Christian Bale: A "Kindred Spirit" to Heath Ledger
Christian Bale wants people to know Heath Ledger’s work as the twisted and morose Joker in The Dark Knight was just thatwork!
“I hope in a small way that The Dark Knight can be a celebration of his work,” Bale says in the new issue of Parade magazine. “Not like the hideous circus after he died, which I felt was an invasion of a private life. This movie is not a personal home video. This is what he did. I hope people will embrace that in the correct fashion.”
Bale misses his late costar dearly. “He was a unique character, a very infectious character,” he says. “He was a good man, and I was glad to have spent time with him…He was something of a kindred spirit to myself.”
Bale also opens up about his own life, including spending much of his childhood on the road because his mother was a circus dancer. These days, he lives a much more stable existence with his wife, Sibi, and their three-year-old daughter (whose name Bale refuses to reveal publicly).
“There’s a hard line you find in yourself when you become a parent, an absolute belief that cannot be questioned,” he says. “It’s something that you will kill and die for in a way that you never experienced before. I’ve always enjoyed the gray in life. This is an area of total black and white. This is something that is unquestionable.”
Drive-In Movie Theaters Turn 75 Years Old
Today is the 75th Birthday of the Drive-In Movie Theater.
Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr. came up with the idea in 1932, conducting outdoor theater tests in his driveway with a screen attached to trees in his backyard and a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car. He opened the first drive-in theater on June 6th 1933 on Admiral Wilson Boulevard at the Airport Circle in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Hollingshead’s Drive-In was only operational for three years, but the concept quickly spread.
Approximately 100 major drive-ins opened nationwide before the war, and the craze eventually peaked in the late 1950s, with an estimated 4,000 drive-ins spreading across the United States, mostly in more rural areas. Drive-ins usually charged by the car load, ran double features, and provided a private viewing environment for families who were afraid to bring their noisy children to traditional theaters (oh, how times have changed).
Land value increases, real estate economics, the invention of the multiplex, cable television, and home video has lead to a massive decline. Only 383 commercially operational drive-in movie theaters around today, down from 447 in 1999.
You can find a Drive-In Movie Theater near you on DriveInMovie.com.
Breaking! Writers Reach Tentative Deal with Producers
Finally…some real and quantifiable progress in the writers' strike.
Though it's not over till it's over and someone signs on the bottom line, news has broken this morning that the Writers Guild of America has reached a tentative agreement with the producers. (Get all the details in our news story.)
All together now: Yeeeeeee….? (That's cautious optimism.)
The proposed pact will be presented later today to the more than 100,000 WGA members at separate meetings on both coasts (at the Crowne Plaza in Manhattan and the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles). If it is well received, the leaders of the WGA will meet Sunday to finalize the documents, and, well, writers could be back to work in as little as 48 hours.
WGA leaders spent much of yesterday going over the legal language of the proposal, and early this morning, WGA bosses Patric Verrone and Michael Winship sent out a message that emphasized gains in the most hotly contested area, new media:
It is an agreement that protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery. It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas and establishes the principle that, "When they get paid, we get paid."
According to insiders, the proposed deal does not match the Internet-download formula the WGA had hoped for. However, it does allow for some gains—namely, double the residual payments they were receiving under the old home-video formula. This is the exact same equation that was agreed to by the Directors Guild of America.
Some WGA members have openly criticized the DGA deal, saying it is not sufficient to meet the writers' needs. "Double of nothing is still nothing," one screenwriter close to the negotiations said this morning. "We were hoping for more. So, it is disappointing."
Another point of contention has been the length of time a network can stream a full episode on its website. Many WGA members were hoping for a shorter time frame than what the DGA agreed to (24 days), but the proposed pact mirrors the DGA's.
Still, many other writers seem ready to come to terms with the gains that have been achieved and put the picket signs behind them. "I don't think any of us [writers] think this deal is ideal," says one TV writer. "But I think there's also a feeling that we fought the fight well and we should be content with the advances that were made."
Verrone and Winship seem to agree. In their letter to writers, they say: “We believe that continuing to strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks and that the time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike. Much has been achieved, and while this agreement is neither perfect nor perhaps all that we deserve for the countless hours of hard work and sacrifice, our strike has been a success.”
If the tentative deal is signed off on tomorrow by the WGA leaders, a portion of this TV season will survive (for some series), and pilot season might also be salvaged.
Stay tuned…
Fraggle Rock and Farscape now on iTunes
As reported by TUAW, properties from the Jim Henson Company are available on iTunes. Sadly, this does not include The Muppet Show, which was sold to Disney in 2004.
Among the shows available are the first seasons of Fraggle Rock and Farscape for $1.99 per episode. The article mentions that Farscape is difficult to find on DVD due to difficulties over home video rights (although it has been released previously).
I remember Fraggle Rock from my youth and I always enjoyed it. I remember being scared over the episode with the Terrible Tunnel. As I think about it now, I think Mokey Fraggle had the exact same voice as Rizzo the Rat from the Muppets.
So, for those who use iTunes, here is the chance to indulge yourself and purchase the first few seasons. Or, in the case of Fraggle Rock, you could just buy the DVD.