Coming Soon: Cool Tenacious D Toys!

A great team-up between John Kricfalusi, Thunderdog Studios and STRANGEco. I love the retro colors and oversprayed paint work. Can't wait to buy 'em!

Thanks to Vinyl Pulse for the photos.

Oscar Night: The Departed Leaves The Podium With Gold

NY TIMES: ‘The Departed’ Wins Best Picture, Scorsese Best Director
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and SHARON WAXMAN
Published: February 26, 2007

HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 25 —Twenty-six years and seven snubs after his first Oscar nomination, for “Raging Bull,” Martin Scorsese finally felt the warm embrace of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Sunday as he was named best director and his murderous mob thriller “The Departed” was named the best picture of 2006.

“Could you double-check the envelope?” Mr. Scorsese quipped after silencing a raucous standing ovation of whistling, whooping academy members.

“I’m so moved,” he said, accepting the directing prize. “So many people over the years have been wishing this for me. Strangers — I go into doctors’ offices, elevators, I go for an X-ray — they say, ‘You should win one.’ ”

Forest Whitaker won best actor for his performance as the cunning, seductive and savage Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.”

“Receiving this honor tells me that it’s possible,” Mr. Whitaker said. “It is possible, for a kid from East Texas, raised in South Central L.A., and Carson, who believes in dreams, who believes them in his heart, to touch them and have them happen.”

Helen Mirren took best actress for her performance as a traditional monarch in a modern world in “The Queen.”

“For 50 years or more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle,” Ms. Mirren said. “I salute her courage and her consistency, and I thank her, for if it wasn’t for her, I most certainly would not be here.”

Graham King, the only of three credited producers permitted to accept the best-picture award for “The Departed,” said, “To be standing here where Martin Scorsese won his Oscar is such a joy.” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo Del Toro’s magical-realist fantasy set in 1944 Fascist Spain, received Oscars for cinematography, art direction and makeup at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony, but fell short of its ultimate prize, best foreign-language film, which went to “The Lives of Others,” from Germany.

Jennifer Hudson, the “American Idol” reject-turned-star of “Dreamgirls,” was named best supporting actress, giving two of the four acting awards to African-Americans. And Alan Arkin, the cranky, heroin-snorting grandfather in the bittersweet family comedy “Little Miss Sunshine,” won best supporting actor.

“Little Miss Sunshine” also won for its original screenplay by Michael Arndt, a former assistant to Matthew Broderick who had to wait seven years for his script to be produced. “When I was a kid my family drove 500 miles in a van with a broken clutch,” he said, explaining the source of his inspiration. “It ended up being one of the funnest things we did together.”

On a night in which several top awards came as no surprise, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary featuring Al Gore on global warming, won best documentary feature.

“I made this movie for my children,” said the director, Davis Guggenheim, his arm on Mr. Gore’s shoulder. “We were moved to act by this man.”

Mr. Gore took his moment in the worldwide spotlight to underline the film’s message. “My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis,” he said, adding that the “will to act” was a renewable resource. “Let’s renew it,” he said.

That film also won best original song, for “I Need to Wake Up,” by Melissa Etheridge, upsetting “Dreamgirls,” which had three songs in contention. Holding her Oscar aloft backstage, Ms. Etheridge quipped that it would be “the only naked man who will ever be in my bedroom.”

In a twist, “The Lives of Others,” which examined the Orwellian police state that was East Germany, won in something of an upset. The German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, thanked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California “for teaching me that the words ‘I can’t’ should be stricken from my vocabulary.”

The awards for Mr. Del Toro’s movie came on a night in which his and two other films by Mexican directors were up for a total of 16 honors. One of them, “Babel,” won for its original score by Gustavo Santaolalla, who also won last year for “Brokeback Mountain.”

“Happy Feet” was named the year’s best animated feature.

Accepting for best supporting actor, Mr. Arkin said that “Little Miss Sunshine” was about “innocence, growth and connection.” His voice cracking, he praised his fellow actors, saying that acting was a “team sport.” He added, “I can’t work at all unless I feel the spirit of unity around me.”

William Monahan won best adapted screenplay for “The Departed,” his transplantation of the movie “Infernal Affairs” from Hong Kong to South Boston.

An Oscar also went to Thelma Schoonmaker, the longtime editor to Mr. Scorsese. She saluted Mr. Scorsese for being “tumultuous, passionate, funny” as a collaborator. “It’s like being in the best film school in the world,” she said.

“Dreamgirls,” nominated for eight awards, the most of any film, also won for sound mixing. But Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” whose three nominations were caught up in the tempest caused by the director’s drunken, anti-Semitic rant last summer, was shut out.

Ellen DeGeneres made her first appearance as the host of the movie industry’s annual celebration of itself, on a night expected to have its share of pregnant moments. Three filmmaking titans — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola — presentedthe award for best director.

Ms. DeGeneres said it had been a lifelong dream of hers to be host for the Oscars, rather than to win one. “Let that be a lesson to you kids out there: Aim lower,” she said, sounding a theme for the evening’s opening, which was designed to honor the many nominees, 177 in all, rather than focusing on the winners.

Ms. DeGeneres repeatedly ventured into the audience, at one point getting Mr. Spielberg to take a picture of her with Clint Eastwood, “for MySpace.”

And in a choice full of irony for industry insiders, Tom Cruise, who was thrown off the Paramount lot last summer by Viacom’s chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, gave the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairwoman who retired during a shake-up by Mr. Redstone two years earlier.

Backstage, Ms. Lansing said she had not known that Mr. Cruise was going to give her the award. “I saw him at an Oscar party a few days before, and he was sort of cold to me,” she said. Onstage, she said, he had whispered in her ear: “This is an honor. I really wanted to do this, you know how much I love you.” Ms. Lansing said she believed Mr. Cruise, who had a rough year before taking over management of United Artists, would be back to pick up an Oscar for directing or producing within five years.

Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer, received an honorary Oscar from Mr. Eastwood, who starred in the spaghetti westerns for which Mr. Morricone provided the unmistakable music.

The program began with a bouncy montage, directed by Errol Morris, of interview snippets with nominees reciting, among other things, the number of times they had come close to winning an Oscar. “Zilch,” said Peter O’Toole, of the number of times he had won.

Will Ferrell and Jack Black, leading members of Hollywood’s comedy rat pack, did a song-and-dance number bemoaning the paucity of comedic talent among the Oscar nominees. “I guess you don’t like laughter,” Mr. Ferrell sang. “A comedian at the Oscars is the saddest, bitterest, alcoholic clown.”

John C. Reilly, a past Oscar nominee, then stood up in the audience to remind them — in song — that he had been in both “Boogie and Talladega Nights.” All three then crooned that they hoped to go home with Helen Mirren, a best-actress nominee, who is in her 60s.

Breaking with tradition, the show’s producer, Laura Ziskin, best known for the “Spider-Man” franchise, rejiggered the lineup of awards to leave the marquee categories — best actor, actress, director and picture — for the end of the night. The first half of the show was front-loaded with technical and craft categories: art direction, makeup, sound editing and mixing, costume design and visual effects.

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” won for visual effects; “Letters From Iwo Jima” took sound editing; “Marie Antoinette” picked up costume design.

The director Ari Sandel won best live-action short film for “West Bank Story,” a spoof on “West Side Story” with feuding Palestinian and Israeli falafel stands. “This is a movie about peace and about hope,” Mr. Sandel said. “To get this award shows that there are so many out there who also support that notion.”

The award for animated short went to “The Danish Poet,” written and directed by Torill Kove.

Mr. Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, a nominee for best actor (“Blood Diamond”), announced in the middle of the telecast that the program had offset its carbon emissions by buying energy credits. “This show has officially gone green,” Mr. DiCaprio said.

The Oscars adopted other conservation measures this year, such as using recycled paper for the Oscar ballots. “We have a long way to go, but all of us, in our lives, can do something to make a difference,” Mr. Gore said.

But Mr. Gore did not throw his hat in the ring, as the producers of his film, among others in Hollywood, had hoped he might. Asked if he had a major announcement to make, Mr. Gore said: “With a billion people watching, it’s as good a time as any. So my fellow Americans, I’m going to take this opportunity, here and now, to formally announce” — and the Oscars orchestra, right on cue, drowned him out as if he had droned on a second too long.

The Academy Awards capped a season in which the conventional wisdom has often been wrong, and actual wisdom has been in short supply. The big question before the nominations was how many Oscars “Dreamgirls” might win, and what film could compete with it for best picture. The only question after the nominations was, What happened to “Dreamgirls”?

Many theories were advanced, including misguided marketing and an abundance of hype, but the film’s director, Bill Condon, cut to the chase: “Maybe the Academy saw five films they liked better.” Whatever the reason, the film’s elimination left the race wide open to an array of films that took very different routes to the nomination.

“The Departed” rode a wave of box-office success and a plan to keep Oscar hype on the down-low, partly because many in the industry felt it was time to recognize the director Martin Scorsese’s lifetime of excellence. “Little Miss Sunshine,” a new take on the family road-trip movie, which won four Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, was a film that no one in Hollywood seemed to want to make, but it connected with audiences to the tune of more than $94 million in worldwide box-office receipts. “Babel,” by contrast, left United States audiences cold while doing good business abroad, but connected with critics and was rewarded for a global, ambitious story by winning best dramatic feature at the Golden Globes.

“The Queen,” a small movie that managed to do everything right, managed to ride one of the year’s more remarkable performances — Ms. Mirren as a traditional monarch in a very modern world — to broad critical recognition. And after “Flags of Our Fathers,” another would-be Oscar hopeful, met with indifference, Mr. Eastwood and his studio, Warner Brothers, decided to release the film’s twin, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” before year’s end — and were rewarded with a best-picture nomination.

This appeared to be the most ethnically and linguistically diverse batch of film nominees yet, appropriate enough given that Hollywood’s foreign revenues now eclipse the domestic take by a significant margin. The Oscar slate included several films shot largely in languages other than English, most notably Mr. Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” in Japanese, and Mr. Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” in Maya dialects.

“Babel,” from the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, spanned three continents and five languages — Japanese, Berber, Spanish, English and sign — and two of its actresses, Rinko Kikuchi of Japan and Adriana Barraza of Mexico, received nominations. (Three films by Mexican directors were up for a total of 16 honors.)

Early Muppets: Wilkins Coffee Ad, Late '50s

Here's Wilkins and Wontkins in action! With the prerequisite violent ending. Cool!

Oscar And The Film Business

LA TIMES: Oscar isn't Hollywood's face
The academy honors the Helen Mirrens, but the industry is really all about the Adam Sandlers.
By Joe Queenan - February 25, 2007

OF ALL THE creatures on the face of the Earth, only humans would dream of nominating Ryan Gosling for a best actor award for his exemplary work in a film almost no one has seen.

Actually, the only humans who would make such an extravagant gesture are that tiny group of mysterious voters who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Year in, year out, this largely unidentified group of voters — many of them quite advanced in years, some presumably dead — persist in honoring actors, actresses, directors and screenwriters for their superb work in films that are widely ignored and have almost nothing to do with the industry's raison d'etre.

Let's face it. The movie industry is not about "Half Nelson," Rinko Kikuchi, "Pan's Labyrinth," Jackie Earle Haley, "Little Children," Abigail Breslin or Ryan Gosling. The movie industry is about Will Ferrell, "King Kong," Owen Wilson, "Meet the Fockers XV" and, to a greater or lesser extent, all films that either are or resemble "Nacho Libre." Ryan Gosling and Rinko Kikuchi have nothing to do with it.

To bring into focus the extraordinary iconoclasm the academy exhibits each year in its determination to reward films that Americans do not care about, actors we usually ignore and directors we don't even like, one need only consider the very different mentality that prevails at the Grammys.

Two weeks ago, the music industry, as usual, went out of its way to honor insanely famous artists who sell lots of records. The music industry does not dole out its highest honors to gallant but obscure recordings made by gallant but obscure artists; it gives its awards to people such as Madonna. The music industry revels in the fact that it is in the revenue-generating sector; it is in the Justin Timberlake, Ludacris, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Red Hot Chili Peppers business. It is in the Mary J. Blige, Gnarls Barkley, John Legend and Dixie Chicks business.

It is not in the Kristin Hersh, Richard Thompson or Pierre-LaurentAimard-plays-Anton-Webern-pianotranscriptions business. True, it does give a limited number of awards to artists such as Chick Corea and Doc Watson, whose records do not sell and of whose existence the public is generally unaware. But it does not give major awards to these artists. If there is a music industry equivalent of Abigail Breslin (who played Olive in "Little Miss Sunshine"), then sorry, no Grammy for Parallel Abigail.

The academy has a different approach. The academy does not want to be confused with its craven, vulgar cousins in the music industry. Even though it is well aware that choosing a middling success such as "Crash" as best picture over any number of "Spider-Mans" is the equivalent of Major League Baseball giving the Cy Young Award to a pitcher who went 11-8, or its MVP award to a leftfielder who batted .268 with 13 home runs and 78 RBIs, the academy loves to honor films that make people in the movie business feel better about themselves.

And why not? No one really wants to think that they started out in the "Citizen Kane" line of trade and ended up working for Talladega Nights Inc. No one is really comfortable with the idea that the face of the industry is Adam Sandler and Ashton Kutcher rather than Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes. Nobody wants to go home after a hard day making Brittany Murphy movies when it would be so much more fulfilling to pretend that work was all about Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

This is what makes Oscar night so special. It's not so much a case of the industry presenting itself the way it would like to be seen; it's the night when the industry gets tanked up and forgets what it does for a living.

Is this a bad thing? I guess not. Hypocrisy and self-delusion are two of America's most revered traditions, without which none of us could function. More to the point, the academy's self-delusion reaps vast benefits for us all.

The current cover of Vanity Fair — the Hollywood issue — is graced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Owen Wilson and Jack Black. Even for a magazine that once put the dopey, synthetic, rich-boy-discovers-poor-black-people Anderson Cooper on its cover, this is a sad moment.

If this motley crew is the best Hollywood can offer, then the age of radiant movie stars is over. For whatever else this quartet of glamour-challenged chaps may be, they are definitely not matinee idols.

