HollywoodIdiocy.com

E! Online is reporting, direct from showrunner Bryan Fuller, that even if the strike were to end this week, his show, ABC’s Pushing Daisies, would not be back for more episodes this year. And I quote from E! Online:

“Lots of talk has been going down this past week,” Daisies boss Bryan Fuller told me earlier today. “Essentially, even if the strike is resolved in the next week or two, we wouldn’t be back until next season. There was a preliminary conversation that involved a plan to hit the ground running and try to get episodes on the air as soon as possible, but it no longer seems like that’s going to happen. It seems most likely that we will have a very short first season and then come back in the fall for a proper season two.”

Now, that’s a dang shame. Sure, it took yours truly until the strike break to find time to display a bunch of TIVO’d episodes of Pushing Daisies across my standard Sony WEGA sitting awkwardly atop my plasma tv mount, but once I found the show and realized it was from the same wonderful folks who brought us Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, I was all over that show and it’s now in my personal Top 10 “Must Watch” list.

C’mon, Fuller… say it ain’t so! If the writer’s strike settles soon, I don’t wanna have to wait till September to see more of The Pie Maker and Dead Girl! That’s just wrong in SO many ways!

Well, the Qtrax site is back to allowing downloads of the client software, which has turned out to be powered by the Songbird Media Player, already in v0.2 beta release. While the point-to-point unlimited “free and legal” downloads haven’t been enabled just yet, I am pleased to say the media player performs well.

Using a bunch of stuff I’ve ripped off my CDs for play on my shoddy 1GB MP3 player, the sound quality is as decent as any time I’ve played the same tracks in RealOne or WMP. The nice bit, though, is how slim and fast the app performs. The download is only just over 9MB in size, installs quickly and when I pointed it to my “My Music” folder that contains a modest library of just over 300 ripped tracks, the program read and incorporated them into the My Library area so quickly, I wasn’t sure it had really worked; but there they were, ready to play.

Those are the positives.

On the downside, the media player has not yet successfully connected to the Qtrax site to enable any of the “artist-related information” searching promised in the initial beta release. Perhaps the servers are overwhelmed, though, and this’ll settle down once more folks have the player downloaded and installed.

Another downside is the player’s hit-and-miss performance on picking up artist and album information. For example, I get sermon CDs at the house of worship I attend and like to rip them into MP3 format for convenient listening; even though I manually entered all the information for those CDs and it works in RealOne and WMP, Qtrax’s Bluebird player is extremely hit-and-miss on capturing manually-entered information like that, which leads to my files being far less organized than I prefer in Qtrax.

Even so, the app feels light, fast and responsive and considering the increasingly bulky performance of RealOne and WMP, not to mention iTunes, Qtrax Songbird is at least in the running from a performance standpoint. The black user interface feels clean, usable and smooth, though rather light on features so far, and I haven’t tested it out to see if I can use Qtrax to rip songs off my existing audio CD library, though it doesn’t appear to be a feature that’s enabled just yet.

In the final analysis, Qtrax Songbird Media Player v0.2 beta has a long way to grow before it lived up to its promise, but it’s a nice start. Only time will tell if Qtrax is actually the 25 million-plus downloadable songs, “unlimited free and legal” app that it boasts it intends to be, but so far, so good. At least the music player performs well, and the ads? Well, they don’t bug me yet, or affect playback performance, so who cares?

Qtrax, the “free and legal” unlimited music download service scheduled to debut yesterday (Sunday) hit a snag when at least four of the biggest music companies - Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music and Universal - put the brakes on by announcing Monday that their deals with Qtrax were not yet finalized.

Talks between Qtrax (and parent company Brilliant Technologies Corp) and major music labels are said to still be ongoing and the company released a statement stating it believed such details could be addressed quickly so that the debut of the Qtrax service could go forward; however, for now the downloadable software needed to access the Qtrax service has been blocked by the site from further downloads until the service can fully debut.

The company is making several promises beyond offering “25 million songs, free and legal.” One promise is that the company will offer an iPod solution by April 15 (which is also, ironically, tax day in the US), which may come as a surprise to Apple, whose iTunes music service uses a proprietary codec that is exclusively licensed to Apple; it’s unlikely that Apple, currently charging 99 cents per tune, would offer its codec to a competing music service that would undercut its prices by 100 percent.

