Jason Smilovic interview

Screenwriter Jason Smilovic (Lucky Number Slevin), interviewed by Michael O'Sullivan for The LA Times.

"Now, as a working writer, I know that writing is torture. Writing is work. Writing is hell. I hate those writers who say that writing isn't work and that it comes easy and that they think that everything that they write is great. Let me be very clear: Writing is very much work for me. And I hate everything I write."

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

American comic book writer and playwright, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, interviewed by David Cote in The New York Times.

"One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer," said Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa, who was a devoted comic-book collector growing up in Nicaragua and Washington, and who likes his characters to have a theatrical bent. (In one issue, the Human Torch snags tickets to "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.") "When you tell people you're a playwright, their eyes sort of glaze over," he said. "But when you say you write the 'Fantastic Four' or 'Spider-Man,' they perk up. It's a touchstone that has gained more credibility as artistic expression."

Andrew Crumey interview

In The Independent Scarlett Thomas talks to physicist and novelist Andrew Crumey.

"To me, a novel is made up; it is a fiction. But it's the paradox of being unreal and real at the same time that interests me. F Scott Fitzgerald talked about the importance of being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time. It's a very child-like way to be as well. Even as grown-ups we go to a magic show and we can be impressed by the illusion and we don't want to know how the trick is done. That's what novels are like."

Da Vinci Code case implications

What are the implications of Dan Brown's successful defence for breach of copyright?

Jon Silverman has a good summary for the BBC.

Since there is no copyright in an idea, any claim for breach of copyright must rest on the way that the idea is expressed.

In this case, it was described as the "architecture" or "structure" of the work, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

The plaintiffs claimed that this structure - the central theme - had been lifted by Dan Brown for the Da Vinci Code.

The judge rejected this claim even though he said that Brown had copied some language from the earlier book.

But to suggest, as Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of Random House, did outside court, that the judgement represented a significant victory for creative freedom, is probably going too far.

The judge himself acknowledged that nothing in the plaintiffs' case would have stultified creative endeavour or extended the boundaries of copyright protection.

There's comment from most of press, including The Daily Telegraph. A summary of the judgement appears in The Times.

Bryony Lavery interview

Playwright Bryony Lavery tells Lyn Gardner in The Guardian about how she has recovered from the accusations of plagiarism that threatened her career.

"The only thing to do was to write my way through the dark times. And I discovered a joy in it. I had always taken a pleasure in writing, but the joy became deeper, perhaps because what had happened had made me more serious and more rigorous and made me realise just how important every word is." She laughs. "I suppose you could say that I drew on the pain creatively." She raises an eyebrow. "That's writers for you. We use everything."

Lavery was accused of lifting arguing passages for her play Frozen from an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker in 1997. The case never came to trial and many people, including Gladwell himself, supported her.

"I have changed the way I write. I make sure that I've left any research that I've done a very long way behind," she says. "What happened has made me much more careful and that's a good thing. I think, writing Frozen, I was immensely naive and very stupid. Frozen's subject matter was so thorny I wanted it to be completely accurate, but that meant I wasn't as careful as I should have been. It is typical of me: if I was going to make a mistake, it was going to be a big one."

101 Greatest Screenplays

The two American Guilds have announced the results of their members' poll for the Top 100 Screenplays of all time. No great surprises, but it got some press coverage even in the UK, which should help people realise that films do actually have writers.

The winner was Casablanca, written by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.

Court rejects Da Vinci copy claim

The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not breach the copyright of an earlier book, London's High Court has ruled.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who wrote 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, sued Random House, publisher of both books.

Mr Brown said the verdict "shows that this claim was utterly without merit".

"I'm still astonished that these two authors chose to file their suit at all," he added.

More from BBC News.

Mark Barty-King tributes

In Publishing News, Patrick Janson-Smith remembers publisher Mark Barty-King. There's also an obituary by Mike Shaw in The Guardian.

Against the apparent modern trend, the publisher Mark Barty-King, who has died aged 68, believed that "the author is the most important person on the block". He understood the importance of personal relationships. His authors were often surprised to find that the receptionist knew who they were, that their books had been widely read throughout the company and that high hopes were not confined to their editor.

Is there such a thing as feminine writing?

Caroline Phillips in The Independent reports from The Hindustan Times Kitab Festival in Delhi.

One topic that has already got feathers flying is the subject of women's writing. For a start, there's the category itself. "Woman writer!" exclaims [Githa] Hariharan. "It's not a terribly useful label if it just becomes lazy, a way to ghettoise." [Deborah] Moggach says: "I don't really like separating women from men novelists. Most female novelists of any calibre are not writing novels that remotely suggest that they're written by women."

Kapoor hotly counters this view: "Of course women's writing is different from men's," says the best-selling author of Difficult Daughters, and professor of English at Delhi University. "It's bound to be. Our experiences are different."

Chinese PEN complains about Yahoo

The director of Chinese Independent PEN Centre's Writers in Prison Committee, Yu Zhang, has lodged a formal complaint against Yahoo for its alleged part in the conviction of Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao.

More from Richard Lea in The Guardian.

Marc Cherry - the man behind Desperate Housewives

Marc Cherry interviewed by Tony Vitale for the Writers Guild of America, west.

“I always thought my mother had this wonderful life, that she had everything she wanted,” Cherry says. “To discover there were these moments of great frustration and desperation for her-that discovery just rocked my world. If my mother had those problems, then there were other women who must have those feelings too.”

Will and Me, by Dominic Dromgoole

Dominic Dromgoole, soon to take over as artistic director at London's Globe Theatre, has just published a book on Shakespeare, called Will and Me.

In a glowing review in the Telegraph, Charles Spencer writes:

"Will and Me is actually less indebted to the mountain of scholarly volumes on Shakespeare than it is to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. There's a similarly blokeish tone, but instead of expounding on his love of a football club, Dromgoole describes a lifelong passion for Shakespeare."

New Officers For The Writers’ Guild

From the Writers' Guild e-bulletin (emailed free of charge to all guild members every Friday)

The next Chair of the Writers’ Guild will be Katharine Way, whose work has frequently been seen on The Bill, EastEnders, Casualty, and other top TV series. She has twice been nominated for Writers’ Guild awards for her work on The Bill. Katharine has been elected unopposed and will take up the position at the Guild AGM in London on Friday 19 May 2006. She takes over from TV writer and novelist Graham Lester George, who has been Chair for the past three years. Katharine Way is also a founder and the present Chair of the Screenwriters Workshop.

The two new Deputy Chairs – also elected unopposed – will be Rupert Creed and J.C. Wilsher. Rupert, who has written extensively for the theatre and BBC radio, is returning to a position he held several years ago. John Wilsher, a TV writer best known for The Bill and Between The Lines, is a past President of the Guild.

Full election results can be found in the ebulletin.

ND/NF, Day 6

Twelve and Holding

After two days in Europe, it's time to get back on the US indie track. Four years ago, commercial director and photographer Michael Cuesta splashed on the scene with his impressive feature debut L.I.E. First shown in the UK at the London Film Festival, the film expressed the loneliness of Long Island suburban teens without the over-eager posturing of American Beauty or the pitch-black humour of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness). L.I.E. showed to which extent teenagers will go to find love, warm and affection in the absence of caring, focused parents. Much like Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, the film nudges a lonely teen towards a pedophile without letting the story be about sex, sleaze or sensationalism.

All of these films are about spoilt American adults who are too busy with their own lives to see the needs of their own off-spring. None of them are about sex, because the characters don't have time for that. There are second jobs to be held down, second mortgages to be paid, mistresses to buy jewellery for. Cuesta's follow-up Twelve and Holding returns to the same territory. This time the protagonists are a few years younger than in L.I.E. but the burdens they carry are no less heavy. Cuesta didn't write this film, newcomer Anthony Cipriani did, but he was interested in revisiting L.I.E. territory because as he explains in the press notes, "My own children happen to be young right now, so that's spilling into what I'm reading, writing and how I respond to the world."

In contrast to the low-key subtle tone of L.I.E, Twelve and Holding is blessed with a keen sense of humour. Not nearly as dark as Solondz's, but it does an excellent job in driving home the point that sometimes children are more in touch with their feelings and their place in the world than adults are.

