Category Archives: Entertainment

The dueling TV and film production centers in the United States

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Was the latest movie or television show you watched made in Hollywood or New York City?

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While California kept its crown at No. 1 with $1.76 billion in movie and TV production spend, New York is drawing major titles at a much more rapid pace, according to industry tracker ProdPro’s closely-watched quarterly snapshot released on Thursday. The state surged 87 percent in production spend in the quarter to $1.61 billion compared with California’s 17 percent uptick.

Bulked up soundstage infrastructure, a large crewmember union base, easier access to neighboring Tri-State locations are all adding up for New York. Take Universal Pictures’ Miami Vice: 85 as a case study. The Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler neo-noir actioner has been filming in the Empire State as well as Wayne, New Jersey along with its namesake locations in Florida.

New York also has what all states covet, and what California has been losing: scripted TV shows that run for seasons and seasons, often in the same soundstages. And inventory for soundstages has grown 43 percent in the state since 2020 with a boom in purpose-built facilities, per real estate services giant CBRE, which added in a June report that the state is “better positioned for recovery than some competitor markets” after studio belt-tightening on overall content spending…

And we haven’t even talked about New Jersey yet, aka Hollywood East, which is emerging as a major player in its own right and has arguably been the biggest growth hub over the past year in production. The state bestowed Netflix, Paramount and Lionsgate as studio partners, which have conferred a series of incentives to produce titles there. And it has been reaping the benefits. Of late, Netflix’s Kevin Hart-Henry Cavill actioner Spy Duo and Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups 3 have been filming in Monmouth County, while series like Cupertino (CBS) and Dan Levy’s Big Mistakes (Netflix) shot in-state.

Both cities have been major media centers for decades. Hollywood has the reputation for being the place where TV and movie dreams are made, where a combination of stars and weather and settings and production infrastructure and booming populations leads to narratives that shape imaginations and discussions.

Some of this is easy for viewers to see on screen if you know where to look. You can examine establishing shots or common sets or certain local features that keep popping up. I saw one the other day on a commercial as I had stood on almost exactly the same spot while touring a Hollywood backlot.

Some of it is hard to know. Many scenes are set in generic places that could stand in for almost anywhere. Unless there are particular local clues (trees, architecture, etc.), a New Jersey suburb could stand in for a community in the Pacific Northwest or the South.

What might be interesting to see is how New York City could play up its TV and film production in the same way Hollywood does. What would it take for people to want to go tour New York City area backlots? Or take bus tours of where the stars live? Or have something like the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Perhaps this is not needed in New York City in the same way given the city’s different economy (finance! Wall Street! international business!) and history.

Nightlife, collective effervescence, and social change

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A new book considers how nightlife has changed modern societies:

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In this fabulous alternative history of the modern world, the academic and “party historian” Imogen Willetts looks at the last 500 years of civilisation through the sometimes blurry lenses of its after-dark scenes, with fascinating results. She begins by trying to capture what it feels like to go on a big night out, focusing on a phenomenon that, in 1912, the sociologist Émile Durkheim labelled “collective effervescence”. In one passage, she explains this by referencing dancing as part of ancient tribal hunting rituals, listening to Charli xcx’s 365, or singing along to Sweet Caroline with tens of thousands of other people in a stadium.

This is no dry academic study, then, and its mix of historical research, critical theory and conversational references to pop culture makes for a bright and compelling read. What Willetts calls the “seemingly superficial act of getting gussied up to drink, dance, have fun and meet people” is, of course, much more than that, and she scratches away at the layers with skill. Nightlife can contain, or enable, rebellion, community, innovation, art, love, sex and political revolution. From Japan to France, from Shanghai to Germany, via many detours to the United States, she examines historical movements as they might be seen from dusk till dawn.

Part of the appeal of collective effervescence is that individual people get caught up in a scene or moment or crowd. It is not just doing something fun or unique; it is collective activity that is something different compared to what an individual can experience alone. It is about taking part in something bigger.

Do we have good predictors of when nightlife crowds or activities can turn into society changing moments or movements? Nightlife occurs regularly in many places; what helps it turn into something consequential or when it spills out beyond the initial gathering or activity?

And since I study suburbs, I wonder about the lack of nightlife in many suburban communities. This is part of the appeal to many; suburbs are quieter places for people to live. On the other hand, cities are known for more nightlife options. How much does this contribute to what many perceive to be a lack of interest in social change in American suburbs?

I see almost no ads online and I see a lot on streaming services

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I remember hearing as a kid that Americans would see thousands upon thousands of advertisements in their lifetime. I have not heard updated figures for years as entertainment habits have changed. Where are people seeing or hearing advertisements today?

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I realized recently I see almost no ads on websites and limited ads on social media (and I do not use apps for social media). Because I use multiple ad blockers, I see no ad banners at the top of pages, ads on the sides of pages, and rarely see ads on videos.

