Bacall, Corman, Willis To Get Honorary Oscars
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP)- Actress Lauren Bacall, producer-director Roger Corman and cinematographer Gordon Willis are the first Oscar winners of the season.
The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Thursday that the three will receive honorary Oscar statuettes.
Bacall made her screen debut with Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not” in 1944. She went on to star in more than 30 films, including such classics as “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo.” Corman has directed more than 50 films and produced more than 300 during his five-decade career, including “It Conquered the World” and “The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Willis is a two-time Academy Award nominee for “Zelig” and “The Godfather, Part III.”
The board also voted to present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to producer-executive John Calley. His producing credits include “Postcards from the Edge,” ”The Remains of the Day,” for which he earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination, “Closer” and “The Da Vinci Code.”
All four awards will be presented at the Academy’s inaugural Governors Awards gala event on Nov. 14 in Hollywood.
Networks, Advertisers Seek Better Viewer Counts
DAVID BAUDER, Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) – Fourteen media companies can agree on something – that they need better ways to measure who is watching television programming.
The companies include ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, along with prominent advertisers such as Procter & Gamble and AT&T. They’ve formed a coalition that will fund promising research projects, calling it the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement.
The companies are all worried that they don’t have a good enough way to measure who is watching TV on their computers, mobile phones or in public places. Media companies frequently grumble about Nielsen Media Research, the company that has a virtual monopoly on counting TV viewers.
The coalition says it isn’t funding a competitor to Nielsen. It’s just looking for interesting research ideas right now.
Trailer For Jackson Film to Debut at MTV Awards
NEW YORK (AP) – MTV says a trailer for a Michael Jackson film built around rehearsal footage left behind after the King of Pop’s death will debut at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards.
“Michael Jackson: This Is It” will be released for a limited two-week theatrical engagement worldwide on Oct. 28. Longtime Jackson collaborator Kenny Ortega is directing the film, which offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Jackson preparing for a series of London shows he was rehearsing when he died June 25.
The 2009 Video Music Awards will be hosted by Russell Brand, with performances by Beyonce, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Green Day, Pink, Taylor Swift and Muse.
Janet Jackson will pay tribute to her late brother at the show. The Video Music Awards will be presented at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Organizers Unveil London Film Festival LineupLONDON (AP) – Organizers are announcing the lineup for this year’s London Film Festival.
The two-week movie event is trying to raise its international profile, and more than a dozen world premieres are on its slate of 300 British and international films.
Stars including George Clooney and Meryl Streep are due to attend the opening night film, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” on Oct. 14. Wes Anderson’s animated feature is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s story.
The festival closes Oct. 29 with “Nowhere Boy,” Sam Taylor-Wood’s film about the young John Lennon.
More details were announced at a press conference in London on Wednesday.
Founded in 1957, the London festival does not hand out major awards like rivals in Cannes, Venice or Toronto.
AP Sources: YouTube May Offer Online Movie Rentals
Ryan Nakashima, Business Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) – YouTube, Google Inc.’s online video streaming service, is in talks with Hollywood studios to rent new release movies online, according to people familiar with the talks.
The move follows similar deals by Apple Inc.’s iTunes and others.
A final deal would be contingent on pricing and an agreed-upon release date, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions were still ongoing.
The move takes YouTube one step away from an ad-supported business model, but does not break the mold of other online rental deals already struck by iTunes, Amazon.com Inc. and Cinemanow.com, a unit of Sonic Solutions. All of them offer movie rentals for between $1.99 and $3.99 each with a 24-hour viewing period.
The talks were first reported on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site Wednesday.
Discussions were most advanced with Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., Sony Corp.’s movie studio, Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bro s. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., all of which already have ad revenue-sharing deals with YouTube, the people said.
The Internet site declined to comment specifically on the talks.
“While we don’t comment on rumor or speculation, we hope to expand on both our great relationship with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community,” said YouTube spokesman Chris Dale.
If YouTube becomes a rental channel for movie studios, it would mark a return to what Google used to do before it bought YouTube for $1.76 billion nearly three years ago. Besides offering free looks at short clips, Google Video sold the right to view some movies and TV shows.
Google got out of the online video rental business shortly after it bought YouTube and poured more resources into building a larger audience for YouTube’s totally free service.
YouTube is still unprofitable although Google management says it’s close to making money, thanks to all the ads on there now.
According to a person with direct knowledge of the deals in the works, YouTube plans to begin a three-month test of the online rental service this month.
Every studio would likely come to different terms, but most would receive around 60 percent of the revenue from each rental, with a floor of about $2.40 that could vary depending on the age of the title, the person said. That’s very similar to the studios’ deals with other online outfits, as well as those agreed upon with cable operators such as Comcast Corp., which offer videos on demand.
The “window” – or the time lag between the sales date of DVDs and their rental, which is meant to protect sagging DVD sales – could be 30 days or more.
However, Warner Bros. has been allowing video-on-demand rentals on the same day that its DVDs hit retailers. The move has boosted sales and not hurt physical disc rentals, which don’t generate as much profit as digital ones.
