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Special effects innovator Stan Winston died on Sunday, at 62. He'd won four Academy Awards for his work in movies such as 'Aliens' and 'Jurassic Park.' Here's the LA Times obituary.I interviewed Winston in 2005. He told me that he was "a storyteller and an artist first." "For me, the way that I've been able to have had the chance to innovative technically is to think innovative thoughts artistically. The art has to come in front of the technology."Making a movie, Winston told me, "is the most collaborative art form of all time. Every artist is not only an artist, but a tool for another artist, and at the top of that food chain is the director."We talked a lot about his collaborations with James Cameron and Steven Spielberg ...

When Amazon sold out of Kindle e-book readers after just a few days, I was skeptical: they'd never announced how many were available in that first production run. Was it 100? 1000? A million?Now, we've got the same situation with Roku's new $99 set-top box that delivers "Watch It Now" streaming movies from Netflix: they're sold out, according to the San Jose Mercury News, but no one will say just how many were available.So does it matter that Roku is "sold out" of its set-top box? Or is this just a PR gambit to make the device seem "hot"?(Or maybe it's a manufacturing snafu: Roku says it'll take six to eight weeks to clear up the backlog, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.)

BusinessWeek Online has a nifty piece about documentary filmmakers taking control of their own distribution. The lead example is a film called 'What's Your Point, Honey?', which I hadn't heard of...but apparently has been doing well in New York.John Tozzi writes:...[L]ike musicians who shun record labels to sell their music themselves, anecdotal evidence suggests documentary filmmakers—already an entrepreneurial bunch—are foregoing the conventional path of shopping their films to a distributor. They're skipping such deals and using the Internet to get their stories in front of people who want to hear them."Indie filmmakers are getting a little bit less afraid to say no to somebody with all that power, because other new channels are opening up," says Amy Sewell, co-director of What's Your Point, Honey?

The NY Times tech blog, Bits, has some excerpts from an interview with Sony CEO Howard Stringer that are worth a look.One provocative snippet:Mr. Stringer was asked whether movie downloads would soon make Blu-ray discs obsolete. “I don’t think in this country it’s going to be competitive,” he said, noting that most broadband services are so slow in the United States that it can take 10 or 14 hours to download a high-definition movie. “Blu-ray is really gathering momentum.”Stringer also muses about delivering digital versions of Sony movies to Sony televisions -- even before their DVD release. David Gallagher notes, "...[H]e indicated that the company was considering new ways to combine its hardware with its content to bolster its profit margins in markets that are becoming commoditized."