Where I do see more ads is through streaming services. Because they now require paying more each month to eliminate ads, I see breaks while watching shows.

In terms of older media forms with ads, with TV (particularly live sports) and radio I can skip to another station during ads. I no longer subscribe to newspapers and magazines – even though I enjoy reading them – so I do not see print ads. I still get plenty of junk mail addressed to me.

Am I living a life with fewer advertisements compared to several decades ago or are the ads ever more present across a range of media? They might be there in product placements in TV shows or in how many baseball game plays on a radio broadcast are sponsored. Or I still drive past plenty of signs and billboards. (I was also recently in Times Square in New York City and it was full of ads.) Or many everyday items – water bottles, sports equipment, clothing, etc. – prominently features logos and branding.

The advertising industry is not going away in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Even as I and many others will claim that these advertisements do not affect us, there is a whole industry that will continue to find more ways to personalize ads, have them in all media forms, and find news ways to tailor these ads to our particular interests and settings.

Billy Joel and “The Great Suburban Showdown”

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I have not listened to an early Billy Joel album for a long time. In my quest to find more music that explicitly references suburbs, I recently ran into his song “The Great Suburban Showdown,” track number three on his 1974 album Streetlife Serenade. The character in the song is headed home for a visit and this is the chorus:

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I’ve been gone for a while
Made some changes in my style
And they say you can’t go home anymore
When the streets all look the same
And I’ll have to play the game
We’ll all sit around in the kitchen chairs
With the tv on, with the neighbors there

The song describes several common images of American suburbs:

  1. Family life in suburbia. Home is where mom and dad are. There are barbeques, neighbors.
  2. Things look the same and the suburbs have not changed.
  3. In contrast to #1 and #2, the main character is now living somewhere else. He has made changes to his life while the suburban life still looks and feels the same. Suburban life is dull and predictable but not other kinds of places are not like this.

The song refers to a “suburban showdown” where all this will come into conflict. Joel himself grew up in suburban Long Island; could he be referring in this song to his own experiences?

Dating the monoculture back to award shows in 2014?

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Peak monoculture might have been in 2014:

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At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time.

The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people. The photo (for which Cooper used a phone made by Samsung, a major Oscars sponsor) became a dayslong news cycle unto itself…

It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million. The Emmy Awards in August 2014 had 15.59 million viewers on NBC — down about 12 percent from 2013 but still a very healthy audience. Five other music awards shows that year brought in at least 10 million viewers…

If awards shows are a proxy for what people — both the folks who make the things nominated for awards and the public that consumes them — are dialed in on at any given time, then our collective attention has steadily waned over time. None of the big awards telecasts has approached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still usually the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or so viewers rather than 40 million-plus. The Grammys (14.41 million viewers in 2026) and other awards shows have similarly fallen off.

As the article notes, it might be hard to isolate one point where a common collective experience in the United States dissolved. I’ve heard people date it to going beyond three major TV networks to the rise of premium cable TV shows (think The Sopranos) to the rise of the Internet in the 1990s to streaming services to the advent of 24/7 cable news. Usually this line of discussion refers to the number of media outlets people can access but it is also related to the number of narratives or stories people have.

Another way to think about it: prior to the rise of mass broadcast media in the twentieth century (radio and TV), how collective were people’s experiences within and across countries? News traveled more slowly. People heard about important events but it might be days or weeks later.

The accompanying piece to this article would be considering what we have lost if large numbers of people are no longer watching the same Oscars or going to the same movies. How much does this contribute to fragmentation, polarization, individualism? Or how has it helped contribute to freedom and creativity?

And it might be worth remembering that such fragmentation might not necessarily last. The trend toward personally curated experiences might continue – but it could also go back the other direction. The streaming services could all collapse back into each other. The audio streaming platforms could consolidate. The Internet and social media might retract in scope. The multiculture or pluriculture might be an artifact of the early 21st century.

What I learned working for a Christian college radio station #2: the formal and informal practices of radio

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Organizations may have some obvious or well-known procedures while other practices are more hidden. Some of the formal policies of radio stations might be obvious. You have to air a station ID around the top of the hour. You have to air emergency alert tests every so often. Not following through with these policies comes with consequences.

Here is one example of a less well-known policy. According to the FCC, certain information had to be kept in a file. Radio is a federally regulated industry with licenses coming with requirements. I always wondered who might stop by and look at such files. Do most people even know were radio stations are located?

