Tag: 06.06.00

BBC BOUNCING BACK?

Arts programming has been getting increasingly less airtime at the BBC over the past few years. “BBC has been without a head of music and arts for nearly nine months. Programmes are scattered idly around the schedules. Major series have been arbitrarily cancelled. Television hours devoted to the arts have almost halved since the mid-’90s. There is no longer a regular documentary arts strand, single music documentaries have virtually disappeared, and the two literary strands have been axed.” Yet, some new programming hires may signal the beginning of a reversal of the trend. – The Independent 06/06/00

HOME MOVIES IN THE PRC

Chinese film plays all over the world. But at home an existential crisis. “One school wonders if it should imitate Hollywood. Another sees Hollywood as a virus that will destroy what is left of the domestic film industry. There’s no doubt, though, who is winning. A Chinese film is lucky to get 20 or 30 people per screening. Meanwhile, a lackluster John Travolta vehicle now showing on the yellowing screen, usually gets a packed house of 300 or more.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada) 06/06/00

VISIBLY CANADIAN

A number of Canadian films are losing funding from a government fund set up to support Canadian films. The reason? They’ve been judged not Canadian enough.  This year the fund introduced a ranking system judging their Canadianness, based on a system of points. One filmmaker denied funding says: “You couldn’t get more Canadian unless you dressed in Canadian flags. I’m aghast at these new guidelines. It’s a reason to leave Canadian filmmaking altogether.” – National Post (Canada) 06/06/00

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR ARTS FUNDING

As do most ex-chairpeople of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jane Alexander has written a book about her experience running the American public arts funder. “From her coy pose on the cover, to the last desperate Shakespeare quotation, Jane Alexander has…produced a stunning argument for saving trees. This account of her tenure as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1993 to 1997, unfortunately reads like a high school student’s account of a summer abroad. – The Idler

DEATH STAR

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos predicts that “the advent of computer e-books would likely spell doom for independent booksellers since customers would not be coming to their stores to download reading material.” But Bezos’ dire prediction was made at a news conference and was different from the speech he had given earlier to the BookExpo convention reassuring booksellers that their business was safe from the likes of him. – Seattle Post-Intelligencer