D-Day in New Orleans

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), May 30, 2000

Still, Brownie scenes didn't have the stiff, staged look of formal portraits taken in the 19th century. With the growth of popular photography came spontaneity. "You see a lot more pictures of pets, little kids running around and just goofy things," said Kathy Connor, curator of the George Eastman Collection. "Now you could have fun with photography a little bit more because it was less expensive."

Taking the public's pulse

HOLLYWOOD (NYT) -- Once upon a time, back when people wore leisure suits and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were inventing the summer blockbuster, Hollywood's most lucrative period began on Memorial Day weekend and ended on Labor Day. Well, it's been many years since that was true, with more and more summer-type blockbusters opening in mid- May, then early May and now, as with this year's U-571, in April. So with Memorial Day weekend passed, the summer movie season is well under way.

There are already three successes -- Ridley Scott's Gladiator, Disney's Dinosaur and M:I-2 -- and some notable failures, like The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and the bona fide disaster of Battlefield Earth. Can we learn anything yet about what audiences are hungry for this year?

"In the digital age, perhaps movies are as much about the places they take you as the stories they tell," said Walter Parkes, who with Laurie MacDonald is jointly head of production at DreamWorks, which released Gladiator.

Parkes and MacDonald, who were also executive producers of Gladiator, last week signed a new six-year deal with Dreamworks that will allow them to continue their administrative duties while producing some of their own movies, including films for Spielberg, one of the studio's principals.

Douglas Wick, one of the producers of Gladiator, said audiences seemed ready for new things. "My sense is, it's one of those periods where there's a little bit of fatigue with the same-old, same-old," said Wick, whose producing credits also include the recent Stuart Little and the coming Hollow Man, an invisible-man thriller. "There is no question that there is an appetite for unusual things."

While this summer season has its share of sequels (M: I-2, The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps, Pokemon 2000) and some car-chase action films like those popular in previous summers (Gone in 60 Seconds), there are also a lot of big, expensive movies with unusual settings: second-century Rome in Gladiator, colonial America in The Patriot, North Atlantic fishing grounds in The Perfect Storm. And there are "dinosaurs like nobody's ever seen before," Wick said.

"At the moment, it's better to go into the marketplace with something that feels new," he said. "Maybe it's just an old genre, like sword-and-sandal movies, given new life with new technology."

Motorola pages young adults

NEW YORK (NYT) -- Motorola plans to introduce a two-way pager aimed at young adults. The pager, the Talkabout T900, is called a personal interactive communicator by the company. It will cost less than $200, with additional monthly service starting at $14.95. The T900 is about the size of a standard pager and has a keyboard for entering e-mail messages and a form of instant messaging. Unlike what are usually called alphanumeric pagers, these units allow the user to get information like news, sports, weather reports, horoscopes and driving directions.