Hollywood producers are terrified that writers and actors will go on strike next summer when their union contracts are up. So studios are stockpiling films and scripts just in case. – Variety
Tag: 08.02.00
STAR KIDNAP
One of India’s big movie stars has been kidnapped, and the story sounds like it’s right out of an outlandish movie plot. Nonetheless, “schools are closed, buses have shut down, shops are shuttered and people are frightened to go out as bands of angry, rock-throwing movie fans rampage through the streets. Newspapers dubbed the day after the kidnapping Black Monday.” – Washington Post 08/02/00
THE PLACES YOU’LL GO
Nine years after the real Dr. Seuss died, the good doctor’s work makes a comeback – a new movie, new musical, even a couple of new books. “Altogether, not a bad comeback for a man who worked in a variety of advertising, film and magazine cartooning jobs well into his 50s, when he finally achieved literary stardom with his back-to-back children’s books Cat and Grinch (1957). His middle name was Seuss – or was it Mischief?” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
MODERN-DAY ROMEO AND JULIET
The opera singers Marijana Mijanovic and Kresimir Spicer are “the couple of the summer,” having thrilled audiences at Aix-en-Provence’s popular summer opera festival. “But it is also because they are a real-life Romeo and Juliet: she is a Serb, he is a Croat, and they live together in Amsterdam. – New York Times
FROM BAD TO (SLIGHTLY) LESS BAD
Canadian actors get an 8.5 percent pay raise. Under the union deal, “Canadian Stage Company artists have had salary increases from their weekly wage of more than $700, as have artists in smaller, lower-performing productions who were paid less than $400 per week before the deal.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
BEYOND THE FATAL SHORES
“There is no complaint that Robert Hughes left Australia more than three decades ago and established a successful niche as art critic for Time magazine in New York. Good luck to him. But Australians are entitled to ask why the ABC still sees value in airing the thoughts of Robert Hughes as an ‘intimate perspective’ on contemporary Australia. It isn’t.” – The Age (Melbourne)
AN ANIMATED FUTURE
At the Venice Biennale, US architects present the future. “The emerging generation of architects represented here uses animation software to study the effects of natural forces on different forms, and film- and Web software to produce virtual environments and atmospheric effects. Moreover, they say, they are among the first architects to respond to the way that digital technologies have altered people’s aesthetics, even their very sense of space.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
SPACEMAN
- The man doing the sophisticated computer modeling for the designs of Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria is a big fan of the museum. He’s also a prisoner. “Max” works on the project from prison. “I find it fascinating that a man who has been incarcerated for so much of his life has such an interest in space, and dimensions and images. I doubt it’s purely coincidental.” – The Age (Melbourne)
ALL OR NOTHING
The New York Philharmonic truly wanted Riccardo Muti as its next music director, but the courtship’s officially over – the Philharmonic decides now that what it needs most of all is a full-time musical director. So the search goes on… – New York Times
MODERN-DAY ROMEO AND JULIET
The opera singers Marijana Mijanovic and Kresimir Spicer are “the couple of the summer,” having thrilled audiences at Aix-en-Provence’s popular summer opera festival. “But it is also because they are a real-life Romeo and Juliet: she is a Serb, he is a Croat, and they live together in Amsterdam. – New York Times