Media

The public broadcaster won seven trophies, with HBO and CBS following with six each.

The Christian Broadcasting Network’s news channel will provide a religious perspective that other channels lack, CEO Gordon Robertson told the Associated Press in an interview in advance of the network’s formal launch Monday.

“[It’s] the largest drop since the country’s box-office boom era began. Trump’s trade war with China has yet to directly impact the entertainment business, but Hollywood’s position in the massive Middle Kingdom marketplace is becoming somewhat precarious.”

Frank showed producers like Ira Glass the possibility of radio as a narrative artform, but Glass adapted that lesson for the rest of the country. Nearly five million people listen to This American Life each week; at its peak, Frank’s shows reached a fraction of that number. But This American Life traffics in the audio equivalent of glossy longform magazine journalism, not Frank’s uncategorizable radio autofiction.

It’s truly weird that Netflix can’t get it right in Nappily Ever After when shows like This Is Us and Grown-ish get it so right. Then there are the how-tos on YouTube for Issa Rae’s hair from Insecure, and the joys of Atlanta: “As they discussed child-care plans, Van took down her voluminous curls, which had been twisted into Bantu knots. It’s wasn’t the focus of the scene — and that’s precisely what made it so powerful.”

Listen, you might think the actor’s movie choices are random. Au contraire, mes frères: The luminous star of the new Colette is (sometimes literally) sticking it to The Man. “In all of Knightley’s historical films, she is at the center. She is not relegated to the role of love interest; men are. Romances, marriages, children, and dalliances are all secondary to her own development — as a woman, but also as the protagonist in her own life story, no matter how tragic it may become.”

Elayne Boosler performed in the most elite comic clubs on both coasts, but she could never get her own sitcom or even a network special – and she saw very limited time on the Tonight Show (Johnny wasn’t into assertive women). But she was a master of the stand-up hour. “Make no mistake: Ms. Boosler was its first female star, regularly putting out hours of jokes on cable in the 1980s and early ’90s that represented a break from the past. … Her act — hard-hitting, topical and dense with punch lines — anticipated the future of comedy better than most if not all of her peers.”

A Pay Equity Summit was billed as “the first step” in getting women pay equity with men. One of the craft guilds “published a study this year arguing that female-dominated crafts are often paid less than male-dominated jobs of similar responsibility level. The study equated women-dominated jobs like script supervisors to male-dominated jobs like assistant directors.”

‘Bongo Cat’ took off a month ago, and in a world of constant reporting on sexual assaults and climate change, the meme has won over just about everyone. (Yes, you need to watch “In the Hall of the Bongo Cat.”)

One critic says that TIFF did a pretty good job: “It’s one thing to say we need to be there. But we’ve been on the carpets and in these rooms and felt the disrespect. I didn’t feel like an outsider [at TIFF] and that is getting it right. It felt like a genuine change they were actually trying to be part of.” But now? Larger outlets need to diversify their rosters.

If you are liberal—and in this political climate, we’re calling readers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN liberals—you went on the internet this morning and saw a flood of #BelieveWomen tweets and women talking about how Blasey Ford’s testimony moved them to tears.  But if you are conservative, you went on the internet today and saw a deluge of #BackBrett tweets, a great deal about flying, and a lot of lamenting.

Public radio fans may remember Scott Carrier from his segments (many involving long road trips) on This American Life. In 2015, he switched to podcasting, reporting and producing the series The Home of the Brave with funding provided solely by listeners. Barrett Golding, who co-founded with Carrier the Peabody Award-winning NPR project Hearing Voices, talks with him about the transition to solo work and everything that it takes (and takes out of you).

“Behind the scenes, executives are reviewing departments and evaluating staffers’ expertise to determine ‘the most efficient merger’ and to ‘match people to the right roles based on our priorities,’ said Kerri Hoffman, the former PRX CEO who holds the same position in the new entity. … The merger, announced last month, will also bring a combined board, free services for stations, and new experiments with PRI’s The World, the network’s flagship newsmagazine.”

In 1940, just after the Generalissimo and his fascist forces won the Spanish Civil War, he wrote the screenplay for a film titled Raza, a self-justifying combination of allegorical propaganda and autofiction. Ten years later, in the wake of World War II, Franco censored his own film and remade it.

Even by his standards, the making of The Other Side of the Wind was a long and messy process; he did finally finish shooting, but he never finished fussing over the editing before he died in 1985. But, thanks to hard work from friends and colleagues and funding from Netflix, a plausible version of the movie will be available for streaming in November. Writer Craig Hubert explains the story, the satire (very meta), and the fistfight with Ernest Hemingway that started it all.

Last week, after a series of unfortunate events, Telltale Games — the studio behind the Walking Dead series and Minecraft: Story Mode — abruptly laid off 90% of its employees. Now a lawsuit alleges that Telltale “failed to pay its laid off workers their respective wages, salary, commissions, bonuses, accrued holiday pay, and accrued vacation for 60 working days following their terminations,” as required by California law.

The board’s announcement that Michelle Guthrie was out said only “The decision follows discussions over several months that concluded when directors resolved that it was not in the best interests of the ABC for Ms Guthrie to continue to lead the organisation.” Media journalist David Tiley “make[s] an op-ed stab at the issues behind this.”

While executives come and go regularly, no one can remember a time when there was so much change and turmoil at the top of all of the networks.

Telltale Games, which produces the popular interactive series The Walking Dead and Minecraft: Story Mode, more or less collapsed over the span of 48 hours. Brian Crecente reports on how it happened.

Yep, but not because of their content or the experience of watching. It’s because they were kinda radioactive. “Color television, in this instance, was not just bringing images of the contemporary world into the home; it was also physically manifesting one of that world’s most pressing and feared perils.”

One creepy social media guy photoshopped smiles onto Brie Larson’s face in the promotional posters for Captain Marvel. The actor responded by photoshopping the same icky smile onto the other Marvel superheroes, like Ironman and Captain America.

Wait, is Daniel Craig really going to be James Bond again? What about that one Idris Elba tweet? And what’s the deal with Danny Boyle – wasn’t he supposed to direct? Find out more on Instagram, probably, if you didn’t already see it on an actor’s Snapchat (or maybe – old school! – a Facebook Story).

It’s almost like there’s a network of harassers. Yes: This is a story about sexual harassers all the way down, including one of the guys tasked with reviewing, and then rejecting, Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein for NBC.

But that’s only because a judge overruled the country’s film board, which had said that the film – about a lesbian romance – “was an attempt to ‘legitimize lesbianism’ in the East African nation, where homosexuality is illegal.” The ban is lifted for one week only, which will make the film eligible for the Academy Awards.

So if one of the benefits of podcasting was that they made good money, why are companies like BuzzFeed shutting down or downsizing their operations? One obvious answer is a glut of supply—in 2015, a list of the “must listen” podcasts was 200 items long. At some point, even podcasting aficionados started to wonder who had time to to listen to all those podcasts. A similar thing happened with video, after everyone pivoted to short-form video because Facebook said it wanted as much as possible.

Steven Eastwood shot his feature film Island in a hospice on England’s Isle of Wight, where four patients allowed him to capture their final days and (actual) final breaths. “What’s interesting is there isn’t an image. You can’t see the dying. I think that’s fascinating, because to talk about how the film shows you the moment of death, I don’t know when that moment is. I’ve watched it over and over.”