Jacob hides a huge red birthmark behind the ski mask that he wears permanently. He discards it when his twin brother, who was always the brighter, better one, is tragically killed by malicious classmates. His parents go into a tailspin after the death of their favourite one, so Jacob decides to chart a course of his own. His friend Malee is the free-spirited Asian daughter of a white therapist who is very busy listening to strangers who pay her to do that. Malee's nascent awareness of her body puts her on a collision course with one of her Mom's very attractive patients. Finally, their very overweight friend Leonard sees the light when his gym teacher gives him a book on nutrition and exercise. Re-educating his parents, the ones who 'love' him with huge quantities of comfort food, proves to be harder than he thought. Drastic measures are called for.

The plot's denouements veer towards the farcical territory of Solondz's latest film Palindromes, which is alright, since by then both Cuesta and Cipriano have invested a great deal in the characters' emotional baggage and they do it in their own way. This is not a film about messed-up teenagers, it's about messed-up 'adults' who think about their own needs first. Like Palindromes, it is a scathing critique of the American soul that wants MORE! NOW! Palindromes had trouble landing an American distributor and the first American reviews of Twelve and Holding are not enthusiastic, but that is probably because most Americans do not take kindly to the reflection in the mirror. Cipriano's warm humour and the children's entrancing performances make the film less of a sociopolitical treatise, but simply another impressive notch on the bedpost of New York indie cinema: the perfect conclusion of this year's New Director/New Films series.

ND/NF, Day 5

Texas

After yesterday's successful detour to Europe, I decided to linger on that continent for a while. Texas is not the latest American indie flick shot on a borrowed digital camera by a few college students in Austin. Evoking the wide-open spaces and car culture of Dubya's fair state, the film's narrator describes his small hometown as a sort of Italian Last Picture Show in the semi-rural province of Piemonte.

Italian cinema is not in a good place. Once celebrated, it is still coasting on the international success of 2003's international hit La Meglio Gioventù (The Best of Youth) by Marco Tullio Giordano. In Italy, most cultural organisations are run by political appointees, ranging from film funds and the Cinecittå studio to the Venice film festival. Since Italian politics are in the firm grip of Mr. Berlusconi, he also has quite a considerable influence on the film industry. As a result, filmmakers are not exactly lining up to protest å la Nanni Moretti and his '70s inspired social criticism. In the last couple of years, most of the films shown at foreign festivals have been either introspective documentaries about rural life or introspective features about rural life. To make a film about life in the big city, you end up tackling big issues and that doesn't seem to be possible in today's Italy.

Texas is no exception. Written by the young Italian playwright and actor Fausto Paradivino, it shows a group of young locals in small Piemonte town. They are in their late twenties, early thirties and their rich friend's house allows them to party as much as they want in a desperate effort to stave off adulthood. Of course they are still living with their parents, so they're doing pretty well on that score. When one of them starts cheating on his girlfriend with the local school mistress, the tension in the group rises and rises, until it boils over to the rest of the town. This may be foggy Northern Italy, but the locals do like their drama in this part of the country too.

The teacher is played by a miraculously toned down Valeria Golino, one of Italy's most well-known actresses, who does get to play her trademark sex pot, albeit with very little make-up and frumpy outfits. Her young lover is played by current teen idol Riccardo Scamarcio, who does a believable job in portraying a spoilt male predator, not a very complex role to perform.

The rest of the group is played by young actors and associates of Paradivino. Two main roles within the group are played by his co-screenwriters, Iris Fusetti and Carlo Orlando. Their familiarity with each other is obvious, which helps in creating a believable sense of community. This makes the viewer more involved when the dynamics start to tear the group apart. Their flawed characters make them more interesting than the hot lead characters; it's a pleasure to watch the back-and-forth between them. Paradivino is obviously a actor's director. Most impressive however is the fact that he doesn't go for the shoot-out. The drama whipped up in the usually dormant town does not get played out to fatal consequences, as its characters are ultimately more interested in preserving harmony. This act of tenderness is usually the hallmark of the older, more mature writer, and we can only hope Paradivino and his screenwriting/acting friends go on to do more works like this.

Because of the unique way it's funded....

Interesting comment piece in today's Guardian, about the future of BBC funding. MeidaGuardian editor Emily Bell argues that the corporation's decision to start charging overseas users for access to its popular websites is part of a plan to make the BBC self-sufficient if and when the licence fee is axed. Bell, who runs the Guardian's own online empire, is a direct cyber-competitor of the BBC's.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,1745319,00.html

Waterloo Road recomissioned

BBC1's Waterloo Road has been recommissioned despite lacklustre ratings. BBC drama controllre, Jane Tranter, asked production company Shed to make 12 more episodes for next year, after eight episodes were commissioned for series one.

Shed also produces Bad Girls and Footballers' Wives.

Read the full story in today's Guardian's online:
http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,1745771,00.html

ND/NF, Day 4

First on the Moon

After yesterday's disappointing Old Joy, it's time to make a U-turn towards the other end of the spectrum. The Dutch 30-minute 'short' Still World and the Russian feature First on the Moon celebrate monochrome celluloid, photography and genuine experimentation.

Still World by newcomer Elbert van Strien charts a journalist's descent into paranoia through a series of black and white film stills. Shot digitally by one of Holland's most adventurous DP's, Guido van Gennep, the resulting 'film' has been transferred to 35mm. The succession of photos acquires a rhythm of its own, always in tandem with the journalist's voice-over and strategically placed sound effects. The journalist gets a mild case of mid-life crisis when his untalented friend Max publishes a novel. This soon spirals into conspiracy theories and ends in a Paul Auster-like chase.

First of the Moon also relishes the power of the black and white image. Alexey Fedorchenko comes from the Ural mountains, Russia's isolated heartland. Although he trained at the VGIK film school in Moscow, he's been affiliated with the local Sverdlovsk studio. To be at the center of such a vast country must give artists plenty to think about without too many outside distractions.

If First of the Moon has any influences to show for, it is probably the hand of fellow Sverdlovsk-born filmmaker Alexey Balabanov (Brat, War). Balabanov's Of Freaks and Men (1998) is the sepia-toned story of a German photographer's career in 19th century St. Petersburg, where he becomes the city's first pornographer. First of the Moon is a faux documentary about a top secret mission. Apparently, at the height of Stalinist terror, a group of cosmonauts made it to the moon as early as 1938. Just like his more well-known colleague Balabanov, Fedorchenko must have had a ball constructing the fake historical sequences, sepia-toned photo materials and humorous situations. His pleasure beams from the big screen at Lincoln Center, where such celebration of the medium truly belongs.

ND/NF, Day 3

Old Joy

After seeing two genuinely well-made NY indies, I eagerly rushed into the screening room to see Old Joy by Kelly Reichardt, another New York native. One of the main roles is played by cult muso Will Oldham. It was executive produced by indie star director Todd Haynes and the film had won a Tiger Award at the Rotterdam, which is usually reserved for successful cinematic pioneering.

Unfortunately, the Rotterdam Tigers must have had an off-day, because Old Joy looks remarkably similar to the type of well-meaning, but ultimately not convincing video features spawned by the Land of the Free and the Home of the Shortcut. Shooting on video because you can't afford film is not a great opportunity for undiscovered talent. It's a shortcut that almost never works. Old Joy was shot on 16mm, but screened digitally to save money, something which American critic Dave Kehr claims is not visible. Well, it is. Please people, if you're going to shoot a Hou Hsiao Sien-inspired meditation on the healing powers of nature, don't involve pixels. They are not easy on the eye, the green is too green, the light is too harsh and it ends up looking like a cheap-ass nature program on Japanese TV.

Secondly, like any other U.S. indie, the film contains a great deal of verbal sparring between Kurt (Oldham), a free spirit who drags his old friend Mark (Daniel London) away from his highly pregnant passive-aggressive wife for a weekend of camping in one of Washington State's impressive national parks. Kurt misses the good old days and vies for Mark's attention with exactly the same kind of nagging that poor embattled Mark has to endure from his wife. Oldham's performance is both wooden and smug at the same time, while London's role isn't meaty enough to portray much more than a hotly-pursued pretty boy with soulful eyes.

