Brent Lang - FishbowlLA

Shout! Factory Extends Roger Corman, Judd Apatow Shelf Life

Richard Horgan — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 06:45:44 +0000

Any Hollywood company that can claim a 25-30% annual profit jump for the past five years and gross annual revenue growth of five to 10% deserves a media shout-out. This morning, Shout! Factory gets just that from TheWrap senior writer Brent Lang.

Two key assets in Shout! Factory’s retro-DVD arsenal are Judd Apatow‘s short-lived Freaks and Geeks series and the films of B movie maestro Roger Corman. For the former, company execs nimbly worked around some music licensing issues while, for the latter, they beefed things up with old-school DVD Extras featuring interviews with the likes of Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard:

“The DVD market was slipping when we made the deal, but, on the other hand, the slippage of DVD sales isn’t a cliff, it’s sort of a slope,” Corman said. “The hill is sloping downward, but it’s not dead. There’s still money to be made and Shout! has done just that.”

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TheWrap Hires Joseph Kapsch as Deputy Managing Editor

Richard Horgan — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:55:31 +0000

We just wrapped up (pun intended) a brief conference call with Sharon Waxman and Joseph Kapsch. They were kind enough to ring FishbowlLA this morning to let us know that Kapsch, formerly with Celebuzz, The Hollywood Reporter and the LA Times, will be relocating back to the west coast to start as deputy managing editor of TheWrap on March 25.

“I just think that when it comes to the entertainment industry, you have to go where the opportunities are,” Kapsch said. “And this was a really great opportunity for me.” Added Waxman: “I’ve been a fan of Kapsch for a long time and admired what he’s accomplished at other sites.”

Kapsch will be tasked with growing the breadth, depth and audience for content created by the TheWrap’s roster of staff reporters. The site also has a network of several hundred unpaid bloggers, but that side of things will remain the purview of managing editor Lew Harris.

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When Mike Wallace Blew Off Michael Mann

Richard Horgan — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:30:09 +0000

Interesting tidbit from TheWrap film writer Brent Lang.

Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes from 1983 through 1997, told Lang that prior to the making of Michael Mann‘s 1999 drama The Insider, he arranged for Wallace to meet with the director at the Beverly Regent Wilshire hotel. Why? Because Mann at the time hoped to convince Wallace to play himself in the film (the correspondent was, of course, famously channeled in the end by Christopher Plummer). From Lang’s piece:

The movie depicted Wallace caving to CBS’ corporate leadership after the network refused to air the Jeffrey Wigand interview over concerns about a potential lawsuit from tobacco company Brown & Williamson. Wallace claimed that he never agreed that the story should be killed.

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TheWrap’s Daniel Frankel Segues to PaidContent.org

Richard Horgan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:30:42 +0000

It took some time, but PaidContent.org has finally found someone to step into the slot previously occupied by Andrew Wallenstein. Starting January 9, Daniel Frankel—formerly of TheWrap and Variety (pictured)—will take over as west coast based senior editor. His last day at TheWrap was December 30.

“PaidContent has been trying to establish a west coast operation for a while,” Frankel tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “We had some talks last spring and then continued talking. PaidContent also lost David Kaplan, so I will be doing some coverage of New York advertising and publishing as well.”

Frankel, who will be home-based, is familiar with that territory from his days with Adweek. He comes to PaidContent after a long stint at TheWrap as news editor and senior writer. After being laid off at Variety the same day as Mike Speier, Frankel began freelancing for the latter at TheWrap in May of 2009 and joined the website’s staff in October of that same year.

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UCLA Prof Comments on Pauline Kael’s Research Theft

Richard Horgan — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:00:17 +0000

If UCLA professor emeritus Howard Suber one day finds himself sitting in a chair in his dying old age, muttering about a traumatic, formative turning point, his golden whispered word could well be “research.”

As detailed in Brian Kellow‘s October 27 biography of revered film critic Pauline Kael, the famed journalist was guilty of stealing Suber’s groundbreaking Orson Welles research for a two-part 1971 New Yorker article “Raising Kane.” Suber cooperated with the author and is now commenting in the media for the first time about this resurrected scandal, via a Brent Lang bylined article today on TheWrap:

“I take no satisfaction in the story coming out,” Suber said. “I was depressed over the weekend, despite getting included in the New York Times and New Yorker reviews, because it did stir up a lot of painful memories…”

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Report: Michael Ovitz Maneuvering Triggers IMG Board Battle

Richard Horgan — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:15:01 +0000

It’s rare these days to see the name Michael Ovitz headlining an entertainment news “Exclusive,” especially one that has nothing to do with a valuable painting or expansive piece of property. But there he is today, in a firecracker piece on TheWrap co-authored by Sharon Waxman and Brent Lang.

