The Play's The Thing

In The Observer, Brian Logan goes behind the scenes of Channel 4's upcoming reality playwriting series.

'There's almost a fear of being selected,' says a young writer, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. 'Because, you might actually get your play put on in the West End. Which six months ago none of us had imagined.'

It's hard to be critical of a project promoting new writing, but you do wonder if putting a brand new writer on in the West End is almost inevitably setting them, up to fail for the sake of TV. The producer Sonia Friedman almost admits as much herself.

'So am I panicking?' asks Friedman. 'No. Have I got a great play? Probably not. Do I have a theatrical event?' Pause, for dramatic effect. 'Probably.'

The Play's the Thing starts on Channel 4 on 12 June. Preview performances of the winning play begin on the same day at the New Ambassadors Theatre, London WC2.

Cannes 2006 - Babel

Having arrived in Cannes last night I was able to see my first film this morning at 8.30 - Babel, directed by Alejandro Inarritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga.

It's a multiple narrative, with four separate stories that overlap and interlink, and for me it highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of an increasingly common genre.

As in the Oscar-winning Crash, Babel's multiple stories allow a number of big name actors to have powerful storylines - it's a great way to get Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Koji Yakusho and Gael Garci­a Bernal in the same film. Each storyline is compelling in its own right and the performances are very strong. Jumping from story to story and country to country means that you're unlikely to get bored.

The concern is whether it adds up to anything very much. Common humanity separated by different languages (hence the title)? Maybe. But for me it felt like four totally separate stories no one of which was entirely satisfying.

Short Cuts, adapted and directed by Robert Altman from Raymond Carver's stories, which started the modern craze for multiple narratives in 1993, seemed to add up to more than the sum of its parts. I'm not sure the same could be said for Babel, even though it already seems to be generating an award-winning buzz

Move over Hollywood

In The Guardian Weekend, John Patterson and Gareth McLean celebrate the current Golden Age of American TV.

Today, US television is where cultural debates are sparked, and where popular culture renews and reinvigorates itself. Over the past 10 years, TV has slowly seized the creative initiative from the movies and run with it, all the way to the Emmys - and to the bank. With entire seasons of TV shows available on DVD and cheap iPod downloads of popular shows online, television is now teeming with beautifully written, well-made programmes, including The Sopranos, Deadwood, Law & Order and its many spin-offs, Lost, 24, Six Feet Under, The Shield and Nip/Tuck. Umbilically connected to the internet, TV is also able to attach itself swiftly to new currents in subterranean culture and bring them to viewers in a matter of days. This inventiveness affects all areas, from news to drama. And it is because of the sudden upsurge in TV drama, along with the immense fortunes to be made in it, that so many names we associate with the cinema are moving to television.

Film school

In The Guardian John Patterson lays into (American) film schools.

Since film school costs as much as a regular degree nowadays, film school is packed with precisely the people who have the fewest interesting things to say: those with parents who can sponsor them in education until they turn 30, and for whom the one transformative locale in life has been ... a college campus.

Brits compete for Tony Awards

Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Conor McPherson’s Shining City scooped three of the four slots in the Best Play nominations for the 2005-2006 Antoinette Perry (Tony) Awards announced on May 16. The fourth spot was filled by Rabbit Hole, written by David Lindsay-Abaire

More from The Stage.

More Cannes links

In addition to the links posted earlier this week, you can also find good Cannes coverage from:

• The Times
• BBC News Cannes reporter's log
• David Gritten's blog in The Daily Telegraph
• The LA Times
  
• The Hollywood Reporter

If you're going to Cannes, or are there already, Wendy Idle in The Times has a guide to the best parties.

According to a Fox spokeswoman, there will be no party after the out-of-competition screening of X-Men: The Last Stand because the talent are flying out immediately to attend the US premiere. This means either ta) there is no party. Or b) there is a party and it will be the most extravagant shindig yet, with barmen who can mix drinks using only their telekinetic powers. But, sorry, riffraff are banned.

Black theatre in Britain

In The Guardian Bonnie Greer assesses the state of black theatre in Britain.

Today's theatre houses several outstanding, award-winning young black playwrights, such as Roy Williams, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Debbie Tucker-Green. But two decades since I was first inspired by British theatre, the black presence is little more than marginal. In the late 1980s I would have predicted, based on the promise clearly apparent then, that the 21st century would have produced a handful of major, mature black playwrights, nurtured and supported through commissions and productions - just as the late August Wilson was in the US and, say, David Hare has been in this country. I would have expected to see black actors - particularly women - regularly appearing in leading roles. Black directors, costume and scenic designers, producers and an artistic director or two should all now be part of the level playing field that should be a characteristic of this, the best theatre in the world.

Akiva Goldsman - writing the Da Vinci Code

Akiva Goldsman is one of the world's highest profile screenwriters and his latest adaptation, of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, premieres in Cannes tomorrow. He talks to Rachel Abramowitz in The LA Times.

There are few screenwriters who are as commercially successful as Goldsman — he's practically the Jerry Bruckheimer of the genre — churning out popcorn entertainment as fast as he can type — everything from his early oeuvre of Grishams ("The Client" and "A Time to Kill") and Batmans ("Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin") to his more recent Ron Howard canon of "A Beautiful Mind" (for which he won his Academy Award), "Cinderella Man" and, now, "Da Vinci."

