Meanwhile, in the UK the TV elite looks to be putting its desire for more diversity in creators and audiences where its delightfully metaphorical mouth is:
by Vanessa Thorpe
Stuart Murphy, the influential head of entertainment at Sky TV who resigned on Friday, has joined some of Britain’s leading television screenwriters, includingPaul Abbott and Brian Elsley, creators of the hit dramas Shameless and Skins, in calling for a wider social range in British dramas. Telling stories about people from every class is not just a moral duty, Murphy argues, it also makes better television.
Murphy, Abbott and Elsley are supporting a scheme, launched this weekend, which uses funds gleaned from top ratings successes such as Downton Abbey andCall the Midwife to find and then sponsor writers from less privileged backgrounds.read article
Writing is solitary? Uh-oh, don’t tell all those U.S. network and studio execs who keep making producers open larger and larger writers rooms. Here’s a good article from India illustrating a not-so-good truth that American showbiz just doesn’t get anymore:
Filmmaker Habib Faisal. Hi, Habib. Need another writer?
by Prashant Singh
When you enter his quiet pad in Andheri’s Lokhandwala area, writer-director Habib Faisal instantly sets the tone of our chat by uninhibitedly sharing his views on the current state of affairs in the country. “We always connect politics to party politics. But it can also be about politics of entertainment or engagement (sic),” says the 49-year-old, as he also talks about his journey in Bollywood, his admiration for Amitabh Bachchan, and more.
You are an accomplished writer and director. What excites you more — writing or directing? I can’t pick one over the other. They’re both very different experiences. Writing is a very solitary experience; it’s a bigger personal struggle for me. On the other hand, when I direct, I have a script that I have confidence in. But when I am writing, I don’t have anything. Writing is a far more complex process. When it happens, it’s joyful. But when it doesn’t, you hate and curse yourself.read article
Last week, I spent a little time watching the Dodgers lose to the Mets with a couple of guys who are really at the top of their game. One has had a show on the air for more than two decades, the other was a producer who’d had a great career and finally struck real gold on one of the most successful sitcoms of all time.
Neither one had a thing to prove to anyone. They’ve played the game and won it many times over — but if you subtracted their success, they’d probably still be the two most relaxed, genial guys in the room.
Here’s the takeaway: You’ve got to be that person now, on the way in and on the way up.read article
Techdirt is a fascinating site for many reasons. Right now this TVWriter™ minion, at least, is blown away by this article on the cultural and political ramifications of copyright law. Who’d a thunk that the copyright thing was so frighteningly complicated?
1st seen on the web at https://chinguyenlan.wordpress.com
by Mike Masnick
For quite some time we’ve pointed out how problematic Section 1201 of the DMCA is. That’s the part of the law that says it’s copyright infringement to simply circumvent any kind of “technological protection measure” even if the reasons for doing so are perfectly legal and have nothing to do with infringement at all. And, of course, we now have the big “1201 Triennial Review” results that are about to come out. That’s the system that was put in place because even Congress realized just how stupid Section 1201 was and how much innovation and research it would limit — so it created a weird sort of safety valve. Every three years, the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress would work together to come up with classes of technology that are magically “exempted” from the law. Now, normally, you’d think that if you have to come up with exemptions, there’s probably something wrong with the law that needs to be fixed, but that’s not the way this worked.
The latest triennial review results are about to come out, and a lot of people are focused on it — in part because of current events. As you may recall, earlier this year, we wrote about one of the exemption requests in particular: over whether or not you can tinker with the software in your car. GM was fighting against this, and we were shocked to then see the EPA side with GM (!?!?) on this issue, claiming that it’s a perfectly reasonable use of copyright law to stop tinkering with cars on the off chance that some of that tinkering might lead to changing emissions to illegal levels.read article
