Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 41

E2 THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2006 THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC Movie industry may turn to marketing to stop slide FROM THE COVER WW? i i 1 7 1 States last year, a 9 percent drop from 2004 and the lowest total since 1997. At the same time, Hollywood is churning out more movies than ever. Last year, the industry released an all-time high of 563 movies, the association said. Few films struck gold, however. Last year, the average Hollywood movie cost $60 million to make and $36.2 million to market.

The films took in an average of $37.3 million. Glickman and the National Association of Theatre Owners plan to attack a particular irritant for moviegoers: cellphones. Owners group chief John Fithian said his group is in discussion with the Federal Communications Commission for permission to block cellphone signals in theaters. Industry surveys find that about 80 percent of people favor limits on cellphones in theaters, he said. "But we would still want emergency calls to come in," Fithian said.

Glickman said, "We have to keep this in historical perspective. Obviously, we want to do better. But the movie business is still pretty healthy." By Scott Bowles USA Today LAS VEGAS Got movies? Hoping to stem a three-year decline in moviegoing, the film industry soon may launch ads similar to the ubiquitous milk commercials, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday. Speaking at the ShoWest convention of theater owners, MPAA chief Dan Glickman said his group is considering an advertising campaign to get "people excited about getting out of their homes to go to the movies." As former head of the Department of Agriculture, Glickman said he saw the pork, beef and milk industries improve sales with generic ads. "Not to suggest that the movies are like pork chops.

But those campaigns were done because individual consumer brands were falling, and this reversed the trend," he said. And the film industry could use a reversal of fortunes. According to new statistics from the movie association, about 1.4 billion tickets were sold in the United i DAVE CRUZTHE ARIZONA REPUBLIC An architecture major, Andolina Vallone has experience designing buildings and building with Legos, which she started toying with at age 5. 'Blockheads' bond on Internet IF! i i LEGOS Continued from El noticed at a Model Builder Search two years ago. He didn't win, but he impressed judges enough to land a job in the model shop, eventually working his way to Master.

It is a path Andolina Vallone of Phoenix hopes to follow. Vallone, 23, built many a Lego fortress with her dad, having just as much fun stomping through them a la Godzilla and infuriating her mother, who was left to pick up the pieces. As an architecture major at Syracuse University in New York, she incorporated the toy into a model library she built as a third-year project. Professors loved it, and she hopes to have similar success at the Model Builder Search. "It's going to be a challenge," Vallone said.

"I'll be nervous. With all the creativity and talent that will be Sony moves back release of PlayStation 3 until fall i finalists from seven cities are expected. As in the regional competition, they will be given a theme and a bucket of Legos, said Julie Estrada, Legoland spokeswoman. They also will be allowed to pillage the Lego store for additional bricks. Kristi Klein, 30, won two years ago.

She built a cartoon-like dog in the Los An- geles regionals, and finished first in the finals with her mini-Atlantis that included an octopus's garden. She has worked in the Legoland model shop ever since. "People have a hard time believing what I do for a living," said Klein from Legoland, where she was building treasure for the new pi-rate-themed area. "Sometimes so do The theme park's builders do violate a cardinal rule of Lego purists: They use glue. They must, since many of their sculptures are grabbed, twisted and climbed on by hundreds of kids each day.

Not even glue can stand up to that punishment, so Klein and other builders spend the first few hours each day examining every model, making repairs when necessary. Their tools consist of chisel, hammer and bottle of glue. With 30 million bricks used thus far in Legoland models, there is a lot of ground to cover. "The other day I had to give a gopher a facelift and a new paw," Klein said. tic surgery." Just don't expect to get rich as a model builder.

The pay ranges from an hour, according to Legoland. You do get free admission to the park, as well as an employee discount on Legos, perks that can be worth their weight in gold to AFOLs. Reach the reporter at scott. cravenarizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8773. AVI U.

