“The writers strike has quietly metamorphosed into the story of how Hollywood is being shut down by two unions, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. This unprecedented guild alliance not only upended the Globes and promises to wreak havoc with the Oscars, but has Hollywood’s studio overlords re-evaluating their dismissals of the WGA as a bunch of radicals and crackpots too hapless to engineer a successful labor stoppage.”
Author: sbergman
Bringing Theatre To The Front Lines
A third-year drama student at Juilliard who also happens to be a Marine lance corporal “is hoping to prove to reluctant officials that serious theater [would] be excellent for troops in war zones.” The military has been a tough sell, convinced that their troops only want lowbrow entertainment. But at a trial performance at Camp Pendleton, there were promising signs.
A Composer Without Ideology
Judith Weir may not be as well-known as John Adams or as controversial as Elliott Carter, but she “has risen to the top of the tree and found a genuinely large public by simply being a wonderful composer… Weir’s unwillingness to be pinned down to a position is mirrored by her music, which is oblique, humorous and averse to striking obviously emotive attitudes.”
Honolulu Symphony On Road To Recovery?
Less than a month after it announced that it was unable to meet its biweekly payroll for musicians and staff, the Honolulu Symphony has raked in more than $450,000 in donations. The emergency fundraising campaign, which has raised four times what HSO officials had hoped for, has allowed the orchestra to repay half of the money it owes to its employees.
Teen Grope Not Enough To Get Star Bumped Offstage
A former star of the Broadway production of Beauty & The Beast admitted in court last week to groping and having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl in his dressing room back in 2001. He faces two months in jail, but apparently, his conviction isn’t enough to dissuade producers from engaging him to star in a new Broadway musical set to hit New York in 2009.
Striking Writers Face A Publicity Catch-22
“One of the hoariest maxims in the overstuffed pop culture manual is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But lately, screenwriters… have been coping with the dilemma that promoting a film to further one’s career will likely also help the offending studio’s bottom line, at a time when all eyes are finally on writers because of the strike.”
Tough Year Looming For Canadian Publishers?
“The announcement on Monday that Vancouver-based Raincoast Books is suspending its domestic publishing program, shuttering its Ontario warehouse and laying off 20 employees this year is a harbinger of tough times ahead for the Canadian trade-book industry.”
Baghdad’s Librarian
The man is spending his life trying desperately to rebuild Iraq’s National Library and Archive in a city that is still very much a war zone. And the hell of it is, he didn’t have to be there at all. Saad Eskander lived happily abroad for decades, yet agreed to come back to his home country in November 2003 to try and rescue a critical piece of Iraqi history.
Apple To Cut UK Download Prices
“Apple has announced that it will cut the price it charges for music downloads in the UK from its iTunes music store within the next six months. The cut will bring the UK into line with the charges in the rest of Europe.”
Writer/Dancer Ernestine Stodelle, 95
“Ernestine Stodelle, a pioneering modern dancer who performed with Doris Humphrey and José Limón and also wrote about dance, died on Saturday in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 95.”