Worth a Look - Weinstein

Another week of fairly dense coverage...

SAG-AFTRA Obtains International Support for Anti-Harassment Efforts

Variety: SAG-AFTRA has obtained a declaration from the International Federation of Actors urging the industry to work with unions to achieve workplaces that are free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.

Posted by David at 10/27/2017 01:09:00 PM

IATSE And Teamsters Condemn Sexual Harassment In The Industry

Deadline: The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees has issued a statement on sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, commending “the many who have courageously shared their stories of sexual abuse and harassment.”

Posted by David at 10/23/2017 11:00:00 AM

CMU, Point Park drama schools respond to Hollywood sex scandals

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: During the dozen years Don Wadsworth has been teaching the Business of the Business class for Carnegie Mellon University senior actors, there have been occasional discussions about the casting couch. Is it a myth? Is it a thing?

In the past few weeks, it has become “the elephant in the room,” Mr. Wadsworth said.

Posted by David at 10/26/2017 10:38:00 AM

Janice Min: Harvey Weinstein is “emblematic” of much larger issue

Salon.com: Late-night comedian Bill Maher sat down with Janice Min, the former president and chief creative officer of The Hollywood Reporter, to discuss the recent sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, as well as how she believes the revelations are connected to the anger from the election of President Donald Trump.

Posted by David at 10/23/2017 11:01:00 AM

Harvey Weinstein Is a Monster of Hollywood’s Own Making. What Are We Going to Do About It?

Variety: We are at a tipping point.

Three weeks ago, Harvey Weinstein was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Today, he is radioactive — denounced, dismissed, and defending himself against potential lawsuits and criminal investigation. It has felt for several days as if the sky is falling in Hollywood; as if the firmament that the entertainment ecosystem is crumbling before our eyes. It has been horrifying and cathartic, in turns; long-held secrets are being uncovered, while long-buried suspicions are being validated. What may have started with Harvey Weinstein is not ending with him: Already, several men throughout media and entertainment have been outed by their employees and in many cases, ousted by their employers. When a movement can unseat an agent, an editor, a showrunner, and an executive, it is just getting started. Little doubt there are more to follow.

Posted by David at 10/24/2017 10:12:00 AM

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

"The World of The Hunger Games" Opens in Dubai

The Mary Sue: Irony has taken many blows in the marketing for Lionsgate’s adaptation of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ young adult trilogy about a society which transforms suffering and death into reality-show entertainment – but this one might be the death blow. Variety announced that Lionsgate has partnered with Dubai Parks and Resorts to open “The World of The Hunger Games” theme park.

Posted by David at 10/23/2017 11:01:00 AM

Open Letter to Marin Theatre Company and to Our National Theater Community

Truth Telling – A Community of Black Women Professional Theatre Makers in the Bay Area, California: We, a community of African American/Black diasporic theater artists of varying cultural backgrounds, religions, sexual and gender identities, worldviews and artistic aesthetics, believe the theater industry has a responsibility to create work that does not do damage to the communities it attempts to represent on stage.

We are united in our belief that, from its very inception, Marin Theatre Company’s (MTC) current production of Thomas Bradshaw’s Thomas and Sally is an irresponsible, deeply harmful project with no accountability to black women and girls. As black artists, and as black women, we are all too familiar with our histories and our narratives being imagined through the gaze of white supremacist patriarchy. We take issue with producing organizations whose choices perpetuate the notion that we are a voiceless, powerless group, incapable of understanding how we are being represented. We take issue with the dismissal of our concerns and the erasure of our country’s violent history.

Posted by David at 10/24/2017 10:16:00 AM

Why Using These Pronouns In An Interview Could Cost You

Fast Company: During an interview, hiring managers always ask about your experience. They want to know what you did as well as the kind of results you delivered. But when you’re describing your current job, be careful of your word choice: Two pronouns in particular could send a bad message.

Posted by David at 10/24/2017 11:13:00 AM

OPINION: Why is there's still no justice for Radiohead drum technician Scott Johnson?

