New Asterix and Obelix comic book set for release
A new comic book featuring the Roman-bashing warrior Asterix and his inseparable chum Obelix will be appearing in stores next month.
One of its creators, Albert Uderzo, announced the latest book in Brussels Thursday, but he revealed little about it except for the title -- Le Ciel lui Tombe sur la Tete or Asterix and the Falling Sky.
He also assured fans that Asterix and the Falling Sky would not be his last album.
"I enjoy what I'm doing despite my age and as long as I can find a good idea I will make another album," he said.
The 33rd comic book depicting the famous Gaul heroes will go on sale in 27 countries around the world on Oct. 14.
Illustrator Uderzo, 78, met author Rene Goscinny in the 1950s in Brussels, and together they created the characters, which first appeared in a French magazine in 1959.
Since then over 300 million comic books have been sold in more than 107 languages. The last title, Asterix and the Actress, sold 10 million copies.
When Goscinny died in 1977, the colourblind Uderzo continued writing and illustrating another eight albums.
Brussels was getting set to celebrate the new book this week by converting its medieval Grand-Place square into a Gaul village. Fans will be able to enjoy a "magic potion" made by village druid, for those who wish to attain Asterix style superhuman strength.
Neil Young Opens Vaults
Rocker to release series of eight-disc rarities sets
After nearly fifteen years of promises, Neil Young is now confident that a slew of material from his vaults will begin to see the light of day in 2006. With his latest album, Prairie Wind, out next week, the rock legend is planning several eight-disc sets packed with outtakes, home recordings, album tracks, live cuts and DVDs.
"It starts with my earliest recordings in 1963," says Young. "Then several recordings with a group called the Squires, into the earliest Buffalo Springfield stuff. Then there's a live record culled from a week's worth of performances at the Riverboat in Toronto."
Fans can expect a 1970 show at Toronto's Massey Hall, featuring material from Harvest a year before its release, as well as Crazy Horse live at the Fillmore East. "It's got a sixteen-minute 'Cowgirl in the Sand,'" Young says of the Fillmore gig, "and a super-long 'Down by the River.'"
One live performance, the rock vet is convinced, trumps the original recording: the entirety of Tonight's the Night, recorded live at London's Rainbow Theatre. Says Young, "It's better than the record."
Little Girl Lost
Evangeline Lilly is the ultimate desert-island fantasy
On an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, strange things are happening, things not usually seen on network television. We refer, of course, to the Hawaiian island of Oahu, overrun by a marauding pack known as the cast of TV's hottest show, Lost.
"One night, we had all gone bowling," says Evangeline Lilly, 26, who plays the show's female lead, the beautiful but mysterious criminal Kate. "Most people left, so it was myself, Matthew [Fox], Jorge [Garcia] and Dominic [Monaghan] -- three goofy, out-there guys. So we're in the middle of a parking lot in Kailua, daring each other to do things. Jorge turns to me and says, 'I'll give you twenty dollars if you pee in that garbage can.'" Lilly flashes her America's-sweetheart grin. "Thirty seconds later, I've got my pants down and my bum hanging into this garbage can, and he has to give me twenty dollars."
Lilly laughs loudly. "I don't have a lot of inhibition," she adds, somewhat unnecessarily.
With her freckles and curly brown hair, Lilly has the wholesome/sexy good looks of Kate Beckinsale, or maybe a particularly convincing spokeswoman for a dating chat line (one of her past gigs). She also looks phenomenal in a bikini -- a fact that Lost's producers haven't been shy about taking advantage of. Lilly has become the ultimate desert-island fantasy of 2005 -- the tough girl with improbably well-conditioned hair who could kill you a boar but still look fabulous at the end of the day.
Lost is the strange, addictive, highly unlikely hit show that cross-pollinates Survivor, Twin Peaks and Gilligan's Island: an airplane traveling from Sydney to Los Angeles makes a crash landing on a remote island, leaving forty-eight survivors and a lot of luggage. The island has a whole lot of unexplained hazards, including a murderous tribe of "Others," a polar bear, an invisible monster and a weird goddamn hatch in the ground. Conjecturing about the show's overarching secrets -- It's a government experiment! It's purgatory! -- has become an obsession among fans, one that's reached a fever pitch going into the second season, which premiered on September 21st.
