How the Grammys, set for Feb. 10, will be affected by the writers strike is the subject of an NYT Jeff Leeds story:

The Grammy Awards on Feb. 10 were supposed to be a balm to the ailing music industry, a 50th-anniversary celebration of artistry and longevity at a time of mass layoffs and sharply declining sales. Instead the music world began bracing for the latest havoc from the continuing strike by Hollywood writers, as a stalemate with the Writers Guild of America threatened to force record labels and organizers of the Grammy Awards to proceed with a show with severely diminished star wattage.

This is of course another dispatch from the “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people” desk. Interesting tidbit farther down in the story: “Grammy organizers said the show would proceed even if striking writers picket the ceremony, held at the Staples Center arena here.” If that happened, we will be able to see which pop, rap and rock stars find it expedient to cross a picket line. You can be sure that Kanye West will walk past strikers, starving children, and the bleeding to get to the ceremony; but the story also specifically and pointedly mentions Alicia Keys, who has performed for the striking writers, and the Foo Fighters, both of whom are also on the show’s current schedule.

The Foo Fighters are playing because, in a classic piece of Grammys randomness, it was suddenly decided that Dave Grohl had made one of the best records of the year, a distinction his former band never received.

Entertainment industry awards show range from the defensible (for better or worse a scrupulously overseen accounting of Hollywood’s feelings about itself) to the indefensible (just about all the others). The Grammys are a special case, existing in its own category of badness, for many but particularly these three reasons:

• Decades of awards that consistently fall upon on a spectrum ranging from the haphazard or the absurdist to the silly and the just plain wrong. To ask how the Foo Fighters become an album-of-the-year band is to ask why Evanescence (or Maroon 5, or Paula Cole, or Hootie & the Blowfish) was a best new artist, or why U2, after a 20-something-year career, is suddenly routinely winning album, song and record of the year awards.

And whatever happened to Christopher Cross, anyway?

• Michael Greene, the renegade NARAS CEO, and MusiCares, the worst charity in the history of the world. The Academy let Greene run wild for so long that the LA Times’ Chuck Philips and Michael A. Hiltzik eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the corruption. Among other things, MusiCares was found to have devoted about one percent of the money it raised to, uh, caring.

• Speaking of corruption, the Grammys, as you know, reflects the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ views of the best recordings of the year. Since those members, as we have seen, are boneheads, but also, and more importantly, because the group makes a ton of money of its awards show on TV each year and has to beef up ratings, its leadership devised a crafty scheme some years back. (This aspect of the Academy’s voting procedures is almost never mentioned in coverage of the awards.) It allows a secret committee secretly to revise the nominations in the top four categories. (Album, song and record of the year, and best new artist.) This allows the leadership to proceed with a show that might not only contain fewer embarrassments but also, not coincidentally, feature a nominations lineup of artists with a bigger fan base than, say, latter-day Steely Dan, not to mention a younger one.

A posting on Slashdot lets us know that Time magazine is jumping on the “vinyl is back” bandwagon. (Billboard ($) did the story first, back in November.)

Writes Kristina Dell:

From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct music medium has been showing up lately. And we don’t mean CDs. Vinyl records, especially the full-length LPs that helped define the golden era of rock in the 1960s and ’70s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of music executives, increasing numbers of the iPod generation are also purchasing turntables (or dusting off Dad’s), buying long-playing vinyl records and giving them a spin.

Wow, what a trend! Why, LP sales went up more than 15 percent last year, it turns out. The only problem is that that increase–some 130,000 total–represents about three-hundredths of one percent of the 500 million CDs sold last year.

Time ends the short piece with a list of three benefits the LP has over CDs. The third details the “social interaction” of “getting up to flip over a record.” The utter marginality of this trend will not stop the story from being a staple of boomer news outlets for the next few months.

As summer began last year, the movie-release schedule was a parody of itself: What on first glance seemed the usual raft of sequels became, on further examination, a less-usual raft of threequels, beginning with the latest iterations of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Shrek” and “Spiderman” (all released in May), but also including “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Ocean’s 13” and “Rush Hour 3”; the fourth or fifth “Harry Potter”; and the fourth “Die Hard.”

It’s easy to make fun of the movie industry for such pathetic, “The Player”-like lack of ideas. But of course it’s the audience that dictates what gets released and, as can be seen from the annual box office returns, the top seven slots include no less than five threequels.

There are a lot of great movies that get released, so this isn’t an aesthetic issue. But at a certain point someone is going to notice that the industry is in effect cannibalizing itself. This point doesn’t get noted enough in analyses of the film industry. The Times’ year-end wrap up goes out of its way to note that the three top grossing threequels didn’t do as well as their respective predecessors, if you take inflation into account. This is good in the sense that too many box-office stories don’t mention the effects of inflation, which obviates most of the silly records bruited about by the industry. That said, the idea that the $300M-plus grosses of the last “Shrek,” “Spidey” and “Pirates” is anything but great news for the studios is silly. (Disney has now grossed more than $2.5 billion from box offices alone from a franchise—based on a Disneyland ride, remember—that was considered a joke before the first film was released.)