Some practices are less formal or more open to interpretation across stations. Two examples stand out. One was the way we organized music during a typical hour. We had certain categories for songs, such as heavy rotation, medium rotation, and power gold. How many slots each hour had for these categories plus the number of songs in that category determined how often those songs would play. With some other rules for songs (such as there had to be a certain amount of time between two songs from the same artist playing), this meant the heavy rotation songs would play about 40 times a week. And the heavy rotation category led off every hour. Why do people listen to music on the radio? They want to hear the popular songs. With our system the would not hear them every hour but every few hours. And those songs would tend to play at the beginning of the 15 minute increments that make up radio hours (and that are tied to ratings). As a college radio station, we did not always follow this format – we had other parts of the day that were structured in the same ways.

A second example involved how we referred to ourselves. Radio stations have options, that typically include their FM or AM frequency number or their call letters (typically 4). We were WETN on FM 88.1. We would often call ourselves “WETN – Wheaton College Radio.” Sometimes we would refer to our frequency: “FM88, Wheaton College Radio.” Or “WETN, FM88.” WETN is a good shorthand for “Wheaton,” a name both our college and community shared (traced back to the same Wheaton brothers who were early settlers). And not a lot of stations can boast that they are in the 88s.

Once I knew these practices, they seemed obvious. The station ID was built into our on-air scheduling software. How many ways are there to refer to our call letters and frequency? Perhaps this is true in all settings but with no previous experience in radio, it took time to learn these official and informal policies.

Possible link between major music releases and driving deaths

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A recent working paper looked at the possible connection between music releases and traffic fatalities:

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A group of researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School recently issued a working paper reporting an association between the release days of the most-streamed albums and an increase in US traffic fatalities. The authors say the pattern is consistent with smartphone-enabled driver distraction, including the use of in-vehicle phone-mirroring platforms.

“Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study,” the researchers said in their explanation for performing the study. Fatal traffic accidents and release days for popular streaming albums, the team said, were chosen as an “exogenous event” that “may offer an opportunity to quasi-experimentally study the impact of distraction using observational data.”…

The team used data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which catalogs all fatal crashes on public US roadways, and compared that to data from Spotify charts, looking specifically at the top 10 albums with the most first-day streams between 2017 and 2022 (Taylor Swift and Drake each appear three times in the top 10, for those curious)…

They adjusted for fixed effects like holidays, the day of the week and week of the year, repeated the analyses to select for infotainment systems and other automobile information, and accounted for driver characteristics including age, the number of people in the car, and involvement of alcohol. The team even conducted multiple “placebo album” falsification tests, running experiments on randomly-selected dates, to be sure they weren’t overlooking something else unknown.

This sounds like an example of a “natural experiment” where researchers can see what happens to driving deaths on Fridays with major music releases and Fridays without them.

Three quick thoughts in response:

  1. I remember when major music releases were on Tuesdays, not Fridays. And when the music was not yet digital, a consumer had to go to a location to buy a physical copy. I was never in any release lines but I definitely went to stores on release day to buy CDs. (Have never done this for records or cassettes.)
  2. How many people enjoy new music in a car versus via ear buds, headphones, and speakers in other settings? A moving vehicle can make it difficult to hear music. The road is noisy. A vehicle makes noise. The car has a certain sound system. In newer vehicles, the listener is streaming music. But driving is better with entertainment. And driving with friends and music can be fun. Driving fast with friends and loud music can feel fun.
  3. What might be a public health response to this? Regulations about screens in cars – making them easier to operate, smaller, less distracting, etc.? Music release days back on Tuesdays or another weekday to avoid the possible connections to weekends? Public safety messages? Promoting the use of driverless vehicles?

What I learned working for a Christian college radio station #1: speaking into a microphone in an empty room

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I worked at WETN 88.1 FM, Wheaton College’s radio station, for all four years as an undergraduate and for several years later as a faculty member. This is the start to a non-consecutive series of posts regarding the valuable lessons I learned while doing this. #1:

You are alone in a radio studio. You sit down in front of the mixing board and computer display. Various audio equipment surrounds you. You put on headphones, press a button to turn on the microphone, push the fader up, and start speaking.

This is a common occurrence in a radio studio but it is an odd situation compared to most of life. Typically when you start talking there is a visible audience. You are talking to a friend or a family member or to a coworker. They can see you and you can see them.

One of the first things I learned as a first-year student in college at the college radio station was to talk into a microphone with an audience in mind but no one in front of you. No immediate reactions from people or a visible audience. You can hear yourself in your headphones but that is about it. You just have to keep going until your segment is over.

What does one say in such a situation? Can you carry on a conversation with yourself? Can you imagine who might be listening? It took time to feel comfortable doing this, to have a sense of what you could feel comfortable saying and how long it might take. Even if many people have experiences talking to themselves in their heads or out loud, it is a different experience doing it into a microphone for public consumption.

And it is a skill that I think has served me well. In comparison, such an experience makes talking in front of people look more attractive. They react. They are not imaginary. You get quick feedback regarding how what you are saying is landing. There might be opportunities for dialogue. If you can keep a conversation going with yourself, having material to work with in conversation often provides better opportunities.

