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BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

“When the memorial to Fanny Burney is unveiled in Westminster Abbey in June 2002, she will join Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters as the only women to be commemorated in Poets’ Corner.”  Why has Burney – popular 18th-century novelist, diarist, wicked satirist, and playwright (one of her recently discovered plays is receiving its first-ever full-scale production at the Old Vic) been all but forgotten and woefully under-read? – The Guardian

I’M A GENIUS – WHO NEEDS HELP?

David Eggers book “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” has all the buzz and has climbed to No. 5 on the NYT Bestseller list. He’s sold the paperback rights for $1.4 million, and foreign publishers in 10 countries have coughed up an estimated $500,000. So what does he need with agents? He’ll represent himself – and he turns down a seven-movie Hollywood deal. – Variety

YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME

London’s Marlborough Gallery, convicted of defrauding the Mark Rothko estate in 1975 and accused last month of cheating the Francis Bacon estate, has also been fighting a legal battle over the estate of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters for the past two years. In 1998 a Norway court ruled against the gallery (to the tune of nearly $4 million to be paid to Schwitters’ family), but last month an Oslo appeals court reversed the decision. Now the family owes Marlborough $1.2 million in compensation. – New York Times

LOST AND FOUND

A growing number of stolen Chinese artifacts have been turning up in Japan, a trend Chinese archaeologists view “as a clear-cut example of a rampant global problem: the theft of cultural relics that are then given a false provenance and sold to private collectors and museums. The greatest number of such thefts occur in China, where farmers, construction workers and criminal gangs unearth thousands of relics, large and small, each year and quickly sell them to smugglers.” – New York Times

HOLLYWOOD EAST?

  • India already has the biggest film industry in the world. Now it is “riding a growing wave of television, internet and computer animation technologies along with an expanding international audience to become a potential alternative to its State-side big brother, Hollywood.” – New Zealand Herald (Reuters) 04/19/00

    • THE LINEUP for this year’s Cannes Film Festival is announced. – Ottawa Citizen (AP) 04/19/00

    • Major US studios largely missing in this year’s Cannes lineup. – Variety 04/19/00

    • Official Cannes lineup. – Variety 04/19/00

SO MUCH FOR EDUCATION

The Australian Film Institute has been told its funding for research and for distribution of documentaries is to be cut. That means that crucial promotion of Australian film is in jeopardy.  “It seems almost impossible that in the year 2000 one has to push the concept that information and education are important to industry development. I thought we’d got past that.” – The Age (Melbourne) 04/19/00

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

What’s up with London’s National Theatre? “The National should be at the centre of the debate about what kind of society we are. It should also be dangerous and controversial.” Sure it’s produced some decent productions of late. But shouldn’t it be “offering us blood, risk and adventure, and an inspirational lead to a theatre already sufficiently mired in caution?” – The Guardian