Hey! It’s that time of the year again!
You know what time I’m talking about! The week to two weeks that every major organization tracking gender diversity in theatre/television/film creation releases their terrible statistics on how few women and people of color are making their way to the top of their profession so we can write angry blog posts about it for a week and then go back to business as usual!
Well, more like an intranet kind of thing really. It’ll be called the M Channel and play new content on TV sets in about 700 McDonald’s. Do they really think that’s going to make uswant to eat that crap?
Big wheel keeps on turnin’. Proud Mary keeps on burnin’. Kee-ryst!
by Robin Reed
I keep hearing about the book series The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I haven’t gotten around to reading the books, but they’re on my list. Recently I stumbled on a Dresden Files TV series, that ran for one season on Sci-Fi – when it was Sci-Fi – in 2007. Set in Chicago, my home town, it is a Canadian production. I assume Toronto or some such place is the background in most of the episodes, but they insert enough Chicago shots, the El and the skyline mostly, that it gives a flavor of the real thing.
There is theatre, and then there are cliches and assumptions about theatre.
Certianly the single biggest achievement of Smash’s first season (and perhaps the thing we should applaud it for) has been cataloguing an astonishingly thorough collection of the latter.
As a New Yorker and a theatre artist, I thought it might be fun to debunk a few of the bigger myths Smash throws our way about theatre and it’s business:
” The only thing we enjoy more than making people stars is tearing those stars out of the sky afterward.” Old showbiz saying.
THE INTERNET, FAN CULTURE, AND CREATORS: A BLESSING WE SHOULDN’T TURN INTO A CURSE – by Alanna Bennett
Steven Moffat enrages a lot of people. It’s simple fact. When you take over one of the most popular sci-fi franchises of all time and replace a beloved showrunner, the change is bound to stir up some feelings no matter what you do. This is made double true when among the changes to the show are issues that lend themselves easily to Internet ranting (read: most things, but most particularly those involving female companions and the like). This is madetriple true when you are the type of showrunner who likes to interact—some would say tease, some would say torture—your fans on said Internets, metaphorically poking them with a long stick and frequently reminding them how often you are going to make them cry.