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Comic-Con ’09: 17 Sneak Peeks

For the uninitiated, the convention started small and pure in 1970: Some 300 comic-book enthusiasts in San Diego gathered to celebrate the medium they loved. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Hollywood began to see the San Diego Comic-Con as a marketing gold mine, and began establishing the routine: Trot out your big names, answer fan questions, screen footage, and (hopefully) ignite a frenzy. For more on ”The Con,” check out the latest issue of EW, including Josh Rottenberg’s cover story on next summer’s Iron Man 2, starring Robert Downey Jr. Enjoy our private tour of some of the coolest new movies and TV shows hitting Comic-Con, before the 125,000-strong legion descending on San Diego on July 23-26 get their first peek. —Adam B. Vary

via Iron Man 2, Robert Downey Jr. | Comic-Con ’09: 17 Sneak Peeks | Comic-Con 2009 | Photos | EW.com.

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IRON MAN 2

STARRING Robert Downey Jr., Mickey Rourke, and Scarlett Johansson

DIRECTED BY Jon Favreau

RELEASE DATE May 7, 2010

Buzz around the first Iron Man started building at the 2007 Comic-Con — the success caught many people by surprise. Now, three months into shooting on Iron Man 2 — in which Stark faces off against Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a Russian inventor who adopts the nom de evil Whiplash — star Robert Downey Jr. is the underdog no more. ”There are a lot more invisible eyes on us now,” Downey says. —Josh Rottenberg

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Francois Duhamel

via Iron Man 2, Mickey Rourke | Comic-Con ’09: 17 Sneak Peeks | Comic-Con 2009 | Photos | EW.com.

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ALICE IN WONDERLAND

STARRING Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Mia Wasikowska

DIRECTED BY Tim Burton

RELEASE DATE March 5, 2010

Burton’s Alice explores the angst beneath the surface of the classic about a girl (Wasikowska) seriously interrupted. ”It’s about somebody who has a rich fantasy life, who feels alone in a strange world,” he says. ”Pretty much my life.” —Christine Spines

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via Alice in Wonderland, Mia Wasikowska | Comic-Con ’09: 17 Sneak Peeks | Comic-Con 2009 | Photos | EW.com.

BY ARIEL SCHWARTZ Thu Jun 25, 2009 at 2:12 PM

The tallest building in the U.S. is about to get a $350 million green makeover as part of a plan to cut electricity use by 80% and save 24 million gallons of water each year. The goal of the project, according to developers, is to turn the Sears Tower into a living laboratory for green retrofits. It’s an ambitious plan for the building, which contains 4.5 million square feet of space, 104 elevators, and 16,000 windows.
Sears Tower, now on track to become the tallest building to receive LEED certification, will receive a laundry list of upgrades designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture over the next five years: solar panels and wind turbines on the roof, up to 35,000 square feet of roof gardens, an energy-efficient lighting control system, insulation improvements, new plumbing systems, and a green learning center on the ground floor. The renovation is expected to create 3,600 jobs. Much of the cost of the retrofit, financed through grants, private investments, government cash, and debt financing, will be offset by energy savings.
The Sears retrofit comes only a few months after the owners of the Empire State Building announced a $20 million retrofit to cut annual energy use by 38%. The project isn’t anywhere near the scale of the Sears renovation–Sears is 110 stories tall to the Empire State Building’s 102 stories, and the Chicago retrofit will cost hundreds of millions more. Both retrofits, however, will serve as green demonstration projects if developers make sure that visitors and tenants understand how the technologies used can be applied to other projects.
[Sears Tower]
Related:
Empire State Building’s $20 Million Green Makeover

By Ben Sheffner

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) – The recording industry secured a resounding victory last week when a Minneapolis jury awarded the four major labels $1.92 million in damages after unanimously finding that a 32-year-old mother had willfully infringed on their copyrights by downloading and sharing 24 songs on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network.

But a question arose after the verdict about whether the sheer size of the damages could lead to a backlash against an industry that is already portrayed in some quarters as overreaching. Sony BMG attorney Wade Leak, who testified at the trial, said he was “shocked” by the damages award.

No one expects that the labels will collect the entire amount from Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old Brainerd, Minn., mother of four who testified during the retrial that her ex-boyfriend or sons, then 8 and 10, were most likely responsible for downloading and distributing the songs. Thomas-Rasset lost her previous trial in 2007 and was ordered to pay $222,000, only to achieve a now-pyrrhic victory when the court tossed the verdict because of a faulty jury instruction.

Even for law-abiding citizens who believe that labels have every right to protect their copyrights, a verdict of almost $2 million could be hard to swallow. Indeed, the Recording Industry Assn. of America said it was willing to reach a settlement with Thomas-Rasset, as it had been all along.

The Copyright Act provides for awards of statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, in the case of willful infringement. A number of copyright scholars on the “copyleft,” led by Harvard Law School’s Charles Nesson, have argued that such damages awards for personal use of file-sharing networks are excessive. Though no court has yet adopted that theory, the Thomas-Rasset verdict provides a very human face to the argument, which she will likely pursue on appeal if the case isn’t settled.

While the recording industry claims strong support in Congress, with powerful champions including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and his Senate counterpart Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Minneapolis verdict could well lead to a legislative move to reduce the damages awards available against individual infringers like Thomas-Rasset.

Thomas-Rasset’s attorney, Kiwi Camara, said he was “very surprised” by the size of the verdict and signaled a willingness to talk about a possible settlement with the labels. But Camara also listed a number of potential issues to appeal should the parties be unable to resolve the case, including a challenge to the labels’ ownership of the copyrights at issue based on the argument that they were improperly classified as “works made for hire” in contravention of the Copyright Act of 1976.

(Ben Sheffner is a copyright attorney who blogs at http://www,copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com. Previously, while employed at 20th Century Fox, he worked on an amicus curiae brief in this case for the Motion Picture Assn. of America.)

(Editing by Dean Goodman at Reuters)

The business is a maze of media platforms including but not limited to; television networks, cable broacasters, special interest distributers, internet content providers, sponsors, stand alone digital theaters, small and large production companies, investors, agents, and video game developers. You can compound the number of these platforms by adding in dozens international counterparts.  In order to sell a “idea” be it a commercial film, television program, documentary, web series, etc. one must have a complete understanding of all of these platforms.

So you didn’t get into the graduate film program at USC, and you don’t have a Masters in creative writing from Columbia but you are convinced that you and your great idea are just a meeting away from securing a commitment from a major studio and as a result turning “you” into the industry’s next mogul. Well all I have to say is “GOOD LUCK”, because you are going to need a boatload of it. In future postings I will begin to present some of the knowledge I have obtained over the last 2 decades from actually selling ideas to all forms of broadcast media. You don’t need a Ivy league degree to do so but you do need to do your homework and someone willing to let you in on how things really get done.

“I know, acheived is mispelled, kinda in a rush this morning.