Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Paramount To Transform Hollywood With Warner Merger After AG Settlement That Clears Way For Warner Merger

www.forbes.com: An imminent settlement of the lawsuit by 12 states’ attorneys general blocking the $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery by much smaller rival Paramount Skydance removes one of the last barriers to a fundamental reshaping of Hollywood’s battered entertainment industry.

 

1776 Hair Plan-Related Lawsuit to Continue

BroadwayWorld: It has been over two-and-a-half years since Zuri Washington sued the 1776 tour producers for racial discrimination and retaliation, and finally a court has addressed the substance of her allegations. After a venue change and the filing of two amended complaints, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland dismissed Washington's claims for discrimination but allowed her claims for retaliation to continue.

 

AI and your intellectual property

www.thefabricator.com: In the 1980s, television stations across the U.S. picked up a tag line that originated in New York media for public service announcements that TV watchers from that decade will remember: “It’s 10:00 PM. Do you know where your children are?” Today, parents can track their children through their smartphones and tablets. They have a good handle on where they are most of the time. Can the same be said for manufacturing companies and their data? Do they know where that is?

 

George Lucas Reminds Hollywood Not to Listen to the Haters

gizmodo.com: Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Lucas was talking about the reaction to his tinkering with the Star Wars movies for the 1997 special editions when he dropped in this little gem. “It’s hard to explain to the studios that if you listen to the people who are unhappy, it’s not going to turn out well,” Lucas said. “It’s going to be sad. Because they’re not people who know how to make movies.”

 

Crisis at the Kennedy Center: Why Its Main Building Is Going Dark for Two Years

time.com: The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees on Tuesday voted to immediately close the lauded arts institution’s main building. President Donald Trump, who is its Chairman, announced the decision on Truth Social. Hours before the vote, a district court ruled against the Board’s latest effort to add Trump’s name back to the building—this time, in recognition of his purported role in the planned renovations. The closure decision also came one day after leadership claimed that the cultural center was on the brink of bankruptcy.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Seeding the Chicago theater field with new productions and companies

Chicago Reader: In July, Oskar Eustis, the celebrated longtime artistic director of New York’s Public Theater (the venue where both A Chorus Line and Hamilton were birthed), announced he would be leaving his position in two years. In an interview with Michael Paulson of the New York Times, Eustis, while declaring the state of the Public itself “strong,” also said, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over. That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over. But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model. We’ve lost a lot of theaters, and we’re going to lose more.”

 

Kennedy Center could close as early as Tuesday, warns of bankruptcy, documents show

The Washington Post: Leaders of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, installed by President Donald Trump, say the center is on the brink of bankruptcy and argue that putting the president’s name on its facade — and thus ensuring his fundraising efforts — may be the only way to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

 

Songwriter Urges Supreme Court to Let Landmark Copyright Ruling Stand

www.billboard.com: The songwriter who won a landmark ruling on copyright termination is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject efforts by major music companies to overturn it, telling the justices there is no “emergency” and that publishers are “doing just fine.”

 

What Burning Man’s Gen Z problem says about the festival

Salon.com: The first time Samantha R. went to Burning Man, it was on a whim. She hadn’t read much about it and had no idea what to expect. She received a free ticket from someone she met at a Grateful Dead event and had little time to prepare. She didn’t bring goggles or even a big coat to survive the cold, dusty nights. Despite the spontaneity and haphazardness of it all, which contributed to a rough burn, the 22-year-old returned on two more occasions — including this year.

 

The art of producing

Chicago Reader: Before any performer twirls a tassel, drops into a split, or picks up a mike, there’s a producer writing emails, organizing spreadsheets, calling venues, crunching numbers, creating posters, tracking ticket sales, wrangling tech information, hiring talent—you get the idea. I haven’t been producing that long, but from just the handful of shows I’ve put on, I can tell you it’s a heavy task.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

The Creators of Come From Away Recall Living in NYC During 9/11, and How That Influenced Their Musical

Playbill: Irene Sankoff and David Hein have always considered their musical Come From Away as a show, not about 9/11, but about what happened on 9/12 and after. Notes Hein, "In times of tragedy, we often focus on the horrible things that happen. And in the days after, it's the wave of support and the wave of people who are doing good that doesn't get highlighted enough."

