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One Of Australia’s Most Popular Soap Operas Roiled By Accusations Of On-Set Racism

Neighbours, which has been running in Australia since 1985 and is one of the country's most successful TV shows internationally, has had two indigenous cast members and one of Indian descent publicly describe some brazen behavior from fellow cast and crew members, including one incident where an actor compared the Indian-Australian colleague to a bobblehead doll. - The Guardian

What The Closing Of The Arclight Theatres Means For Movie Theatres

The truth is, the cinema experience as we know it, is likely doomed. While it isn’t going to disappear entirely, it will become a “nice to have” option for the populace, versus the “must have” it was through much of the 20th century. Look forward to much more expensive tickets and far fewer movie houses, more like what happened...

Awards Shows Used To Be Ratings Gold. Now They Struggle

The Emmy Awards — already in a ratings tailspin in recent years as it no longer celebrates mass-appeal hits — showed how far audience levels can drop, sinking 9% to 6.1 million viewers Sept. 20. Other shows, such as the American Music Awards, the Country Music Assn. Awards and the Billboard Music Awards, hit all-time lows as well. -...

Two Beloved California Movie Theatre Chains To Close

ArcLight's stable includes the prized Cinerama Dome Hollywood. The Dome, built in 1963 by Pacific Theatres' parent company the Decurion Corp., is the crown jewel of the small theater complex that was later reconstructed in the early 2000s. Throughout the decades, the Dome, in particular, has been a favorite site place to stage premieres — it timed its opening...

Nature Documentaries Are A Lot More Like Porn Than You’d Like To Think

It's not just that they're wildly popular and can be addictive. It's because nature documentaries have at least as much artifice as any studio-produced adult video and maybe more. ("Are these seabirds supposed to be majestic or comical as they enact their mating dance? The music tells us. Whom are we to root for in this interaction of predator...

The Surrealists Would Have Loved TikTok

In fact, reporter Angela Watercutter compares the 15-second-video service old Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse: "The platform, thanks to its duetting and stitching functions, automates a lot of what the Surrealists were doing. It' not exactly an exquisite corpse, since TikTok records the entire genealogy of any given work, and there is a want for continuity with what others have...

And Now: Virtual DJ’s Powered By AI

"Virtual entertainment is the new cultural center of gravity," Authentic Artists founder and CEO Chris McGarry told Protocol. Authentic Artists has developed a dozen such virtual DJs thus far, and is powering their performances with a custom-built AI music engine that uses a catalog of 130,000 MIDI files to generate performances in real time. The resulting music is being...

Hot Off The Press — How The Sacramento History Museum Became A TikTok Star

Museum docent Howard Hatch started making short videos of him working an old printing press. Soon the museum had more than a million followers on TikTok - WESH (Sacramento)

The British TV-Watching Public Complained A Lot About An Excess In Coverage Of Prince Philip’s Death

As a matter of fact, there were so many complaints about the bump in programming for special coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh's death that the BBC had to set up an whole new temporary complaint page. And it wasn't just the main channel. "BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live also aired special programming charting Prince Philip's life,...

The MTV Show ‘The Real World’ Jump-Started Reality TV As We Know It, But At A Huge Cost

In 1992, television wasn't all about the latest competition or race or humiliation reported to the camera. So when The Real World started, it was a shock. Perhaps not as much of a shock - but a choice that has echoed for nearly three decades - is the way the show framed Black cast members. "The show often sacrificed...

The Messy, Low-Budget, Rediscovered Late Soviet Era Lord Of The Rings

The 1991 project was believed to be lost. "But after Tolkien fan clubs urged the broadcaster to scour the archives of its Soviet predecessor, Leningrad Television, workers for Channel Five managed to find the footage last year" - and to put it online for all of us to enjoy in late March. - The New York Times

BAFTA Wins Include A Fair Number Of Surprises

Chloé Zhao won another directing award for Nomadland, which also won best film on the second night of the mostly online awards. Anthony Hopkins was a surprising win for The Father; at 83, he's the oldest male actor to win a BAFTA. Promising Young Woman and Emerald Fennell also came in for surprising wins, and Youn Yuh-jung's win for...

Chloe Zhao Wins Director’s Guild Honor, Cementing Her Status As Presumptive Oscar Favorite

Zhao, director of Nomadland, is the first woman of color and only the second woman ever to win the DGA award. Though director David Fincher didn't win for Mank, he had a great line: "Directing ... is a bit like trying to paint a watercolor from four blocks away through a telescope, over a walkie-talkie, and 85 people are...

New Guidelines Suggest Actors Set Nudity Boundaries Before Filming

To keep actors safe - and, of course, to cover their own liability - some productions are now employing intimacy coordinators. But contracts can go farther, and the #TimesUp group has suggested that "a so-called 'nudity rider' or 'simulated sex waiver' should be in place before filming begins." - BBC

So You Want To Be In The Movies

The easiest part of being an extra, ahem, a background artist, is that you just have to be there. "Being an extra requires no experience, no acting talent and no talking." - Los Angeles Times

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