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Saturday, October 19, 2013
Jeffrey Katzenberg: 'Turbo' TV Show Being Produced Largely in South Korea
SEOUL — Jeffrey Katzenberg says a large portion of Turbo, DreamWorks SKG’s recent endeavor to expand into television, is being produced in South Korea, a fast growing market for animation.
"DreamWorks has been on a very aggressive course of diversification in the last 18 to 20 months and our latest is in television," he told reporters Friday. "Because of the amazing amount of work we are undertaking under our current Netflix deal we will be producing our own TV shows in every corner of the world."
The film version of Turbo was top-lined by Ryan Reynolds, who voiced an animated snail obsessed with racing. The film stalled at the U.S. box office, but was one of the most successful animated films of the year in Korea.
Katzenberg said "a sizable piece of the production" for the TV adaption of Turbo is taking place in Korea, marking the first time DreamWorks has brought a production to the country. Katzenberg spoke with reporters ahead of attending a forum centering on technology in the creative industry.
STORY: Quentin Tarantino, Jeffrey Katzenberg to Hold Talks With Bong Joon-ho
"The animation industry here in Korea is growing very rapidly and is becoming a very important force in the country and also in the rest of the world. You can see it in the enterprise Pororo," he said, referring to the Korean penguin TV cartoon that has sold to over 120 countries and is airing around the world.
CJ Entertainment is behind the distribution of Pororo and the opening of the forum, where Katzenberg will discuss various topics with Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer). CJ in 1995 was a founding investor in DreamWorks SKG. Paramount later bought the share stake.
"Nineteen years ago when Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and I started DreamWorks, there were really two people that made that dream come true, one of which is Miky Lee," he said of CJ’s vice chairperson, also known as Lee Mi-kyung.
Katzenberg said looking to Asia is an important part of DreamWorks' growth.
"The next step is to become a family-branded entertainment company that has many opportunities. So television, consumer products, location-based entertainment, international markets -- these are the greatest opportunities."
PHOTOS: 'Snowpiercer' Character Posters: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton in Propulsive Sci-Fi Thriller
He also looks to Korea for creative inspiration.
"There is a very specific story that comes out of a historical or maybe mythical Korean element, but we can’t share details at this time," he said.
Though DreamWorks may deliver content in different formats such as mobile, one thing will remain the same, Katzenberg said: "It's about bringing laughter."
During the forum to be held Friday at Sejong University, Bong and Katzenberg will discuss East-West dynamics as the entertainment industry becomes more global and technology continues to advance. Katzenberg and Jennifer Yuh Nelson, director of Kung Fu Panda 2, will also take part in a cartoon pitching event for students.
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'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' finds humor in humanity
TV
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/entertainment/brooklyn-nine-nine-finds-humor-humanity-not-stereotypes-8C11381614
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8 hours ago
Fox Broadcasting Co.
"I grew up around a ton of cultures and ethnicities and sexual preferences in Berkeley," says "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star Andy Samberg. "To have that be the tone of the show is very comfortable for me, and I'm very happy that people have taken note and said it's a big deal in that it's not treated like a big deal."
Andy Samberg’s “Brooklyn Nine Nine” character, Detective Jake Peralta is seated at his desk at the police precinct, head in hands and hung over when he receives an antidote from fellow detective Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero), one handed down by her grandfather: a glass of raw egg yolks. “You look like the corpse we just pulled out of the river,” says their commander, Captain Ray Holt (Andre Braugher), as he walks in. Jake plays it off by claiming the drink is part of his fitness routine.
“You should drink it all,” Holt deadpans and pauses. “For your guns.”
It’s an amusing line the way the Emmy-winning Braugher dryly delivers it during a recent taping on the show's Los Angeles set. Samberg is inspired to improvise different endings that involve consuming the drink, insulting Santiago’s grandfather and trying to one-up Braugher. Soon, both actors are cracking up.
The exercise proves that Fox’s new comedy “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” isn’t going for edge. “Parks and Recreation” producing team Dan Goor and Mike Schur have teamed up again to create a throwback workplace comedy that features daily life in a Brooklyn precinct without a laugh track a la “The Big Bang Theory” or a fake documentary crew like “Parks.”
