Actors and directors are threatened by crowds and harassed by authorities; occasionally, a film set is vandalized; some stories become off-limits. "Out of fear, you draw back and you draw back and you draw back, until you step on the very people you ought to be defending." - The New Yorker
"You may have already forgotten about it, but Vault by CNN launched in the summer of 2021 as a marketplace for its own NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that would 'offer collectors the opportunity to own a piece of history.'" Well, it did last 15 times longer than CNN+ did ... - The Verge
In one game, the player is a Ukrainian tractor driver stealing Russian tanks; in another, she slaps Putin with a sunflower; in another, he shoots the free-floating heads of prominent Russians (plus Elon Musk). One game just has the player walk around Kharkiv talking with other survivors. - The Guardian
Cleese's as-yet-untitled show on GB News, shared with satirist Andrew Doyle, will presumably be part of his notorious ongoing campaign against "wokeness" and "cancel culture" and in favor of "free speech." ("The Ministry of Silly Wokes?" quips The Hollywood Reporter.) - BBC
Characters, sports figures, local TV news anchors: They all have a Q, and that Q Score was used by advertising agencies, TV studios, Hollywood execs, marketing companies and consultants to put the most-liked people/things/characters in front of eager American audiences and consumers. - Washington Post
Some companies are coming to the conclusion they will need a dance partner to pursue growth instead of going it alone. Other Hollywood giants realize they probably should have one major offering in the marketplace, rather than two or three separate ones. - The Wall Street Journal
Writer-director Frances O'Connor says, "Sometimes it takes us a while to get the courage to step into something that we really feel passionate about, ... but if you’re going to tell a story now, I think it’s good for it to speak to women in a way that’s alive." - The Observer (UK)
A Netflix exec: "We loved going to see great original family films. ... Sadly, now when you look at what a lot of the offerings are, they aren’t live-action family. It’s usually animated for family, and then it’s reboots, remakes, sequels, low-budget horror." - The New York Times
Or rather not ending, but continuation, as a U.S. company buys and intends to expand the company that hired actors and built elaborate sets for "immersive screenings" of everything from Star Wars to Stranger Things. - The Guardian (UK)
"Poor on the outside and rich on the inside, and led by pioneers like Lynda Myles, Murray Grigor and many others, the Edinburgh film festival was feminist, unbridled, Nonconformist Scottish and passionately international. ... It changed film culture." - The Guardian (UK)
The range isn't the same, either for visuals or his music. "To this day, I still get letters from people going, 'There's 20 seconds of music missing in The Dark Knight,' and I'm going, 'No there is not any music missing. You're listening to it on your phone.'" - BBC
"The problem was that he misunderstood what made the monolithic mass media world a financial success. He was convinced that you could keep all the business structures basically the same, and just replace the media's phony reality with an authentic one." - The New Atlantis
Journalist Tiago Rogero has created three sets of podcasts — Negra Voz (Black Voice), Vidas Negras (Black Lives), and The Querino Project (Brazil's equivalent of The 1619 Project) — celebrating the "people, struggles and achievements that had been airbrushed from the history of a country that is more than 50% Black." - The Guardian
Most people don’t follow a bunch of political “elites” on Twitter — a group that, for these authors’ purposes, also includes news organizations. But those who do typically follow many more people they agree with politically than people who they don’t. - NiemanLab
