Settle down about new Buffy film

27May09

The internets have been blazing over the last two days about the reported feature film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that would not involve Joss Whedon. While I try to not to place this blog in the maelstrom of rumor mongering and fan panic, I’m inspired to take a break from grading to share [...]

Filed under: Film, Film Industry, TV Shows, Television   |  1 Comment
Tags: buffy

On piracy, property, and popularity

24Feb08

Not that they need any advertising, but I wanted to highlight this entry on David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s blog about the history of His Girl Friday. It’s a great account of how works like films outlive their initial moments, a process I’ve studied for television programs in my book using the term “cultural life” [...]

Filed under: Academia, Copyright, Film Industry   |  1 Comment
Tags: Dragnet, film studies, His Girl Friday, public domain

Television writers – on strike, but off-base

11Nov07

The writers’ strike is reaching at the one week point. Since my last post, an 11th hour negotiating session led the writers’ to inexplicably cave on one of their chief demands, doubling the DVD residuals. Ken Levine offers the explanation – the studios had suggested that pulling DVDs from the table would yield a new [...]

Filed under: Fandom, Film Industry, New Media, TV Industry, TV Shows, Technology, Television   |  13 Comments
Tags: Heroes, Lost, strike, wga

The Strike

04Nov07

The big news in the world of American television is the upcoming strike of the Writer’s Guild of America, planned to start Monday, November 5. While I’m not an expert on the convoluted world of Hollywood labor policies, I thought I’d blog a bit about what’s going on and offer a bit of analysis from [...]

Filed under: Film Industry, TV Industry, Television   |  6 Comments
Tags: labor, strike, wga

My neighbors, The Simpsons

11Jul07

As you might have heard, a contest surrounding The Simpsons Movie pitted different Springfields across the country against each other to determine which one could claim ownership of the animated city and host the film premiere. Against all odds, my fair state of Vermont won the contest, submitting an amusing video featuring a Homer-clone chasing [...]

Filed under: Film Industry, TV Shows, Vermont   |  2 Comments
Tags: The Simpsons

Box office misreadings

28May07

Yesterday I posted the TV ratings chart and tried to dispel some mistaken assumptions about how ratings work. So today when I read an article titled “Early summer movies underperform at box office,” I couldn’t resist another round of debunking. The premise of the article is that the (allegedly) weak performance of the first three [...]

Filed under: Film Industry   |  4 Comments