Quantum Mechanix steps up

I just received my copy of the extended RAZOR DVD in the mail yesterday. No time yet to rewatch RAZOR - but can I just say that in the extras, all those shots from various eps throughout the series looked SO GLORIOUS on DVD. The crisp amazing picture, the clear-as-a-bell sound. Ahhhhhhhh. New Caprica never looked so good!

Meanwhile, can I direct your attention today to the Quantum Mechanix ad that was inserted in the DVD box - QM is now selling a bunch of delightful new BSG items including personalized dog tags, the HOW TO SPOT A CYLON poster, and this set of Fleet Propaganda posters - which are by Adam Levermore-Rich, the artist behind QM's unforgettable SERENITY travel posters. Nice stuff. Great Xmas gifts!

Star Trek Day

Trek Movie Report notes that the WGA is planning a Star Trek day at Paramount on Monday December 10. Writers and actors from Star Trek will walk the picket line, including Scott Bakula, Brent Spiner, Judy and Gar Reeves-Stevens, Harlan Ellison and Ronald D. Moore (as confirmed by Mrs. Ron). Ron's first professional sale was the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "The Bonding".

From Trek Movie Report:

They also hope people working on the new Star Trek film will join them. There will even be a band (The Intergallactic Blues Band). Fans are also welcome to come and show their support.

If you are interested in attending, the check in spot is the Windsor Gate. The event runs from 11-3 at Paramount Pictures at 5555 Melrose in Hollywood.

TrekMovie.com will provide updates on the event as new information becomes available. TrekMovie.com will also report from the event itself on Monday.

The Future

Thomas L. Martin reviews Bear McCreary's Season 3 soundtrack album.

Throughout, 'Battlestar Galactica' has been a rewarding experience in writing, direction, acting and music. Bear McCreary's haunting soundtracks weave in and out of the program superbly, amplifying key moments with tense string movements, bold drums and assorted world music influences.

Season 3's soundtrack is probably the strongest collection so far. The other two soundtracks had some excellent pieces but I feel this one holds together as a CD better than those. McCreary heavily lifts the songs selected from the episodes 'Maelstrom', 'Unfinished Business' and the two-parters 'Exodus' and 'Crossroads'.

The string composition 'Violence And Variations' is a moving and dynamic piece and 'Heeding The Call' brings rock guitars into the mix with great effect. Each song has a distinctive feel that harks back to the individual episodes but the overall compilation is a good listen, too. Gaelic dance pieces, African drums and Indian sitars all feature to give this soundtrack a very diverse feel whilst never straying too far from the distinctive taut 'Battlestar Galactica' sound.

McCreary's rendition of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower' from the season finale is probably going to catch all the attention and rightly so. Lifting an Earth-based familiar song for the first time in a non-Earth based series was a bold and ambitious move. Placed amidst the huge revelations of 'Crossroads Part II' the placement of the track was jarring and surprising, shocking the viewer at the perfect moment.

Rickey Purdin interviewed Jamie Bamber about Razor.

And Buddy TV reviewed Razor.

“All of this has happened before, and will happen again.”

These are the words that echoed throughout "Razor," the long awaited Battlestar Galactica movie meant to stoke our Cylon deprived brains between seasons 3 and 4 of the sci-fi series. Creator Ronald D. Moore promised revelations that would keep us theorizing until the season 4 premiere, and I'm happy to say he didn't disappoint. "Razor" not only managed to give us a different perspective on events in Battlestar Galactica's past, but gave us insight into where the show may be heading in the future.

WGA and Reality

Here's Wednesday's end of day statement from the WGA:

“The Writers Guilds met today with the AMPTP and discussed issues of jurisdiction for original content for the Internet, Reality TV, Animation, and Basic Cable. The talks also were focused on contract enforcement. For the last two days, we have had substantive discussions of the issues important to writers, the first time this has occurred in this negotiation. However, we are still waiting for the AMPTP to respond to all of our proposals, including Internet streaming of theatrical and television product and digital downloads. Bargaining resumes tomorrow at 10 a.m.”

