News

July 22, 2011 - [ Digital Journal ]

Valley Stars Take Center Stage at Upcoming Valley Economic Alliance Gala
Leaders in Business, Entertainment, Education and Philanthropy Honored at San Fernando Valley's Most Prestigious Recognition Event

The San Fernando Valley's brightest stars will take center stage at the 14th annual Valley of the Stars Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony on Saturday, July 23, 2011 at the new world-class Valley Performing Arts Center on the campus of California State University, Northridge. Hosted by The Valley Economic Alliance (VEA), the region's premier economic development organization, the event will celebrate leadership in arts and entertainment, business, education and humanitarianism.

July 18, 2011 - [ TV Week ]

Food, Inc., which aired on PBS' "P.O.V." was nominated for 2 News & Documentary Emmy Awards. The categories are Outstanding Informational Programming and Best Documentary.

July 17, 2011 - [ Hollywood Reporter ]

Spanning 11 days, the 29th Annual Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival culminated with the announcement of its winners on Sunday.

Stephen Cone's The Wise Kids took home the Grand Jury Awards for outstanding U.S. dramatic feature film and outstanding screenwriting, while Andrew Haigh's Weekend won the Grand Jury Award for outstanding international dramatic feature film.

Thank You For Your Call won the jury award for outstanding documentary short film, I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone won the jury award for outstanding dramatic short film, and Habana Muda won the jury award for outstanding documentary feature film.

Nikohl Boosheri was named outstanding actress in a feature for her portrayal of Atafeh in Circumstance, while the entire cast of Private Romeo won the award for outstanding actor in a feature. Circumstance also won $5,000 and the audience award for outstanding first U.S. dramatic feature film.

July 13, 2011 - [ IndieWire.com ]

It looks like Steven Soderbergh is returning to the land of smart mainstream commercial filmmaking with Contagion (September 9), starring Matt Damon as an everyman whose wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) appears to be patient zero in a burgeoning killer bird flu virus sweeping the globe. It is transmitted by touch. Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, John Hawkes and Laurence Fishburne also star.

July 5, 2011 - [ Forbes ]

In a brief minute interview, first president of eBay and philanthropist Jeff Skoll shares his thoughts on early inspiration and the role of technology today in bettering our world.

What role did technology play in your life as you were growing up, and how do you perceive the intersection of technology and social change today?

Ever since I was a young engineer, I believed that technology could make the world a better place by empowering and connecting people and helping to improve lives.  This was the underlying power of eBay and I’ve since applied these lessons to my other organizations, including the Capricorn Investment Group, the Skoll Foundation, the Skoll Global Threats Fund and Participant Media.

July 1, 2011 - [ The Hollywood Reporter ]

The midweek launch is designed to build word-of-mouth.  

DreamWorks and Disney are moving up the release of The Help by two days, from Aug. 12 to Aug. 10. The switch means the film, based on Kathryn Stockett’s runaway best seller, will open on a Wednesday. By going out midweek, DreamWorks hopes to capitalize on strong word-of-mouth. 

DreamWorks has begun screening the film in earnest to various groups, and reports great reaction. The Help was directed by Tate Taylor, Stockett’s longtime friend, and stars Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Mike Vogel and Allison Janney.    

June 22, 2011 - [ The Orange County Register ]

Documentary filmmaker says his goal was to raise awareness about treatment of dolphins. And he did.

School's out and, like many parents, Vanessa and Tom Lewis of Fullerton are making plans to keep their two young sons busy this summer.

In July, as they have for the past several years, they'll head to San Diego to attend the Comic-Con convention. While there, they'll also squeeze in a little San Diego-area sightseeing, places like Balboa Park and a local maritime museum.

One San Diego place they won't hit this year — SeaWorld.

June 22, 2011 - [ San Jose Mercury News ]

Jeff Skoll has a business plan for making the world a better place.
 
Most people who might put forth such a plan would be laughed at as simplistic and Pollyannaish. But anyone inclined to laugh at Skoll should first take a glance at his résumé.
 
