Reference
Working notes on where entertainment information comes from, how it travels, and how much of it to believe.
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2015-10-20
Checking an entertainment claim
Entertainment is unusually rich in facts that everyone knows and nobody can source. Production anecdotes, box office records, casting near-misses and on-set incidents circulate for decades…
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2015-08-05
Runtimes, cuts, and the versions problem
Look up the running time of a well-known film in four places and you may get four answers, several minutes apart. The usual assumption is that someone made a mistake. Usually nobody did.
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2015-06-24
Why titles disappear from streaming
A film is on a service in March and gone in April, with no announcement and no explanation. This is normal, it is rarely a decision about the film, and the mechanics behind it are worth…
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2015-05-12
Reading a set of film credits
End credits are the most complete public description of how a film was made, and they are written in a professional shorthand that assumes you already know the trade. A few minutes spent on…
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2015-04-07
The long afterlife of old-time radio
American network radio drama ran for roughly three decades and then stopped. What is unusual is not that it ended but that so much of it is still in circulation, traded freely, and easy to…
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2015-03-18
Where entertainment information comes from
Almost nothing you read about a film, a record or a broadcast originates with the person writing it. Entertainment information travels along a supply chain, and knowing the shape of that…
/notes/where-entertainment-information-comes-from