Gone With the Wind is a controversial film these days because of its problematic portrayal of race. But it is still an important film. I show this clip to help illustrate how GWTW was able to play fast and loose with the production code rules of the late 1930s, in part because it was such a big budget studio film that it had to be allowed to do what the filmmakers wanted to.
Love With The Proper Stranger – 1963
This little romantic drama tells the story of a relationship between jazz musician Steve McQueen and shop girl Natalie Wood. In the movie, McQueen gets Wood’s character pregnant from a one-night stand, and Wood wants McQueen to help her find “a doctor.” Given that this was made during the Production Code era, the filmmakers made an entire film about getting an illegal abortion without once using the term “abortion.”
Midnight Cowboy Trailer – 1969
Midnight Cowboy was the first, and only, movie to win the Oscar for best picture while having the toxic X-rating. The ratings board tried to get the producers to make some minor changes (remove a single frame) so they could say the movie had been re-edited and give it a more acceptable R rating, but the film’s producers refused. The rating board still went ahead and claimed the movie had been edited and gave it an R rating.
Titanic – 1997
Like Gone With The Wind, Titanic was a movie that was “too big to fail,” so it ended up with a PG-13 rating to make it more accessible to the target teen audience even though it had an attempted suicide, extended nudity, a sex scene, violence against women, and an extended, disturbing death scene.
Jaws – 1975
Jaws was the first of the big summer blockbuster films featuring the very young Steven Spielberg as director and the iconic score that helped make John Williams the most sought-after composer in Hollywood.
Star Wars – 1977
While Star Wars did not have digital effects in it, it was the first movie to have computer-controlled motion cameras that could make multiple passes making the exact same motions each time, allowing for spectacular practical effects.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – 2004
Sky Captain was the first feature-length American released film to have entirely digital sets. The movie was a financial and critical flop, but it showed how you could make an incredible-looking film for a reasonable budget. The techniques pioneered with this film have now become a standard for Hollywood.
Mad Max – Fury Road 2015
Mad Max – Fury Road has been credited with bringing back practical effects to big budget movies. Maybe… While it has lots of computer generated imagery in it, they have mostly been created out of scenes that were actually shot in the field with real-life stunts. The CGI looks so good in this movie because they are all based on things that actually happened.
Black Panther – 2017
Black Panther illustrates one of the ways to make a movie profitable. Make a movie for a big budget ($200 million), load it up with movie stars and an up-and-coming director, then promote with lots of marketing tie-ins. Because it had a great director, cast and script, and was well promoted. it is in the Top 10 all-time box office.
Everything Everywhere All At Once – 2022
Everything Everywhere was made for a modest $25 million budget but made $143 million globally. It it had had a Black Panther-level budget, it would have been a failure. But with low costs of production and promotion, it didn’t need to make a lot to be a success. All those Oscars didn’t hurt, either.
Hip Hop artist T-Pain from NPR’s Tiny Desk. Image from Entertainment Weekly.
Back in 2014, hip-hop artist T-Pain was famous for his creative use of Auto-Tune software, not to put his voice on the correct pitch but rather to produce a sound that was instantly recognizable as his own. But that wasn’t what he delivered when he showed up to do a stripped-down show for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. (NOTE: This video contains potentially offensive language.)
“The audience was expecting to hear classic T-Pain, his trademark autotuned voice with its robotic-like pitch singing over a hip-hop beat that gets the club moving,” says NPR Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe in a program looking back at the concert series. Instead, they got T-Pain sitting in front of a crowded bookshelf with his keyboard player, a classic soulful R&B singer with a subtle jazz-infused accompaniment. He was singing his hits, but in an all-new way sitting back behind show producer Bob Boilen’s tiny desk, no other technology in sight. (NOTE: If you have a little time, listen to the stream of Rascoe’s program. Much better than reading the transcript!)
