Berlin International Film Festival
The Berlin International Film Festival called the Berlinale, is a film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany. Founded in West Berlin in 1951, the festival has been held every February since 1978 and is one of the "Big Three" alongside the Venice Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival. With around 300,000 tickets sold and 500,000 admissions each year, it has the largest public attendance of any annual film festival. Up to 400 films are shown in several sections across cinematic genres. Around twenty films compete for the festival's top awards, called the Golden Bear and several Silver Bears. Since 2001 the director of the festival has been Dieter Kosslick; the European Film Market, a film trade fair held to the Berlinale, is a major industry meeting for the international film circuit. The trade fair serves distributors, film buyers, financiers and co-production agents; the Berlinale Talents, a week-long series of lectures and workshops, is a gathering of young filmmakers held in partnership with the festival.
The film festival, EFM, other satellite events are attended by around 20,000 professionals from over 130 countries. More than 4200 journalists produce media coverage in over 110 countries. At some high-profile feature film premieres held during the festival, movie stars and celebrities are present on the red carpet; the Berlin International Film Festival was founded in West Berlin in 1951, with film historian Dr. Alfred Bauer as its first director, a position he would hold until 1976. Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca opened the first festival. Bauer was succeeded by film journalist Wolf Donner in 1976. After his first Berlinale in June 1977, he negotiated the shift of the festival from the summer to February, a change which has remained since. After only three years in the role, Donner was followed by Moritz de Hadeln who held the position from 1980 until current director Dieter Kosslick took over in 2001; the festival is composed of seven different film sections. Films are chosen in each category by a section director with the advice of a committee of film experts.
Categories include: Competition: comprises feature-length films yet to be released outside their country of origin. Films in the Competition section compete for several prizes, including the top Golden Bear for the best film and a series of Silver Bears for acting and production. Panorama: comprises new independent and arthouse films that deal with "controversial subjects or unconventional aesthetic styles". Films in the category are intended to provoke discussion, have involved themes such as LGBT issues. Forum: comprises experimental and documentary films from around the world with a particular emphasis on screening works by younger filmmakers. There are no format or genre restrictions, films in the Forum do not compete for awards. Generation: comprises a mixture of feature-length films aimed at children and youths. Films in the Generation section compete in two sub-categories: Generation Kplus and Generation 14plus. Awards in the section are determined by three separate juries—the Children's Jury, the Youth Jury and an international jury of experts—whose decisions are made independent of one another.
Perspektive Deutsches Kino: comprises a wide variety of German films, with an emphasis on highlighting current trends in German cinema. There are few entry requirements, enabling emerging filmmakers to display their work to domestic and international audiences. Berlinale Shorts: comprises domestic and international short films those that demonstrate innovative approaches to filmmaking. Films in the category compete for the Golden Bear for the best short film, as well as a jury-nominated Silver Bear. Retrospective: comprises classic films shown at the Berlinale, with films collated from the Competition, Forum and Generation categories; each year, the Retrospective section is dedicated to important filmmakers. The special Homage series examines past cinema, with a focus on honouring the life work of directors and actors. In addition to the seven sections, the Berlinale contains several linked "curated special series", including the Berlinale Special, Gala Special, Forum 5, Culinary Cinema and the Homage.
Since 2002 a 50-second trailer opens the performances in all sections of the festival with the exception of the Retrospective. The Golden Bear is the highest prize awarded for the best film at the Berlin International Film Festival. Golden Bear Best Motion Picture Best Short Film Lifetime Achievement Silver Bear The Silver Bear was introduced in 1956 as an award for individual achievements in direction and acting, for best short film. In 1965 a special film award for the runner-up to the Golden Bear was introduced. Although its official name was the Special Jury Prize from 1965 to 1999, has been the Jury Grand Prix since 2000, it is known as the Silver Bear as it is regarded as a second place award after the Golden Bear. In 2002 a Silver Bear for best film music, in 2008 an award for best screenplay. Jury Grand Prix Alfred Bauer Prize: in memory of the Festival Founder—for a feature film that opens new perspectives on cinematic art Best Director Best Actor Best Actress Best Short Film Outstanding Artistic Contribution - Not awarded every year, in some years more than one award is made.