Musical instrument industry news | MI Pro: On the afternoon of 16th June 2012 in Toronto, Canada, an outdoor stage intended to host a performance by Radiohead collapsed, killing the band’s drum technician Scott Johnson and injuring three others. A subsequent investigation resulted in charges being brought against the concert promotors Live Nation, the staging contractors Optex and an individual staging engineer.

Posted by David at 10/25/2017 01:00:00 PM

What American theatre can teach us about diverse casting

WhatsOnStage.com: Whenever I come to New York City, I'm always struck by how much more diverse than London this city seems. Not just seems, but is: 56 per cent of New Yorkers are non-white, compared to 41 per cent of Londoners. That shifts the sense of your surroundings. It lessens the notion of majorities and minorities. Instead, the experience is one of a mix – genuine multiculturalism – exacerbated both by a tourist's eye and the city's cultural geography.

Posted by David at 10/26/2017 11:16:00 AM

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Midnight Rider Case: CSX Wants New Trial; Sarah Jones Family Fights It

Deadline: CSX is asking for a new trial after losing a civil case this past summer to the parents of Sarah Jones who was killed on a GA train trestle in 2014 while filming the Greg Allman biopic Midnight Rider, and the deceased camera assistant’s family filed a brief earlier this week to try to stop it.

Posted by David at 10/16/2017 11:56:00 AM

Equity Announces Major Change to Membership Candidacy Program

Backstage: On Tuesday, the nation’s union for stage actors and stage managers, Actors’ Equity Association, announced a change to their Equity Membership Candidacy program (EMC). The statement, emailed out to suitable candidates, explained that in 2018 the EMC program would be relaunched. The biggest shift? The amount of weeks a candidate would have to accrue before being offered membership to the union.

Posted by David at 10/20/2017 03:44:00 PM

How costumers are using cosplay to overcome disabilities

The Verge: One of the most beautiful things about New York Comic Con this past weekend was the diverse array of attendees at the four-day celebration. New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center and its surrounding streets were filled with children, senior citizens, couples, families, seasoned cosplayers, self-proclaimed “blerds” (a portmanteau for “black nerds”), and everyone in between. It was hard to not be moved by the inclusive nature of the event, where thousands of people came to express their fandom for whatever character or property they identify with, whether that meant simply watching the crowd, or arriving in elaborate costumes they crafted themselves.

Posted by David at 10/16/2017 12:10:00 PM

Climate Change Theatre Action is held at NU for first time

dailynorthwestern.com: To Communication senior Isadora Porte, theater can be more than just a performance — it can be a call to action, too.

Porte and other Northwestern students will get together Sunday to present Climate Change Theatre Action at NU, one of more than 200 theatrical performances in a biennial global series aiming to provoke dialogue and action toward climate change.

Posted by David at 10/20/2017 03:50:00 PM

Australian Government Wants to Give Satire The Boot

Electronic Frontier Foundation: The National Symbols Officer of Australia recently wrote to Juice Media, producers of Rap News and Honest Government Adverts, suggesting that its “use” of Australia’s coat of arms violated various Australian laws. This threat came despite the fact that Juice Media’s videos are clearly satire and no reasonable viewer could mistake them for official publications. Indeed, the coat of arms that appeared in the Honest Government Adverts series does not even spell “Australian” correctly.

Posted by David at 10/20/2017 03:50:00 PM

Worth a Look - Weinstein

There were dozens of articles in this vein last week...

'Casting Couch': The Origins of a Pernicious Hollywood Cliché

The Atlantic: The chorus of condemnation against Harvey Weinstein, as dozens of women have come forward to accuse the producer of serial sexual assault and harassment, has often turned on a quaint-sounding show-business cliché: the “casting couch.” Glenn Close, for instance, expressed her anger that “the ‘casting couch’ phenomenon, so to speak, is still a reality in our business and in the world.”