But of course, while box office was up four percent this year, attendance was about the same as last year’s. Which means that the many threequels had to find their audience from people who were giving up seeing other movies.

Again, I don’t think this hurts smaller, presumably better, films; no one went to see “Pirates” instead of “No Country for Old Men.” And the trend does have to end at some point, or the movie industry will devolve, in about the year 2019, into a slate of six or seven films, total, annually, ranging from “Mission: Impossible: 9” to “When Wolverine met the Invisible Woman,” the long awaited X-Men-meet-the-Fantastic-4 epic. But it does take the movie industry a step or two further down a dead-end street.

Anne Eisenberg, in the NYT, has a story about a new device from Neuros that can take any digital input and turn it into an MPEG-4 file, which means it will play easily on your computer or iPod. The article is about how Neuros, the company, is allowing the device to be hacked, software- and hardware-wise; the idea is that programmers and hardware experts can tweak the device to make it continuingly useful as technology and file formats evolve. The article doesn’t discuss the copyright implications, which seem to me legion.

As the Ipod came to dominance four or five years ago, skeptical of Apple and curious about open-source issues I decided to get one of Neuros’s MP3 players. It did some snazzy things, among them play radio and serve as a voice recorder, but its bulk, difficult software, and hardware problems eventually wore me down. I dealt with the company’s customer service, which wasn’t entirely unhelpful but certainly never got me a product I could use the way it was supposed to. I ended up junking the not-inexpensive thing and ran back to Apple, tail between my legs.

The NYT has an astonishingly misinformed story on Ipods and audio quality today, a matching bookend with Lee Gomes’ in the WSJ from a few weeks ago.

[O]ver the last decade the ranks of true audiophiles have been thinning, in large part because of the growing popularity of MP3 players and iPods. These nifty devices enable you to store thousands of hours of your favorite music and take it with you as you bop through your day. You can listen while shopping, while jogging or even, depending on your job, while at work. No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner. Still, for consumers, easy access has trumped high fidelity.

The writer, classical music critic Anthony Tommasini, meanders on and on pondering the end of high fidelity. Like Gomes’ story, the point is true, as far as it goes. Mp3s do have inferior sound quality, in a relative sense; they are compressed sound files that make sonic compromises. But as the cost of computer storage continues to go down, the situation will slowly begin to right itself as more and more fans begin to listen to uncompressed files on their ever-bigger Ipods. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has scooped up a discounted half-terabyte drive and is busy digitizing CDs in the Apple lossless format.

(Another issue the audio bemoaners overlook is that, like most other electronic gear, the quality of even low-end audio equipment, particularly speakers, is much higher than all but the best stuff from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.)

As I’ve written before, the change will give the record companies one last resale opportunity, as they mount a campaign to inform iPod owners that the audio quality of their songs is inferior, and to give them the chance to rebuy their music, one last joyous time, in a lossless format.

The biz section of the Times profiles Brian Grazer today. The thesis of the article is that Grazer isn’t famous enough:

[D]espite Mr. Grazer’s enormous success in the movie business, his public profile remains relatively slight when compared with his Hollywood peers. Imagine Entertainment, founded 20 years ago by Mr. Grazer and the director Ron Howard, has produced a strong slate of films, including “Liar Liar,” “Eight Mile,” “Inside Man,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “The Da Vinci Code.” His latest, “American Gangster,” opened two weeks ago as the top film in the country, taking in more than $43 million at the box office its first weekend.

The diversity of his films makes Mr. Grazer an anomaly in Hollywood, where careers are typically built on well-defined brands. Everyone knows what a Steven Spielberg movie is, or a Jerry Bruckheimer film. But few people could describe a Brian Grazer project, except to say that it will probably make a lot of money.

The assertion is risible: Besides maybe Saul Zaentz, Grazer is in fact probably the best-known producer in Hollywood who is not also a filmmaker. (Scott Rudin is more colorful, but Grazer’s several films nominated for best picture and his partnership with Ron Howard have gotten him much more mainstream ink.) What he is really unhappy with (and this is something that the writer doesn’t mention) is the phenomenon of the faceless producer. That’s a mildly interesting issue, in that they are sometimes the creative force behind a particular film, even in the ongoing era of the cult of the director. But this story isn’t about that. This was my favorite part:

For the last 20 years, Mr. Grazer has met each week with a person who is an expert in science, medicine, politics, fashion, religion — anything other than entertainment. He is so serious about the meetings that he has a staff member whose job it is to find interesting people.