Outstanding Single Achievement - Not a
The Fox and the Hound
The Fox and the Hound is a 1981 American animated drama film produced by Walt Disney Productions and loosely based on the novel of the same name by Daniel P. Mannix; the 24th Disney animated feature film, the film tells the story of two unlikely friends, a red fox named Tod and a hound dog named Copper, who struggle to preserve their friendship despite their emerging instincts and the surrounding social pressures demanding them to be adversaries. Directed by Ted Berman, Richard Rich, Art Stevens, the film features the voices of Mickey Rooney, Kurt Russell, Pearl Bailey, Jack Albertson, Sandy Duncan, Jeanette Nolan, Pat Buttram, John Fiedler, John McIntire, Dick Bakalyan, Paul Winchell, Keith Mitchell, Corey Feldman; the Fox and the Hound was released to theaters on July 1981 to financial success. At the time of release it was the most expensive animated film produced to date, costing $12 million, it was re-released to theaters on March 25, 1988. A direct-to-video followup, The Fox and the Hound 2, was released to DVD on December 12, 2006.
After a young red fox is orphaned, Big Mama the owl, with the help of her friends Dinky the finch and Boomer the woodpecker, arranges for him to be adopted by a kindly farmer named Widow Tweed. Tweed names him Tod. Meanwhile, her neighbor, a hunter named Amos Slade, brings home a young hound puppy named Copper and introduces him to his hunting dog Chief. One day and Copper meet and become playmates, vowing to remain "friends forever". Slade grows frustrated at Copper for wandering off to play, places him on a leash. While playing with Copper outside his doghouse, Tod awakens Chief. Slade and Chief chase Tod. After an argument, Slade threatens to kill Tod. Hunting season comes and Slade takes his dogs into the wilderness for the interim. Meanwhile, Big Mama and Boomer attempt to explain to Tod that his friendship with Copper will not continue, as they are natural enemies, but Tod naively refuses to believe them, hoping that he and Copper will remain friends forever; as months pass and Copper both reach adulthood.
Copper has become an experienced hunting dog. On the night of Copper's return, Tod sneaks over to visit him. Copper explains that while he still values Tod as a friend, he is now a hunting dog and things are different, their conversation awakens Chief. In the ensuing chase Copper catches Tod. Against better judgement, Copper lets Tod diverts Chief and Slade. Tod tries escaping onto a railroad track, but is caught and pursued by Chief as a train approaches the tracks. Tod ducks under the train, but Chief is struck by the train and falls into the river below, breaking his leg. Angered by this and Slade blame Tod for the accident and vow vengeance. Tweed, realizing that Tod is no longer safe with her, takes him on a drive and leaves him at a game preserve. Tod's first night alone in the woods proves disastrous, as he inadvertently trespasses into an irritable old badger's den. Thankfully, a friendly porcupine offers Tod shelter; that same night and Copper plan to poach Tod. The next morning, Big Mama introduces him to a female fox named Vixey.
Wanting to impress her, Tod fails due to his lack of survival skills. Vixey and the other animals laugh at him, Tod makes an angry rant. Big Mama straightens the matter by reprimanding Tod for his childish rant and directs him to be himself; the two foxes reconcile and Vixey helps Tod adapt to life in the forest. Meanwhile and Copper trespass into the preserve to hunt Tod; as Tod manages to escape Slade's leghold traps and Slade pursue both foxes. They hide in their burrow while Slade tries trapping them by setting fire to the other end of the burrow; the foxes narrowly escape without getting burned as Slade and Copper chase them up the top of a hill until they reach a waterfall. There and Copper close in for the kill, but a large bear emerges from the bushes and attacks Slade. Slade trips and falls into one of his own traps, dropping his gun out of reach. Copper is no match for it. Not willing to let his former friend die, Tod intervenes and fights the bear until they both fall down the waterfall.
With the bear gone, a bewildered Copper approaches Tod as he lies exhausted near the bank of a waterfall-created lake. When Slade appears, Copper positions himself in front of Tod to prevent Slade from shooting him, refusing to move away. Slade leaves with Copper. Tod and Copper share one last smile before parting. At home, Tweed nurses Slade back to health. Copper, before resting, smiles. On a hill, Vixey joins Tod as they look down on the homes of Tweed. Mickey Rooney as Tod Kurt Russell as Copper Pearl Bailey as Big Mama Jack Albertson as Amos Slade Sandy Duncan as Vixey Jeanette Nolan as Widow Tweed Pat Buttram as Chief John Fiedler as The Porcupine John McIntire as The Badger Dick Bakalyan as Dinky Paul Winchell as Boomer Keith Mitchell as Young Tod Corey Feldman as Young Copper Wolfgang Reitherman read the original novel and found it touching because one of his sons had once owned a pet fox years before, he decided that it would make for a good animated feature for which production began in spring 1977.