But the show is quietly breaking ground (it has yet to crack five million viewers) with one of the most ethnically diverse casts on broadcast television. Samberg’s star detective is a goofball but skilled investigator whose two bosses are black men—one of whom is gay—and two of his detective peers are Latinas. In the same way that ensemble dramas like “ER,” “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” paved the way for multiculturalism without tokenism, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” defies stereotypical comedic expectations and finds the humor in humanity—not skin color or ethnic background or sexual preference.
“The worst kind of comedy, the worst kind of stand-up to me is when they talk about what you’re looking at—‘I’m Jewish’ or ‘I’m wearing glasses,” Samberg said. “You want to hear jokes about life and things you can relate to. I don’t think this show will ever go out of its way to make comments in that regard.”
Instead, the laughs are found in how the stoic and hard-to-read new commander Holt reacts to Peralta’s antics or how badly Santiago wants to beat Peralta’s closure rate—not where they come from or who they sleep with. Detective Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) is in love with hard-to-get detective Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), a tough cookie who doesn’t speak with an accent or acts particularly sassy. Sgt. Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) is a hulk of a man who has become petrified of fighting crime since he became a father of twin girls; office secretary Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti) is just plain insane.
“I was working on this thing for a month before I realized that there’s two black guys running the precinct—and I work on the show!” said Crews during an interview with NBCNews in his dressing room. “I didn’t even think about that, which is so cool because, oh my God, we have all been there. I’ve turned down a lot of stuff where the message was ‘We’re going to be diverse!’ Give me a break. We’re in Brooklyn. If you don’t make it diverse, it looks funny. We are what ‘Friends’ should have been.”
During an interview in the set’s evidence room, Beatriz, who played Sofia Vergara’s character’s sister on “Modern Family” earlier this year, teared up as she described what it means to her to play a Latina whose ethnicity is not the butt of the jokes or the essence of her character.
“I remember as a kid watching TV and looking for myself and not being able to find myself very often,” she said. “There were very few shows I could see myself. I get a little emotional about it because it’s very important. Back in the day, people would go to theater to watch the human story. Now we’re watching it from our houses; to know that there are people who are watching it who can see themselves is a good feeling. I don’t talk about being Latina every day. I also don’t talk about what kind of deodorant I use. It’s something that happens or is a part of me. And it’s the same on the show. It’s almost monumental in its normalcy.”
The producers and casting director Allison Jones assembled the cast of veterans and fresh faces by staying open-minded during auditions. Once Samberg was cast in the lead role, Goor said his team went about making the Brooklyn precinct as realistic as possible without committing any characters to certain backgrounds or ethnicities. “Parks,” which is set in a small Indiana town, also boasts a multi-ethnic cast that includes Aubrey Plaza, Rashida Jones, Retta, and Aziz Ansari alongside star Amy Poehler.
“Our feeling was not calling attention to their ethnicities and not calling attention too much to Captain Holt being gay,’ Goor said. “We just feel like in real life you’re in a workplace and the Latina lady is not referencing the barrio. She’s a person, just like you’re a person. To a certain extent, it’s just writing toward reality.”
For example, Beatriz auditioned for the role of “Megan.” When the producers decided they wanted to hire her, they renamed her “Rosa.” That the two top officers in the precinct turned out to be black men, Goor said, was a function of wanting to work with Crews from the outset and being pleasantly surprised that Braugher, who is known for his dramatic heft, wanted to test his comedy chops. The role of the commander was always written as gay because the writers wanted the new leader to be a hard-working, ambitious policeman who had been held back because he had come out of the closet in the 80s.
“I’m not playing a gay police captain,” Braugher of his first comedic television role. “I’m playing a police captain who happens to be gay. The distinction is large in my mind. The gay police captain is eventually going to be wearing hot pants and singing ‘YMCA.’ The police captain who happens to be gay is going to be a huge collection of personality characteristics and motivations. I’ll get a husband one of these days but he’ll be my sweetheart as opposed to that man candy we bring in for stunt casting.”
In that same way, detective Boyle (Lo Truglio) is trying to win Rosa’s heart without any mamacita jokes or “spicy” references. “I love that these are traits that don’t define the characters,” the former “Reno 911” star said in an interview. “They shouldn’t. The reality of a police precinct in Brooklyn today is what you see here.”
Braugher jokes that he was lost in the “woods of drama” when “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” found him and won him over with its realistic treatment of diversity. “Broadcast TV is very conservative and they’re always concerned about reflecting the audience’s prejudices rather than reflecting the world as it is. When you’re going into people’s homes, there’s a big pressure to be lovable and acceptable. But life is made up of all these juicy parts. I’m not necessarily a fan of that kind of conservatism. I would like to start by holding a mirror up to life. And this is a show that does that.”