He is not so serious about garnering outside knowledge as to do what normal people do, which is read a book every once in a while!

But those meetings are key parts of his creative process, we are told:

The weekly get-togethers have led to some of Mr. Grazer’s most successful ideas. After meeting with five of the top trial lawyers in the country, Mr. Grazer came up with the idea for “Liar Liar.”

Liar Liar, the Jim Carrey Movie, is about a lawyer who all of a sudden can’t lie any more. For that Grazer needed to meet with not one but five top trial lawyers, when he could have just listened to a Jay Leno monologue and saved himself the expense of that hard-working staff member. The piece mentions Grazer’s well-known head of ludicrously spiked hair, but doesn’t dwell on it. Instead we learn:

He wears a conservative uniform to work each day — black pants, a white shirt and skinny black tie — because he fears looking like the typical Hollywood producer struggling to appear young.

The story also doesn’t mention the junk Gazer has produced, including ultraviolent crap like The Missing. He also gets a pat on the back because Angels and Demons, his follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, will purportedly be his first sequel. What about “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps”?

As of today the editorial pages of both the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal have offered their thoughts on the new album by the Eagles, “Long Road Out of Eden.” (The album, you will recall, was offered for sale only at Wal-Mart; prompted a revision of the Billboard charts, which previously had excluded CDs not universally available; and ended up topping the charts that week with 710,000 copes sold.) The Times editorial, from last Sunday, discussed the prime criticism of the album—that the band, with its latter-day anthems attacking environmental despoliation and corporate greed, had gotten in bed with a big source of such problems—and ended on a cautious note:

Have the Eagles sold out? Mr. Henley says that by doing business with Wal-Mart, he has more influence and easier access to the company’s executives, including the ones responsible for trying to make the company more environmentally conscious. His argument is almost certainly bolstered by the strong sales of ”Long Road Out of Eden.”

We hope, with him, that he has the influence he suggests, otherwise this arrangement may well turn out to be nothing more than a long road to Wal-Mart.

The WSJ editorial ($), impishly hedded “Desperados,” took a much rosier view:

In cutting out the record company, the band cut itself in for a bigger share of the per-album profits. While it might have expected fewer sales from restricted availability, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Wal-Mart’s retail price of under $12 for the two-disc album has allowed smaller retailers to stock up on the album at Wal-Mart and then resell them with a markup.

The Eagles aren’t the first to try new ways to sell a record. Garth Brooks signed an exclusive deal in 2005 with Wal-Mart and has sold millions of records. Beyonce has released an exclusive DVD through the store. Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney are selling their music through Starbucks. Billy Joel’s daughter, Alexa Ray, is trying to establish her own music career by doing an exclusive with Target.

These and others are evidence that Napster and its filesharing successors weren’t the death of the music business but a smart bomb that forced the creation of new delivery models. Apple’s iTunes is the most famous. But the Web has allowed thousands of bands to find new audiences, and even create global niche brands. Thanks to the Internet, a Norwegian metal band named Enslaved has been able to fill small town bars and auditoriums in the U.S.

The unexpected, wholly thrilling appearance of Enslaved on the WSJ ed page comes from a NYT piece on the band from a week or so ago. The editorial concluded:

We believe in property rights as much as anyone, but when technology is changing, businesses have to change too — and that includes the business of music. So let’s applaud Mr. Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and the other Eagles for some creative capitalism, however politically incorrect.

The trouble here, as with Starbucks’ selling the latest Paul McCartney album, is that these are one-time PR events. The Eagles deal isn’t the start of something new, it’s a last gasp. Barring the band’s conjuring up some new radio hits, the next Eagles album will not be as notable, and selling it only through one retailer probably won’t make any sense. This will of course also be true for Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello and whatever other fading stars are looking for a way to call some attention to themselves when they have a new product to sell.

Financially, it probably was a smart move for the Eagles, just as the Starbucks alliance was a smart move for McCartney. They both will get more money for their crummy new album than they otherwise would. The McCartney record had a high price, as I recall; Starbuck’s strategy was to make the CD as expensive as its upscale clientele would tolerate. Wal-Mart’s audience isn’t so much downmarket as it is more suburban and rural, and carried a much-more-reasonable $12 price tag. (It’s a two-CD set, too.) In both cases, to varying degrees, the retail outlets are subsidizing the artists’ profits. Starbucks’ motivations were mostly marketing driven; they got million of dollars worth of publicity on the deal. For Wal-Mart, the deal was a more traditional loss leader, designed to get folks into its stores to buy the Eagles album and some other crap, as well.

