By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2013
An April 2013 item marked The Hollywood Reporter staking out a beat that the streaming era would make far more important than it looked at the time.
Then
The Hollywood Reporter launched ‘Behind the Screen,’ a new hollywoodreporter.com blog curated by contributing editor Carolyn Giardina. Its first posts covered a filmmakers’ collective documenting the space shuttle Endeavour’s delivery to downtown’s California Science Center, and previewed a Tech Summit keynote by producer Jon Landau.
The blog’s stated mission was to cover the talent and technology behind Hollywood — visual effects, sound, editing, cinematography, digital cinema and animation — and how changing technology was reshaping how films and television were made.
Giardina brought more than a decade on the beat, including coverage for Shoot and Film and Video. FishbowlLA noted the launch coincided with THR’s best single day of web traffic to date, more than 1.8 million unique visitors.
Now
The below-the-line technology beat that ‘Behind the Screen’ staked out turned out to be one of the most consequential in entertainment journalism. The 2010s and 2020s brought a visual-effects and post-production revolution, the rise of virtual production, and eventually the contentious arrival of generative AI in filmmaking — all of it squarely on this blog’s turf.
Carolyn Giardina became The Hollywood Reporter’s long-running authority on craft and technology, covering the Oscars’ science and technical awards and the people who actually build the images on screen.
Jon Landau, whose Tech Summit keynote the blog teased, remained a central figure in that story as a producer of the Avatar films until his death in 2024 — one of the industry’s foremost champions of the production technology the blog set out to cover.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.