As if all that weren't complicated enough, every episode features one or two of the characters in flashbacks, showing what their life was like before the island. "Our characters are designed to be enigmatic," says Damon Lindelof, Lost's co-creator and executive producer. "We wanted to populate the island with people who didn't want to talk about themselves." They went on the prowl for likable, little-seen actors with a hint of mystery.
In a large cast filled out by unknowns -- Party of Five veteran Matthew Fox stood as the biggest star -- Lilly was the ultimate novice. She grew up in small towns in western Canada; her only previous acting experience was a handful of commercials and a few jobs as an extra in projects shooting in Vancouver, like Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital and White Chicks. Her father was a grocery-store produce manager, and her mom ran a day-care center out of the house. Raised Baptist and Mennonite, Lilly taught Sunday school for eight years, and one of her first jobs out of high school was as a flight attendant for a "really shitty airline." Not exactly typical network-TV-star material.
J.J. Abrams, executive producer and co-creator of Lost, rejected actress after actress for the role of Kate, insisting that they would find the alluring unknown they were looking for. Just two weeks before shooting was set to begin on the pilot, he saw Lilly's audition tape and proclaimed her to be both beautiful and goofy -- exactly the girl he wanted. But could she handle it? Before Lilly took the part, Abrams looked her in the eye and said, "You have no idea what's about to happen. If you don't really want this, run." Lilly avoided his stare and muttered that she was ready, thinking that if she didn't like making the pilot, she'd just go back to college and finish her international-relations degree. Turns out she may never get that degree after all.
"She's amazing," Fox says. "Stepping into the lead of a show with no experience? Her poise and confidence are remarkable."
According to Lilly, Fox tells her something different. Between takes on location, she'll shinny up a vine or maybe eat a slug on a dare, at which point she will receive a steely Fox gaze: "He's constantly looking at me and saying, 'Evie, do you realize you're really weird?' And then he'll just walk away."
Abrams (currently shooting Mission: Impossible 3 in Europe ) says that Lilly's inexperience kept cropping up in Season One; she'd rehearse her scenes at home and then feel off-balance when actors on the set made choices she hadn't expected. "It reminded me how wildly green she was," he says. "And she had mannerisms she had to unlearn, like crinkling up her forehead in a crazy way."
In a show with one mystery piled on top of another like a teetering Jenga tower, Kate's secrets have been central blocks, if confusing ones. In the course of the first season, viewers learned she had killed the man she loved, knocked over a bank to recover a toy airplane from a safe-deposit box and been on the lam for another, unspecified crime (hopefully one that makes more sense).
"I want to see Kate's psychotic side come out," Lilly says of Season Two. What she doesn't want: any more scenes where she sits on the beach pining for Fox's character, the good doctor Jack. "How many times have you seen Kate staring into the ocean, and suddenly Jack walks up and sits down beside her and they have a heart-to-heart?" she complains. "It became laughable. I would say, 'No, no, no way, not again, I'm not doing it.' And the director would say, 'Come on, do it for me, one more time.'"
Lost is that strangest of phenomena: a cult show with blockbuster ratings. Although it had an annoying habit of alternating excellent episodes with mediocre ones, it finished its first season at Number Fourteen in the Nielsens. But previous shows built around Big Mysteries have a way of going sour: Although The X-Files limped on for nine full seasons, it became tiresome after only five; Twin Peaks collapsed in Season Two, after viewers were told who killed Laura Palmer. The big trick for the Lost producers: Keep things puzzling enough to intrigue the audience, but not enough to frustrate the shit out of them. "That's the tightrope walk," says Lindelof. "Sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology. And then the audience says, 'I find this confusing and alienating and too weird.' So then we pull back, and they say, 'You're not giving us enough.'"