The title was reported as The Fox and the Hounds, but the filmmakers dropped the plural as the story began to focus more and more on the two leads. Reitherman was the film's original director along with Art Stevens as co-director. A power struggle between the two directors and co-producer Ron Miller broke out between them over key sections of the film wit
Lotte Reiniger
Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926—thought to be one of the oldest surviving feature-length animated films—and Papageno. Reiniger is noted for having devised a predecessor to the first multiplane camera. Lotte Reiniger was born in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin on 2 June 1899 to Carl Reiniger and Eleonore Lina Wilhelmine Rakette; as a child, she was fascinated with the Chinese arts of paper cutting of silhouette puppetry building her own puppet theatre so that she could put on shows for her family and friends. As a teenager, Reiniger developed a love of cinema, first with the films of Georges Méliès for their special effects the films of the actor and director Paul Wegener, known today for The Golem. In 1915, she attended a lecture by Wegener. Reiniger convinced her parents to allow her to enroll in the acting group to which Wegener belonged, the Theatre of Max Reinhardt.
She began by working backstage. She started making silhouette portraits of the various actors around her, soon she was making elaborate title cards for Wegener's films, many of which featured her silhouettes. In 1918, Reiniger animated wooden rats and created the animated intertitles for Wegener's Der Rattenfänger von Hameln; the success of this work got her admitted into the Institut für Kulturforschung, an experimental animation and shortfilm studio. It was here that she met her future creative partner and husband, Carl Koch, as well as other avant-garde artists including Hans Cürlis, Bertolt Brecht, Berthold Bartosch; the first film Reiniger directed was Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens, a five-minute piece involving two lovers and an ornament that reflects their moods. The film was well received, its success opened up many new connections for Reiniger in the animation industry, she made six short films over the next few years, all produced and photographed by her husband, including the fairytale animation Aschenputtel.
These shorts were interspersed with advertising films and special effects for various feature films—most famously a silhouette falcon for a dream sequence in Part One of Die Nibelungen by Fritz Lang. During this time, she found herself at the centre of a large group of ambitious German animators, including Bartosch, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger. In 1923, she was approached by Louis Hagen, who had bought a large quantity of raw film stock as an investment to fight the spiraling inflation of the period, he asked her to do a feature-length animated film. There was some difficulty, however. Reiniger is quoted as saying "We had to think twice; this was a never heard of thing. Animated films were supposed to make people roar with laughter, nobody had dared to entertain an audience with them for more than ten minutes. Everybody to whom we talked in the industry about the proposition was horrified." The result was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, completed in 1926, one of the first animated feature films, with a plot, a pastiche of stories from One Thousand and One Nights.
Although it failed to find a distributor for a year, once premiered in Paris, it became a critical and popular success. Because of this delay, The Adventures of Prince Achmed's expressionistic style did not quite fit with the realism, becoming popular in cinema in 1926. Reiniger uses lines that can be called "colorful" to represent the film's exotic locations. Today, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is thought to be one of the oldest surviving feature-length animated films, if not the oldest, it is considered to be the first avant-garde full-length animated feature. Reiniger, in devising the predecessor to the first multiplane camera for certain effects, preceded Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks by a decade. Above her animation table, a camera with a manual shutter was placed in order to achieve this, she placed planes of glass to achieve a layered effect. The setup was backlit; this camera setup was popular in cel animation. Reiniger wrote instructions on how to construct her "trick-table" in her book, Shadow puppets, shadow theatres, shadow films.