Tiny Desk got started in 2008 when NPR Music producers Bob Boilen and Stephen Thompson were in Austin for the South By Southwest music and tech festival. They tried to hear musician Laura Gibson at a bar, but the noise there was so bad, they couldn’t hear a thing. So they told Gibson that she should come to their office at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., and play some music at their desks. Thompson says he was “half joking” about it, but three weeks later Gibson showed up, the producers recorded her singing for about 15 minutes in Boilen’s office, and history was made.
It took two months before the second show in the series with the late Vic Chestnutt, but they now come out on a steady basis. Audiences and performers love the shows, which are streamed via video over the internet rather than airing on the radio. By 2022, Tiny Desk was an institution, hosting its 1,000th concert with West African singer and activist Angélique Kidjo. (NPR used to be known as National Public Radio, but as of 2010 it started going by just its initials because it sends out as much programing online as it does on its affiliate radio stations. )
It’s almost impossibleto classify what kind of music you will get from a Tiny Desk. Artists who have appeared include hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion from before her ”WAP” fame, pop music queen Taylor Swift, jazz greats Chick Corea and Gary Burton, the cast of the Broadway musical Wicked, and even cello legend Yo-Yo Ma.
Senior Tiny Desk producer Bobby Carter says that when he’s prepping artists for their show, he tries to explain how different this will be from their regular shows: “We always let them know, like, listen, whatever you’re used to doing on stage, once you come into this building, it is going to be the complete opposite. This not a soundstage, which many artists think it is. This is an office and a real desk, real shelves, real NPR employees.”
You might think that Tiny Desk with its basic setting and no room for lots of equipment would focus more on singer-songwriter coffee house type performers, but as we have seen, it’s a major home for hip-hop presented in a new way. Producer Carter says, “I’m fulfilled the most when we really, really nail a hip-hop Tiny Desk because in many ways, that’s the biggest adjustment for most artists because that’s not the way they originally recorded these songs. So with hip-hop Tiny Desk, you usually almost get a completely new interpretation of the records, and you make them new.”
You can find all of my Tiny Desk posts using the link below:
Editor’s Note: This week is the American Library Association’s Banned Book Week. The following blog post looks at a history of book challenges in the US and how these efforts have massively escalated in the 2020s.
Books are capable of inciting great passion in readers who love them and those who hate them. So wherever there are books, there are people who will want to ban or control them for one reason or another. Attempts at control can range from removing the book from a school library to threatening to kill the author.
Until recently, most book censorship efforts in the United States were local rather than national in scope, with efforts focused on removing specific titles from school libraries or reading lists. Typically, the focus was on books thought to contain sexually explicit material, offensive language, violence, or offensive treatment of religion. Other reasons given are for being “unsuited” for a given age group or for being “anti-family.”
Occasionally, though, a book’s publisher would instigate the censorship. Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a “fireman” whose job is to burn books rather than put out fires. (Fahrenheit 451° is the temperature at which book paper starts to burn.) The book was originally published in 1953, but in 1967, Ballantine Books brought out an edition for high schools that modified 75 passages in the text to eliminate such words as hell, damn, and abortion. This was done without Bradbury’s knowledge or consent. When he found out about it 13 years later, he demanded that the edited version be withdrawn.
Different titles show up on various lists of banned or challenged books, but a few appear repeatedly. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has had its position on many school reading lists challenged because of its description of the rape of the author as a child. Other frequently challenged books include the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine, J. D. Salinger’s coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye, and Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the firebombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five.
But in the 2020s, there started to be coordinated efforts nationwide to remove all books from public schools that included depictions of sexual activity, LGBTQ+ content, material that could make people feel uncomfortable about race, and material that was critical of police.
In 2023, the Washington Post took a deep dive into the issue of who was objecting to books in schools and what kinds of books these people disliked. Reporters looked at more than 1,000 challenges filed during the 2021–22 school year from 150 school districts nationwide. Topics objected to included a biographical book on assassinated gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a story about a boy who dresses as a mermaid, and a story about a Black child’s reaction to the killing of a girl by police in his hometown.
