Media

The chair of the Board of Supervisors of Easttown says the real town isn’t much like the show. “‘I can’t remember when the last homicide was here, if ever,’ said Marc Heppe (pronounced “heppy”), chair of the Easttown Township board of supervisors. … The big conflicts are over ‘a lot of NIMBY stuff’ — new development and more traffic. But locals are proud of the show.” – Los Angeles Times

Gotta keep those subscriber numbers up with direct to streaming movies! But … how do agents, producers, directors, and actors feel about this? It’s not ideal right now: “Talent typically has little leverage should a studio decide to put a title onto a streaming service, sources say. It did not readily occur to either agents or studios that contracts for projects releasing in 2021 — drawn two to three years ago, before some of the major services had launched — would have to stipulate paydays should the film be moved from a planned theatrical release.” – The Hollywood Report

The app – long derided both for squelching LGBTQIA voices and exploiting Black creators – reacted to the George Floyd protests by starting an incubator for Black voices. How’s it working now? “Program members bonded. … They shared legal advice, sample media kits, tips on talking to potential agents or collaboration partners and the stresses of turning a hobby into a career.” And, TikTok says, the program will likely be expanded. – Los Angeles Times

Simon V.Z. Wood: “Searching for evidence that bad actors were weaponizing artificial intelligence for political gain, what I found instead was an emerging field of detection firms, government grantees, startups, academics, artists, and nonprofits that seemed to depend on one another to sustain interest in deepfakes. Call it the deepfake-industrial complex — or, perhaps, a solution in search of a problem. … The winners in this ecosystem of constant possible delusion are the people who exploit fears of deepfakes to create plausible deniability about real-life events.” – Columbia Journalism Review

In the wake of Bob Garfield’s firing from On the Media for what he’s described as “anger mismanagement,” Celeste Headlee — who endured mistreatment on and off the air as co-host of The Takeaway with the now-disgraced John Hockenberry — writes, “There is no such thing as a host who is ‘too big to fail.’ Executives in the past have made a devil’s bargain, [sacrificing] psychological safety and well-being for the majority for the comfort of some powerful individuals. … Enough.” – Current

It’s an inevitable progression, and not surprising Amazon would do it first. Unlike Netflix, it has failed to reliably produce original hits. And unlike, say, NBCUniversal, its corporate model isn’t solely entertainment. It’s also a cloud computing company, massive retailer, and grocery store chain, to name a few. It had a net income of more than $21 billion last year alone. It’s easier for Amazon to dig in the couch cushions to buy MGM and its 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows than it is for the company to try to launch a new studio with the same heft—especially given how rocky its experience was trying to do exactly that with video games. – Wired

“It’s a natural process because every platform has a ceiling. If Netflix has 80 million subscribers in the U.S., they’re done. They can’t grow beyond that. All their growth has to come from international, and local content is the best way to secure that growth.” – Hollywood Reporter

To get more advertisers to move their dollars to streaming, the TV executives are working furiously to gather all the streaming fans for the same advertising experience. It’s not going to be easy. – Variety

Sunday’s spending spree means the mysterious anonymous bidder will become the owner of the Charlie Bit My Finger clip. But it also gives them a chance to create some follow-up content. The auction page says the NFT winner will be given the opportunity to “recreate a hilarious modern-day rendition of the classic clip” that will feature “the original stars, Harry and Charlie”. – BBC

For Amazon, snapping up MGM — which has more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows in its catalog — is a way to supercharge its Prime Video service with a slew of well-known entertainment titles. In addition, Amazon is anticipating being able to mine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer properties like the Pink Panther, Rocky and, yes, the 007 franchises for new originals. – Variety

Representing Trump during his first impeachment trial, Dershowitz ended his answer to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz by saying, “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, … and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” During coverage that evening, CNN political analyst Paul Begala said, “The Dershowitz Doctrine would make presidents immune from every criminal act, so long as they could plausibly claim they did it to boost their re-election effort.” Dershowitz says this was a misleading statement of his views that has damaged his scholarly reputation, and he is suing for $300 million. – The Hollywood Reporter

This often irreversible decay of Web content is commonly known as linkrot. It is similar to the related problem of content drift, or the typically unannounced changes––retractions, additions, replacement––to the content at a particular URL. – Columbia Journalism Review