As eBay's (EBAY) first president, he wrote the business plan for the San Jose online auction company. As a philanthropist, Skoll, at age 46, has already given away a billion dollars. His film company, Participant Media, launched seven years ago, quickly garnered a reputation in Hollywood for producing well-respected movies with social messages that regularly garner Academy Award nominations. Meanwhile, he has created his own private wealth-management firm, Capricorn, which makes socially conscious investments in companies such as the manufacturer of installed water-free urinals.

June 18, 2011 - [ Los Angeles Times ]

The New York Times documentary is likely to hearten believers and leave skeptics unmoved. It's a picture of media in transition, and some inside the paper resent it.

In the new documentary film Page One: Inside the New York Times, we see media columnist David Carr attending lots of conferences on the future of newspapers. People talk intently about new platforms, worry about endangered advertising models, and parse the viability of "pay walls."

Something else goes on at these powwows. "It's kind of lonely and scary out there," Carr tells us. "It's a way to sort of gather around a campfire and say, 'We're all right aren't we? We're OK.' … 'Yeah, we're fine. We've got [conference] badges.'"

June 18, 2011 - [ IndieWire ]

If you’re expecting a prosaic documentary spotlighting a group of editors in ties sitting around a conference table, debating what’s worth putting on the front page of the country’s leading newspaper, you’re in for a surprise. Andrew Rossi’s vibrant film hones in on a handful of colorful figures on the Times staff in order to personalize the story and give it focus. By profiling them and their work he provides a razor-sharp picture of how a story is generated, reported, edited, and showcased in print.

He also deals with the larger issues facing not just the Times but every newspaper, including shrinking circulation and ad revenue, competition from online sources (many of which take their material from the Times and other old-media outlets), and the unpleasant reality of having to trim the staff and run a leaner operation.

June 17, 2011 - [ Oscars.org ]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is extending invitations to join the organization to 178 artists and executives who have distinguished themselves by their contributions to theatrical motion pictures. Those who accept the invitation will be the only additions in 2011 to the Academy's roster of members.

"These individuals are among the best filmmakers working in the industry today," said Academy President Tom Sherak. "Their talent and creativity have entertained moviegoers around the world, and I welcome each of them to our ranks."

June 17, 2011 - [ New York Daily ]

"PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES" -- 4 STARS

Reviewed by Joe Neumaier

Documentary about challenges faced by the title newspaper (1:36). R: Language. At the Film Center, Angelika. 

Admittedly, a documentary about the newspaper business will hit home in ink-stained offices. But director Andrew Rossi's deep-sourced "Page One" is ultimately about more than just this one outlet and the way personalities and principles fare when they come up against hard facts.

June 16, 2011 - [ Politico ]

It may have been the most meta media moment ever: a media reporter interviewing two other media reporters about their role in a documentary detailing their struggle to cover the financial peril threatening their own newspaper.

It kind of makes the eyes cross.

Yet there I was, quizzing New York Times media writers David Carr and Brian Stelter ahead of yesterday’s Washington premiere of Page One: Inside the New York Times about this very hall-of-mirrors effect. Shouldn’t a documentary designed to make people care about the future of journalism focus more on, I don’t know, the Baghdad bureau?

June 16, 2011 - [ Gothamist ]

Two years ago the dramatic decline in advertising revenue and the ascent of online media combined to create a financial maelstrom that brought down one regional newspaper after another. Across the board, the situation for newspapers was so dire that the inconceivable began to seem highly plausible: That the New York Times might actually fold. Criticizing the Times establishment is a fun and important American pastime, but with so many other newspapers crumbling, the Times has increasingly become the nation's most robust and important investigative news organization. But in 2009 the Times was acutely imperiled, and filmmaker Andrew Rossi (Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven) just so happened to be inside its costly new offices with the cameras rolling.