In addition to Reiniger's silhouette actors, Prince Achmed boasted dream-like backgrounds by Walter Ruttmann and Walter Türck, a symphonic score by Wolfgang Zeller. Additional effects were added by Berthold Bartosch. Following the success of Prince Achmed, Reiniger was able to make a second feature. Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere was based on the first of the English children's books by Hugh Lofting; the film tells of the good Doctor's voyage to Africa to help heal sick animals. It is available only in a television version with new music, voice-over narration and the images playing at too many frames per second; the score of this three-part film was composed by Paul Hindemith and Paul Dessau. A year Reiniger co-directed her first live-action film with Rochus Gliese, Die Jagd nach dem Glück, a tale about a shadow-puppet troupe; the film starred Jean Renoir and Berthold Bartosch and included a 20-minute silhouette performance by Reiniger. The film was completed
The Adventures of Prince Achmed
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a 1926 German animated fairytale film by Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film; the Adventures of Prince Achmed features a silhouette animation technique Reiniger had invented which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. The technique she used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets, though hers were animated frame by frame, not manipulated in live action; the original prints featured color tinting. Several famous avant-garde animators worked on this film with Lotte Reiniger, among them Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch, Carl Koch; the story is based on elements taken from the One Thousand and One Nights "The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou" featured in Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book. An African sorcerer conjures up a flying horse; when the sorcerer refuses to sell it for any amount of gold, the Caliph offers any treasure. The sorcerer chooses the Caliph's daughter, to her great distress.
Prince Achmed, Dinarsade's brother, but the sorcerer persuades him to try out the horse. It carries the prince away and higher into the sky, as he does not know how to control it; the Caliph has the sorcerer imprisoned. When Achmed discovers how to make the horse descend, he finds himself in a strange foreign land, a magical island called Wak Wak, he is greeted by a bevy of attractive maidens. When they begin fighting for his attention, he flies away to a lake. There, he watches as Pari Banu, the beautiful ruler of the land of Wak Wak, arrives with her attendants to bathe; when they spot him, they all fly away, except for Pari Banu, for Achmed has her magical flying feather costume. She flees on foot, he gains her trust. They fall in love, she warns him, that the demons of Wak Wak will try to kill him. The sorcerer frees himself from his chains. Transforming himself into a bat, he seeks out Achmed; the prince falls into a pit. While Achmed fights a giant snake, the sorcerer takes Pari Banu to China and sells her to the Emperor.
The sorcerer pins Achmed under a boulder on top of a mountain. However, the Witch of the Flaming Mountain rescues Achmed; the sorcerer is her arch-enemy, so she helps Achmed rescue Pari Banu from the Emperor. The demons of Wak Wak find the couple and, despite Achmed's fierce resistance, carry Pari Banu off. Achmed forces a captive demon to fly him to Wak Wak. However, the gates of Wak Wak are locked, he slays a monster, attacking a boy named Aladdin. Aladdin tells of how he, a poor tailor, was recruited by the sorcerer to retrieve a magic lamp from a cave; when Aladdin returned to the cave entrance, the sorcerer demanded the lamp before letting him out. Aladdin refused, so the sorcerer sealed him in. Aladdin accidentally ordered it to take him home, he courted and married Dinarsade. One night, Aladdin's magnificent palace and the lamp disappeared. Blamed by the Caliph, Aladdin fled to avoid being executed. A storm at sea cast him ashore at Wak Wak; when he tried to pluck fruit from a "tree", it turned into a monster and grabbed him, but Achmed killed it.
The witch arrives. Since only the lamp can open the gates, she agrees to attack the sorcerer to get it, they engage in each transforming into various creatures. After a while, they resume their human forms and fling fireballs at each other; the witch slays the sorcerer. With the lamp, they are able to enter Wak Wak, just in time to save Pari Banu from being thrown to her death. A fierce battle erupts. A demon steals the lamp, she summons creatures from the lamp. One hydra-like creature seizes Pari Banu; when Achmed cuts off one of its heads, two more grow back but the witch stops this regeneration, allowing Achmed to kill it. A flying palace settles to the ground. Inside, Aladdin finds Dinasade reunites with her brother; the two couples bid goodbye to the fly home in the palace. Reiniger required several years, from 1923 to 1926; each frame had to be painstakingly filmed, 24 frames were needed per second. No original German nitrate prints of the film are known to still exist. While the original film featured color tinting, prints available just prior to the restoration had all been in black and white.
