Filmmaker Michael Moore has lost his appeal to have the ‘R’ rating slapped on his Fahrenheit 9/11 changed to a PG-13. The film is slated for release this week, and one industry expert predicts that “the R rating could reduce the film’s theatrical revenues by 10 to 20 per cent.” Moore is urging teens under 17 to try to see the film anyway.
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Takes One To Know One?
Michael Moore certainly seems to enjoy making enemies, and Bruce Kluger is sick of hearing about how the self-important filmmaker plays too rough, or is too wrapped up in his own image as a rabble-rouser. “The truth is, Moore may be as much a propagandist as the spinmeisters at the White House and Pentagon. If he is, he’ll surely be held accountable for his truth-twisting, just the way the president should be for his.”
Jumping In With Both Feet
The new director-general of the BBC isn’t wasting any time in putting his mark on the organization. In his first day on the job, Mark Thompson announced a sweeping overhaul of the way the UK’s leading broadcaster conducts its business. A new board will oversee the BBC’s news division, chaired by Thompson’s deputy. In fact, oversight boards seem to be the way of the (foreseeable) future at the corporation…
Portrait Prize Winner
The winner of this year’s £25,000 BP portrait award is an Aberdeenshire-based graphic designer and artist, Stephen Shankland.
But He’s A Young 70
It’s been a busy year for Peter Maxwell Davies, the septuagenarian Scottish composer named earlier this year as Master of the Queen’s Music. At an age when many composers are content to bask in their legacy, Maxwell Davies is composing ten string quartets, keeping up his lifelong interest in left-wing politics, and writing children’s music for a festival he helped to found. “Davies himself sees no problems in fecundity. He has always been that sort of composer, and age has not slowed him. Indeed, like Mozart before him, he could almost be described as accelerating towards oblivion.”
Going National (And Political?)
“The New York Historical Society, with a newly hired president and a conservative financier emerging as a board power, is shifting its focus from the city to more national concerns, stirring the objections of some historians and staff members… This shift in emphasis appears to signal the ascendance on the society’s board of Richard Gilder, a stockbroker and a leading fund-raiser for Republican and conservative causes, who became a trustee a year ago. It also seems to close off all possibility of the society’s merger with the Museum of the City of New York.”
The Bigger They Are, The Faster They’re Canceled
The Lollapalooza concert tour, long one of the big events of the summer mega-concert season in the U.S., has been canceled due to poor ticket sales. It’s only the latest blow for promoters in a summer which has seen slow sales for many large touring shows, and comes only days after pop’s reigning mega-princess, Britney Spears, had to pull out of her nationwide tour following a knee injury.
Bad Time To Be A Politician
Scottish composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has blasted the Scottish Executive for its treatment of Scottish Opera, calling the politicians responsible “a disgrace,” and accusing them of deliberately “wrecking the country’s artistic heritage… Scotland is not philistine, but it is being rendered philistine through the lack of vision of those in charge.”
Apres Ott: New Direction For Seattle Rep?
What’s behind Sharon Ott’s sudden resignation as head of Seattle Repertory Theatre? “Was Ott too steeped in the “new and controversial” for Seattle? Or did audiences simply not warm to her particular programming choices, in an increasingly competitive arts environment? One thing is clear. Since taking the helm at the Rep from her respected 17-year predecessor, Daniel Sullivan, Ott has shaken up Seattle’s flagship playhouse and steered it in a new direction. Now the question arises: Will the Rep stay the course Ott charted? Or is a different course needed in these uncertain waters?”
Would Playing Faster Increase Productivity?
Australia’s Adelaide Symphony Orchestra isn’t exactly a luxurious place to work. Its highest-paid musician is paid less than the lowest-paid member of the Sydney Symphony, and an organizational restructuring this year has cut costs and staff to the bone. And yet despite significant gains in ticket sales and private contributions, the ASO is still struggling with the deficits that have plagued Australia’s orchestras since they were privatized in 1997. Part of the problem may be that government assumptions concerning orchestras consistently expect that productivity can increase. But as one union leader points out, “it takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to rehearse and perform as it did 200 years ago.”