Looking on the bright side, if Oscar night were run like the Grammys, or Major League Baseball, or any of the other organizations that love to hand out awards to people who don't really need them, then the movie stars stepping up to receive their fulsome homage tonight would be Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Owen Wilson and Jack Black, with Adam Sandler not far behind. This would be a very bad thing.

Personally, I think that any organization that stubbornly refuses to honor Jack Black, even though he will earn more for his worst movie than Helen Mirren will earn in her entire career, is to be congratulated. And so, my hat is off to the academy. The Nobel Prize in literature never goes to a Stephen King or a Danielle Steel; the Oscar for best actor should never go to a Chris Rock or a Jack Black. Leave them on the cover of Vanity Fair where they belong.

Joe Queenan writes frequently for Barron's, the New York Times Book Review and the Guardian.

Apple, Cisco Come To Terms

NY TIMES: Settlement Lets Apple Use ‘iPhone’
By BRAD STONE
Published: February 22, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 21 — Apple and Cisco Systems have decided that a name is not worth fighting over.

On Wednesday, the companies settled their dispute over the iPhone trademark. Six weeks ago, Cisco filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco over Apple’s planned use of the name for its much anticipated multimedia device, which combines the features of a mobile phone, an iPod and a BlackBerry.

Cisco claimed that it had owned the trademark since 2000 and was using it for a line of Internet-connected phones.

Wednesday night, in a short, ambiguously worded statement, the companies said they would dismiss all legal action against each other regarding the trademark and that Apple could use the name for its device, which it plans to start selling in June.

In addition, the companies said they would explore ways to make their identically named iPhone products work together “in the areas of security and consumer and enterprise communication.”

Representatives for Apple and Cisco said other terms of the deal would remain confidential. It is not known if Apple made a cash payment to Cisco, but intellectual property lawyers say some sort of payment is typical in these cases. It is also unclear whether Cisco had sold Apple the name iPhone outright and had then secured permission to use it itself.

But the deal appears to give a partial victory to both sides. Apple can begin selling its phone with the name that its strong-willed chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, seemed to prefer.

Cisco can also continue to use the name, and with the promise of interoperability, it might have some of the hype and magic surrounding Apple’s products rub off on its own less prominent offerings.

Hostilities broke out between the two companies last month, when Mr. Jobs announced the music phone at the annual Macworld convention in San Francisco.

Cisco, the networking company based in San Jose, Calif., was using the name to sell phones that can plug into a PC or connect with a wireless hot spot and make free calls over the Internet.

The two companies negotiated intensely over the trademark in early January. Executives had planned to make announcements concurrently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and at Macworld, proclaiming the links between their iPhone products.

After talks broke down and Mr. Jobs announced his iPhone anyway, Cisco filed a lawsuit, saying that Apple’s use of the iPhone name constituted a “willful and malicious” violation of Cisco’s intellectual property. In response, Apple called the lawsuit “silly” and noted publicly that several companies besides Cisco were using the iPhone name.

Cisco’s lawsuit described covert Apple attempts to obtain the rights to the iPhone name. In September 2006, a corporation calling itself Ocean Telecom Services filed an application for the trademark based on earlier filings in Trinidad and Tobago. In its complaint, Cisco asserted that Apple was behind the efforts.

But while they flung legal accusations at each other, both companies faced significant pressure to settle. Apple’s iPhone will be released in June and will be available to customers of the AT&T wireless network, which was formerly known as Cingular Wireless. If Apple had failed to settle with Cisco and subsequently lost the battle in court, it could have been liable for financial penalties for each unit that it sold.

But Cisco also faced a strong incentive to reach a deal.

“Cisco had to provide access to the trademark to Apple if it wanted to achieve the highest value for the name. There was no potential second buyer who would have equaled Apple’s desire for the iPhone mark,” said Alan Fisch, an intellectual-property lawyer at Kaye Scholer in Washington.

He added that Cisco also faced the reality that consumers associated the name more with Apple.

“The iPhone name has been informally synonymous with an anticipated Apple phone for years prior to the product’s formal announcement,” he said.

DrawerGeeks Gets More Attention

This time, on the Frederator blog (Feb. 9th). Check it out!
Thanks to Mike Milo for mentioning us!

Photo Studio-In-A-Box: Test #2

I thought some of the problems with the previous photo might be that the lights were too high, so I set them on the floor, the left light aimed at the top of the figure, the right light at the lower half. Since the card table was still set up, setting the lights on the floor spread them apart to some degree.

Well, it didn't work at all - almost everything got worse. Even after tweaking it in iPhoto and Photoshop, the bottom seam and fabric are still pretty clear. The back shadows are all over the place, and the good ones (like the one under the hat brim) are a lot weaker. Ugh! I guess I'll try moving the card table out of the way, and placing them closer together next time, as well as a little closer to the cube and the figure. The figure's color is different because I tweaked the 'temperature' sliders in iPhoto.

To be honest, I'm not even sure that I've got the cube set up properly. Maybe there's a better way to postion it so the seams son't show as much. The other potential tactic is to figure out the proper focal length to keep the figure in focus and blur out the background. I took a community college photography course a while back, but most of that has totally fallen out of my head!

Warner Bros. Considers Making A Justice League Movie

VARIETY: Justice prevails for Warner Bros.
Studio eyeing DC superhero team feature
By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK
Posted: Thurs., Feb. 22, 2007, 10:00pm PT

DC Comics super-team Justice League is heading for the bigscreen.

Batman may meet up with Superman on the bigscreen after all -- along with Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash and all the rest of DC Comics' biggest names.

Warner Bros., with its major appetite for fresh franchises, is looking to make a feature based on super team the Justice League of America, hiring writing duo Kiernan and Michele Mulroney to pen the script.

It's the first major action the studio has taken on the project.

Feature film is bound to include some combination of DC's most iconic superheroes, although the studio wouldn't confirm which ones they might be. It's unlikely that the studio and DC Comics, a division of Warner, would opt to feature second-tier characters.

Since its inception in 1960, JLA has featured almost every major hero in the DC Comics universe, although the core team has largely remained the same: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter.

The heroes typically band together to fight alien menaces or groups of supervillains.

"The Justice League of America has been a perennial favorite for generations of fans, and we believe their appeal to film audiences will be as strong and diverse as the characters themselves," Warner prexy of production Jeff Robinov said in announcing the hiring of the Mulroneys.

In taking on the ambitious project, Warner faces several conundrums.

Now that the Batman and Superman film franchises have been revived, does the studio go after Christian Bale ("Batman Begins") and Brandon Routh ("Superman Returns") to star in a Justice League pic? Studio is also trying hard to bring Wonder Woman to the bigscreen.

To a large degree, casting will depend upon the story arc for the JLA feature and at what point in the superheroes' lives the plot takes place.

Warner also must deal with myriad producers working on the Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman franchises.

Studio dropped its efforts to make "Batman vs. Superman" in order to focus on relaunching "Batman" and "Superman" as individual properties, which it has done.

Filmmakers Chris Nolan ("Batman Begins") and Bryan Singer ("Superman Returns") are each on board to helm the next installments in the two respective franchises. Nolan's "The Dark Knight" is eyeing a 2008 release and the next "Superman," 2009.

The potential payoff of bringing JLA to theaters can't be ignored by Warner, which turns out more tentpoles than any other studio.

Comicbook fans have long clamored for a movie version of JLA, and word of the Warner project is certain to be a hot topic at New York Comic Con, which unspools today in Gotham.

JLA has spawned several cartoon TV series, including 1960s and '70s show "Super Friends" and current Cartoon Network skein "Justice League Unlimited" from Warner Bros. Animation.

The Mulroneys -- Kieran is the brother of thesp Dermot Mulroney -- caught the attention of studios around town with their rewrite of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" for Fox.

Other screenplay projects include "On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction," "Paper Man" and "Worst Case."

Kieran and Michele Mulroney are repped by Creative Artists Agency and Management 360.

(Ben Fritz contributed to this report.)

Ball-Point Pen Doodle

While I was waiting for an appointment.

One Good Thing To Come Out Of The Underdog Movie

Mezco's whipping up some great new figures this summer, presumably on the heels of the upcoming movie. Wisely, these look like the cartoon designs - I'm assuming the less-than-spectacular sales of the live-action Flintstones and Grinch toys had something to do with that. Cool!

If quantity's your thing, you can pre-order a case of Underdog figures for $167.99 + shipping at Entertaiment Earth.

DrawerGeeks Preview: Grrrr Face

Here's my drawing for this go-round. Enjoy!

Not Content With Apes Remake, Fox Moves On To Earth

FIRSTSHOWING.NET: The Day the Earth Stood Still Being Remade for 2008 - Confirmed!
February 21, 2007 by Alex Billington

Apparently Box Office Mojo, the best website for all things box office earnings, has updated their schedule for summer 2008 and included a listing of The Day the Earth Stood Still to open on May 9th, 2008 (one week after Iron Man). The original is a sci-fi classic 1951 movie about an alien and a robot that land on Earth to try and save the world from being destroyed. IMDB doesn't even have a listing for this remake, but Box Office Mojo claims it's being produced by Fox, fast-tracked for a spot in 2008's busy summer.

Is this real? We don't know yet, but we'll put in some requests with Fox to find out. I can bet if it is real, it's going to be directed by someone who will give all sci-fi geeks quite a tingle. This movie is a very well-known classic and I don't think they'd risk screwing up a remake - like The War of the Worlds, another 50's classic, fortunately they did a pretty good job with that. Updated inside!

Update: Fox confirmed with us that this is true and the date is correct, meaning a The Day the Earth Stood Still remake is definitely underway for summer 2008!

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The original's one of my favorite science-fiction films, so you can bet I'll be giving this a miss. Wouldn't a restoration/re-release be a lot cheaper? I think the Cold War paranoia'd still resonate.

Photo Studio-In-A-Box: Test #1

After moving in the card table and setting up the lights, I shot this at about 10 PM. The lights can help blow out a lot of the bg details, but in this case, I think I had the lights much too high. I had to darken the hat in Photoshop to get it back in sync with the rest of the figure, and the bottom seam/fabric are showing up a lot more than I want. Not a home run by any means, but educational.

He Who Proposes With The Tube, Breaks Up With The Tube

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Student’s hostile breakup witnessed by thousands on campus, YouTube
By MIKE BAKER
Associated Press Writer

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Was it live ... or was it just a stunt for YouTube?
A one-time college couple say their melodramatic Valentine’s Day breakup — complete with singers, hundreds of spectators and a profanity-laced tirade — was real. Those who were there say it all seemed a little too staged.

Still, there’s no question it’s an Internet hit.

“It really wasn’t supposed to be like this,” said Mindy Moorman, the girlfriend who got dumped. “The fact that it’s gotten so big is quite comical to us.”

The various videos of Moorman’s hostile breakup with University of North Carolina senior Ryan Burke have been watched more than 300,000 times as of Wednesday — making it one of the most popular clips on YouTube.com in recent weeks.

Burke said Wednesday he invited Moorman, a sophomore at nearby North Carolina State University and his girlfriend of four months, to join him at a popular gathering spot on the UNC Chapel Hill campus for a “surprise.” It was not only Valentine’s Day, but Moorman’s birthday. The couple had plans for a dinner date that night.

Hundreds of students and several photographers were waiting for the couple on campus after Burke promised “a bad public breakup” on the Web site facebook.com: “You don’t want to watch, but you can’t look away.”

Burke greeted Moorman with a hug. Then she appeared surprised when an a cappella group of singers started belting out the Dixie Chicks hit “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice” instead of Moorman’s favorite tune, Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.”

Burke confronted her about her alleged infidelity and dumped her in front of the raucous crowd. Moorman responded with an angry rant filled with unprintable words. Those watching surrounded the couple, their cheers and chants keeping the argument going for several minutes.

“To be honest, it wasn’t really about her,” Burke said. “I thought the relationship was headed that way anyway, so I just wanted to see people’s reactions to the breakup.”

Burke, a history major, said the breakup was something of an experiment in human behavior. But he also said it was genuine — he was furious about Moorman’s alleged cheating.

“It was like they were reading from a script,” said James Mundia, a manager at UNC Chapel Hill’s student TV station, who helped edit the online footage. “There wasn’t a lot of passion for a breakup where there’s a lot of raw emotion.

“But I guess that’s YouTube. It didn’t matter if it was real or if it was fake, everyone wanted it to be real. People wanted that entertainment.”

Despite the very public breakup, Moorman and Burke said they are still on speaking terms. The Charlotte natives have known each other for years, and Moorman said they have since shared laughs remembering the incident. Burke said he has received thousands of comments and e-mails — some vulgar, some encouraging.

Moorman, a political science major who is thinking of going into politics, said she does have one regret: With her public breakup forever memorialized — and easy for friends, family and potential employers to find on the Internet — she admits, “I probably did say the f-word a little much.”

“As my mother said, ‘Mindy, how do you expect to be elected now?”’ she said.

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This is even weirder than the proposal-via-television-ad. I feel kind of guilty even posting about it, since that's feeding it in a way. Is reality TV warping our behavior that much? Is this the natural result of video cameras being so (relatively) cheap and plentiful?

What is the endgame of this? Will we become incapable of living without an audience, spending our lives constantly recording one another, interaction reduced to whatever provocation is effective?

I watch this stuff too, so I'm not holier that thou or anything. But sometimes it weirds me out a little.

1950s Jell-O Instant Pudding Ad

Designed by Saul Steinberg, by the looks. The animation's simple enough that he may have done that, too.

It's interesting that the tempo is so slow, considering that the ad's about a hectic work day! Still, it's cool.

Star Trek Cribs

A long version of the ad for the G4 re-broadcasts of "Star Trek". I'm assuming this was animated by the "Robot Chicken" folks. Regardless, it's great!

DrawerGeeks Gets Attention

There's a write-up for it on the lines and colors website. Cool:

lines and colors: DrawerGeeks
Posted by Charley Parker at 10:53 am
Bookmark on del.icio.us

Now here’s a great idea from a group of artists for an informal series of creative projects that also translates into a fun web site.

