The stats are deeply ugly: “In 2016, only 7 percent of the directors behind 250 of the year’s highest-grossing domestic releases were women. (In television, things are a bit better: Thirty-two percent of first-time episodic directors during the 2016-17 television season were women.) From there, women directors get lower budgets on average, and their projects are played on only one-third as many movie screens as male-directed films, according to a study cited in 2016 in The Hollywood Reporter.”
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The Township That Ended Library Fines – And What That Might Mean
Why would the politicians who make those decisions think this was a good one? “The council said in a statement that fines can be ‘off-putting for customers,’ and it hopes the change, which will see library fines eliminated across Trafford for all ages from April, will lead to ‘a further increase in usage of libraries across the borough.'”
Yes, MoviePass Is Growing Fast, But If It Doesn’t Grow Faster, It May Be Headed For A Fall
Will this happen? “To get well beyond the 2 million [subscribers] it already has, MoviePass needs to convince people that they really want to go to movies more often. In most cities, a subscriber needs to watch 13 movies a year to break even. In big cities, it’s eight.”
In The Original Content Fight, Here Comes A Huge Contender: Facebook
A new 10-episode dramedy series is just the newest in a lineup of original content with which Facebook is trying to bust in on the Amazon Prime/Netflix/Hulu/HBO Now game (and it’s even got on of the Avengers in it).
A Broadway Bigwig Gets A Web Series, And Takes On The President
Jordan Roth, whose Jujamcyn Theatres owns five of Broadway’s 41 theatres, and “who has had a longtime interest in performing and has dabbled in video production previously, conceived of this new series months ago, with the idea of developing ‘a kids’ show for adults,’ modeled on ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ and ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse.'” And there’s a lot of swearing – not to mention jokes aimed squarely at the president.
Listen Up, Literary Snobs: You Need To Wake Up To The Fact That Romance Is Lit
Romance isn’t pretending not to be about politics. “Romance is political because all art is political, but also specifically because of what it is and who makes it. As the genre grapples with its place in the resistance, it confronts the structures of privilege and exclusion that have shaped the genre for decades. It is a reflection of America, after all, in more ways than one.”
Florence Price Is A Composer Who Always Should Have Been In The Canon
Musicologist Douglas Shadle: “Everything she was doing was musically mainstream but at the same time idiosyncratic. … Her music has kind of a luminous quality that strikes me as her own. Our understanding of American modernism of the 1930s and 1940s is not complete without Price’s contribution.”
Has Anything Changed In The UK For Working-Class Children Who Might Want To Be Writers?
Author Kit de Waal says that when she grew up, “The only writers I knew were dead. And apart from Enid Blyton, they were dead men. And white. And posh. Even when I began to read widely in my 20s, it was still a case of: if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. No one from my background – poor, black and Irish – wrote books. It just wasn’t an option.” And things haven’t changed much, she says.
A Dance – And Performance Art – Made Of What We Leave Behind
Choreographer and dancer Alexandra Pirici created her performance piece for the New Museum for five dancers, and a hologram. “‘The biological body wants toilet breaks,’ she said, ‘it gets tired, it decays.’ A hologram, though, makes no demands.”
The Biotic Portal Is What Happens When Two Poets Take Over The Garden
Poets Denise Newman and Hazel White won a grant to collaborate with the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. Then they created a massive collaboration. “Poetry is often so nearly silent, floating on the page, unseen and unheard by the vast majority of people, even those who read. I sense in Newman and White the desire to break down the barriers between poetry and the world, to get out there and chat, even as they undertake brainy inquiries about the nature of beauty and how a seemingly innocent activity, like collecting plants, can conceal human power dynamics.”