Conor McPherson interview

Irish playwright Conor McPherson talks to Jason Zinoman in The New York Times.

Anyone familiar with Mr. McPherson's career shouldn't be too surprised to discover that he was once an alcoholic, since his darkly comic plays are filled with early-morning hangovers and late-night binges. ([His new play] "Shining City" is unusual in that it includes only a few sips of wine.) His first was called "Rum and Vodka," and his most famous, "The Weir," which ran on Broadway for eight months in 1999, is set in a pub.

Cannes Film Festival 2006

If you're off to Cannes this week, or just want to follow the Festival from home, here are some sites that might help. Feel free to recommend any Cannes websites you like or to offer any tips or advice.

• Official Festival website
  
• Cannes Critics Week


• Cannes - A Virgin's Guide (including an excellent history of the Festival)


• The Guardian in Cannes


• Festival blog


• Weather forecast - looking good!

This blog will be coming from the Festival next week.

US networks turn to drama

Following the ratings success of recent series the US TV networks are commissioning an increasing number of new dramas. Leading the way, reports The New York Times, is ABC.

ABC, a network with some of television's biggest hits, as well as a lot of misses, will announce a new prime-time schedule today populated with a raft of new series.

It has ordered 12 new scripted series, the most of any network this season, clearly searching for some shows that will be able to match its existing hits, like "Desperate Housewives," "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy."

NBC, currently bottom of the ratings pile, is following suit.

In an unusual commitment to adding new drama to its schedule, NBC ordered six series out of the seven drama pilots it made during this development season. The network had already announced it would bring back several that had been considered on the fence for renewal, including "Las Vegas," "Crossing Jordan" and "Medium," and the six new hours will tip the network heavily in drama's direction.

The triumph of reality TV was, it seems, exaggerated.

Lyric's new season has no written plays

Hammersmith’s Lyric Theatre is to strenghten its links with innovative, physical storytelling this year, with an autumn/winter programme containing no traditionally-written work.

...[Artistic director David] Farr told The Stage: “We have built a really strong links with artists who are experimenting with how you tell stories, embracing everything theatre can do and really thinking the impossible."

More from The Stage.

Real jury will judge drama suspects

A jury made up of members of the public will decide whether a character in a new drama about date rape on digital channel More4 is guilty of the crime.

The 90-minute programme, in which a date rape scenario will be followed through from the alleged crime to the outcome of the trial, will also feature real-life barristers questioning the accused.

Independent producer Century Films is making the drama, which will begin with a scripted segment chronicling two colleagues who go on an away day and end up in bed together. The woman claims she was raped but the man says the sex was consensual.

More from Leigh Holmwood in Media Guardian (free registration required).

Guild's Wales Committee

The next meeting of the Guild's Wales Committee will take place tomorrow (17 May) at 7.30pm at in the Caio Arms, Cathedral Road, Cardiff. There will be a distinguished guest speaker, Lleucu Siencyn, Deputy-director of the Welsh Academy. All Guild members are welcome.

For more information, contact the Guild office.

Charlie Kaufman analysed

In The LA Times, David L. Ulin looks at the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and the artistic status of screenwriters in general.

The notion that screenwriters are artistically legitimate is hardly a new one, although it's been out of vogue for quite a while. "I think it used to be more true," says novelist Steve Erickson, who edits the literary journal Black Clock and is the film critic for Los Angeles magazine. "People like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges were known for the films they wrote. In fact, they became directors to protect their screenplays." Earlier this year, National Endowment for the Arts literature director David Kipen published a book titled "The Schreiber Theory," which argues that movies should be categorized by writer, not director. "Imagine a library of novels alphabetized by editor," he writes. To some extent, Kipen means to be provocative; the problem with looking at movies as writer-driven is that film is a profoundly collaborative art. "It's a very interesting situation," says Jonathan Lethem, whose novels, not unlike Kaufman's screenplays, use dark humor, pop culture and a touch of homegrown surrealism to get at deeper fascinations of his own. "I can understand the impulse to consider screenwriters as writers, but at the same time, the whole nature of screenwriting is to relinquish control. Even from the perspective of the audience, movies are different. You don't experience the story in the direct and intimate way a reader does on the page."

Thanks to Billy Mernit for the link - he has his own reflections on Kaufman's work.

I've hung out with Charlie on at least half a dozen occasions -- he and his wife are friendly with a couple near and dear to me -- but to say I "know" him with any great conviction would be to kid myself. He's famously difficult to get to know, a wary, guarded kind of fellow, and despite a number of conversations with the guy, he remains as mysterious to me as ever.

But I think I do know where he's coming from. It's not from trying to follow industry trends, or from how do I get an agent and sell my script for a million dollars? It's not from "what page is my first act turning point supposed to be on?" or from trying to second-guess What They're Looking For. He comes from, you know, a personal place.

Where the passion lives.

World Cup Tapes

Capture the magic, the mystery and the mayhem of the World Cup in a 2-3 minute monologue and win the chance to have it broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live with a star actor.

Full details from BBC Writersroom.

Text book success

How Naomi Simmons has sold almost 90 million books worldwide, by Jack Malvern in The Times.

Ms Simmons, from Shenley in Hertfordshire, is the author of New Standard English, a series of text books for primary school children that has sold 105 million copies in China.

But unlike [Dan] Brown, who has earned £250 million from royalties for his novels, Ms Simmons took a fixed payment of £160,000.