And the challenge for Evangeline Lilly? After a year that took her from Vancouver to Hawaii, from Sunday school to an international object of obsession, it's figuring out just who she is while the whole world is watching. Lilly doesn't have the most polished acting chops in prime time -- what people react to in Kate is her own personality, vivacious and a little inscrutable. "I really don't want to be mysterious," she insists. "Women in this business are expected to put forth a poised and perfect persona. I want people to see that I'm an ordinary-Joe girl. I blow my nose after work, I drool in my sleep and my shit stinks."
Some areas of her life, however, Lilly emphatically wants to leave obscure. When I ask her about recent British newspaper reports that she was married for one year and got divorced soon after Lost started shooting, she laughs and declines to comment, saying, "I don't talk about that kind of stuff. Wherever they got their information, it wasn't from me." She then abruptly changes the subject to the coral abrasions on her legs.
"She's a Christian, but she's a pottymouth," says cast mate Monaghan, formerly known as a Lord of the Rings hobbit. (The two are reportedly dating, although neither will confirm this.)
"Over and over again," Lilly says, "I've been called a walking oxymoron. I do things that you wouldn't associate with a good little Christian girl. People say I'm half-boy, half-girl." Before I can object that the visual evidence suggests otherwise, she continues, "I love style and dressing up, but I've also got competitive testosterone and I'm incredibly stubborn. When I'm going for a jog and I come up behind a guy on his bike, I try to beat him, even if it kills me."
Lilly is now earning far more than she ever did as a stewardess or an oil-change grease monkey (another early job), but her lifestyle hasn't changed all that much. She lives with two roommates (both of whom worked as her stand-ins on Lost). She relishes the idea of being an actress for five to ten years, then walking away and having babies.
She knows that in many ways her job is a dream, but despite Abrams' warnings she wasn't prepared for how overwhelming it would all become. She managed to put off the Big Meltdown until near the end of Season One. Worn down by her workload, she called her parents in full hysterics. They told her, "Screw Hollywood -- you come home and we'll feed you some chicken-noodle soup."
Instead, Lilly went to Rwanda, where a friend was doing missionary work. "I holed up and read and wrote and prayed," she says. "I just disappeared off the face of the earth." Ironically, the consequence of playing the character of a forgotten person stranded on one of the most remote corners of the planet is that she has to travel great distances to end up someplace where nobody will recognize her.
I meet Lilly in the parking lot of an airfield on Oahu's north shore; she wants to go for a glider ride. Lilly is wearing a white shirt and white shorts. She'd be the perfect tennis-player pinup, except for the smudges on her arms: "dirt" makeup from the show that doesn't wash off easily.
"Want to go for a swim?" she says, and spontaneously strips off her clothes, revealing a green bikini and an extremely well-toned body that looks even better in person than on TV. We run toward the Pacific. The surf conceals sharp rocks, but Lilly never slows down.
Back at the airfield, our pilot reports that the glider is ready. Lilly and I squeeze into a passenger seat that seems better suited to one person; she encourages me to put my arm around her. Another plane tows us into the air, and then we spend the better part of an hour flying around in circles without an engine, riding thermal pockets like a roller coaster. Lilly loves every gut-twisting moment in the air, lamenting only that this particular glider can't loop the loop. The pilot keeps up a running monologue, but when he says, "Youth is wasted on the young," Lilly interrupts him.
"It's not wasted on me."
(RS 984, Oct. 6, 2005)
'Concert For Bangladesh' Finally Coming To DVD
The George Harrison-led "Concert for Bangladesh" will make its DVD debut Oct. 25 via Rhino, the same day Capitol releases a remixed, remastered CD of the project. Rhino is also creating a deluxe edition set with a reproduction of Harrison's handwritten lyrics for the then-new song "Bangla Desh," a postcard set, a sticker and a print of the original show poster.
Staged on Aug. 1, 1971, at New York's Madison Square Garden, the show raised funds via UNICEF for Bangladeshi refugees caught in the middle of the country's battle for independence from Pakistan.
It featured Harrison performing alongside Bob Dylan (making a rare public appearance in the wake of a serious motorcycle accident), Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Ravi Shankar, Billy Preston, Badfinger and Leon Russell. The event was chronicled the following year on a triple-LP set and a feature film.