Working from surviving nitrate prints and British archivists restored the film during 1998 and 1999 including reinstating the original tinted image by using the Desmet method. The film is screened often on Turner Classic Movies; as of August 2017, the film is available to stream through the subscription-based FilmStruck. English-market DVDs are available, distributed by Milestone Films and available in NTSC R1 and PAL R2. Both versions of the DVD are identical, they feature both an English voice-over. The English-subtitled film is available via LiveTree. Two homages to this movie can be spotted in two Disney films: the duel between a witch and a wizard who both transform in various creatures is found in Disney's 1963 The Sword in the Stone, a character named Prince Achmed makes a cameo at the beginning of Aladdin; the art style served as inspiration for the Steven Universe episode "The Answer". The original score was composed by German composer Wolfgang Zeller in direct collaboration with the animation of the film
Glen Keane
Glen Keane is an American animator and illustrator. Keane was a character animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios for feature films including The Little Mermaid and the Beast, Pocahontas and Tangled. Keane received the 1992 Annie Award for character animation, the 2007 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to the field of animation and in 2013 was named a Disney Legend. In 2017, Keane directed Dear Basketball, an animated short film based on Kobe Bryant's retirement poem in The Players' Tribune. At the 90th Academy Awards and Bryant won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for their work on Dear Basketball. Keane was born in Philadelphia, the son of cartoonist Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus, Australian-born Thelma Keane, he was raised in Arizona. He was raised Roman Catholic. Keane's interest in art developed as a child by observing his father's work as a cartoonist.. In his early attempts to draw, his father gave him a copy of Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy, instructed him to analyze the body forms and the creative approach to life drawing.
After graduating from high school at Brophy College Preparatory, Keane applied to the California Institute of the Arts-School of Art, opting out of accepting a football scholarship from another college. His application was accidentally sent to the Program in Experimental Animation, where he was mentored by Jules Engel. Keane joined Disney the same year, his debut work, created over a 3-year period, was featured in The Rescuers, for which he was an animator for the characters of Bernard and Penny, alongside the famed Ollie Johnston. In 1975, during the production of his debut film, Keane married Linda Hesselroth, they are the parents of design artist Claire Keane, computer graphics artist Max Keane. After The Rescuers was completed, Keane went on to animate Elliott the Dragon in Pete's Dragon. Keane animated the climactic bear showdown in The Fox and the Hound. In 1982, after being inspired by the groundbreaking film Tron, Keane collaborated with fellow animator John Lasseter on a 30-second test scene of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, optioned for them by Disney executive Tom Wilhite.
The test integrated traditional character animation and computer-generated backgrounds, like Tron, was a cooperation with MAGI. It was Disney's first experimentation with digital inked and painted characters. But, the project turned out to be too expensive, the studio was unwilling to invest further in the planned featurette; the test for Where the Wild Things Are was revolutionary for its time, a predecessor to the famous ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast. In 1983, Keane worked as a freelance artist. During this time, he worked on the character of Professor Ratigan in Disney's The Great Mouse Detective, he served as an animator on The Chipmunk Adventure where he did the sequences of "Boys and Girls of Rock n' Roll" and "Getting Lucky". He returned to Disney to work on the characters of Fagin and Georgette for Oliver & Company. Keane rose to lead character animator, becoming one of the group of young animators who were trained by and succeeded "Disney's Nine Old Men". Keane animated some of Disney's most memorable characters in what has been referred to as the "New "Golden Age" of Disney Animation.
Keane designed and animated the character of Ariel in the film The Little Mermaid the eagle Marahute in The Rescuers Down Under. Subsequently, Keane worked as the supervising animator on the title characters for three Disney hit features: Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas. While living with his family in Paris, France for three years, Keane completed work on Disney's 1999 Tarzan for which he drew the eponymous character. Keane returned to Disney's Burbank studio as the lead animator for John Silver in Treasure Planet. In 2003, Keane began work as the director of Disney's CGI animated film Tangled, which released in November 2010. In Tangled and his team hoped to bring the unique style and warmth of traditional animation to computer animation. In October 2008, due to some "non-life threatening health issues", Keane stepped back as director of Tangled, but remained the film's executive producer and an animating director. On March 23, 2012, having worked 37 years at Disney, Glen Keane left Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Keane said in a letter sent to his co-workers, “I owe so much to those great animators who mentored me – Eric Larson, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston – as well as to the many other wonderful people at Disney whom I have been fortunate to work with in the past nearly 38 years. I am convinced that animation is the ultimate form of our time with endless new territories to explore. I can’t resist its siren call to step out and discover them.”In December 2013, it was announced that he had joined Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects Group and is cooperating with its engineers to create interactive hand-drawn animation. Keane released his first animated short- Duet- at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco on June 25, 2014, it is the first hand-drawn cartoon made with 60 fps, the third in a series of shorts called the Spotlight Stories that are designed to explore spatial awareness and the sensory inputs of a mobile device to create a distinctive storytelling experience. Motorola was a subsidiary of Google.
