Televisa, top producer of novelas, is considering the purchase of Univision, one of the two major Spanish-language networks. This is not exactly true but it makes a better headline than “Televisa is teaming up with U.S. private equity firm Providence Equity, U.S. billionaire investor Haim Saban and Venezuela’s Cisneros family to put together a possible [...]

This article in Slate explains why there has still been no convincingly realistic human character to come out of the CGI mills of the world. Shuzo Shiota, who runs one such mill, says it takes an army of people an incredible amount of time to produce such a character, and even then it will only [...]

A bill currently pending in Congress would require movies that include sex scenes of any kind to be policed the same way that porno films are. It may suprise you to learn this, but part of the adult film rigamarole includes an affidavit listing the names and ages of all actors participating. This is to protect [...]

Gotta tell you, if you’re Netflix you must feel like Bruce Lee, the sole fighter against an army of trained assasins. At least they only come at you one at a time.
Blockbuster, still smarting from the roundhouse kick that Netflix dealt to its bottom line, went into the DVD-mailing business last year, and in response Netflix [...]

First desktop publishing put typesetters our of business, then loops eliminated the need for studio musicians. Now, technology threatens the career of Frank Sinatra Jr.
(I know I used this story yesterday. It’s a great story.)

I’m a little less dyspeptic about the TV ratings this week - for one thing they seem to have changed the week so it ends on Sunday, which means they won’t be impossibly old when I do the podcast. But even better, half the shows in the top ten are written and feature actors (or rather, written by union [...]

Writer Insists ‘Da Vinci’ Copied From Him AP - Wed Mar 8, 9:36 AM ET
LONDON - A writer who claims “The Da Vinci Code” copied from his work insisted in court Wednesday that there were specific echoes of his book in the best-selling thriller.
Get in line, pal.
Nancy Sinatra wants Dad to tell his own story Reuters [...]

The Kinks are getting airplay again. The bad news? It’s in the service of laundry detergent and IBM.
The music of the baby-boomer generation is increasingly hard to find on radio as new acts and musical styles crowd it out. What is a stadium-rock act to do? More and more, it’s cozying up with corporations, providing [...]

Box Office Weekly #005 (MP3 - 8.4MB - 24 min)
 DOWNLOAD THE SHOW HERE On today’s show we succumb to Oscar© fever, teasing out the hidden messages in last night’s Academy Awards. We shore up the weekend’s crippled box office numbers, face reality in the TV Ratings segment and report on the fight to protect the [...]

NOTE: I’d like to have found something as little less… think-piecey to write about; but the post-Oscar buzz has sucked all the air out of showbiz news. I’ll talk about the Awards tonight on the podcast, teasing out the hidden messages, but today I write about why the movie business isn’t normal.
Art Buchwald is dying. [...]