“Women make up 27 percent of television writers and 19 percent of feature film writers, according to the most recent Guild membership report from 2005, according to figures supplied by the Writers Guild of America. Writers attribute the scarcity of women in their midst to tokenism, a tradition of bawdy humor in the writers room, and the dearth of women in key managerial positions.”
Tag: 01.09.08
UK Theatre Leaders Come Together To Protest Government Cuts
“Arts Council England has been delivered a ‘vote of no confidence’ at an emergency meeting organised by Equity and attended by leading figures from the UK theatre industry including Ian McKellen, Peter Hall and Kevin Spacey.”
Simone de Beauvoir, 100 Years Later
“One hundred years after her birth on Jan. 9, 1908, French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir remains a pioneer for generations of women and an author who practiced emancipation in her life and whose books established the theoretical underpinnings of modern feminism.”
Warning: London’s West End Theatres Need Help
West End ticket levies will not be enough to save the deteriorating state of London’s historic theatres, Society of London Theatre president Rosemary Squire has warned.
Cost Of Writers Strike Now $1.4 Billion
“Right now the impact of the lost wages [of WGA members and below-the-line workers], when you apply that ripple factor, it’s about $1.4 billion.”
UK Wants Deal On Ticket Scalping
British MPs don’t want to ban the secondary ticket-selling market, but say that promoters and artists should get a share of the sales.
Pandora Forced To Stop Music Streaming To UK
The music service was forced to stop streaming music to British users of the service because of a dispute over royalty rates.
Seattle’s Henry Museum Gets A New Director
Sylvia Wolf comes from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where she was head of the department of photography from 1999 to 2004. She’ll replace Richard Andrews, who ran the Henry for two decades. | From 1987 to 1999, she was a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Teen Grope Not Enough To Get Star Bumped Offstage
A former star of the Broadway production of Beauty & The Beast admitted in court last week to groping and having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl in his dressing room back in 2001. He faces two months in jail, but apparently, his conviction isn’t enough to dissuade producers from engaging him to star in a new Broadway musical set to hit New York in 2009.
Striking Writers Face A Publicity Catch-22
“One of the hoariest maxims in the overstuffed pop culture manual is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But lately, screenwriters… have been coping with the dilemma that promoting a film to further one’s career will likely also help the offending studio’s bottom line, at a time when all eyes are finally on writers because of the strike.”