Free Republic

Quibi, the app that staked its future on short videos, is shutting down just six months after it launched, the company announced Wednesday. "We started with the idea to create the next generation of storytelling and because of you, we were able to create and deliver the best version of what we imagined Quibi to be," co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman wrote in an open letter. "So it is with an incredibly heavy heart that today we are announcing that we are winding down the business and looking to sell its content and technology assets." The company, which struggled...

Published on Feb 28, 2016 From the producers who brought you "The Producers," #Trumped is a new musical starring Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Cloris Leachman and the unlikely candidate himself, Donald Trump.

Olney Theatre’s production of Mel Brooks’s 2001 musical The Producers only has three more performances, but it’s not going to close without a bit of manufactured controversy. Audience members at Montgomery County playhouse are going to have to walk past a small coterie protesting the show’s play-within-the-play, because, the demonstrators say, it makes light of Adolf Hitler and the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.“I understand the intent is satire,” says Jeffrey Imm, who is organizing the demonstration through his anti-discrimination group, Responsible for Equality And Liberty. “This is the point of morality: some things we have to recognize as absolute...

Stage farce lets Israelis see funny side of the Fuhrer Stephen Farrell, Tel Aviv 17feb06 IN a khaki blur of bad taste, SS uniforms and prancing Fuhrers, the Mel Brooks Broadway farce The Producers has come to Israel for the first time. The show, in Hebrew but replete with swastikas and Nazi salutes, is playing nightly in Tel Aviv to chuckling audiences of Holocaust survivors. Even as they chat during the interval about the best lines, many recall the horror of Kristallnacht. "If ever there was a place that has full licence to make fun of Hitler, it is probably...

Yesterday, I sat in a theater watching "The Producers" while "Brokeback Mountain" ran in the empty theater next door...and it hit me. Someone is making a bundle selling 100% of "Brokeback Mountain" a guaranteed flop, to several investors. It explains so much. Like, how our country could be at war and films like "Stealth" are produced. And it got me thinking...if I were really out to alienate and offend 80% of the country, what would be my next film? I immediatly thought of casting James Brolin as Ronald Reagan...but that's been done. How about "The Oliver North Story" starring Christopher...

Germany's unemployment figure rose above the psychologically important level of five million last month. On Wednesday, the German Federal Labour Agency said the jobless total had reached 5.037 million in January, which takes the jobless rate to 12.1%. "Yes, we have effectively more than five million people unemployed," a government minister said earlier on ZDF public television. Unemployment has not been this high in Germany since the 1930s.

The lies from Michael Moore’s latest schlock-umentary begin before you enter the theater. On the posters out front, the movie is identified as “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Half the title and most of the concept were stolen without so much as a by-your-leave from the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, by the great Ray Bradbury. A few million Americans of a certain age (and I am one) got their introductions to excellence in science fiction, and also excellence in writing English regardless of subject, from Ray Bradbury. A dark vision of the future, in which the government suppresses and destroys knowledge, appears in...

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) - A former police officer trying to prove her innocence in a 20-year-old murder case sued the "Dr. Phil" show, claiming false imprisonment before the taping of a show led to injuries and the amputation of her leg. The suit filed Monday in Superior Court claims Laurie Bembenek was hurt in 2002 when she tried to escape from an apartment where she was taken and kept by producers.</p>