Movies

You know Julie Chang for her three years of work at WNYW/Channel 5. The entertainment correspondent is featured on Good Day New York, alongside anchors Greg Kelly and Rosanna Scotto.

However, Chang will be alongside actors Neil Patrick Harris and Sofia Vergara in the feature film The Smurfs opening next week.

In the four-second unspoken cameo, Chang is seen walking down a few steps with Vergara and standing in the background.  (Click here for the clip) 

Chang said on Friday’s Good Day that she’s playing herself for the brief role, but joked, “We have to loop it, because my scene is so short.”

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Andrew Rossi is making waves for the intriguing documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, but this isn’t his first time pulling back the curtain on a high-stress industry. He previously chronicled the food business in Eat This New York and A Table in Heaven and was lucky enough to have a few of his projects featured at Sundance Film Festival.

Not an easy feat, he explained in the final installment of our @mediabeat interview.

“It’s an honor to be at Sundance, and it’s hard to sort of suggest ‘have your movie be at Sundance,’ because it’s not a given,” Rossi said. “It’s hard to get in there. But one thing I can say is we really keyed our whole process [of making Page One] to trying to get it done for that deadline, so that it would be at Sundance.”

Watch the full video for Rossi’s visual storytelling tips for journalists.

This video is also available on YouTube.

Part 1: Andrew Rossi Goes Inside The New York Times
Part 2: Andrew Rossi on How The New York Times Sets The Public Agenda

In Page One: Inside The New York Times, filmmaker Andrew Rossi followed reporters David Carr, Tim Arango and Brian Stelter for one year as they covered the changing media landscape.

However, it’s The Atlantic‘s Michael Hirschorn who makes arguably one of the film’s most profound statements: The New York Times dictates our national conversation… but no one knows it.  (We see you, trendy grandparent names.)

“There’s not like a digital bar code that’s attached to the original information,” Rossi explained in our @mediabeat interview, “and so you see that information kind of filtering out into so many different platforms, which is wonderful. That’s one of the beauties of this sort of social media connected world we live in. However, it’s important for people to realize that a lot of that information does come originally from a story in the Times.”

Watch the full video for more details on Rossi’s filmmaking process and to learn why he “didn’t necessarily have an agenda” for shooting.

You can also view this interview on YouTube.

Part 1: Andrew Rossi Goes Inside The New York Times
Part 3: Page One‘s Andrew Rossi On Getting Your Film To Sundance

Andrew Rossi‘s Page One: Inside The New York Times hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles June 17, with a special premiere tonight at Lincoln Center. In the film, Rossi trails reporters at the paper’s media desk (including TVNewser founding editor @BrianStelter) to document what he calls the “play within a play,” or how the Times must cover the struggles of traditional media while facing its own uncertain future.

But how do you get the country’s notoriously private paper of record  to allow you to film it for a full year?

“The way that I approach the film is the reason why I think ultimately the Times decided to move forward,” Rossi explained in our @MediaBeat interview. “It’s an observational documentary, meaning that I don’t go in there with an agenda. It’s not one that’s heavily polemical. It’s really about giving viewers an opportunity to go behind the scenes to the front line of where original reporting is being done.”

Watch the full video to find out the one “tense moment” Rossi says the Gray Lady wouldn’t let him film.

This video is also available on YouTube.

Part 2: Andrew Rossi on How The New York Times Sets The Public Agenda

Part 3: Page One‘s Andrew Rossi On Getting Your Film To Sundance

For next week’s @MediaBeat interview, we talk with Andrew Rossi, director and producer of the highly-anticipated documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times. Even if you’re not a newspaper buff, you’ll enjoy this film. It’s got great pacing, enough history to keep you informed but not bore you, and lots of the hilarious, always quotable David Carr. Seriously, watching Carr rip the publishers of Vice a new one is worth the $12 ticket price alone.

Our full interview airs Monday, June 13, but you can catch a preview of Rossi explaining a typical day of shooting below.

The trailer for the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times is now available on iTunes, but because FishbowlNY loves you, we’ve got it right here. As we’ve mentioned, the film – which releases in June – provides an inside look at the paper, and features some writers like Brian Stelter and David Carr.

If the trailer is to be trusted, this movie is going to be great. Do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s under three minutes, which makes it shorter than the video for Brandy’s I Wanna Be Down, and we know how often you watch that. So there’s really no excuse.

This week, Editor & Publisher asked readers what their favorite journalism- or newspaper-based movies were. It got us thinking. Lots of our favorite movies revolve around newspaper writers and their lives in and out of the newsroom. From Citizen Kane, to His Girl Friday, to All the President’s Men to Runaway Bride and 27 Dresses.

Magazines get a lot of play, too, as magazine offices were considered quite glamorous pre-recession. Just look at The Devil Wears Prada, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days or Confessions of a Shopaholic, to point to a few recent favs.

As journalism evolves, the journalism-related movies will evolve as well. Just look at Julie & Julia, a movie based on a book that evolved out of a blog. The movie, which opens today, is based on a book of the same name written by Julie Powell, who started a blog to track her year-long quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child‘s quintessential cook book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

Back in December 2006, Powell spoke on a mediabistro.com panel about turning blogs into books. “I got really, really lucky,” Powell said about her book deal.

“I found blogging was a really freeing medium for me,” she went on, “because of the feedback, because of the fact that I didn’t have to worry about — for me, endings are really difficult for me, and with blogs I didn’t have to worry about that.”

You can check out the whole panel, or just watch a little preview featuring Powell, here.

“Julie & Julia” is getting some good and some mixed reviews. Will you be going to see it this weekend? What are some of your favorite journalism-related movies?

The movies love the media industry. Just this year, we had Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams playing investigative reporters in “State of Play,” Isla Fisher pratfalling in the office of a business mag for “Confessions of a Shopaholic” and Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds finding love at a publishing house in “The Proposal.”

Now, Drew Barrymore is returning to another role in journalism (remember she played a reporter in “Never Been Kissed”?) and she’s taking over the Associated Press‘ New York headquarters to do it.

This week, Barrymore is shooting scenes at the AP’s offices for her upcoming film “Going the Distance,” in which she plays an “older-than-usual newspaper intern” at the fictional New York Sentinel, the AP reported. The filming will also take place in the offices for The New York Daily News which is in the same building as the AP at 450 West 33rd St. The Daily News will serve as a rival paper.

The movie also features Barrymore flame Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis of “SNL” and Christina Applegate.

If you work for the AP or Daily News (or any other company in the building) and have any good stories about the stars’ taking over your stomping grounds, send us an email or leave a note in the comments.

(Photo by David Shankbone)

Recently, Lifetime Television was adapting a Candace Bushnell novel called Trading Up into a movie. Now that the market has crashed, however, the network is reconsidering.

“Overnight, it was like the script had been written two years ago,” Arturo Interian, Lifetime’s vice president for original movies, told The New York Times. While the movie will likely still be made, the plot will be altered and production may be delayed. (Can you say “silver lining”?)

Elsewhere, other movies based on the Wall Street boom times are feeling the pinch as well.

Read more

University of California, Los Angeles recently held a series of semi-secret meetings for low level Chinese movie executives. The speakers included Ron Meyer, president of Universal. and MGM CEO Harry Sloan.

Due to “security concerns,” the clinics were kept under wraps until they concluded. Officials were concerned about the safety of the travelers, who were selected by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

So why were they here again? And Kung Fu Hustle really needed four rewrites?

Read more