Via Gawker, from the NY Observer: genuine NY kids fill in the rest of the sentence, “When you’re 10, you should be able to…”
After four years running NBC’s “The West Wing,” the show’s creator and exec producer has elected to leave the Warner Bros. TV-produced White House drama. Exec producer-helmer Thomas Schlamme is also ankling.
“Creative and financial differences with the net and studio may have played a role in Sorkin’s decision, but were not likely the determining factor. Both men have at least another year left on their deals with WBTV.
“John Wells, who’s also been an exec producer on the show since its start, has agreed to take on an expanded role at the series, essentially serving as showrunner. Execs at NBC and WBTV asked Wells to take the reins when Sorkin and Schlamme informed them of their plans.”
…Sigh. For a few years, now, this has been the only television outside of the news that I watch regularly: the only show for which, when it’s on, everything else in the house stops. And it’s been the scripts that have made the difference. As “West Wing” fans, we’ve been lucky to be in Ireland: RTE (I have to leave the fada off the E, it upsets the RSS feed…) is one of only two English-language European broadcasters to be carrying it — E4, Channel 4’s pay service, is the other — and RTE is also showing current-season episodes rather than airing them long after the US season is over. (I still wonder how they managed that deal with WB.)
Well, we’ll see how it goes from here. I fear the worst, but I’d be glad to be proven wrong.
I had to laugh a few times at the tone of this Variety column from their normally-moderately-clued-in commentator on the interface of the literary world with the world of TV and film, Jonathan Bing. (I’m hoping this isn’t “premium content”.) It invokes the stereotype of wirters as necessarily solitary beings, and does a few other funny things. Just a few snippets:
“For screenwriters who’ve seen their movies trumpeted in junkets and TV campaigns, the quiet, low-budget, tactical nature of publishing marketing may come as a shock.”
(Yeah, well, at least their names get mentioned in the marketing of the books in a way that’s actually noticeable. By contrast: want to find the writer’s name on the movie poster for, say, X-MEN 2? Bring a magnifying glass. Hear the writer’s name on the commercials? See it on the Pepsi cups? I don’t think so.)
“Some novelists find the fat paycheck and the glitz of Hollywood irresistible, even if it means giving up control over the fate of one’s work. Screenwriters, on the other hand, want to pour their talents into a vehicle more meaningful than the typical megaplex hit, even if the pay is, hour for hour, far inferior.”
(For the first part of this: fair enough, so far as it goes. But the wise novelist who’s Crossed Over also remembers Sterling’s Stricture (Revised): “Hollywood is where they stick your tits in the wringer [there’s a slightly more robust version of this metaphor for male writers, which Sterling used in his original dictum] and start turning the crank while handing you thousand-dollar bills. When you realize that you can’t do without those thousand-dollar bills…they’ve gotcha.”)
But rather further down the article, the line that brought the house down: “Writing novels has its own rewards, of course. There are no rewrites, and if the book is under contract, chances are will be published….”
Whoops, sorry, didn’t know I was reading alternate-universe SF! I think probably none of the big-ticket screenwriters-turned-novelists Bing quotes at the beginning of the article were willing to admit to rewriting to editorial direction. But if that’s not the case, one thing’s for sure: they don’t have any of my editors.
…Back to work now. Today is Peter’s turn in the Sterling Script-O-Matic, while I get to luxuriate in the Land of No Rewrites. (Guffaw.)
From the BBC website this morning: Baboons “protesting” at the killing of one of their group have disrupted traffic on the busy Tororo-Jinja highway in eastern Uganda.”
Via Boingboing: a tale of the delights of suing that telemarketer who woke you up at half past five in the morning, with hyperlinks that turn it into a most complete tutorial.
This is most educational. EU law is getting to the point where we’ll be able to do this kind of thing too…
Or it did around here when I read the rest of this BBC article, which alleges that the Americans are refusing to arrest Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf because he’s not on the “A-list” of the fifty-five people they do want. …Poor guy! Nobody takes him seriously now.
“US President George W Bush has admitted that he enjoyed Mr Sahhaf’s briefings so much that he used to interrupt some of his meetings just to watch him.
“‘He’s my man, he was great,’ [Bush] told NBC television in a recent interview. ‘Somebody accused us of hiring him and putting him there. He was a classic.'”
There seems to have been something wrong with the post about C.S. Lewis’s childhood home. It’s fixed now.
The giant ugly pile of dirt produced by Peter’s excavation of the fishpond site is gone. Gone, gone, gone, and every ounce of it shifted by my own two hands, bucketful by bucketful. (If I have a couple of minutes to rub together later in the day, I’m tempted to weigh a sample bucketful and then estimate the total tonnage moved.) All that dirt is now a flowerbed which extends the rockery over to the wire fence on the east side of the property. (Itself to be replaced shortly by a reed or woven-withy fence.)
I decline to publish before-and-after pictures, mostly because the “after” still needs a lot of work. I need more plants (going over to the big nursery in Johnstown over the weekend ot pick up some more buddleia, and [if I can find it] a white lilac), and I need to spray Pathclear or a similar weedkiller all over the gravel in front of the house to prepare it for the truckload of washed pebbles that are going to go down in a week or so. After that I’ll post a picture.
Now back to work, where (in one universe) a hero is about to have an unsettling encounter with a dragon’s blood and (in another) alien wizards are mall-crawling in a shopping center in the New York suburbs.
What a great site! LogoType features 72,000+ logos from all over the world. A super stimulus for us crazed graphic-design fans. (NB: these are copyrighted, not clipart.) Thanks to Joey / AccordionGuy for the link.
(The above from remarks by the Irish minister for health regarding keeping SARS from getting a foothold in Ireland. To quote [in case the Irish Times article is premium content]):
“Preventing a SARS outbreak in the State will need similar high-profile approaches as were adopted during the foot-and-mouth crisis, the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, conceded yesterday.
“However, he called for calm and some perspective in the debate about the virus, pointing out that many more people were dying from flu and malaria than SARS.
“‘We are dealing with an unknown phenomenon here called SARS which has just recently become known to the medical community internationally and it can’t be stopped by [stepping in] buckets [full of disinfectant] and water…’
One of the measures announced was the opening of the Irish Department of Health SARS information page. Despite the occasional typo, it’s fairly comprehensive.
Meanwhile, in China things are a little tenser. “UP to 2000 villagers torched a school earmarked as a SARS quarantine centre, ransacked government offices and overturned cars in China’s first reported instance of social unrest related to SARS.”
…The image to the right comes from Ziboy.com’s photoblog from Beijing. A little too much protection, possibly…? (Thanks to geisha asobi blog for the link.)
Check this out first. A tutorial on How to Bow! (Thanks to Languagehat for the link.)