I can’t sum it up any more succinctly than they do themselves in the first paragraph of their FAQ: “DrawerGeeks is a fun thing we do every other Friday, where professional artists (mostly from the animation, comic book, illustration and design fields) all draw their own version of a chosen fictional character.”

The result is a delightful amalgam of divers styles, techniques and artistic approaches that is pulled together with a common theme. The characters are often drawn (if you’ll excuse the expression) from mainstream comics, e.g. Thor, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Bizarro; but you’ll also find characters from movies, literature, fairy tales and other areas of pop culture, like King Kong, King Authur, Little Red Riding Hood and Cereal Mascots.

The artists sometimes make the themes bit broader than they seem by giving them an open-minded interpretation; Iron Man, for example, can be the Iron Man, the Marvel Comics character, or an iron man. Keeping to the chosen character is one of only two rules the artists apply to themselves, the other being to “keep it clean”.

There’s no requirement or limit on the amount of time devoted to the piece, and you will see examples from both ends of the spectrum, though most tend to be quite finished and some are very elaborate.

This seems a tremendous way for these artists to have fun and encourage themselves to indulge in playful creation, unrestrained by the demands of art directors and deadlines, but within a framework of a collegial atmosphere and perhaps a bit of friendly competition.

Before you run off looking for how to join, DrawerGeeks is more or less a closed circle. In order to try to keep this as a fun thing for the original participants, and not burden someone with administering a giant web site, participation is limited to invitation only.

The idea to take from this, beyond enjoying the fruits of their project by following the site every other week, would be to initiate a similar project among your own circle of artist friends.

Or, if you want an already established framework for creating a themed illustration on a regular basis and sharing it with a large group, check out Illustration Friday.

The other thing to take from DrawerGeeks is to check out the page that lists the participating artists and visit their individual web sites — something I’m just starting to do. Enjoy.

Suggestion courtesy of Meg Levitt.

Brain Fart: Animators Are Observant

As you know, the Police have reunited and are going to tour soon. I was never a big Police fan, but I like some of their music, so I thought this would be a good time to examine their 'albums' more carefully, having never heard one (well, maybe Synchronicity) in its entirety. I had just heard Invisible Sun on the radio, so I thought, well, I'll get the 'album' with that song on it. That turned out to be 1981's Ghost In The Machine.

Now I've seen that cover design for almost thirty years now. I liked it because at the time, it seemed hi-tech and modern. But it wasn't until this week that I noticed that those cool LED glyphs formed the faces of the band members (the story is that they couldn't decide on a cover photo). I literally thought they were just abstract glyphs all that time. Oh, brother! I guess I'd better quit that amateur detective business!

Oliver Stone Grumpily Kicks His Dog

NY TIMES: Single Bullet, Single Gunman
By GERALD POSNER
Published: February 21, 2007

THE ability to use advanced forensics and minuscule traces of DNA to solve crimes, even cold cases decades old, has turned many Americans into armchair sleuths seeking to “solve” the unexpected deaths of people like Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith. But sometimes, old-fashioned evidence is as useful in solving puzzles as anything under a nuclear microscope.

Last weekend, a never-before-seen home movie was made public showing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade just before his assassination. An amateur photographer, George Jefferies, took the footage and held onto it for more than 40 years before casually mentioning it to his son-in-law, who persuaded him to donate it to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. The silent 8-millimeter color film was of interest to most people simply because it showed perhaps the clearest close-up of Jacqueline Kennedy taken that morning.

But to assassination researchers, the footage definitively resolves one of the case’s enduring controversies: that the bullet wound on Kennedy’s back, as documented and photographed during the autopsy, did not match up with the location of the bullet hole on the back of his suit jacket and shirt. The discrepancy has given conspiracy theorists fodder to argue that the autopsy photos had been retouched and the report fabricated.

This is more than an academic debate among ballistics buffs. It is critical because if the bullet did enter where shown on the autopsy photos, the trajectory lines up correctly for the famous “single bullet” theory — the Warren Commission hypothesis that one bullet inflicted wounds to both Kennedy and Gov. John Connally of Texas. However, if the hole in the clothing was the accurate mark of where the bullet entered, it would have been too low for a single bullet to have inflicted all the wounds, and would provide evidence of a second assassin.

For years, those of us who concluded that the single-bullet theory was sound, still had to speculate that Kennedy’s suit had bunched up during the ride, causing the hole to be lower in the fabric than one would expect. Because the holes in the shirt and jacket align perfectly, if the jacket was elevated when the shot struck, the shirt also had to have been raised.

Some previously published photos taken at the pivotal moment showed Kennedy’s jacket slightly pushed up, but nothing was definitive. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have done everything to disprove that the jacket was bunched. Some used grainy photos or film clips to measure minute distances between Kennedy’s hairline and his shirt, what they dubbed the “hair-to-in-shoot distance.”

The new film has finally resolved the issue. At the end of the clip, as the camera focuses on the backs of the president and first lady, Kennedy’s suit is significantly bunched up, with several layers creased together. Only 90 seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald fired the first shot, Kennedy’s suit jacket was precisely in the position to misrepresent the bullet’s entry point.

While the film solves one mystery, it leaves another open: estimates are that at least 150,000 people lined the Dallas motorcade route that fateful day, so there must be many other films and photographs out there that have never come to light. Those who have them should bear in mind that even the most innocuous-seeming artifacts, like the Jefferies tape, can sometimes put enduring controversies to rest. As Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum said the other day, “The bottom line is, don’t throw anything away.”

Gerald Posner is the author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J.F.K.”

*************************************************************************************

Shows what I know - the footage looked pretty innocuous to me when I first saw it. I have to say, the Stone film didn't convince me of its own theory, but I left feeling like the Warren Report couldn't possibly be right. Ockham's Razor strikes again!

Photo Studio-In-A-Box: The Set-Up

So I thought I'd devote tonight to setting up a little photo studio in my basement. The one thing that strikes me right away is that anyone else considering this purchase might not want to get the large version - as it turns out, that white nylon cube is BIG. It's about as big as my old 30' picture-tube tv set. I've set up two wide folding tables in front of one another down there, and I still don't have enough room for the lights yet! I'm going to set up our card table in front of those, and hope it's the same height as the other tables.

I think I might pack it in for tonight, and finish the set-up tomorrow morning - if I'm lucky, maybe get one test shot in before I go to work. The instructions do indeed have numerous and sundry warnings about how hot the lights get - they recommend only turning them on when it's shutter time. I haven't even plugged them in, I'm so paranoid now!

I'm A Sucker For Bubo

Remember that stupid robot owl in Clash of the Titans? I don't know if I love it because it's a such a blatant R2-D2 rip-off, or in spite of it. Even though I'm not a big fan of the movie itself, I've always wanted a Bubo toy or statue or something, and now I'm going to get my wish. Gentle Giant takes one more name off the rapidly-shrinking list of recognizable genre film characters that haven't been mechandised yet by making a limited-edition (500 pieces) Bubo statue! Cool!

You can pre-order it here - it'll cost $59.99 + shipping at Entertainment Earth.

Cool Foster's Toy Previewed At Toy Fair

An image of Mattel's radio-controlled Trouble-Making Blooregard, courtesy of Animation Magazine. Looks great! Here's hoping it really does hit stores, though I'm assuming if it's made it to Toy Fair, it's going to see the (retail) light of day this fall.

The Charlie Brown Of Presidents

LA TIMES: The forgettable Millard Fillmore
The 13th president shows that the country's highest office is remarkably indestructible.
By George Pendle
February 19, 2007

A NATION did not mourn him. History has not restored him. His picture will never adorn an ad for a President's Day sale. When death claimed Millard Fillmore, the unlucky 13th president of the United States, on a bitterly cold March day in 1874, few but his family cared about his passing.

Newspapers attempted to eulogize Fillmore, but aside from pursuing the blandest of political careers, what had he accomplished? He had been president for three years, from 1850 to 1853, but he seemed little more than a cipher. "Could it be possible," asked one newspaper in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., "that living thus near to him, we failed to adequately appreciate his greatness?"

The answer is a resounding "no." Fillmore reminds us that the platitude that "anyone can be president" is as much a threat as a promise.

Few figures in American history have aroused such overwhelming indifference as Millard Fillmore. Ascending to the presidency following the death of Zachary Taylor, Fillmore was dubbed an "accidental" president. But before long he would gain more colorful tags, such as "inept," "vacuous" and "doughface." Indeed, no sooner had he clambered into his new position as head of state than he seemed to let drop the reins of power. "He was content to let chance and other persons direct his course," sniffed one of his contemporaries.

Even when Fillmore was finally bullied and cowed into making a decision, it was inevitably for the worse. His support for the Compromise of 1850 may have helped stave off the Civil War for another decade, but its inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Law — which allowed escaped slaves in the North to be forcibly returned to the South and slavery — was a disastrous miscalculation.

Despised by the North and discarded by the South, Fillmore was as dead a duck as the White House has ever accommodated. When it came time for the next election, he was rejected by his beloved Whig party, despite being the incumbent, and when he ran for the presidency again four years later, it was at the head of the rabidly anti-Catholic Know Nothing party. Cartoonists rejoiced. He received "a very light vote." Fillmore spent the last 20 years of his life in self-imposed exile from public life. In 1860, he wrote that he was "the world forgetting; and by the world forgot."

In his time, some praised his good-natured demeanor — "the best loser of the day," opined one friend. "No citizen ever bore defeat, disappointment and disillusionment with more dignity and equanimity." The problem, stated the New York Times in his obituary, lay in the president's "mental constitution rather than his lack of moral principles."

Posterity, when it has deigned to remember him, has been even harsher toward Fillmore than his peers. American History Review declared that he had "neither brains nor gall." American Heritage magazine said that "to discuss Millard Fillmore is to overrate him." Even the White House's official website (www.whitehouse.gov) damns him with the faintest of faint praise: "Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true."

Historians looking to unearth behavioral quirks to help illuminate his presidential failings have searched in vain. Rarely has a president's life been so devoid of intrigue or gossip. He engaged in none of the sexual escapades of Thomas Jefferson, nor suffered from the depression of John Adams. He never smoked or chewed tobacco, gambled only once and was fond of boasting that he "never knew intoxication." By comparison, Fillmore makes Jimmy Carter look like Richard Nixon.

On Presidents' Day we are so used to praising the wisdom and courage of Washington, Lincoln, a Roosevelt or two, that we expect their qualities to go hand in hand with the office itself. However, the office can't transform its occupant into a great leader. Rather than alter character, the presidency tends to magnify it: the good become great; the bad become wicked, and the venial flaws of the mediocre swell and bloat to become moral and political catastrophes. Being a likable, blundering, normal guy, with a good head of hair (and Fillmore had one of the best in White House history) is simply not enough.

Of course, Fillmore isn't the only bumbler we've elected president. After all, it is statistically improbable that all presidents will be good, and because we must resign ourselves to the fact that mediocre presidents are a natural occurrence, we really ought to celebrate Fillmore today.

As underwhelming as it is, his story shows us that while the office of the presidency is surprisingly indiscriminate, it remains — despite the best efforts of some of its occupants — remarkably indestructible.

GEORGE PENDLE is the author of "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore," due out in April.

Life After Rings At New Line

NY TIMES: For New Line, an Identity Crisis
By SHARON WAXMAN
Published: February 19, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 18 — For six weeks in 2005, Robert K. Shaye, the founder and co-chairman of New Line Cinema, lay in a coma in a New York City hospital, fending off death from a sudden infection.

He survived, narrowly, and over many months quietly made his way back to health, a dizzying and unexpected turn for one of Hollywood’s mavericks.

Now Mr. Shaye, 67, is back to what he has done for nearly 40 years, running New Line, a midsize studio in a world of competitive behemoths, at a time when the company, owned by Time Warner, has been beset by rumors of dysfunction and executive change, and bedeviled by a slate of unsuccessful films in 2006.

That too is an unexpected turn for a studio that three years ago capped the phenomenally popular “Lord of the Rings” series with a best picture Oscar for the last installment, “The Return of the King” — a first for the studio.

Since then, according to both Mr. Shaye and Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the president of Time Warner, the studio has been financially successful, earning more than $100 million every year for the last three, largely in revenue from previous hits that continues to stream in through DVD and other post-theatrical sales. “New Line is very profitable,” Mr. Bewkes said in an interview. “We’re making money hand over fist.”

But in Hollywood and on Wall Street, some question the focus at New Line. After the success of “Lord of the Rings,” some had expected the studio to pursue a more ambitious agenda than the urban comedies and horror films of its past. That might have included pressing ahead with “The Hobbit,” from the “Rings” author J. R. R. Tolkien, to which New Line shares the rights.

Instead, Mr. Shaye has been trading insults with the “Rings” director Peter Jackson, while the studio has struggled to find a new breakout hit.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as financial crisis, even if they had a bad year,” said Harold L. Vogel, an entertainment analyst. “It’s more like an identity crisis. It’s a fair question: where do you go from here? Everyone has the same problem, whether you’re 90 or you’re 20. And they’re facing it now with a little more emphasis.”

If critics have observed that the studio seems distracted, there may be good reason. Mr. Shaye’s illness, the seriousness of which was not disclosed to the public before now, apparently derailed the studio for a portion of 2005 and affected the slate in 2006. And last year he took time to direct his own movie, “The Last Mimzy,” a family-oriented science fiction adventure (co-written by New Line’s president of production, Toby Emmerich) that will open in theaters next month.

In an interview in his office in Los Angeles last week, Mr. Shaye said that he had as much enthusiasm for running his studio as ever, and said he believed that this year’s releases would do well. “I started this company in 1967,” he said. “I still come to work every day. I still have the same passion I had then.”

Mr. Shaye acknowledged his disappointment in the studio’s performance in 2006, with duds like “Snakes on a Plane,” which cost $33 million to make and took in only that much in domestic theaters despite higher expectations, and “Tenacious D: ‘The Pick of Destiny,” the Jack Black comedy with a budget of less than $20 million, which took in a scant $8 million in domestic ticket sales.

