Archive for December 19th, 2007

The NLRB will seek an opinion from its general counsel before deciding whether to issue any complaints in connection with 10 unfair labor practice charges filed by the WGA against the studios.

National Labor Relations Board general counsel Ron Meisburg now will decide in the next few weeks what to do about the WGA’s charges, filed Nov. 1 in connection with the guild’s strike rule requiring members to register scripts on open film and TV projects, officials said. The WGA has charged that studio companies acted illegally in ordering writers to disregard the strike rule.

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The Viacom channel on Thursday will begin airing Short Film Shootout: Cannes, a half-hour documentary about one of the competitions that took place during this year’s Cannes Lions: The Young Creative Film Festival. During the contest, camera crews followed the teams, ultimately capturing 40 hours of film. That film is being turned into a show that MTV is making available to its local networks in 161 countries on Thursday. (Spoiler alert: You can read which team won here: http://www.adweek.com/aw/cannes/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=100360288
8.)

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The Golden Globes (airing January 13) and Oscars (February 24) sought waivers to allow union writers to help put together their awards shows, but Reuters tells us that the WGA says it will deny those waivers. Show organizers say they will go on regardless. As for what to do for scribes, Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said “There are any number of possible options we might explore” regarding what the Oscars intend.

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The fourth season of NBC’s hit reality show The Biggest Loser took a bow last night and during the finale, viewers saw some of the most amazing weight loss success stories the program has ever featured. I’m not huge on reality shows and don’t often stick with them, but even I’ll admit it — this season of TBL was a good one.The winner was Bill Germanakos, seen at right before the competition started. Over the course of four months at The Biggest Loser campus, Bill lost a whopping 164 pounds and took home the win. Let the endorsements begin.

Running in today’s USA Today, Bill is already being featured prominently in an ad campaign we all know: Got Milk? Makes sense I suppose. He’s now a nationally recognized poster boy for weight loss. That being said… I don’t remember him ever having a glass of milk during the course of the season. If we’re to believe all the product placements that The Biggest Loser features, then all the contestants ate were Nabisco 100 Calorie packs, Subway sandwiches, and Jennie-O turkey sausage links. I suppose they had to wash it all down with something.

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Figuring out where 30 Rock ends and commercials begin requires a sharp eye, thanks to American Express.

Recent episodes of the NBC series have been interspersed with the credit card company’s so-called “podbusters”: content segments featuring Rock cast members that appear right before the commercial break. Read the rest of this entry »

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NEW YORK — Hollywood woke up Tuesday to one weird awards season.

The day after the WGA indicated it would not grant a writers waiver to the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, the effects began to ripple across town.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and Dick Clark Prods., which co-own the Globes, on Tuesday sought to prevent picketing at the show by trying to cut a signatory agreement similar to the one being discussed between the WGA and Worldwide Pants to bring back “Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.”

Talent, meanwhile, continued to wait for further office guidance from SAG — or unofficial indications from A-listers stepping forward with statements — before committing to shows that have received the thumbs down from the writers guild.

The Academy Awards is the more significant show from a financial and prestige standpoint, but the focus was on the Jan. 13 Globes because it comes before the Feb. 24 Oscar ceremony.

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The WGA is in discussions with several smaller AMPTP signatory companies and expects to have some news to announce regarding interim agreements with them as early as next week, WGA negotiating committee head John Bowman said Wednesday.Bowman would not identify any of the companies. He said the proposal on the table for the interim agreements are substantially the same as the WGA has hit an impasse on with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, including the controversial issue of expanding WGA’s jurisdiction to include reality and animation scribes.

“We’ll probably make some announcements next week or the week after,” Bowman said. Guild this past weekend confirmed it would approach individual AMPTP members for bargaining talks in the wake of the Dec. 7 breakdown of talks with the AMPTP.

“There are a lot of individual companies who think the AMPTP’s position is ridiculous,” he said.

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LAST WEEK’S POST ON the writers’ strike potentially leading to a boon of quality digital media touched off some great conversations. One commenter, David Jaeger, who had left a well-informed comment disagreeing with a structural shift toward new media, later came across a great article in the L.A. Times about VCs looking to fund professional digital content ventures. While this article really embodies the potential for change, it only suggests that there will attempts. VC and other funds follow the potential for revenue; whether there can actually be enough revenue generated to support systematic change will be a question of execution. For real change, the writers will need scale of operations, distribution and monetization. Scale is needed because, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Regardless of how complex the technology gets that distributes it, entertainment is still an art that requires people to respond. This is actually amplified in the new-media landscape. Sure, if you are a content producer, the digital world is your oyster, but instead of convincing a couple of studio executives to fund and distribute your content to millions, you now need tens of thousands of individual people to syndicate your content (or at least suggest it) to reach millions. It’s harder than ever to predict what will make people do this, and it’s changing every minute.

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The most recalled ad on television in 2007 was part commercial, part program.

IAG Research found that hybrid ads, in which products are pitched in specially created spots that tie in to the show in which they air, tend to be recalled better than traditional 30-second commercials.

The highest-scoring example, in which a host of TLC’s “What Not to Wear” talks to Macy’s sales associates about clothes that can be worn both in the office and as evening wear, was recalled at triple the rate of the typical hybrid ad, with an index of 337.

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MTV has forged an exclusive pact with Jerry Bruckheimer to produce videogames — the first such deal any film or TV producer has made in the vidgame world.Accord also marks the first major move in the vidgame space for MTV since it released music title “Rock Band,” from “Guitar Hero” developer Harmonix, last month.

The only similar partnership is that of Electronic Arts with Steven Spielberg, though in that case the director is actually helping to create three games, not producing them.

Bruckheimer and MTV will create a co-owned gaming studio that will develop videogame properties. It’s not expected to develop games based on films Bruckheimer produces, as the interactive rights to those are typically owned by studios.

“We’ve been researching videogames for quite a while, trying to find the most talented people to partner with,” Bruckheimer said of the move.

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