Fine, innovative, enjoyable new musicals are not a pipe dream. David Greig and Gordon McIntyre's recent two-hander, Midsummer, had everything a great musical needs: the creation of a special world, important characters, feeling, conflict, humour and wonderful music.
[Arts Council England] Chief Executive Alan Davey is urging local authorities across the country to maintain their investment in the arts, and warns that the Arts Council can't mitigate council cutbacks.
Speaking on 31 March 2010 at the Arts Council-sponsored Local Government Association's annual culture, tourism and sport conference in Newcastle, Alan argued that local authority investment in the arts has already paid dividends in terms of economic and social benefits, and that the arts are well placed to play an even greater role in the future success of local communities, if investment is sustained.
Smashwords, a site where writers can publish their own e-books, said today it has signed a distribution deal with Apple to put its books into the iPad iBookstore. Mark Coker, chief executive of Smashwords, said in an email to authors that his company has been working on the deal ever since the iPad was announced. And, yes, this means that unpublished authors can sell their work on the Apple iPad at virtually no cost.
In The New York Post, JD Shapiro, the first screenwriter on the box office flop Battlefield Earth, says sorry. It wasn't as I intended -- promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn't really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.
ITV intends to use the multimillion-pound saving from axing The Bill to create shorter run drama series for the 9pm slot with projects in the works including a new medical series with writer Peter Bowker and a new series from Collision and Foyle's War writer Anthony Horowitz.Update: Here's the Guild's response to the news.
"The Bill has been a fixture on our screens for more than 25 years and has been the home of some of the UK's best serial drama storylines, and a great showcase for terrific scriptwriting and fine acting talent," said Peter Fincham, the ITV director of television, channels and online.
"But times change, and so do the tastes of our audience. Whilst The Bill will come to an end in 2010, we will continue to invest more in drama programming than any other commercial broadcaster in the UK and viewers can look forward to a wide range of high quality drama on ITV1."
Although, I've never gotten rich from residual checks, they are always a welcome sight. And I thank my two wonderful unions, SAG and the WGA, for having made these magic envelopes possible.(In this country, of course, the WGGB negotiates residuals agreements for writers as part of its Minimum Terms Agreements)
Although the original thinking was that artists should participate in the profits being earned by the recycling of their work, the most revolutionary outcome of this plan was that for the first time in the history of show business, it became possible for lesser-known artists working in TV and film to actually become respected, middle-class citizens. Finally, instead of living like vagabond gypsies, one could buy a nice little place in the Valley and raise some kids.
QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.Link via @GailRenard
SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?
THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.
The 2010 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most prestigious international award for children's books, has been given to British author David Almond and German illustrator Jutta Bauer. The award, which was announced this afternoon at the Bologna Book Fair, is given biennially by the International Board on Books for Young People to an author and artist whose work has made "a lasting contribution to children's literature."Almond's books for children include Skellig and The Fire Eaters, both of which won Whitbread Awards.
Poet Ted Hughes is to be recognised with a permanent memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.There are appreciations of Hughes in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and by Erica Wagner in The Times:
His name will feature alongside some of the country's best-loved poets including T.S. Eliot, William Blake and William Wordsworth.
Hughes was never afraid to look very hard and very carefully into his memory and imagination, whether he was writing about the natural world or about his first wife, Sylvia Plath, in his final volume of poems, Birthday Letters.
That simple description, incidentally, is as good a way as any of saying what it really means to write. Ted Hughes was fearless, and he taught other writers to be fearless, too.
"It would have been absolutely foolish and mistaken [to ringfence drama from the cuts]. It would have meant I'd have taken a disproportionately large chop at news, current affairs, religious programming … " he says. The result however, will be more repeats in the Friday-evening slot – and this after announcements that Radio 7 is to be overhauled and made into 4 Extra, which will surely mean there needs to be more content, rather than less.
Moffat says he doesn't have an agenda for how his Doctor Who will differ from [previous showrunner, Russell T] Davies's but "these things happen as a matter of instinct" and his instinct led him towards a more "storybook quality". "For me, Doctor Who literally is a fairy tale. It's not really science fiction. It's not set in space, it's set under your bed. It's at its best when it's related to you, no matter what planet it's set on.There's also plenty of politics in the interview - Moffat is a critic (to say the least) of the Conservative Party and the Murdoch media empire.
"Every time it cleaves towards that, it's very strong. Although it is watched by far more adults than children, there's something fundamental in its DNA that makes it a children's programme and it makes children of everyone who watches it. If you're still a grown up by the end of that opening music, you've not been paying attention."
