Charges that James Frey’s best-selling memoir ”A Million Little Pieces” contains numerous ”wholly fabricated or wildly embellished” details are dogging the book. “It’s unclear what effect the allegations will have on readers. The Oprah’s Book Club edition of ”A Million Little Pieces” was the best-selling book on Amazon.com yesterday.”
Blog
German University To Return Piece Of The Parthenon
“A German university plans to give back a fragment of the Parthenon sculptures, marking the first time any piece of the statues held outside Greece has been returned to Athens, the Culture Ministry said Monday.”
Preserving The Play
“We forget that the live performing arts, and particularly theatre, are more than almost anything else at the mercy of the whims of producers. It’s difficult enough, of course, to persuade anyone to mount a new play. But once that play has finished its initial run, and at best the production revived once in a subsequent season by the same theatre, even a very good play is likely to disappear into oblivion. It’s almost a unique problem.”
Dance Through The Ages
What does it mean to dance at the various stages of life?
Defining The Producers For Oscar
The Producers’ Guild is limiting the number of producers eligible for Oscar credit. “Making the grade is important because it’s the only way the phrase ‘Oscar-winning producer’ will end up in your obituary should your film win. For the guild, it means playing bad cop, which seems appropriate given that’s what producers are often forced to do when making a film. But the organization has a bigger agenda in trying to rein in the proliferation of unearned producer credits on movies, which studios give away like freebies just to stroke egos.”
Cal State Fullerton Gets A PAC
California State University at Fullerton has opened a new $48 million performing arts center. “Instead of the originally proposed single hall that would serve multiple purposes, Fullerton ended up with three theaters of different sizes specifically designed for dramatic, instrumental and choral performances. Overall, the new venues are much better suited to the college’s needs.”
Why We Yawn
“Yawning is an ancient, primitive act. Humans do it even before they’re born, opening wide in the womb. Some snakes unhinge their jaws to do it. One species of penguins yawns as part of mating. Only now are researchers beginning to understand why we yawn, when we yawn and why we yawn back.”
A New generation Of British Arts Leaders
“In the summer of 2004, 27 curators, theatre managers and other administrators were named as the inaugural fellows of the new £1m Clore Leadership Programme, designed to tackle a perceived deficit in training for leaders in the arts. It was hoped they would provide an answer to repeated problems of poor management in major national institutions and offer an alternative to the trail of Americans, Australians and Europeans who have arrived to head everything from the South Bank Centre to Tate Modern. And, it seems, they have.”
Blockbuster’s Downfall
Bloackbuster is America’s No. 1 video rental chain. But the company is struggling and on the way out. As far the studios are concerned, other than collecting the money that Blockbuster owes them for past movies, the video chain has little relevance to their future. Viacom perspicuously divorced itself from Blockbuster by spinning it off to its shareholders, and, as one Viacom executive told me, “Blockbuster will certainly not survive and it will not be missed.” It is another zombie in Hollywood.
Joffrey’s New Chicago Highrise Home
“The Joffrey Tower, at the corner of State and Randolph streets — directly across from the flagship Marshall Field’s (soon to be Macy’s) department store — will have retail tenants on the first two floors and condominiums on floors 5 through 32. The third and fourth floors will be the new permanent home of the Joffrey Ballet, which acquired naming rights when it purchased 45,000 square feet of space. The floors will include the Joffrey administrative offices plus seven state-of-the-art rehearsal studios and a black-box theatre.”