Citizen Anschutz and the movies

[LiviaOlivia]

Citizen Anschutz
How the conservative Christian head of Regal Cinemas is trying to change how you see movies.
by Justin Clark
March 23, 2006
Nerve.com

Consider the following scenario: It's Saturday, and you feel like going to the movies. You see the latest installment of The Chronicles of Narnia advertised in your local Examiner newspaper, part of a chain whose name has been trademarked in more than seventy cities. You decide to go to your local theater — a Regal, Edwards, or United Artists. You sit through twenty minutes of advertising, followed by the film itself, which has been delivered from studio to theater by a fiber-optic line.

The underlying theme? Every stage of your moviegoing experience — from production to promotion to distribution to exhibition — was controlled by one man: sixty-six-year-old religious conservative Philip Anschutz. Named Fortune's "greediest executive" in 1999, the Denver resident is a generous supporter of anti-gay-rights legislation, intelligent design, the Bush administration and efforts to sanitize television. With a net worth of $5 billion, he is Forbes ' thirty-fourth richest American, two spots above Revlon's Ronald Perelman. Anschutz heads a vast media empire whose assets include the Examiner chain, twenty percent of the country's movie screens, and a sizeable stake in Qwest Communications, the scandal-ridden telecom giant he formerly directed. (Anschutz was accused of helping falsely inflate Qwest profit reports, then making millions by selling his own shares in the company — a claim he ultimately settled by paying millions to charity.)

~snip~

A heavy contributor to the Republican Party for decades, Anschutz helped fund Amendment 2, a ballot initiative to overturn a state law protecting gay rights, and helped stop another initiative promoting medical marijuana. More recently, he helped fund the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank that mounted a public relations campaign and financed "research" into intelligent design. He has also supported the Media Research Council, the group that generated nearly all the indecency complaints with the FCC in 2003. As a friend of his told Fortune, Anschutz "has a latent interest in doing something significant in American Christianity. He is working deliberately and diligently on it."

~snip~

Anschutz isn't just blurring religious and secular lines with his film(s), but taking advantage of a softened divide between production and exhibition. In the early days of Hollywood, film studios dominated the exhibition business, obligating independent theater owners to accept bad films in exchange for the right to play good ones. In 1948, the federal government issued the Paramount Consent Decree, forcing the major studios to divest their theater holdings. Recent theater mergers, such as the consolidation of AMC and Loews (the number two and number three chains, respectively) must pass antitrust scrutiny. AMC/Loews, whose merger closed in January, was forced to sell off theaters in key markets such as Boston and San Francisco last year to avoid creating a monopoly.

~snip~

http://www.nerve.com/dispatches/clark/citizenanschutz/

[Democrats_win]

1. Wow, didn't know he was the invisible hand behind CO's many problems.

Amendment 2 and all that--it's surprising.

Was aware of the incredible human cost of his Qwest Communications crimes. Many people who'd worked their whole lives for Qwest lost their retirment. If Jesus was here to day, Anschutz would be picking up the pieces of his overturned money-changer table. Most Greedy Executive? You bet!

[SheilaT]

2. Because of the ads and previews,

I always time my arrival at a theater to miss most of those. It's not that hard. Right now where I live it's just about exactly 7 minutes from the time the theater lights dim until the movie actually starts.