They go camping in the mountains and find a tucked-away hot spring. Reichardt inserts close-ups of snails and ferns to emphasize the meditative powers of nature, but it feels like a contrived mechanism, not part of the film as a whole. No film that includes huge chunks of dialogue neatly conveying the characters' emotions is suddenly going to turn into an introspective art gem. Man Push Cart is a successful film because it makes the viewers guess about its characters' inner life, rather than have them pour out their hearts to the first available victim. Mark's uptightness finally melts away in the hot spring, where Kurt offers a deep tissue shoulder massage. Reichardt hints at a happy ending by showing Mark's hand with his wedding ring slip into the water when he lets go of his tensions. I'm sure there are more poetic ways to show the delights of a hand job, especially if you are going to emulate Asian masters of visual restraint.

Another American critic, Emanuel Levy, doesn't understand why the Sundance festival put Old Joy in its experimental Frontier section and not in its competition. At the opening night reception in the lobby of the MoMA, a New York Post critic proclaimed that he really likes the film too. It seems people are really hungry to embrace new American indie talent. Well, Sundance director Geoff Gilmore may know something that the Tiger jury didn't. To paraphrase New York's dating manual du jour (He's Just Not That Into You), "the film just isn't that good". But as the ND/NF program shows, there are lots of other homegrown productions to love.

ND/NF, Day 2

Man Push Cart

They are everywhere in NYC. After all, thousands of office workers need to get their caffeine fix in the morning and lunch at noon. You don't really notice them unless you're thirsty or hungry. Sometimes it's the sound of halal kebab sizzling on a hot plate grabbing your attention, or a brave soul cranking up the Lebanese pop music on his transistor radio. After 9/11, they've survived by plastering their carts with American patriotic stickers, downplaying their Arab or Muslim roots and patiently enduring abuse. Their silver carts seem to be permanently bolted to the street corners, especially in Midtown.

Few people know that when the donuts are sold-out in the afternoons, these carts are schlepped on foot to a storage space, where they resurface at the break of dawn to cater to the crowds. Man Push Cart reveals the world behind the carts and their owners. Most of them don't even own the cart, but rent them from cart-wholesalers, turning them into the sharecroppers of the 21st century, or recalling the 19th century feudal landlords in their native South Asia.

However, there is no political posturing in Man Push Cart, which is not a documentary, but fiction based on the real story of a push cart man. This impressive feature received its world premiere at last year's Venice film festival and won the FIPRESCI critic's award at the London film festival. It is by far the strongest New York film in this year's ND/NF edition, having sold for distribution to seven countries, including France and the U.S.

Man Push Cart observes the daily grind of Ahmad, a former Pakistani rock star who is mourning the death of his wife and the loss of his son, whom his resentful in-laws are shielding from him. Ahmad is convincingly played by Pakistani Brooklynite Ahmad Razvi , who once pushed a cart himself. One of his customers, a Pakistani yuppie, attempts to take him under his wing, partly out of a macho pleasure in watching a compatriot hustle to make a buck. When he recognizes Ahmad as a former singer, he gets an even bigger kick out of the menial jobs and false hope he throws Ahmad's way.

New York-based director and U.S.-born Ramin Bahrani spent three years in Iran making his feature-length thesis film Strangers and then lived in Paris before returning to the U.S. As a result, Man Push Cart reflects both the preference for minimalist vignettes of daily life as favoured by recent Iranian films and the French existentialism of Albert Camus. As a result, he guides the viewer through Ahmad's hard life without judgement or sentimentality.

Even though New York plays a major part and all of its makers are Newyorkers, the film's understated rhythm and its reliance on images rather than dialogue are a breath of fresh air in this verbose city that fears introspection and pessimism. "You will hopefully care for this [Pakistani] man whom in today's world we have been trained to hate and fear," proclaims Bahrani in his press kit. Although the film itself doesn't feel like it wields such a clearly political axe, you end up feeling you've gotten to know those anonymous Sisyphus's and their push carts a little better, which is typically the first step towards dispelling fear.

New Directors/New Films, Day 1

Half Nelson

For the past 35 years, spring in New York is usually announced by the New Directors/ New Films series that presents undiscovered or about-to-be-discovered filmmakers from all over the world. For the next six days, Thessa Mooij reports from the screening rooms of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

New York City likes to pound its puffed-up chest, fancying itself the capital of the world. But a closer look at the Big Apple's creative output shows a slightly conservative city that likes its modern art to be colourful, pictorial and illustrative; easy on the eye and the brain cells. It takes its music, fashion and design cues from London and Tokyo before watering them down and proclaiming them as their own. As for film, the city's independent filmmakers have definitely suffered from a financing blow after 9/11.

Since films take years to make - especially the good ones - it has taken a while for indie talent to return to the big screen in any significant numbers. The New Directors/New Films series shows a remarkable renaissance of high quality independent films with the city's stamp on them. The 35-year old series is an understated affair by New York's standards - presenting 25 features and five shorts - most of which do not have a distributor in the U.S. and are only screened during this programme. The curatorial choices are adventurous by New York standards, not relying on other festivals hits or hyped-up distribution acquisitions. The selection committee is well known for nurturing talent in the early stages by presenting remarkable short films and inviting some of these filmmakers to return with their first features.

This was the case with the series' opening film, Half Nelson, which was based on the short film Gowanus, Brooklyn that was shown in the programme two years ago. Written by director Ryan Fleck and producer Anna Boden, the film maps out the rough-and-tumble neighbourhood of Gowanus Canal. Surrounded by heavily gentrified brownstone Brooklyn, this semi-industrial area mixes rough-and-tumble kids from the projects and young hipsters who can't afford the brownstones.

Dan is caught in the middle of this: junior high school teacher by day, coke-sniffing ladies man by night. The magnetically talented actor Ryan Gosling gets a chance to play the entire spectrum from trying to bridge gaping racial gaps to scoring hard drugs from a family friend of his favourite student Drey. who sees her crush on him evaporate with the sweet smoke coming out of his crack pipe.

Too often, American films, even the indies, opt for a clear-cut battle between right and wrong, following by a soothing redemption that leaves no loose ends untied. Half Nelson (a wrestling term for keeping someone in control, but not pinning them down) is surprisingly fluid in its statements, withholding judgment as much as it can. The film is not about drugs or sex, but about the fragile bond between a charismatic, but weak teacher and a talented student looking for a role model. It's a delight to see Ryan Gosling sparring with teenage actress Shareeka Epps, who played the role of Drey in the preceding short film. She can certainly hold her own with her mix of vulnerability and scowling contempt.

The only false note comes from Fleck's depiction of Dan's parents as wine guzzling, washed out '60s radicals. There is a cowardly hint at a difficulty father-son relationship, but seeing his family in action does nothing to explain his need for a drug induced haze. Considering the non-judgmental tone of the film, it would have been more consistent to let Dan be himself, in the present, without explaining his background or history. But overall, this is an impressive debut, both for the filmmakers and for Shareeka Epps.

Tardisodes

The BBC will be producing 60-second 'Tardisodes' for mobile phones to accompany the new series of Doctor Who next month.

Tardisodes co-producer Jo Pearce says: "Our aim, when planning the development of all these projects, is to make the interactive content around Doctor Who series two compelling, exciting and intriguing as well as enticing a broader audience to Doctor Who by positioning it on different platforms."

Absence of a loved one

Sudden disappearance is driving a growing amount of contemporary drama, writes Julia Keller in The LA Times.

Such a theme made hits out of the CBS series "Without a Trace" and "Cold Case," shows that spotlight mysterious disappearances and the strenuous attempts to fill in the blanks.

These aren't standard police dramas; they are rich explorations of the momentous impact of absence. Their power derives from the searing sadness that trails in the wake of vanished loved ones. Episodes aren't cold, abstract puzzles for clever detectives to solve; they are journeys into the heart of loss, a loss that can't be relieved by tracking a killer or thwarting a bank robbery.

Victoria Pile interview

Victoria Pile, creator of Channel 4 comedy series Green Wing, talks to Amy Raphael in The Daily Telegraph.

Pile works with a team of seven writers, but argues that they never set out to imitate the classic American way of writing comedy. "I had a small, hardcore team of sketch writers dating back to Smack the Pony who were interested in writing something with more depth.

"When we started work on Green Wing, we often wrote independently and then pooled ideas. We spent a long time defining the characters and discussing people we knew.

"We had little drawings of the characters so we knew them really well before we cast them."

It's strange to think that when Pile handed in the first series of Green Wing, she was convinced she'd never work in television again. "It's a hard bloody job to make comedy," she says, laughing.

