THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
AMERICA'S MOST UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY WEB SITE!
Blogroll Me!
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
Hollywood studios would like to believe that digital effects are worth the cost, if only because they hold the prospect of a licensing cornucopia for toys and video games. But, alas, the studios also confront the less happy reality that even state-of-the-art CGI, if it gets out of synch with the story, does not create an audience either at the movie houses or on DVD. Sony learned this lesson recently with the $133 million sci-fi bomb Stealth, as did DreamWorks with its $120 million sci-fi bomb, The Island. Despite massive CGI and marketing expenses, neither studio earned back $18 million from the U.S. box office on these films. (Sony, at least, was able to repackage Stealth as part of a video game for its PlayStation Portable.)
To be sure, some directors, notably Peter Jackson in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, George Lucas in the Star Wars franchise, and Sam Raimi in the two Spider-Man films, have succeeded brilliantly in overriding audience-alienating effects that proceed from the schizoid split of movies. But fewer and fewer directors have the clout with the studios—or the budget flexibility—to control, even if it means redoing, the CGI side of the production. If this new economy of illusion allows the CGI side of a production to overwhelm the director's ability to tell a coherent story in his live-action side, digital effects may prove to be the ruination of movies.
MAY prove?