Ms Simmons and her co-authors became a phenomenon in China after the Chinese ministry of education decreed in 2001 that English should be taught in schools. Her book — published by Macmillan English and FLTRP, the publishing house of Beijing University — has inspired a generation of Chinese schoolchildren to sing songs about how the British use knives and forks rather than chopsticks.

The race to adapt

With the movie version of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code set to open in Cannes on Wednesday, Eric Pfanner in The International Herald Tribune looks at how studios are trying to hunt down the next big adaptation.

"There's more and more desire to see things that people haven't seen before, and a need for interesting source material, for films that don't fit a category," said David Livingstone, head of marketing at Working Title Films, the British production house behind "Pride and Prejudice."

"That's why literary adaptations are big," he said.

A new skin

As part of an overhaul of the Writers' Guild online, we've re-skinned this blog. No major changes but some sharpening up from what was previously very much patched together.

Credit to Talia Hussain from Edition for both the blog design and the new-look website.

NB Full Members of the Guild can log-in to the site and enter their credits to the Find A Writer database. It's still in beta, so if you have any questions or comments contact me c/o the Guild office.

ITV faces "Clause IV moment"

Speaking at the Royal Television Society last night, ITV director of television Simon Shaps admitted the broadcaster had neglected its main channel, reports Owen Gibson for Media Guardian (free registration required).

ITV's £300m spending on drama needed to be channelled into the best writers and be "more contemporary and less predictable". Mr Shaps said the drama reinvention would be accompanied by a "painful but necessary process" by which popular programmes including Celebrity Fit Club, Footballers Wives and Rosemary and Thyme would be dropped. It was, he said, "a kind of clause IV moment for ITV", referring to Tony Blair's reinvention of the Labour party.

Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland

The new National Theatre of Scotland heads the field with eleven nominations for the 2005-06 Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Dundee on 4 June.

The appeal of docs

In The Times Stephen Armstrong examines the enduring appeal of medical dramas.

The debuts of Grey’s [Anatomy] and Vital Signs mean there are now 14 medically related shows on air at the moment — if you include M*A*S*H reruns on cable. The curative couple join Casualty, ER, House, Bodies, Nip/Tuck, Holby City, Kingdom Hospital, No Angels and Silent Witness, as well as the comedies Green Wing and Scrubs, in supplying us with white coats and hormones to an astonishing level. It’s currently possible to absorb almost 24 hours of doctor-related telly in your average viewing week. Why? Of course, in dramatic terms, the advantage of a medical setting is clear. “It’s far easier for people to relate to the human- interest element in a medical drama than in a legal drama simply because they come across them every day,” says John Forte, the creator of Vital Signs. “I wanted to tell a family story, but the medical world was an immensely useful vehicle for Rhoda. It made the emotions attached to her work life far more intense.”

Murakami accuses editor over manuscript

Writer Haruki Murakami in the March issue of a monthly magazine accused one of his editors of selling several of his manuscripts to bookstores without his permission.

The accusation has raised questions in the publishing industry as to who has ownership rights to manuscripts and whether such unpublished writings should be on the market at all.

In the article, Murakami, the noted author and translator whose most recent novel is "Kafka on the Shore," described the behavior of the now-deceased editor, who was a longtime acquaintance, as a type of theft.

More from Arata Sugimoto in The Japan Times.

BBC Writers Academy reminder

Remember, if you're planning to apply for the BBC Drama Series Writers Academy the closing date is 15 May.

Finds in translation

In The Guardian literary translator Eric Dickens argues that the British publishing industry should be creating and publishing more translations.

At the London Book Fair we were treated to soothing words that told us that it was quite normal that only three per cent of books published in Britain are translations. At the Leipzig Book Fair a few days later, a Ukrainian intellectual spoke about the state of his culture. Yuri Andrukhovych has written one of the few Ukrainian postmodernist novels to have been translated into English - Perverzion, translated by Michael Naydan - but he is also a blunt purveyor of home truths when it comes to central and eastern Europe. At Leipzig, Andrukhovych suggested that Ukrainians should be afforded visa-free travel to western Europe. But are they being afforded such travel into the minds of British readers?

Starbucks New Voices at The Old Vic

The Old Vic is inviting applications from 18-25 year-olds in Greater London to take part in their next 24 Hour Play Challenge, sponsored by Starbucks.

The closing date for applications is 9 June 2006.

Andrew Davies interview

You can't get away from Andrew Davies at the moment. But why would you want to? This week, with his new adaptation of Alan Holinghurst's In The Line Of Beauty launching on Sunday, he's interviewed by Jan Moir in The Daily Telegraph.

Andrew Davies remains the man with the golden script, who can command upwards of £200,000 per project. At least in his case, it looks like BBC money well spent and even Davies is bemused at recent revelations that the corporation spends millions on payments to disc jockeys such as Jonathan Ross and Terry Wogan: "I think they ought to be punished rather than paid well. I don't want to listen to them. I'd try to arrange it so that there wasn't anybody talking bollocks in between the records. Or having inane competitions and f---ing phone-ins."

That's one thing that makes him angry. Hollywood executives who treat him badly are another. "Oh, it's dreadful, infuriating and humiliating! I've got a monstrous ego to keep in check and a list of bastards I won't work with again, although they probably feel the same way about me," he says, then laughs.