WaPo reporters also found that a small number of people were responsible for a large proportion of the challenges. In fact, the Post’s research found that just 11 people were responsible for 60% of all the objections. That meant that 6% of the objectors were responsible for 60% of the objections. One woman who submitted 24 challenges went online looking for books she might object to, checked them out from a local library, and then filed her challenges. Among the titles she was attempting to remove were Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Other efforts to challenge books have come from activist groups such as Moms for Liberty who would look for books they might object to by searching for “keywords such as ‘incest,’ ‘rape,’ and ‘pedophilia’” in the school library’s catalog.
Work done by the writers’ group PEN America found 2,362 instances of book bans in the United States during the 2022–23 school year. PEN’s research showed that in addition to activists working to remove books, several states have passed laws requiring school districts to remove whole categories of books from libraries and classrooms. Florida, which passed stringent limits on books that could be housed in schools, had more than 40% of all book bans in the United States, followed by Texas, with 625 book bans.
The American Library Association has been tracking the most-challenged books for many years. Challenged books are those that some individual or group has attempted to remove or restrict. The challenger does not need to have been successful in getting the title banned for it to appear on the list. Not all challenged books are contemporary. Several classics have received complaints as well. According to the American Library Association, the following books are frequently challenged:
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, because a book about adultery conflicts with a community’s values
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, because it contains profanity
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, because the comedy is perceived as promoting homosexuality
In a North Carolina school district, merely discussing school book censorship became controversial when district officials told principals not to have their schools participate in events tied to the American Library Association’s annual Banned Book Week. The message to principals said, “It is not something we teach in our classrooms or as supplementary material for out of school learning.” The district was also concerned that discussion of banned books might violate a new state law that said parents had the right to control what their children learned in school. Edward Helmore, writing for the British newspaper The Guardian, said that this might be the first time that “efforts to draw attention to banned books has itself been banned.”
Graphic by Annie Aguiar of the Poynter Institute. Click on image to go to the source at Poynter.org.
Back in 2012, American consumers were grossed out by stories that found ground beef sold in plastic chubs was often supplemented with the meat byproduct euphemistically known as “finely chopped beef.” This collection of “trimmings” is sprayed with ammonia gas to kill off the bacteria in meat and fat. Accompanied by unappealing photos, this “finely chopped beef” was dubbed “pink slime” by critics, a label the meat industry fought largely unsuccessfully against.
Journalist Ryan Zickgraf first applied the term“pink slime” to journalism back in 2012, when he was reporting on how content farms were using low-paid writers located in the Philippines to rewrite (i.e., plagiarize) stories published on other sites. Annie Aguiar, writing for Poynter, a journalism think tank, says that “pink slime” has more recently been used to describe automated websites that publish poor-quality news stories and political propaganda while pretending to be high-quality local news sites. They often thrive in areas that are news deserts with few other legitimate news outlets. Former Washington Post media analyst Margaret Sullivan talks about how this variant of fake news has become popular:
Increasingly, “articles” that look like news may be something entirely different—false or misleading information grounded not in evidence but in partisan politics, produced not by reporters for a local newspaper but by inexperienced writers who are paid, in essence, to spread propaganda.
As an example, Sullivan pointed to a story published on the West Cook News website, serving the suburban Chicago area, that claimed without evidence that a local school district would “require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.” This story, which had no basis in fact, then got picked up by bloggers and social media influencers and spread across the country with predictable levels of outrage. The school district completely denied the story. While some of the people who shared the false story issued corrections or took down their posts, the story still spread.
Brian Timpone, one of the publishers for Metric Media, operated an online portal in 2023 that allowed political operatives to request stories and submit opinion pieces to be published on his sites designed to look like legitimate news pages in “communities where there is ‘little or no local news.’”
Until recently, pink slime sites have been powered by stories created by low-paid writers working in so-called content farms. But now generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs such as ChatGPT are being used to completely automate the process, creating hundreds of stories a day for these sites.