Rhino's DVD restores the original 99-minute movie in 5.1 sound and tacks on a wealth of extras, including a rehearsal performance of "If Not for You" with Harrison and Dylan and a soundcheck take on "Come on in My Kitchen" with Harrison, Clapton and Russell, plus Dylan performing "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," an outtake from the theatrical release.
The DVD will also include a 45-minute documentary, "The Concert for Bangladesh Revisited 2005," which features interviews with Bob Geldof and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Artist royalties from the sale of the "Bangladesh" DVD will be donated to UNICEF.
Here is the track list for "The Concert for Bangladesh":
"Bangla Dhun"
"Wah-Wah"
"My Sweet Lord"
"Awaiting on You All"
"That's the Way God Planned It"
"It Don't Come Easy"
"Beware of Darkness"
Band Introduction
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
"Jumpin' Jack Flash"
"Youngblood"
"Here Comes the Sun"
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
"It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train To Cry"
"Blowin' in the Wind"
"Just Like a Woman"
"Something"
"Bangla Desh"
Destiny's Child Rounds Up Hits, New Songs
In addition to a live DVD first reported here last month, the soon-to-split Destiny's Child will say goodbye to fans with the album "#1's," due Oct. 25 via Music World/Columbia. The set will include the new songs "Stand Up for Love" and "Feel the Same Way I Do," plus a Beyoncé/Slim Thug track, "Check on It," which is earmarked for the upcoming "Pink Panther" remake in which Beyoncé co-stars.
"Stand Up for Love" is doubling as the anthem for the 2005 World Children's Day (Nov. 20), a worldwide fundraiser for Ronald McDonald House Charities and local children's organizations. The track will be released Tuesday (Sept. 27) as a seven-inch vinyl single.
It is unknown what criteria the label used in determining a "number one," as some of these tracks did not reach the top of any Billboard chart. The only No. 1 hits on Billboard's Hot 100 are "Independent Women Part 1," "Say My Name," "Bootylicious" and "Bills, Bills, Bills," while "No, No, No Part 2" reached the top of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
With Destiny's Child winding down, its members are already preparing new projects. Before the end of the year, Beyoncé will begin filming a new movie, "Dreamgirls," which co-stars Jamie Foxx and will be written and directed by Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters," "Kinsey").
"Each artist goes through the next step in their career, and the soundtrack is the first joint venture Beyoncé has with her own label," her father/manager Matthew Knowles tells Billboard.com. Beyoncé's next solo album is pegged to arrive in fall 2006.
As for Michelle Williams' next album, Knowles says, "Don't be surprised if she comes out with an R&B record," as opposed to the gospel-leaning material found on her first two solo releases.
As previously reported, Kelly Rowland is featured on the new Trina single "Here We Go," a pairing "that will surprise a lot of folks," Knowles says. Rowland is also at work on a new solo effort.
Here is the track list for "#1's":
"Stand Up for Love"
"Independent Women Part 1"
"Survivor"
"Soldier"
"Check on It" (Beyoncé featuring Slim Thug)
"Jumpin', Jumpin'"
"Lose My Breath"
"Say My Name"
"Emotion"
"Bug a Boo"
"Bootylicious"
"Bills, Bills, Bills"
"Girl"
"No, No, No Part 2"
"Cater 2 U"
"Feel the Same Way I Do"
Keys Nearly Had Bruce, Keef For 'Unplugged'
Alicia Keys' "Unplugged" CD/DVD (due Oct. 11 via J) has no shortage of special guests, including Common, Mos Def, Damian Marley and Maroon 5's Adam Levine. But the project nearly got a major lift from rock legends Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards, who had to back out at the last minute.
"I was going to cry," Keys tells Billboard.com with a laugh. "Bruce and I were going to do 'New York City Serenade' but the schedule just conflicted. And with Keith, the day the show taped was the day the Stones started rehearsal for their tour. But it was really lovely to reach out to people I admire and for them to be so down to do it."
