The longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America was the consumate lobbyist. In a sometimes unreasonable business, Jack Valenti was a giant voice of reason,” Steven Spielberg said in a statement. “He was the greatest ambassador Hollywood has ever known, and I will value his wisdom and friendship for all time.”
Tag: 04.26.07
The Shape Of Balanchine’s Legacy
“The pressing question is: How are these works being danced now? There has been plenty of complaint in the past two decades about the NYCB’s custodianship of the Balanchine canon. The company’s performances have frequently been criticized as slipshod. The rich, subtle dynamics that characterized NYCB performances when Balanchine himself supervised them were too often absent from the evening’s program, as they have been for some time. But a handful of extraordinary talents often made the stage vibrant.”
Artists, Scientists Collaborate
Artists and scientists are increasingly getting together to find points of collaboration. “Engineers and artists, robotics specialists and printmakers, they’ve come to listen and talk about the growing overlap between new technologies and art. Their mailing list has 150 names on it. When they meet, it’s a Collision Collective Collusion.”
London Theatre Puts Tony Blair On Trial
Tricycle Theatre is staging ‘Called to Account,’ which “uses the real words of real people. But in this case, the theater organized the hearing that is the play’s source material, naming two British lawyers, Philippe Sands and Julian Knowles, as prosecutor and defense counsel, respectively, and inviting 15 witnesses with direct experience of the run-up to the Iraq war to provide evidence behind closed doors. Some 30 hours of testimony were then edited down to a 130-minute play.”
NBC Scores Another Disastrous Week
For the second week in a row, NBC has set new records for its lowest ratings ever. “One week after NBC averaged 6.8 million viewers — its smallest in-season audience since at least 1987 — the network sank to 6.2 million the week of April 16-22.”
Study: Video Recorders Add Audience
A new study says that some TV shows are benefiting from digital video recorders. “Fox’s ‘House’ and ABC’s ‘Lost’ led a recent week in increases in absolute viewers, with “House” gaining 2.7 million viewers in DVR playback — on top of the 19 million who watched the show live — and “Lost” adding 2.5 million to its 10.8 million viewers seeing the show when it first aired for the week ending April 8.”
More On The Great Daisey Walkout
Was the student group that walked out in the middle of monologuist Mike Daisey’s performance at American Repertory Theatre the other night told that the show had some strong language? The students say no; the theatre says they were. Meanwhile, the YouTube video of the incident has been viewed 90,000 times…
One Way To Kill The Movies: Ignoring Women
“While Hollywood has not stopped making films appealing to women and girls … women here worry that the future will not be so bright. They are nervous about the disappearance of many of the movie world’s most visible female power brokers and concerned that a box office dominated by seemingly male-oriented action films like ‘300’ means less attention for movies that have obvious appeal to female audiences, 51 percent of moviegoers.”
One More Time, Bill For Artists’ Deductions Introduced
“For the fifth consecutive session of the US Congress, a bill has been introduced that would allow artists to deduct the fair market value of works of their own creation from their taxes, if they donate them to museums and libraries. Existing provisions enable collectors to deduct the value of donated art, but artists can deduct only the cost of supplies such as canvas and paint.”