AP Business Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Study Finds Prime Time on the Internet is 11 p.m.
Peter Svensson, Technology Writer
NEW YORK (AP) – It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where your neighbors are?
Chances are they’re online. According to a study, North Americans have been staying up late to do their Internet surfing this summer, so late that the peak usage for the whole day has been at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
That appears to be a shift from previous years, when most Internet activity was in the daytime.
The new study by Chelmsford, Mass.-based Internet security firm Arbor Networks found that people using the Internet at work and school produce a smaller traffic peak around 4 p.m. Eastern time on weekdays.
Internet activity then declines as people head home. At 8 p.m. Eastern, U.S. and Canadian home Internet traffic starts spiking, and stays surprisingly strong past midnight, Arbor found. At 2 a.m. Eastern, overall traffic is as high as it is at 9 a.m., when people are logging in at work.
Of course, 11 p.m. Eastern time is just 8 p.m. on the West Coast. But th e Eastern and Central time zones account for three-quarters of the U.S. population, so it’s clear there’s lot of late-night traffic.
It also seems North Americans are staying up much later on the Internet than Europeans. Their traffic peaks when it’s 9 p.m. in Western and Central Europe, and then drops sharply.
So what is it that keeps us up at night?
Internet video, including both YouTube and pornography, appears to be a big part of the answer, according to Arbor’s Craig Labovitz. Video usage peaks at midnight Eastern, later than any other traffic.
Gaming is another big evening activity, but one that’s most intense between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern, coinciding with TV’s prime time for most Americans. Labovitz found a jump in gaming traffic at exactly 8 p.m. Eastern, and speculates that it’s caused by “World of Warcraft” players who prearrange to get together at that time to tackle virtual monsters.
Arbor gathers data from Internet service prov iders that account for about half of North American traffic. The study looked at 10 weekdays in July. Labovitz said there was a chance that children on summer vacation could be affecting the numbers, and plans to keep watching traffic patterns in different seasons.
YouTube’s New Sales Pitch: Join Our Ad ProgramMichael Liedtke, Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – YouTube hopes to convert more amateur videographers into capitalists as it strives to show more advertising on its Web site and reverse years of uninterrupted losses.
The Internet’s top video channel will try to widen participation in a 20-month-old advertising program by actively recruiting the makers of widely watched clips.
The more aggressive approach announced Tuesday is a switch from YouTube’s previous practice of waiting for video makers to apply to the ad program.
The strategy hasn’t been profitable for YouTube so far – something that the site’s owner, Internet search leader Google Inc., wants to change.
After buying YouTube for $1.76 billion in late 2006, Mountain View-based Google initially focused on luring more people to the video site.
As the recession squeezed Google, the emphasis this year shifted to making money, prompting YouTube to explore new ways to show ads alongside more of the millions of clips clicked on its site each day.
YouTube won’t allow advertising without the consent of a video maker, largely to avoid legal fights over who has the right to profit from the work.
That policy means YouTube needs to persuade more video makers to allow ads. Toward that end, YouTube will try to quickly identify videos with a big following and then contact the owners of the clips about advertising opportunities.
YouTube expects the solicitations to boost the number of advertising partners from the thousands to the tens of thousands, said Tom Pickett, the video site’s director of online sales and operations.
It probably won’t require much arm twisting, given that the video owners get most of the revenue from the ads accompanying their clips. Google won’t specify how much it pays each of its ad partners, though it typically ranges anywhere from 70 percent to 90 percent of the revenue.
Nirvana Members Dismayed by ‘Guitar Hero 5’
Derrik J. Lang, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP)-Kurt Cobain’s appearance in the latest “Guitar Hero” video game is not hitting the right notes with the surviving members of Nirvana.
Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl said in a joint statement Thursday that they were “dismayed and very disappointed” that an avatar of the late Nirvana frontman could be used to play songs by other artists.
“While we were aware of Kurt’s image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn’t know players have the ability to unlock the character,” they said. “This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants. We urge Activision to do the right thing in ‘re-locking’ Kurt’s character so that this won’t continue in the future.”
Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, had been lashing out on Twitter this week about her late husband’s inclusion in the game, calling it vile and claiming she would sue Activision, the game’s publisher. Love claimed she never approved Cobain’s digita l likeness, and that she thought the grunge rocker would despise the rhythm game “let alone this avatar.”
Activision said in a statement Thursday that they secured the necessary licensing rights from the Cobain estate in a written agreement signed by Love to use the singer’s likeness as a fully playable character in “Guitar Hero 5,” which includes “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium” among its 85 tracks that can be played with instrument-shaped controllers.
Other real-life rockers featured in the latest edition of the popular rhythm game franchise for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Wii include Carlos Santana and Johnny Cash. Previous “Guitar Hero” editions have featured the likenesses of Jimi Hendrix, Billy Corgan, Ted Nugent, Sting, Ozzy Osbourne, Travis Barker and members of Aerosmith.