“After last year I will take a more considered approach to the green-light process,” he said. “I will act as more of an adversary, or critic, of the decisions advocated by others.”

But he said the studio would continue to aim for its traditional zone of comedies and genre films, with a couple of highbrow dramas and one or two big-budget bets, in the range of $100 million and above.

For this year, those big bets include “Rush Hour 3,” the next in the successful series of martial arts comedies, and “The Golden Compass,” a fantasy adventure with special effects and a budget of $150 million, a potential new franchise for the studio.

The studio has also secured a $350 million line of credit in a financing deal with the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving it a financial cushion.

Mr. Shaye spoke in detail for the first time about the illness that almost killed him two years ago. In March 2005, he said he suddenly came down with a lethal form of pneumonia, from streptococcus A bacteria, similar to a rare illness that precipitously killed Jim Henson, the “Muppets” creator, at age 53 in 1990.

On the advice of a doctor, Mr. Shaye checked into NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and was placed in a medically induced coma in the intensive care unit for six weeks. (In his film “Mimzy,” Mr. Shaye names one character Dr. Sherman, in tribute to one of his caregivers.)

He emerged from the coma and after two months in the hospital, he was permitted to go home to his Manhattan residence. Even then he took many months to recover, unable initially to walk for more than two or three minutes at a time, and slowly taking up work again.

But Mr. Shaye says he thinks more clearly now than he did before his illness. “It’s difficult to explain, but I have a clarity of thought and, I believe, of reason, which was one of the gifts” of his illness, he said. And, he added, “I certainly appreciate the normal functioning of life a lot more.”

One thing that has not been blunted by illness is Mr. Shaye’s temper, which flared last year when he was asked about a lawsuit filed by Mr. Jackson over profits from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Mr. Shaye, criticizing what he called Mr. Jackson’s “arrogance” and calling the director “myopic,” told Sci-Fi Wire: “I don’t care about Peter Jackson anymore.” He added, “He wants to have another $100 million or $50 million, whatever he’s suing us for. He doesn’t want to sit down and talk about it. He thinks that we owe him something after we’ve paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars.”

Asked about the remarks last week, Mr. Shaye said that he made the statement “in a moment of emotion” but did not regret it. “I regret losing a friend,” he said, as he showed a visitor a Gandalf sword that Mr. Jackson had sent him as a gift, before the lawsuit.

A representative for Mr. Jackson declined to comment.

But the ill will has held up plans to make “The Hobbit.” Without specifically saying he would not make the film with Mr. Jackson, Mr. Shaye made it plain that he had no interest in working with difficult filmmakers. “Some directors are impossible,” he said. “Are there a few people I wouldn’t work with? Yes, but I won’t name names.”

And he would not comment on reports in the news media that the “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi had been asked to direct “The Hobbit.” He said, however, that although there was no workable script yet for the film, he intended to release it in 2009.

The Hollywood rumor mill has worked overtime in debating the future of New Line, which has had to justify its existence repeatedly over its 40-year history. Some people have questioned, for example, why the studio that made Will Ferrell’s breakout hit “Elf” in 2003 has not made other movies with him.

Until now. This month New Line began production on “Semi-Pro,” starring Mr. Ferrell; Mr. Shaye said that Mr. Ferrell had not found material he wanted to make at New Line until now, and chose not to make a sequel to “Elf.”

And although the studio is now part of Time Warner, current and former executives said that it continues to operate much like a family. Mr. Shaye, the father figure of the group, described his partnership with his co-chairman, Michael Lynne, this way : “I’m emotion. He’s reason.”

But as in a family, some producers and agents complained of confusion in their business dealings with the studio. Several said they had made deals with Mr. Emmerich or another executive at the studio, only to have Mr. Shaye redefine the terms later.

An executive connected with the coming film “Rendition” said the same thing happened on that project, a big-budget production under way in Morocco, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep. Weeks after the producers closed the deal with the studio, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his business relationships, Mr. Shaye came back to them and placed additional conditions, like finding a financing partner.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Emmerich disputed that account, saying that Mr. Shaye had reservations about the script from the start.

Still, some agents and producers point out that the loose atmosphere at New Line can also lead to daring decisions, like the one that led to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Mr. Shaye denied that any executive changes were in the works, and said that Mr. Emmerich would continue to run production, while Russell Schwartz would continue to run domestic marketing.

Mr. Bewkes, the Time Warner president, said that he regarded the three years of success with “Rings” to be an anomaly — albeit one that brought in well over $3 billion in revenue to New Line.

“The business they’re in is a combination of all those ‘little titles,’ which add up to a steady stream for the indie business, and occasional but pretty regular big commercial franchises, like ‘Rush Hour,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘The Golden Compass,’ ” he said. “I feel confident about New Line’s future.”

And Mr. Shaye, whose contract is up in 2008, seemed to fully agree. “It’s never business as usual, because the business is unusual,” he said, adding, “but we’d rather work on movies than anything else — every one of us.”

The Police Prepare For Their Reunion Tour

NY TIMES: They Can Play. Can They Play Nice?
By JON PARELES
Published: February 18, 2007

NORTH VANCOUVER, British Columbia
IN a high-ceilinged studio at the Lions Gate film complex earlier this month, the Police were rehearsing for a very public first gig: opening the Grammy Awards broadcast last Sunday with their 1978 hit “Roxanne” before announcing a world tour the next day. Sting, 55, on bass; Andy Summers, 64, on guitar; and Stewart Copeland, 54, on drums, were working through a list of two dozen songs. For the first time in decades the Police would be back together for more than one night. “I’ve trapped myself back 30 years,” Sting said.

The old Police sound was a lean, nimble, pointillistic approach to syncopation and space that Mr. Summers called “the sound of tension,” and that tension sounded intact as the band kicked into “Message in a Bottle,” with its jumpy guitar riff and stamping beat. Half a minute later Sting waved the song to a stop. “Pick,” he said tersely, his voice slightly irritated. “It doesn’t work.”

Mr. Summers had been playing guitar with a pick, not his fingers as he used to. “You thought for a second that he wouldn’t notice?” Mr. Copeland cackled. Mr. Summers shrugged: “I played it with a pick all day yesterday, and he didn’t say a word.” He abandoned the pick, Mr. Copeland shouted “One! Two! Three! Four!” and in an instant the song was galloping forward again. It was just another moment of readjustment for three headstrong musicians rebuilding a tricky alliance.

Twenty-four years ago the Police ruled the rock world. Their seven-year career had been one unbroken ascent: each album outselling the last, each tour bigger. In 1983 they had claimed the mantle of the Beatles by playing Shea Stadium.

But as all three freely admit, their years as rock stars together were also years of bitter conflict, sometimes to the point of fistfights backstage. “We would be playing arenas and feeling the love pour onto us,” Mr. Copeland said. “And then you would come backstage, to the guys that mattered most, and feel the unlove.” From the beginning they had been three disparate personalities. Mr. Copeland is voluble and extroverted, Sting earnest and pensive, and Mr. Summers looks happiest talking about chord changes and guitar gizmos. What connected them was the music that they fought over most determinedly of all.

“We didn’t go to school together,” Sting said. “We didn’t grow up in the same neighborhood. We were never a tribe. There was friction for the right reasons. We care passionately about the music and we’re all strong characters, and nobody would be pushed around. So it was part of our dynamic. We fought cat and dog over everything.”

Although Mr. Copeland founded and named the Police, Sting quickly emerged both as the band’s voice and its hitmaking songwriter. But the band’s songs were simultaneously taut pop structures and improvisational melees, with Mr. Summers layering on complex chords and guitar effects, while Mr. Copeland’s drumming shattered and precisely reassembled the beat. As the Police worked up Sting’s songs, decisions were often made two against one. Sting grew to feel constrained.

“I wanted no rules, no limitations,” he said. “Bands that stay together have to toe the party line. And I wasn’t willing to do that.” And so, when the band wound up their 1983 stadium tour, Sting struck out on his own. “We were the biggest band in the world, by all intents and purposes,” he said. “And I just thought: ‘Well, this is it. After this everything else is just diminishing returns. I want another challenge. I want to start again.’ ”

In recent years each member has told his part of the Police story. Mr. Copeland made a documentary. Sting and Mr. Summers wrote memoirs. But the recollections are strikingly different.

Sting’s “Broken Music” dispatches the entirety of the Police’s glory years in just two pages. Mr. Summers’s “One Train Later,” by contrast, details an exhilarating whirlwind of tours and ends soon after the band’s breakup, which he calls an “open wound.”

“At the time there was a sort of numbness,” he said at rehearsal. “I don’t think I realized what was happening. I felt like I walked off a cliff and realized. ...” He looked downward, as if into a chasm. “It felt like a limb had been chopped off. It was like being deserted by a lover.”

Since that time Sting has remained a rock star, with multimillion-selling albums and well-publicized causes like rain forests and human rights. Mr. Summers has been leading groups on the jazz circuit, from clubs to festivals. Mr. Copeland established himself as a film composer (for directors including Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone), and was coaxed back to performing by the jam band Oysterhead. No one had any reason to expect a reunion. “For years it was just, forget it,” Mr. Summers said. “Five years passed, 10 years passed.” Sting, in a radio interview, once called the prospect of reviving the Police insane.

And yet here they are: booked for arena concerts worldwide into next year, with some stadium dates on hold, just in case. The tour begins on May 28 in Vancouver and comes to Madison Square Garden on Aug. 1 and 3.

Band members had stayed in touch since 1983, but they only played together on a few brief and uncomfortable occasions. Then last year they all found themselves at the Sundance Film Festival, and later Mr. Copeland and Mr. Summers both attended the Los Angeles stop of Sting’s current tour. He is playing the lute songs of the Renaissance composer John Dowland. Mr. Summers and Mr. Copeland said they had both sensed a change. It was more than they had seen of each other in a long time.

“I was thinking, ’Well, now what do I do?’ ” Sting said in an interview in his hotel room. His lute was leaning against a wall. “Do another lute record? I don’t want to paint myself into that corner. Do I do another Sting record? What’s going to surprise people? What’s going to surprise me? Wow, can I really be thinking that?”

A Police reunion “just seemed right,” he said. “It felt right in the heart. I woke up, and I just had this instinct, just had this desire to call the guys up and say, ‘Let’s give this a go.’ ”

Actually his manager, Kathryn Schenker, made the calls. She sprang the idea on Mr. Summers and Mr. Copeland at a meeting where they expected to discuss plans for reissues of the five Police albums, which will mark the 30th anniversary of the band’s formation in 1977. “They were so shocked it wasn’t funny,” Ms. Schenker recalled. “They were so happy and excited but very, very, very, very surprised.”

The Vancouver rehearsal studio where they eventually reunited was a long way from the Police’s do-it-yourself beginnings in punk-era London. A film crew was on hand to make the inevitable documentary, with bright lights, makeup for the band members and a camera on semicircular tracks rolling around their setup. A caterer served lobster for dinner.

For pre- and post-rehearsal workouts there was a Pilates trainer who brought along with her a machine called, coincidentally, a Group Reformer. A beat-up guitar that Mr. Summers is playing isn’t the one that toured the world with him in the early 1980s; it’s an exact replica made by Fender, copying every nick, chip and scrape as well as the pickups (made by Fender’s rival, Gibson) and custom electronics inside. It’s part of a limited edition of 250 that sold out at $15,000 each — a measure of Mr. Summers’s lasting reputation among musicians and guitar geeks.

For all three band members, reuniting the Police wasn’t just a matter of relearning parts. They were also rebuilding a collaboration that had been as volatile as their music. “After 20 years we’ve all changed shape, and the pieces don’t quite fit together in the same way they used to,” Mr. Copeland said. “With the best of intentions, with the best of attitude, we were wanting to kill each other.”

Since they last worked together, all three had gotten used to being bandleaders and composers. “It would be much easier just to go in the studio and make a record with my band,” Sting said. “And it’s not just the musical stuff. It’s the social stuff, it’s the personal psychology stuff of going back to a marriage, returning to a dysfunctional marriage and making it better, making it work. I really want it to work.”

The Police had already had a few days of rehearsal before allowing a visit from an outside observer, and they had built a wary, joshing camaraderie. Sting, who at first had tried to lead the reunited Police by telling the others what to play, was still taking charge and picking songs to work on. But he was now prefacing his ideas with “I think” and “Perhaps” and “Do you think we might.” He and Mr. Summers hazed Mr. Copeland about wearing a sweatband; in turn Mr. Copeland would punctuate their discussions over abstruse chord substitutions with mock exasperation.

“Somewhere in the beginning of 2008,” Mr. Copeland said, “we’ll be playing the last show of this tour. And I’ve got $10 here that says Sting will suggest another chord for Andy to play.”

“And why not?” Sting said.

During a break Mr. Summers said: “I feel it all coming back, the whole thing. Some of it’s moronic, like wandering around being a rock star, and everybody going, ‘What do you need, what do you need?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember this.’ But it’s like getting into an old familiar suit. I feel all the old reflexes coming back.”

They were the reflexes of virtuosos determined not to become their own tribute band. “At the moment it’s an exercise in nostalgia, certainly,” Sting said, “but also trying to get something modern and something new out of this situation. That may result in another song. I can’t predict. I’d like that to happen. But we’re just trying to remember the chords at the moment.”

The sound the Police created in their seven years together — light-fingered but assertive, musicianly but unmistakably pop — hasn’t aged as fast as much 1980’s music, and it has been emulated by musicians from Fugazi to Tool to Incubus to John Mayer. “We were the greatest rock band in the world, and that’s the way we want to be,” Mr. Summers said. “And we still have enough ego to think that we can come back, probably just like all bands, and blow every other band out of the water.”

But not yet. “Right now we’re not incredible,” Mr. Copeland said. “We started out like a high school band last week. We got to be like a college band. Yesterday we started to sound like a bar band. Today we sound like, ’O.K., we could earn a living like this.’ But we are not yet playing like we deserve to play in a stadium. We’ll get there, now that we’re on the right track.”

Sting kept working to add subtleties to songs that he has been performing continually through the years. He described “Every Breath You Take” to the band, explaining why he wanted nothing flashy, just a subdued, metronomic beat. “To me it’s like a Bergman movie,” he said. “Nothing happens until two very violent acts. One is the bridge, two is the coda. But not a mouse stirs. It’s like a still life.”

