THIS WEEK IN XENA NEWS... TWXN 114 10/04/97 The advance sheet of XENA MEDIA REVIEW (XMR): http://xenafan.com/xmr Excerpts from the following cites will appear in future issues of XMR. From the editor: 1. Today is my sister's birthday. Happy birthday, Kathy! 2. Hey! I am going to be a guest on a syndicated PBS Internet review tv show called "Internet Cafe" (check out its site at http://www.pctv.com) to talk with them about WHOOSH and Xenafandom on the internet. The taping will be at the CyberSmith internet cafe in Palo Alto, CA (on University Avenue) on October 13, 1997. The taping begins at 4pm. Guests are encouraged and if anyone in the SF area wants to come down and watch the taping, I would appreciate it. Afterwards, if there is any interest, we can have one of those ritual Xena Mass Meals. 3. The commentary will be non-existent today because NOT ONLY have I been sluffing off in my TWXN duties (in honor of the apparent breakdown of the infrastructure of the IRS), but I am going to hang out at the beach in San Luis Obisbo County this weekend while the REST OF XENAFANDOM is at Valley Forge. And the car leaves in ten minutes!!!! Here's THE NEWS: [ ] 05-12-97 PEOPLE. Page 158. 162 words. "The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World 1997/special Double Issue. The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. Lucy Lawless" REPRINT: Hey, it's not like Amazon goddesses fall out of the trees every day. She's armed, charmed and as sexy as she is testy. We lesser mortals have no choice but to bow down before the camp vamp that is Xena: Warrior Princess. "I'm not an intimidating beauty," insists 29-year-old Lucy Lawless, the 5'11" New Zealander who fills Xena's micro-mini armor in the syndicated TV adventure. "Half my hair's not even mine. They import a heap from Spain for me. The extensions are ghastly. No one can run their fingers through my hair." The assets that do belong to the divorced mother of Daisy, 8, are "magnificent shoulders, beautiful arms, lovely cleavage and a beautiful face," says Xena costume designer Ngila Dickson. But ask Lawless what she likes best about herself, and you'll get a surprising reply. "I have nice feet," she says. "Long and skinny, with long toes. I wear my dark silk lingerie and paint my toenails and I feel like a kept woman." Don't tell Hercules. GRAPHIC: [Lucy Lawless] [ ] 05-12-97 PEOPLE. Page 57. 1973 words. "The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. With a Wink at Harrison Ford's Weathered Ruggedness and a Bow to The Fresh Radiance of Winona Ryder (Right), this Eighth Edition of Our Annual Tribute Proves Beauty Knows No Bounds of Time Our Fabulous 50 1997" EXCERPT: ...GRAPHIC... ...COLOR PHOTO: She calls her beauty habits "unremarkable, so middle-of-the-road," but Lucy Lawless stops traffic.... [ ] 05-12-97 THE NEW YORK TIMES. Monday. 931 words. "Reporter's Notebook; The Clintons' Caribbean: TV, a Pool and Time Off" EXCERPT: For Bill Clinton, one of his closest aides once explained, "words are actions." That, as much as his crutches and a sore back, may explain why Mr. Clinton was so exhausted by his talk-filled Latin American tour, before he finally got a day off today with his wife, Hillary, on this prim little island. All the extravagant toasts and polite speeches, all the summit palaver and the pauses for interpretation, and all the joint agreements frosted with sugary items about protecting tiny dolphins and providing advice on electric vehicles, had clearly worn down even this notoriously loquacious President. Twice in recent days he has felt uncharacteristically compelled to say, "Most of what needs to be said has been said" -- and then to say less himself than anyone expected... ...At a news conference on Thursday in Costa Rica, a Central American journalist asked if Mr. Clinton's summit meetings, apart from discussion of trade issues, "should not be considered as social events with rhetorical results that have nothing to do with reality"... ... Here, in paradise, the press scrutiny has subsided somewhat, though. Outside the camera frame, some network correspondents are wearing shorts with their shirts and ties; during a briefing by high-level Administration officials on Saturday evening, the television sets flanking the podium showed not CNN but "Xena: Warrior Princess."... [ i] 05-12-97 THE GAZETTE (Montreal). Monday. Page E2. 619 words. "Blockbusters battle in air, under sea: Studio gets flak from Harrison Ford over plans to release Titanic, Air Force One the same day" By Doug Camilli; the Gazette EXCERPT: ...Fashion notes: Did you hear about Lucy Lawless, who stars in this syndicated TV show Xena, Warrior Princess? Lucy was doing the American national anthem at the Red Wings-Mighty Ducks game in Detroit the other night, wearing a tight, red, white and blue costume she described as "Uncle Sam meets Hugh Hefner." And just as she was singing those last impossible notes ("ho-o-o-o-me of the braaaave") her left breast popped free, right there on TV. Detroit's Channel 50 fielded about a dozen calls - one complaining, all the others demanding a replay. (They didn't rerun it.) Lawless just laughed it off as "quite a bit more exposure than I wanted."... [ ] 05-12-97 FORTUNE. Page 32. 