1 i ah i "The beauty of Legos for me is you can build anything you can think of And then when you tire of it, you can take it apart and start all over again" Eric Hunter A Master Model Builder at Legoland By Yuri Kageyama Associated Press TOKYO Sony will put off the release of its much-awaited PlayStation 3 console until November from its planned spring debut because more work is needed on its next-generation DVD technology, the company said Wednesday. Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony's video-games division, made the announcement at a hastily called news conference after reports of the delay surfaced in the business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun and other papers. The new timeline means that PlayStation 3 will hit stores simultaneously in Japan, North America and Europe, for Christmas. Kutaragi said Sony is still trying to finalize the copyright-protection technology and other standards for the Blu-ray DVD disc, the format for PlayStation 3, and next-generation video for the company's electronics gadgets in the works. "I'd like to apologize for the delay," Kutaragi said at a Tokyo hotel.

"I have been cautious because many people in various areas are bank The wait gets longer. PlayStation 3 won't be available until November. Holding up its release are copyright-protection issues, which initially were to have been resolved by last September. ASSOCIATED PRESS ing on the potential of the next-generation DVD." Blu-ray preparations were initially to have been completed by last September, but now won't be finalized until next month, he said. The delay comes at a time when competition in next-generation game consoles is heating up with U.S.

software-maker Microsoft Corp. already putting the Xbox 360 on sale last year. Nintendo the Japanese manufacture of Game Boy machines and Pokemon and Super Mario game software, is also planning its version called Revolution later this year. The PlayStation series is the dominant brand for home consoles, helping support Sony's bottom line in recent years, and controlling about 60 percent of the global market, according to Kutaragi. Sony has shipped nearly 204 million machines worldwide when combining shipments for the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2.

Toshiaki Nishimura, analyst for Yasuda Asset Management said the delay is likely to hurt game revenue for Sony, but the market had anticipated a delay. day," he said. "My own mother was a crusader against the defamatory St. Patrick's Day cards." Lulow manages a diverse staff of 400, whose goal is to keep tasteless jokes out of cards that end up in stores, she said. Still, the cards appear each year, and even though no one is roused to a letter-writing campaign or boycott, many people of Irish descent wince, just a little.

"I guess I can laugh because I know that they're a caricature of what people think the Irish are, but I know better," said Mary Moriarty, executive assistant at the Irish Cultural Center in Phoenix. or (602) 444-8770. No one knows exactly how many AFOLs there might be, but Steve Witt, spokesman for Lego of America, estimates there are about 60,000, based on the number of people who download an online magazine. There are likely far more, Witt said. Boomers use Legos to link to their past, as the toy remains as popular today as it was 30 and 40 years ago.

Lego also clicks with their creative side. As kids, they followed instructions to build a train or boat. But as adults, they'll experiment, building outside the Lego box, Witt said. "It's more of a creative outlet, a medium like paint," Witt said. "A lot of what they do is art." Endless possibilities The Lego brick is a flexible medium, one that suits everyone from the hobbyist, who may spend a few hours crafting a house, to the enthusiast, who could work weeks erecting a skyline.

At a recent Brickfest, a convention where AFOLs show off their best work while gathering ideas from others, Witt saw skyscrapers up to 5 feet high, an 8-foot-long World War II battleship, and a model train layout that was 75 feet long and 50 feet wide. Buildings, trees and hills were all done in Legos. He accompanied one AFOL to a nearby Lego store where the man dropped $12,000 on kits and assorted parts. "Some people spend a lot of money on their cars," Witt said. "AFOLs spend their money on Legos.

It's like just another hobby and can be just as expensive." It's also a hobby that, for a lucky few, can lead to a career. Judges will invite as many as four contestants from the Phoenix Model Builder Search to the May 23 finals at Legoland. About 28 A Spock make his can't-miss NCAA Ohio State, one of Pratt's and Hunt's Final Four teams. Young speculates that the monkeys somehow got a tip from ESPN.com's Peter Tier-nan, who was pointing out that 12-seeds have a pretty good winning record in the NCAA tourney. "Damn those monkeys," Young says.