...not only a significant boost for black playwrights and small theatres, since The Mountaintop started its life at Battersea's Theatre503 before moving to the West End. It also gives new life to the whole awards circus, which has become monstrously repetitive and wearisomely predictable.Here's some background on Katori Hall, the 28-year-old from Memphis whose play now appears to be set for Broadway.
We’ve all heard some dud plays, but we’ve also heard work to make the ear rejoice and the mind sing, of plays no theatre or TV station would attempt with casts neither could afford. Radio is cheaper than either in production terms and, arguably, more lasting in impact. A formula for producing great work all the time in all of them has not, in spite of centuries of effort, yet been devised. What is universally agreed is that excellence is occasional and only comes from a critical mass of constant production.In repsonse to her article, Guild General Secretary, Bernie Corbett, wrote to the editor - his (edited) letter is published today (scroll down).
...this year’s entries have been suffused with human misery. Judging the award, she said, “there were times when I felt like a social worker”.Moyes adds:
I think Goodwin’s entrants have simply realised the truth: that there are no literary credentials to be gained from writing upbeat prose. Current wisdom suggests you cannot be taken seriously if you include a happy ending, wit – or even in some notable cases – a plot.Goodwin's comments are also considered in The Guardian and The Times. Elsewhere in The Telegraph, Celia Walden is pondering what seems to be on male novelists' minds: sex.
I find it both exasperating and affecting that men never grow out of sex. I don't mean the act itself – which would be sad – but talking about it, intellectualising it and constantly endowing it with supernatural, universe-defining powers. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in Martin Amis's new book, The Pregnant Widow; every page of it is saturated with nubile breasts, oversized buttocks – and the philosophical relationship between nubile breasts and oversized buttocks.
I wrote what I thought was a pretty good script about an old woman with an obscure eye condition that meant she could see things that weren't there...Fortunately for Joy she persevered and is now a regular writer on the show.
One of the things this old woman hallucinated was a cat. Now, if the script was amazing in all other ways, the producers just might have made their lives hell by adding a performing cat into the mix of hectic shooting schedules and strict budgets. But as my script was already fundamentally flawed, the presence of a cat in the cast list probably did not help its chances.
I got a gutting letter. Thanks, but no thanks. Characters too thin. All the best. Bye bye now.
The story really started to take shape over three residential writing weekends. We sat around the table discussing, arguing about and laughing through every scene, character and plotline. Eventually we had a 60-page treatment and a story that we were all happy with.
The problem was how to write dialogue with 15 writers. Improvisation worked well for some scenes and characters, but not others. We tried working in groups of two or three on individual scenes, which I would then give notes on. After countless rewrites, our production line eventually delivered a final draft that the actor and director Kathy Burke, an avid supporter of the project, described as the most enjoyable script she’d read in a long time.
Roy Boulter (right) in Hollywood with American actor Zac Efron (Photo by Solon Papadopoulos)
The BBC has scooped 18 prizes out of 25 main categories at the Royal Television Society Awards.
Awards at the TV industry ceremony included best drama series for The Street [created by Guild member Jimmy McGovern] and best soap for EastEnders.
In 2004, Bhatti's decision to set the play [Behzti] in a gurdwara became the main point of contention. The [Birmingham] Rep had taken the unusual step of inviting Sikh community leaders to a private preview to air their concerns, after which they agreed not to oppose the play if the setting was moved to a community centre. Bhatti refused. "I wanted to write a play about religious hypocrisy," she explains, "for which the setting in a gurdwara was non-negotiable. The attempt to establish a dialogue with the Sikh community was well intentioned, but ultimately misinterpreted as an invitation to rewrite my play."
In Behud, the writer pours scorn on what she terms "Enid Blyton Asian plays where everyone loves each other in the end". Is that how Bhatti feels? "I would say it is, yes. Part of me is glad that I had the chance to make [religious leaders] listen to what I had to say."
Behud is at the Belgrade in Coventry 27 March–10 April, then at the Soho Theatre in London 13 April–8 May.
Amazon.co.uk has launched hundreds of dedicated author pages, offering customers a full bibliography, recommended titles and videos. The pages went live this week and include the likes of Hilary Mantel, Stephenie Meyer, and Dan Brown.Link via Helen Smith on Twitter (in fact this whole blog seems to be via Helen Smith this week...)