Mr. Copeland interjected, “But there might be a lion, sir.”

“Yeah,” Sting said. “That’s me.”

For the Grammys the Police’s allotted television time would hold a tightly abridged “Roxanne.” A crew member was timing the song. “We’re going for a clean 3 minutes 30,” Sting said.

This “Roxanne” would mix the familiar and the exploratory, announcing both the return of the Police and their determination to be more than an oldies act. “ ’Roxanne’ needs a slightly new dress every night, a slightly different pair of heels to get me excited,” Sting had said earlier.

The first verse and chorus had the old Police attack. Then the middle floated into new, echoey improvisations before the end charged back into the chorus that used to have whole arenas shouting along. Here the big finale was followed by a brief silence and a call from the crew: “3:37.”

“What happens if we go over by seven seconds?” Mr. Summer asked. “Emasculation?”

“They’ll take a Grammy away,” Sting said.

“For each second over, you lose one,” Mr. Summers agreed.

“But that does leave us with another 16 or something,” Sting replied. (He has won 16 Grammys, including five as a member of the Police and one as the songwriter of “Every Breath You Take.”) A second runthrough ran 3:32.

“We only lose half a Grammy,” Sting said.

“We only lose Andy’s Grammy,” Mr. Copeland said. (The Police’s “Behind My Camel,” written by Mr. Summers, was named best rock instrumental in 1981.) Then he changed his mind, looking toward Sting: “Now wait a minute. You’ve got the most Grammys. So we start with Sting’s Grammys.”

“Easy, big guy,” Mr. Summers said.

Battles had been reduced to banter. The Police knew they would have to get along for a year to come. “I used to think that strife and struggle and tension were important in a band,” Mr. Copeland said. “I no longer believe that. And in fact this band has been rescued by our refusal to fall into strife and confrontation.

“When we arrived here in Vancouver, we had big musical problems. And we didn’t resolve them by shouting at each other, by getting angry at each other, by power plays, by any of that stuff. We resolved our musical issues by comity. The music was sick, and we had to use our social bond to get through and try different solutions to the musical problems.

“It sounds cool that angst, sturm and drang, produces music with fire. No. We’re going to get to fire by love. Because we love each other.”

Sting said: “There’s more compromise now. There’s more sense of, just relax and this will be O.K.” He paused. “So far.”

The Newbery Medal Vs. The Word 'Scrotum'

NY TIMES: With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: February 18, 2007

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Susan Patron, the author of the book and a librarian, said the controversial word was just part of the character’s learning about body parts.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.”

The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools.

Pat Scales, a former chairwoman of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship.

“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” she said. “That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”

If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club title. Libraries and bookstores routinely order two or more copies of each year’s winners, with the books read aloud to children and taught in classrooms.

“The Higher Power of Lucky” was first published in November by Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, accompanied by a modest print run of 10,000. After the announcement of the Newbery on Jan. 22, the publisher quickly ordered another 100,000 copies, which arrived in bookstores, schools and libraries around Feb. 5.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

“The word is just so delicious,” Ms. Patron said. “The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of “The Higher Power of Lucky” is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

In the case of “Lucky,” some of them take no chances. Wendy Stoll, a librarian at Smyrna Elementary in Louisville, Ky., wrote on the LM_Net mailing list that she would not stock the book. Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview. One librarian who responded to Ms. Nilsson’s posting on LM_Net said only: “Sad to say, I didn’t order it for either of my schools, based on ‘the word.’ ”

Booksellers, too, are watchful for racy content in books they endorse to customers. Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass., said she once horrified a customer with “The Adventures of Blue Avenger” by Norma Howe, a novel aimed at junior high school students. “I remember one time showing the book to a grandmother and enthusing about it,” she said. “There’s a chapter in there that’s very funny and the word ‘condom’ comes up. And of course, she opens the book right to the page that said ‘condom.’ ”

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book’s content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

*************************************************************************************

It's a good thing she added that last comment - she probably deflected hundreds of emails (citing James Joyce or Henry Miller) in a matter of seconds.

"...in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah’s Book Club title."

I think it's a little bit better than that. It might be the same in financial terms, but in terms of prestige... it's not even close. A Newbery medal is the highest honor a children's book can get. It means (and I know this sounds funny, but you know what I mean) your book is "Make Way For Ducklings" good. You're in the pantheon.

A Note To Archive Browsers

You may notice that the Toy Of The Day posts are disappearing from the Pidgeonblog archives. Not to worry - all of that writing is still available for perusal in my new Toy Of The Day Flickr archive. I've been making duplicates of all the posts in Flickr right along, and since I've had trouble with crashing blogs in the past, it didn't make sense to have so many posts that were duplicated elsewhere.

Toyota Enters NASCAR

NY TIMES: The Jingoism 500
By MICHAEL YAKI
Published: February 17, 2007

TOMORROW, ordinary citizens will be bracing themselves against the howling sound of Japanese engines throttling up and bearing down on their beloved American heroes. No, it’s not a squadron of dive-bombing Zeroes re-enacting Pearl Harbor. It’s the Daytona 500, the kickoff to the Nascar season, and for the first time in Nascar’s history Dodge, Chevy and Ford will be joined by ... Toyota.

Japan’s biggest car company, which is poised to overtake General Motors as the largest car manufacturer in the world, has entered the hallowed tracks and pit rows of that most American of race circuits, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. But to hear some Nascar fans talk, when those engines fire up it will be Dec. 7, 1941, all over again.

The war metaphors have been brought to the fore by Jack Roush, a prominent racing team owner. Mr. Roush has said that “we’re going to war” and that he’s preparing himself “for siege.” He has accused Toyota of having bought its way in, of raising the costs of owning a team and generally spoiling the pot. Other Nascar columnists, pundits and fans, even a Web site dedicated to being “against racing Toyotas,” have chimed in against the auto maker’s entry into Nascar.

Nationalism and pride in one’s country can be admirable traits. Nationalism, however, is the razor’s edge in the American psyche, where just a push turns it into xenophobia. Nascar, like so many professional sports before it, may soon be faced with a situation where deliberate ignorance of simmering prejudice is not an option.

I am an American of blended Asian ancestry, including Japanese, and a certain insult — a word as odious as its counterpart for African-Americans — sets me off. That word has been flying fast and furious in many Nascar-related forums and chat rooms. It offends me so much I cannot even abbreviate it here. One person wrote that “we don’t need any foreign nameplate in Nascar.” Others have taken up the “if you love them so much go live in Japan” theme and, curiously, wondered that if the Iraqis built a car would drivers of Japanese cars “become fans of the terrorists?”

The drivers hired by Toyota have been subject to the same opprobrium. Dale Jarrett, whom Nascar has named one of the 50 greatest drivers in its history, has been called a sell-out. Michael Waltrip, a Daytona winner, has been invited to “leave America” with his Japanese truck. (His recent woes at Daytona, including accusations that his team was cheating during qualifying, have only increased the vitriol.) Nor have the up-and-comers Brian Vickers and Jeremy Mayfield been spared. In blogs and on fan sites all have been characterized as traitors for driving “rice burners.”

Although team owners like Joe Gibbs and Rick Hendrick have welcomed the competition from Toyota, Nascar itself has said little during the rants and grumblings, apparently hoping it will all die down. That is unacceptable. There are, of course, Asian-American Nascar fans, and several of Nascar’s races are held in California, the state with the highest population of Asian-Americans.

Nascar’s goal has always been to ensure competition from inside the cockpit, not on the outside. It is all about devising a race where one variable — human skill at 200 miles an hour — is prized above all. When I watch the races (I am a fan; my mother-in-law is an uber-fan), I am fascinated by the men and the occasional woman maneuvering around banked tracks at speeds I cannot fathom with the touch of scrimshaw masters. I am not thinking of a Chevy Monte Carlo or a Dodge Charger or a Ford Fusion — or a Toyota Camry. I am watching Jeff, Junior, Tony, Mark and all those others with the courage, talent and sheer guts it takes to withstand, much less win, a 500-mile race when my legs cramp up after a leisurely two-hour drive.

Nascar’s roots in the South’s “good ol’ boy” mentality are a part of its lore and charm that cannot be denied. Movies like “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Talladega Nights” both spoof and glorify its origins. Its partnership with the American auto industry is also a part of this history, born in the myth that you can drive the same “stock” car that Richard Petty drove to victory. But Nascar has become a global superbrand, still undeniably American yet ubiquitous enough for the world’s best — not just auto manufacturers, but racers like Juan Montoya, the Colombian who has dominated Formula 1 — to want to test its drivers and its superspeedways.

More than 20 years ago, this country feared that Japan would take over American industry. It didn’t happen. But today the Big Three are still on the ropes and, combined with Chrysler’s recent layoffs, a Toyota victory in one of Nascar’s events could reawaken latent fears of Japanese domination. We cannot forget that in 1982 a young Chinese-American, Vincent Chin, was killed in Detroit because two autoworkers assumed he was Japanese. Apparently there remain embers just hot enough to re-ignite the flame of racism.

You can be pro-American, and you can declare that Americans should buy American cars. But doing so involves a degree of hypocrisy. Today an “American” car could have been assembled in Mexico, or had most of its parts manufactured offshore. And Dodge, part of the Chrysler brand, is owned by Daimler of Germany. Yet I don’t hear anyone disparaging the patriotism of the racers driving Dodges. It’s another indication that the opposition to Toyota is rooted not in patriotic pride, but racism.

Along with millions of others, I will watch the Daytona 500 tomorrow. There would be nice symmetry if the Great American Race also meant that in the arena of race relations, Nascar, like all major professional sports, were to take measures to reject the appearance and insinuation of intolerance and prejudice in its ranks.

Michael Yaki is a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

*************************************************************************************

You can be pro-American, and you can declare that Americans should buy American cars. But doing so involves a degree of hypocrisy. Today an “American” car could have been assembled in Mexico, or had most of its parts manufactured offshore. And Dodge, part of the Chrysler brand, is owned by Daimler of Germany. Yet I don’t hear anyone disparaging the patriotism of the racers driving Dodges.

Exactly.

But First, A Bit Of Fun

Cute characters and jazzy music! Too bad the show couldn't live up to this fun opening. Animation by Irv Spence, music by Hoyt Curtain.

Fantastic Frank Cho Vinyl Figure On The Way

It looks like "Monkey Boy" (Frank Cho's alter ego in Liberty Meadows) will make 'his' debut at the New York Comic-Con, Feb. 23rd - 25th. What a great figure! Nice, punchy colors and a sculpt that really nails Mr. Cho's drawing style. This'll be an exclusive paint variant to the Con, so snap it up if you're in the area. Mr. Cho will be making an appearance as well, so you can get it signed! Another (presumably the 'regular') version is due out soon from MINDstyle. However much it costs, it's worth it!

Thanks to vinylpulse for the tip-off!

Another Of My Storyboard Drawings Online!

Very cool! Check it out here.

New Bee Movie Trailer

I still like the live-action part better, unfortunately. Judge for yourself...

Peter Ellenshaw, 1913-2007

PETER ELLENSHAW, one of the premier matte artists in special effects filmmaking, died Monday in Santa Barbera at the age of 93. His artistic career - including production design and concept illustration - spanned more than seven decades, working with such acclaimed filmmakers as Walt Disney, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Powell and W. Percy Day.

Born on a farm in Essex, England in 1913, Mr. Ellenshaw was fortunate enough in his early twenties to get a job as an apprentice to W. Percy Day, O.B.E., the British film industry’s foremost special effects artist and painter for matte shots (realistic paintings done on glass of extended sets or fantasy locations which are combined with scenes of actors in real sets). Day, the Royal Academy trained artist, took the young Mr. Ellenshaw under his wing, working on such classics as Things to Come, The Thief of Baghdad and Black Narcissus.

After serving in the Second World War as a pilot for the Royal Air Force, Mr. Ellenshaw returned to the film industry as a matte artist for MGM's Quo Vadis. In the late 1940s Walt Disney approached him to work on the studio's first live action feature, Treasure Island. Thus began a professional collaboration and friendship which lasted over 30 years and 34 films.

In 1953, Mr. Ellenshaw and his family moved to California and he found himself expanding upon his matte painting work to contribute to the dramatic and spectacular special effects on Disney's epic film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The Walt Disney Studio was also in the pre-planning stages for Disneyland. Mr. Ellenshaw also contributed his artistic touch to many of the attractions at the new theme park, including the first Circlevision theater show, TWA's Rocket Ship to the Moon and X-1 Satellite View of America.

In 1960 Mr. Ellenshaw did a matte painting of Rome for Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, while continuing to work full time for Disney studios. He contributed to the popular television show 'Disneyland' with work on Davy Crockett and Zorro, as well as classic Disney features including Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Mary Poppins and The Love Bug. For Mary Poppins, Mr. Ellenshaw won an Oscar® for Best Special Visual Effects on the landmark film. He has also been nominated for an Academy Award® an additional three times; for his production design work on Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Island at the Top of the World as well as for his effects work on The Black Hole. (Just this year Mr. Ellenshaw attended the "re-premiere" of Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke at Hollywood's El Capitan theatre, celebrating the release of the special DVD edition of the film.)

In addition to his film career, Mr. Ellenshaw also enjoyed landscape and seascape painting. In the 50s, he began painting the picturesque coves and crashing waves along the California coast. He soon developed a reputation as a fine art painter whose oils are enjoyed and collected today.

In 1993, Peter Ellenshaw was officially designated a 'Disney Legend' at the Walt Disney Studios in a ceremony presided over by CEO Michael Eisner and Roy E. Disney.


Much of this biography is originally from ellenshaw.com, where you can view artwork by Mr. Ellenshaw and his son, Harrison Ellenshaw.

It's Here!

At last! My Photo Studio-In-A-Box arrived in the mail yesterday. I'll try setting it up tonight and see how it works. Hopefully, 3:00 PM won't be my cutoff (when the light goes in the living room) for taking toy photos any more!