Thankfully, one solution Qtrax will allegedly offer is to correct roughly a decade of mistakenly attributed music. For years, since the advent of the original Napster service, many music download tracks floating around the Internet have attributed songs to the wrong artist. One notable example is Weird Al Yankovic, who has been credited for many parody songs he’s never written, including works by political satirist Paul Shanklin. Qtrax is also promising not only album cuts in its lineup, but rarities and live performance tracks as well.

While it still sounds too good to be true, Qtrax may be delayed, but is apparently not an Internet hoax.

EMI, Universal and Warner Music - the same companies that only a few months ago charged Minnesota native Jammie Thomas the equivalent of $9,250 per song for every song she’d allegedly downloaded for free - have changed their mind about free online music downloads. According to the Times Online (UK), those companies as well as many other recording companies, have decided at last to embrace file sharing technology.

The reversal came as the music industry announced the introduction of Qtrax, a digital music service that promises a catalog of 25 million songs that users can download and keep for free with no limits. The catch if that Qtrax’s digital jukebox will feature some advertising - kind of like radio ads - and both artists and record labels will be paid based on download popularity. Nearly every song available will allow unrestricted use through the service. If Qtrax takes off, it could pose a serious threat to Apple’s iTunes digital music store, which charges 99 cents per track.

If this all ends up being as good as it sounds, maybe music aficionados can finally spend their hard-earned sawbucks on something other than a Brandi Carlile single; like maybe some wholesale fashion jewelry or an HDTV.

The only question remaining is whether Jammie Thomas is going to be let off the hook by the men in music-industry black suits.

I’ve mentioned Car Angel before; they’re the nonprofit company that accepts donated cars and other sorts of vehicles in order to help kids and teens in crisis. But how does it work, exactly?

Well, it begins when someone has a vehicle they don’t need anymore and decide to make a car donation to charity; in this case, of course, the charity would be Car Angel. What happens then is that volunteers who are part of Car Angel set about restoring and repairing the donated cars, then reselling them.

Sound like a scam? It’s not. While a lot of charities - even famous ones - eat up a lot of donated money in exorbitant administrative fees and the like, Car Angel puts all their proceeds directly into their mission, which is to produce and distribute videos that can help young children and teens during times of crisis.

Some of the videos have a religious message; some don’t. Either way, the central goal of Car Angel is to help out young kids and teens when they need it most. What could be better?

J.J. Abrams made his latest monster movie, Cloverfield, on a relatively modest (by Hollywood standards) budget of $25 million and a handful of Sports Authority coupons, but the wise budgeting helped place the Bad Robot Productions film in the black in its first weekend. Setting an all-new record for January bows, Cloverfield raked in $41 million in its first weekend, nearly twice the take of the second film on the weekend list, fellow first-week debut film 27 Dresses, which made only $22 million.

The Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman buddy flick, The Bucket List, added $15 million to its take in its fourth week of release, Cloverfield nearly eclipsed that film’s total four-week take in only three days; The Bucket List has grossed $42.7 million thus far. The good news for The Bucket List is that it is holding relatively steady even after being in release for four weeks.

CityTV viewers in the great white north will benefit from a special scheduling situation this Monday night. The Canadian broadcaster will be transmitting the final two pre-strike episodes of the dramady CHUCK, about a reluctant spy, in its regular Monday night time slot. All NBC affiliates, including Canadian NBC affiliates, will still be airing the final two Chuck episodes on Thursday as planned, scheduled on either side of an all-new episode of Celebrity Apprentice.

The show’s brief return from hiatus marks a successful pre-strike run for the dramady, which typically aired on Monday nights in the fall, as a lead-in to HEROES. It is one of a handful of select shows already renewed for next season, thanks in part to the strike-shortened timeframe of the show’s run. Another freshman NBC drama from the Monday fall schedule, Journeyman, a personal favorite of HollywoodIdiocy.com, was not as fortunate; not only has the show been canceled, but the studio apparently tore up its agreement with the writer-producer of the show as part of a strike tactic.

One things for sure, owning a pair of disposable gloves might be necessary to avoid all the dust that’s going to be settling once this strike is done and over with.

