The Morning Fix: Time for summer movie previews and TV pilot guessing games! Andrea Wong joins Liberty Media’s board. What Conan O’Brien said on ’60 Minutes’ (spoiler alert)
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After the coffee. Before breathing a sigh of relief that the week is almost over.If only there were some sort of market where I could bet on how all these movies will do. Yes, I linked to USA Today’s summer movie preview just so I could say that. But nonetheless now you can plan your summer calendar. I’m pretty sure I won’t be at the movies the weekend of May 14 (‘Robin Hood’) and most definitely May 27 (‘Sex and the City 2,’ which I’m guessing is as imaginative as its title). In the meantime, here’s the box-office preview from the Los Angeles Times for this weekend when a new ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ opens.
What’s hot now, what will be next year. Variety takes a look at this year’s freshman class of sitcoms and dramas to tell us what worked. The paper then looks at which pilots are picking up steam for this fall. I do not miss doing those stories. Every agent tells you they have the hot pilot, and the networks are getting tighter and tighter with information. All this for a bunch of shows unlikely to make it past three months. Note to NBC: Don’t mess up ‘The Rockford Files.’
Chasing the dream. Writer Nicole LaPorte’s new tome, ‘The Men Who Would Be King,’ about the creation of DreamWorks (got my free copy in the mail yesterday) is hitting stores and in this Daily Beast piece she details the difficulties of digging up the dirt on moguls Geffen, Spielberg and Katzenberg. If that was challenging, try finding people outside of the biz who will want to read it, although there is plenty of dirt on what a lovely human being Russell Crowe is.
Andrea Wong joins Liberty Media’s board. Ex-Lifetime chief Andrea Wong has been tapped to join the board of Liberty Media. Can’t say I’m surprised as I heard (OMG, it happened, I just wrote ‘I heard’) she was one of the runner-ups for the job of running Starz that ultimately went to Chris Albrecht. No idea if that was true as Wong never responded to questions about it months ago, but this appointment would seem to indicate she made some new friends over there recently. Details from Broadcasting & Cable. Wong, by the way, has an office at Disney and is tight with Chief Executive Bob Iger, so don’t be surprised if she ends up with something over there.
Goal! The Hollywood Reporter takes a look at how the World Cup, which starts next month, will wreak havoc on international box office. ‘Many countries come to a standstill during the World Cup games, especially if the home team is playing,’ Warner Bros.’ president of international distribution, Veronika Kwan-Rubinek, told the paper. There’s something kind of nice about that.
The Bergstein blues. I’m sure lots of people are interested in this whole David Bergstein financial mess, and I’m not one of them (though probably at some point I’ll end up writing something about it). Anyway, the latest is that Bergstein and Ronald Tutor filed a counter lawsuit against hedge fund D.B. Zwirn & Co. For more, see the Hollywood Reporter, and for how Bergstein’s woes blew up a David O. Russell comedy, check out the Daily Beast’s Kim Masters story on ‘Nailed.’
Spoiler. Thanks to the New York Times’ Bill Carter, I don’t need to watch Conan O’Brien’s interview on ’60 Minutes’ this Sunday. While others got a news release with some quotes, CBS screened the entire segment for him. Still not a whole lot there you wouldn’t expect and to be honest, I probably was going to skip it anyway. O’Brien doesn’t believe NBC when they say his show was losing money and there is probably a Harvard class on the economics of TV that could explain it.
For all the New Yorkers. Rich or poor, you’ve had coffee out of a Anthora cup, those blue and white staples of diners and delis with ‘We Are Happy To Serve You’ written on the side. RIP, Leslie Buck. An obituary from the New York Times.
Inside the Los Angeles Times: Activision Blizzard Inc. signed a deal with the developer of Halo. Betsy Sharkey on adult movies. Speaking of adult movies, here’s film critic Kenneth Turan’s review of ‘Please Give.’
-- Joe Flint