What is down market, in the end, is these artists’ ever-more-limited options when it comes to selling actual records. (Both make kazillions touring.) I said above that selling the next Eagles CD through one retailer probably won’t make sense. When Wal-Mart inevitably passes, however, there may be another, slightly grimier outlet looking for a little buzz to liven its image: K-Mart, say, or possibly Linen ‘n’ Things, or maybe 7-Eleven. I hope I live to see the day the new Eagles album is offered for sale exclusively at the Cracker Barrel.

The NYT has a story today about students organizing over the broad issue of copyright constraints. The organizing came after students started getting letters from the RIAA, and some had to settle for sharing music files. But the point of the story is this:

But in recent months, the group has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first national conference, held at Harvard in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.
…

The movement is not without its critics. Early on, Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the group should pick more consequential problems to rally around than access to music.

“Part of what’s so tricky about this movement is trying to pry apart access to entertainment from some of the more serious issues, like access to medicine,” he said. “The movement does itself a disservice by blending all the issues together.”

The idea that students will begin actually to organize on a large scale over this issue is far-fetched. More likely—and this is the record industry’s Achilles heel—is that students legally attacked by the RIAA will begin to fight back, simply and lethally. The industry can be sneaker-netted to death in a heartbeat once folks start swapping mp3 discs seriously. One lazily enterprising guy on the floor of a dorm can stick 15 or 20 CDs’ worth of new music onto a disc and pass it down the floor and distribute the equivalent of thousands of downloaded songs in an hour or two. (More energetic ones, of course, simply set up private nets for distributing songs among a trusted group.) This all happens now, of course. But as awareness grows of the results of the industry’s misguided and destructive legal campaign, won’t music fans begin to apprehend there’s an easy and devastating way to fight back?

James Frey, the fabulist whose memoir “A Million Little Things” was exposed as having been in many parts made up and exaggerated, has gotten an unspecified deal for a new novel, to be called “Bright Shiny Morning.”

Times story here.

WSJ story here.

Frey is a hugely uninteresting guy, but there are a couple of interesting things in the coverage. For example, there’s this in the NYT piece:

In a news release yesterday, HarperCollins announced that Jonathan Burnham, a publisher, had negotiated the deal for “Bright Shiny Morning.” Minutes before the release went out, the news was reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The Times’s policy is to credit the original sources of news, but this one is either a) strained or b) mocking, I can’t decide which.

But it seems plain the Times was on the story as well; the piece, by Motoko Rich, says that Frey was “reached by telephone before the announcement” to respond to rumors he was selling a short-story collection. Frey dismissed the question, saying “I have never written a short story in my life.” The Times rather tendentiously notes he had published one–in a catalog to an LA art show last year.

More exasperating is a comment in the Times story from Nan Talese, who published Frey’s original bullshit book, and had her ass handed to her on a platter by Oprah Winfrey last year.

“I would have loved to see it [Talese said of the new Frey book], but I’m very glad that James has happily landed.”

“He made a mistake by exaggerating those things and not letting us know about it,” she said. “If it wasn’t a four-million-copy best seller, no one would have noticed you’ve made a mistake.”

Talese is using the word “exaggerate” to mean “made tons of stuff up out of whole cloth, including several of the most memorable parts of his book.” On the slow-motion car wreck that was Winfrey’s show on Frey, Talese, who as a book editor might be expected to be a bit more intellectually honest, came off similarly Clintonian.

Here’s the Smoking Gun’s original expose of Frey:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim. It’s a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims’ parents bewildered. “As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident,” said the mother of one of the dead girls. “I figured he was taking license…he’s a writer, you know, they don’t tell everything that’s factual and true.”

Jeff Leeds in the NYT analyzes Britney Spears’ commercial prospects after her much-ridiculed performance at the VMA’s Sunday night:

Endlessly mocked in the mainstream news media and the blogosphere, it has left her fans and her handlers bewildered. The show also left raw nerves: Ms. Spears’s label, Jive Records, sent a note to MTV chastising the network over the comments of the comedian Sarah Silverman, who took the stage immediately after Ms. Spears and referred to her children as “mistakes.”

With her first studio album in four years scheduled for release on Nov. 13, the music industry is debating whether Ms. Spears’s career can recover.

The story does not mention if Jive had anything to say about another of Silverman’s shticks, which involved stretching out her lips and turning her head sideways to approximate Spears’ shaved vagina.

But it does bear the marks of industry finger-pointing, notably from a record company distancing itself from its star:

The idea [to appear on the VMA’s] received a mostly cool reception from Ms. Spears’s principal advisers at Jive. But Ms. Spears’s entertainment lawyer, Gary Stiffelman, figured she could benefit from MTV exposure, and pressed her to sign on. Mr. Stiffelman also helped steer Ms. Spears to a new manager, Jeff Kwatinetz, about a month ago to guide her through preparations for the appearance. Mr. Stiffelman and Mr. Kwatinetz declined to comment.

