The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.

Mr. Ryang chose “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last year’s “In Good Company.”

His 'Secret' Movie Trailer Is No Secret Anymore

Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.

"The South is a spiritual place, a place where God is very important in people's lives. It's about the ritual of family and togetherness and of singing and storytelling. It's about giving back to the community, investing in other people's lives, caring about other people."

Sweet Home, Tennessee

Sneak Previews of New, Unreleased Films With Conversations

Each fall and spring Harlan Jacobson's TALK CINEMA offers its subscribers a unique series of quality films. Each series showcases innovative independent and foreign films. Screenings are followed by discussions led by distinguished critics and filmmakers.

The Element of Surprise

TALK CINEMA subscribers don't know in advance what the film is or who the guest speaker will be. We think this is part of the fun -- seeing a film the way the critics do, without any preconceived notions, without the hype.

In Los Angeles, Talk Cinema is hosted by The Bridge: Cinema De Lux, at the promenade at Howard Hughes Center. The fall series begins on September 25.

Talk Cinema

At a time when movie attendance is flagging, when home entertainment is offering increasing competition and when the largest theater chains are focused on shifting from film to digital projection, a handful of smaller companies with names like Muvico Theaters, Rave Motion Pictures and National Amusements are busy rethinking what it means to go to the movie theater.

Liked the Movie, Loved the Megaplex

Thirty summers after Jaws attacked intelligent filmmaking, the question remains: Why are the movies so bad? A search for answers with David Thomson.

Hollywood's Phantom Menace

An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, "Pretty Persuasion" is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing.

A High School Princess Who Treats the World Like a Frog

k wrote:

Enter Peerflix, which can be described on a basic level as eBay meets Netflix.

[ Decent idea. -k]

It's interesting that engadget acts as if they're doing original reporting on this topic, even though CNET also has an article on Peerflix today.

When you read the CNET article, they make it clear right up front that the 'news' angle is Peerflix CEO Billy McNair's prominent presence at this week's AlwaysOn conference.

Some weeks ago, I read a review of this service, which I can't locate at the moment. The reviewer found that Peerflix isn't really a market, it's a swap meet. So if you're making eBay comparisons, it's only applicable to the consumer-to-consumer side of eBay. In practice, if you "take a chance" on a film with low liquidity, there's a high probability you're going to get stuck with it, whether you wanted to keep it or not.

The value proposition for this service is flawed. In order to make it work, Peerflix needs to operate more like a used bookstore, where the store agrees in advance to buy back (at an advertised discounted rate) anything you purchased at the store. If you can find another customer, you can make a direct sale. But if you can't find a buyer for a DVD you want to unload, Peerflix should be willing to buy it back. The discount rate would be a function of the liquidity for that particular disc.

The Peerflix challenge

If the 65 I haven't seen are as good as the 35 I have, then there's still a lot of movie-watching left to do.

Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Movies

Pamela Samuelson has built a nice collection of pointers for her course on the legal and policy challenges of peer-to-peer technology.

News angle: The Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the MGM v. Grokster case, as early as Monday. Steve Lohr at NYT has written a brief article:

The mission of Mr. Glickman's trade group is to tilt the legal climate and public opinion as much in Hollywood's favor as possible -- to influence legislation, law enforcement and people's attitudes so that illicitly sharing copyrighted movies becomes more risky and less acceptable behavior.

"My advice to Hollywood is to really start selling online," said Bram Cohen, the 29-year-old programmer who created the BitTorrent software. "They have nothing that vaguely competes with Netflix."

For every day that Hollywood spends sitting on its hands, film further fades in mindshare among the next generation. By the time they decide how to react, customers will have moved on. Hollywood is the new Broadway, and that's not a Good Thing. Consider the history of the musical:

The decline of the Broadway musical had several causes. First and foremost, the competition of television soap operas, that catered to the same audience as the musical. Then the escalating production costs, that simply made it too risky a venture for entrepreneurs who could invest their money in more reliable ventures. In terms of "taste", the musical never truly managed to assimilate the new taste that developed with the advent of rock'n'roll, disco music and hip-hop. Somehow, the musical had successfully assimilated new genres (ragtime, jazz) up until the Sixties. In the Sixties, rock music introduced not only a new musical paradigm but also new forms of consumption (from Woodstock to the video clip) that were simply not compatible with the theatrical format. Finally, there certainly was a change in the national psyche: as the Cold War forced the USA to abandon its childhood and entered its adulthood (a difficult time of subtle strategizing and risky undertakings on a global scale), the musical had a hard time abandoning its childhood, and eventually fell out of synch with the rest of society.

When I say GWOT, do you think Hollywood? No, I didn't think so.

The Challenge of P2P | INFOSYS 296A-2 | SPRING 2005

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

To appear in 2003's Terminator 3, Arnold Schwarzenegger received a fixed fee of $29.25 million, a package of perks totaling $1.5 million and a guaranteed 20% of gross receipts from all sources of revenue worldwide. With that, writes Epstein, no matter the film's box office results, "the star was assured of making more money than the studio itself."

Such is the "new logic" Epstein explores in this engrossing book. Gone are the days of studio chiefs dominating their stars with punitive contracts and controlling product from script to big screen. Writers now sell their work to the highest bidder, stars have become one-person corporations who "rent" their services to individual productions, and the studios have morphed into what Epstein labels "clearing houses." These multinational corporations exist, in Epstein's description, to collect revenue from an ever-growing variety of sources -- home video, overseas markets and product licensing, to name a few -- and then disburse it to a fortunate minority at the top of Hollywood's food chain.

Epstein explains the structure, personalities and behind-the-scenes interconnection of the "sexopoly" (the six huge media companies that control motion picture entertainment).

In vivid detail, he describes the current process of how a film is made, from the initial pitch to last-minute digital editing. There's a refreshing absence of moral grandstanding in Epstein's work. With no apparent ax to grind, he simply and comprehensively presents the industry as it is: the nuts and bolts, the perks and pitfalls and the staggering fortunes that some in the business walk away with. This is the new indispensable text for anyone interested in how Hollywood works.

The Big Picture : The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood