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Enough With The Subheads, Already!

There seems to be a belief on the part of newspaper and magazine editors that the people who buy their product hate to read, writes Jim Walsh. This would seem like an inherent contradiction, since the consumer who buys a periodical must presumably know that s/he will have to read it to really get full value for her/his money. But the creeping use of subheads – those little in-story boldface descriptors that only exist to tell you in advance what the words in the upcoming paragraph will say – is an unquestionable assault on serious writing, and serious reading, and Walsh isn’t going to stand for it.

Miscalculating Reagan

How did the CBS Reagan mini-series get to be so controversial? “The producers of ‘The Reagans’ were so intent on re-examining their subject’s legacy that they missed the missile-defense shield surrounding Mr. Reagan, now incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease. He is not just a beloved former president; he is the Moses of the conservative movement. Rather than treading lightly, the stars gloated about how controversial their film would be.”

Special Screeners – Newly Hot

“Special screenings are hardly a new idea. Publicist Peggy Siegal, considered by some to be the mother of this invention, has been doing them for more than 20 years. But their importance to film marketers—especially those with smaller budget art-house movies—has supersized in the last 30 days. Film marketing was already a difficult gambit in a 24/7 world of celebrity stimuli and instant, online gratification, but last month the Motion Picture Association of America made it even more difficult when it decided to severely limit how film distributors could raise the awareness of their films and still be considered for the one of the best marketing tools out there, an Oscar nomination.”

Teachout: Why The Producers Doesn’t Have Legs

So why is The Producers fading on Broadway? Terry Teachout believes he knows: “To see ‘The Producers’ is to be immersed in that older style of comedy, and for anyone born before 1960, the experience will be as nostalgic as a trip to the county fair. Somehow I doubt that was what Mr. Brooks had in mind, though. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is one of the last places in America where he could draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.”

The Science Of Theatre (Why Not?)

There have been a number of plays in recent years that take up science as a topic. But most of them bury the science behind personalities. But why not put science or math upfront? “Doing mathematics can often feel like the creative process of a theatre improvisation. You set up a tableau with conditions for collisions of ideas and let the thing run. Very often it gets nowhere – but sometimes there is a dynamic created that clicks. Like the rules of a theatre game, the conditions push you in extraordinary unexpected directions that too much freedom would stifle.”

Ideas 10, Writing, 0

Why is academic writing so bad? “One reason academic bad writing is evergreen is vocational. The bad writing in question is not the merely quotidian clunkiness and hack writing that’s inevitable in a vast profession under constant pressure to publish – it’s the notoriously opaque, preening, self-admiring, inflated prose of ‘theory.’ And for the moment, for whatever bizarre reason, ‘theory’ is what gets promoted and given tenure, therefore aspiring Assistant Professors and adjuncts have to crank it out, whether they actually like doing the stuff or not. But another reason, and one with a more malign effect, is the easy availability of an array of defense mechanisms.”

Latino USA

Latinos are now the largest ethnic minority in the US, and they’re having a big influence on mainstream culture. “There are now more than 35 million Latinos in the US. In the last year, Spanish has become the most popular foreign language in American high schools and universities.”