I do not know how many hours I ended up talking by myself into a microphone. I did spend a lot of solo time in a basement on-air studio or recording for on-air and creating ads and promos in a recording studio. The on-air studio had a few methods for interacting with the outside world – a phone line that could also be placed on-air, the computer (AOL Instant Messenger and email in my early days), and the campus “Blanchard Cam” that showed outside conditions in front of our main building. A lot of time to figure out how to be comfortable with that microphone.

I also had enjoyable radio experiences with conversation partners. I co-hosted a talk show one academic year and we regularly invited guests for conversation. I read news on our morning show and had more off-the-cuff interactions with multiple hosts. I did play-by-play of football and soccer games with partners. Radio was not only a solitary experience but learning to talk alone was critical to the experience and for other areas of life.

Trying to explain the magic of The Beatles – in children’s books

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Many have tried to explain what made The Beatles great. Was it the relationships between the members, the time they spent honing their craft in Hamburg, their songwriting, their musical and recording innovations, or their being in the right spot at the right time?

Whatever the answer is, how does one explain this in children’s books? I read a recent example in We are The Beatles, an entry in the “Ordinary People Change the World” series.

As someone who has read plenty of books about The Beatles, I appreciate seeing opportunities for kids to learn about the group. With an overview of the group’s members and their career (plus some lively illustrations), this might give kids a sense of what the group was and what they accomplished. Just complete the line implied at the end of the second page depicted above: “with a little help from my friends.” (I’ve also read Who Were The Beatles? in the “Who Was” series.)

But it may be just as hard to explain to kids as it is to explain to adults. I also recently read The Genius Myth which has an extended discussion of The Beatles. If “genius” is not about a lone innovator, does this musical group help us see the relational and social alchemy that leads to genius?

As The Beatles and their music continue to age (Paul and Ringo can’t live forever, can they?), it will be interesting to see if the narratives about their success change. What might kids and adults think in 2060, one hundred years after the group worked hard to establish themselves?

What it took for a successful suburban musician to push against their suburb’s push to go to college

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A look back at the life of musician Justin Baren, member of The Redwalls, highlights how they forged a path to music success from their suburban upbringing:

Along with his older brother, Logan, Baren was an obsessive fan of the British Invasion sound of the 1960s, which he channeled into the band the brothers formed while students at Deerfield High School. Jordan Kozer, the band’s first drummer, recounted how the brothers studied Beatles albums like holy scripture; Justin would record rehearsals and require the others to spend hours listening to their mistakes to get their parts right the next time.

“He didn’t know anything else. He didn’t try anything else. Deerfield was pushing people to go to college. He and Logan didn’t care anything at all about that. They were laser focused on making this happen. There was no backup plan,” Kozer said.

The perseverance worked. On the same day of their high school graduation, the band was in Los Angeles signing a contract with Capitol Records, the U.S. label of the Beatles. Two years later, the Redwalls opened shows for Oasis in U.K. soccer stadiums…

“From a very early age, we knew the kids in high school weren’t going to be our scene,” Justin told this writer in 2005. “We wanted to get into the real music scene and not be limited by what other kids were saying or doing. We wanted to be Downtown where it was happening.”…

Despite their age, their hard work, sophisticated musical sensibilities, confidence and charisma impressed the network of music professionals in the city. The Redwalls, which included guitarist Andrew Langer, solicited the help of Mitch Marlow, then the talent buyer for a music club in Evanston, by blindly handing him a cassette tape of their music. “What nerve, they put Beatles outtakes on a cassette and are saying it’s their band,” Marlow first thought, until realizing days later the recordings were contemporary…

Marlow ended up managing the group. He booked headlining shows for them at Double Door, the Hideout and Metro. He recorded them, encouraged them to keep writing original songs and introduced them to Bob Andrews, co-founder of Champaign indie label Undertow Music, a collaboration that resulted in “Universal Blues,” the band’s 2003 debut. They were high school seniors.

To become a professional in many fields requires focus and practice. To do this by the end of high school is impressive.

It is interesting to hear that Baren and the band did this while pushing against what was expected of them in their suburban high school. Deerfield High School is a highly rated institution and like many such schools encourages students to go to college. What would parents say to students in similar schools who say they want to pursue music rather than going to college? How many high school musicians are able to secure a record deal and open for a major rock group? Is this a good life path?

And then the path toward music success moved away from their suburban community to Chicago. They played in music venues utilized by numerous music groups, small and big. They got into the music networks of promoters and venues and labels that are based in big cities.

Was there anything in their music or performances that would belie their suburban roots? Maybe not. But the story of suburban high school to major record label is rare even as there must be plenty of suburbanites among successful music artists in the United States.