9/11/24 Editor’s note: Yesterday morning I showed the “Welcome to the Rock” clip from the 9/11 themed musical Come From Away as my pre-class video in JMC 100 – Global Media Literacy. I then tried to tell my class the following story about my experiences on Sept. 11, 2001, but I got about one sentence in before I choked up too much to go on. Even 23 years later, the feelings from that awful day are still really raw.
The following stories and videos are drawn from a series of annual posts I have made over the years to commemorate 9/11.
What are your 9/11 memories? Feel free to add them to the comments below.
It was 23 years ago this morning that I was teaching my freshman media literacy course at West Virginia University. I had a class with close to 350 students in it. C-SPAN’s Washington Journal morning show was playing on the big screen as students gathered. At 8:30 a.m. I shut off C-SPAN and started teaching. When I got back to my office an hour-and-a-half later, news that our world was changing was in the process of breaking.
No one knew what was happening. An airliner had hit one of the World Trade Center towers, and the skyscraper was burning. Then a second plane hit, and everyone then knew that this couldn’t have been an accident.
9/11 has always been highly personal to me.
One of my (and my Dear Wife’s) student’s father was supposed to be working in the section of the Pentagon that was hit by one of the planes. But since that area was under renovation, his dad ended up safe.
Another one of my students had a mother who was a flight attendant who flew out of the same airport the Twin Tower planes had departed from. She was desperate for news. Fortunately, her mother was not on one of the attack planes.
One of my friends was the public radio correspondent for the area, and he ended up providing much of NPR’s coverage of the United 93 crash in Shanksville, PA.
And one of my colleagues, who taught advertising, lost an old friend in the Twin Towers collapse.
As someone who lived in West Virginia at the time, less than 100 miles from the United 93 crash site, the Sept. 11th attacks will always be personal. This was not a remote event; it was a local story directly affecting people I knew. And I will never forget the worries for my students, my neighbors, and my colleagues.
One of the last plays I saw before live theater shut down for the pandemic in March of 2020 was the brilliant and heartbreaking musical Come From Away that tells the story of the town of Gander, Newfoundland, where many of the planes crossing the Atlantic were diverted when United States airspace was shut down on 9/11. I still have to be careful when I listen to the soundtrack from the show. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through the show without crying. Here are two of my favorite songs from the show in a radio concert performance.
“Welcome to the Rock,” that tells how everything changed for Gander in just a moment.
“Me and the Sky” is for me the heart of the show where pilot Beverly tells her story of becoming American Airlines first female captain and her horror of airliners being used as weapons.
A performance by many of the original members of the Broadway cast is now airing on Apple TV+. Watching Come From Away is one of the best ways to honor the memory of 9/11.
My next memory is a look at cameos the Twin Towers made in numerous Hollywood films. Those two giant buildings defined the New York skyline from the 1970s until 9/11:
Finally, Paul Simon singing his achingly beautiful American Tune is a good way to remember our beautiful country.
This last memory has nothing to do with the media. It’s a brief story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting every year on 9/11.
Took a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.
Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)
Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.
Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.
Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.
The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.
A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)
It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.
The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.
The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.
It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back on PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.
I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.
President Lyndon Johnson was famous for his coarse language, with one of his most famous examples being “I do know the difference between chicken sh– and chicken salad.” He also knew that in the 1960s his profanity was never going to find its way into print.
President Joe Biden has been known throughout his political career for letting his enthusiasm get the best of him. At the signing ceremony for the Affordable Care Act, then Vice President Biden was heard telling President Barack Obama, “This is a big f—ing deal.” President Obama got some static for calling his opponent Mitt Romney a “bullsh—er” in Rolling Stone magazine. Neither made much of a splash.
It was really President Richard Nixon who forced the press into dealing with how to report profanity. Nixon recorded every conversation in his office, and when the Watergate hearings made those tapes public, many people were shocked to hear the torrent of bad language pouring out of his mouth. When transcripts of the tapes were published, they did not contain the troubling words; instead, they were always replaced with the now iconic phrase “expletive deleted.”