Aliens attack critics

In The Guardian, Quentin Reynolds, executive producer of Evil Aliens, says that criticas need a reality check.

I produced Evil Aliens, with my own money, because I saw a talent and an audience - two things so often left out of the equation when funding British movies. I'm not surprised that Evil Aliens isn't getting great reviews: the critics and the UK industry are inextricably linked.

Sony Radio Awards nominations

Nominations have been announced for the 2006 Sony Radio Academy Awards, including for Best Drama and Best Comedy.

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is, in the words of Forbes magazine, “the most famous author you’ve never heard of”. His 25-year career has always been of a decidedly strange hue, taking in comics, graphic novels and children’s fiction — many of them produced in collaboration with the graphic artist Dave McKean — plus fantasy fiction for adults and screenplays (MirrorMask, which has just been released, and Robert Zemeckis’s long-awaited Beowulf). There is even an unauthorised biography of Duran Duran with Gaiman’s name on it. Supplying the source material for the new National Theatre of Scotland is only the latest feint from a writer more or less impossible to pin down.

More from Jasper Rees in The Times. The National Theatre of Scotland's production of Wolves In The Wall, based on th book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, opens on Saturday at the Tramway theatre in Glasgow.

Making games from movies

As news is announced that Desperate Housewives will be launched as a video game later this year, Julie Tamaki in the LA Times wonders why the King Kong game has had such disappointing sales.

Part of the reason is...the fundamental difference between movies and games: Games are interactive, movies are passive. Movie-based games that succeed often use the film as a starting point for new stories that cater to the strengths of interactive entertainment.

BAFTA TV Awards 2006

Nominations have been announced for the BAFTA TV Awards 2006. Leading the pack is Andrew Davies's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Bleak House with four major nominations, including for Best Drama Serial.

Zombies are back

If you haven't been paying attention — and if you haven't been paying attention, heaven help you — zombies are back. In films, books and video games, the undead are once again on the march, elbowing past werewolves, vampires, swamp things and mummies to become the post-millennial ghoul of the moment.

More from Warren St John in The New York Times.

Jane Smiley

An interesting article by author Jane Smiley in The Guardian about inspiration and what happens when you lose it.

When I sat down at my computer, though, and read what I had written the day before, I felt something new - a recoiling, a cold surprise. Oh, this again. This insoluble, unjoyous, and unstimulating piece of work. What's the next sentence, even the next word?

The Verb

BBC Radio 3 programme, The Verb, has launched a competition for first-time novelists.

Listeners are invited to write the opening first 800 words of a first novel. The prize will be an Arvon course for first time novelists, taught by award-winning writers Tim Lott and Matt Thorne, with special guest, Sarah Waters, of Fingersmith fame.

The closing date is 1 July 2006.

Jason Reitman interview

Jason Reitman, writer/director of Thank You For Not Smoking, is interviewed by Dylan Callaghan for The Writers Guild of America, west.

Are you very disciplined when it comes to writing?

I'm very undisciplined. I never really write treatments, I just start writing. I'll get to page 60, realize I should be at page 40, cut it back, keep on writing, get to page 80, realize I should be at 60 [and] cut it back. I write a lot. I usually write three times as much as I need. If I think of a scene and it's not where I'm at with the script, I'll write the scene by itself. The film finds itself.

Do you find treatments and outlines stifle you?

Yeah, if I do that I tend to overthink. Often I don't know where the story needs to go when I start writing. I don't mean to sound airy-fairy, but I find that a film decides what it wants to and needs to be. It happens in the writing and the shooting and the cutting.

Understanding Failure's Success

Romantic comedy guru Billy Mernit dissects hit film, Failure To Launch (written by Tom Astle and Matt Ember).

Apparently the success of Failure lies in the studio's savvy understanding of what some women really want: the malleable himbo with a McConaughey grin.

Looking back at Look Back In Anger

Fifty years after its opening night, The Independent looks back at John Osborne's Look Back In Anger, with Osborne's own reflections and a selection of the first night critics.

Kenneth Tynan in 'The Observer', 13 May 1956: 'Look Back in Anger' presents post-war youth as it really is, with special emphasis on the non-U intelligentsia, who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, 'posh' and 'wet'. To have done this at all would be a significant achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle.

Film Council welcomes new tax relief system

The UK Film Council has welcomed the Chancellor's budget announcement yesterday of a new system of tax relief for films made in Britain. It's all rather complicated, but if you're interested there's lots of detail on the UK Film Council website.

David Halliwell obituary

David Halliwell, who has died aged 69, was a dramatist and director destined to be remembered for his first and most successful play, Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs. But, although he never repeated this initial triumph, he was a highly influential figure in the burgeoning fringe movement of the late 1960s. He pioneered the idea of lunchtime theatre and multi-viewpoint drama and left his mark on several close collaborators, including Mike Leigh.

More from Michael Billington in The Guardian.

Update: see comments for details of commemoration service.

Understanding Beckett

There has been a rash of articles celebrating the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth, with many critics suggesting that he should be considered the greatest playwright of the twentieth century. Terry Eagleton, however, while asserting Beckett's greatness, believes that the symbolism of his work has been overstated, as he writes in The Guardian:

...he was not some timeless spirit but a southern Irish Protestant, part of a besieged minority of cultural aliens caught uneasily within a triumphalistic Catholic Free State. As Anglo-Irish Big Houses were burnt by Republicans during the war of independence, many Protestants fled to the Home Counties. The paranoia, chronic insecurity and self-conscious marginality of Beckett's work make a good deal more sense in this light. So does the stark, stripped quality of his writing, with its Protestant aversion to frippery and excess.

Martyn Hesford interview

Fantabulosa, based on the diaries of Kenneth Williams, scored BBC Four's highest ever ratings last week. The writer of Fantabulosa, Martyn Hesford, talks about his career to Leah Stoker for Broadcast Freelancer.

I started out in TV as an actor. I tried my hand at writing a script and sent it to every agent and every production company but nobody agreed to it. I then entered it into a Radio Times competition for unsolicited scripts and it won. Then everybody wanted to make it...

Thanks to Guild member Richard Bevan for the link.

Peter Shaffer interview

When the National Theatre announced plans to revive a play (The Royal Hunt For The Sun) by Peter Shaffer this year some people might have wondered if the great playwright was still alive. He is. It's 21 years since he last had a play open at the National, but as Robert Butler finds out in The Daily Telegraph, at the age of 79 Shaffer, the author of plays including Amadeus and Equus, is still writing.

Shaffer still works on a manual typewriter and possesses only a single copy of each of the two plays in progress. He tries to write every day to keep his dramatist skills in good nick.

"Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump, use it, that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it."

Too many words

Today's animated films rely too much on dialogue, says Charles Solomon in The New York Times. Walt Disney often made his artists prepare their storyboards with only pictures; dialogue was added at the end of the process, when they determined how few words were actually needed to tell the story. In 2001, Joe Grant, who did key story work on "Snow White," "Pinocchio" and other Disney features, said in an interview: "Walt was a great advocate of pantomime. He would stand in front of the boards and re-enact the scene. You could see the reflection of him in the film: his pantomime was beautifully followed through. Today it's all talking heads."

The Chatterley Affair

The Chatterley Affair by Guild member Andrew Davies is on BBC Four tonight, and in The Times, Paul Hoggart recalls his father's role in the famous indecency trial.

The introduction to the drama of the affair could easily have been naff, especially when the couple start to use the book as a rather preachy sort of Lovers’ Guide. In fact it is handled with great wit and sensitivity. Davies, then a teacher, recalls the era clearly — he was “a bit miffed” by the acquittal, having paid one of his sixth-formers about £5 to bring him an unexpurgated copy from Paris which he could now get for 3s 6d (about the price of two pints). He uses the jurors’ reactions to provide a subtle exploration of the ways in which attitudes to sex and authority were starting to shift.

US Google copyright case dismissed

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that Google Inc.'s Web search systems infringe on a publisher's copyright, a minor victory for the company which faces numerous suits charging that its services trample on the rights of authors.

In a ruling issued last Friday and made known on Thursday, Judge R. Barclay Surrick of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejected eleven allegations contained in a civil complaint by plaintiff Gordon Roy Parker of Philadelphia.

More from Eric Auchard on Reuters.

New Writing Ventures

The Booktrust has launched the 2006 New Writing Ventures aimed at idenitfying emerging talent. All the winners and short listed writers will receive a place on the year-long Ventures Development Programme, which includes individual mentoring, workshops and professional advice.