But the zoo's Mark Echevarria and Josh Crabtree insist there's been no monkey business in filling out the bracket. The onl info the monkeys cars, planes and helicopters, and when he was in junior high or high school, his skills were so refined that he sent two of his creations to Lego to consider as possible kits. Lego responded, Arnsmeyer said, with a ton of bricks, keeping him in Legos for years. He has passed his passion on to his 6-year-old son, Ryan, the two building a connection as they link the bricks. "We can build for hours," said Arnsmeyer, who entered the Model Builder Search, though a business commitment may keep him from attending.

"It's by far the most fun I've had with Legos." Like many an AFOL, Arnsmeyer scans auction sites looking for the best deals, since the interlocking blocks can be expensive. Small kits start at $5, but the most popular sets run Larger, more intricate models can be as much as $300, and a custom-made, 8-foot-long Star Destroyer from Star Wars fetched $35,000 in a recent charity auction. The prohibitive cost, in part, drove AFOLs to the Web, long before they knew they existed in such numbers as to warrant a label. Sites dedicated to used kits and bricks quickly grew to become online communities as AFOLs found one another. The largest is the Lego Users Group Network (lugnet.com), where thousands of "blockheads" trade ideas, kits and parts.

Zookeeper Mark Echevarria helps They pay no heed to favorite sons either: Wisconsin dumps Arizona. They're awash in upsets, the kind that throws a monkey wrench into most office pools. They have Bradley (13) knocking out Kansas (4). (Their handlers swear they told them nothing about last year's Bucknell upset.) They have Gonzaga, the all-time favorite Cinderella team, falling from the tree in Round 1 and Davidson (miracles can happen) wiping out Si-. sik -v.

Irish stereotypes are fading but just don't seem to disappear there, it will be pretty intense. But it's hard to beat a job where you sit down and play with Legos all day and get paid for it." An early start Andy Arnsmeyer, 34, of Scottsdale, has been a Lego bricklayer since he was about 5, an age when most kids are capable of building little more than a minefield by leaving blocks scattered across the floor. Arnsmeyer was assembling Put your money where the monkeys' is NCAA Continued from El such an even field, anything can happen." (He has UConn winning it.) The monkeys made their choices Tuesday by alternately picking poker chips from one of two buckets. After two weeks of practice, they were prepared for the bracket completion when they pulled numbered chips, corresponding to NCAA teams, from the buckets. Their only hesitation was picking the winner.

The monkeys are counting on the Aggies. They have North Carolina, Boston College, Texas and Arkansas in the Final Four. It's in Round 2 that they really go out on a limb: Kentucky over Connecticut; George Washington taking out Duke; Penn eliminating No. 2 seed Texas. 1 CARDS Continued from El accept them was as a race of happy-go-lucky drunks, Rogers said.

During the 1970s, Irish-Americans rallied against the defamatory cards with letter-writing campaigns and boycotts, but since then, there has been little public protest. "There's something about Irishness that people refuse to take seriously," Rogers said. The cards don't bother Phoenix attorney Jim Curtin as much as they did his mother a generation ago because, he says, now there are more positive images of the Irish in popular culture. "There was certainly a time when it was cause for more concern than it is to SHERRIE BUZBYTHE ARIZONA REPUBLIC Tournament selections. have relied on is the newspaper.

"We made sure we gave them the sports section every day so they were prepared," Crabtree, a senior keeper, said. Young and Hunt pick the Huskies to win it all; Pratt sas it'll be the Bruins. "i t's Spock, Monster, Hunt and Young. Bring all those monkeys on. I'm ready," KMLE's DJ says.

Reach the reporter at susan.feltarizonarepuhlic.com or at (602) 444-8246..