Ms. Spears began a program of fitness training and choreography sessions to get ready, with executives from MTV and Jive receiving updates on her progress from her management. Shortly after the preparations began, though, Ms. Spears jolted the team by shaking up her coterie of advisers, ousting Mr. Stiffelman.

To hear the public press tell the story, things always used to be better. Music was better, movies were better, TV was better.

This is almost never true, for all sorts of reasons. One is the selectivity of history. It’s easy to think that every movie made in the 1940s was superior because every ’40s flick you see is a stunner. That’s because you’re only watching 20 or 30 films from the era–the ones that people still want to see today.

The flipside of that is neglecting to mention the bad stuff. When CDs came in, paeans to the LP were heard everywhere (and still are). One thing you didn’t hear is that response on an LP plummeted as the needle headed toward the center of the disc; that’s why so many album sides begins with loud rockin’ tracks and end with softer ones. Isn’t that an unforgivable technical compromise?

Anyway, Lee Gomes in the WSJ ($) tells us how mp3s are ruining music:

If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it.

Those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry — producers, engineers, mixers and the like — say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player. That combination is thus becoming the “reference platform” used as a test of how a track should sound.

Wasn’t it ever thus? Didn’t kids walk around with crummy little cassette Walkmans? (In the mid-1970s, I am embarrassed to recall, I had a funky little portable 8-track-tape player I lugged around.) And what about AM car radios? Isn’t it pop lore that Motown producers carefully listened to their productions through tinny car speakers?

But now all of a sudden the iPod is ruining fine music:

All these engineers tend to be audiophiles, the sort who would fuss over a track to make it perfect. But they’re beginning to wonder if they should bother.

“I care about quality, even though the kid on the street might like what he hears on MySpace, which is even worse than an MP3,” said Stuart Brawley, an L.A. engineer who has recorded Cher and Michael Jackson. “We try to make the best quality sound we can, but we increasingly have to be realistic about how much time we can spend doing it.”

Howard Benson, who has done work for Santana and Chris Daughtry, says members of a studio recording crew will sometimes complain after a session, “I just spent all this time getting the greatest guitar and drums solo, and it ends up as an MP3.”

Sigh. Gomes is a smart guy, and notes a lot of caveats at the end of his column, but his thoughts are ill-timed. The fact is, as I noted below, the compressed mp3 sound will be an evanescent phenomenon. Already the new 160-gig iPod will hold 9,000 or 10,000 songs, or the entire CD collection of most music fans, in the Apple Lossless format, which promises full CD-quality sound.

The story ends with this indefensible quote from studio owner Skip Saylor, nostalgia-monger extraordinaire:

Still, engineers experience some nostalgia about earlier technologies. Says Mr. Saylor, “What we’ve lost with this new era of massive compression and low fidelity are the records that sounds so good that you get lost in them. “Dark Side of the Moon” — records like that just aren’t being made today.”

Matea Gold in the LAT makes the rounds before the Emmys this Sunday to see what HBO needs to do in a post-Albrecht, post-”Sopranos” world. (The show has 15 nominations for its last season, including its delectable finale; Chris Albrecht was the network’s talented capo, who flamed out in the spring after hitting his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot.)

The fix the network is in is good for us viewers; HBO is taking a seeing-what-sticks approach, and trying everything from absurdist sit-coms like “Flight of the Conchords” to joyless sexfests like “Tell Me You Love Me.” There’s more to come, says Gold:

That’s not to say that HBO doesn’t have high expectations for the trio of new programs it picked up for next year: “12 Miles of Bad Road,” an hourlong dramedy by “Designing Women” creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, with Lily Tomlin as a Dallas real estate magnate; vampire drama “True Blood,” executive produced by “Six Feet Under’s” Alan Ball; and “In Treatment,” executive producer Mark Wahlberg’s adaptation of an Israeli series about a therapist, played by Gabriel Byrne, struggling with his own demons.

Next spring will also mark the arrival of “John Adams,” a $100-million miniseries based on David McCullough’s biography, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Simon — whose gritty urban drama “The Wire” will return in January for its final season — is also producing “Generation Kill,” a miniseries for next fall about a group of Marines who participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fan favorites “Big Love” and “Entourage,” as well as the quirky cult hit “Flight of the Conchords,” will return midyear.

And further down the road:

To ensure a steady pool of creative talent, [HBO execs] have sought out people in the industry who didn’t have previous relationships with the network, urging them to bring their ideas to HBO. Strauss is developing a new project with Milch and is working with Martin Scorsese on a series about the development of Atlantic City. And HBO Films is overseeing nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of productions around the world, including “The Pacific,” a $200-million World War II miniseries from executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, set to air in 2009 as the companion piece to “Band of Brothers.”