Amy Worth, head of book buying at Amazon.co.uk, said: "It's like having a bookshelf of the author's titles on the website. It launched on Amazon.com a few months ago and proved a popular feature."
Checking the constant 'news' stream on Twitter makes me feel like ace reporter Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday though if you've never tried it, perhaps the experience is better explained as being wheeled in your armchair into a very large room where lots and lots of friends and plenty of strangers are shouting, reading funny bits out from the newspapers, telling jokes, complaining about their day, celebrating recent successes. You can join in, you can just listen or you can get up and walk away. No-one minds or particularly notices if you leave, though they always seem pleased to see you when you return.
BBC children's channel, CBBC, will today broadcast its first in-house long-form animation series, an adaptation of Muddle Earth (lead writers Rob Sprackling and John Smith, based on the book by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell).'We are thrilled to have been able to produce a world-class animated series entirely in the UK, which is testament to the extraordinary talent that we've been able to gather together.
'CBBC has a strong commitment to support the British animation industry and I hope that Muddle Earth is just the first of many great local successes for us.'
Working on Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC in the early 80s made me aware of the different rhythm of stage storytelling (the ear working more slowly than the eye, you need fewer words to achieve the same effect, particularly – frankly – with Dickens). Stage dialogue also tends to be more jagged than novel dialogue: long speeches are longer, short contrasting drop-lines crisper, antiphonal dialogue less gracefully balanced, lines are more often interrupted, unfinished or broken. Further, the stage allows the writer much stricter control over the pace of the storytelling. Playwrights use set-ups and pay-offs as meaning-bearing devices much more than novelists because they can guarantee that something planted at 7.45 will pay off at 9.30, night after night. With a novel, you don't know if the pay-off will be read in the same sitting as the set-up, or days (or even weeks) later.
Arthur & George is at the Birmingham Rep 19 March-10 April and at the Nottingham Playhouse 22 April-8 May
In The Independent, Boyd Tonkin meets novelist Ian McEwan whose new book, Solar, features a prize-winning scientist, Michael Beard. A princely has-been, burnt out but still flattered like royalty, Beard may owe just a little to the Nobel laureates McEwan met at a conference at Potsdam in 2007 organised by his friend John Schellnhuber, the German government's climate-change adviser: "I was the after-dinner entertainment." There, "I was struck by how grand they were – some of them comically grand in the way neither Seamus Heaney nor J M Coetzee are. They run fiefdoms in a way that writers can't, or don't – or shouldn't. These guys were politicians as well as scientists."
Fellowes said that TV, like much of culture in general, was run by the children of the 1960s who got swept up in the “cult of youth and “want to think they’re still young at heart”.
“One of the agreeable things about TV is that it is for an older, more adult audience,” he said. “With a lot of TV commissioners, you hear them thinking about a youth audience, but very few of them watch TV in the traditional way. I can’t tell you the number of discussion I’ve had about this mythical youth audience. It fascinates me that very few TV executives seem to feel empowered to embrace the older audience.”
As the television event of the past five years, it’s not surprising that the revamped Doctor Who is turning out to be something of a talent crèche. Equally unsurprising is the fact that most of the Doctor scribes are men. The Welsh writer Helen Raynor is the exception: she cut her teeth script-editing the show right from its 2005 rebirth, then graduated to writing episodes of both Torchwood and Doctor Who on her own, including the excellent The Sontaran Stratagem. She is currently co-writing a new original series, The Fabulous Baker Boys, for BBC Wales, which will be a chunk of social realism firmly rooted in a small valleys town.
Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.There's also a report on the story in Media Guardian.
The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google's YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.
It was so immensely satisfying to see Kathryn Bigelow (Best Director for The Hurt Locker) win her award, and realize that history and symbolism notwithstanding, her being a woman was also incidental. She was being acknowledged for a job well done. The honor was just.
This year's Academy Awards were unusual as well for being, despite the weak start and the bloated length, such enjoyable cultural comfort food. At a time when our country rarely does any one thing together - our communally watching a live show in real time has become, outside of sports on TV, an odd, almost retro event - the Oscars fulfilled a kind of American ideal.
Although women were found to be well-represented in the soaps – where almost half of all the roles are for women – in light entertainment, comedy and drama they make up just four in every 10 participants.
There's a big old pompous article in the Guardian Books Section entitled 10 RULES FOR WRITING inspired by Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules (yeah, Elmore Leonard, that great literary giant) that's tipped me into a twisted rage this week. The Guard have asked some crusty and seemingly bitter authors to impart their withering wisdom and the result is stomach turning...
