Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has crafted an open letter to George Lucas, re: eventual distribution options for his in-the-works Star Wars TV series:

Mr. Lucas, take a cue from Radiohead, and tell the networks to take a hike.

Why bother with traditional TV? You own the one of the biggest brands in the, well, universe. The shows are already being produced without a network commitment. Avoid the hassle of negotiating terms with networks around the world (and dealing with their marketing and promotions).

But most of all, it would give you what you are famous for — control.

The reference to Radiohead seems a little bit off the mark, as Albrecht doesn’t seem to be suggesting that Lucas set up his own storefront and/or allow fans to set their own price. It’s also worth noting that Radiohead’s price-it-yourself experiment has not been an unqualified success: though 1.2 million copies were legitimately purchased last week, another 500,000 were downloaded illegally. But if Georgie were to follow one of Albrecht’s suggestions and broadcast his series via an ad supported video sharing network like Brightcove, piracy wouldn’t be an issue, and he’d be able to keep all ad revenue for himself.

It would be a very, very encouraging sign if someone like Lucas were to wake up to the fact that the internet is where his fan base lives, and subsequently take the initative to come to them. But even if Albrecht is right in that an online-self release would actually give Lucas *more* control over his content, I think the perception amongst traditional media producers is still that the internet is the wild west, and that releasing content in this world is equivalent to giving up control. Isn’t that why Video ID exists?

Note: Variety.com appears to be down as of this writing, so we’re introducing a new “trade” today: The Guardian.

• George Lucas says he’s finally begun work on his long-rumored live-action Star Wars TV series. Lucas is adamant that the series will go beyond the tortured Skywalker clan to focus on peripheral characters from the film series, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem with the fans: at 6:30 on my local news this morning, this story was punctuated with a shot of the sun triumphantly rising over Manhattan set, to Darth Vader’s theme song. Production assistants at WNBC will apparently take whatever Star Wars extension they can get.
• From the “Yes, The Hollywood Executive Actually Said That” File: Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter says Tyler Perry’s box office victory last weekend (his third in three years, after 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion) has “heartened the growing number of studios looking to crack the market for black films.” He quotes Sony Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper:”There’s probably not one new story to tell that hasn’t been told about white people. But there are so many stories that haven’t been told yet about people with brown and black faces.”
• Warner Brothers will tack a seven-minute Batman short in front of IMAX prints of the Will Smith vampire film I Am Legend. The short will cover the origin story of the Joker, to be played in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman flick by Heath Ledger.

Once a month, cultural critic Camille Paglia publishes a lengthy assessment of the current moment in pop culture at Salon.com. This month’s installment went live today, and the meat of it is an Antonioni/Bergman inspired elegy for the art film. The whole piece is, as is the norm for Ms. Paglia, terribly quotable, but the part where she appears to elevate the entire Star Wars series to the status of those late Europeans’ “masterpieces” is probably the most controversial:

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces — what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Persona? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multilayered, six-film Star Wars epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

A lot of bloggers are reading this and doing a double-take, as if to say, “Did she just say George Lucas is as good as Bergman? OHNOSHEDIDN’T!!!” Example, from The Opinion Mill: “Only in the mind of Camille Paglia can Jar-Jar Binks push aside Antonius Block to play chess with Death on the stony beach. I’d always considered the mutual starfucking between George Lucas and Joseph Campbell to be the last word in intellectual vacuousness, but one should never underestimate Camille.”

This is not how I read Paglia’s statement at all — I read it as, “The only films of the last three decades that may in the future be considered classics are the Star Wars films, and that’s evidence of how far from the art house golden era we’ve fallen.” But maybe I’m wrong. For all I know, Paglia really did mean to equate Antoniennui with (let’s all make this joke at once) the travails of Jar Jar Binks. Later, in the very same column, Camille suggests that Kelly Clarkson has the potential to singlehandedly “revive…the American fine arts.” I’m all for being contrarian, but at some point, doesn’t the polemic start to strain credulity?

Discussing “The Best & The Worst.” Paul reviews The Queen with Helen Mirren, best picture and best actress nominee for the Oscars 2007. Kevin reviews A Sound of Thunder. George Lucas betrays The Empire Strikes Back. Risselada calls in unhappy about our coverage of Sundance.

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