"Unplugged" premieres tonight (Sept. 23) on MTV. On the show, Keys uses the opportunity to premiere a new song, "Unbreakable," which was originally intended to appear on her 2003 studio album, "The Diary of Alicia Keys." It is the top debut at No. 61 this week on the Billboard Hot 100.
"We set the crowd up and the vibe was just perfect, and then I walked over to my piano and I asked them if they wanted to hear something new, and they just went crazy," Keys enthuses. "It was so great to perform that song there for the first time."
Although she concedes she may "do a couple of spontaneous, small, 'Unplugged'-style things" in the near future, she has no plans to tour for a while. Instead, Keys will move directly into working on her first feature film, "Smoking Aces," which begins shooting Nov. 3 and will wrap Dec. 20.
She is also still planning to star in a biopic about biracial child piano prodigy Philippa Schuyler, which she says is "still in development. That one we should have the script for by the holidays and we'll take it from there."
By early next year, Keys says she'll be ready to get serious on her third studio album. Asked if she was already working on any new material, she replies, "Oh, there's been a lot of things springing forth from me. I have this new direction I'm feeling I will go in for the next album. I've been playing around, experimenting and vibing on different styles. I have about four or five songs I've been working with but I'm constantly writing all the time."
Carell Kicks Off 'SNL' Season
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) The increasingly ubiquitous Steve Carell has been tapped to host "Saturday Night Live" when NBC's venerable late-night show begins its 31st season next week.
Carell, star of "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" and NBC's "The Office," will take his first turn as host of the show on Saturday, Oct. 1. He'll be joined by musical guest Kanye West, whose last live appearance on NBC caused some controversy. Appearing on NBC's Hurricane Katrina benefit Sept. 2, West harshly criticized media coverage of New Orleans' African-American community and ended his remarks by proclaiming that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
Although Carell has never appeared on the "SNL" stage before, he has contributed to the show in the past. He and fellow "Daily Show" alum Stephen Colbert provided the voices of Ace and Gary, "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," in a series of animated shorts on the show a few years back.
"Napoleon Dynamite" and "Just Like Heaven" star Jon Heder is set to host on Oct. 8, while Catherine Zeta-Jones and Franz Ferdinand will headline the Oct. 22 show. Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong takes the hosting reins Oct. 29, with his fiancee, Sheryl Crow, performing as the musical guest.
"Saturday Night Live" has also added two featured players to its cast this season, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg. Hader previously worked as a "field agent" on MTV's "Punk'd" and performed at Second City Los Angeles. Samberg has worked on shows for web-based TV network Channel101.com and written for the MTV Movie Awards.
Review: Atari Brings Back Bygone Era
SAN FRANCISCO - Some sobering news for anyone who has recently crested 40: Everything you grew up with is now officially retro. Clothes, music, hair styles — even video games.
Long before "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," there was "Pong," a simple video game from Nolan Bushnell and the folks at the original Atari Inc. Two paddles, one ball and no Hot Coffee mod to unlock hidden sex scenes. THAT was gaming.
The Atari brand has traded hands in the years since "Pong" hit the scene, but the new owners are still milking some mileage out of this game and 39 others with Atari Flashback 2. This $30 device offers a fun and affordable glimpse into the gaming's past — one that, for better and worse, looks nothing like the present.
The console itself looks like a scaled-down version of an old Atari 2600, with faux wood paneling and other dated details. There are no cartridges to plug in, as technology advances have made it easy to stuff all of the games onto a small chip inside. And the controllers are exactly like the Atari 2600 joysticks of yore.
The unit connects to your home television through common audio and video RCA inputs. Many sets have these connections on the front, which is a bonus with this console because I found the cables that come with it a bit short.
Among the 40 titles are classics like "Centipede," "Asteroids," "Missile Command," "Yar's Revenge" and "Pitfall." Some are licensed from Activision Inc., which made games for the 2600, but most are original Atari gems.
How do these titles hold up in the face of today's video games with highly detailed graphics, Dolby Digital sound and online connectivity? As well as could be expected of large primary-colored blocks jumping around the screen.
