(An open letter to American Film Producers)
Dear Powerful, Connected American Film Producers (you know who you are!):
I was reflecting on the Henry Darger article and it got me thinking about L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. I read them all– My family inherited my great-grandmother’s original hardbounds, and they were the first full-sized books I ever [...]

According to Variety, the actor selected to play the Green Hornet in the big-screen, no-doubt big-budget motion picture is… This guy.
Don’t get me wrong. Seth Rogen is a fine actor– likable, mildly charismatic, tallish. “Millionaire publisher-turned-masked crime fighter?” Really?
Really?
I had a hard enough time buying him as Katherine Heigl’s boyfriend.
–Skot C.
p.s. If you think this [...]

LARRY DAVID’S WIFE FILES FOR DIVORCE
This could be very, very bad news for Cheryl Hines.
HBO RECEIVES 86 EMMY NOMINATIONS
85 for the last 5 minutes of THE SOPRANOS alone.
BRIGITTE NIELSON CHECKS INTO REHAB
They tried to make her go to rehab, she said “I will journey across the wasteland to avenge the death of my parents and [...]

The scene: The San Fernando Valley, Summer 1994.
I was visiting some pals in the Los Angeles area. Among them was Bill (Daniel’s high-school chum whose brother would end up writing a trivial little Disney Channel movie called High School Musical) and Bill’s roommate Dirk, a DGA assistant director who had just finished up work on [...]

There is a good article in yesterday’s New York Times which not only exposed my relative ignorance of the current state of affairs between the production and exhibition ends of the movie biz, but also helped explain the unrelenting weekly hammer-to-the-head which is the summer film release pattern.
During the period of time I worked in [...]

Remember a couple of days ago we linked to an underwhelming Xbox product intro, in which Peter Moore introduced the HALO-themed Xbox 360 to yawns and snickering? You don’t? Well, Microsoft remembers. And now Peter Moore is working elsewhere.
Fresh off the startling announcement that it would take a charge of more than $1 billion to cover [...]

Box Office Weekly #075 (MP3 - 14.2 MB - 22 min)
Listen here:

In todays show: Welcome Back Potter: boy wizard breaks all the usual records… the truth is out there, but not for long… and in this week’s commentary; Guest-writer Skot reveals his system for quantifying geekdom. All this and your next kidney may be Dutch, [...]

Curse you J.J. Abrams! Your ultra-vague trailer for…. something that opens January 18 is setting the blogosphere alight! Trailer, which appears to have been hand-shot (and edited in secret) by Abrams himself, premiered on top of the TRANSFORMERS movie.
What’s it about? You can’t know yet. Hell, you can’t even know what it’s called. However, the [...]

This is gonna be a “big idea” article, hopefully the first of several. By the end, this one will connect Outsider Art, Star Trek-style fandom, The Wizard of Oz and documentary filmmaking. Fun, huh?
In the Realms of the Unreal is a 2004 documentary by filmmaker Jessica Yu. It’s subject is “Outsider Artist” Henry Darger (1892-1973). [...]

A correction:
In a previous posting I marveled at the enormous print run for the current Harry Potter flick. Variety magazine stated the size of the print run in today’s issue: it was 12,000, not the 22,000 I originally sourced from the IMDb. I honestly don’t why I trust the IMDb for anything; they editorialize their [...]