weak opening for “A Christmas Carol.”
Mark Zoradi, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Group and the head of worldwide marketing for all Disney, Pixar, Touchstone and Disneynature movies, said Monday he is stepping down immediately.
No successor was named.
Zoradi’s move came after the 3-D remake of the classic Christmas tale starring Jim Carrey opened to $30.1 million at the weekend box office in the U.S. and Canada.
With an estimated $175 million production budget and a marketing campaign that involved a 40-city train tour, Cowen & Co. analyst Doug Creutz says he expects it to lose $50 million to $100 million.
Last month, Disney named Rich Ross as chairman of its movie studios, following a year of disappointing movie results and the abrupt departure of its former chief, Dick Cook.
Disney’s studio revenue has fallen in each of the last five quarters, sinking from $1.82 billion in the March quarter of 2008 to $1.26 billion in the quarter ended in June this year.
Nick Counter, Hollywood Studios’ Negotiator, Dies
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nick Counter, a longtime negotiator for Hollywood producers who led the studios through two grueling writers’ strikes last year and in 1988, has died. He was 69.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers says Counter died at a Los Angeles hospital on Friday.
Counter served as the group’s president for 27 years and negotiated more than 300 collective bargaining agreements with entertainment industry guilds and unions on behalf of movie studios, television networks and independent producers.
Current AMPTP President Carol Lombardini says Counter’s ability to find consensus at the bargaining table led to a sustained era of labor peace.
His family says he was most proud of his work with the industry health and pension plans.
‘Call of Duty’ Game sells $310M in 24 hours
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) – First-day sales of Activision Blizzard Inc.’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” broke records, raking in an estimated $310 million in North America and the United Kingdom alone.
The video game went on sale all over the world on Tuesday, but Activision provided figures Thursday only for North America and Britain. The company estimates that it sold about 4.7 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours in those markets, making it the biggest-selling launch in the history of entertainment.
The latest installment in the “Call of Duty” action franchise was expected to at least match last year’s “Grand Theft Auto IV,” which was the most successful video game release in history and at the time may have been the top entertainment launch ever.
That game, from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., had sold 3.6 million units on its opening day, worth $310 million worldwide. “Call of Duty” made that much in just North Americ a and Britain.
The launch of “Call of Duty” also easily brought in more than last year’s record $155 million opening weekend for the Batman movie “The Dark Knight.”
Like the previous five “Call of Duty” games, which are all rated “M” for mature (not for kids under 17), this one lets players shoot their way through a complex series of scenes. The game’s developer, Infinity Ward, spent two years creating realistic graphics that are amplified in many players’ homes by big-screen, high-definition TVs sets and powerful speakers.
Players can fight one another, whether they’re at the same game console or in separate locations and connected online. Or a player can dive in alone and get swept into the game, which includes jarring depictions of war and an intricate story of good versus evil.
The game sells for $60 and plays on Windows -based computers, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3.
Lucy Liu Film Highlights Child TraffickingBy Sarah El Deeb
CAIRO (AP) – Actress Lucy Liu, who has produced a film about children sold into the sex trade in Cambodia, says the fight against human trafficking will be long.
Liu praised several projects funded by the U.N. children’s agency in Egypt, where she was promoting the film “Red Light” at the Cairo International Film Festival.
The actress co-produced and narrated the movie, which follows the stories of a number of girls over the course of four years as they are kidnapped and sold to brothels in Cambodia.
Liu said Wednesday it “is really going to take a really long time” to fight human trafficking, labeled the third most profitable business in the world after weapons and drugs trading.
That assessment rings true in the Middle East, where stigma in conservative societies and a lack of data have frustrated activists’ efforts. Highlighting those challenges, organizers of several UNICEF-funded programs Liu visited in Egypt did not even want to make details of their efforts public out of fear doing so would stir up controversy and pressure from conservatives.
“The first step is there are a couple of projects that exist and that is something wonderful,” Liu said.
In Egypt, the sex trade is often hidden under the guise of temporary marriages sanctioned by some religious figures and local authorities. Under these marriages, hundreds of underage girls in rural Egypt are essentially sold by their families for large sums to wealthy visitors from Gulf nations.
Egypt recently passed its first child protection law, which criminalized trafficking and raised the age of marriage to 18.
The country’s first Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, launched a global initiative to fight human trafficking in 2006, signaling that there is a political will to confront an issue affecting nearly 2.4 million people around the world, according to 2007 figures from the U.N. International Labor Organization.