According to the article, IMG Worldwide board member Ovitz has been aiming to take over the company while chairman and CEO Ted Forstmann (pictured) battled brain cancer. The firm represents Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and many other sports world A-listers. An IMG board conference call reportedly scheduled for today was set to address the idea of “ousting” Ovitz:

According to another insider, board members Jerry Perenchio and Irving Azoff–respectively the ex-CEO of Telemundo and executive chairman of LiveNation –are leading the charge to get Ovitz booted…

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Disgruntled Freelance Photographer Sues LA Times

Richard Horgan — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:00:25 +0000

Earlier this week, TheWrap’s Brent Lang had an item that was a bit of a stretch. Using vague, unattributed sources, he insinuated that LA Times columnist Tim Rutten might have been recently laid off because of mistakes made on the job (a charge Rutten gently denied).

This time around on the LA Times beat, Lang is on much more solid exclusive footing. He has the skinny on an ugly bit of litigation filed against the newspaper in May by entertainment biz photographer David Strick, who freelanced for the paper up until 2010 and now works with the Hollywood Reporter. The artist is not buying the LA Times argument that he surrendered ownership of his work by uploading it to the company’s content management system (CMS):

Strick does not set a figure for the damages he believes he’s owed, but he alleges that the Tribune Company and its television stations and various papers have published at least 174 of his photos illegally. He cites at least 510 violations of his copyrights.

Ed Greenberg, an attorney for the photographer, told TheWrap that each infringement could come with an award for as much as $150,000.

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Tim Rutten Interviews Rile LA Times

Richard Horgan — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:30:23 +0000

The most outspoken victims of the latest round of LA Times layoffs have been book reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds and award-winning columnist Tim Rutten (pictured). Today, Rutten has shared a couple of interesting new observations with TheWrap’s Brent Lang.

Rutten says he was puzzled by his removal from book review assignments after he made a mistake in a February 2, 2011 Op Ed piece. He also reveals that his former employer was unhappy with the comments he made on KPCC and KCRW in the immediate aftermath of his dismissal:

“I know they were upset with those interviews–which I did not seek–because one of my editors was instructed to call me and tell me that they were upset by it,” Rutten said. “I think that if people were upset, then the burden is on them to say what part of what I said about the state of the Times is either factually incorrect or substantially unfair. If they can point to those things, I think they have a legitimate beef.”

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Sharon Waxman Tones Down HFPA Suicide Headline

Richard Horgan — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:30:30 +0000

Late yesterday afternoon, the following e-mail news bulletin was fired off from the TheWrap: “EXCLUSIVE: New HFPA Bombshell – Longtime Member Commits Suicide”

Immediately, readers started piling on in the comments section, disgusted at how article author Sharon Waxman had sensationally headline-connected the circa January 17th suicide of Hollywood Foreign Press Association member Max B. Miller (pictured), a 73-year-old photographer, with the organization’s other recent travails. Here’s just a small sample of the outraged reader comments:

[This site just sad now]: Sharon – are you really this desperate for traffic? Is getting your head handed to you by Nikki Finke on a daily basis having this deep an effect on your standards? You used to work for the NY Times, for God’s sake. At long last, have you no decency?

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The Filing Room at TheWrap’s TheGrill

Tina Dupuy — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:32:05 +0000

Yes, “the wrap” and “the grill” makes us hungry and lunch is late due to an early morning accident on the 10 Freeway. TheGrill is the one day pow wow of movers and shakers in the media and tech industry. “The leaders, the deciders, the disrupters.”

Pictured above TheWrap’s Managing Editor Lew Harris, Brent Lang and the anonymous blogger from Hollywood Temp Diaries.

No Nikki Finke sightings. No shock there.

You can view and read about the speakers here. We’ve been waiting for one of the CEOs, founders or thinkers to get off message. No luck yet. Maybe if they switched the Starbucks for some whiskey.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.