When Google sold Motorola in 2014 early, his group remained with Google. In 2015, it was revealed he, a
MTV
MTV is an American pay television channel owned by Viacom Media Networks and headquartered in New York City. The channel was launched on August 1, 1981, aired music videos as guided by television personalities known as "video jockeys". At first, MTV's main target demographic was young adults, but today it is teenagers high school and college students. Since its inception, MTV has toned down its music video programming and its programming now consists of original reality and drama programming and some off-network syndicated programs and films, with limited music video programming in off-peak time periods. MTV had struggled with the secular decline of music-related subscription-based media, its ratings had been said to be failing systematically, as younger viewers shift towards other media platforms, with yearly ratings drops as high as 29%. In April 2016, then-appointed MTV president Sean Atkins announced plans to restore music programming to the channel. Under current MTV president Chris McCarthy, reality programming has once again become prominent.
MTV has spawned numerous sister channels in the U. S. and affiliated channels internationally, some of which have gone independent, with 90.6 million American households in the United States receiving the channel as of January 2016. Several earlier concepts for music video-based television programming had been around since the early 1960s; the Beatles had used music videos to promote their records starting in the mid-1960s. The creative use of music videos within their 1964 film A Hard Day's Night the performance of the song "Can't Buy Me Love", led MTV on June 26, 1999, to honor the film's director Richard Lester with an award for "basically inventing the music video". In his book The Mason Williams FCC Rapport, author Mason Williams states that he pitched an idea to CBS for a television program that featured "video-radio", where disc jockeys would play avant-garde art pieces set to music. CBS rejected the idea, but Williams premiered his own musical composition "Classical Gas" on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where he was head writer.
In 1970, Philadelphia-based disc jockey Bob Whitney created The Now Explosion, a television series filmed in Atlanta and broadcast in syndication to other local television stations throughout the United States. The series featured promotional clips from various popular artists, but was canceled by its distributor in 1971. Several music programs originating outside of the US, including Australia's Countdown and the United Kingdom's Top of the Pops, which had aired music videos in lieu of performances from artists who were not available to perform live, began to feature them by the mid-1970s. In 1974, Gary Van Haas, vice president of Televak Corporation, introduced a concept to distribute a music video channel to record stores across the United States, promoted the channel, named Music Video TV, to distributors and retailers in a May 1974 issue of Billboard; the channel, which featured video disc jockeys, signed a deal with US Cable in 1978 to expand its audience from retail to cable television.
The service was no longer active by the time MTV launched in 1981. In 1977, Warner Cable a division of Warner Communications and the precursor of Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment launched the first two-way interactive cable television system named QUBE in Columbus, Ohio; the QUBE system offered many specialized channels. One of these specialized channels was Sight on Sound, a music channel that featured concert footage and music-oriented television programs. With the interactive QUBE service, viewers could vote for their favorite artists; the original programming format of MTV was created by media executive Robert W. Pittman, who became president and chief executive officer of MTV Networks. Pittman had test-driven the music format by producing and hosting a 15-minute show, Album Tracks, on New York City television station WNBC-TV in the late 1970s. Pittman's boss Warner-Amex executive vice president John Lack had shepherded PopClips, a television series created by former Monkee-turned solo artist Michael Nesmith, whose attention had turned to the music video format in the late 1970s.
The inspiration for PopClips came from a similar program on New Zealand's TVNZ network named Radio with Pictures, which premiered in 1976. The concept itself had been in the works since 1966, when major record companies began supplying the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation with promotional music clips to play on the air at no charge. Few artists made the long trip to New Zealand to appear live. On Saturday, August 1, 1981, at 12:01 AM Eastern Time, MTV was launched with the words "Ladies and gentlemen and roll," spoken by John Lack and played over footage of the first Space Shuttle launch countdown of Columbia and of the launch of Apollo 11; those words were followed by the original MTV theme song, a crunching rock tune composed by Jonathan Elias and John Petersen, playing over the American flag changed to show MTV's logo changing into various textures and designs. MTV producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert used this public domain footage as a concept. A shortened version of the shuttle launch ID ran at the top of every hour in various forms, from MTV's first day until it was pulled in early 1986 in the wake of the Challenger disaster.
