Word: viacom
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...Entertainment Tracking System--it sounds like something the Pentagon would have if we had fought a war to depose Viacom's Sumner Redstone instead of Saddam Hussein. And in a way, the ETS is the nerve center of a war: the War on Indecency. It is a war that had a shot seen round the world--Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl--but had been simmering much longer. It is a war with strange allies and enemies: it pits free-market conservatives against family-values conservatives, free-speech liberals against Big Government liberals, and a normally pro-business Congress...
...headlines as much for who he was as for who he is. Freston, the new co-president of media giant Viacom, had been chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, whose MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central channels make it the lifeline to the youth market. One of Freston's missions from Viacom boss Sumner Redstone is to freshen the image and, more important, goose the profits of Paramount Pictures, the most geriatric of the Hollywood studios. So when the company's new Mr. Big showed up at the iconic indie-film festival, media types saw it as a signal of revolutionary...
...object of this attention smiles at all the inferences--not least because, at 59, Freston is old enough to be the granddad of his target ticket buyer. He was in Park City, Utah, he says, at the invitation of Robert Redford, whose Sundance Channel is owned by Viacom. When at a film festival, see a film. Hence his presence at Hustle & Flow. "I couldn't believe the articles--'God, he stood up when the movie was finished!' There were 1,000 people standing up in the room. I was one of the last guys to stand," Freston says...
...Redstone and Viacom's stockholders won't be laughing if Freston and Brad Grey--the former agent (for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, among others) and packager (The Sopranos) who was recently chosen to run Paramount--don't rejuvenate the moribund movie division. Sherry Lansing, Grey's predecessor, had a nice run of Oscar-winning blockbusters: Forrest Gump, Braveheart and a sea story called Titanic. But the past few years have been strewn with pricey duds, mostly aimed at adults. In a business where about 40% of the audience is under 25, you don't make movies for your friends...
...show, new box) and profit margins high--as much as 50%, according to Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen. By 2008, Cohen projects, the business will grow to $3.9 billion annually. The biggest beneficiaries: Time Warner, which owns HBO, Warner Bros. and New Line (and this magazine); Viacom, with its Paramount and MTV divisions; and 20th Century Fox, which is mostly owned by News Corp. Big-name actors like James Gandolfini of The Sopranos and Dave Chappelle of Chappelle's Show are grabbing for a bigger piece of the DVD pie during contract negotiations. --By Barbara Kiviat