June 16, 2011 - [ The Atlantic ]

The new documentary offers a hopeful portrait of an American institution struggling in a time of change and difficulty
 
An explanation: Participant Media, a major backer of the new documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, has a partnership with PublicAffairs to publish books about Participant's documentaries (Waiting for Superman and Food, Inc., among others). These books are intended to extend the reach of the films through informed essays on the films' subjects. Jeffrey Skoll, founder and chairman of Participant Media, explains the company's purpose this way: "With each film, we create social action and advocacy programs that highlight the issues that resonate in the films and provide ways to transform the impact of the media experience into individual and community action."

June 15, 2011 - [ TakePart ]

The New York Times always seems to have a star of the moment. For the last few weeks, the role has been played by Bill Keller, who announced he would step down as executive editor and lit up the Internet with a screed against Twitter. With Friday's release of Page One, the attention will no doubt shift to David Carr, who seems just as comfortable being the story as he does reporting it. But at a discussion about the film last night at the TimesCenter, even with Keller and Carr on stage, the star of the panel was a reporter who hasn't worked for the Times in more than 40 years: Gay Talese.

Talese got his start as a copyboy at the Times in 1953. Sixteen years later, he published the definitive book on the place, The Kingdom and the Tower. And last night, with his trademark pocket square perfectly aligned, Talese brought that institutional wisdom to bear.

June 14, 2011 - [ The Nation ]

It may turn out to be one of the most acclaimed and popular documentaries of the year, but Andrew Rossi never intended to produce and direct the film, opening this Friday, Page One: Inside the New York Times.

As he tells it, Rossi was actually developing another project for HBO on Web 2.0 and social media, "and everyone kept on saying that on the road to digital future there would be several major dead bodies on the side of the road." When a controversial (and almost laughable) article by Michael Hirshorn predicted the death of the New York Times—in just months—Rossi was filming a dinner party of web entrepreneurs and investors and, he told me this week, there "seemed to be this glee people were taking in the potential demise of the Times."

June 14, 2011 - [ NYMag.com ]

Page One: Inside the New York Times paints the Times’ media section as a testosterone-driven machine composed of Bruce Headlam, David Carr, and Brian Stelter — a sort of nerd Hangover trio. At a paper-sponsored screening of the film, we talked to them and director Andrew Rossi about how appearing in front of the cameras affected their relationships.

"The first time I met David, he told my wife, Kate, and I that he had been a drug addict and that he was going to write a book, Night of the Gun, about his textured life, quote unquote, then he asked us if we wanted to get a drink across the street." Somehow Rossi thought he heard, "Do you want to come up to my hotel room and smoke some crack?" Yipes. "I don't know why I interpreted it as that, but I basically looked at my wife, and I said, 'What do you want to do here?' And she heard it correctly, so she said, 'Let's go.' And then of course we had a drink at the bar and David had a Diet Coke. A friendship was born."

June 13, 2011 - [ Vanity Fair ]

The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese’s 1969 masterwork describing the inner workings of The New York Times, opens with this description: “Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world,
the imperfections in people and places.”

At the June 9 screening of Page One, a documentary about The New York Times, hosted by Talese, very few attendees could see any warts on the film, least of all Talese himself. The film’s director, Andrew Rossi, had spent a year following reporters and editors from the Times’s media desk. Rossi uses them to examine the financial pressures plaguing newspapers and the changing landscape of news coverage. He shows scenes of layoffs and describes the Times’s partnership with Wikileaks. Rossi was basking in praise, some of the most effusive coming from Talese, who had called Rossi minutes after first watching the film (Talese had been given a copy some time ago) and offered to help support it.

June 10, 2011 - [ Screen Daily ]

Sarah Cooper vows to write more hardhitting stories after watching Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times at Sheffield Doc/Fest.

I came away inspired to be a better journalist after watching Andrew Rossi’s fascinating documentary Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times in Sheffield last night.

Rossi spent a year (2010) following the media desk at the NYT as they battled to keep doing their jobs amidst the turmoil facing the newspaper industry – declines in advertising, job cuts and the raging debate between new and old media – covering stories from WikiLeaks to The White House (we cover Working Title to the Weinsteins – just as important).