As you might have guessed this pushes all sorts of buttons inside of me. Red buttons. Big red buttons with nuclear insignias all over them. I wouldn't mind if the rules from these writers were drizzled with a touch of humility and self effacing humor. But they aren't. Most are smeared with contempt for me and you, the lowly student.
It seems to me that many of the creators of British sitcom were... unaware of what they were doing: they just nosed out talent and gave it its head. They were not unduly obsessed with ratings. They trusted their writers and reckoned that on the whole they would come up with something wonderful, given a chance. And they did, again and again. Whether they’re still doing it is another question.
...as a literary agent for these past 33 years, I am compelled to express my observation that over the past decades, the editorial role has been profoundly devalued. As corporate structures have gulped down and digested independent publishing houses and imprints, their corporate agendas have brought about a slow steady erosion of reliance on the editor's skill and intuitive vision. In order to release the magnificent sculpture that such an editor may perceive in a stone, the work of editing takes time, focus, sometimes isolation, silence, deep cogitation, and some eureka moments when the objective eye finally perceives the solution to a thorny dilemma. Few editors today are granted the luxury of so much quality time.
A former Eng Lit student at Oxford, where he first started to direct before honing his craft in Poland, then New York, and latterly Manchester, which saw him build an experimental buzz around the Contact Theatre, McGrath, 47, reflects: “If you’re going to have national theatres, theatres that enable countries to think about themselves, then Wales needs one. You could just put more money into touring, but that wouldn’t have the same effect. The word national focuses everyone’s minds.”Meanwhile, in The Guardian, Stephen Moss talks to a range of people involved with National Theatre Wales's first year of productions, including Alan Harris.
A Good Night Out is based on stories local people provided in workshops that McGrath, writer Alan Harris and young volunteer Hannah Bevan held across the Valleys last autumn. Harris then reimagined them, drawing on anecdotes and characters. The work attempts a portrait of a living community – the six actors will play 25 parts – and wants, above all, to avoid being an exercise in nostalgia, a paean to the industrial landscape flattened in the last 30 years.
"At those workshops I got a load of stories and a load of characters," says Harris. "We expected stereotypical stories, and we did get some people talking about Aberfan or the miners' strike or the decline in industry. But a lot of times we got more personal stories. And they were stories of hope, rather than 'Woe is us'. People told us they wanted to see their lives on stage, but a woman in Aberdare said, 'We don't want you to take the piss out of us.' By that she meant life isn't all mines and unemployment. There's a lot more to it. She was saying, 'Our lives are a lot more complex than the view that it's a post-industrial wasteland where everyone works in Asda.'"
...will the writers again seek jurisdiction over reality shows and animation operations that are not currently covered in their contracts? Michael Winship, the president of the East Coast writers guild, said his union was already testing member sentiment on exactly such questions.
While Mr. Winship was part of the last round of talks, many of the other faces have changed.
Patric M. Verrone, who was the president of the West Coast writers guild through the last round of talks, has been succeeded by John Wells, who during an earlier stint in that office made a deal without a strike.
To survey the filmography of 3-D, from the days of “Bwana Devil” to a movie like “Jaws 3-D,” which, in 1983, earned eighty-eight million dollars worldwide, is to trespass upon a mythical land that is both laughed at and lost. It’s like hearing from survivors of Atlantis that the place was a bit of a dump.And he considers the implications of the rise of 3-D now that many of the technological problems have been overcome.
Those members of the “Avatar” audience who said that they felt blue, in every sense, as the movie ebbed away were the most accurate critics of all. 3-D will ravish our senses and take us on rides that no drug could match, but my guess is that, like so many blessings, it won’t make us happy. It will make us want more.
In these days of stringent cutbacks and downsizing, it is a minor miracle that the BBC’s Radio Drama Company - better known to most actors as “the Rep” - is still going. Although not quite the mighty beast it was in its heyday, it still offers training to young actors out of drama school and the opportunity to work with some of the country’s top actors.
Does he worry that his generation is less politically engaged? "Well. I'm really interested in what 'political' is," he says. "I think there's something generational in the type of political playwright we have. My mum and dad went on marches, my mum went to jail for the CND, they were very active political people. But the boundaries of what political is have changed a lot: you can now be political as a consumer, for example – changing what you eat. Younger playwrights tend to pose questions more. I want to write stuff – and I haven't yet – that says, 'This is the problem, I don't necessarily know the answer.'"(Original link only had part of the article - now updated)
