Category: International

MUMBAI: PRNewswire-FirstCall, a leading provider of integrated media management services, today announced that it had purchased for $4.75 million an 18,000 square foot building in Hollywood into which the Company will consolidate its Highland Ave. and Eden FX operations.

Haig S. Bagerdjian, the Company‘s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer said, “The purchase of the building fixes our facility costs for these operations for the foreseeable future. We will avoid the need to negotiate long lease arrangements in the expensive Hollywood market as well as improve our annual EBITDA and cash flow by approximately $0.6 million each. We financed $1.2 million of the purchase price with a 10-year mortgage which provides for interest only payments at 7 per cent a year with the principal being due on the tenth anniversary date.”

MUMBAI: A No. 1 Japan opening for the fourth title in the sci-fi action series, Salvation which has played overseas since May 27 generated $10.7 million from 729 sites. The film‘s China bow registered $9 million from 1,671 locations. In all, Salvation took the No. 1 spot in more than 30 territories.

MUMBAI: Revenue from advertising in U.S. movie theaters grew just 5.8 per cent last year marking the slowest gain in the seven years that such statistics have been kept.

Still, the Cinema Advertising Council, which is about to release its 2008 report can boast of an ad industry still showing growth while most others are not.

“Media has seen such huge slippage — with audiences and advertisers both leaving — that to have a medium with growth is significant,” CAC president and chairman David Kupiec said.

According to the CAC, cinema advertising in the U.S. grew 5.8 per cent to $571 million in 2008, down from 19 per cent growth the previous year and 15 per cent the year before that.

The CAC has been keeping track of revenue generated by the industry since 2002, when the industry took in just $186 million. Since then, it has grown at an average clip of 21 per cent each year.

MUMBAI: Health officials in Los Angeles have confirmed that 22 actors in adult sex movies had contracted HIV since 2004, when a previous outbreak led to efforts to protect pornography industry employees.

The officials accused an industry-supported health clinic of failing to cooperate with state investigations and of failing to protect not only industry workers but their sexual partners as well.

“We have an industry that is exposing workers to life-threatening diseases as part of their employment,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of public health for Los Angeles County. “That is outrageous and anachronistic. These infections are virtually entirely preventable.”

MUMBAI: From Jennifer Aniston‘s self-deprecating remarks about her personal life to Universal executive Stephanie Sperber‘s recounting of her emotional personal story, laughs and heart were in attendance at Women in Film‘s 2009 Crystal + Lucy Awards.

Aniston generated plenty of laughs when, after she accepted the Crystal Award in excellence in film from Stacey Snider, compared the titles of her films — The Good Girl, Rumor Has It, Derailed and The Break-Up — to the evolving goings on in her life at the time.

On a more serious note, Aniston said that no matter how much the entertainment industry may try to distill movies into pure science or pure business charts, powerful and authentic stories will be told. “The people in this room will find a way,” she said.

While Dorothy Arzner Directors Award recipient Catherine Hardwicke made a call for the room to write “beautiful parts for women of all ages, color and shoe sizes” and Lucy Award honoree Holly Hunter thanked everyone from her presenter Jodie Foster to the writers on her TNT show Saving Grace it was Universal executive vice president of partnerships and licensing Sperber who moved the crowd with her story of battling breast cancer.

Sperber recounted how last September, at age 43, she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, how she underwent six weeks of chemo, daily radiation therapy, a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction, and had to have her ovaries removed. She also went through a divorce and found herself a single mom.

But, she said, it was the women in this industry that helped her through her terrible time.

“As I moved through every phase of this trial, and it was at times brutal in the true sense of the word, the support from this community grew,” Sperber said. “I never went to a chemo session alone. My daughter always had playdates if I couldn‘t get out of bed.

“I had a hand to hold as I was poked, undressed, biopsied, and injected. I was told I was beautiful even when I had no hair on my head or no lashes and no eyebrows. And somehow these women made me believe it…Producers, directors, writers, executive of every stripe, you all circled around me and protected me as best you could. Many of these women are here tonight. I want to thank them all.”