Clicker.com Aims To Become Internet’s TV guideBy Michael Liedtke, Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Web surfing is becoming more like channel surfing as television shows, movies and music videos pour onto the Internet.
That’s why pointing people to their favorite TV episodes and flicks could emerge as next big opportunity in Web navigation. Former online search executive Jim Lanzone is hoping to lead the way with Clicker.com, a free service debuting Thursday.
“We are trying to build the ultimate programming guide for the coming age of Internet TV,” said Lanzone, who ran IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com until last year.
After two months of invitation-only testing, Clicker is welcoming all comers to peruse an index that includes 400,000 TV episodes, 50,000 music videos and roughly 30,000 movies that are part of Netflix’s streaming library or Amazon.com’s video store.
Streaming from Netflix requires a subscription while Amazon.com sells or rents video downloads. Most of the other material in Clicker’s database is shown for free.
The selections range from television staples such as “Seinfeld” to Web-only productions such as “The Basketball Jones.”
Other services already have been trying to cut through the Internet’s video clutter. Clicker will vie against at least two similar sites, Channels.com and BuddyTV.com, as well as video search options offered by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL.
“It’s going to be a highly competitive field,” predicted Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.
That’s nothing new for Lanzone. As Ask.com’s CEO during a two-year stint that ended in January 2008, Lanzone became accustomed to battling Internet search’s big three – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Although Ask.com’s audience remained well behind those of the larger rivals, Lanzone oversaw a team that came up with some search innovations that were good enough to be copied by Google.
Clicker is trying to set itself apart by combining elements of a search engine, a d igital video recorder and a forum that allows people to recommend shows to one another. Clicker also will evoke memories of an old-fashioned TV guide, with episode summaries that include the year the video was made.
To make money, Clicker will rely on advertising and eventually may try to collect commissions from video producers that charge to watch content.
The site is part of Clicker Media Inc., a Los Angeles startup that has raised $8 million from such investors as venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures.
Studio Settlement Reported for Fake Movie News
FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) – Universal Pictures has agreed to pay $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club to settle complaints about fake news archives used to promote the movie “The Fourth Kind,” the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.
The Anchorage lawyer who negotiated the settlement for the Fairbanks paper and six other media outlets, John McKay, said the fake online stories undermined the credibility of the news organizations.
Universal created a series of fabricated online news articles to publicize the movie about a purported plague of alien abductions in Nome a decade ago. The articles posted appeared to be from real Alaska publications.
The articles included a fake obituary and news story about the death of a character in the movie, Dr. William Tyler, that supposedly were from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
The settlement also requires Universal to remove the fake news articles from the Internet.
McKay praised the company for res ponding quickly to the complaints.
The Alaska Press Club wasn’t part of the complaint, but McKay suggested it receive settlement money as a compromise that would benefit Alaska journalism.
Universal spokeswoman Kori Bernard said Thursday that the studio had no comment on the report.
YouTube to Support 1080p High-Definition VideosLOS ANGELES (AP) – YouTube says starting next week it will support the same high-resolution video that can now be seen on flat screen TVs.
The online video unit of Google Inc. said Thursday it will support video playback in the full high-definition format known as 1080p, upgrading from the current 720p.
After engineers tested its system, YouTube spokesman Chris Dale said the company is not worried about infrastructure problems or higher costs associated with supporting bulkier files.
Videos uploaded from regular users will still have a 10-minute limit, although the maximum file size will likely get a boost from 2 gigabytes.
Videos that had already been uploaded at 1080p will be automatically re-encoded to play back at the higher resolution.
Adobe announced Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.2
Adobe announced Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.2, a free update for existing customers of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, and Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection software. The new version provides compatibility for Panasonic’s AVC-Intra format along with updates for leading post-production hardware, including IO support.
Support for AVC-Intra augments Adobe’s existing support of tapeless cameras such as RED, Sony XDCAM EX and HD, Panasonic P2, and AVCHD, providing users with the industry’s most efficient workflow without transcoding or rewrapping. Additionally, the update will improve performance and stability for Blackmagic, AJA and Matrox IO cards, as well as update an issue introduced by Final Cut Pro 7 in Adobe’s Final Cut Pro importer.
For additional details, please see the Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.2 datasheet and this video with David Helmly, Senior Business Development Manager of Digital Video and Digital Imaging at Adobe.
