Random News Bits

• ABC has decided to split season 3 of LOST in two: 6 new episodes to run starting Oct. 4, then a 13-week break during which a new detective drama will air in its place (instead of LOST reruns), then the rest of the season's LOST episodes will return in February 2007. ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson was quoted as saying, "It's a very, very difficult show to produce. You know, if we could run 22 straight in the fall, we probably would. But we just can't get the shows done in that amount of time."
• "You, Me, & Dupree," which shot in Hawaii for a week last year, opened #3 at the weekend box office, bringing in $21.5 million.
• New Line Cinema announced today that it would forego press screenings of "Snakes on a Plane," which opens August 18th, and which was partially shot in Hawaii. This move is in line with the recent trend to eighty-six press screenings of genre films for fear of negative reviews tanking ticket sales on opening weekend.
• Hawaii-based movie software co. PipelineFX recently reeled in another film school client for its flagship Qube! renderfarm software. Full Sail, an entertainment media school in Orlando, Fla., has joined the University of Hawaii's Academy for Creative Media and the Pratt Institute's Department of Computer Graphics and Interactive Media in New York in acquiring the software for their students to use.

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