Archive for March 12th, 2008

CULVER CITY, Calif. (March 12) - Lauren Conrad has another show to add to her resume.

Conrad, full-time star of MTV’s “The Hills” and part-time student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, made her designer debut at Mercedes-Benz L.A. Fashion Week without her MTV reality TV crew in tow Tuesday. The budding 22-year-old designer’s first fashion show won’t be featured on her popular docu-soap because she says it’s “what I do in my spare time.”

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HOLLYWOOD - Hit sitcom Ugly Betty is set to be adapted for Chinese TV.

Chinese network Hunan Satellite TV has unveiled plans for Invincible Ugly Woman, a localized version of the Salma Hayek-produced series about a nerdy assistant working at fashion magazine Mode.

The lead role in Invincible Ugly Woman has already been cast to a female with no prior acting experience, Hunan Satellite TV has confirmed.

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David Beckham signs with Sharpie; teaser ads only show his John Hancock. Coldwell Banker brings Coldwell and Banker back from the dead. Have we learned nothing from the resurrection of Orville Redenbacher? Let’s launch!

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CBS is 95 percent sold out of its NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship tournament inventory and expecting to bring in about $450 million in TV ad revenue over the course of the telecasts which begin on March 20, according to John Bogusz, executive vp, sales and marketing for CBS Sports.

CBS is expected to bring in an additional $21 million in ad revenue from its various Internet streamings of the tournament games.
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HULU, THE ONLINE VIDEO INITIATIVE of News Corp. and NBC first announced one year ago, went live this morning with a slate of hundreds of TV shows and movies. Programs run the gamut from old black-and-white favorites like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to current shows like “30 Rock,” while movies include Sundance hit “Waitress” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.”

Much of the press coverage has presented Hulu.com as a competitor to YouTube, but the site actually seems more like a rival to AOL’s in2TV, which launched two years ago with a roster of old TV shows. YouTube, by contrast, still seems more the destination for short clips — music videos, parodies, mash-ups and the like.

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Although 3-D movies have been around since the 1950s, DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg described them Tuesday as “nothing less than the greatest innovation that has happened for all of us in the movie business since the advent of color 70 years ago.” The difference today, Katzenberg seemed to suggest, is the ability to control the 3-D product using digital technology. He made his comments at ShoWest, the Las Vegas conference of movie exhibitors. Katzenberg also suggested that 3-D movies permit theaters to offer something that is “far superior” to anything available to consumers at home. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times following his address, he observed that 3-D would likely add about $15 million in extra expenses per production but that he expected that amount to be easily recouped as a result of burgeoning attendance and increased prices for tickets.

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To coincide with a presentation at Las Vegas’ ShoWest, which we’ll report on later today, Paramount has released two new shots from Tropic Thunder. Click the images below to see larger versions over at JoBlo.

Where the first shot released last week showed us Robert Downey Jr wearing make-up that transformed him into a black man, here we see both a better look at that make-up and him in his alternate guise. Those blue eyes are really freaking us out. He looks a little bit Regan MacNeil.

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TiVo has announced it has reached an agreement with online video sharing site YouTube to enable owners of its Series3 and TiVO HD DVRs to access YouTube videos and display them on their home TVs. TiVo has not set a date for when the service might be available, promising only too offer it “later this year.”

“We’re delighted to be working with the world’s leading online video community so that TiVo subscribers can access YouTube’s popular content on the TV via the TiVo DVR,” said TiVo’s VP and general manager of content services Tara Maitra, in a statement. “Being able to make available YouTube videos to the TiVo subscriber base using one device, one remote, and one user interface is another major step in our commitment to combine all of your television and web video viewing options in one easy to use service.”

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FC is bellying up to the bar with a new sponsor from the spirits category, signing Absolut to a multiplatform deal that will integrate the vodka purveyor’s brand into on-air and online content.

Per terms of the deal, Absolut will enjoy exclusive sponsorship rights to a new Saturday-night film series, Absolut Indies, as well as IFC.com’s Indie Short Film Challenge, a contest that encourages aspiring filmmakers to submit their own interpretation of the company’s “In an Absolut World” campaign. (TBWA/Chiat/Day’s $35 million initiative launched in April 2007.)

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Each week, the Absolut Indies showcase will feature a pair of movies, presented with no commercial interruptions. The night kicks off with a 45-second graphic gateway, followed by shorts culled from the Absolut-branded film series. Among the feature-length films IFC will screen as part of the Saturday night block are: The Cooler, Gosford Park, Elephant and Kinsey.

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LONDON — The British government has clamped down again on film financing schemes that exploit loopholes in U.K. tax laws.Over the past year, financiers such as Scion, Ingenious, Future and Prescience have quietly used these loopholes to pour millions of pounds into movies from U.S. studios and indie producers alike, despite previous attempts to block such tax avoidance efforts.

The government’s latest move will shut down these so-called “sole trader” schemes. But the U.K.’s official system of tax credits for film production will continue unaffected.

In its annual budget Wednesday, the government announced that individual investors – “sole traders” – will no longer be able to offset their film production losses against tax using the mechanism of “sideways loss relief,” unless they can prove that they are actively engaged in the business.

Financiers have been using sole trader schemes to bankroll significant volumes of film production in the past year, after the government blocked investment partnerships from using sideways loss relief in March 2007.

For example, Scion has co-financed a package of Universal and Focus movies, including “Burn After Reading,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Changeling,” “Death Race 2000” and “Repossession Mambo,” as well as indie pics including “My Life in Ruins.”

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