There may be light at the end of the tunnel after all, folks.

Six days after the Directors Guild of America began negotiations with the Hollywood hotshots (otherwise known as AMPTP, the negotiating arm for producers), the DGA struck a deal with producers to avoid a strike of their own and may, in the process, have paved the way for labor peace between scribes and studios.

At least one Hollywood type who is a member of the WGA says he’s amazed at what the DGA negotiated out of the AMPTP, and if writers get a carbon copy deal, it would be groundbreaking. That person is ER executive producer John Wells.

“This is a genuinely landmark deal. I’ve been involved in negotiations for 20 years. This is the best deal I’ve seen that anyone’s been able to negotiate,” Wells told online sources on Friday. “The DGA took all the leverage the writers gave them and negotiated a hell of deal. I didn’t think we’d be anywhere close to this.”

Wells went on to predict the writer’s strike would be over in two weeks or less, if the WGA is willing to accept a carbon-copy deal of what the DGA agreed to. If so, maybe irate TV fans can put their rakes and pitchforks back in tool storage and return to the business of watching scripted dramas and comedies, rather than, y’know… communicating with their family members for the first time in 35 years.

Now the WGA writers strike is getting ugly for the long haul; the kind of ugly that a simple exchange of religious jewelry cannot solve.

In a trend started last week by ABC and taken up this week by Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox TV, CBS Paramount Network TV and Universal Media Studios, Hollywood’s leading studios have decided to cut costs by axing the development deals of several writer-producer teams whose output has halted as a result of the strike.

The move is seen largely as a counter-move to the WGA’s decision to come to individual agreements between the WGA and certain studios, like David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, a deal which allowed the CBS late night host to return from hiatus with his staff of writers intact.

By axing the writer-producer deals with these studios, the studios are cutting their costs but are also freeing up a lot of creative talent from their current obligations, so that when the labor agreement is finally settled, there could be a lot of “free agent” producers available whose services could induce a bidding war.

But before that can happen, a labor agreement must be reached; unfortunately, the move of studio owners to ax existing deals in the middle of the strike is likely to result in a strike that is much longer, more bitter and increasing entrenched, rather than one that will be resolved more quickly.

The days of giving and receiving Valentines Day gifts are over far too soon for 25-year-old actor Brad Renfro. Renfro was found dead in his Los Angeles County home on Tuesday, January 15, 2008. The cause of death has not yet been determined, but an autopsy could be conducted as early as Wednesday.

Renfro’s biggest role was his first, cast at the age of 10 in Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of the John Grisham novel, The Client, which starred Susan Sarandon as a lawyer who takes on a case for the 10-year-old client played by Renfro. His early success led to a role a year later in Tom and Huck, a retelling of two of Mark Twain’s most famous American novels.

However, while the movie roles kept rolling in, Renfro’s career kept getting more obscure as the level and quality of the movies in which he was cast declined. His career enjoyed a brief upswing in 2001, when he appeared in the indy movie, Ghost World. However, although he was able to keep working, none of the roles that followed were as well-received.

At the time of his death, he was involved in two movies that were incomplete; The Informers and Joe the Engineer. It is not known at this time whether his performances will be integrated into the final cuts of those films, or if his death will spur directors to recast his roles in those films, and reshoot completed scenes.

The actor allegedly struggled with drugs and alcohol, but media sources are quoting his lawyer, Richard Kaplan, as saying Renfro was working hard in recent months to stay clean.

A moment of silence, please.

The Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman buddy comedy, The Bucket List, topped weekend box office with an opening debut just under $21 million. The Ice Cube-Tracy Morgan comedy First Sunday wasn’t far behind with $19 million.

Yet Bill Gates may want to double up on his individual health insurance policy after the beating taken by the Microsoft-backed debut of In the Name of the King: A Dragon Siege Tale. Seems the PC hit RPG only had devout PC gamer fans attending its first-week bow as the film took in only $3.26 million despite appearing on over 1,600 screens.

The special effects-laden epic was beaten out by two spots by 3D animated Christian film, Veggie Tales: The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, which took in $4.4 million over the same period. The Veggie Tales movie finished just out of the Top 10 at the 11 spot, while In the Name of the King bowed at spot 13, the worst debut of the week.