Deadline Hollywood Daily reports:

The largest part of today's negotiations were taken over by the WGA's small group discussion of jurisdiction for Reality TV and made-for-Web content as well as animation and cable. I've learned the WGA played hardball by demanding that network and studio CEOs no longer make deals with Reality TV producers like Mark Burnett Productions, Fremantle, Endemol etc unless those companies become signatories of the WGA. This is part of the WGA's continuing campaign to ensure that Reality TV writers -- often referred to as the story editors or story producers of the shows -- start to receive the same benefits and pay and protections as guild members. (Of course, further complicating matters is that some Reality TV shows have signed deals with IA, the editors guild.) It's also clear the WGA's demand today was timed to this Friday's big writers protest outside Fremantle Media headquarters.

Needless to say, network CEOs expressed disbelief and anger that the WGA would try to put Reality TV on the table today. I swear one mogul was going to have a coronary, sputtering as he charged that today's talks were "going backwards". (Did the producers not hear that Variety erroneously reported pre-strike that the WGA negotiators had dropped their nonscripted proposal? On the other hand, don't the writers consider New Media formulas a more pressing issue? Am I starting to lose the will to live?)

Interestingly, the WGA's demand that all made-for-web work be placed under the guild's full jurisdiction didn't seem to hit a nerve with either the AMPTP or its CEOs.

Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D. will be at the above noted WGA Friday protest.

Union

BSG fan Joss Whedon was on United Hollywood's podcast today. They talked to Joss about the "Mutant Enemy Strike" in which fans of Joss' shows will picket outside Fox's Pico Gate this Friday. They also talked to the staff writers of Jericho. (iTunes link.)

Maureen Ryan reports on cable shows like Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, and others that might be aired on the broadcast networks if the strike lasts for a long time...

But, the WGA today reported they "accepted the framework in [the AMPTP] proposal of last Thursday for a fixed residual in the first year." That proposal relates to internet streaming. They continue to haggle over the details. And there's still no word on the download/purchase issue. Perhaps they want to solidify agreement on streams before moving on to that topic. At least it feels like progress is being made.

See also: Deadline Hollywood Daily.

Best Buy Disc

Battlestar Galactica fans who bought Razor from Best Buy might be getting screwed. Best Buy has an exclusive offer of a special bonus disc inside the package with Razor called "The Making of Battlestar Galactica Razor"

However for those of us who bought Razor from Amazon or other places, or if you bought it from Best Buy and it didn't come with the promised bonus disc, there are reports that the bonus disc "making of Razor documentary" has already migrated online.

But, Best Buy and Universal Home Video appear to have a minor problem on their hands.

The strike - will it change EVERYTHING?

[Cross-posted from my Livejournal cuz I think y'all might enjoy.]

Mood: eager and thoughtful


Have you been following the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike? I know a lot of you have done. I've been reading my fill of it for seems like many months now, even though I have nothing to do with that side of the film/TV biz. Yet as a fan, and as someone who makes my living marketing films to the masses, I am fascinated with this strike and its fallout.

One of the most important elements to this strike is the new media self-awareness tipping point among what is called "the creative community" - ie, the writers, filmmakers, actors, and even producers, of all the shows we fans are so enamored of. Is this entertainment indeed as Joss Whedon has recently suggested, America's #1 Export? Is it something that we fans simply cannot live without, our modern mythology, a mirror we hold up to ourselves? What is its value, that is now apparently the question in Hollywood.

Anyone who follows this strike at all on the internet has probably read a few of the things I want to bookmark here. I just want to make sure you've read all this, if you are interested in the future of entertainment on the internet...or "in new media" or however you like to call it.

Something happened when NETSCAPE founder (and FUNNY OR DIE investor) Marc Andreessen wrote this on his blog - and, much more importantly, this piece here about the idea of Hollywood beginning to become more like Silicon Valley. While somewhere in their gilded castles high above us all, Steve Jobs gleefully rubbed his hands together, and the Google Boys popped open another bottle of Dom, these two little blog posts began to make the rounds. On the picket lines, and elsewhere. Meanwhile the striking writers' presence on the internet, and their direct interaction with fans, blossomed. Most people on my flist probably know what I'm talking about. (If not, go have a look at the past month of posts on Sitrep and UnitedHollywood.)

After a little time, Patrick Goldstein had some more to say. Maureen Ryan collected her thoughts and (being a previously music-obsessed journalist), made the music connection as well as the Silicon Valley one.

