Producers Of ‘Big Little Lies’ Promised A Woman Director Complete Creative Control – And Then Yanked It Back

Showrunner David E. Kelley had a plan, but he didn’t share it with British filmmaker Andrea Arnold before shooting began … or finished. “There was a dramatic shift in late 2018 as the show was yanked away from Arnold, and creative control was handed over to executive producer and Season 1 director Jean-Marc Vallée. The goal was to unify the visual style of Season 1 and 2. In other words, after all the episodes had been shot, take Arnold’s work and make it look and feel like the familiar style Vallée brought to the hit first season.” – IndieWire

The Mystery Mural At L.A.’s Coliseum – And The Teen Who Solve It

The kid who solved the mystery was simply obsessed – and lucky, thanks to a tweet, to find the right timeline. “‘The entire time I was trying to figure out who painted it, I thought it was from 1932,’ said Gordon, now 19 and a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts. ‘All my research was in that time period.'” Understandable … but wrong, as research showed. – Los Angeles Times

When Will Theatre Awards Catch Up With Nonbinary Actors?

Howard Sherman says the time has come to figure this out: “So long as there are categories for best actor and actress (or best male and female actor), those who identify outside of the binary will be left out, misidentified and othered. This will come home to roost the first time someone with non-binary identity is nominated for an award, and then we will see awards-giving organisations doing hurried acrobatics to come up with a solution. The better option is to understand where the thinking is heading, and thoughtfully make the appropriate changes now.” – The Stage (UK)

How A Large, Decentralized Social Network Is Dealing With A N*zi Problem

Mastodon was meant to be a kinder, gentler, no-fascist Twitter. Then a right-wing social network moved to Mastodon. “It’s a hard problem, playing off the deepest limitations of decentralized projects like Mastodon. Mastodon arose from the idealistic open-source software movement, designed to let anybody run their own social media site. But it was never intended to support something like Gab.” – The Verge

The Offstage Toll It Takes To Play A Loathsome Racist Character

“It can be fraught and isolating, it seems, portraying a white character activating the racial overtones of a beloved novel brought to the stage. Just ask Fred Weller, essayer of Bob Ewell, the patently evil father of Wilhelmi’s Mayella, who forces her to concoct the story that sends a blameless black man, Tom Robinson, to prison for rape.” – Washington Post