David Shore interview

David Shore, creator of House, talks to John Doyle in the Ontario Globe and Mail. Thanks to Denis McGrath for the link.

In my opinion, Canadian television so often fails for the same reason American movies so often fail: They're not controlled by writers. Now I'm biased on this one and there are obviously great, smart directors out there and great, smart producers but no one knows the story like the writer. American movies are controlled by directors; Canadian television is controlled by producers; American television is controlled by writers.

US Guilds sign mobisodes agreement

The Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) have reached a landmark agreement with Touchstone Television covering the writing of mobisodes for ABC's television series Lost, creating a framework for future industry mobile-content and other new technology agreements.

The agreement was reached after WGA members working on Lost insisted that proposed mobisodes be guild-covered. Their stance was supported by members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and the three talent guilds coordinated negotiations with Touchstone. While the agreement covers mobisodes the network had ordered to supplement the Lost series, the new deal provides a flexible template for future negotiations, when the Companies and content creators address issues related to emerging technological platforms.

More from the Writers Guild of America, west.

Looking back at Osborne's Anger

Fifty years after the premiere of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger at The Royal Court, the theatre is hosting a week of special events under the heading of The Angry Brigade.

Neil Smith for BBC News also looks back at Osborne's legacy.

It [the Court week of events] is the cause of some satisfaction for Osborne's biographer John Heilpern, who aims to challenge critics who have questioned the play's significance.

"It was Look Back in Anger that opened the gates to other playwrights and put the Royal Court on the map," he says.

"The revisionists have tried to make out John made no contribution whatsoever and was a lousy playwright.

"As his biographer, I'm thrilled his reputation is being re-established in this way."

Sony Radio Awards 2006

As always, Radio 4 programmes won both the comedy and drama awards at the Sony Radio Awards last night.

The drama winner was No Background Music, by US playwright Normi Noel, based on interviews with American nurses in the Vietnam war.

The Comedy award went to The Ape That Got Lucky, Chris Addison's adaptation of his own Edinburgh Fringe show.

Rounders lawsuit

A landmark case is finally making its way to a courthouse near you (if you live in L.A.), and it could potentially affect how every screenwriter does business in this town. Possibly for the better, but possibly for the worse.

Call this one a case of “be careful what you wish for.”

Craig Mazin looks at the issues around the lawsuit being brought in LA by screenwriter Michael Grosso who claims that Miramax stole his ideas when making the film Rounders.

Doing it for money

John August reflects on the anonymity of screenwriters.

There are no famous screenwriters.

There are rich screenwriters with houses in Malibu. There are acclaimed screenwriters with awards on their mantels. But none of them are actually famous. Your aunt in Pittsburgh can’t name a single screenwriter — except for you, her little champ, working so hard to make it in Hollywood.

BBC dominates BAFTAs

BBC dramas dominated the BAFTA TV Awards last night. Winners included:

• Single drama: The Government Inspector (Channel 4, written by Peter Kosminsky)
• Drama serial: Bleak House (BBC One, adapted from Charles Dickens's novel by Andrew Davies)
• Drama series: Doctor Who (BBC One, lead writer Russell T Davies)
• Continuing drama: EastEnders (BBC One)
  
• Situation comedy: The Thick Of It (BBC Four, created by Armando Iannucci )
  
• Comedy programme or series: Help (BBC Two, written by Chris Langham and
  Paul Whitehouse ).

Russell T Davies also won the Dennis Potter Award.

Cannes Grand Cru Award

Short films are the accepted way to make a splash as a director, but what about the writers? Too often scriptwriting for short films is undervalued or just ignored.

That's why the Writers' Guild has teamed up with the French Guilde des Scénaristes and screenwriting magazines across Europe to launch the Grand Cru Award at Cannes Film Festival 2006.

The Award will go to the best screenplay from short films selected for Critics Week at the Festival, with a jury chaired by Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Amores Perros).

The Award will be presented in Cannes on 25 May and is supported by the MK2 Group, the SACD, UGS, the EICAR school of television and film, Editions Montparnasse, and Arane.

BBC Film Network downloads

BBC Film Network will make selected short films available as downloads for a trial period of 12 months.

The download application, which will be available to the first 10,000 visitors to sign up, will allow users to watch a selection of the very best shorts in full screen, at a quality similar to a DVD.

More from the BBC Press Office.

Jay Presson Allen obituary

American screenwriter and playwright Jay Presson Allen has died at the age of 84. She was best known for adapting work for the screen, including Marnie, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and Cabaret. There is an obituary by Ronald Bergan in The Guardian.

Based on a pulp novel by Winston Graham, Marnie, one of Hitchcock's most bizarre psychological/sexual thrillers, was Allen's first screenplay. "Hitch taught me more about screenwriting than I learned in all the rest of my career, and I think of his flair for visual shorthand whenever I get verbose," she recalled. "I think one of the reasons that Hitch was fond of me, and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote, was that I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has to be a reason for everything. And he loved that."

Skip Press

Hollywood screenwriting coach Skip Press, profiled by Patricia B. Gray for Fortune Small Business.

Letters pour in from all over the world - France and Israel and Russia - heartbreaking in their naivete and earnest ambition to make it big in the movie business. Lloyd "Skip" Press answers them all, dispensing encouragement by e-mail deep into the night from his small three-bedroom bungalow in Burbank, Calif.