President George W. Bush was caught on tape at a dinner in Russia talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair saying, “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s—, and it’s over.” There was little fuss over this quote in 2006 as it was not said in a particularly public setting, and it was seen as a fairly honest statement of the situation he was discussing in Lebanon. In this case, the Washington Post did not deem it necessary to quote the actual word.
During his term in office, President Donald Trump was known for frequently using profanity in public and private, but he generated the most news for it after making some highly offensive and obscene remarks about the country of Haiti, the continent of Africa, and presumably several countries in Central America, referring to them as “shithole countries.”
But as my Seven Media Secrets state:
Secret 4: Everything from the margin moves to the center.
So this morning the WaPo ran an article asking the question:
In the article, Maura Judkis reports on a wide range of examples:
From Vice President Kamala Harris:
Trying to get governors to rally for President Joe Biden early this summer before he dropped out, she told them: “This is about saving our f—ing democracy.”
“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that f—ing door down.”
From former President Donald Trump:
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said.
Why are candidates developing such potty mouths these days? Judkis gives a host of reasons:
It can make candidates seem more relatable.
It can be cathartic.
It can be to break taboos.
She goes on to note that profanity can be used in multiple ways. Harris, for example, tends to use profanity as a tool for emphasis, while Trump tends to use it as an insult.
But it could also be because it coarse speech is becoming more acceptable following Trump’s first term. Toward the end, Judkis writes:
Criticism of Harris’s swearing has not been nearly as pointed as it was for [Hillary] Clinton — a sign that language and manners are evolving. (Whether that’s in a positive or negative direction is up for interpretation.) Or maybe we’re actually ready to focus on the issues, and not the utterances.
In other words, Everything from the margin moves to the center.
First day of school for Fall ’24 at UNK today! Here are some media questions worth asking… Maybe.
Where can I watch big events, like the Republican and Democratic political conventions, without interruption by commercials and commentators?
The national treasure that is C-SPAN of course. The public service network covers congress, government events, and events of public interest uninterrupted, all without government funds – paid for the cable and satellite TV industry. Really wish Hulu would be a sponsor and carry it.
When you do something awful online, how do you properly apologize?
Former MMA fighter Ronda Rousey shows us how it’s done. (Note, her apology did not contain the words, “If I offended anyone, I’m sorry for hurting their feelings…”)
What is the greatest song from the musical Hamilton, and why is it One Last Time, aka Washington’s farewell address?
Here are Christopher Jackson and Lin Manuel Miranda performing this brilliant song from the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors.
The job of being a journalist around the world can be a dangerous one; reporters literally risk their lives to report the news. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that in 2023, 99 journalists and media workers were killed worldwide, more than three-fourths of whom were killed covering the Israel–Gaza war. Outside of the war in Gaza, the deaths of journalists were down compared to the 69 deaths in 2022. CPJ also documented 320 journalists who had been imprisoned globally in 2023, with China, Myanmar, Belarus, Russia, and Vietnam leading the list for incarcerations.
The best known of these imprisoned journalists has Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, who was detained and jailed on March 29, 2023, in Russia. Gershkovich was an accredited journalist working in Russia when he was arrested based on allegations of being a spy, something both he and the Wall Street Journal vehemently deny. As of July 19, 2024, Gershkovich had been sentenced to 16 years in a Russian penal colony. The Wall Street Journal reported this came after he was “wrongfully convicted in a hurried, secret trial that the U.S. Government has condemned as a sham.”
But on Aug. 1, 2024, he was released as part of an extensive multi-nation prisoner exchange that involved the Russians releasing more than a dozen prisoners in return for multiple Russians being held in the U.S. and Europe, including a convicted assassin. The Journal ran a lengthy article giving the full story on how Gershkovich’s release was secured in what has been described as the most elaborate prisoner swap since the end of the Cold War.
A counter on top of a WSJ site tracked the days, hours and minutes that Evan Gershkovich had spent in Russian custody.