MUMBAI: A galaxy of stars including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Matthew McConaughey, Tobey Maguire, Martin Sheen, Oliver Stone, Benicio Del Toro and Kathleen Turner were among those present when Michael Douglas was honoured with the 37th AFI Life Achievement Award tribute held at Sony Pictures Studios last evening.

After introductions by Sony President and CEO Sir Howard Stringer and AFI President and CEO Bob Gazzale, the show opened with a surprise ‘made-for-the movies‘ moment as a stunt double fell through a fake ceiling (re-enacting Douglas‘s climactic dinner entrance in his film, The Game).

The highlights of the show included a moving appearances by the honoree‘s father, film legend and 1991 AFI honoree Kirk Douglas and Steve Swankay, an ex-child soldier from Sierra Leone whose education Douglas had sponsored.

MUMBAI: Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have co-written the past four James Bond features, will be joined by Frost/Nixon scribe Peter Morgan on the latest installment of the franchise for MGM. Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli of EON Productions Ltd. will produce.

The three writers will collaborate on the screenplay for the 23rd Bond film, which will once again star Daniel Craig as Agent 007. The triple hiring fits the pattern of the two most recent pictures, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, which saw Purvis and Wade drafting the initial script and Oscar-winning Crash writer-director Paul Haggis coming on to augment it.

MUMBAI: One of Hollywood‘s largest prop shops is closing, the latest sign that the falloff in local film and TV production is taking its toll on small businesses that serve the entertainment industry.

20th Century Props of North Hollywood said Thursday that it would shut its doors next month because of mounting business losses.

The prop shop, which supplied the chandeliers in the blockbuster Titanic and futuristic furniture in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, has been a fixture for two decades. It operates out of a 1,18,000-square-foot warehouse near Lankershim Boulevard.

Earlier this year, 20th Century Props employed 28 people, but it is now down to only six. Owner Harvey Schwartz said a steep decline in orders forced him to close. “I‘ve been losing money every month for the last year,” he said. “It‘s been horrible.”

MUMBAI: TV stations across the U.S. started cutting their analog signals Friday morning, marking the final signoff for a 60-year-old technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.

The FCC put 4,000 operators on standby for calls from confused viewers, and set up demonstration centers in several cities. Volunteer groups and local government agencies were helping elderly people set up digital converter boxes that keep older TVs functioning. Any set hooked up to cable or a satellite dish is unaffected.

“When you‘re alone like me, that‘s my partner,” Patricia Bruchalski, 82, said about her TV.

Bruchalski, a pianist and former opera singer in Brooklyn Park, Md., got assistance from Anne Arundel County‘s Department of Aging and Disabilities and a community organization called Partners in Care. After her converter box was installed, Bruchalski marveled that digital broadcasts seemed clearer and gave her more channels — about 15 instead of the three she was used to.

“You‘re going to be up all night watching TV now,” volunteer installer Rick Ebling told her.

About 15 per cent of U.S. households don‘t have satellite or cable, and they tend to be poorer. The Nielsen Co. said minority households were less likely to be prepared for Friday‘s analog shutdown, as were households consisting of people younger than 35.

A survey sponsored by broadcasters showed that Americans are well aware of the switch, thanks to two years of advertising about it. But many people simply procrastinated.

Some people might also need new antennas, because digital signals travel differently than analog ones. While a weakly received analog channel might be viewable through some static, channels broadcast in the digital language of ones and zeros are generally all or nothing: If they don‘t come in perfectly, they are blank or they show a stuttering picture that breaks apart into blocks of color. Indeed, one of Bruchalski‘s newly available stations had that pixelated look, and Ebling said she might have to get a different antenna.

MUMBAI: Chris O‘Dowd has been cast as the bad guy in the upcoming Fox comedy Gulliver‘s Travels. The actor joins Jack Black, Jason Segel, Amanda Peet and Emily Blunt in the big-budget adaptation of the classic Jonathan Swift story.