Today I see that Goldstein (aka "PGoldy" in some blogger circles, heh) has taken this ball and run even further. This new piece is the most fascinating yet, in that we fans can glean here from a super-insider, Hollywood-wide discussion going on right now that could change the film & TV business in PROFOUND WAYS. I feel the need to post this excerpt:

Perhaps both sides in the writers strike should start studying the new economic model operating in today's pop music world. If your product has lost its value in one arena -- meaning if no one's buying your CDs anymore -- you can create value in a new arena. That's why Prince gave away millions of copies of his latest CD, because the real money for him was in concert tickets. It's why Beyoncé and Gwen Stefani have launched clothing lines and the fragrance industry is chock-full of perfumes from Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez.

"Successful pop artists represent something to people, so their value is in loaning their persona, their music or their likeness to other marketers," says Ken Hertz, a veteran music industry attorney who represents Beyoncé and the Black Eyed Peas and does strategic marketing with such companies as Hasbro and McDonald's. "That's where the new equity lies. Music is the best way for a marketer to build trust with people. And if you trust them, you're going to buy their product, but the real engine for creating trust is the music."

That's not to say that screenwriters will strike it rich endorsing Dell computers (although "Daily Show" contributor John Hodgman will surely make more money for his appearances in those Mac vs. PC ads than writing books like "The Areas of My Expertise," a hilarious almanac of utterly unreliable information). My point being: No one knows where the real value of writing will come from five years from now. It may still be in residuals from TV and films, but it may be from some new YouTube-style Internet buzz site fueled by outside money from Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

While the WGA and the studios flail away at the negotiating table, snarling at each other like the warrior ice bears in "The Golden Compass," new entrepreneurs from Wall Street and Silicon Valley are entering the fray every day. The studios have been buying up or trying to co-opt many of the new entertainment streams, but the writers have a lot to say about the future, since the Internet is a medium where the word has retained tremendous power.

"We're entering an era where, just as there are 300 cable and satellite TV stations, there will be 300 different economic models for different kinds of entertainment," says veteran film producer Michael Shamberg. "There will always be a primal need for people to tell stories, but no one knows what the price structure for those narratives will be. It's a time of extraordinary experimentation of how to sell things, therefore it's an extraordinary time in terms of what you can sell."

So the writers can count on one key advantage. Even when it's difficult to agree on the value of almost anything, it's not hard to understand that in a business of storytelling, everything starts with the storyteller.

On a final note - many months ago, I read this piece in the New York Times...and wondered about its larger implications in the film/TV biz.

This is very, very exciting for us fans. Keep your eyes and ears to the ground folks.

And please keep calling the Big Media, keep sending pencils.

The art of haggling

Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that Tuesday's WGA/AMPTP talks were positive with both sides haggling. If both sides keep working on it, hopefully progress will be made. While they seem to be working on the issue of content streamed on the internet, they don't seem to have yet tackled the thorny issue of downloads.

United Hollywood has more information on the negotiations, rumors and an upcoming food drive.

Jane Espenson will be picketing at Warner Bros. tomorrow with other WGA bloggers, Josh Friedman, John August, and Craig Mazin.

Mrs. Ron reports on plans to deliver the pencils to the studios, and how you can help in the delivery.

Bamber Bunnies support the writers...and towels

In typically over-the-top-we-love-you BSG fandom style, a bunch of Jamie Bamber fans have posted videos in support of the Pencils2MediaMoguls campaign. And the towels. Defamer and United Hollywood have noticed.


Nice job, fangirls.

Briefly Noted

Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary has upgraded his blog to WordPress and added RSS feeds. Check it out here.

Razor on DVD Today

Battlestar Galactica Razor extended and unrated comes out today, Tuesday December 4th, 2007. Buy it so you can see deleted scenes like these:

(If you listened to the Razor writers' room podcast you know the genesis of those scenes.)

And you'll see this extended scene added within the movie itself. (Holy Frakking Spoiler Alert, Do Not Watch This Video Unless You Are Prepared to be Spoiled and blown away.)


But, mostly buy the DVD, so that you won't have to sit through this ever again:

Your nightly strike update

Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood Daily has two new scoops. First she reports that the major media moguls are starting to break ranks, and that most of them want one of their own to lead the negotiations and sideline the current top negotiator, Nick Counter of the AMPTP. Finke also wonders why the studios are sticking together at all when it would be to their competitive benefit for each company to make individual deals with the WGA. (As an example the big three auto makers don't join forces when dealing with the UAW, each company makes their own deal with the UAW.) Of course then the WGA would benefit from the competition. (In this scheme in talks with Disney/ABC they could say, "Well, NBC/Universal gave us X, so don't you think you should too? Maybe there is a game theory expert out there who can sort this whole thing out. Maybe the recent Nobel Prize in Economics winners could help.)