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/entertainment/brooklyn-nine-nine-finds-humor-humanity-not-stereotypes-8C11381614
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Commuter chaos in San Francisco area train strike
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area got up before dawn on Friday and endured heavy traffic on roadways, as workers for the region's largest transit system walked off the job for the second time in four months.
People were lined up well before 5 a.m. Friday at a Bay Area Rapid Transit train station in Walnut Creek for one of the charter buses BART was running into San Francisco. And traffic at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toll plaza into San Francisco and the roads leading to it was backed up for miles.
At the West Oakland BART station, a frazzled Tatiana Marriott raced to board a free charter bus to San Francisco shortly after 6 a.m. She had to be at work by 7 a.m.
"I probably should've gotten up a half-hour earlier," Marriott, 21, a seamstress, said, conceding that she would be late for work. "I just want BART and the unions to figure it out. I just want to get to work."
Other alternatives to BART include ferries and Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District buses.
"It's very frustrating," said Mary Nelson, a retail worker, as she waited for a ferry in Oakland. "I feel like they should be able to come to an agreement. I don't understand why they're holding a lot of hardworking people hostage."
The walkout began at midnight Thursday, the culmination of six months of on-again, off-again talks that fell apart. BART and the unions came "extremely close" to agreement on economic, health care and pension issues, but the parties were far apart on work rule issues, said Roxanne Sanchez, president of Service Employees International Union Local 1021.
The impasse came after a marathon negotiating session with the participation of federal mediators.
About 400,000 riders take BART every weekday on the nation's fifth-largest commuter rail system. The system carries passengers from the farthest reaches of the densely populated eastern suburbs to San Francisco International Airport across the bay.
SEIU said it was fighting to prevent BART from changing employees' fixed work schedules. Some employees work four-day, 10-hour shifts while others work five-day, eight-hour shifts. Union officials said BART wanted to schedule people as they saw fit.
BART officials say work rules refer to past practices that require approval from unions and management to change. The rules make it difficult to implement technological changes or add extra service on holidays because of a special event, the agency says.
Sanchez said SEIU and the Amalgamated Transit Union suggested taking the remaining issues to arbitration but management refused.
BART General Manager Grace Crunican countered that the agency needed to alter some of those rules to run the system efficiently. She said BART also needed to control costs to help pay for new rail cars and other improvements.
"We are not going to agree to something we can't afford. We have to protect the aging system for our workers and the public," Crunican said.
She urged the union leaders to let their members vote on management's offer by Oct. 27.
A four-day strike in July saw commuters lining up early in the morning for BART's charter buses and ferries across the bay, and enduring heavy rush-hour traffic.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said it has developed plans to help people to get around, including providing two expanded carpool locations.
The key issues during most of the talks had been salaries and worker contributions to their health and pension plans.
Talks began in April, three months before the June 30 contract expirations. The unions initially asked for 23.2 percent in raises over three years. BART countered with a four-year contract with 1 percent raises contingent on the agency meeting economic goals.
The unions contended that members made $100 million in concessions when they agreed to a deal in 2009 as BART faced a $310 million deficit. And they said they wanted their members to get their share of a $125 million operating surplus produced through increased ridership.
On Sunday, BART negotiators presented a final offer that includes an annual 3 percent raise over four years and requires workers to contribute 4 percent toward their pension and 9.5 percent toward medical benefits.
The value of BART's proposal is $57 million, BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost said.
Workers represented by the two unions, including more than 2,300 mechanics, custodians, station agents, train operators and clerical staff, now average about $71,000 in base salary and $11,000 in overtime annually, the transit agency said. BART workers currently pay $92 a month for health care and contribute nothing toward their pensions.
____
Associated Press writer Haven Daley contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/commuter-chaos-san-francisco-area-train-strike-154324589--finance.html
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Friday, October 18, 2013
Why Scientists Are Trying Viruses To Beat Back Bacteria
Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that causes severe diarrhea, can be difficult to treat with antibiotics.
Stefan Hyman/University of Leicester
Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that causes severe diarrhea, can be difficult to treat with antibiotics.
Stefan Hyman/University of Leicester
Not all viruses are bad for us. Some of them might even help up us fight off bacterial infections someday.