New Writing Ventures is one of the programmes delivered by the New Writing Partnership,supported by Norwich City Council, Norfolk County Council, the University of East Anglia and Arts Council England, East.

Paul Farrell - script to screen

Paul Farrell's long and winding road to getting a script commissioned and made for BBC TV's Silent Witness, as told to BBC Writersroom.

Steve [Matthews, script editor] rings up and invites me...to a real post mortem - in Southend. I travel there with Emma, Assistant Script Editor and Researcher, and Christian, another commissioned writer from the scheme. We gab all the way there but on the way back we are all silent.

Tony Marchant

Award-winning TV writer Tony Marchant, interviewed by Jasper Rees in The Daily Telegraph.

The common denominator of all his urgent modern parables - even his adaptations of Great Expectations and Crime and Punishment - is the flawed hero who journeys towards some form of redemption. In America they schmaltzily call it the learning minute. It's a bit more visceral with Marchant.

"I'm a very lapsed Catholic," he says. "I suppose my interest in redemption must be a bit of me that I can't quite get rid of. Plus there's the very prosaic reason that if you are going to put people through three hours of shit, you need to give them something at the other end."

YouWriteOn.com

An interesting new initiative for unpublished authors, YouWriteOn is a website backed by the Arts Council.

The aim of YouWriteOn.com is to help new writers develop and to help talented writers get noticed and published. We are funded by Arts Council, England - the UK’s largest grant giving body for the arts.

The YouWriteOn.com premise is simple: you review and rate another members opening chapters and then your chapters are randomly sent to another member to review and rate in turn. Each month, the three highest rated new writers enter our Best Seller Chart and receive a free critique from one of our literary professionals, who include established authors and a literary agent.

The completed book of the highest rated opening chapters of the year will be awarded our Book of The Year Publishing Award – the author’s book will be published by YouWriteOn, available to order as a paperback through booksellers such as Amazon, W.H.Smith, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Waterstones and most US and UK bookstores. The winner earns royalties, and sales made through booksellers such as Amazon will feature on Amazon’s own book charts.

Hath not a playwright bills?

Join a debate about the difficulties facing new/young playwrights on The Guardian's Culture Vulture blog.

BBC White Paper

A "unique solution for a unique organisation" with measures to put the licence fee payer at the heart of everything the BBC does, were set out by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell today, as she published a white paper on the future of the corporation.

The white paper, A public service for all: the BBC in the digital age, confirms that the BBC will be overseen by a new Trust that is separate from its management and will actively work to ensure the interests of the public are paramount at all times.

Central to this will be ensuring that the cycle of Charter reviews can't dictate the BBC's approach to its services.

In addition, the white paper sets out in further detail how the BBC will be expected to reach a more consensual relationship with the media industry, providing transparency, certainty and clarity where its activities could have an impact on the wider market.

Ms Jowell also urged the BBC to "continue to take fun seriously" in the future, stressing that high quality entertainment remained a vital part of the corporation's mission.

More from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

There's lots of comment in all the newspapers, of course (e.g. MediaGuardian, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph) but most if not all of the contents of the White Paper were widely anticipated.

The common theme in most of the comment is that broadcasting is changing fast. As Torin Douglas says on BBC News: "Many in broadcasting find it hard to predict the next 10 months - let alone 10 years - so rapid is the pace of change in communications." Keeping pace with this change is and will continue to be the BBC's biggest challenge.

Bill Hays obituary

In The Guardian, Alan Plater remembers film and theatre director Bill Hays.

Bill organised a meeting of pitman-turned-writer Sid Chaplin, songwriter Alex Glasgow and myself - all native sons of County Durham - in Sid's front room, and together we made the musical Close the Coalhouse Door, which opened triumphantly in Newcastle in April 1968. Later that year, it reached London's West End, where it played to rave reviews and minute audiences at the Fortune Theatre - or "the graveyard of champions", as we christened it.

BBC Last Laugh winner

James Donohue has won the BBC's Last Laugh competition.

In the contest to write the second half of sitcom scripts by established writers, Donahue chose to finish The Old Guys, started by Guild members Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. It will be shown later this year.

It's been a strange competition. Getting eight half-completed sitcom scripts from writers as famous as Marks and Gran is quite an undertaking but, as we reported in January, the BBC never really gave the contest much publicity.

Harold Pinter interviewed

Having won the Europe Theatre prize, Harold Pinter was interviewed in Turin by Michael Billington - their discussion is printed in The Guardian.

I'm not aware of my consciousness working in that way at an early stage of writing. After it's got to a certain point, I then work very hard on the text, quite consciously. In other words, I just don't live in my unconscious the whole damn time. I keep an eye on it. But one of the most exciting things about being a writer is finding the life in different characters whom you don't know at all. To a certain extent, you've got to let them live their own life. But there's also a conflict constantly going on between you as the writer and them as the characters. Who's in charge? There's no easy answer to that. I suppose, finally, the author is in charge. Because, whether the character likes it or not, all I've got to do is take out my pen and do that (a gesture of erasure) and he's lost a line. It may be one of his favourite lines of dialogue [laughter]. But I've got the pen in my hand.

There are lots of references to Pinter's Nobel lecutre, which you can read online if you missed it first time round.

Lionel Shriver on success

Novelist Lionel Shriver spent years struggling for recognition, until last year she won the Orange Prize (for We Need To Talk About Kevin). But, as she writes in The Guardian, success has brought it's own problems.

...the biggest challenge to living in a limelight that has previously swept elsewhere goes to the core of your identity - of not just who you are to other people, but who you are to yourself. Before this last year, I had lived for decades in the literary hinterlands. Locating myself in the cultural margins provided a sense of identity just as geographical as my dozen years of residence in off-the-beaten-track Belfast. I had long thought of myself as an outsider, holding on in the world of letters by the skin of my teeth. Agreeably, I got used to people leaving me alone, and keeping their noses out of my business. Relocating myself closer to the cultural mainstream has upset my interior furniture, much as when you load your country house on to a flatbed tractor-trailer and drag it into the city, the walls can skew, and its accoutrements fall on the floor.

McGovern - ITV drama is "dross"

Top TV writer Jimmy McGovern has criticised prime-time ITV drama as "dross", reports Dave West for Digital Spy.

He said television drama in general was disappointing and singled out ITV and in particular Footballers' Wives, which he described as "dross". The writer was speaking at the launch of his new drama The Street on BBC One.

"A lot of my stuff has been crap but if I see anything on ITV at 9pm, I don't watch it," commented McGovern. "I tuned in to half an hour of Footballers' Wives and people tried to convince me it had a political angle. It didn't, it was dross."

McGovern himself is turning to musical theatre, according to Ben Dowell in Media Guardian (free registration required), working with composer Howard Goodall for a piece set in the 19th century cotton mills in the north of England and in the cotton fields of the American deep south.

BBC teen drama will show online

Wannabes a new BBC drama for teens, is being made specifically for the web.

Using a mixture of streamed video, interactivity, animation and games, Wannabes will encourage its web viewers to become part of the club crowd.

The Wannabes characters will ask for advice on their relationships and life choices and award viewers a rating, depending on how much they value them as a friend.

The show, written by Ariane Sherine and Will Jewell, will launch on bbc.co.uk/teens in the autumn. As we reported in November, Wannabes follows in the footsteps of the BBC's fictional popstar, Jamie Kane, star of an interactive game for over-14s.

The Sopranos writers

On his always entertaining blog, Ken Levine sings the praises of The Sopranos, created by David Chase, and looks at the writers behind the penultimate series (the final series launched in America yesterday.)

Reprieved from an earlier post – some past credits of the SOPRANOS staff (not saying these are all bad shows, just somewhat different from what you might expect…so I don’t want a lot of comments saying how great Secret Squirrel was.):

The Magician
2 Stupid Dogs
Batman (the animated series)
Cover Me
Swat Kats
Hack
The In-Laws
Baby Blues
American Gothic
DiResti
The New Flipper
The Naked Truth
Living in Captivity
Sister Sister
..... and of course – the Secret Squirrel Show.

As Levine also points out, most of the writers are in their fifties.