It reached 491 days, one hour and 20 minutes — until it was replaced Thursday morning a headline: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich is free. https://t.co/18KmkowKxq
Remembering the genius that was Robert Towne Legendary screenwriter/script doctor Robert Towne died Tuesday, July 2, at the age of 89. He was most famous for writing the original screenplay for the neo-noir Chinatown (1974) as a movie for Jack Nicholson to star in.. That movie also brought Towne his only Oscar. And to be fair, if he never had done anything else, writing Chinatown would have been enough. But he also wrote The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), The Firm (1993) and the first two Mission: Impossible films (1996 and 2000).
Those were the films he got screenplay credit for, but his uncredited script doctoring record was even more impressive, with contributions to The Godfather (1972) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967); as well as The Parallax View (1974), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Marathon Man (1976), Heaven Can Wait (1978), Reds (1981), Fatal Attraction (1987), Crimson Tide (1995), and Armageddon (1998).
But honestly, if you want to understand the brilliance of Towne, pull out a copy of Chinatown, pour a big slug of bourbon, turn down the lights, and lose yourself in the world of 1930s Los Angeles. With direction (and acting!) from Roman Polanski; peerless performances from Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston; and one of Jerry Goldsmith’s best scores ever.You’ve got your homework. Go watch.
So the buzz over the last year has been that sequels, big budget movies, Disney and Pixar are all done for. Finished. Kaput! Just look at how everyone was crowing about the failure of Pixar’s Elemental. (Oh, you say it actually made $494 million globally after an admittedly slow start? Well, that’s inconvenient…)
But while there have been bombs this summer (Fall Guy, Furiosa), The Atlantic’s David Sims has some good analysis about what the emotional hit Inside Out 2 (see what I did there?) and other blockbusters mean for Hollywood’s future.
A Quiet Place: Day One shows how to find success in the current marketA Quiet Place: Day Oneopened to $98.5 million globally, exceeding all expectations. Given that it was made for a reported $67 million, the post-apocalyptic thriller seems headed to financial success. Hollywood – Pay attention. Get an interesting cast, have an original take on your revisiting of IP (intellectual property), don’t spend too much money, and keep the length of the movie under control. Absolutely loved this new take on the Quiet Place alien invasion franchise. Go see it in the theater. Now.
As I have been closing out work on the ninth edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, it’s amazing to think back on how different things were back in the spring and summer 2020 when I was finishing up the eighth edition. We were still in the midst of the global pandemic lockdown and all the lasting effects the lockdown had on the media industry. Sports teams stopped playing, movies and television shows stopped being produced, theaters were closed, music was being recorded at home or through complex online links, and everyone was just staying home to consume their media.
Now, four years later, we are dealing with the aftermath of how the media industry and media consumers have emerged from that time.
Young, and not-so-young, folks are busy engaging with all-thingsTaylor Swift. It seems impossible to listen to music, watch television, go on social media, watch football… without encountering the megastar.
The movie industry is trying to figure out how to bring people back into theaters in great enough numbers to keep cinemas open. Coming in on top of all the holdups from the pandemic and people getting used to viewing at home, movies (and television) are dealing with the aftermath of lengthy writers’ and actors’ strikes over the last year.
American culture is also dealing with a lot of new or revived fears about the media. There have been unprecedented efforts to ban books about race and sexuality from libraries and public schools, and parents are worrying about how social media are affecting teens, especially young women.
There are intense concerns as to whether the local news industry can survive steep decline in community newspapers.
And yet, through all of this there are new voices being heard through streaming services and other long-tail media. Independent bookstores are finding fresh relevance as people turn to people, rather than algorithms, for advice on what to read, and millions of people are discovering the joy of the minimally produced NPR Tiny Desk concerts on YouTube.
The COVID-19 pandemic may not be over, but both the media industry and media consumers are trying to find their way to a new normal, and that’s what this ninth edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World is going to explore. Thirteen of the chapters have new opening vignettes, highlighting many of the changes that have happened in the media world. All of the chapters have been substantially updated with both new statistics and examples.
As is usually the case when I’m finishing up revisions, the blog has been neglected, but I’m planning on trying to talk here about a lot of the new material coming up in the ninth edition.
