The Nov. 20 high-definition release of Star Trek: The Original Series, featuring new, computer-generated special effects, will be preceded one week earlier by a special one-night theatrical screening of the one-hour episode The Menagerie in some 300 digitally equipped theaters, Paramount Home Entertainment and CBS Home Entertainment announced Wednesday. The Nov. 13 screening will also include a half-hour documentary, narrated by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's son Rod, about how the episodes were remastered from the original 1966 negatives. The Menagerie was originally broadcast on Nov. 17, 1966 and Nov. 24, 1966 -- almost 41 years to the day of the new release. Nearly 20 years later the original Star Trek pilot was discovered and excerpts from it were used to create flashback scenes that were incorporated into the Menagerie episodes. Tickets for the Nov. 13 screening, priced at $12.50, are being sold online at www.FathomEvents.com.

Toughening its stand against Hollywood movie and TV producers, the Writers Guild of America said Wednesday that if a strike is called next month, it will bar writers from performing any work for new media or for animation, even though those areas are not included under the current contract, Daily Variety reported today (Thursday). The WGA is also taking the position that any nonmembers who perform work for the producers during a strike will be barred from joining the guild afterwards. Steven Hulett, longtime business agent for the Animation Guild, told the trade publication, "Any union can discipline their members for violations of internal rules and policy. But I can't imagine our union attempting to prevent someone from joining and working for another union. So good luck to them."

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Disney's Buena Vista Home Video have each claimed the No. 1 spot on the DVD sales chart for the week ended Oct. 7. Nielsen VideoScan First Alert placed Walt Disney Studios' Platinum Edition of The Jungle Book at the top of its chart. Fox maintained that, in its debut, its Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer sold more copies than any other release since it was released in two formats -- a stand-alone and a two-pack in which it was packaged with the original Fantastic Four movie. Sales of the two releases combined put Surfer slightly ahead of Jungle Book. Meanwhile, Home Media magazine gave Surfer the top spot on its rental list with $9.5 million in revenue.

In an interview with Elle magazine, L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke accuses the news media of pandering to Hollywood moguls, whom she refers to as morons. "All moguls are morons," Finke says in the interview. "Everyone in Hollywood is part of a very broken system. Feed it with praise and you'll never get the players to step back and say, 'What the hell are we doing even playing this rotten game?'" When the Elle interviewer observes that Finke's "incendiary" articles often free other reporters to follow her lead, Finke responds: "People will perpetuate the myths until someone like me pushes the envelope by telling the truth. Then other reporters can go to their editors and say, 'Look what she's reporting, ' and they can do a tougher piece. It's always hard to be the first, and I've suffered a terrible price for that." In 2002, Finke was fired as a columnist for the New York Post after Disney complained about her reports that it had shredded documents related to its rights dispute with the owners of the Winnie the Pooh characters.

If, as expected, Movie Gallery files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by the end of the month, shareholders will likely wind up with 5 percent of the company while bondholders will get the remaining 95 percent, Bloomberg News reported today (Thursday), citing two people with direct knowledge of the company's plans. Meanwhile, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, told the wire service that Movie Gallery officials were to blame for the company's collapse by incurring $1.1 billion in debt when they bought the Hollywood Video rental stores two years ago. "These guys had blinders on," Pachter told Bloomberg. "They really didn't think that Blockbuster and Netflix could grow this fast and take customers from them."

NBC Sports executive producer David Neal said Wednesday that he expects sales of high-definition television sets to soar worldwide in advance of next summer's Olympic Games coverage from Beijing. Speaking to the HD World conference in New York, Neal observed that NBC plans to deliver 756 hours of HD programming from the Summer Olympics -- nearly twice the 399 hours that it produced for the 2004 Games in Athens. Calling the planned Olympics coverage a "signature moment" for HDTV, Neal predicted that it will help "get HD out of the niche and fully into the mainstream." By the time it's over, he suggested, fully half of U.S. households will have HDTV sets. He thanked the Chinese hosts for "making it happen" by covering many of the costs involved in wiring the Olympic venues with the expensive fiber-optic cables required to carry the HD signals from more than 1,000 cameras covering the events. Reporting on the importance of the Games coverage to NBC and its corporate parent, G.E., the London Financial Times observed today (Thursday): "The Olympics are expected to provide NBC ... with a windfall in extra advertising revenues as well as a chance to display its technological and journalistic prowess. The games also allow G.E. to boost sales of its aviation, medical technology and other businesses in China. G.E. is forecasting $500 million in extra sales from Olympics-related contracts, excluding NBC."

Of all the broadcast network TV shows that sported websites during the first week of the new season, NBC's Deal or No Deal was the one that drew the most traffic. In fact, according to Internet usage analyst Hitwise, the NBC game show was responsible for 15.46 percent of all traffic to the TV show websites mounted by the broadcast networks. Others on the top-five list included: 2. Dancing With the Stars, ABC, 11.23 percent; 3. Heroes, NBC, 9.71 percent; 4. Grey's Anatomy, ABC, 3.51 percent; 5. America's Most Wanted, Fox, 2.7 percent.

ESPN on Wednesday denied that it had anything to do with the decision to exhume the remains of former Notre Dame football star George Gipp, who was portrayed in the 1940 movie Knute Rockne All American by Ronald Reagan. (The movie produced one of the most memorable lines in movie history, "Win one for the Gipper," which later became Reagan's slogan when he entered politics.) ESPN filmed the exhumation for an upcoming documentary. According to news reports, DNA tests had been sought by members of the Gipp family, who declined to discuss the reasons for their decision to exhume the body, calling it "a very sensitive family matter."

Burbank, California, made famous by announcer Gary Owens when he referred to it as "beautiful downtown Burbank" in his weekly introduction of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in the late '60s, will be losing the TV network that put it on the map. NBC is expected to announce today (Thursday) that it plans to sell its studio site and move to the nearby Universal Studios lot in Universal City, an area of Los Angeles. "It's a sad day for Burbank," city manager Mary Alvord told today's Los Angeles Times.NBC is expected to construct new studio space for its West Coast news operations and local stations KNBC-TV and Spanish-language KVEA-TV at what is now the parking lot serving a subway station near the Universal Studios entrance. It is also planning to upgrade Studio One, a soundstage on the studio lot, as the new home of the Tonight show. After selling the Burbank property, it is also likely to lease back studio space at its old facility, according to the Times.

Despite spending $600 million to get its propaganda message to the people of Cuba, the U.S. has failed to find an effective way to counter the Communist country's technical blockage of TV Marti and Radio Marti, according to NBC's Mark Potter. Although the channel is now carried by the DirecTV satellite service and is beamed over the island from aircraft flying north of the Cuban coast, Potter noted in a report on MSNBC.com, a report to Congress indicated that fewer than one percent of Cuban households watched TV Marti during the past year. (Satellite dishes are forbidden in Cuba.) Penn State professor of communications John Nichols told NBC, "They're getting zero bang for their buck. It's counterproductive to U.S. foreign-policy interests. It's embarrassing ourselves to the rest of the world, and we're in violation of international law." He added that the station often focuses on Cuban-exile politics in South Florida and that its real purpose is "to curry favor with a very important U.S. domestic political constituency." Arizona Republican Congressman Jeff Flake agreed. "It's a mess. ... Republicans have used it lately, but Democrats have used this issue as well to mine for voters." But Alberto Mascaro, head of the government office that oversees TV Marti, insisted, "We are giving a service to people who don't have the freedom and democracy that we all enjoy."