Robbing Peter to pay Paul is a time-honored con, but Bernie Madoff, may have made off with more money executing it than anyone before or since. THR reports that the infamous swindler’s highly publicized ponzi scheme will soon be the subject of an ABC miniseries titled Madoff, and the network has already released the first trailer.
Richard Dreyfuss, who plays the magnate-turned-inmate, opens the trailer by letting you in on a little secret that con-artists have known for centuries: “You want to know how to get people to trust you with their money? You present it as an exclusive thing.” He goes on to add “nothing on Earth makes people want something more than telling them they can’t have it.”
Understanding that simple truth was a big part of how Madoff attracted investors and came to manage (and ultimately lose) in excess of $50 billion dollars in capital. Of course, what Dreyfuss left out was that it helps to be completely compassionless and utterly lacking in scruples as well.
The trailer goes on to explore the excess and opulence that resulted from Madoff’s shady dealings and the devastation that was wrought when the other shoe finally dropped. Ironically, it seems that even Ruth Madoff (Blythe Danner) and Mark Madoff (Tom Lipinski) — Bernie’s wife and son — weren’t in on the scheme, and one of the most dramatic moments in the trailer comes when the fraudster is forced to tell his family that he has lost an unfathomable amount of money.
ABC’s upcoming miniseries debuts on February 3, 2016, and is one of two in-the-works TV projects inspired by Brian Ross’ book The Madoff Chronicles. The other — HBO’s Wizard of Lies — stars Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer as Bernie and Ruth Madoff.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?