GORE VIDAL DEAD AT 86

Gore Vidal, the firebrand novelist, essayist, historian, screenwriter, and politician, has died in Los Angeles at age 86. Death was attributed to complications from pneumonia. As a novelist, Vidal was perhaps best known for his 1968 parody on Hollywood Myra Breckinridge, which became a movie starring Raquel Welch in 1970. He was a prolific writer […]

REPORTER FEUDING WITH NBC HAS TWITTER ACCOUNT CANCELED, THEN REINSTATED (Update)

Twitter has apologized to British journalist Guy Adams for suspending his account and has reinstated it. Its general counsel, Alex Macgillivray, said that the Twitter team working with NBC on the Olympics had engaged in unacceptable behavior when it alerted NBC staffers to Adams’s tweets critical of NBC’s Olympics coverage and urged them to report […]

NBC CRUSHES RIVALS WITH OLYMPICS COVERAGE

NBC’s Olympics coverage on Monday averaged 31.4 million viewers in primetime. By contrast, ABC, CBS, and Fox averaged 9.5 million viewers — combined!. The only competing show on any of the other networks to attract more than 4 million viewers was CBS’s rerun of Two and a Half Men at 9:00 p.m. Virtually every show […]

ABC AND UNIVISION TO PARTNER ON AN ALL-NEWS SITE

It’s now official: ABC and Univision have signed a deal to debut a new cable news channel in mid-2013 that will focus on events affecting the Latino community. Prior to that, the two television networks plan to launch a website in the fall of this year that will “provide news and information from a Latino […]

APPLE’S TV SPOTS ASSAILED

On the heels of a disappointing quarterly earnings report, Apple is now taking a drubbing for its current round of television commercials featuring an Apple “genius” dispensing advice to Macintosh buyers about how to use their laptops. Several bloggers mentioned that they doubted the spots would ever have received a stamp of approval from Steve […]

IRAN WON’T LET SELECTED FILMS APPEAR AT VENICE

The Iranian government is “currently investigating a plan to boycott this year’s Venice Film Festival,” the Tehran Times reported on Monday. The newspaper indicated tht such a boycott would be in retaliation for “the strong sanctions imposed by the European Union on Iran.” In a statement, Alireza Sajjadpur, an official of the Culture Ministery, noted […]

JACKSON EXPANDING THE HOBBIT TO THREE FILMS

Peter Jackson says he has now found a way to extract three films from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It was originally planned as a two-partner. The first two films are scheduled to be released in December of this year and December of next year. The third film will now be released in the summer of […]

KNIGHT DROPS 61% IN SECOND WEEK

The Olympics may turn out to be the bane of Warner Bros. and The Dark Knight Rises. The film wound up earning $2 million less on Sunday than the studio’s estimate as NBC broke ratings records for second-day coverage of the competition. The weekend total for the movie: $62.1 million, down 61 percent from the […]

TONY MARTIN — STAR OF RECORDS, RADIO, TV & MOVIES — DEAD AT 98

Tony Martin, the handsome singer/actor who was frequently cast as the leading man during the golden age of the Hollywood musical, whose recordings are among the classics of the ’40s and ’50s, and who became one of the most familiar celebrity faces on television in the 1950s and ’60s, has died in Los Angeles at […]

NBC SETS ITS OWN OLYMPIC RECORDS

After a weekend of spectacular ratings success, it seemed clear that NBC’s decision to blanket its Olympics coverage over cable and Internet outlets has not resulted in cannibalizing its broadcast audience. On Saturday, ordinarily the least-watched day of the week for broadcast television, 28.7 million viewers tuned in, setting a record for an opening night […]

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