Dan Brown's saving error

In the latest twist in the legal action faced by Dan Brown, accused of plagiarising another book to write his bestseller The Da Vinci Code, it seems that historical inaccuracy might come to his rescue. As Alan Hamilton writes in The Times:

According to [Brown] the Priory of Sion, alleged keeper of the secret of Christ's wife and children, was founded in Jerusalem during the Second Crusade in the reign of Baldwin II. But according to the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, who are suing Brown for stealing their plot, the Priory was founded in 1099 during the First Crusade, and Baldwin did not ascend the throne of the ancient city until 1118.

The case is a reminder of how difficult it is to make a legal challenge to authorship. Unless something is copied word for word then it seems almost impossible to judge that plagiarism has occurred. A single chink in the prosecution case, (see above) can be enough for the defence to win.

Amazon planning to publish?

Following reports last year that Amazon was planning to publish fiction, there's more discussion about whether they, and the internet in general, are a threat to traditional publishers.

Is Liverpool's Culture dream in tatters?

When it was announced that Liverpool would be the European City of Culutre, there was great rejoicing. But, asks David Ward in The Guardian, will the dreams of a transforming event be realised?

The Mersey waterfront in Liverpool is both a world heritage site and one of the draughtiest places in western Europe; today a biting east wind is bullying the 16 flags that line the path from the maritime museum to the Pier Head.

Look closely and you will see that each flag announces that Liverpool will be European Capital of Culture in 2008 - but also that each flag is ragged and grubby. To your right lies an empty Porsche car showroom. By now it should have been flattened to create a spectacular site for the Cloud, a shimmering building designed for this space by the architect Will Alsop. Plans for the Cloud stirred up huge controversy, not least because no one seemed to know what was going to go in the building, but they helped win Liverpool the culture title. Now it will not be built because the money for it has already been diverted to other, less iconic, projects.

Sad flags and failed ambition: inauspicious signs, with less than two years to go, for what is meant to be a year of celebration for Liverpool.

Video games become BAFTA's 'third arm'

The growing importance of video games to entertainment culture has been recognised by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), which has elevated the sector to become an equal to those for Film and Television. Champions of the moving image, BAFTA seeks to reward artistic and creative innovation within video games, as one of the principal contemporary art forms.

This newly defined status means The British Academy Video Games Awards are set to confirm their position as the most independent and valued awards in this arena. The British Academy Video Games Awards move to October 2006 to be positioned as the climax to London Games Week, a new set of major industry and consumer events set to be a highlight of the European gaming calendar.

More from the BAFTA press release (pdf file). Sadly there's no award for writing, even though the role of the games writer is getting much greater attention within the industry.

'Blooker' short-list announced

The first short-list for a literary prize that rewards bloggers turned bookwriters has been announced.

Dubbed the Blooker Prize, the contest is for those bloggers who have turned their episodic journals into something more substantial.

More from BBC News.

Ivor Cutler

The poet, composer and perfomer Ivor Cutler has died at the age of 83. As The Times obituary notes:

Throughout his career Cutler remained the grit in the oyster of respectability. He did not dispute the description once given to him that he was a rather stupid genius. Such genius derived from his ability to view life from the opposite direction to that taken by society, and his ability to empathise with the implications of that viewpoint, as in his one-sentence poem: “A fly crouching in a sandwich cannot comprehend why it has become more than ordinarily vulnerable.”

There are also obituaries in The Guardian and Daily Telegraph. If you've never experienced Cutler's weirdly funny and sometimes unsettling poems, you can listen to some on his website.

Bond attacks Royal Court

Playwright Edward Bond has launched a blistering attack on modern theatre in general and the Royal Court in particular, reports Alistair Smith in The Stage.

Speaking at the ceremony for Arts Council England’s John Whiting Award, Bond dismissed modern theatre, claiming that “it only pretends to take risks” and “does not deal with the problems it should be dealing with”. He also rejected television and film as “soft fascism”, adding that “it does not really deal with the problems of society”.

However, he saved his final attack for the Royal Court, the venue which staged his break-through play Saved in 1965, saying: “When I began to write, the Royal Court was an oasis in a desert. It is now a graveyard in a desert.”

Pam Gems interview

In The Daily Telegraph, Dominic Cavendish talks to playwright Pam Gems.

'A love letter to the theatre" - that's how Pam Gems describes her latest play, Mrs Pat, recalling a forgotten heroine of the British stage, Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865-1940). It's hard not to smile at this, because all Gems's plays might be summed up thus. From the show that first got her noticed in the mid-'70s, Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, to the bio-dramas for which she is best known - Piaf, Marlene and Stanley (about Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich and Stanley Spencer) - an unmissable feature of her work is passion: passion for her subject, and passion for the medium she has chosen, or which chose her.

Are gays and lesbians being Tuned Out?

Tuned Out, a new report from gay rights group, Stonewall, argues that BBC TV is seriously failing gay, lesbian and bisexual viewers.

We monitored 168 hours of peak time TV on BBC One and BBC Two: during that time, lesbian and gay people and their lives were realistically and positively portrayed for just six minutes.

In Media Guardian (free registration required), Stonewall Chief Executive Ben Summerskill points the finger at EastEnders as one of the main offenders.

Its last gay visitor, from 2001 to 2005, was Derek. But to satisfy the prudes who appear to run East- Enders, Derek had almost no characterisation. In his tenure in Albert Square, whose other residents rival the Bloomsbury Group as bedhoppers, viewers never got a single meaningful insight into his private life. (The only evidence of his past was a - touch-free - chance encounter with a former boyfriend who turned out to be an entertainments manager in a holiday camp.)

Oscar triumph for Guild member

Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, co-written by Guild member Bob Baker, has won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Guild member Jeffrey Caine, who was shortlisted for his adapatation of John le Carré's novel, The Constant Gardener, was beaten to the Oscar for Best Adapated Screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Brokeback Mountain (from a short story by Annie Proulx).

The imitation game

The Dan Brown case sees the collision of two contradictory tendencies in modern culture. On the one hand, more and more ideas are owned, sold, and protected; but at the same time, more and more of what is on sale has been copied with very small variations from other things also on sale.

In The Guardian, Andrew Brown argues that too much copyright is a bad thing.

The real threat to creativity doesn't come from too much copying, but too little. Nothing can be learned except by imitation, and it's hard to imagine any worthwhile writer who did not start off imitating others.

Comment: many writers will have mixed feelings about the Dan Brown case. On the one hand writers' livlihoods depend on the ability to defend their copyright, as the litigants, Michael Baigent and Richard Leig claim to be doing. Yet most writers are also, to some extent, intellectual magpies, picking inspiration and ideas from a variety of sources, often unconsciously.

Gerald Kelsey

Screenwriter and founder member of the Guild, Gerlad Kelsey, has died. The funeral will take place at Eltham Crematorium at 11.45 a.m. on 10 March. Family flowers only, but donations to Woodland Trust or Cancer Research. For more information contact the Guild office.

There will be an obituary in the next issue of UK Writer.

More on self-publising

In The Guardian, Victor Keegan follows up his own previous article about self-publishing and printing on demand.

Self-publishing enables anyone to upload a book in digital form to a website, which then formats it complete with a cover. It costs anything from £4.50 (single proof of one book) to more than £500 for full personalised involvement of the publishing house at all stages, from starting up to getting a link to Amazon.

Print on demand enables unsigned authors to publish their books without having to pay for the first 500 or 1,000 copies, as they are simply downloaded from a database to be printed copy by copy as required.

When actors get fussy

Ken Levine recalls how he and co-writer David Isaacs kept the actors on MASH in line after receiving rather too many pernickety script notes.

The next time it occurred we went back to the room, addressed all of their minor concerns, and then made a one other little change of our own to the script. We made it a cold show.

The next day filming began at the Malibu ranch. Summer temperatures were routinely in the 90's and 100'’s. Now the cast was all in parkas standing over fire barrels delivering lines about how bitterly cold Korea was in the winter.

Ashley Pharoah interview

Danny Stack talks to TV writer Ashley Pharoah.

How did the idea for Life on Mars come about with co-creators Tony Jordan and Matthew Graham?

About eight years ago the production company KUDOS sent the three of us off to a hotel in Blackpool for a long weekend with the brief to come up with some series ideas. We had all just written on CITY CENTRAL and didn't fancy doing another cop show but somehow we got talking about THE SWEENEY and thought it would be amusing to see a techno modern cop in the seventies. It all mushroomed from that core idea.

