Signs of the Apocalypse Roundup – July 2009 – Week 1
VH1 orders two hip-hop reality series
Frank ‘The Entertainer’ Moresco to star in his own show
VH1 is giving two female hip-hop artists their own reality series — Sandra “Pepa” Denton of Salt n Pepa and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas from TLC. Also, The Entertainer (from the “I Love NY” and “I Love Money” shows) will get his own series called “The Entertainer” and it will feature his parents and his basement bachelor pad. The as-yet-untitled “Pepa” and “Chilli” series as well as “The Entertainer” are scheduled to premiere in 2010.
MTV greenlights eight projects
Jamie Foxx, Mark Burnett to exec produce series
MTV has greenlit eight projects for series development. The cabler also commissioned a pilot for an untitled reality show featuring Audrina Patridge (“The Hills”) that “Survivor” guru Burnett is exec producing, while “Saturday Night Live” head writer Meyers and colleague Mike Shoemaker are shepherding “The Awesomes,” an animated half-hour about a bumbling superhero team.
ABC adopts ‘Find My Family’ show
Net nabs six episodes of relationship reality skein
ABC has picked up six episodes of the relationship reality series “Find My Family,” which follows the stories of people desperate to find a long-lost relative or friend. Two different reunions are featured in each episode, as participants reveal what happened to their relationship — and cameras follow them as they meet up with their long-lost relative, friend or love.
Piligian to fly airplane repo show
Producer snatches rights to reality show
“Dirty Jobs” exec producer Craig Piligian has nabbed the rights to turn the dangerous work of airplane repo man Nick Popovich into a TV series. Popovich is the co-partner of Sage-Popovich, a repossession firm that specializes in taking back big-ticket items — mostly airplanes. According to a recent profile of Popovich by Salon.com, the company’s clients include Citibank, Transamerica and Credit Suisse, and the firm nets $600,000-$900,000 per job. Popovich’s business is booming in this weak economy, as he travels the globe to grab Gulfstreams, Learjets and even 747s from cash-strapped owners who have defaulted on their payments.
CBS sets date for ‘Neighborhood’
Reality show to air on Sundays at 9 p.m.
The show has already been drawing attention for the sheer spectacle it has created in suburban Atlanta, where a massive 20-foot wall has enclosed an entire block of homes. Neighborhood centers on eight families locked inside that compound and competing in various games for $250,000. With little electricity and no contact with the outside world, the families are forced to reconnect as they face off with their neighbors.
Business of the Business
Yahoo CEO gags at gossip glut
Britney overload makes Bartz want to ‘throw up’
At its annual shareholder’s meeting Thursday, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz proclaimed her solidarity with a man who practically begged her to reduce the amount of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ and similar celebrity news off the home page. “I’m the same way. If I see another Britney Spears thing, I’m gonna throw up,” she said. Then she mentioned something they’re doing internally called the Fluff-o-meter where users can customize their preferred mix of hard news and fluff, which, of course, will only work if consumers will be honest about what they want.
Report deflates teen tech tendencies
Teens still rely primarily on traditional media, study finds
“The notion that teens are too busy texting and Twittering to be engaged with traditional media is exciting, but false,” according to the executive summary. Instead of replacing traditional media with new-media consumption, teens are simply making time for both, it concludes. Other myths that the report debunks are that teenagers’ preferences differ vastly from adults, that teens’ media and entertainment spending is insulated from the recession (they actually reduce it, with out-of-home entertainment more affected than in-home) and that traditional advertising can’t resonate with teens (once ads break through the clutter, teens like them more).
High court declines to hear DVR case
Cable firms want to phase out In-home recording devices
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a challenge from television networks and Hollywood studios alleging the remote-storage architecture violates copyright laws. The high court’s decision to reject the complaint affirms an earlier ruling by the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that Cablevision’s network DVR service, which stores captured content on servers at the head-end, is fundamentally identical to what end-users experience while using traditional set-top DVR.
Aborigine filmmakers break the mold
New voices emerge in a slew of Australian films
The box office success of two aboriginal stories by white directors, Phillip Noyce’s “Rabbit-Proof Fence” and Rolf de Heer’s “Ten Canoes,” has gone some way to enhance distributors’ perceptions of the prospects of indigenous subjects. Both were internationally acclaimed and achieved domestic grosses of A$7.6 million ($5.5 million) and $2.8 million respectively.
Transmedia storytelling is future of biz
Studios create mythologies, multimedia worlds
Transmedia takes the concept of the bible — a document containing backstory information that film and TV writers rely on for building plots and characters — to an extensive new level. The idea of developing a piece of intellectual property in a consistent manner across multiple media platforms was pioneered in its modern form by George Lucas, who turned his first “Star Wars” film into five more features, multiple TV shows, a panoply of books and an onslaught of toys and games. The feature films alone have generated a cumulative worldwide box office of more than $4 billion.
Planet of the Odd
Michael Jackson dies at 50
Pop icon suffers suspected heart attack in L.A.
On Thursday afternoon, a crowd gathered at UCLA Medical Center soon after word spread that the self-declared “King of Pop,” aged 50, had been rushed there from his Bel-Air home. The Los Angeles Fire Dept. responded to a call that he was not breathing.
Farrah Fawcett Dies of Cancer at 62
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, bewitched a generation of men, died Thursday morning, June 25, 2009, in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62.
Johnny Depp Leaves $4K Tip For Chicago Waiter
Depp, his “Public Enemies” co-star Marion Cotillard, director Michael Mann, along with about a dozen other folks — who were in Chicago last week for the premiere of their new gangster movie — made a stop at Gibsons Steakhouse around 11:30 PM, according to the Chicago Sun Times. Once the bill came around 2:30 AM — totaling up to a reported $4,400 — Depp made sure the man who waited on the group into the late hours was well compensated for his time, as Mohammaed A. Sekhani reportedly received a $4,000 tip from the star.
Ray Bradbury to Yahoo: “To hell with the Internet!”
“The Internet is a big distraction,” said Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, while speaking out in defense of libraries in The New York Times. Bradbury was being interviewed prior to a public appearance benefiting Ventura County’s H.P. Wright Library, which is in danger of shutting its doors because of budget cuts. “Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’ It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”
EuropaCorp fined for ‘Taxi 2′ death
Company guilty of involuntary manslaughter
France’s Court of Appeal has fined Luc Besson’s shingle EuropaCorp Euros 100,000 ($140,607) for involuntary manslaughter of a cameraman. Alain Dutartre, 41, died in 1999 during the lensing of a car chase scene for “Taxi 2.” It found that “Representatives of the company tried to reduce costs, which led them to refuse the budget proposed by Remy Julienne to carry out preliminary tests to prepare for the car chase scenes.”
The Fine Print
This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive roundup of the entire weeks’ news. All stories are chosen by me for no other reason than that they got my attention and might capture yours. If something you think is more important chime in on the feedback; we’d love to hear comments and have a conversation about it.
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