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Recession Kills SpongeBob
3:50AM Hamilton Nolan | In your inexorable Thursday US media column: Nickelodeon magazine folds, newspapers face threats from within and without, Glenn Beck is allegedly a superstar, and the answer to a question you didn’t know you had: More »
Flotsam & Jetsam
Viacom Has 22 Reasons Not To Pay You
5:02AM Hamilton Nolan | And we thought Australian media companies defied logic. In March, US blog Gawker revealed “Invoiceworks,” Viacom’s Kafkaesque new system for paying (or not!) its freelancers. How bad is it? We present to you, “22 Invoice Rejections at Once”: More »
‘Bromance’ Crisis Averted in Viacom, Time Warner Settlement
4:10AM STV | After Viacom went blazingly public Wednesday with its threat of an MTV/Comedy Central/Nickelodeon blackout on Time Warner Cable, an 11th-hour truce settled the matter just in time for 2009. More »
SpongeBob on Strike: Viacom Threatens to Pull 19 Channels From Time Warner
3:14AM STV | Ensnared in a vicious battle over 23 cents per customer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Daily Show, South Park and the rest of Viacom’s cable offerings may vanish tonight for 13 million Time Warner subscribers. More »
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Hollywood Xmas: The Personnel Purging Begins
5:10AM Seth | As you may have already heard, a staggering 850 people were laid off from Viacom today. Torrents of blood washed down the halls of MTV on both coasts of the US, with added security in wading boots posted on every floor for “observation” (translation: making sure downsized employees don’t try to swipe a promotional copy of Trivial Pursuit: TRL Edition on their way out of the building). After the jump: The Universal globe stops spinning for 70 unlucky souls. More »
Thousands of Drunken Co-Worker Trysts in Jeopardy as Industry Cuts Back Holiday Parties
5:53AM STV | The odds that you remember the drunken, depraved glories of your employer’s past holiday parties are virtually nil, so most of Hollywood shouldn’t be too upset today to hear how the recession-to-be is affecting this year’s big industry fetes. Variety reports that Disney and Viacom won’t be celebrating at all, while other studios are scaling back their own events and even awards-season premieres to the extent their needy talent will allow. And if the global economic meltdown didn’t feel like a crisis before, wait until you hear how the caterers will be hit: More »
Paging Dr. Redstone: Viacom president Philippe …
6:00AM STV | Paging Dr. Redstone: Viacom president Philippe Dauman was optimistic Tuesday in Cannes, where he downplayed Sumner Redstone’s move this week to sell off $US233 million in stock to help pay down the company’s debt. We guess it is better than last week’s estimate of $400 million, but Dauman isn’t letting numbers get in the way: “If you have a life-threatening crisis,” he said, “there is no one on the planet you would more want to have by your side, helping you figure out how to get out of it, than Sumner Redstone.” Oh, please, Philippe — we love Sumner, too, but everyone knows that nobody assuages A-list panic better than Werner Herzog. [Variety] More »
7:48AM STV | Rape Sells! South Park beat George Lucas at his own pervy game Wednesday with its already-infamous “Indy rape” episode — the show’s highest-rated fall premiere in nine years. Paradoxically, this must mean Indiana Jones 5 will be green-lit within the hour — probably at the end of that crisis meeting rumoured to be unfolding today at Paramount. Sadly, bitterly, the cycle continues. [The Live Feed] More »
8:50AM STV | To Catch a Thief: When you’re done parsing the genetic heritage of Dane Cook’s slightly doppelgangy new film, we’ve got another, bigger provenance for you to deduce: Steven Spielberg is one of several defendants named in a new lawsuit accusing the creators of the 2006 hit Disturbia of stealing the idea from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Of course, they pretty much did; the Shia LaBeouf voyeurism thriller tied up a two-quadrant crowd-pleaser with a black ribbon of 21st-century paranoia, all on the way to grossing nearly $80 million domestically. The estate of Window source author Cornell Woolrich finally Netflixed the film over the weekend, it appears, alleging both copyright infringement and breach of contract in a suit filed today in New York. “What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation,” the suit claims, also citing DreamWorks, Viacom and Universal among the offending parties. And here you thought Fox took its sweet time torching Warner Bros. over Watchmen. Expect a settlement by 2014, probably around the time that DreamWorks/Reliance deal closes. [Reuters] More »