The first
California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts is a private university in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created for students of both the visual and performing arts, it offers Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Fine Arts, Master of Arts, Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in six schools: Art, Critical Studies, Film/Video and Theater. The school was first envisioned by many benefactors in the early 1960s, staffed by a diverse array of professionals. CalArts students develop their own work, over which they retain control and copyright, in a workshop atmosphere. CalArts was formed in 1961, as a merger of the Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. Both of the existing institutions were going through financial difficulties around the same time, the founder of the Art Institute, Nelbert Chouinard, was mortally ill; the professional relationship between Madame Chouinard and Walt Disney began in 1929 when Disney had no money and Madame Chouinard agreed to train Disney's first animators on a pay-later basis.
It was through the vision of Disney, who discovered and trained many of his studio artists at Chouinard, that the merger of the two institutions was coordinated. Joining him were his brother Roy O. Disney, Lulu Von Hagen and Thornton Ladd, of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music; the original board of trustess at CalArts included Harrison Price, Royal Clark, Robert W. Corrigan, Roy E. Disney, Roy O. Disney, film producer Z. Wayne Griffin, H. R. Haldeman, Ralph Hetzel, Chuck Jones, Ronald Miller, Millard Sheets, attorney Maynard Toll, attorney Luther Reese Marr, bank executive G. Robert Truex Jr. Jerry Wexler, Meredith Willson, Peter McBean and Scott Newhall. In 1965, the Alumni Association was founded as a nonprofit organization and was governed by a 12-member board of directors to serve the best interests of the institute and its programs. Members included leading professional artists and musicians, who contributed their knowledge and skill to strengthen the institute; the 12 founding board of directors members were Mary Costa, Edith Head, Gale Storm, Marc Davis, Tony Duquette, Harold Grieve, John Hench, Chuck Jones, Henry Mancini, Marty Paich, Nelson Riddle and Millard Sheets.
The ground-breaking for CalArts' current campus took place May 3, 1969. However, construction of the new campus was hampered by torrential rains, labor troubles and the earthquake in 1971. CalArts moved to its present campus in the Valencia section of the city of Santa Clarita, California in November 1971. From the beginning, CalArts was plagued by the tensions between its art and trade school functions as well as between the non-commercial aspirations of the students and faculty and the conservative interests of the Disney family and trustees; the founding board of trustees planned on creating CalArts as a school in an entertainment complex, a destination like Disneyland, a feeder school for the industry. Such a model is exemplified in the 1941 Disney film The Reluctant Dragon. In an ironic turn of fate, they appointed Robert W. Corrigan as the first president of the Institute. Corrigan, former dean of the School of Arts at New York University fired all the artists and teachers from Chouinard in his attempt to remake CalArts into his personal vision.
Herbert Blau was hired as the Institute's dean of the School of Theater and Dance. Subsequently, Blau was instrumental in hiring a number of professionals like Mel Powell, Paul Brach, Alexander Mackendrick, sociologist Maurice R. Stein, Richard Farson, as well as other influential program heads and teachers such as Stephan von Huene, Allan Kaprow, Bella Lewitzky, Michael Asher, Jules Engel, John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Ravi Shankar, Max Kozloff, Miriam Shapiro, Douglas Huebler, Morton Subotnick, Norman M. Klein and Nam June Paik most of whom came from a counterculture and avant-garde side of the art world; the fundamental principles established at the Institute by Blau and Corrigan included ideas like “no technique in advance of need,” and that a curriculum should be cyclical rather than sequential, returning to root principles at regular intervals, that “we’re a community of artists here, some of us called faculty and some called students."Corrigan held his position until 1972, when he was replaced by William S. Lund, a Disney son-in-law.
Within a month of Lund's tenure as president, 55 of CalArts' 325 faculty and staff were fired. Structured schedules were introduced. Classes were trimmed back and, within a year, the Institute was operating on budget; some credit Lund with saving CalArts. Others see his tenure as the end of an idealistic experiment. In 1975, Robert J. Fitzpatrick was appointed new president of CalArts. Holding this position for 12 years, in 1987 Fitzpatrick resigned as president to head Euro Disney in Paris. Nicholas England, former dean of the School of Music, was appointed acting president. One year Steven Lavine, associate director for arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, was named new president. On June
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