The story closes with this optimistic quote…

“We’ve never had a bigger and more aggressive slate than we have at the moment,” said Colin Callender, president of HBO Films. “The important thing here at HBO is that we continue to take risks and that talent feels it’s a place where they can take risks with us. I think in that sense, we all shared a clear creative vision.”

… but I think obscures one key issue. Even if you take HBO’s public mantra of its charter at face value–the one that says it has a sophisticated audience, which wants the network to program adventurously and will allow it to fail occasionally–the reality of its dizzying profit margins is slightly different. Those were helped along mightily by DVD sales, led by “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under” and of course “The Sopranos.” That’s many many millions of sets sold at $40, $50, $60 and more. That all adds up, as did the syndication sales of the shows to basic cable–$2.5 million per episode of “The Sopranos” alone. What those figures have in common is that they were all free money. HBO doesn’t need a critical hit. It needs another cash cow–or two or three.

The LAT says that, on the first day of the release of the new albums from Kanye West and 50 Cent, West is kicking 50 Cent’s ass.

Reports Todd Martens:

That can’t be pleasant news for 50 Cent, who touched off quite a tempest last month when he told the website SOHH.com: “If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on Sept. 11, I’ll no longer write music. I’ll write music and work with my other artists, but I won’t put out any more solo albums.”

In the dreary world of hip-hop feuds, or beefs, this was a refreshing development. The CDs went on sale Tuesday, so the figures quoted in the LAT story are not definitive as yet. For updates, check out the box in the upper right-hand corner of this Amazon page, which is keeping track of the pair’s sales on the site. As of this writing, West was ahead by more than two to one.

Michael Cieply in the NYT reports that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces tomorrow (Wednesday) that Jon Stewart will be the host of the 2007 Oscars. The show is scheduled for Feb. 28 of next year.

Stewart hosted the 2005 awards, when “Brokeback Mountain” lost out to “Crash.” Ellen DeGeneres hosted last year, when “The Departed,” yawn, beat out “Babel” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” (Not to mention the unnominated “Children of Men,” Hitsville’s film of the year.)

For those who care, here’s how the audience numbers stack up, per Cieply:

The ceremony drew just 38.9 million viewers on Mr. Stewart’s watch. The number was smaller than the 39.9 million drawn by this year’s ceremony, whose host was Ellen DeGeneres, who played it folksy in an open collar and red velvet, or the 42.1 million who watched Chris Rock, who played with fire when he tweaked stars like Jude Law in 2005.

It was also far below the 55 million who tuned in when the immensely popular “Titanic” swept the awards in 1998, and Billy Crystal made one of his eight appearances as host.

Nikki Finke trumpets that the Harry Potter films are the biggest box-office franchise of all time—or, as she breathlessly hedlines it, “Harry Potter Biggest Film Franchise Ever!”:

With the success of this summer’s Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix, Warner Bros announced today that its five Harry Potter films have combined to become the top-grossing film franchise worldwide in history. It surpasses even the box office total of all 22 James Bond and 6 Star Wars franchises, with two films yet to come — Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The combined worldwide box office gross for the five Harry Potter films to date is in excess of $4.47 billion even as The Order Of The Phoenix is still going strong in theaters around the globe. In addition to holding the franchise box office record, all five of the Harry Potter films are among the 20 top-grossing box office hits of all time.

This is, of course, the “Inflated Play Money™” box-office record beloved by studio publicists, those who have a need to suck up to them, and the dumb. Finke is talking about worldwide grosses, at which the Harry Potter films excel in particular and in any case benefit from more efficient modern studio global-marketing campaigns. Still, as can be seen in Box Office Mojo’s inflation-corrected list of domestic earnings, all but one of the Star Wars films made more money than the highest-grossing of the Potters, “Sorcerer’s Stone.” (The original “Star Wars” made three times what “Sorcerer’s Stone” did, in fact.) And George Lucas isn’t too bad at worldwide marketing himself. I don’t feel like doing the math, but since two of the 22 James Bond films (”Thunderball” and “Goldfinger”) heavily outgrossed “Sorcerer’s Stone” domestically, I don’t think it’s likely Potter surpasses Bond, either, in real dollars.

p.s. to the ongoing Apple vs. NBC items, below:

How many times are journalists going to keep quoting with a straight face the PR guy from NBC talking about “attractive” pricing, anyway? Again, the quote is:

“Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

Is that guy attractive, er, high? And why don’t the reporters ask the direct follow-up question: Did NBC want to raise the prices on its shows on the iTunes Store, yes or no?