Elmore Leonard wins Diamond Dagger

The Crime Writers' Association has awarded its Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2006 to American novelist, Elmore Leonard.

Leonard will be making a rare visit to London for the presentation of the award and said: "This is great news, by far the best kind of achievement award, to be recognised by fellow writers for the one thing I have ever wanted to do in my life, tell stories, what I've been doing for the past 55 years. I see the Diamond Dagger giving me a boost of energy, telling me to make the book I'm writing now the best one yet."

More from book2book.

Professionals and amateurs

Text of a (long) speech given by screenwriter John August about the distinction between being an amateur and professional writer.

When we say “professional,” I think what we’re really talking about is “professionalism,” which is this whole bundle of expectations about how a person is supposed to act.

World Book Day 2006

Just in case you didn't realise, today is World Book Day 2006.

World Book Day was designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and was marked in over 30 countries around the globe last year. The origins of the day we now celebrate in the UK and Ireland come from Catalonia, where roses and books were given as gifts to loved ones on St. George's Day − a tradition started some 80 years ago...A main aim of World Book Day is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.

BBC to revive Play for Today

The Play for Today strand that helped launch the careers of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Dennis Potter is to return next year, the BBC has confirmed.
The tentatively titled Evening Play will have a primetime slot on BBC One and will feature work by new writers.

A spokeswoman for the corporation said it was "very early days" and that no scripts had so far been commissioned.

More from BBC News.

The golden age of TV drama is... now?

The golden age of TV drama is... now? Discuss...

Grim, gritty realism was all the rage in TV drama in the 90s - think Cracker, Prime Suspect, Between The Lines, Cardiac Arrest, NYPD Blue, ER. But the noughties (terrible phrase - does anyone have anything better?) is more about high concept, glossy escapism, fantasy, adventure , fancy camerawork and effects, flashbacks and other non-linear narrative techniques - last night's final episode of BBC1's Life on Mars being a prime example.

Join the debate with Hason Deans on The Guardian's Organ Grinder blog.

Rob Long's Martini Shot podcast

Former Cheers writer Rob Long is producing weekly podcasts about life in Hollywood, Martini Shot.

Thanks to Patrick Goldstein in The LA Times for the link.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie postponed Off Broadway

A potential Off Broadway production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," an acclaimed solo show about an American demonstrator killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop the destruction of a Palestinian home, has been postponed because of concerns about the show's political content.

The production, a hit at the Royal Court Theater in London last year, had been tentatively scheduled to start performances at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village on March 22. But yesterday, James C. Nicola, the artistic director of the workshop, said he had decided to postpone the show after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feelings about the work.

More from Jesse McKinley The New York Times.

Update: In The Guardian, Katherine Viner, one of the people who adapted Rachel Corrie's writing for the stage, attacks the Theater Workshop's decision.

It makes you wonder. If a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded, and dead, American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggle to find out who she wanted to be, and how she found that by travelling to Gaza and discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live - if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else? The non-American, the non-white, the non-dead, the oppressed?

Further update: New York Theatre Workshop's Artistic Director, James Nicola, denies the allagations, on the company's website.

When we found that there was a very strong possibility that a number of factions, on all sides of a political conflict, would use the play as a platform to promote their own agendas, we asked a rather routine question, or so we thought, to our London colleagues about altering the time frame. Our intent in asking for the postponement was to allow us enough time to contextualize the work so Rachel Corrie’s powerful voice could best be heard above the din of others shouting for their own purposes.

Thanks to Mark Shenton for the link.

Update: the rebuttal of the rebuttal (if you're interested).

Science in plays

In The Financial Times, Chris Wilkinson looks at how playwrights tackle science and maths.

The best example of how a play can communicate a particular scientific idea is London's Soho Theatre's recent production On Ego. Born of a collaboration between its director Mick Gordon and the neuropsychologist Paul Brok, it seeks to explain "bundle theory". This is Francis Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" that we are "nothing but a pack of neurones". Or as Alex, a character in the play puts it, our consciousness is made up of "nothing but material substance: flesh and blood, bone and brain. . . There's no one there, no essence, no ego, no 'I'." The play works, not simply because it explains these ideas, but rather because, in the relationship between Alex and his brain-damaged wife, the huge implications of this theory are graphically demonstrated for us. The very structure of the play reflects the emotional and psychological dilemma that such an apparently counterintuitive theory poses for us as human beings.

Glorification of terrorism

This afternoon the Lords have to decide whether to defy the Commons and vote to remove the glorification clause from the terrorism bill for a second time. Artists - particularly in the arts which involve representation - will be hoping they'll do so.

More from Guild member David Edgar in The Guardian.

David Chase and James Gandolfini

With the final series of The Sopranos due to air in America next month, Bill Carter in The New York Times talks to creator David Chase and star actor, James Gandolfini.

Mr. Gandolfini and his imposing physical presence influenced Mr. Chase's understanding of the character from the very first days of filming. Mr. Chase recalled that in the pilot script, originally written in the late 1990's for the Fox network (one of the great misses in TV history), he had conceived a scene where Tony's nephew, Christopher, reveals that he is thinking of selling his story to Hollywood. In the script, Tony responded by cuffing Christopher behind the ear.

After HBO finally agreed to shoot the script, that moment remained in the pilot. When they got to the scene, Mr. Chase, who was directing, called "Action," and instead of that affectionate little cuff, he remembered: "Jim picks the guy up and just throws him. I can still see Michael Imperioli. He was just sitting there with a beer bottle in his hand and the next thing I know there's like this blur of movement and the beer bottle is rolling along the ground and Michael is up off his feet." Mr. Chase laughed, remembering the impression Mr. Gandolfini's move left on him. "Of course, this is how you lead people," he said.

That one gesture changed the show. "He was always going to be a tough, hard person for most people to love," Mr. Chase said. "But that is what a gangster is. "

Thanks to Alex Epstein for the link.

Da Vinci Code copy case begins

A claim that Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code copied the ideas of two other authors is going before London's High Court.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh claim Mr Brown stole the idea that Jesus had a child from their 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

They are suing publisher Random House, which also published their book. Random House denies the allegation.

More from BBC News.

Poetry collections

In The Independent, Hugo Williams reveals the secrets behind publishing poetry books.

When putting a book together I always think of what Philip Larkin told his publisher when asked if there might be another book in the offing. "In the past I've always had 10 good ones and the rest were fillers. Well, I've got the fillers.'' Not all of us are so rigorous. We go ahead and publish our fillers and are damned. Larkin said he always liked to put a good one at the beginning and at the end of a book. I always look there before buying anyone's new book. If the last poem's no good they're in trouble. Another consideration might be to sprinkle your "good ones'' throughout the book, to give an impression of quality, or at least to spread out your "fillers'' so they don't gang up on you.

Danny Stack's spec script challenge

Guild member Danny Stack was aiming to write a spec script over the weekend. Find out how he got on.

[Saturday:]I'm on page 32. I thought I'd get drunk tonight and plough my way through twenty more pages but I've had my drinks and am now too tired, so I'm going to bed.

Small publishers

The UK's small publishers are making a comeback, reports Tara Mulholland in The Herald International Tribune, thanks to people like Alessandro Gallenzi, founder of Alma Books.

...for now things look hopeful. Asked about the future of the British independent publisher, Gallenzi resorts to the image of Medusa: "You kill an independent publisher and the next day there will be five coming back again - good publishing comes down to independent thinking."

Venues for new plays

The nominees for this Sunday's Olivier Award for Best New Play comprise three plays premiered in the last year at the National, and one at the Royal Court: while it's a particular accomplishment that the National has managed to put itself at the centre of new writing, as well as much else, now (and a pity that the Royal Court, which styles itself as a writers' theatre, above all, should be lagging so far behind), the eternal quest (and question) for new plays remains what opportunities there are to develop them elsewhere.

Mark Shenton on The Stage Newsblog says that, with several prominent new-writing theatres struggling, competitions are becoming an increasingly important source of opportunity for playwrights.

Jean-Claude Carrière

Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (who has worked with directors including Milos Forman and Luis Buñuel) has just completed a book, Please Mr Einstein, that brings the famous physicist back to life. He talks to Peter Forbes in The Independent.

Carrière's Einstein project has fulfilled several goals. It has ensured that he won't (on his own reckoning) die an idiot, and a conscious purpose was "to seduce young people into science".