Finke's second report is about how the goal of Tuesday's talks is haggling. Apparently the WGA leadership is feeling receptive to the idea of flat fees for internet usage instead of relying on Hollywood's "creative book keeping" to get a percentage. But, with the AMPTP offering numbers as low as $250 for one years of internet reuse when normally a writer would have gotten a check for around $20,000 for a network rereun of their show, I'd say they have a lot of haggling to do for such divergent numbers to get even close to each other.

Also Maureen Ryan in the Chicago Tribune The Watcher Blog, asks, Who will control the future? That's the question at the heart of the strike:

Entertainment conglomerates are not the only game in town, as musicians have realized and as Hollywood writers, directors and actors are figuring out. The strike blogs and videos that have proliferated in the last few weeks are indications that it’s easy—and fun—to do an end run around the companies that allegedly control the entertainment industry.

Unless studio executives begin to view the people who create films and TV shows as their partners, not pesky contractors, it’s the executives who’ll be writing the “death warrant” for the industry, contrary to a blustery statement one anonymous executive made to the New York Times Dec. 1.

People who harness their imaginations for a living — whether they work in film, music or TV — want more ownership of what they create, and they want more of the revenue that comes from those creations. And the Internet is one of the things that will allow them to do that.

In other news, Lost showrunner Carlton Cuse, a member of the WGA negotiating committee explains the recent reports that he had crossed the picket line to edit episodes of Lost. Carlton says:

On November 16 I, regretably, was quoted by a Wall Street Journal reporter saying I was going to perform some of my non-writing, post-production duties on episodes of LOST to protect the show for the fans. However, I'm sure to the delight of the AMPTP, my statement became the story and gave the false impression that there was disunity among showrunners over the issues of this negotiation.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Every showrunner I know, whether producing or not producing, stands in full support of the goals of our guild.

For the past two months I have been working seven days a week on these negotiations alongside my fellow negotiating committee members.

As a committee we did everything we could to get both parties back to the bargaining table this last week. We were fully prepared to enter into the kinds of back-and-forth discussions that are necessary to reach any sort of labor deal. I sincerely hoped this return to the table would lead to real progress.

I was wrong.

In fact, given the events of last Thursday -- and where things currently stand -- I can no longer in good conscience continue to work on my show in any capacity.

What I will be doing is continuing my work as a member of the committee for as long as it takes, contributing in any way I can, to get us the fair and just deal that we must have.

And finally, here's a recent funny strike video by a Colbert Report writer, about how YouTube cats, dogs, and other animals are joining the work stoppage:

Mac-using BSG fans - frakked?

YahooTech noticed that all BATTLESTAR GALACTICA episodes have been removed from iTunes as part of the collapse of NBC/Universal's deal with Apple.

While PC-computer users can now go to Amazon Unbox to buy Season 3 eps, we lowly Mac users currently have no way to legally purchase digital copies of last season's episodes.

Sigh.

New Season 4 Promos

Two striking new promos for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Season 4 aired last night during TIN MAN on SciFi Channel...whoa.

Strike Humor

There are a number of WGA strike blogs, but the funniest is the one by David Letterman's Late Show Writers on Strike.

Ken Levine finds some of the good things to come out of the strike.

United Hollywood runs down all the Pencils Prizes from shows like BSG, Eureka, Lost and others. (I think I'll be buying some pencils in the name of Lost along with the ones I ready bought in the name of BSG.)

Just a bit funnier than the towel thing...THE HILLS

This is pretty off-topic, but since the Sitrep has been sharing silly TV writer strike videos all week, I figure this one is a must-see. Judd Apatow and his former colleagues from FREAKS & GEEKS, writer Mike White and actor James Franco, just put this together for Funny Or Die. I believe this is the first film writer strike video to hit the netwebbys.

Lee Adama throws in the Towel

It looks like our favorite show's Powers That Be are definitely KILLING all other shows in the Pencils2Moguls prizes department, in this multi-fandom competition to send the most pencils to Big Media. In addition to giving BSG fans their pick of a personal phone call from from Mary McDonnell, Tricia Helfer, Michael Hogan, Jamie Bamber, or Michael Trucco, or a hockey game with Aaron Douglas, we now hear that Jamie Bamber has further upped the ante by offering a few TOWELS as prizes for the winner who donates the most pencils in his name (actually you need to write in "BSG Jamie Bamber").

