“[Stephen] Daldry will be in overall creative charge of ceremonies while [Danny] Boyle will be artistic director of the opening ceremony itself. … Unlike the £70m budget granted to the Chinese film director Zhang Yimou for the 2008 Beijing games, the London team will have a total of £40m for all four ceremonies.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Plot To Cash In On Stolen First Folio Outlined In Court
“Calling unannounced at [the Folger Shakespeare Library], the 53-year-old pressed reticent academics to back his claim that the 387-year-old treasure was previously unknown, kept in a box by the mother of a major in Fidel Castro’s army.” In reality, a prosecutor said, the man “allegedly forced locks at a sparsely attended exhibition in Durham to steal the book 10 years earlier.”
Royal Festival Hall To Restore Pipe Organ With £950K Grant
“The restoration on the organ will be undertaken by Harrison and Harrison Ltd, its original creators. The work, which is the final phase of revamp of the building on London’s South Bank, will finish by 2013.”
Paul McCartney Is Writing A Ballet
“Details [of the commission] still need to be fleshed out but he’s already started work on the score and says he’s ‘enthusiastic’ about it.”
Alberta’s Culture Minister: ‘Why Do I Fund So Much Crap?’
Lindsay Blackett on homegrown talent: “I sit here as a government representative for film and television in the province of Alberta and I look at what we produce and if we’re honest with ourselves, why do I produce so much shit? … Why aren’t broadcasters picking up more Canadian content? It’s because Canadian content isn’t what it should be.”
Getting Roald Dahl’s Golden Ticket To The Opera Stage
Dahl thought of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” on which “The Golden Ticket” is based, “as his most musical story. But his widow, Felicity, says that didn’t help it get to the stage. ‘I think there is a problem in the opera world — that they associate the story with children,’ she says. ‘There’s great difficulty in getting new repertoire for children in opera.'”
Unions: Listing Birth Dates, IMDb Aids Age Discrimination
“The Writers Guild of America, West, is leading an effort to convince the massive database — used by virtually everyone in Hollywood and far beyond — to permit people to remove their birth dates from the site.” Other Hollywood unions “have reached out to the site to see about taking down the birth dates of people who are not movie stars.”
US Musicians Hit The Road As Cultural Ambassadors
Since 2006, Rhythm Road, a State Department-funded arts diplomacy initiative administered by Jazz at Lincoln Center, “has sent more than 100 musicians on tours to 97 different countries, most of them outside the reach of American music. … The program is a revival of the Jazz Ambassadors of the Cold War,” this time with more teaching.
Kids’ Book Apps Animate The Reading Experience
“The first sign there’s something different about ‘Alice for the iPad’ comes when … the White Rabbit’s old-fashioned pocket watch, dangling by its chain from text, starts swinging whichever way the reader is holding the iPad. … There’s something fitting about the sensation of gravity that the animations bring to a story with so much body-shrinking and mind-blowing going on [in] it.”
Once Proudly Original, Pixar Puts Its Money On Sequels
“The surfeit of sequels for a studio that had produced only one –‘Toy Story 2’– since its first movie premiered 15 years ago, marks an important turning point for Pixar” and “shows how the … digital animation pioneer, which has held itself aloof from the grubby realities of Hollywood, is [no] longer immune from the economic laws of the entertainment marketplace.”