The latest Weinstein brawl is between Harvey Weinstein and NBC/Bravo, now that Harvey is pulling Project Runway away from a cable channel that wants to keep running it in favor of another deal--for five years--at Lifetime. It is highly unusual for a producer to switch gears like this with a hit show. Here's the news story in Variety, EW.com and UPDATE: The NYT. The jubilant Lifetime press release is on the jump.
Harvey is also still fighting the filmmakers of the Star Wars comedy Fanboys, who have launched a major counteroffensive.
My two cents: 1) If U.S. telcos can ever figure out how to make IPTV anything more than a faster, cooler cable TV system, the merger of TV and the World Wide Web could look a lot more like "television" than it does now. But so far, they haven't.
On the one hand, I wonder when the studios will adopt a long tail strategy and put all their content on websites for audiences to find them. On the other, it drives me crazy when I can't just go to you Tube to find the clips I want to see, easily, effortlessly, and grab the code and put the clip on my blog if I want to. Otherwise you have to go hunting around on these cluttered web sites with lousy search engines and then the code isn't available (that's how you get the nice box) and even if it is it doesn't work. Comedy Central is one such site.
So CBS may be on the right track by abandoning the strategy of distributing their own videos on one site.
I thought I was the only one. I see the likes of Meg Ryan, Courtney Love, Goldie Hawn, Melanie Griffith, Elizabeth Taylor and Cher and feel like I'm looking at the results of a science experiment. Partly it's because I know what they're supposed to look like. I hail the women who are willing to look their age, from Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave to Julie Christie. Here's a fascinating WSJ story on botox and TV casting. Also, the web has countless sites, from TMZ.com's "Fake or Real" series to awfulplasticsurgery.com that are obsessed with how celebs mash their faces and bods. Who's fooling who? As every F/X master knows, the human eye can detect the slightest deviation from reality instantly.
Variety.com deputy editor Anne Thompson writes a weekly Variety film column as well as this daily blog.
This Week's Variety Column
Toback toe-to-toe with Tyson's tale
Filmmaker James Toback had been close with Mike Tyson ever since the fighter broke into boxing, even before he became a star in the ring at age 18.
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The latest Weinstein brawl is between Harvey Weinstein and NBC/Bravo, now that Harvey is pulling Project Runway away from a cable channel that wants to keep running it in favor of another deal--for five years--at Lifetime. It is highly unusual for a producer to switch gears like this with a hit show. Here's the news story in Variety, EW.com and UPDATE: The NYT. The jubilant Lifetime press release is on the jump.
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