The 5 Boldest Media-Tech Companies of 2020 (Guest Column)

Editors note: Rachel Feldman is a Los Angeles-based film and television director whose credits include over 75 hours of longform movies and recent series including ABC’s The Rookie, CBS’ Blue Bloods and Criminal Minds, and MGM’s The Baxters. A former chair of the DGA Women’s Steering Committee, she is working on a political thriller based on the life of equal-pay icon Lily Ledbetter.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentThe entertainment industry had been under fire for irresponsible depictions of violence from the early days, including 1930s gangster movies and the glut of 1950s TV Westerns.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentThe public often assumes that if celebrities are rich and famous, their lives must be trouble-free. Actually, lots of showbiz horror stories negate that, but they’re usually about addiction and/or self-destruction.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentAs a long-delayed sequel to Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1939 guest column, Variety invited First Lady Michelle Obama to write about showbiz. The item ran on the front page on Oct.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentThe sixth-anniversary issue of Daily Variety, on Oct. 20, 1939, contained something that was unprecedented for the newspaper and for the author: A guest column by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt about movies.She started by saying she was uniquely unqualified to write about the motion picture industry.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentOne of the many upheavals created by World War II was the method of news reporting. In May 1939, for example, Variety carried a story about an exciting system that allowed newsreel footage from Europe to be seen in the U.S.

The Black Lives Matter movement: The year began on a heartbreaking note when a video of the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis surfaced on May 25, which in turn triggered a wave of protests against police brutality and systematic racism in the United States. Since then, setting aside concerns for their personal safety, in the midst of a global pandemic, hundreds of thousands have marched to support the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM).

When Universal, Disney and Warner Bros. revealed changes to their film release plans during the past nine months, the focus had been on tentpoles.

Editors Note: As chairman/CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment in the era of Titanic, X-Men, Independence Day and Braveheart, and producer of the Oscars and Oscar-nominated films like Hacksaw Ridge and Coraline, Bill Mechanic has been part of the fabric of the film industry his whole career. He thought he had seen every iteration and change in a business striving to stay relevant in the digital age.

Peter Csathy COVID-19 forever changed many aspects of our lives this past year, and our collective media and entertainment choices certainly were no exception.The global pandemic fueled a massive industry divide where in-home entertainment choices thrived, while many out-of-home entertainment players, quite literally, died. Whereas Netflix living-room streaming reached new heights, many live music venues and movie theaters shuttered.