text: Ted Turner, who had been increasingly marginalized by the leadership of Time Warner since he sold Turner Broadcasting to the company in 1996, will step down from its board after its upcoming annual meeting, he said on Friday. In a statement, Turner, who remains Time Warner's largest individual shareholder, gave no reason for his decision, saying only that he had reached it "after much deliberation." Some analysts speculated that Turner may have been particularly upset over Time Warner's recent decision to sell some of the businesses that had long been an integral part of the Turner Broadcasting empire, including its sports teams and a sports cable network.
  Don Knotts, best remembered for his role as Barney Fife, the nervous deputy on the long-running Andy Griffith Showin the 1960s, died Friday of lung cancer at the age of 81. He also appeared in another long-running show, Three's Company, as Ralph Furley, the blustery landlord, in the 1970s and '80s.
  Darren McGavin, who had one of the longest careers of any television actor, including that of Casey, Crime Photographer in the Sidney Lumet-directed TV series in 1951 and Kolchak: the Night Stalker in the 1970s, died Saturday in Los Angeles at the age of 83. His most memorable film role was as the father in the 1983 family movie A Christmas Story.FAMILY FARES WELLTyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion became just as big a hit over the weekend as his Diary of a Mad Black Womanwas a year ago. The new film took in an estimated $30.3 million on 2,194 screens, averaging $13,788 versus $14,771 for Diary, which opened on 1,483 screens. Two other new films tanked. The Weinstein Co.'s animated Doogal grossed just $3.6 million, while New Line's Running Scaredscared up only $3.1 million. Disney's doggy adventure Eight Belowplaced second in its second weekend with about $15.7 million, dropping only 22 percent from its opening weekend, while the third weekend of Sony's The Pink Panther took in $11.3 million, to bring its gross to $61 million. The top ten films for the weekend, according to studio estimates compiled by Exhibitor Relations:1. Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion, $30.25 million; 2. Eight Below, $15.7 million; 3. The Pink Panther, $11.3 million; 4. Date Movie, $9.2 million; 5.Curious George, $7 million; 6.Firewall, $6.3 million; 7.Final Destination 3, $5.35 million; 8.Doogal, $3.6 million; 9. Running Scared, $3.1 million; 10. Freedomland, $2.9 million.
  In an interview with Bloomberg News, Walt Borchers of MovieTickets.com credited Tyler Perry's strong appeal among black churchgoers with the success of Madea's Family Reunion. "Everything that's being rolled out now that's targeted to the religious sector is doing well," Borchers said. Daily Varietyobserved that African-American women 35 and over comprised 52 percent of the film's audience. The film was not screened for critics, who had few complimentary things to say about Perry's earlier Diary of a Mad Black Woman and even fewer nice things to say about the current one. Typical is Geoff Pevere's in the Toronto Star, who describes the movie as "an exercise in Christian inspirational healing" and "an entertainment engineered for a pretty specific audience." Pevere suggests that he, as a "middle-aged Canadian white guy," is certainly not a part of that target audience. But Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, one of the country's few black critics, says that Familymarks a significant improvement over Diary, writing: "Rather than push for sitcom nonsense, Perry spins a mean, satisfying soap opera."
  In the latest blow to the NBC Universal empire, Universal Studio Chairman Stacey Snider announced on Sunday that she has decided to leave the studio to become CEO and co-chairman (with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg) of DreamWorks. Viacom's Paramount Studios acquired DreamWorks in December for $1.6 billion, snatching the studio away from Universal, which had been negotiating to buy it, but whose corporate parent, GE, had reportedly blinked at the pricetag. The Wall Street Journalobserved in its weekend edition that some senior executives at Universal, presumably including Snider, had staked their careers on the deal to acquire DreamWorks, "and came to believe, after it fell through, that GE doesn't consider the movie business a priority." Snider told today's (Monday) Los Angeles Timesthat after making frequent presentations to GE brass, she concluded that the corporate style did not "suit my personality" and that losing the deal to buy DreamWorks "forced me to think about my future differently." In an interview with Daily Variety, Paramount Chairman Brad Grey said that Snider's contract will not start until her contract with Universal expires in December. "If she's free sooner than that, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." In a statement to theTimes, Spielberg said: "Stacey has a unique combination in a film executive in that she recognizes a need to make commercial movies, but also aspires to make art. She recognized that balance is good." The newspaper observed that she will earn a base salary of $2.5 to $3 million annually, far less than her Universal paycheck but certain lucrative incentives were believed to have been written into her new contract.
  Rumors spread flood-like through the Internet over the weekend that Apple Computer might make an attempt to acquire the Walt Disney Co. The rumors were touched off by an item in Barron's, the Dow Jones weeklymagazine, by Mark Veverka, its Silicon Valley-based correspondent. It noted that Apple now boasts a stock-market value of more than $60 billion -- $10 billion more than Disney's, and that when Disney completes its acquisition of Pixar, Steve Jobs, who heads both Pixar and Apple, will become Disney's largest shareholder, with four times the stake of Michael Eisner and seven times that of Roy Disney. (Veverka incorrectly identifies Disney as the brother of Walt; he is Walt's nephew.) The article quotes Institutional Risk Analytics analyst Christopher Whalen as saying that it would be "an open option" for Jobs to make a run at Disney, adding, "Disney is badly undervalued right now. Jobs might get an opportunity to take it out." Moreover, several analysts forecast that Disney will soon develop a movie downloading service for its video iPods, which are expected to sport larger screens in their next evolution. "From an intellectual property standpoint, [an Apple-Disney merger] would be a match made in heaven," Washington D.C. intellectual-property attorney Alan Fisch said in the Barron'sarticle.
  
  The people have spoken and the results are in - Mozo has crowned the winners of its 2017 People’s Choice Awards in Banking, Electricity, Car and Home Insurance.
  The Mozo People’s Choice Awards were based on a national survey of over 3,700 Australians, who were asked to rate their banking providers, insurers and electricity providers. The responses covered a total of 118 different banking institutions, 46 car insurers, 50 home insurers and 32 electricity retailers.