Richard Price and Len Blum

Two new writer interviews from the Writers Guild of America, west. With Richard Price (who has just finished adapating his novel Freedomland for the screen

People have this illusion that, If I write the script I can control the movie, and that's not true. It makes it even worse that you have that illusion. I think it's much more difficult to adapt your own stuff because you don't have the distance to be as ruthless as you need to be to make this thing work at a hundred and twenty pages. It's not even a hundred and twenty pages of prose; it's like a singing telegram. You've gotta throw so much stuff overboard. If you own every sentence of a book and you're in charge of gutting it, that doesn't make it easy. Just because you're a dentist, doesn't mean you should do your own root canal.

and Len Blum (one of the writers of the new Pink Panther remake).

My primary goal at this point [when a script is first submitted] is to give the reader a really good read and then have them reach for their checkbook saying, “I want to commit $60 million to making this picture.” If I wanted to make a really good movie, I might be specific about all kinds of other things, but that's not my goal. The reader who's going to commit $60 million just wants to have an excellent time reading. He's not going to make the movie; other people are going to make the movie. He just wants to have a good time, so I'm not too worried at this point about translating it to the screen.

BBC and Film Council announce new partnership

The BBC and the UK Film Council, two of the biggest stakeholders in British film, have joined forces to put film and broadcasting at the centre of a brand new partnership.

The BBC and the UK Film Council will work in tandem with a range of collaborative projects designed to give audiences more choice, develop and support creativity and skills across the industry and encourage public participation in film.

A key element of the BBC’s renewed commitment to film is a new BBC film strategy for broadcast across all its channels and platforms, supported by a minimum 50% increase in the BBC’s budget for film from £10 million a year to £15 million a year and an increase in the proportion of the BBC’s acquisition budget allocated to British films with a guaranteed £50 million over the next charter period subject to the outcome of the licence fee settlement.

More from the UK Film Council.

RTS nominations

Dramas by Guild members Paul Abbott and Andrew Davies lead the field in nominations for the Royal Television Society Awards 2005.

Shameless (Abbott) and Bleak House (adapted from Dickens by Davies) have both received four nominations.

The awards will be presented on 14 March.

Playwrights and war

In The Guardian, Adam Thorpe asks if contemporary playwrights are shying away from depicting violence on stage.

If anything, modern theatre prefers the bleak emptiness of the post-nuclear warscape to the chaotic fury of conventional battle.

Charley Says

BBC News is featuring classic public information films including the fabulous Charley Says animations. (I've been trying to see who is credited for these but can't find any names - does anyone know?)

Users are also invited to make and submit their own public information film.

More on digital books

Following the launch of the Sony Reader, here's more on why some people see a bright future for digital books, from Business Week.

Portable devices are becoming lighter and more appealing. Books are being scanned into digital form by the thousands. The most important step forward may be in "digital ink," the technology used for displaying letters on a screen. A small company called E Ink has created a method for arranging tiny black and white capsules into words and images with an electronic charge. Because no power is used unless the reader changes the page, devices with the technology could go as long as 20 books between battery charges. The text also looks just as sharp as ink on a printed page, since each capsule is the size and pigment of a grain of laser-jet toner.

Save Peep Show

Peep Show (written by Guild members Jess Armstrong and Sam Bain)is one of the funniest and most original sitcoms of recent years. That must be why Channel 4 are, apparently, considering axing it.

If you'd like to campaign for its survival you can sign an online petition.

Thanks to The Guardian's Culture Vulture blog for the link.

Coronation Street cleared by Ofcom

Ofcom, the independent media regular has ruled that Coronation Street was not in breach of the Broadcasting Code for an episoide on 16 January. 502 viewers complained about a character using the phrase "poor white trash." Here's the full text of the Ofcom decision(pdf file).

ITV 1, 16 January 2006, 20:30

Introduction

In this episode, single mum Sunita is struggling to keep her head above water with her new-born twins. Her brother Jayesh suggests the possibility of her going back to live with their parents. In the course of the conversation, he suggests that such a move would be preferable to living like “…poor white trash”. 502 viewers complained that the expression was unacceptable and racist.

Decision

In drama it is often the case that characters will say challenging things in order to propel storylines and, indeed, raise issues - sometimes of a controversial nature. Such characterisation, in terms of freedom of expression for writers, producers and actors, is an important right. It is important that modern day dramas are able to
reflect the society they seek to portray. Coronation Street often handles controversial issues, including race, from different angles.

Against this has to be balanced the possibility of offence. Rule 2.3 of the Broadcasting Code requires broadcasters to justify the inclusion of potentially offensive material through the context in which it is broadcast. Relevant contextual elements in this particular scene were that:

• the character of Jayesh has been established in previous episodes, when, it is clear, he is unhappy with the life and the life-partners Sunita has chosen. He is not necessarily a sympathetic character;
• Jayesh, although a man with traditional views, does not necessarily represent any one particular group or community;
  
• Sunita’s response to her brother clearly showed that his comments were unacceptable. She retorted “… some of my best friends are what you would call poor white trash”.
• Very soon afterwards, because Jayesh persisted in his attitude, Sunita threw him out telling him never to come back.
  

While the term “white trash” has obvious racist overtones, it can also be used in context to describe those from a low socio-economic group. It was clear throughout the dialogue and characterisation that the programme was not condoning the attitudes displayed by Jayesh. However, it is also clear that the programme, dwelling as it often does on contemporary social issues, has a right to reflect the fact that some people do hold such attitudes. By portraying them in dramatic form, in our view, the programme took a legitimate approach to exploring such matters.

Not in breach

Is theatre too sexual for young people?

With his new play for young people, Citizenship, soon to open at the National Theatre, Mark Ravenhill in The Guardian argues that a recent directive from the Welsh Assembly is seriously misguided.

In a new directive - which, it's feared, might soon be applied in England, too - the Welsh assembly states that kissing in school productions should be replaced by "a peck on the cheek or an embrace", and that characters should "hug each other in friendship". If this were applied to Citizenship, it would reduce the play to a nonsense. And how chilling the Welsh assembly's advice to teachers not to rely on "arguments about the artistic integrity of the text". It's vital to the production of Citizenship - and, yes, the artistic integrity of the text - that young people kiss and touch each other in a way that is sexually charged. Only through doing so can the young performers and their young audience make sense of the world and themselves.

Language of love

In The Daily Telegraph, Amanda Craig stands up for romantic fiction.

Dorothy Parker dismissed "lady novelists": "as artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush." D H Lawrence was equally sneering: "What's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy time." Few serious readers of romantic fiction would recognise the latter, and the former, while it may well encompass some writers of chick-lit, is so sweeping as to be ridiculous.

New plays in the West End

Is it still possible to succeed with a new play in the West End, asks Richard Brooks in The Times.

Though musicals are much more expensive to produce than dramas, which themselves cost about £350,000 to stage, they have a better chance of surviving and making money; hence, half the theatres in the West End are now staging musicals. Typically, however, a successful drama revival is likely to be of a play perceived as “classic”: they are known quantities and attract star players. So the West End can currently boast Kathleen Turner in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Woody Harrelson in Night of the Iguana, Martin Shaw in A Man for All Seasons and Edward Fox in You Never Can Tell. The same rule applies to the few examples of new work. Embers, previewing now, is a novel-adaptation by a “name” writer, Christopher Hampton, and comes armed with a heavyweight star — Jeremy Irons. Ditto with a newish play, Honour, starring Diana Rigg, which premiered at the National three years ago. Pretty safe bets for their backers.

Movie short-cuts

In films nothing can be allowed to slow down the action, says Larry Williams in The LA Times. But sometimes movie short-cuts are just too clumsy.

When the customer pays for the beer, he never wants any change. I'm not talking about leaving it on the bar but pointedly refusing to take it: "Keep the change." That phrase is all over the movies, for it eliminates change-making, which might slow down the story for 10 seconds. For me, the story stops when a guy tells a 7-Eleven cashier to keep the change.

That is the problem with movie shortcuts. Sometimes they're so glaring that they snap you out of immersion in the movie. That happens to me whenever a driver in a car chase looks over his shoulder at his pursuer. Why is he not looking in his rear-view mirror?

The Pitchers

If you don't read The Guardian on a Friday you might not have met Chet and Foley. They're The Pitchers - two Hollywood screenwriters in a comic strip created by Berger and Wyse.