Coming From Dark Horse: Gary Panter's Jimbo Figure

It'll be a run of 2,500 pieces, and come out in September. The figure'll retail for $34.99, but you can pre-order it here for $27.99 + shipping. I'm not this biggest Gary Panter fan (though I did like his design work for the Pee-Wee Herman show), but this toy looks pretty cool!

Thanks to Plastic and Plush for the tip!

On Fame And The Audience

NY TIMES: Why Did We Watch? The Answer Isn’t Pretty
By CARYN JAMES
Published: February 10, 2007

Becoming famous is relatively easy: Anna Nicole Smith was born with a beautiful face, a big smile and a voluptuous body she was happy to bare for Playboy. Staying famous for nothing much is hard work, and that is the real story of Ms. Smith’s life and death. Her desperation for fame was so raw that she didn’t mind being the butt of the joke if it helped maintain her place in the spotlight. Her career started out tacky, went downhill from there and ultimately says more about the culture’s fascination with celebrity than it does about Anna Nicole Smith.

While most stars play a clever cat-and-mouse game with the media, Ms. Smith’s sport was Extreme Fame. Her sense of how to court attention was simply to show up, pose and practically say, “Come get me, use me.” In that blatant desire for publicity she embodied the ultimate symbiosis of celebrity: between an individual who acted as if life out of the spotlight were worthless, and a press and public eager to indulge her craving for attention.

But without any actual career to back up her claim on the public, the question becomes: why did we watch? The unsettlingly vapid reason: because we could. She was a glittery spectacle who offered guilt-free voyeurism, as we watched her dramas with drugs and weight and inheritance laws. And the lesson of her fame is that there is no lesson.

All the attempts to justify her fame that have flowed in since her death on Thursday are hollow. She was not Marilyn Monroe; the closest Ms. Smith came to a real movie career was a small role in the spoof “Naked Gun 331/3 : The Final Insult.” She was not a rags-to-riches inspiration; most little girls don’t dream of growing up to be Playmate of the Year, marrying an 89-year-old billionaire and fighting for his money all the way to the Supreme Court. And she was not a cautionary tale; she courted attention too relentlessly to seem innocent or deluded.

There was the ring of truth in what her mother told “Good Morning America” yesterday: that her daughter said, “If my name is out there in the news, good or bad doesn’t matter, good or bad I make money, so I’m going to do whatever it takes.” It says a lot about the bubble Ms. Smith lived in that even her mother, Virgie Arthur, communicated with her daughter through the media. On “Good Morning America,” Ms. Arthur said she had tried to warn her estranged daughter about her drug use, and had done so by appearing on the Nancy Grace show.

Ms. Smith’s lust for fame coincided with a media explosion she could exploit. After her weight ballooned, and her modeling career declined, she latched onto the reality television craze. But her two seasons of “The Anna Nicole Show” on E! revealed how inept she was at shaping an image. Her speech was slurred, her voice was whiny, her manner was demanding, and the curiosity that fed the ratings quickly dissipated. She seemed beyond pathetic by 2004, after she became a diet-product spokeswoman and showed off her newly slim body in another slurry appearance at the American Music Awards.

Her story took an indisputably tragic turn in September, when her 20-year-old son, Daniel, died days after Ms. Smith gave birth to a daughter. Yet even then she couldn’t rise above the lurid nature of her fame. She sold photographs of her son and newborn in the hospital room where he died to In Touch magazine; even now, video of her Caesarean section is available on YouTube.

And soon an ugly paternity battle over the infant broke out in a flurry of media interviews, with two men claiming to be the father: Larry Birkhead, a former boyfriend, and Howard K. Stern, Ms. Smith’s longtime lawyer and confidant. (He seemed glued to her on the reality show.) It’s no surprise that Mr. Stern announced his fatherhood on “Larry King Live,” with Ms. Smith by his side.

The messiness of her death — its unknown cause, the continuing legal battles about the inheritance and the little girl’s paternity — have made its aftermath just as media-centric as her life, with cable news channels trotting out a parade of casual former boyfriends, sometime-friends and estranged relatives.

Donna Hogan, Ms. Smith’s half-sister, talked to Larry King on the phone about her forthcoming book (announced long before Ms. Smith’s death), predictably called “Train Wreck: Anna Nicole Unauthorized.” Ms. Hogan said she hadn’t seen her sister in about a decade.

And while commentators are struggling to find meaning in her life, the responses to her death in the hours just after it was announced may more accurately reflect the public attitude toward her as a joke who drew gawkers rather than fans.

Many reactions seemed to defy the usual courtesy of not speaking ill of the dead. A post by the Web site Wonkette.com said, “the dope-addicted floozy Anna Nicole Smith keeled over dead in a Florida hotel about an hour ago,” a fast turnaround of irreverence even for the Internet. Geraldo Rivera on the Fox News Channel put the blame for Ms. Smith’s sorry life on Mr. Stern, saying, “He’s a pimp,” who sold her to the media. (What does that make her?) And even Larry King, the friendliest of anchors, told Wolf Blitzer that Ms. Smith was “not the smartest person in the world” before praising her good humor and good heart.

The news of her death brought the inevitable jolt that comes when anyone dies suddenly at 39. And there is the inescapable tragedy of a 5-month-old left without her mother. But Anna Nicole Smith’s fame is as sad and shallow in death as it was in life, just as much of a tawdry compact between her and us.

The Host Trailer

This looks pretty interesting. Apparently, the formaldehyde dumping is based on a real case of U.S. military negligence in Korea. Bonus points for the archery!

Episode 6 Of The Swazzle WorkShop Now Online!

Prairie Dog Pete visits the workshop, and teaches Tiger and Mousedeer how to make a multi-charactered glove puppet. Have fun... Yee-haw!

Purple and Brown

Here's one of a cute series of shorts made for Nickelodeon! Enjoy.

New Star Trek Previews

If you're curious about the newly-revamped Star Trek (The Original Series, or TOS for short) episodes, you can see previews for four different episodes at startrek.com. The effects do stick out a little by virtue of them being slicker than the live-action footage, but it does look pretty good. It's also interesting to see these ads treat the material as if it's never aired before, with modern "In a world..." sales techniques!

Whiteout Graphic Novel Coming To The Big Screen

VARIETY: Sena to direct 'Whiteout'
Action-thriller is first Dark Castle film
By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK
Posted: Wed., Feb. 7, 2007, 7:02pm PT

Dominic Sena will direct Kate Beckinsale in action-thriller "Whiteout," the first movie to go into production under Joel Silver's new Dark Castle Entertainment genre label.

Warner Bros. will distribute the pic, based on Greg Rucka's 1999 comicbook miniseries of the same name. Scribes Jon and Erich Hoeber are adapting for the bigscreen.

Dark Castle Prods., a unit launched last fall within Warners-based Silver Pictures, is backed by more than $240 million from 15 different investment firms. Coin will be used to finance 15 pics over the next six years, with Warners distribbing the entire slate.

Silver has sole greenlight authority under the terms of the deal. He also has full creative control. Film budgets are expected to be in the $15 million-$40 million range.

"Whiteout" is set to begin lensing March 5 in Montreal.

Story revolves around a lone U.S. marshal (Beckinsale) stationed in Antarctica who is drawn into a shocking murder investigation. With only three days until winter, she must solve the crime before the continent is plunged into darkness and she is trapped with the killer.

Producers are Silver and Dark Castle co-prexy Susan Downey. Dark Castle co-prexy Steve Richards, Don Carmody and Rucka are exec producers, while David Gambino is co-producing.

Beckinsale, who appeared in 2007 Sundance entry "Snow Angels," was most recently in theaters with "Click," opposite Adam Sandler, and horror-thriller "Underworld: Evolution." Later this year, she'll be seen in "Vacancy."

Sena's credits include "Gone in 60 Seconds," "Swordfish" and "Kalifornia."

DrawerGeeks Preview

Here's this week's drawing, for the Captain Marvel theme. I'm really happy with this one!

This One's For Anita

NY TIMES: A Story in Every Box
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Published: February 8, 2007

TIFFANY & Company has long enjoyed a gilded reputation, conferred by its association with the happy things in life: engagements, weddings, babies, trophies, retirements, anniversaries and romantic Hollywood movies. Most notable among the last category is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the 1961 version of the 1958 Truman Capote novella. In the movie, Holly Golightly and the writer find the cat and decide to get married and live happily ever after.

But in the book, the cat is lost forever and Ms. Golightly ends up at some unsavory, unmentionable station in life. The ending is ambiguous, but I always thought we were supposed to think she becomes a hooker.

Capote hated the movie. In his version, life isn’t accompanied by a soppy Henry Mancini soundtrack but by a vacuum of sorrow, failure and self-deceit. Critical Shopper has long made a study of whether Tiffany, the store, and Tiffany, the embedded romantic image in the mind of the consumer, might be just as different.

Over the last decade, Tiffany has been the victim of its own success, first building up its inexpensive silver lines, like the Return to Tiffany bracelets and necklaces, to attract younger customers, then raising the prices when the store wound up attracting too many younger customers, devaluing the Tiffany name. (Maybe it was the scene in “Legally Blonde” with Elle Woods wearing nothing but a bikini and her Tiffany heart jewelry that pushed the store over the edge.)

Facing competition from high-end jewelers — not to mention the luxury designers getting into the jewelry business — Tiffany underwent something of a face-lift, both physical and ideological. The new message is bring on the bling.

Tiffany operates in more than 100 locations in 16 countries, but the celebrated Art Deco flagship is best for observing the human animal in its ritual courtship dance. On a recent weekend afternoon, the second floor was crowded with couples cautiously circling the counters of engagement rings. To me, they all looked too young to be getting married; some of the men were wearing varsity letter jackets.

I credit the store for its gentle displays here: the most inexpensive rings — prices start at $1,090 for a ring with a round .18 carat diamond — seem to be presented in the clearest, brightest lights. This is not intended to make these rings seem bigger; rather, it makes them appear to be just as important as the icebergs down the counter — say, the round 10.5 carat diamond ring that sells for $1.12 million.

The face-lift has entailed refreshing the wood paneling and adding some modern touches, like a wide staircase between the third and fourth floors, over which hangs a brushed-steel and crystal chandelier. Some new jewelry lines are now offered, like the pieces by Frank Gehry, hired by Tiffany in 2005, but those I found — squiggly bracelets, metal mesh bracelets and earrings studded randomly with pearls — would appeal to an artier crowd than Tiffany attracts.

There is some inexpensive silver jewelry, like that at the Charm Bar on the third floor. But the charms for the choose-it-yourself bracelets are limited to letters and Tiffany Roman numerals, which may explain why the place was deserted. The only other charm bracelets are prefabricated versions with dogs and golf clubs. It seems pointless to offer charm bracelets with such a tantalizing lack of variety.

On the third floor, I tried on some Paloma Picasso pearl earrings ($1,250) and a Cruella DeVille-esque pearl and black onyx necklace (also $1,250) and engaged in a lengthy conversation with the saleswoman about feeling empowered in one’s 40s. (Translation: you can wear pearls and not necessarily look like the elder Barbara Bush.)

The staff members are, as you would expect, unremittingly polite. On the fourth floor, I watched a young woman with a rumpled Bloomingdale’s bag pore over silver key chains for half an hour with a patient clerk. “No, he doesn’t have this many keys,” she said, passing over one, her chin in her hand. “We could engrave this one,” the clerk offered, showing her another.

While Tiffany has sold millions of diamond engagement rings, many of its customers would pay a surcharge for the blue box because it represents trust and quality. What most people want when they celebrate their marriage is the manufacture of perfect memories, and for them the blue box is as essential a part of the wedding tradition as a white veil. In the marriages I’ve observed that began with a blue box, there is a kind of assurance that buying your ring at Tiffany inures you from bad marital juju, as if the union were protected by the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. But if things don’t work out, those kinds of expectations in marriage make for the bitterest of ends.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve visited Tiffany possibly a dozen times and put the Web site through its paces. I registered there when I got married, and on that count, it fared beautifully. When my china pattern was to be discontinued, the company sent me three letters asking if I wanted to buy more before it was no longer available. But the best test, I thought, would be to see if an earring I left there for repair in 2002 was still at the store.

So much time had passed that Tiffany’s customer service department has moved to another floor. It had been so long that people I know have met, gotten engaged (with that little blue box), married, had a child and already divorced. It had been so long that I had lost all the paperwork stating my ownership of the earring.

On a Sunday afternoon last month, I sat waiting in the confessional-like carrels of the service department, expecting to be told that the small Schlumberger turquoise earring (a gift) had long been remanded to the bad, anonymous place where all unclaimed repaired earrings go. But after five minutes of gentle tapping at her computer, the attendant summoned me. It had been sent to an outlying warehouse, but they had it.

“This time, why don’t we send it to you?” she said. “I think we’d better not wait for you to come pick it up again.” And so they did, free of charge. A happy movie ending, to be sure.

Now, if only I can find the other earring.

*************************************************************************************

• Tiffany & Company 727 Fifth Avenue (57th Street); (212) 755-8000
• ATMOSPHERE: Depending on the day, either bank-vault quiet or carnival-esque. Between 5 p.m. and closing on Valentine’s Day is “a real hoot,” one clerk said. “The men come in sweating and screaming, ‘Do you have anything heart-shaped?’ ”
• SERVICE: Reliable and gentle.
• PRICES: A silver chain for a Tiffany charm, $50; 64-carat pear-shaped diamond earrings, $6.5 million.
• OVERHEARD CONVERSATION: “Honey, I love you a lot, but not three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth.”

An Astronaut's Life In Free Fall

NY TIMES: From Spaceflight to Attempted Murder Charge
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: February 7, 2007

Like most of today’s astronauts, Lisa Marie Nowak worked in relative obscurity — even last July, when she took the spaceflight that she had spent 10 years at NASA hoping for.

She is famous now, the smiling image of her in astronaut gear a sharp contrast with her police mugshot, a woman with wild hair wearing an expression of personal devastation.

She is charged with the attempted murder of a woman she believed to be her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. Police officials say she drove 900 miles to Florida from Texas, wearing a diaper so she would not have to stop for rest breaks. In Orlando, they say, she confronted her rival in a parking lot, attacking her with pepper spray.