“Attractive” isn’t the only word that means “high” right now. “Flexible,” as one can see from the Shields quote, seems to mean that as well. Here’s another example from the Times the other day, about the producers of the new Mel Brooks musical, “Young Frankenstein,” readying the money trough:

Earlier this summer the production unveiled a tiered ticketing scale, with the tickets for the 250 or so best seats in the theater priced at $450 and $375 on weekends and matinees, a move that was criticized as much for its timing — i.e., before the show opened and achieved hit status — as for the prices themselves.

Mr. Sillerman, who said he was simply trying to make ticketing more flexible, pointed out that the show was also holding lotteries for $25 front-row seats at most performances, and reserving a large number of center-orchestra seats for sale only at the Hilton box office for the nonpremium $120 price.

There’s “flexible” again. Let’s do the math and see what flexible means here. Two hundred and fifty seats times four times the usual top ticket price equals a potential income equal to more than half again what the producers could generate in a sold-out house in the 1800-seat theater. So “flexible” in this context equals “almost 50 percent more money for the producers.”

But, that’s not all. Sillerman also says he is reserving “a large number” of seats for sale at $120, which sounds positively generous, until you remember that $120 is already at the high end of Broadway’s top normal ticket price. The writer of the Times story doesn’t describe it that way, opting instead to call that price a “nonpremium” one. I, inflexibly, call it a “greedily high” one.

So that’s the other definition of “flexible” on Broadway: “Some tickets we’ll sell at four times the normal rate, but we’ll also sell some at the high end of regular price. We don’t price every ticket insensibly high. We’re flexible!”

David Carr in the NYT takes a contrarian view of Steve Jobs’ face-off with NBC, which doesn’t like the single-pricing for its TV shows at the iTunes store. Carr says:

Let me get this straight: Steve Jobs insists that songs on iTunes cost 99 cents and television episodes cost $1.99 because consumers crave simple pricing.

Except, of course, when it comes to Apple’s own products.

He’s talking about Apple’s decision to lower the price of an iPhone by a third. The company endured a lot of complaints from first adopters and offered them $100 credit in Apple products.

Carr continues:

[W]hen you think about it, the media companies Mr. Jobs is fighting with want the opportunity to make the same mistake.

Earlier this summer, the Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, said it would not renew its contract with iTunes because it wanted more flexibility in setting prices. Last week, NBC Universal and Apple issued dueling press announcements, with Apple saying it would not carry television shows from the coming NBC season because the network wanted double the $1.99 price and NBC saying that was not true.

“Apple is not telling the truth. We never asked to double the wholesale price of our shows,” said Cory Shields, a spokesman for NBC Universal. “Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

There’s an interesting issue here, of why Jobs won’t just let the record companies and networks do what they want. His reasons (which I attempted to limn below) are defensible; but since he makes his money from iPods, not the iTunes Store, why does he care? It could be that Jobs thinks he right. Carr’s not buying it, which is fair, but I think he missed a few things:

1) For the record, Apple does have a simple pricing strategy for the vast majority of its products, and doesn’t let wholesalers discount, either. In the past it has paid the price for this rigidity, of course.
2) When the NBC spokesperson says, “Apple is not telling the truth,” he carefully clarifies what he claims Apple is not telling the truth about. You’ll note he never says, “NBC does not, in any way, want to raise the price of its products on iTunes.” Absent that assertion, it’s reasonable to assume NBC did want to increase the price of its shows and that, when Shields talks about “making our products more attractive to consumers” he is talking about raising prices. So I think it’s NBC that is lying.
3) Then Carr makes this case:

[Jobs’] arguments against variable pricing (flat rates draw new customers and lessen the appeal of piracy) may have worked a couple years ago, but they are starting to sound a little self-serving. The Web, after all, can easily enable infinitely customized pricing. eBay proved that people will not only track prices closely, but act in their own consuming self-interest.

Should buying media be any different than bidding on a canoe or last season’s Banana Republic sweater?

First, again, it’s hard to see how Jobs’ intransigence on this issue is self-serving. Second, the appeal of piracy is not only still present, it is getting more appealing. In fact, there’s even more ethical wriggle room for consumers when it comes to video. It goes something like, “Hey, I watched this on TV, with commercials, which is the deal the networks cut with me the consumer. I made a VHS tape, but artificial constructs mean I can’t use that tape the way I want to—on my iPod for example. I might buy the DVD at some point, but I can’t play that on my iPod either. So fuck it, there’s no way I’m paying three times for the same show. I’m going to torrent a few episodes.”

Which is why, of course, buying media these days is different from buying a canoe.

Nice to read a refreshing take on the critic’s art:

It’s become a little embarrassing, frankly. I find myself answering the same handful of disgruntled questions, time and again, about how and why I dare to work as a theater critic. My favorite entreaties include “Why are you so mean?” (Because I can be) and “Don’t you care that theater people pour their hearts and souls into every production?” (Not particularly). Mostly people want to know how I could have possibly liked or disliked a particular show, or want to accuse me of having a personal vendetta against theater folk, because I reportedly do nothing but gripe about the shows I see.

