The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| Amazon moving ahead with five original TV series Posted: 29 May 2013 07:44 AM PDT  Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos demonstrates the Kindle Paperwhite during Amazon's Kindle Fire event in Santa Monica, California, September 6, 2012. — Reuters file picSAN FRANCISCO, May 29 — Amazon.com Inc said on Wednesday that it will make five original TV series, having used viewer feedback to pick the shows out of a group of 14 pilots filmed by the world's largest Internet retailer earlier this year. The chosen pilots are: "Alpha House", a political comedy starring John Goodman; "Betas", a comedy about start-up culture in Silicon Valley; "Annebots", a kids' show about robots; "Creative Galaxy", an animated art adventure series; and "Tumbleaf", another kids' show about a small blue fox named Fig. These are the first TV series ever made by Amazon and represent a major foray for the company into original programming delivered over the Internet, stepping up competition with Netflix Inc and Hulu. The new series will be shown exclusively on Amazon's Prime Instant Video service later this year and in early 2014, the company said. Prime Instant Video is free for members of Amazon's Prime service, which offers two-day shipping and other benefits in the United States for US$79 (RM243) a year. Amazon posted all 14 TV pilots online for anyone to watch in April and encouraged viewers to give feedback. The company analyzed the reviews and other data, such as how long people watched, to try to pick shows that are more likely to do well as full series. "We're thrilled to have emerged safely from this harrowing exercise in online democracy," said Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist who created and wrote "Alpha House". Amazon will shoot 12 more episodes of "Alpha House" to complete the first season, which will air starting in November, Trudeau added. Pilots that were not picked up as full series included "Zombieland", a comedy based on the successful movie of the same name, and "Browsers", a musical comedy starring Bebe Neuwirth. Rhett Reese, the writer and producer of "Zombieland", blamed viewer feedback for the TV show's demise. "I'll never understand the vehement hate the pilot received from die-hard "Zombieland" fans. You guys successfully hated it out of existence," he wrote on Twitter. The other pilots that did not make it were: "Dark Minions", "Onion News Network", "Supanatural", "Those Who Can't", "Positively Ozitively", "Sara Solves It" and "Teeny Tiny Dogs". — Reuters |
| Google goes Hollywood with ‘The Internship’ Posted: 28 May 2013 08:03 PM PDT LOS ANGELES, May 29 — When "The Internship", a comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, hits cinemas on June 7, Google will be taking more than a little interest in how the film is received. In an unusual collaboration, the Internet giant was closely involved with the film, a US$58 million (RM174.4 million) Fox production that features two middle-aged watch salesmen determined to get a job at Google. Amidst the comedic hijinks, the film delivers a picture of a kind and gentle Google, a company that offers free food and exercise classes and is in every respect the place you'd like to work. Various Google products get plugs in the film, and co-founder Sergey Brin gets a cameo role. The favourable PR comes at an opportune moment for Google, whose unofficial motto is "Don't Be Evil" but which is often portrayed in far darker tones by privacy advocates, antitrust regulators and competitors such as Microsoft. The US Federal Trade Commission recently began exploring a new set of antitrust allegations against the company, sources told Reuters last week. "It's a good move. It's going to enhance and warm up Google's image perception," said former Coca-Cola chief marketing officer Peter Sealey, who is an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University and worked as a consultant for Google seven years ago. The movie is a far cry from the Hollywood experience of rival Facebook. The social networking kingpin did not collaborate with "The Social Network", which focused heavily on the conflicts between founder Mark Zuckerberg and his early partners and did not make any of them look very good. "Movies like this are always a risk," said Howard Bragman, a Hollywood publicist and vice-chairman of the Internet image-management firm Reputation.com. "They can be great for employee morale or they can drag it down." Early signs suggest Google's gamble may pay off. The website Marketingland.com said the film was "a fun movie, but also a beautiful Google commercial". Inspiration from '60 Minutes' Shawn Levy, director of "The Internship", said Vaughn came up with the premise for the film after seeing a "60 Minutes" special that portrayed Google as one of the best places in the world to work. Vaughn arranged a lunch with Wilson and a group of "Googlers" at the company's Mountain View campus, and sought the company's participation. Google eventually agreed, and vice president of marketing Lorraine Twohill oversaw the project. The company did not make Brin or Twohill available for comment. CEO Larry Page said at a recent conference that Google agreed to collaborate partly because executives felt they did not have much choice, but also to promote science and technology. "The reason why we got involved in that is that computer science has a marketing problem. We're the nerdy curmudgeons," Page said at the Google IO conference. Google insisted on creative control over how the film portrayed its products, Levy said. Such agreements are fairly common when auto makers and other companies strike deals for their products to appear in movies. The company was closely involved in assuring authenticity when production shifted to Georgia Tech, where the film crew built a reproduction of Google's campus, right down to the slides that employees use in the lobby of its buildings and the "nap pods" where they can rest during the day. Levy said the company's input was limited to technical issues rather than plot. Accurately or not, the film cheerfully plays into geek stereotypes. Overweight, slovenly nerds appear in many scenes. Interns are shown wearing hats with propeller blades that are painted in Google's signature red, blue and gold colours, modelled on the ones that Google employees and interns wear on their first day at work. Teams of interns compete against one another in a game based on Quidditch, an invention of the "Harry Potter" books that's a favourite with computer programmers. Predictably, many of the interns are less than adept at running or catching a ball. Google executives may have cringed at some scenes, such as one in which interns get drunk at a strip club. Google complained about the portrayal of the intern group's training officer, who the company thought was mean-spirited and decidedly not "Googley", said Levy. By the film's conclusion, the trainer abruptly becomes warm and cuddly — an evolution that Levy says was not in the original script, but which he denies was done to appease Google. The producers let Google executives watch an early cut of the film, three months ahead of time, and were prepared for "notes" — Hollywoodspeak for corrections — that Levy said never came. "It was a nerve-racking moment," he recalled. "The final movie was definitely different than the screenplay Google had read. I was pleased that their desire for a satisfying movie trumped any kind of preciousness about their company and culture." Google had little choice but to cooperate, said Ruben Igielko-Herrlich, whose Propaganda GEM product placement firm finds roles in movies for clients that include BMW, Nokia and Lacoste. "The movie would get made with or without a company's input," said Igielko-Herrlich. "You have to embrace the production if you hope to soften whatever bad things they might have in there." — Reuters |
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