Media

The Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists’ national board voted to adopt its first-ever agree­ment for influencers—personalities and performers paid to promote products and services on networks like Instagram and TikTok, plus non-networked websites. In addition, those side hustles are no longer prohibited for current members of SAG-AFTRA. – Dance Magazine

Effectively, the studio is making its TV shows as if they were roughly six-hour movies, applying the same production methodology it’s used for the 23 unprecedentedly successful interconnected feature films that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That means empowering directors to lead a lot of creative decision-making, in collaboration with a small cadre of hands-on Marvel creative executives who are with the project from the beginning and report up to Feige. – Variety

Hollywood viewed the awards as meaningless at best and corrupt at worst — most notable for their open bar and the industry perks enjoyed by their some 80 voting members. Jack Mathews, who was a film critic for Newsday, once called them “the best-fed freeloaders in the entertainment industry.” – The New York Times

YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform, announced the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100 million pool of money it’s promising to distribute to creators of the most-engaging clips of its new TikTok-style feature. YouTube expects the program to kick off in the fall of 2021 and continue into 2022. – Variety

Last summer, the game AI Dungeon (less than a year old at the time) got an upgraded version of AI text-generation software that lets users type an action or piece of dialogue for their characters and then creates a new piece of narrative. Before long, some users started creating sexual situations involving children. But when the company put in a content filter and said it would use human moderators for flagged content, users rebelled. – Wired

“‘Something we’ve thought about for a long time is how the show has historically had a strong emphasis on the individual and the internal world and how there was an absence of perspective about the larger structures that the individual exists inside of,’ said [producer Abby] Wendle. To describe the intended shift in somewhat reductive terms, then, this new iteration is an effort to step away from the purely psychological and towards the more structural, societal, and sociological.” – Vulture

Kyle Buchanan: “That’s the thing about awards: These trophies are only as important as the recipients believe them to be, and now that the illusion of the Golden Globes has been punctured, stars might find it hard to go back to suspending their disbelief. … In the meantime, it’s possible that another awards show” — such as SAG or Critics’ Choice — “could move to early January to effectively take the Globes’ place on the awards calendar next year.” – The New York Times

“The Berlin Film Festival, which took place online earlier this year, will show most of the movies that were part of the competition at outdoor cinemas across the German capital next month, taking advantage of falling COVID-19 infection numbers. The summer special offered by the festival, also known as the Berlinale, will take place from June 9 to 20 at 16 venues including a specially created open-air cinema at Museum Island in the heart of the city.” – Reuters

“NBC will not air the Golden Globes in 2022, the network said in a statement on Monday morning. This means the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will now have to decide how or if it will move forward next year without its broadcast partner, or more swiftly enact changes demanded by industry leaders regarding the org’s membership and processes.” – Variety

The director of Moonlight took on a 10-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad partly because it was such a wellspring of fear. “Jenkins was surprised, he says, of the extent to which the retelling of that history affected him. ‘There’s no blood, there’s no fire on set,’ he says. ‘And yet, we were on an actual plantation in Georgia. And as we’re recreating some of these moments, this feeling seeps into your body that things like this happened here. And even worse things.'” – The Guardian (UK)

When the show premiered, it wasn’t the beloved Big Bird and Elmo experience that people think of today. “In 1969, Sesame Street unveils and there is a African American couple who live in the same neighborhood with their white neighbors — yes, with Big Bird and several other Muppets — but it’s a very integrated cast. The first time this [was] ever seen on television in Jackson, Miss., the public television station received a lot of complaints and they stopped airing the show. Miraculously, a commercial station in Jackson said ‘if the public station won’t air it, then we will.’ This is just an example of how groundbreaking this was.”- NPR

Yes, it’s a bit early to start placing bets, but still: “There are many nervous insiders hoping the post-pandemic pendulum will swing back toward those big mainstream movies. So here’s an early look at the presumptive awards field, starting with the very movies the Academy is surely hoping will save the Oscars.” – Vulture

Art house films in particular bear the marks of their specific directors and writers – and that often doesn’t translate (sorry, Another Round and Leo DeCaprio). “This may explain why so many international films optioned for remakes never get made. Paramount’s version of German Oscar nominee Toni Erdmann (2016), DreamWorks’ planned adaptation of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son (2013), or Tom Hanks’ U.S. take of A Man Called Ove, the Swedish sleeper from 2015, remain, as of this writing, in development hell.” And then there are international streaming services. – The Hollywood Reporter

Revenues at the world’s largest exhibition chain topped out at $148.3 million, down 84.2 percent from the year-ago period, while the company logged a loss of $1.42 per share, an improvement on the loss of $20.88 per share that it reported in the year-ago period. – Variety

“There was only one time when he seriously thought about quitting. The project … had just been announced, in the fall of 2016. Within hours of the news — BARRY JENKINS TO ADAPT HOT NOVEL ‘UNDERGROUND RAILROAD’ — the tweets had arrived. “THIS is what he’s doing after ‘Moonlight’? I HATE slave movies. Do we really need more images of Black people getting brutalized?” Jenkins almost pulled the plug right then.” – The New York Times

“How to be a better boss is a question that has come under new scrutiny in Hollywood thanks to some high-profile examples of spectacularly bad ones. … In the trickiest coaching situations, a studio or agency’s human resources department hires a coach to work with a reluctant leader. … For those inclined to roll their eyes at the prospect, [a coach] reminds them of what they stand to lose.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“It’s easy to forget now, given the show’s 52-year ubiquity, that the original program was a shot in the dark – the first show aimed explicitly at childhood education, a combustible attempt to meld learning fundamentals with jingly bits and skits kids enjoyed to watch. … [It] became the longest-running, and arguably most recognizable children’s program in the country, with international co-productions assisted by the Sesame Workshop in 170 more.” – The Guardian

“The process begins with recording an actor speaking the dialog in the required language, as one would in a dubbing process, explains co-founder and filmmaker Scott Mann. The new audio and picture would then be delivered to [the company, called] Flawless, which would effectively use its AI-driven system to create a lip-synced picture.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“The UK’s biggest cinema chain, [Odeon,] which is sweetening its £9.99 monthly all-you-watch subscription scheme to get punters back indoors as summer nears, will welcome back film fans to most of the 112 sites it operates across the UK [on 17 May]. … Cineworld and Vue, the second and third biggest UK operators, are also set to reopen their cinemas, as are the Curzon and Everyman chains.” – The Guardian

The telecom giant is selling Yahoo, AOL and the remainder of its Verizon Media brands to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal announced Monday. – The Hollywood Reporter

Execs at Nexstar, the country’s largest owner of local TV stations, had research saying that consumers wanted a source of nonpartisan news. So the corporation turned its cable outlet, WGN America, into NewsNation, offering five hours of news programming every evening to 75 million homes. Nielsen says NewsNation averages 27,000 prime-time viewers a night. (That’s nationwide.) Several top editorial hires have quit, and there are allegations that the network is not as unbiased as it claims to be. – Los Angeles Times