“In China and Korea, millions of fans make micropayments to writers for incremental updates in their serialized stories.” Now a Korean entrepreneur has launched Radish, which offers a similar service to the American market: writers for TV soap operas develop serialized stories, mostly romance and horror, that get regularly updated in installments that take ten minutes to read on a smartphone. – Publishing Perspectives
Tag: 02.22.19
Jussie Smollett Is Now Getting Written Off Of ‘Empire’
Oh: “The announcement comes just days after the studio voiced its unflinching support for the actor, but that support flagged Thursday after Chicago police held a news conference delineating how the department believed Smollett staged the attack because he was ‘dissatisfied with his salary.'” – Los Angeles Times
The Somatic Genius Necessary To Dance With Hundreds Of Hula Hoops At The Same Time
Yes, one woman can hula with up to 200 (200?!) different hoops. And that’s not easy: “A quick primer on the physics of this stuff: For a Hula-Hoop to continue spinning, one must apply force to the hoop in both the fore-aft and up-down directions. ‘The Hula-Hoop stays aloft thanks to conservation of angular momentum, but the system is extremely unstable—one little hiccup, and the hoop comes tumbling down.'” – Wired
A Refugee Theatre Company Can’t Travel To Malta From The UK After Airline Employees Decide The Actors Look ‘Suspicious’
The co-artistic director says that “the cast members’ travel documents were scrutinised for three hours, with the group returning the next day to be told that one of the actors, Syed Haleem Najibi, would be unable to travel as the officials claimed they had never heard of the Home Office Certificate of Travel that he was carrying.” – The Stage (UK)
If A Western Isn’t Focused On Male Violence, Is It Even Part Of The Genre?
Well, yes, it can be. If you want to see a Western that focuses on women without being cutesy or trite about it, look abroad. The form is still legendary; now it lives better in places where “it’s no longer a throwback.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
The Woman Who Designed Wakanda
Hannah Beachler, the production designer for Black Panther, was the first Black person nominated for the award. She and director Ryan Coogler took their time creating the sets for the visually magnificent movie. “‘The rocks, the moss on the rocks, how the rocks were formed, how they were layered, the color of them — everything around me that was nature I took pictures of,’ Beachler says. Beachler also took note of the architecture, clothing, food, transportation and ways of life.” (Alert: This all paid off, and she won at the Academy Awards on Sunday night.). – NPR
Bestselling Novelist W.E.B. Griffin Has Died At 89
Sure, the man had millions of novels of his own in print – but millions more under other pseudonyms (Griffin is also a pseudonym for William E. Butterworth III), not to mention the numbers of books he ghostwrote. “His fast-paced novels, rooted in history and chockablock with technical details, combined action, sex and patriotism and had a devoted readership.” – The New York Times
Middle-School Girls Are Lustful, Too, And Various Media Are Starting To Catch Up
If you thought middle school girls were “innocent” while middle school boys awoke to their own sexuality, well, think again. In new movies and TV shows, “our girls are awkward and weird. They are undergoing orthodontic treatments. They have made out with every bedpost and doorframe in their bedrooms. Through their eyes, it is the boys who become smooth, uncomplicated objects.” – The New York Times
What’s It Like Watching Your Character On The Page Come To Life As Glenn Close?
Meg Wolitzer, author of The Wife (among many other novels): “All of this is heady, effervescent stuff for a novelist. … I felt a particular kind of excitement. It wasn’t just the generic Hollywood feeling to which many of us are susceptible. The face for which I had created the outline had been filled in, saturated with new meaning.” – The New York Times
A Twining, Twinned, Divergent Path To Broadway
Two actors who played opposite each other in two different plays end up on Broadway at the same time – each in one of those plays. How did they not end up together in at least one of them? Whew: “It’s a bit sensitive, because my agent who was the point person died, and there was a miscommunication,” says one. – The New York Times