One of the busiest screenwriting coaches in Hollywood, he's selling a dream - and he has found buyers across the globe. "I like laying out the red carpet for newcomers to the business," Press says. "Everyone wants to get to Hollywood."

ITV desperate for a comedy hit

ITV director of entertainment and comedy Paul Jackson has vowed there will be a prime time sketch show or sitcom on ITV1 by next year, in order to salvage the network’s ailing reputation in the genre.

The broadcaster is desperate to find a hit comedy that will appeal to ITV1 viewers and attract mass audiences and Jackson has pledged that he will do whatever is needed to get a series in the genre on to the channel in prime time.

He said: “There is no doubt that there will be a big comedy on ITV1 between 8 and 10pm by next year. Either a sketch show or a sitcom. I don’t know what it will be yet but I do know there will be one.”

More from The Stage.

BBC Comedy Soup

Almost unnoticed (by me anyway), the new BBC comedy website, Comedy Soup, has gone live. As we reported before, it's the BBC's attempt to get people uploading comedy clips to create a comedy-only YouTube.

BBC Three are doing their bit by running a Funny Hunt offering "exclusive access to some of Britain's top comedy writers, performers and producers at a series of special masterclasses held in Manchester" for people uploading the funniest stuff.

McGovern's Street recommissioned

Guild member Jimmy McGovern's series, The Street, has been recommissioned by the BBC half-way through its first run, reports Media Guardian (free registration required). Other writers, such as Guild member Marc Pye, have also written episodes of the drama.

John Yorke, the BBC joint head of independent drama, said of the recommission: "It's incredibly reassuring that in this day and age there's still an appetite for single plays and for voices as uncompromising as Jimmy McGovern's. The fact that The Street has found a mass audience and touched a chord with so many people is true testament to Jimmy's talent."

ITV Productions' executive producer of the show, Sita Williams, said: "What is exciting and continues to be exciting about The Street is not only Jimmy McGovern's writing, but his work with new writers who bring their raw talent to project.

Microsoft to create original web shows

Nearly 10 years after wholeheartedly but prematurely embracing original entertainment programming on the Web, Microsoft is re-entering the fray. But instead of attempting to contort itself into a media company by hiring scores of relatively unknown writers and producers and go it virtually alone, this time Microsoft has chosen to team up with some high-profile Hollywood talent.

The first deal for its MSN Originals initiative is an alliance with Ben Silverman, one of the prime movers behind importing the reality show craze to the United States and the producer of shows like "The Office" and "The Biggest Loser" on NBC.

The one-year, multimillion-dollar deal calls for the creation of 10 Web pilots for MSN, each tailored to one or more strengths of the Web. Four shows have already been given the go-ahead, including a short-form comedy that can be described, in classic high-concept Hollywood style, as "The Office" meets "Reno 911" meets "Airplane," doled out in two-and-a-half minute bits starting this fall. Adding to the sitcom verisimilitude: Tom Arnold is close to signing on to star as the lovably flawed pilot for a commuter airline.

More from Lorne Manly in The New York Times.

Has Michael Frayn retired?

In The Guardian, Mark Lawson talks to playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

In the study of his Surrey home, the low hum of a word processor hints reassuringly at potential future titles. But is it true that a second leading British dramatist is following Harold Pinter into retirement? "Well," Frayn says. "If you don't actually have a job, it's very hard to know if you've retired from it. Nobody comes in and gives you a clock." The newspaper story had suggested that Frayn's next book, The Human Touch - a volume of philosophical reflections out in September - would be his final publication. "Yes, it may well be. It's extremely difficult to know. I've always felt, throughout my working life, that I'd be quite unable to write again as of next Monday."

Sex in video games

Brenda Brathwaite tells Kathleen Craig in Wired about what parents should and shouldn't worry about when it comes to video games.

I believe it's not fair to be forced to have a Disneyesque palette for your games. If somebody said to an artist you couldn't have any nudes in a museum, you have to take them all down because kids might see them, then artists would be in an uproar. If that happened to the movie industry? Actors would walk. Everybody would.

When novelists get personal

Is all fair in love, war and novels? Peter Carey's wife, Alison Summers, thinks not, as she tells Anthony Barnes in The Independent.

Alison Summers believes, like a number of others, that passages in the book depicting a marital break-up are a thinly-veiled attack on her and part of an attempt to smear her following the couple's divorce nearly three years ago.

The phrase "alimony whore", repeated within the pages of Theft: A Love Story, has left her feeling "devastated" by Carey's version of events.

US TV market list

If you're harbouring ambitions to write for an American series, you can find out who to contact (through your agent) from the WGAw published TV market list. You'll probably need to move to LA, too.

John Hopkins remembered

On the eve of a retrospective at the National Film Theatre, Alan Plater in The Guardian remembers TV scriptwriter John Hopkins.

Hopkins was way ahead of the game in writing about dysfunctional families; about racism, in both Z Cars and his 1965 play Fable; about sexuality, in Horror of Darkness, also in 1965, starring Nicol Williamson and Glenda Jackson; and about police brutality, in his stage play, This Story of Yours.

Norman Morrill interview

Norman Morrill, creator of TV series Thief (currently running in the UK on Sky One), talks to the WGAw's Dylan Callaghan.

At the very start I said to FX it was going to be a black lead. We all know the challenges with something like that, but it was the story I wanted to tell, and I think it's the story with America right now.

