Movies in AZ generate $38 million in 2009
The PBJ reports that Arizona made $38 million from in-state moviemaking last year, per the state’s film office:
Overall in 2009, the film industry in Phoenix employed 4,795 technicians and actors who worked on 362 projects accounting for 1,290 shooting days and 2,080 hotel nights, the film office reported.
“Maneater,” which aired last May, employed hundreds of local crew members and actors during its three-month shooting schedule. Although the story was set in Los Angeles, producers selected Phoenix because of the visual similarities LA and the Motion Picture Tax Incentive Program administered by the Arizona Department of Commerce, according to the Phoenix Film Office.
Maneater was a Lifetime movie. It sounds like quite a tale:
Beautiful, fashionable and fun, Clarissa Alpert (Sarah Chalke) is a shallow socialite whose speed dial is a veritable Rolodex of Hollywood power players. Staring her 32nd birthday directly in the eyes — though she will admit only to being 28 — the spoiled daddy’s girl is in a panic because she is still single. Clarissa, though, always gets what she wants — even if he’s Aaron Mason (Philip Winchester), the hottest new producer in town. With the help of her family and friends, Clarissa sets into motion an elaborate plan to lasso the dashing filmmaker.
Other prestige projects included “Supernanny,” “America’s Most Wanted,” and “Wife Swap.”
2:19 PM
J.D. Hayworth still talking about Obama's birth certificate
Here he is getting grilled by Campbell Brown last night. The stuff about the birth certificate starts at 5:50.
Hayworth first says that the media are the only people bringing the matter up—and then turns around and says he’s getting emails from constituents about it.
Under Brown’s increasingly incredulous questioning, he then starts talking about … identity theft. And then starts babbling about “a so-called stimulus that led to incredible unemployment.”
And refuses, several times, to answer her direct question as to whether he thinks Obama is an American citizen.
2:31 PM
Yelp's coming to town—big time!
The online city guide Yelp is moving into the Valley, saying it will be employing as many as 200 people, the PBJ reports:
The center will employ sales agents and account managers.
CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the Scottsdale office will be Yelp’s third to go along with its San Francisco base and an office in Manhattan.
The Phoenix Yelp site is here.
Yelp has its uses, and it also has its detractors: A story from last year from the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Berkeley, detailed some of the outfit’s dicey leveraging of its reviews and its advertising. It began this way:
The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy.
“Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say. “You’ve had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You’ve had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those.”
The story had a half-dozen local businesspeople testifying to calls like that—and the unconfirmable but nagging sense that negative reviews of their places of business cropped up high on their Yelp page just before the sales folks started calling.
The Express story got criticized by Yelp, mostly for the fact that all of the people quoted in it didn’t want their names used.
The reporter, Kathleen Richards, defended the practice, noting that the businesspeople understandably didn’t want to get on Yelp’s bad side.
… but just to make the point, she turned around and wrote an even longer piece, this one with a slew of on-the-record complaints about the same practices or worse. That story’s here.
6:36 PM