Month: August 2013

Troy DeVolld: Los Angeles: “It’s a Coal Mining Town”

glendaleby Troy DeVolld

Just heard this late last week over lunch with a new friend, and thought it was important to share.

A young man was being shown the town and in an unremarkable stretch of the Burbank suburbs, he was told to look at the houses and ten year old cars in the driveways and take note that “this is basically a coal mining town.”  Many of the people who lived here were folks who worked on movies and television shows, but they were living modestly, just getting by like much of the rest of America.

It’s very easy to romanticize film and television as places where great fortunes are made, and it’s true — though rare.  Most of us are getting by in unremarkable fashion, slugging it out to pay our rent/mortgage and keep swimming in this pond long enough to be able to retire.  The dollar doesn’t stretch very far in Los Angeles, but this is where the dream is, so you’ve just got to hold on. read article

Why We’d Vote for George Clooney for President

This one definitely speaks for itself:

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George Clooney To Hedge Fund Honcho Daniel Loeb: Stop Spreading Fear At Sony
by Mike Fleming Jr.

EXCLUSIVE: George Clooney, who yesterday sent his Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov to Hollywood to showSony and Fox a first cut of their Oscar-season period film The Monuments Men, has spent most of his career navigating the challenge of making provocative movies at studios obsessed with tentpoles. While he’s won Oscars — the latest the Best Picture prize he shared with Heslov and producer-director Ben Affleck for Argo — Clooney is also the guy who kept a photo of himself as Batman prominently displayed on his office wall, as a cautionary reminder of what can happen when you make movies solely for commercial reasons. read article

Top TVWriter™ Posts for the Week Ending 8/9/13

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Here they are, the most viewed TVWriter™ posts for the past week:

The 2013 PEOPLE’S PILOT Semi-Finalists are: read article

Troy DeVolld: Divorcing Basketball Wives: End of an Era (well, for me, anyway)

It’s been said that TVWriter™ hates all reality TV. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of it is so perfectly choreographed, written, edited, produced that it stands out from the crowd. And, over recent years, one Acme Super High Percentage of that good stuff has come from LB’s buddy, Troy DeVolld.

Gotta love how Troy thinks:

*Apr 07 - 00:10*

by Troy DeVolld

My fifth and final season of Basketball Wives makes its debut on VH1 on August 19th. Leaving a great franchise is tough, but it’s just time. To all my colleagues at Shed, VH1 and in the field, cast members and former bosses who have moved on to other opportunities as well — thank you for making the last three years a very special part of my life. read article

Making Time for the Arts

And now a plug for our favorite cause. No, not ourselves, we’re talking about that highest of higher powers: The Arts!

theartsby Carly Ginsbert

“Today, more and more policymakers think it is the arts, after all, that can motivate kids, engage them and help them develop 21st-century skills such as teamwork and innovative thinking — in sum, be the key to their salvation.” (The Washington Post)

There is a strange, isolating dichotomy between the arts and more “valued” academic subjects in the education system, and the more I think about it, the more baffling it is to me. The problem is that the arts are viewed as these independent entities that have no effect on the other subjects taught in school. The fact is: the arts improve student engagement in the classroom. Many researchers have found causal links between the arts and academic achievement. An Education Week article discusses how “arts education, when it is approached with the seriousness of purpose exemplified by the schools profiled in this report, can be a powerful medium through which students come to love learning, strive for excellence, and imagine a fulfilling, purposeful life.” The arts foster a sense of empathy and awareness that translate into every arena of life, and therefore, I find it critical that we make time for the arts in education. read article