Writers have a lot of clichés in this business like, “I want the city to be a character in the show.” Another one is, “I want to have race without it being racial.” I wanted it to be about the things that are racial without making a diatribe about race. It is what it is. This is America, and you deal with it as it comes. Nick's life is coming apart, but he knows a black man and a white girl in the South going out to dinner draws attention. I don't need to write two paragraphs of dialogue into somebody's mouth to make a point about that.

There's also an article about the show by Fiona Morrow in The Times.

Canongate’s MD to move to Granta

Canongates's MD, David Graham, will become MD of Granta Publications in the summer, taking a lead role in new owner, Sigrid Rausing’s plans to revitalise the Granta business. The new role will involve overall managerial and commercial responsibility for both Granta’s book and magazine divisions as well as at Portobello Books, where he will also become MD.

More from Publishing News.

Goldman is Soho's new artistic director

Lisa Goldman has been appointed as the new artistic director of Soho Theatre, replacing Abigail Morris who left the venue earlier this year.

Goldman co-founded new writing company The Red Room in 1995 and is currently its artistic director. While there she has produced work that includes Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman, Anthony Neilson’s Stitching and The Censor, and Parv Bancil’s Made in England.

More from The Stage.

James Patterson interview

In The Daily Telegraph Cassandra Jardine meets best-selling novelist James Patterson.

He considers himself a true thriller writer, unlike John Grisham: "He sets a good hook but then meanders. I set the hook, and keep setting the hook. Every chapter thrusts the story and the character forwards and turns on the movie projector in our heads."

BBC programme catalogue

The BBC has launched an experimental programme catalogue. Seems to hold mostly pretty basic information, but it does have over 900,000 entries. Are your credits listed?

Young American novelist admits "copying"

We seem to be entering an age of plagiarism scandals. The latest concerns 19 year-old American Kaavya Viswanathan, who has admitted copying portions of her hit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.

Ms. Viswanathan, 19 and a sophomore at Harvard, has previously said her copying from two young adult novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" was "unintentional and unconscious." In the interview, she said she had begun reading Ms. McCafferty's books when she was in high school and had read both books three or four times. She said she had last read Ms. McCafferty's novels in the fall of her senior year; she did not begin working on the manuscript that eventually became "Opal" until months afterward.

More from Dinitia Smith in The New York Times.

Actors might escape smoking ban

Actors may be exempted from the smoking ban if lighting up on stage or in front of the cameras is a key part of their performance, health officials say.
Characters like Absolutely Fabulous's chain-smoking Patsy would not be able to smoke on set or on stage if next summer's ban in England goes ahead.

Theatres also argued they would not be able to portray historic figures like the cigar-smoking Winston Churchill.

Exemptions are now being considered where smoking is integral to the plot.

More from BBC News.

BBC Creative Future

The BBC today unveiled Creative Future, a new editorial blueprint designed to deliver more value to audiences over the next six years and turn the BBC's public purposes laid out in the recent Government White Paper into quality content for the on-demand world.

Plans include:

Create a new teen brand delivered via existing broadband, TV and radio services, including a new long-running drama and comedy, factual and music content

In Drama – create fewer titles with longer runs, find creative space for outstanding writers and cherish the programmes audience love best like EastEnders, Casualty and Holby City

In Comedy – improve the creative pipeline across all platforms, pilot more shows, find new talent and build the big hits for BBC ONE

More from the BBC Press Office.

Guild website and email

We're still having server problems so the Guild website and office email is likely to be down for the rest of the day. Sorry about that. I'll post any updates as soon as we have them.

"I'll have what she's having"

A terrific analysis of the famous When Harry Met Sally fake orgasm scene, by Billy Mernit.

The credible context for this fake orgasm stunt is a New York deli -- in itself a brilliant, necessary choice, in obeying the genre's exploit-all-reversals edict: the original scene was written for an apartment, and according to Ephron it was Ryan who wisely suggested it going public. Rom-com humor's well-spring is embarrassment: things private going public is one of the genre's fundamental comedic reversals.

More on Harley Granville Barker

With Granville Barker's classic play, The Voysey Inheritance, opening at the National Theatre this week, director David Farr argues in The Guardian that now id the time to move beyond the theatrical realism that he began.

It is also clear that we must redefine the whole meaning of "new work". Granville Barker relentlessly championed the importance of new work at the beginning of the 20th century. It is time for us to take up his challenge once again at the start of the 21st - but in a new way. New work can no longer be restricted to a conventional writing process. Writers, directors and performers are working as never before to unearth new ways of telling new stories.

I think that far from being threatened by this collaborative way of working, the writer will emerge stronger. We are already seeing this in the relationship between the writer David Eldridge and the director Rufus Norris: their collaboration on Festen was the great hit of 2004 and has directly led to a hugely ambitious new piece for the National, Market Boy. In the autumn the Lyric will present Pool (No Water), a new collaboration between physical movement company Frantic Assembly and the writer Mark Ravenhill. There is an explosion of possibility in our form right now, and what we don't need is anyone pulling us back by the reins.

The economics of publishing

A fascination breakdown of the economics of American publishing, by Anna Louise on Live Journal.

BBC Series Writers Academy

The BBC is inviting applications for the second year of its Series Writers Academy.

In order to apply you must have had a television or radio drama or a short film (not a student film) produced, or a theatre piece performed professionally. The closing date for entries is 15 May 2006.

