|
Reel News Tim Ryan |
Film spending dropped
45% here last yearCommercial, television and feature film production spending here last year slipped nearly 45 percent to $81.2 million from 2003's record $147.2 million. Feature film production alone accounted for $76.6 million of that amount. It was the lowest production spending since the 1997 tally of $70.6 million.
Production spending fell in every major category last year: TV commercials, feature films, Hawaii-based TV network series, and TV episodic/specials/movies-of-the-week. The largest plunge -- 74 percent -- was in feature film expenditures, from 2002's $76.5 million, down to $18.3 million.
Production expenditures in Hawaii, only twice, has exceeded $100 million: in 2000, it reached $135.9 million, and 2002, $147.2. Only twice has production spending in Hawaii exceeded $100 million: 2000's $135.9 million and 2002's $147.2 ...
ABC's "Lost" and NBC's "Hawaii" series will square off against one another in the 8 p.m. Wednesday time slot in the upcoming network TV fall season. "Hawaii," which begins filming July 12, will likely be based out of a 48,000 square-foot warehouse in Mapunapuna for soundstage and production offices ...
About 90 minutes of the "Lost" pilot was shown on the Home Shopping Center in select mainland cities as part of an audience poll conducted by Intersearch Research Corp. After the screening, selected viewers took part in a session where they rated the show, its characters, how interested they would be for another 11 episodes, various story change scenarios (more science fiction-mystery or survival-relationships), how would they react if there were dinosaurs, and should a crash-surviving, non-English speaking Korean couple have their dialogue in English or subtitles.
The show opens with a close-up of the lead character's eyeball and pulls away to show him in a shirt-and-tie on the jungle floor. Suddenly, overhead, there's the roar of a jet engine. When he runs through the jungle and breaks through the trees, he sees the chaos surrounding a crashed passenger jet. The people who climbed out of the fuselage wreckage hear huge crashing sounds in the jungle. There, the front section of the fuselage is suspended in a tree.
The passengers make their way to the cockpit to find the pilot has suffered a concussion. When the pilot sticks his head out a broken window to investigate some noise, he's quickly eaten by an unseen entity.
More later ...
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Reel News unspools every Wednesday.
Contact Tim Ryan at tryan@starbulletin.com.