Hollywood has responded to the rampage at a Connecticut elementary school by pulling back on its offerings, and one star says the entertainment industry should take some responsibility for such violence.
Jamie Foxx, one of the industry’s biggest stars, said Saturday as he promoted Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming ultra-violent spaghetti Western-style film about slavery, “Django Unchained,” that actors can’t ignore the fact that movie violence can influence people.
“We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn’t have a sort of influence,” Foxx said in an interview on Saturday. “It does.”
In true Tarantino form, buckets of blood explode from characters as they are shot or shredded to pieces by rabid dogs in “Django Unchained.”
Despite Friday’s mass shooting, the press junket for the movie, which opens in theaters Christmas Day, continued in New York as scheduled on Saturday.
Tarantino, whose credits include “Pulp Fiction” and the “Kill Bill” volumes, said he was tired of defending his films each time the nation is shocked by gun violence. He said “tragedies happen” and blame should fall on those guilty of the crimes.
Foxx’s co-star Kerry Washington said she believes the film’s explicit brutality serves an important purpose in educating audiences about the atrocities of slavery.
“I do think that it’s important when we have the opportunity to talk about violence and not just kind of have it as entertainment, but connect it to the wrongs, the injustices, the social ills,” she said.
In the Newtown, Conn., massacre on Friday, a gunman killed his mother and then went to an elementary school, where he killed six adults and 20 children before committing suicide.
In response, premieres for Tom Cruise’s new action movie, “Jack Reacher,” in Pittsburgh and the family comedy “Parental Guidance” in Los Angeles were postponed.
Also, Fox pulled new episodes of “Family Guy” and “American Dad” that were to air Sunday to avoid potentially sensitive content. The originally scheduled episode of “Family Guy” had Peter telling his own version of the nativity story. The “American Dad” episode told the story of a demon that punished naughty children at Christmas. Both series plan to substitute reruns.
Fox also confirmed that a scheduled repeat of “The Cleveland Show” for Sunday was swapped for another rerun of that series out of the same concern.
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More