The training you receive from BBC Drama Series Writers Academy will give you the specific skills required to write for some of the BBC'’s most popular format series such as Doctors, EastEnders, Holby City and Casualty.

Potential writers will have already had at least one film, television or radio drama script produced or one theatre piece performed professionally. The Writers Academy will train up to 8 writers a year, over a period of twelve months.

For an insight into last year's recruitment process, Danny Stack has the inside story of his own near miss.

The Guild's website and email

We're switching servers this weekend ahead of the launch of a new-look website. Hopefully any disruption will be minimal but bear with us if there are any problems.

Watson’s Wind-Up

A new opportunity from BBC Writersroom:

Watson’s Wind-Up is a topical sketch show broadcast on Saturdays at 12:35pm on BBC Radio Scotland. The show is inviting unsolicited submissions for the remaining episodes of the current series.

The show has a cast of three, led by the mimicry talents of Jonathan Watson, and ably supported by Tom Urie and Gabriel Quigley. Writers should bear in mind we have a cast of two men and a woman when submitting material and try to tailor their ideas to fit with the show.

We’re looking for anything topical that week, from 10 seconds to two minutes. As the show airs on Radio Scotland the stories should ideally have a Scottish angle, but for the biggest international stories, this isn’t too crucial. For people living out of Scotland and unfamiliar with the show, it is available on Listen Again.

Please submit any material to philipdiffer@comedyunit.co.uk by noon on Thursdays 20 April, 27 April and 4 May.

Friends writers cleared

Dirty jokes and sexual conversation among the writers of hit sitcom Friends did not amount to sexual harassment of an assistant, a US court has ruled.

The California Supreme Court has rejected a claim by Amaani Lyle, 32, who transcribed the writing sessions.

"Sexual antics and sexual discussions" by the show's writers were not aimed at Ms Lyle, Justice Marvin Baxter decided.

More from BBC News.

Ken Levine also has a take on the story.

If you were ever to be in one of these rooms you would likely be appalled, offended, even outraged…but you would never laugh so much and so hard in your life.

Hanif Kureishi Q&A

At the launch BBC Writersroom's new mentoring scheme, Hanif Kureishi took part in a Q&A.

Sometimes when you begin to write you almost begin to feel an enormous sense of self-disgust and great sense of 'oh my god, how could anyone write this rubbish?' All these voices start to crowd onto you as you begin to write - the hardest thing is to carry on writing with all the other voices chattering at you continuously saying 'you're an idiot, this is rubbish, get a proper job' etc.

You need to be able to hold all that off in order to have a clean space to work out what your thoughts are. The hardest bit of writing is to clear out all those interferences.

Downloadable movies

A top producer of hard-core porn will start selling downloadable movies that customers can burn to DVD and watch on their TVs, illustrating how Southern California's multibillion-dollar adult entertainment industry may again set the technological pace for Hollywood.

Letting people burn downloaded movies is considered key to the growth of online distribution. Despite the proliferation of fast Internet connections, most people still want to watch movies on television but lack an easy way to get them off the computer. Plus, hard drives can store only so many space-hogging movies.

More from Dawn C. Chmielewski and Claire Hoffman in The LA Times.

Author of The Graduate faces eviction

The author behind the film The Graduate faces eviction from his home in East Sussex because of rent arrears.

Novelist Charles Webb, 66, and his partner have only days to pay two months' overdue rent, totalling nearly £1,600, on their flat in Hove.

Mr Webb wrote the book on which the 1967 movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft was based.

The Californian author accepted a one-off payment of £14,000 for the novel, while the film made £60m.

More from BBC News.

Wired magazine on videogames

The April issue of Wired magazine is a videogames special, including an article by guest editor Will Wright.

In an era of structured education and standardized testing ...[the] generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

Craig Mazin interview

One of the writers of Scary Movie 4, Craig Mazin, interviewed by Dylan Callaghan for the Writers Guild of America west.

Because I was raised in the era of the personal computer, everything I do is typed. I have a very odd mechanic to my writing. I call it “ebb and flow.” My wife says when I'm writing, she hears constant typing, but I'm not always moving forward. A lot of times I'm whacking the delete key. It's about steady motion.

Muriel Spark obituaries

There have, of course, been obituaries for Muriel Spark in all the main papers over the weekend, including The Independent. There have also been tributes from, among others, AS Byatt.

One of my favourites [of Spark's stories] is 'The Driver's Seat'. It is about a woman who decides she's going to get herself killed. At the beginning she is buying garish clothes to attract a murderer; at the end she has found him and is dead. The character devises and executes the plot, and it says something very odd about who is "responsible" for evil. The murderer is a kind of victim.

It was the originality of the idea that I admired. You had the feeling that it wasn't Spark the writer who was judging the characters, but some unchanging Divine Justice. This allowed her to have her detached, even flatly sardonic tone. She was a very moral writer, but in a wicked sort of way.

More tributes from:David Lodge, Mark Lawson, Allan Massie.

Mike Leigh interviews

With his play Two Thousand Years back in repertoire at The National Theatre, Guild member Mike Leigh is interviewed in The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.

"To be honest, the way I work, which involves sharing and being open, to a great extent derives specifically from the open, healthy democratic and creative environment of the kibbutz," he says.

Resurgence of the short story

A few years ago short stories were commonly seen as a safe and unexciting form, says Annie Kirby in The Guardian. But the mood has changed, helped by several major new short story prizes.

