John Landis: “The truth is a film needs to be seen on the big screen with an audience. I find it depressing and shocking what the museum is doing and I don’t think the current director gives a . . . about film. I’m militant about this. This is L.A. for chrissakes.” Roger Corman: “The only true art form of modern times is motion pictures. If they do not show the only modern art form, they are not showing art.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Rumor: Spider-Man’s B’way Bow Isn’t Doomed After All
“Word among legiters has it that production on the troubled musical will start up again Wednesday with a call to resume work on the show, which has been halted since early August due to what producers call a cash-flow problem. The industry had recently been hearing that ‘Spider-Man’ could possibly pick up sometime this week or next, although no official confirmation has been issued by producers or the show’s reps.”
Behind Palatial Facade, WGBH Is Forced To Cut Back
“While WGBH produces some of the Public Broadcasting Service’s marquee programming, including ‘Frontline,’ ‘Nova,’ and ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ it must trim about $7 million from its budget this year. … The health of WGBH, which started in 1951, is especially important to PBS. The network depends on the station for over a third of its prime-time TV lineup, and WGBH produces more programs than any of the 349 other PBS stations.”
The Theatre Critic And Contemporary Culture
“If Shakespeare production is in a state of confusion, so too are the critics. We scribblers sometimes like to see ourselves as part of a great tradition that extends from Hazlitt and Shaw to Agate and Tynan: however puny our efforts, we are subliminally conscious of our rich inheritance. Yet criticism today operates in a very different climate from the past.”
Arts Council Fund Sustains The Big Dogs, Starves The Rest
The message Arts Council England is communicating via awards from its £40 million Sustain fund “is not encouraging: £700,000 to the Royal Opera House; £760,000 to the Philharmonia Orchestra; £750,000 to the English National Opera. These flagship organisations already get millions of pounds in public subsidy,” while “smaller organisations have been turned down even when they have been backed to the hilt by regional arts council offices.”
Bristol Asks Public To Vote On Its Fondness For Graffiti
“Bristol City Council will put to the public vote whether murals which appear on buildings, walls and fences are street art or graffiti. As part of a formal street art policy, the council’s street clean team will not take action if people decide the graffiti is nice and want to keep it. … Although the council has pledged to remove offensive and unsightly graffiti, a street art policy will ‘seek to define and support the display of Public Art’.”
Edinburgh Book Festival Had A Banner Year
“The event, the world’s largest literature festival, sold nearly 80% of all its tickets for more than 750 events this year, mirroring a record level of 1.85m ticket sales announced by the Edinburgh festival fringe yesterday. The book festival, held chiefly in a village of tents in the New Town, was also larger than last year…. The bookshops on site also saw a ‘significant upturn’, the festival said….”
Edinburgh Fringe Sales Set Record — Thanks To Economy?
“The Fringe Society said more than 1.85m tickets were sold for this year’s event, an increase of 9% on the previous record, set in 2007, and 21% higher than for last year’s disastrous event, which was hit by problems with its box office. The scale of the improvement surprised fringe organisers.”
The Sheer Gracelessness Of Stealing Another Writer’s Work
“Histories do not grow on trees. The first person to cobble out a definitive narrative has to do a ton of work. You interview hundreds of people and hunt down documents…. You separate truth from hearsay. Then — with endnotes — you meticulously source all your quotations and odd facts so future scholars will know whence they came.” Unless, of course, you’re plagiarizing.
Oscar Ballot Change: #1 Choice Might Not Win Best Picture
“Instead of just voting for one nominee, the way Academy members have almost always done on the final ballot, voters will be asked to rank all 10 nominees in order of preference — and the results will be tallied using the complicated preferential system, which has been used for decades during the nominating process but almost never on the final ballot.”