Captain Nowak was in disguise at the time, wearing a wig, the police said. She had with her a compressed air pistol, a steel mallet, a knife, pepper spray, four feet of rubber tubing, latex gloves and garbage bags.

Those who know her say they are mystified. “I was in shock,” said Dennis Alloy, 43, of Tysons Corner, Va., a friend and high school classmate. “When I knew her, I couldn’t imagine an evil bone in her body.”

Many inside and outside the space agency are wondering how the problems of Captain Nowak, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1985 and served in the Navy before joining National Aeronautics and Space Administration, were not detected before this. Many are also wondering whether the “Right Stuff” image of astronauts has been tarnished, or if that image somehow confused technical excellence with emotional stability.

“Like any other people, they’re human,” said George Abbey, director of the Johnson Space Center when Commander Nowak was selected for the astronaut corps, who recalled her as “an outstanding candidate.”

Captain Nowak, 43, was arrested at 4 a.m. Monday at Orlando International Airport, the police said, after attacking the other woman, Capt. Colleen Shipman of the Air Force.

According to the police report, by Detective William C. Becton, Captain Nowak said that she had not intended to harm Captain Shipman and that she believed that “this was the only time she was going to be able to speak” with her. The compressed air pistol she carried “was going to be used to entice Ms. Shipman to talk with her,” according to the report.

Detective Becton wrote, “When I asked Mrs. Nowak if she thought the pepper spray was going to help her speak with Ms. Shipman, she replied, ‘That was stupid.’ ”

According to the police report, Captain Nowak said she saw Captain Shipman, 30, as a rival for the affection of Cmdr. William A. Oefelein, a fellow astronaut. She told the police that she and Commander Oefelein, whose NASA nickname is Billy-O, had “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.” Commander Oefelein, 41, is divorced and has two children.

Tuesday was a day of confusion and quickly shifting events. Captain Nowak, a married mother of three, was brought before a judge for arraignment at 8:30 a.m. Two of her fellow astronauts — the chief of NASA’s astronaut office, Col. Steven W. Lindsey of the Air Force, and Capt. Christopher J. Ferguson of the Navy — were there to offer support.

The judge had agreed to release Captain Nowak on $15,000 bond on charges of kidnapping and battery, but the police added a charge of attempted murder, and bail was increased to $25,000.

Captain Shipman is seeking a protective order against Captain Nowak, according to documents posted on the Web site of The Orlando Sentinel, which broke the story Monday night.

In Orlando at the end of the day, Captain Nowak posted bail and later in the evening was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet so her movements could be monitored after her return to Houston.

“She’s is going home,” said her lawyer , Donald Lykkebak.

Captain Nowak and her husband, Richard, a flight controller for the International Space Station, live with their children in a two-story brick-and-glass home in Houston.

Few neighbors there wanted to talk about the case, but one, who asked that his name not be used, said the couple had an argument in November with raised voices and the sound of breaking china.

No one was home on Tuesday.

A statement from the family last night on the Sentinel Web site said that the Nowaks had been married for 19 years but that Captain Nowak and her husband “had separated a few weeks ago.”

Earlier in the day, Michael Coats, the director of the Johnson Space Center, said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened by this tragic event. The charges against Lisa Nowak are serious ones that must be decided by the judicial system.”

Mr. Coats said Captain Nowak was “officially on 30-day leave and has been removed from flight status and all mission-related activities.”

How could a person involved in such a case rise within the space agency, which is famous for its psychological screening of astronaut candidates?

Nick Kanas, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied astronaut psychology, said that the screening occurs only at the very beginning of the process and that once an astronaut has gotten through the front door, the formal psychological evaluations give way to evaluation of job performance. Psychological counseling is available but not mandatory, he said.

“We can screen out very serious stuff, but we can’t always predict the future,” Professor Kanas said, and “people change over time.”

Captain Nowak first came to the space program in April 1996 and finally flew aboard the space shuttle in July 2006.

During the 13-day flight of the shuttle Discovery, which was launched on July 4 of last year, she operated the robot arm during spacewalks with her crewmate Stephanie D. Wilson, earning them the shared nickname Robo Chicks.

As an astronaut she performed roles including capcom, the astronaut who communicates with orbiting space station crews.

Professor Kanas said that most astronauts went through the experience of finally reaching space and came out well but that “for some it’s very difficult to adjust” to seeing the abrupt end of something they have worked so hard to achieve.

“These people are extremely well-suited, by personality and training, to deal with the stresses of being in space,” Professor Kanas said. But, he added, “that doesn’t mean that they’re not vulnerable to emotional problems, or problems in their relationships.”

Today’s astronauts find themselves in a world much less glamorous than the original crews. While the Mercury Seven raced Corvettes, today’s family-oriented fliers are likelier to tool around in minivans. They spend much more time in suburbia than in orbit, and there are no more ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes.

Some former officials of the space program said that romantic thoughts and even love triangles were not unknown to the program but that it was up to management to watch carefully and intervene.

Mr. Abbey, the former Johnson Space Center director, said, “You’ve got some hard-charging people, and you need to manage them.” Problems like this “don’t happen overnight,” and so “you have to be sensitive to what your people are doing.”

Now and then on his watch, he recalled, “I stepped in, and people weren’t happy about it,” he recalled, but it was important to tell them that “what you’re doing is not a personal thing for you — it’s affecting a lot of people around you, and affecting your performance.”

Christopher Kraft, NASA’s original flight director, said he was surprised. If someone was slipping toward such trouble, Mr. Kraft said, “your fellow crew members would pick that up.”

Captain Nowak’s use of a diaper on the long drive to Florida is no mystery to astronauts. Mike Mullane, a retired astronaut, said many astronauts wear a device — “we call them urine collection devices” — during launching, landing and spacewalks, “when you’re in a pressure suit and cannot get to a toilet.”

Other mysteries in the case could be more persistent. Michael Stone, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, said he was struck by the thoroughness of Captain Nowak’s preparation, which he said was generally “a guy thing.”

“It’s extraordinarily rare for a woman to do this type of a crime,” Professor Stone said. He said the more customary response was to try to kill the object of affection, as Jean Harris shot Herman Tarnower in 1980. “This is really close to unique in the annals of female crime,” he said.

Ralph Blumenthal, Rachel Mosteller and Maureen Balleza contributed from Houston, Melody Simmons from Baltimore, Sonia Chopra from Orlando, and Stefano Coledan from Cape Canaveral.

Way To Ruin It For The Rest Of Us, Dude

Here's a guy who bought a commercial during his girlfriend's favorite TV show in order to propose to her. I've heard he started a website about the idea (originally, the ad was going to air during the Super Bowl) sometime beforehand, and raised money from various donors. You can see the commercial, cut together with her reaction.

I've got mixed feelings about it. It's hard not to be a little impressed with such a grand gesture, but turning his relationship into a reality show pilot (figuratively speaking), or his proposal into a Candid Camera segment makes me question who he's really doing this for.

Thanks to iFilm for the clip - I think.

Amazon Joins The Downloading Fray

VARIETY: Amazon to challenge Wal-Mart
Giants face off in vid biz
By BEN FRITZ
Posted: Tue., Feb. 6, 2007, 9:55am PT

The video download biz is getting a big shakeup courtesy of two of the country's biggest DVD retailers.

With Wal-Mart -- which sells about 40% of the country's DVDs -- entering the arena Tuesday, existing players face a monster competitor whose purchasing powers in homevideo could give it a leg up in the digital space, where insiders say it will be able to wrangle similar terms.

But Amazon.com, which launched its videostore in October, is trying to stay one step ahead of its new competitor. The e-tailer will today start a test of a partnership with TiVo that will allow users of the digital video recorder to watch downloaded movies and series on their TVs.

Since it's the first physical retailer to start selling digital downloads, Wal-Mart should gain an advantage from its sheer size (other physical DVD retailers have complained about its leverage for years).

Online competitors may face a disadvantage. Most notably, several sources confirmed that in order to sign its recent deal with Paramount, Apple had to agree to pay more for digital copies of library titles than bricks-and-mortar retailers do. That presents a very lucrative option to studios, which can get more money from Apple without having to manufacture and ship a DVD.

That's why at least some of the other majors, along with indies like MGM and Lionsgate that have deep catalogs, are expected to follow Par's lead and start selling library titles on iTunes soon.

Apple still wants better terms for new releases than retailers get for DVDs, however, which is why most studios are reluctant to put new movies on iTunes. Only Disney, in which Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the largest investor, has agreed.

Though Amazon is ahead for the moment, Wal-Mart is looking at various digital solutions for moving downloads to the TV and also has plans to launch the capability to burn DVDs later this year, as do other e-tailers. But for now, it's counting on its breadth of content, retail promotions and the quality of its service to help it stand out.

Wal-Mart also has the key advantage, thanks to its existing homevideo relationships, that it's the only vidstore to offer download-to-own movies from every major studio.

The company already has an online musicstore, which has done very poorly against iTunes. Wal-Mart is not only aiming to do better with video but to make it part of a broadly integrated digital and retail solution.

"Over time, it will evolve into a multiformat video experience in stores and online where the consumer can discover content and get it in whatever format they wish, whether download, DVD or a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc," said Kevin Swint, head of digital media for Wal-Mart.com.

Company is considering ways to highlight movie download availability in stores. It plans to repeat a promotion it offered earlier this year in which consumers who bought the "Superman Returns" DVD got to download the movie for just a few dollars. It is also offering very competitive prices. While all library titles on iTunes cost $9.99, Wal-Mart has some for as cheap as $7.50. Most new releases are priced at $14.88, 11¢ cheaper than the standard price on iTunes.

Downloads work on Windows PCs and portable devices but not on iPods.

For its part, Amazon will let Unbox buyers move their TV and movie downloads to their TiVo with a single click for the same price.

"It's no secret that people like to watch video, especially movies on their TV, and we're very happy to now give them an option," said Roy Price, product manager for Unbox.

Microsoft is currently the only moviestore to give users a simple way to watch downloads on their TV, via the Xbox 360, and has seen higher-than-expected demand. Amazon is hoping that its Unbox service, which hasn't gotten much traction since launching in October, will get a leg up by giving TiVo owners a simple way to watch downloads on the TV.

Service will only work with owners of TiVo series 2 or 3 standalone boxes, a relatively small market of fewer than 1.6 million consumers as of Oct. 31.

The inability to watch downloads on a TV is the No. 1 complaint of most consumers, industryites say. Amazon, which has a much wider selection of movies and TV shows than Microsoft's Xbox Live, will surely tout its early solution to that problem.

Deal could be more beneficial for TiVo, which is looking for added features to offer buyers of its standalone DVR, on which company makes significantly more money than through partnerships such as one soon to launch with Comcast. Though users won't be able to access Unbox directly through their TiVos yet, those who download a movie or TV show at Amazon.com will see it automatically show up on their TiVo boxes along with recorded TV shows.

TiVo previously had a deal to test Internet video-on-demand with Netflix, but that partnership was eventually canceled. Netflix now lets its subscribers stream movies on their computer but not download them.

Wal-Mart Moves Into Video Downloads

NY TIMES: Wal - Mart Launches Video Download Service
By REUTERS
Published: February 7, 2007
Filed at 3:01 a.m. ET

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc., already the nation's top seller of DVDs, said Tuesday that it has become the first major retailer to offer a digital download service that will feature movies from all the major studios.

The product, in beta, allows consumers to choose from more than 3,000 movie and television titles and download them to personal computers usually at a cost less than that of iTunes, the Apple Inc. online store that began selling video downloads more than a year ago.

The business of delivering popular video content on-demand over the Internet is a small but growing one, and becoming increasingly competitive and complicated, with such players as Netflix, CinemaNow and Movielink offering titles with differing rules attached, some for rent and some for sale.

The business got even more competitive Tuesday when Amazon.com said its service, Unbox, has teamed with TiVo Inc. so that downloaded movies can be viewed on TV screens.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Internet video download business is expected to be worth $3.7 billion in annual revenue in 2010, when DVD rentals and sales as a business will amount to about $29.5 billion.

While Amazon.com launched Unbox without movies from the Walt Disney Co., and iTunes offers only movies from Disney and Paramount, Wal-Mart boasts Disney and Pixar, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros. Pictures, Lionsgate and MGM, as well as TV shows from Fox, Fox Reality, 20th Century Fox Television Classics, Comedy Central, VH1, MTV, Nickelodeon, the CW, Warner Bros. and more. Wal-Mart initially will not offer shows from ABC, CBS or NBC.

The company is selling TV episodes for $1.96 and movies, depending on how new they are, at price points ranging from $7.50 to $19.88.

Wal-Mart also said it will bundle some titles, allowing consumers to buy the ``Superman Returns'' DVD and the digital download for a ``small additional price.''

According to estimates, Wal-Mart sells about 40 percent of all DVDs in the country. The company reportedly objected when iTunes began selling movie downloads, worried it might cut into its own DVD business.

Disney CEO Robert Iger disputed such reports, and Wal-Mart said Tuesday that many of its movie downloads will be made available the same day the DVD is released. Oscar-nominated ''The Departed'' and ``Babel'' will be ready for download February 13 and February 20, respectively.

``With thousands of movie and TV titles now available for download, coupled with the strength of our successful physical DVD business, this is an unprecedented offering of video content, features and capabilities currently unmatched in the market,'' said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart divisional merchandise manager for digital media.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Recommended Viewing: The Steel Helmet (1951)

It's been a while since I've seen this, but I originally checked it out because it's referred to in Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom, and wound up really liking it.

I remember it as being a friendship story between a U.S. soldier and young boy (dubbed "Short Round", just like the Temple Of Doom character) during the Korean War. It's directed by Sam Fuller, who's made other vivid films like Shock Corridor and The Big Red One. His films can be brash and lurid, but I like the grit of his war pictures - I think his own experiences as a war correspondent gives them a verisimilitude that most contemporary takes lack.

Unfortunately, it's not available on DVD yet - it's out there on VHS, so hopefully you can see it on cable, or rent it at a really good video store (you know the kind - the ones that have sections of titles sorted by director). It's worth the effort!