But there is magic in the way those blocks moved. Hours of magic.
Games like "Missile Command" have the type of player interaction that remains viable in plot and movement. My mind was thrust back decades as I began to protect the cities closest to my ammunition bunker, keeping an eye peeled for smart bombs, those little blinking diamonds that fell from the sky and tried to evade my explosions.
And "Millipede," a sequel to the popular "Centipede" title, was a blast. I was racking up extra lives on only my second attempt as I weaved past that infernal spider that crept from the corners seeking to squash me.
The action games held up well, but adventure games like "Haunted House" and "Wizard" were mostly duds and offered little real suspense.
Seriously. How scary can a blinking green square be anyway?
The sounds produced by these games are rudimentary at best. Even my cell phone makes more intricate tones.
Nonetheless, lots of people simply refuse to let go of retro-gaming.
Consider that many who long for old quarter-gobbling arcade games like "Joust," "Defender" and "Crystal Castle" have gravitated to free software called MAME, short for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. MAME can run the original ROMs from hundreds of arcade game machines. And those ROMs are also readily available online.
The legality of using MAME to play ROMs you don't actually own is up for debate. But an enthusiastic online community is keeping the old titles alive, and there's no debating the lure of a pixelated pastime that helped define a generation.
Atari has done a nice job of legally giving us another look at these early games, long after the consoles themselves have been relegated to the dust bin.
Pitt, Jolie get busy at Edm. mall
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's visit to West Edmonton Mall yesterday afternoon was full of surprises, with eyewitnesses saying Jolie's adopted son called Pitt "daddy," and the Hollywood superstars were seen naughtily necking.
"It was pretty sexy," said Rosemary Austen, in town from Mayerthorpe.
Pitt and Jolie were in an arcade in Galaxyland at the time, flanked by security. Eager onlookers were snapping photos, some pushed back by bodyguards.
And the kiss, in a darkened corner of the arcade, wasn't a peck, Austen said. "It was full on. They were necking."
Austen knew a picture of the two kissing could fetch a fortune.
Security had already cautioned onlookers they'd be banned from the mall if they took a picture, or tried to touch one of the celebs.
Austen couldn't bring herself to shoot the smooching stars, but did get some pics of the couple walking through the mall and driving away.
"It's really disappointing. It wasn't for lack of trying," said Austen, who'd bought a copy of the National Enquirer to see how much her photos might fetch.
Pitt had been playing pinball with Jolie's adopted son Maddox, 4.
Eyewitnesses said Pitt crouched and Maddox stood on his leg to play High Roller Casino.
The Cambodian-born boy was having a heck of a time, said witnesses, as he played with 'papa' Pitt in the Galaxy Kids Play Court.
That's when it happened, said Sarah Gardener, who works at a radio station in the mall.
Gardener swore she heard little Maddox ask Pitt, "Daddy, can we go on that ride?"
"It just basically looked like a family at an amusement park," said Gardener's co-worker Gennelle Rottare.
"I'm still shaking. I can't believe it. If I was pinched right now, then it would be real."
Jolie was carrying Zahara, adopted this summer from Ethiopia, in a blue baby carrier. Jolie was in New York the night before, opening her film Peace One Day.
Pitt has been in Edmonton filming his new movie, The Assassination of Jesse James.
Pitt and Jolie arrived at the mall around 1 p.m. and were out the door before 4 p.m. Pitt drove the family off in a silver SUV.
Misty Wilson found the couple at a west-end Taco Bell drive-thru. Pitt was driving, Jolie at his side.
"We drove in behind just for a giggle," Wilson said.
The man working the window didn't know whom he'd just served, said Wilson, or what he'd ordered.
Two women approached Jolie's side of the SUV while they waited. "She was lovely to these ladies. It looked like she handed them an autograph."
The couple was then spotted heading west. It's believed Pitt's been staying near Devon.
