A Short Story About the UTA List
My first taste of working in the entertainment industry came in the form of an unpaid internship at a music video production company that doesn't exist anymore. The intern station was four small desks pushed together, with three available computers. There were five of us who would rotate computer usage, as fairly as we could, when we weren't active on a task.One would assume that all five of us were interns, since we all made use of the intern station. This was incorrect. I would eventually learn that one of the five was actually a personal assistant to an executive at the company. There wasn't any space in the office to provide him his own separate des

Netflix on PS3: Pros and Cons
At long last, Netflix has made their Instant Streaming capabilities available to owners of the PlayStation 3. As a PS3 owner myself, this is a welcome addition to an already capable machine. It certainly makes their new "It only does everything" slogan slightly truer.If you own a PlayStation 3 and have a Netflix account, go to Netflix and sign up for the Instant Streaming Disc right away (if you haven't already). You'll need this disc every time you want to watch streaming movies, which is probably a con for some people. Personally, it doesn't bother me that I have to put a disc in the machine to watch a streaming movie. I

Will Apple lower my cable bill?
For many years now, I've been looking forward to the day when I could completely disconnect from cable or satellite television providers and get all the movies and series I want delivered to my TV through the internet. There are several entities out there that want to make that happen. Leading the pack are Apple and Netflix. But there are also Amazon and Hulu and Boxee, and who knows what else?The concept is simple. I should be able to save money by trimming the fat. For the last several years, I've bee

The Variety Show Ad Method
One of my first jobs in television was on a show called "Pepsi Smash." It was a summer concert series on The WB (back when that network existed) wherein popular groups with popular songs would hop up on a stage in front of an audience full of teens and do a couple of their most popular numbers. I was just a production assistant, so the pay was low and the hours were long. But there was free Pepsi! I drank many a can of

"The Blob 2"
For reasons I recently explained, I'm something of a newcomer to the horror genre. I grew up during a period when horror was at its worst, and mistook this bad streak to mean that horror was an inferior genre in general (read here). Now I have an immense respect for what a good horror movie can do -- the way it can subtly and playfully address an issue, comment on our times, make a moral or sociopolitical point. That being said, to a large degree I still don't completely understand the genre. Obviously, I understand the concept of something scary/creepy happening on