Far from being safe, the short story is hazardous territory for writers, the degree of risk inversely proportional to the word count. There is room for forgiveness in a novel, but botch a sentence in a 500-word story and there is no space to recover. There is also risk in the necessary ambiguity of short stories. The writer, with so little time to tell the tale, must trust the reader to take responsibility for filling in the gaps.

How to be a good showrunner

Advice from Ken Levine, a man who should know better than most.

People ask me what’s it like to be a showrunner. I tell them “did you see the end of BONNIE & CLYDE?” It is a constant barrage of problems coming at you from all directions. It can be overwhelming…which is why I’d take the show runner from any well run series and replace Bush with him immediately.

Blogs and plogs

Spike Magazine has a round-up of some interesting literary blogs, including Ian Hocking's experiment with Amazon's new author blogging tool.

AmazonConnect is a newish scheme launched by, who else, Amazon.com, in which authors can contribute to a blog whose entries then appear on the personalized pages of readers who bought their book. Apparently, entries also show up on Amazon.com book searches, so we authors can reach readers who have yet to wallow in the muddy delights of our fiction.

They're called "plogs", apparently.

Rejection letters

When editors and agents reject a manuscript they tend to use a tried and trusted formulation: 'Thank you for your submission, which I read and enjoyed. Unfortunately I don't feel it is quite right for us.' John Howard's children's book, The Key to Chintak, garnered so many of these identikit responses that he suspected the editors and agents weren't even bothering to turn the title page.

So he sent in a new manuscript, The Tin Drum, not his own words this time but extracts from a washing-machine manual.

After a delay the replies started to arrive. You've guessed it: 'Thank you for your submission, which I read and enjoyed. Unfortunately…'

More from Mark Sanderson in The Daily Telegraph.

BBC Decades

BBC Two is set to commission 30 single dramas from different writers for a landmark series called Decades. Making the announcement, Jane Tranter, BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning, said:

30 single films, scripted by 30 of the best British writers - Decades will chart the last 35 years of our social, political and cultural history, providing an incredibly rich picture of our past through the individual voices of 30 British writers.

We are in discussion with a number of writers, and ideas are still being formulated, but the ambition at the heart of this project is to capture the essence of the last four decades which will resonate with our audience on a very personal level.

More from the BBC Press Office.

Dream Team to finish

Dream Team, Sky One's long-running drama about Harchester football club, has been cancelled after 10 years by the channel's new director of programmes, Richard Woolfe.

Jane Hewland, the programme's creator and executive producer, said today the 10th series of the Sunday night drama now in production would be the last.

Ms Hewland, who makes Dream Team through her independent production company, Hewland International, added that she had probably made a mistake by killing off a lot of characters at the beginning of the current series, which had led to a collapse in ratings.

More from Maggie Brown in Media Guardian (free registration required).

BAFTA TV Craft Awards

Nominations have been announced for the 2006 BAFTA TV Craft Awards. Up for the writers' award are Andrew Davies (Bleak House), Russell T Davies (Doctor Who), Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (Extras) and Peter Kosminsky (The Government Inspector).

The awards will be presented on 19 May.

Imagine - Radio 2 competition

In collaboration with BBC writersroom, BBC Radio 2 have launched a national competition for new drama, asking writers to imagine an encounter with their music legend and use it to create imaginative, original drama.

Be funny, be bold, tell a great story in less than 10 minutes.

You can meet anyone, be anyone, go anywhere, do anything... Turn your dramatic ideas into a radio drama between three and ten minutes long and it could be broadcast on the Mark Radcliffe show.

More form BBC writersroom.

ITV2 to develop new comedy

ITV2 is to plough millions into boosting its comedy output in a bid to become a breeding ground for big-hitting shows that can transfer on to the main channel.

The network is keen to use its digital channels to increase audiences in the genre, into which ITV has found notoriously difficult to break. It is hoped the move will enable the broadcaster to develop projects over time and help it emulate the success of shows such as Little Britain, which aired on radio before transferring to BBC3 and later BBC1.

More from Liz Thomas in The Stage.

Up Jimmy's Street

Guild member Jimmy McGovern interviewed by Carol Midgely in The Times ahead of his new TV series, The Street, which starts on Thursday.

Jimmy McGovern suggests meeting in The Grapes, a working man’s pub near his home in Liverpool that has an abundance of fruit machines and the TV racing on at full volume. I had expected him to pick his local, another traditional pub called the White Horse, but it turns out that it’s non-smoking now, so that is that.

“Smoking and drinking are the tools of the trade,” he says slightly ruefully, lighting up a fag. “Do you want another glass of lager?” Human weakness in the face of temptation is, of course, McGovern’s stock-in-trade. Alcoholism, gambling addiction, adultery, rape and, ultimately, guilt and death are the engines that have driven his dramas from Cracker to The Lakes. Other writers use these themes, naturally, but nobody does it quite like the Master. McGovern is renowned for having zero squeamishness around ugly subjects.

Harley Granville-Barker

He ushered in contemporary drama, drew up the blueprint for a national company, and wrote gripping, complex plays, yet Harley Granville-Barker is little known today. Richard Eyre, former director of the National Theatre, pays tribute to a forgotten hero.

More in The Daily Telegraph. Granville-Barker's play, The Voysey Inheritance previews at the National Theatre from 18 April.

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.