Naturally occurring viruses called bacteriophages attack specific types of bacteria. So researchers at the University of Leicester decided to try and take advantage of phages' bacteria-destroying powers to treat infections with Clostridium difficile, a germ that that can cause severe diarrhea and inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract.
Over the last six years, microbiologist Martha Clokie has isolated hundreds of phages that can kill various strains of C. difficile. Now her lab has teamed up with the pharmaceutical company AmpliPhi to try and turn phages into a product, perhaps a pill, that could be used in humans.
There's no guarantee the approach will work, and so far it hasn't been put to a rigorous test in humans infected with C. difficile. Still, there are some good reasons to check it out.
C. difficile is difficult to treat with antibiotics and is resistant to many of them. Another problem is that the germ often strikes when people take antibiotics to treat other infections. The antibiotics kill good bacteria along with the bad, weakening the gut's defenses against C. diff.
Doctors are using fecal transplants and synthetic poop as possible solutions. But Clokie says that phages could be a useful alternative. "We're simply harnessing the natural enemy of the bacteria," she tells Shots.
Unlike bacteria, Clokie says, phages are very specific about what they attack—right down to the sub-species. In fact, a single phage wouldn't be able to take on all the strains of C. difficle. So Clokie is working to develop a cocktail of viruses that would be able to kill the most common strains.
While the bacteria can evolve and try to outsmart the viruses, the viruses can do the same, Clokie says. They've been involved in this arms race for thousands of years.
As long as they can come up with the right cocktail, there's a very good chance that this phage therapy could work, according to Tim Lu, an associate professor of bioengineering at MIT. "If you know what you want to kill, it's kind of like a silver bullet targeting that bacteria," he tells Shots.
And delivering the phages to a person's gut shouldn't be a challenge, Lu says.
Phages are already approved for use in meat and poultry production. Manufacturers sometimes spray food with phages that target listeria, a common food-borne bacterium.
But using phage therapy in humans is a bit more complicated. "Phages were discovered before antibiotics came around," Lu says. And they've been used in humans, he says. But the problem is, they have yet to be tested in well-controlled clinical trials.
There's also the question of intellectual property. Phages are naturally occurring, and therefore they're difficult to patent, which could discourage pharmaceutical companies.
Ultimately, Lu says, "The science is real." The stuff does work. But, he says, "It's a change in the way we think about treating infections, I think that's the biggest hurdle in a way."
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SoftBank to take over mobile distributor Brightstar for $1.26B
Fresh from its acquisition of Sprint, Japan’s SoftBank plans to take control of Brightstar, the dominant distributor of mobile devices in the U.S. and a global player serving more than 200 carriers.
SoftBank has reached a definitive agreement to invest $1.26 billion in Brightstar and immediately gain a 57 percent stake in the company. It will have the option later to raise its ownership to 70 percent. The cash transaction, which SoftBank announced on Friday, will be carried out through a U.S. subsidiary.
What Brightstar does
Privately held Brightstar, based in Miami, is not a well-known name but plays a key role in the mobile phone business in the U.S. and other countries. It works between carriers and device manufacturers, providing a range of services for distribution, retailing, device insurance, buy-back, and other functions. At CES in January, the company announced a partnership with singer and actress Jennifer Lopez and a major Verizon Wireless retailer to set up Viva Movil, a chain of Latino-focused Verizon stores across the U.S.
Stephen LawsonJennifer Lopez at CES 2013The company calls itself the world’s largest mobile device distributor, with annual revenue above $7 billion and operations in more than 50 countries. The SoftBank deal values Brightstar at $2.2 billion, including its outstanding debt.
After the SoftBank takeover, which is expected to take place by the end of this year, Brightstar says it will continue to serve its customers.
Marcelo Claure, who founded the company in 1997, will hand over chairmanship to SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son but will remain president and CEO. He will own 43 percent of Brightstar, which will remain in Miami.
The Brightstar takeover could add to SoftBank’s and Sprint’s clout in acquiring handsets, according to analyst Chetan Sharma, of Chetan Sharma Consulting. “It just makes Sprint more competitive with pricing in the U.S.,” he said in an email interview.
However, Brightstar’s customers include some of Sprint’s biggest competitors, who might be wary of working with a distributor controlled by a rival carrier, some observers said.
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service , IDG News Service
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for the IDG News Service.
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