The Long And Litigious Road

VARIETY: Apple, Beatles resolve dispute
Trademark battle comes to an end
By PHIL GALLO
Posted: Mon., Feb. 5, 2007, 9:00am PT

After nearly two decades of discord, the Beatles and Apple computers are singing the same song: "We Can Work It Out."

Apple Corps, the record company the Beatles founded in 1968, and Apple, the Cupertino computer company, reached an accord that gives the latter ownership of the name and the apple logo.

Apple will license certain trademarks back to Apple Corps. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Deal naturally opens the door to make Beatles music -- the holy grail of pop -- available via Apple's online iTunes store. While members of the Beatles have OK'd the sale of solo work, the Beatles catalog has remained offline.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement, "It has been painful being at odds with (the Beatles) over these trademarks." The resolution, he said, "should remove the potential of further disagreements."

Jobs had stirred the pot regarding a resolution to the conflict when he used the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album cover and played "Lovely Rita" during the launch of the iPhone.

Now, Beatles fans worldwide may well read further into Jobs statement "Let the downloading begin."

But the Fab Four decisionmakers -- Paul McCartney; Ringo Starr; Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon; and the estate of George Harrison -- have been notoriously gun-shy about embracing new technology.

When compact discs were introduced to replace vinyl records, the Beatles were slow to come to the table. EMI, which releases the Beatles recordings, issued the British editions of the albums in blocks beginning in 1987, standardizing the catalog. In 2004, Capitol issued the first four American releases as a box set; last year, it issued the second block of four.

Since the band's breakup in 1970, there have been only about 20 Beatles releases of their recordings from the 1960s; by contrast, RCA and BMG have released more than 200 Elvis Presley packages since his death in 1977.

Evidence of the Beatles' extraordinary power at retail: In 2000, the hits compilation 'Beatles 1" performed so well that it was credited with salvaging the year from disaster.

Agreement replaces a 1991 pact between the two companies and puts an end to the trademark lawsuit Apple Corps filed against Apple in 2003 in London.

The two have had a tenuous relationship over the use of the apple logo in relationship to music commerce.

Apple Corps filed the suit, claiming the Apple iTunes store violated the 1991 deal. A court in London ruled in favor of Apple in May, and Apple Corps' appeal was scheduled to be heard later this month.

During the trial, Apple Corps manager Neil Aspinall disclosed that the catalog was being remastered.

In a statement issued Monday, he said, "The years ahead are going to be very exciting times for us. We ... look forward to many years of peaceful cooperation with (Apple)."

Apple's stock price closed Monday at $83.80, down 81¢.

What Might Have Been

A Night At The Museum, written by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon, based on the book by Milan Trenc; directed by Shawn Levy.

So many effect-laden stories fixate on spectacle and current sensations, it's refreshing to see a film that attempts to extoll the wonders of exploring the past. While many of these ideas (visually and otherwise) have been examined in other movies - Jumanji, Jurassic Park, and The Indian In The Cupbord are among the many echoed here - it's still a thrill to see history literally come alive.

It's the story of New Yorker Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), a divorced dad who's still trying to find his direction in life. His son Nick (Jake Cherry) loves him dearly, but is starting to lose patience - Don, the new dad, may be a dreamless dork, but his stability is beginning to look appealing. Much to Larry's dismay, Nick now understands the concept of a "fallback" plan, since playing hockey is losing its appeal. Larry's current job is in the past tense, and he needs a new one - and fast - before he loses his apartment and his family's confidence.

Desparate, he takes a job as a night watchman for the local museum - one of those cavernous, east-coast style museums that seems to contain everything. The curator (Ricky Gervias in full-throttle officiousness) is downsizing the security staff, and they need one man to do the job of three (Bill Cobbs, Dick Van Dyke, and Mickey Rooney). Why not? Larry doesn't even bother to read the instructions that his predecessors left for him. He can hang onto his lease, and it seems harmless enough.

Except, of course, it isn't. Thanks to a magical Egyptian tablet, the entire collection comes to life at sundown - from the enormous Tyrannosaurus skeleton down to the tiniest figurines in the dioramas. Everyone's dying to get out of their glass cases, so Larry discovers he's got to play substitute teacher to a jungle's worth of wild animals (including the ubitquitous mischevious monkey), explorers, soldiers, cowboys, cavemen, and other various and sundry squabbling figures from history. Like us, the figurines and statues can be prejudiced against their fellows, isolated in their cases from each other, and sometimes themselves. It's affecting to see Sacagewea sealed behind glass, yearning for a larger world.

The first night is a complete disaster, and the instructions are destroyed. Larry sticks to his guns, though, mainly for his son - cramming his head with history from the library and internet, gradually learning how to connect with his charges. It's not without mistakes along the way - the tablet has a quasi-vampiric hold over the inhabitants; if they remain outside when the sun rises, they crumble to dust, lost forever. Along these lines, the tablet also has had a Coccoon-like rejuvenating effect on the elderly guards - this wrinkle is what drives the third act's Time Bandits-style uprising.

Larry discovers that he does have the spark of greatness within him, and ultimately helps to protect the museum and its inhabitants from the forces of evil and selfishness. The action sequences are fine, but it's genuinely touching to have Teddy Roosevelt tell you that you have what it takes. Who wouldn't want that?

This is a terrific, inspiring concept, but unfortunately the script isn't up to delivering on its full potential. There's plenty of great plot elements and some nice heartfelt moments, but the order and proportions seem off. The internal logic of the story isn't thought through carefully - characters have difficulty communicating when it's necessary (as with Attila The Hun), while others are not only fluent, but become translators in other instances (as with the Egyptian king). Additionally, the magic tablet can be conveniently turned off and on at will; and as with other story elements, abilites are added to the tablet as they become useful. Little Nick's future (as a hockey player or otherwise) falls to the wayside, as well as the fate of Larry's tenuous bond with his ex-wife. There's some huge missed opportunities as well - a friend of mine pointed out that you could bring any toy, stuffed animal or figure to the museum, and once they crossed the threshold, they too would come to life at night.

Young children will be thrilled by the set pieces (I know I would've loved this film when I was ten or so), but with a little more thought, this film could've been amazing, treating our inner adults as well as our inner children. And that's truly a shame.

Spaceship Porn

The animation could be better, but it's the thought that counts! I found this on the "i like toys" blog, and tracked it back to YouTube so I could post it myself.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there's a whole website - spacebattles.com - with clip after clip of this sort of thing! Hilarious.

BSG wins these days. Thirty years ago, who'd have thought that'd be the case? Weird.

Learn to Speak Body: Tape 5

Another funny video, with the guy from "Deere John" in it. Most enjoyable!

Deere John

A funny short film. To say more would be wrong. Check it out!

The Long, Tangled Road Of Twice Upon A Time

The latest issue of Animation Blast (#9) has a terrific in-depth article by Taylor Jessen about one of my favorite animated films, Twice Upon A Time. Pick up a copy and check it out!

There's also a great appreciation of the film that he wrote for its twentieth anniversary in 2004. I couldn't have said it better myself:

To a twelve-year-old, the means of fetishizing Twice Upon a Time was simple: They were animated characters. They were swearing. Cartoons simply did not do such things. That's why you stayed up late to watch Heavy Metal, in case you watched it again recently and wondered what in hell you ever saw in it. It's also why ten-year-olds want to rent The Matrix. Nothing really changes; all these films share one totem, one solemn pilaster, one worshipful pose. To the 'tweener, the too-young-for-admittance, they elicit the magic sentence: I am not supposed to be watching this.

Ironically, I prefer the saltier PG version of the film (which none of the filmmakers like at all). I think the language is a funny contrast to the expectations that the medium holds - or at least, did hold in 1984, when I saw a videotaped copy of one of the HBO broadcasts. I don't know if the film would ever be a blockbuster, but I do think it was way ahead of its time in terms of its sensibilities - remember, this was long before South Park, or The Simpsons, or anything on Cartoon Network or Adult Swim. Features like The Secret Of NIMH, The Last Unicorn, and The Fox And The Hound were more the norm.

I'd love to see a Criterion Collection version of this film, with commentary, cut songs and footage, art galleries, and a great DVD transfer of both versions! There's really nothing else in animation like it, and I'd love to see it preserved properly. If you agree, drop Jon Mulvaney a line and politely pester him about it!

This Summer, The End Of The Harry Potter Series

NY TIMES: Harry Potter’s Final Act Is Set for July 21
By MOTOKO RICH and JULIE BOSMAN
Published: February 1, 2007

J. K. Rowling, the author of the record-setting Harry Potter series, announced today that the seventh — and last — book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will be published on July 21.

That will be just eight days after the release of the film version of the fifth volume in the series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” portending a huge summer for fans of the young wizard.

Millions of fans around the world are fiercely anticipating this latest installment. But the end of the series, in which Ms. Rowling has hinted she may kill off one of the main characters, comes as a bittersweet finale not only for readers but also for the publishing companies, booksellers and licensees that have cashed in on the international phenomenon since it began more than nine years ago with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It is hard to imagine how the publishing industry will ever replace the sensation that spawned midnight parties and all-night lines to get the books the moment they went on sale. When “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth in the series, was published in July 2005, it sold 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.

For this final installment, the cover price will rise to $34.99, compared to $29.99 for the previous volume, although many retailers are offering substantial discounts, often as high as 40 percent.

Scholastic, Ms. Rowling’s American publisher, which represents about 37 percent of Harry’s global books in print, is clearly on the hot seat as it prepares for life after the boy magician. “It’s the question that everybody asks about,” said Frederick Searby at J. P. Morgan, an equity analyst who follows Scholastic’s stock. “What happens to Scholastic after Harry Potter?”

On its own, a new Harry Potter title has the power to juice up sales significantly, not just at Scholastic, but throughout the industry. On the London Stock Exchange, the announcement of the new book’s publication date by Bloomsbury, Ms. Rowling’s British publisher, sent its shares up 2.2 percent. In New York trading, the shares of Scholastic rose about 1 percent in the morning but fell back by afternoon. In a year without Harry, his absence becomes an excuse for falling sales.

In the fiscal year ending May 31, 2005, one in which Scholastic did not publish a new hardcover Harry title, for example, sales in its children’s book publishing division dropped 15 percent to $1.15 billion from $1.36 billion. Last year, several bookstore chains, including Barnes & Noble and Borders, mentioned the lack of a Harry Potter hardcover as a reason for declining sales in the second quarter.

Scholastic officials readily admit that there is no one book or series waiting in the wings to succeed the Harry Potter series, which has 120 million copies in print in the U.S. and 325 million worldwide. “If I suggested that I had in the pipeline the one thing that is going to replace what Harry has been to the company, that would be arrogant and ill-informed,” said Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic’s trade and book fairs division. Instead, she said, the company had a number of projects that it believed could generate a sizable chunk of revenue.

Richard Robinson, the company’s chairman and chief executive, is quick to emphasize that despite the outsize attention that Ms. Rowling and her series attracts, it is not the pillar upholding the company. He said that even in a record year like 2005, when sales of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” generated about $175 million in revenues, that was about 13 percent of the company’s book sales and only 8 percent of Scholastic’s total revenues, which include income from educational publishing, children’s television programming, DVD’s, computer software and its international division.

He pointed out that pundits had questioned Scholastic’s survival after the decline of other wildly successful series from the publisher, like Goosebumps and The Babysitters Club. Each of those series have more books in print than all of the Harry Potter books combined. Coming projects include a new series by Ann Martin, author of “The Babysitters Club” titles, more books from Cornelia Funke, the best-selling German fantasy writer and a new sort of junior chick-lit series for 9 and 10-year old girls called “Candy Apple.”

When the company announced first quarter results in September, analysts noted that while sales in the book unit were down by half because of the absence of a new Harry Potter title this year, sales of other books were up 19 percent.

Ms. Holton added that the publication of the last Harry book does not signal the death of the series. “I don’t think there is an end to the Harry Potter franchise,” she said, because new generations of readers will continue to discover the books. Currently, she said, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” sells about 500,000 copies a year.

Scholastic has signed a multi-book contract with Meg Cabot, the author of "The Princess Diaries" and "All-American Girl," Ms. Holton said on Thursday. Ms. Cabot is writing a series for younger girls that will be introduced in spring of 2008.

“Scholastic has dodged the big bullet twice,” said Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University and an analyst for the Book Industry Study Group, which produces “Book Industry Trends,” an annual study of book sales. “I think the company is essentially sound and will continue to be successful,” he added. “But they’re just not going to have that big cash flow and may have to go out into the marketplace and pay a lot of money to replace” Ms. Rowling.

In the years following the publication of the last Harry Potter title, Mr. Greco predicts that growth in revenues in children’s books will decline from double-digits in Harry years to the low single digits.

Stephen Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said that while Harry had provided a strong boost to sales, he was not concerned about the end of the franchise. Like Ms. Holton, he said, “it will be with us for our entire lifetime and beyond.” What’s more, he said, even though sales of a new Harry title were significant in the month they came out, over all, they represented less than 1 per cent of total annual sales.

And it may be that some booksellers never made that much profit from Harry Potter anyway. “If we sell the book at 40 percent off, I don’t think we’re making that much money,” Mr. Riggio said.

Indeed, said Constance Sayre, principal of Market Partners International, a consultant to the publishing industry in New York, “The competing amongst the chain stores and the warehouse clubs for discount probably limited their profits enormously.”

And the end of the Harry Potter series is not the most pressing problem facing publishers of books for children and young adults; competition from other forms of entertainment is the real threat. “When you look now at an 8- or 10-year-old, they are truly online, they are IMing their friends, they are text-messaging, they have an iPod where they are watching and listening to music,” said Susan Miller, president of Mixed Media Group, which develops books, television shows and movies for children. “They have a lot of other ways to spend their time, media wise and, if you like to consume stories you can be watching something on the television. There are a lot of places for them to be entertained.”

Still, there’s always this possibility: Ms. Rowling could just write another series. “At some point she’ll come out of retirement and pull a Michael Jordan,” said Mr. Searby of J. P. Morgan.

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