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.