NHL launches new campaign ahead of new season
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Stung by a yearlong lockout that was resolved in July, the National Hockey League, its players and media partners presented a united front Wednesday night in advance of the game's return early next month.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, a handful of players, along with representatives from NHL, Comcast and OLN (Outdoor Life Network), XM Satellite Radio and others attended an event at the Museum of Television & Radio to show off the league's new campaign and to talk up how hockey had changed. In the past several months, the NHL settled its labor dispute, embarked on a new contract with the players union, made some key rules changes and left its longtime cable home ESPN for a new start on Comcast's OLN.
The NHL's message: It's a whole new game.
"This is about our fans. This is about renewal," Bettman said. "This is about moving forward, about making the game the best it's ever been."
To help draw the fans back and highlight hockey's message, the NHL chose movie marketing company Conductor, a Los Angeles-based firm that has been responsible for a number of movie ad campaigns like "Spider-Man." The ads, known collectively as "My NHL," highlight the cinematic and dramatic qualities of hockey as well as the players, the battle on the ice and the fans who are passionate about the sport.
The campaign, which begins running this month, includes 30-second spots that are league- and team-specific, as well as in both French and English. The tell the story of hockey through five vignettes, including the first shown to press and business partners Wednesday night. It shows a goalie suiting up for a game with the help of a woman who tells him it's time to go on the ice and ends with the player heading off to the rink.
Horne said that hockey had talked to fans in its one-year layoff and they found out a number of things that were incorporated into the campaign.
"They wanted to get closer to the game. ... They said, 'Make it my NHL,"' Horne said.
The campaign is directed by Samuel Bayer, who won an MTV Video Music Award this month for Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."
OLN's cable rights deal includes 58 regular-season games on Mondays and Tuesdays along with the All-Star Game beginning in 2007 and a number of playoff games. The first telecast will be the New York Rangers-Philadelphia Flyers game October 5, the first day of the new season. NBC, another new hockey partner that wasn't able to start its rights deal on time last year because of the cancellation of the season, begins its hockey telecasts January 14.
Colleges offer legit downloads
WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - More than half a million students at nearly 70 colleges and universities now have access to legitimate music download services, according to a report given to Congress on Wednesday by a joint entertainment industry-university task force.
While the report's authors say there has been "considerable progress" in the attempts by universities and copyright holders to reign in copyright piracy on campuses nationwide, it also shows how far the higher education institutions have to go.
According to the report by the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities, 670,000 students can get access to legitimate services through their universities and colleges. By contrast, the Chronicle of Higher Education estimates that there are more than 17 million college students enrolled across the nation.
Despite the relatively few students who have access to legitimate file-sharing services, the report's underwriters said the number of students who now have a legitimate alternative is impressive because there were no alternatives just a few years ago.
"Universities have made impressive progress in combating piracy of music and movies through educational efforts, technical controls, and the adoption of legitimate online services," said Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier, the committee's co-chairman. "At the same time, we in higher education must expand the reach of our efforts and must continue to be vigilant."
The committee, composed of entertainment and higher education leaders, was formed in 2002 as a way to help combat copyright piracy on campuses nationwide. University students, who have access to their institutions' high-speed Internet networks, are often the most likely to illegally download music and movies.
The committee admitted that it was unable to determine how many of the students who now have access to legal services actually use them. Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig said 30,000 of the university's 81,000 students had signed up for the service.
Recording Industry Assn. of America president Cary Sherman, the committee's other co-chairman, said the recording industry was encouraged by the progress.
"We are thrilled to see the number of schools offering legitimate services more than triple in the last year, and (we) remain hopeful that these partnerships will continue to flourish," said Sherman, whose group represents the major U.S. record labels. "At the same time, complacency looms as a constant threat to the tremendous progress we have made. As the landscape changes, so must the anti-piracy programs within the university community. There is much promise in the coming years, but our work is far from done."
The report also identified a number of problems that need to be addressed, including student-run file-sharing systems on schools' local area networks as well as the increased use of unauthorized hacks of the legitimate online service iTunes, both of which are emerging as significant problems.
The release of the report comes a day before entertainment industry officials and university leaders are scheduled to testify before Congress on campus file-sharing problems.