“In The Bigamist, … no one gets beaten up or shot. No one robs a bank or a payroll, and the culprit’s downfall is signaled by nothing more violent than a baby’s sudden cry from out of the dark. Yet it qualifies as a noir, this smoky, black-and-white study in human failure, thwarted desire, and quiet desperation. When you add that The Bigamist is implicitly critical of the conventional moral standards governing romantic triangles, you get a sense of what distinguishes Ida Lupino’s films, as well as why I have dubbed her ‘the First Lady of noir.'” – The American Scholar

Almost all the incidents roiling America’s largest public radio station happened behind closed doors, but, as Times media columnist Ben Smith puts it, “one thing I learned this week about public radio is that no matter what is happening, someone is always recording it.” So he has the details of what Garfield called his “anger mismanagement,” the newsroom mini-rebellion against new editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper, complaints about The Takeaway‘s Tanzina Vega by her producers, and what the station’s CEO heard when she did a listening tour among the staff after she arrived in 2019. – The New York Times

The researchers targeted 2,000 Twitter users from a range of political persuasions who had tweeted 11 overtly false news articles. After an extremely polite correction in the thread, which included a link to factually accurate information, the tweeters’ accuracy declined further—and even more so when they were corrected by someone matching their political leanings. This indicates that partisanship is not driving the tweeters’ responses. – Fast Company

For decades before the internet, TV was dominated by the Big Three: CBS, ABC, and NBC. Movies were probably brought to you by Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM, or one of a handful of others. Now all of those assets, after being scooped up and realigned by bigger companies or telecoms, have come out in a new form, one that focuses more on where content will ultimately wind up when it hits streaming rather than where it debuts. – Wired

Canada’s film industry has managed to continue through the pandemic, in many cases as busy — or more — than before global industry shutdowns. In emails to CBC News, film boards across the country reported healthy industries. – CBC

Other companies have kicked the tires on MGM at various points during a stop-and-start sales process that has been dragging on for months. Industry insiders say that the true value of the studio is more in the $5 billion to $6 billion range along with the assumption of some debt. Even then, they are skeptical that MGM’s prize asset, its stake in the 007 franchise, can be properly monetized. – Variety

More than 100 indie feature filmmakers have unanimously ratified its constitution, and more than 300 have signed letters of intent to join. – Deadline

After multiple writers left the show following season five, the show investigated. The writers – who all refused to be named out of fear of retaliation – say the environment for them was, at best, terrible. Another former writer on Caron’s show Medium and current producer: “It was a toxic environment while I was there. And now that I have much more experience and I have been a showrunner myself, I can tell you, there are a lot of different ways to tell a writer that what they’re submitting didn’t work for you without attacking them in a cruel way. It is entirely possible to do this job with humanity and warmth and to treat people with respect.” – The Hollywood Reporter

Well, not quite yet, anyway. “When futurologist Ross Dawson published his ‘newspaper extinction timeline’ in 2010, he predicted that newspapers would cease to exist in the UK in 2019, in Canada and Norway in 2020 and in Australia in 2022. Wrong, wrong and, barring some unforeseen Australian cataclysm in the next six months, wrong again.” – Irish Times

Actor Diego Boneta could only play famously secretive musician Luis Miguel for Netflix after studying the musician for years – and hiring both an acting and a vocal coach to help him sound, and seem, more like Miguel. But he needed something else: Time with Miguel himself. Boneta says, “He shared some things that he asked me to not share with anyone else, not even the writers. … ‘This is just for you Diego, to help you.’ We shared that secret. It created a complicity between us.” – Los Angeles Times

It may be time to just quit everything. “My eyeballs are considering taking themselves off the market entirely. They’re sick of being courted, coaxed and, frankly, pressured into choosing this streaming service over that one, trying to keep up with all the glitzy platforms while not ignoring the quieter but equally worthy requests coming from those who may not be able to afford the lavish campaigns.” – Los Angeles Times

“The technology is related to deepfaking, which uses AI to paste one person’s face onto someone else. … It involves capturing the facial expressions and movements of an actor in a scene as well as someone speaking the same lines in another language. This information is then combined to create a 3D model that merges the actor’s face and head with the lip movements of the dubber.” – Wired