Yes, you heard me right. Towels. Three to be exact. I'll let Ron Moore explain.

*insert Lucy-Lawless-Lee-towel-joke of your choice here*

Whedon

Joss Whedon creator of Buffy, Firefly, director of Serenity, and a huge Battlestar fan*, posted this message on Whedonesque, which was picked up by the United Hollywood blog:

Get the word out, remind everyone that corporate greed (it's nothing but) is hurting everyone in this country. Not just because they're robbing people of entertainment (and, on occasion, art) and strangling an entire (non-writing) community, but because they're sending a message to every union in the country: you're next. The actors know that in their case, it's literally true, but it's also true for the concept of a unionized workforce. We get a lot of flack for being well-fed, glamorous, rich and powerful. We've worked hard to dispel that stereotype but in fact, a select few of us are wealthy and influential. And we have the support of some of the most famous and beloved (and wealthy and influential) people in the country: TV and movie stars! So the fact that the studios feel perfectly comfortable SPITTING IN OUR FACES in front of the whole world cannot bode well for any other union that works under them -- or under anyone who sees how easy it is to deny the basic rights of workers even so public as we. This is bad for writers, bad for actors, teamsters, teachers, nurses, dockworkers... the shape of this country is changing. The middle class is being squeezed out. We're trundling back to the middle ages, people, and all we can do is lie there and take it.

But of course, that's not what's going to happen. The studios mean to starve us out. They can't. We know what's at stake. We take care of our own, and those around us who aren't our own. We dig in. And eventually, if after months of deadlock we still can't make an equitable deal, you will start to see real change. Change in the way we entertain you, change in the essential structure of America's most popular export. (Unless it's corn. Is it corn?) The fact is, the studios have been robbing us for twenty years. (Actually, it's been much longer, but the statute of limitations says I should let 'em off easy.) This grotesque insult of a negotiation is the end of an era. It will be remembered as the stupidest move the conglomotainment empires ever made. WE ASKED FOR PRACTICALLY NOTHING. And they...

Something snaps. Something changes. Chaos, meet opportunity. Let them try to starve us out. We won't just survive. We will THRIVE. We're known as a creative community, and those numb f#$%ing frost-giants are about to find out we're a lot more of both than they knew.

If they come back to the table this very Tuesday next with the deal we need (and they won't), the change will still have come. The snap. The thing that broke, that can't be fixed. The eye, still wincing from the light, but finally wide open.

[ETA by ProgGrrl: * For anyone keeping track, Joss' most recent statement of how he feels about BSG is that, even though he has pretty much no time to watch any TV these days, "I mean, obviously I watch Battlestar, but that’s like air." As in, you need air to breathe, to stay alive. Heh.]

Walk All Over Me

Tricia Helfer talked to The Georgia Straight a Vancouver entertainment weekly about her new film, Walk All Over Me.

"I grew up a farm girl where I was into sports and into school," the 33-year-old former supermodel says, interviewed in Vancouver's just-off–Main Street Argo Cafe. "I was very tall and gangly, and you certainly don't think that's very pretty when you're a kid."

There's no point pretending otherwise today: Helfer is hot. You don't have to be sitting across the table from her for confirmation of that. She's squeezed into a booth at the Argo, a retro-cool '40s diner where the tables are vintage green Arborite and the specials are scrawled on chalkboards. Helfer, more La La Land than Lotusland, doesn't look like she's from around these parts, even though she splits her time between Vancouver, where she keeps a condo for work, and Los Angeles, where she lives with her lawyer husband and six cats.

She's wearing a low-cut grey sweater, skinny-leg jeans, and black stiletto boots. Her teeth are impossibly white, her hair off-blond, and her eyes Caribbean-ocean blue. The first thing you notice about her is that she looks different in person: preternaturally beautiful and somehow less hypersexualized than what you might have seen in Maxim, Stuff, and the countless other men's magazines that regularly name her one of the most desirable women on the planet.

..."I certainly didn't think that I could ever be a model," she says. "And I had no ambition to be an actor. I was petrified of being on-stage; I wasn't a singer and I wasn't a dancer. I was much more of a tomboy into basketball, volleyball, track and field, and soccer. And, again, I worked on the farm: I drove tractors and fixed farm machinery."

Season 4 Tease

Video with spoilers for Razor and hints about season 4.