And that’s just the first graf. The writer, who goes by the name Robrt L. Pela, is the theater critic at the Phoenix New Times, flagship paper of the now 16-paper chain, which also owns the Village Voice and the LA Weekly, and is a good example of the sort of thing that drives the chain’s detractors crazy. (Disclosure: I worked for New Times in the mid-’90s.) It’s the kind of essay that would never be printed in the Village Voice.

Local theater criticism is one critical venue where the work of one writer, generally at the local daily, has virtually complete hegemony over the health of any one production. The whys and wherefores of this are often overstated. It basically comes down to the fact that a swing of a few hundred customers can make or break a production, and a paper with a few hundred thousand in circulation can persuade or dissuade that number fairly easily with a well-worded rave or a quick pan. (Local dailies can also kill just by lack of attention, of course.)

As a consequence, the reviews of daily critics tend to range from raves to apologetic demurrals. The alternatives are usually left to fill in the blanks and shoot the deserving fish in the local barrel. It’s a fun but sometimes thankless endeavor; Pela doesn’t say it, but in the long run it’s also good for the health of the local scene.

The NYT’s Brooks Barnes notes a turnaround from Warners in its web endeavors:

Warner Brothers has discarded its initial strategy of insisting that advertisers shoulder production costs from the start. Instead, it has decided to finance most projects itself and worry about lining up advertisers to recoup costs later.

“In trying to get the business off the ground,” said Craig Hunegs, executive vice president for business development, “we ended up in a bit of a dance with advertisers about what various projects would look like.”

The shift underlines a growing realization among the big Hollywood studios: Web entertainment is evolving so quickly that they must take on more financial risk to keep up.

The WSJ ($) noted in an editorial over the weekend that NBC has been forced to stop running “Law & Order” reruns while one of the show’s stars, Fred Thompson, runs for president. The paper happily notes that TNT, the cable station, doesn’t have to:

Why should L&O junkies have to suffer just because District Attorney Arthur Branch, er, Mr. Thompson is running for President?

… the editorial board asks, rhetorically. It answers:

The ostensible justification for equal time provisions is that, in a world of media scarcity, broadcasters need to provide a political platform for everyone on an equal basis, lest one candidate gain an unfair advantage through more exposure.

This might have made sense when these rules were written by Congress in the 1930s, but it’s a hard policy to defend in today’s media-saturated world. The sheer volume of media outlets today not only renders these regulations obsolete but also makes fair enforcement all but impossible.

The editorial is worth noting because it is an example of an easy test as to whether those who comment on FCC oversight of the broadcast networks and terrestrial radio are being intellectually honest.

Broadcasters operate over public airwaves. The controllers of those airwaves were given a public resource for a pittance; they now own money factories. (One sale of a Chicago station I covered was bought in the ’70s in the low three figures and was sold in the mid-’90s in the high eight figures.) Those who are allowed to broadcast on that spectrum knew the rules when they bought their stations or networks. Having amassed fortunes through those public trusts, they now hire (tax-deductible) lobbyists to try to change the rules and are supported in this endeavor by institutions like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Any argument about the FCC that does not make reference to that dominating issue, as the WSJ editorial does not, can readily be seen to be practicing the politics of distraction.

Again, the editorial instead devotes itself to refuting this different point:

The ostensible justification for equal time provisions is that, in a world of media scarcity, broadcasters need to provide a political platform for everyone on an equal basis, lest one candidate gain an unfair advantage through more exposure.

Now, to the way most of us watch TV, with broadcast and cable station run together, this seems like a strange distinction. But there is a difference. Just as people can buy as many magazines as they want with stories about Fred Thompson, we can pay for cable and watch all the Fred Thompson TV shows we want. But the broadcast airwaves are still free, and there’s no reason a candidate should benefit from a corporate largess over them. Secondly, the broadcast networks, while fading, are still potent purveyors of a mass audience. Cable shows bigger than typical prime-time broadcast audiences are still rare, and even a network “Law & Order” rerun is watched by many times more people than a first-run cable show.

There’s at least one other issue here that the editorial carefully does not mention. NBC is part of NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric. GE is the sort of outfit that could benefit by having as U.S. president a man whom one of its subsidiaries dutifully broadcast dynamic footage of, week after week, during a wide-open campaign.

In one sense, the editorial is right; media isn’t scarce any more. But the real issue is corporations chafing under restrictions to their power. A corporation will always seek any economic advantage it can take, and it will offer just about any preposterous story when challenged. When it gets caught, it will say, in effect, Hey, it’s what we do to maximize shareholder value. Beware of newspaper editorials proffering the preposterous along the way.