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Episodes of KCRW's The Business Brief
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The $100 million action thriller Green Zone opened the weekend before last, and so far it's brought in anunimpressive $24 million domestically. But perhaps even beforeexecutives at Universal green-lit Green Zone, they had to have known that i
For years and years, the business has been the happy battle ground oftwo trade papers ? Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But in recentyears, the fight has stopped being between the two rivals, and turnedinto a fight for survival...
I'll spare you the Oscar talk; I?ll just report that it looks like ratings for the telecast are up and James Cameron got smacked down, so all is right in Hollywood. Instead I want to talk about movie distribution....
In 1994, 204 million Americans watched the winter Olympics in the picturesque Norwegian town of Lillehammer. The games that just ended in Vancouver had an 8% smaller audience. Which seems even worse considering that there are something like 20%
Nielsen, by far the biggest of the media ratings companies, proudly announced last week that they will start counting on-line and DVR-TV watching this fall. To which I say to Nielsen, "Welcome to 2008..."
As the nation celebrates the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, the name of President Obama is coming up an awful lot. But the folks in Hollywood are not talking much about the remarkable fact that their most bankable movie star these days is al
If you've just woken from an extended bout of unconsciousness, you may not have heard that NBC moved Jay Leno to 10pm last fall, and that now that grand experiment in prime-time is over. Well, fear not. You'll have plenty of opportunity to catc
"Nobody knows anything." That's the line lifted from William Goldman's1983 Hollywood memoir adventures in the screen trade that has famouslycome to describe the entertainment industry. It's become a cliché, butit's a cliché, of course, becau
Avatar is finally coming out this week. At a cost of $300 or $400 million, James Cameron's sci-fi action epic is one of the most expensive movies ever made. At the same time, a studio is talking about starting up a new division to make movies w
Slow and steady wins the race is the moral of the famous fable about the tortoise and the hare, but the folks in Hollywood clearly aren't big on Aesop. A better analogy might actually be baseball. The studios like the home runs, even though a l
Before she came to Hollywood and before she became host of the businesshere on KCRW, Kim Masters covered politics for the Washington Post. Shetold me that it was easier to get people in government to speak franklyand on the record about subs
Yahoo has launched a nice new ad campaign with messages of digital empowerment like "now the Internet has a personality ? yours." But one of their slogans has got to be causing Hollywood severe angina...
The story of Troy Duffy's rocket-ride to success and equally dramaticplummet back to Earth is combination of Hollywood legend and Greektragedy; call it Icarus meets Narcissus meets William Morris. But now,it appears that his saga is far from
Last night was the 61st prime-time Emmy Awards, the television industry's biggest night, and the question has to be: who cares? I'm not trying be provocative, I'm asking the question the TV academyhas got to be asking itself: who really cares
In 2004, a guy from New Orleans named Tyler Perry showed up in Hollywood. He had the temerity to suggest that the studios might want to turn his wildly popular stage productions into movies. And they all said no. Perry then hooked up with indi
Hollywood watched the opening weekend of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds with baited breath. After all, this one movie could determine whether there's a future for one of Hollywood's most colorful and controversial figures: Harvey We
My head is still spinning after seeing District 9 last weekend. Not just because of the relentless action, the complex plot, the uncomfortable political allegory and the cool aliens that look a bit like seafood and are disparagingly referred to
This weekend I watched Sunset Boulevard for like the 1,000th time, andit occurred to me that a lot of modern A-list actors have retreated totheir own literal and figurative mansions, trying to ignore the factthat their stars are fading...
The big comic book, science fiction and fantasy convention known as Comic-Con is to Hollywood what New Hampshire is to presidential politics: that is, it's simply the most important campaign stop of the year. Don't believe me? Just look at th
It seems Michigan is a hot spot for show business folks this summer. But it isn't because of the wonderful beachfront property on Lake St. Clair. It's because Michigan is throwing money at Hollywood with a gigantic 40 percent production tax r
Last March, stock analyst Richard Greenfield gave a thumbs down to Pixar?s newest film, Up. I went on the air condemning his prediction, and $300 million later, Greenfield has admitted he might have been wrong. Now, I'm getting all sorts of c
Thereâs a power pendulum in Hollywood that swings between the studios and the people who actually make movies â directors, writers and actors. When the pendulum swings towards the creative people, you get The Godfather and One Flew over th
In 1939, California passed a law to keep unscrupulous adults from stealing the earnings of child actors. But no one ever got around to crafting legislation that would shield these kids from the psychic damage they?d suffer under the cruel light
After a year of working without a contract, the Screen Actors' Guild finally signed a deal with producers last week. Even so, SAG is a union deeply divided. But this isn't a commentary about Hollywood labor strife but the strife currently being
At the end of April, Disney, which owns ABC, announced that it wouldbecome a partner in the television web site Hulu. So now, Hulu hasthree of the four major networks on board, and they have those greatcommercials with Alec Baldwin. But does
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