 

Laika Officially Doubles Down on Stop-Motion in the AI Era

collider.com: This past weekend, on Sunday during the Telluride Film Festival, Laika President and CEO Travis Knight sat down for a discussion with cinematographer and six-time Oscar nominee Caleb Deschanel and film expert Dave Karger to talk about Wildwood, the next stop-motion animated film from Laika.

 

Can More Pro-Shots Help Broadway’s Money Issues? Maybe, Says the Hadestown Film Team

Playbill: The Hadestown live stage film has successfully completed its run in movie theatres, taking home a very handsome $20.7 million over four weeks and making it the highest-grossing live stage film of all time (surpassing Hamilton)—and that's before you start counting on demand sales and rentals.

 

Pittsburgh CLO and Pittsburgh Public to Merge as Confluence Theater

AMERICAN THEATRE: In the latest news from a historic if bumpy theatre merger between Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera (CLO) and Pittsburgh Public Theater (PPT), a new name for the combined theatre has been announced: Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh. Confluence’s name was reportedly chosen by Pittsburgh residents themselves. According to release from the new company, it will combine the musicals that Pittsburgh CLO is known for with the classic and contemporary plays typically produced by Pittsburgh Public Theater.

 

Maybe Paramount-Warner Should Leave L.A.: Joseph Kahn Opinion Column

www.hollywoodreporter.com: However, for L.A., it’d be a death blow. The infrastructure is already suffering with vendors going out of business and crewmembers quitting. If Paramount-Warners leaves, the built-in advantage of being a mecca for filmmakers with access to top talent, props and equipment disintegrates overnight. Studio stockpiles of props, wardrobe, cranes and cameras can truck over to Nashville or Austin. Crews can suddenly live in lower-cost states and afford homes and schools for their kids. They may have to pray to Baby Jesus a little more, but a little Holy Ghost Power never hurt nobody.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Merged groups announce Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh as new name

90.5 WESA: Confluence Theater of Pittsburgh is the name of Pittsburgh’s newest theater company — the result of the merger of two of its oldest troupes. The group announced the name Monday, about a month after the formal merger of Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Pittsburgh CLO.

 

The Federal Film and TV Tax Incentive Gets a Name as Momentum Builds

www.hollywoodreporter.com: Amid a precipitous drop in domestic film and television production in recent years, Hollywood has coalesced around support for a federal tax credit. It’ll almost always be cheaper to shoot in other countries, but the thinking is that government support could make it palatable to shoot more big-budget projects in the United States.

 

EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype

Electronic Frontier Foundation: The history of technology is rife with copyright panics. In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses, like time-shifting and cautioning courts to avoid rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. We believe that courts now should be similarly wary about the hype surrounding AI.

 

8 things Gen Z sees as burnout that Boomers & Gen X just call having a job

stylegirlfriend.com: A 24-year-old and a 56-year-old describe the same Wednesday. The younger one says it was brutal. Back-to-back calls, a manager who wanted a revision, a Slack message at 6:40 that she answered from the couch. She uses the word burnout twice before she gets to what happened after work. The older one says it was Wednesday.

 

From Bacon to Bananas: Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 in 24 Shows

The Theatre Times: With more than 4,200 shows making up this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, twenty-four performances can hardly stand in for the whole thing. What follows is a subjective itinerary through a week shaped by my own tastes and curiosities, even if several stops were among the Festival’s conspicuous talking points. Across theater, comedy, clowning, and magic, certain motifs kept surfacing in parallel: the stories we tell about ourselves, the selves we perform for others, the seductions of visibility (both online and off), and the strange uses of laughter as camouflage, release, resistance, or simply a way of survival.