936 words. "the Universal Appeal of Schlock; Great U.s. Exports: the 747, the Pc, and ... Xena: Warrior Princess" By Henry Goldblatt REPRINT: The last time an action show was atop the Nielsens, America swooned over scruffy, sockless Don Johnson, patrolling Miami's streets. Judging by the crop of fall pilots and the breakout success of shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, the top-rated syndicated action hour in the U.S. (which depicts the trials of a strapping, leather-clad heroine who kicks ancient Greek butt), the genre's making a comeback. Foreign audiences can't get enough of it; Xena-philia is rampant in Europe. "Action hours were a dying breed until the international market just asked for more," says Christine Amdur of Baskerville Communications in London. Production companies used to make a ton of money creating action dramas for U.S. networks and selling them into syndication after 100 or so episodes--what they made overseas was gravy. Now, domestic revenues alone are not enough to make a network show profitable. When Hollywood heads to Europe and Asia to sell its programming, about 50% of a show's potential revenues are at stake. Action hours, depending on their quality and U.S. performance, can grab as much as $ 150,000 per episode in Europe. The chairman of International Television Trading Corp., Klaus Hallig, calls this trend "a Marshall Plan in reverse." With the burgeoning foreign market, studios have found an afterlife for a genre that was presumed dead. While sitcoms have become the profitable darlings of U.S. network syndication, drama reruns, other than the most successful, have ended up on cable, if anywhere. "The domestic revenue stream is nowhere near where it was. Basic cable doesn't pay what free syndication used to pay ... You're not getting that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which was syndication," says veteran drama producer Dick Wolf, creator of NBC's Law & Order and Fox's New York Undercover. Xena is not the first action show to conquer the overseas market: Baywatch is the show that proved the international appeal of high-action dramas with simple plots (and buff cast members who don't wear much clothing). When NBC canceled the show in 1990, the show's producers, eager to keep it afloat, solicited foreign partners to finance it. Since then it's become a phenomenal hit in Europe and has demonstrated how lucrative foreign markets can be. Universal Studios, one of the largest providers of American programming abroad, capitalized on this trend early by signing deals with European networks to ensure that its programming has foreign outlets. Over the past year, Universal signed several lucrative deals to package older shows like Columbo and Miami Vice (which might otherwise collect dust in its library) along with fresh schlock like Xena. Seeing that Xena has done so well abroad and in the U.S., studios are working on a slew of action-adventure pilots for the fall TV season. Network press kits are packed with pilots like Players, a police drama starring rapper Ice-T, and Timecop, based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Universal is developing Team Knight Rider, a syndicated version updating the 1980s hit. For all the studios' eagerness, however, they may be too late. Europeans' television habits are as fickle as Americans'. Comedies, once duds overseas because of translation difficulties, are becoming more popular. Kirch Group, a German media company, may launch a comedy channel that will incorporate NBC's Friends and Seinfeld as well as some German sitcoms. This new channel also exemplifies the largest problem American studios will face, namely that European viewers--and European governments--want more locally produced fare. "You don't need a quota to tell people that they want to watch local shows. To fight for ratings, [European broadcasters] need their own homegrown stuff," says Amdur. "I think [American] studios should enjoy the windfall, because they are not going to get it again." This makes sense in theory, but ... German sitcoms? GRAPHIC: Action shows like Xena are a hit in the U.S and--especially-- overseas. [Lucy Lawless as Xena: Warrior Princess] [ b] 05-04-97 SUN-SENTINEL (Fort Lauderdale, FL). Sunday. TV BOOK. Page 83. 397 words. "Rating the Jock Schools; Is Snow a Man or Mouse?" By Jim Sarni. Staff Writer COMMENTARY: EXCERPT: ... Lucy Lawless told Playboy she imagined Xena, the popular warrior princess she plays on TV, as "sexy and dark" ... something Gabriela Sabatini-esque, but with brains."... NOTICES: All back issues of XMR and TWXN are available at (http://xenafan.com/xmr). We herein give praise and thanks to Tom Simpson for the space he has graciously donated from his spectacular, TOM'S XENA PAGE (http://xenafan.com). If you have never been there, you are **not** a xenafan! TWXN is the advance sheet for XMR, an annotated world press review of reports regarding the internationally syndicated television show XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS (1995 - 2000) and the castmembers, Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor. TWXN is not available for subscription, however it is posted regularly on the XenaVerse, Hercules-Xena, and Chakram Mailing Lists (thank you Lucia! I am greatly indebted to you); the forums: MCA NetForum and the Xenite Message Center (thanks Angela); and alt.tv.xena (thanks Tim). I also would like to thank sirvin@law.wfu.edu for assistance in collecting the newstories. For a free e-mail subscription to XMR subscribe by e-mail to ktaborn@lightspeed.net by stating somewhere in the subject or text "sub xmr".