Posted by David at 10/17/2017 11:39:00 AM 

Sarah Polley: The Men You Meet Making Movies

NYTimes.com: One day, when I was 19 years old, I was in the middle of a photo shoot for a Miramax film when I was suddenly told it was time to leave. I was wearing a little black dress, showing a lot of cleavage, lying seductively on my side and looking slyly at the camera. The part I had played in the movie, “Guinevere,” could not have been more removed from this pose. My character was an awkward girl, bumbling, in fact, who wore sweatshirts and jeans, and had little sense of her sexual power. But this was how they were going to sell the movie, and at a certain point, I was tired of being a problem, which is how a female actor is invariably treated whenever she points out that she is being objectified or not respected.

Posted by David at 10/16/2017 11:54:00 AM

The Protection Racket

jezebel.com: On Wednesday morning, BuzzFeed published a thinkpiece publicly revealing the fleeting existence of a list that began circulating among women in the media Wednesday afternoon, and was gone by Wednesday evening (a copy seemed to reappear late Thursday afternoon). Put briefly, the list, called Shitty Media Men, had roughly 70 names of men in the industry who were alleged to have engaged in a range of bad behaviors, from “creepy DMs” to allegations of sexual harassment, assault, and rape.

Posted by David at 10/17/2017 12:10:00 PM

Sex, Lies, and the Issue that's Larger than Harvey Weinstein

Cultural Weekly: Every time a character is killed in The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist Western distributed by The Weinstein Company in 2015, blood and butchery splatter across Jennifer Jason Leigh’s expectant face. Tarantino stages these violent outbursts, and the degradation of the female lead, for gleeful male laughter. The residue on Leigh’s face is a porn trope: blood substitutes for semen. To promote the film when it opened, distributor Harvey Weinstein cajoled People Magazine into heavy coverage.

In microcosm, that’s the larger context for the past weeks in Hollywood — because Hollywood is just part of a pervasive cultural fabric that interweaves the complex relationship between business and art, studios and talent, power and media, men and women, entertainment product and sexual assault.

Posted by David at 10/19/2017 11:51:00 AM

Hollywood's Female Crewmembers Suffer Harassment Without the Platform of Stardom

Hollywood Reporter: The problem is endemic below the line too, where women are working in crafts long dominated by men only to face abuse: "We don't have the power that Rose McGowan or Angelina Jolie has."

The accounts of Harvey Weinstein's predatory moves on A-list actresses have generated headlines. But for the growing number of women who work on film and TV shows in a so-called "below-the-line" capacity — on camera and sound crews, in editorial and music departments — such harassment is all too familiar and widespread. And little is being done to stop it.

Posted by David at 10/19/2017 11:48:00 AM

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

When It Comes To Art, Why Is Sex More Controversial Than Race?

NYLON: I’m no expert, but I am aware enough to know that art isn’t meant to be loved by all; it’s meant to be criticized, evaluated, picked apart, sure. Some pieces are going to offend, and others are going to motivate. Why then, as of late, have pieces deemed “controversial,” also been deemed worthy of removal?

Posted by David at 10/09/2017 12:22:00 PM

Snipers For Concerts? Jonathan Gilliam Makes His Case

Pollstar: Jonathan Gilliam has gone on the record that it is time for concerts to start thinking like the NFL and include law enforcement snipers and/or spotters.

This may seem extreme – if maybe less so after the events in Las Vegas – but Gilliam talked to Pollstar to make the case that it is a simple advancement, with no repercussions from the fans. Gilliam’s bio is at the bottom of the interview but it reads like Bruce Willis’s entire career: He has been a police officer, a SEAL, a DHS consultant, a Federal Air Marshal, an FBI Special Agent in charge of coordinating large events and their threat assessments, and has been seen on television news programs more than 1,000 times. He hosts his own Facebook TV show called “The Experts.”

Posted by David at 10/09/2017 12:18:00 PM

Christopher Columbus on Stage: from Satirical to Savage

New York Theater: Even on Columbus Day, Christopher Columbus has largely gone out of favor – in America, and on stage. The closest recent nod to Columbus on a New York stage was a character named Before Columbus in the recent revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World”

If that’s not the way it always was – the first play about Columbus goes back to the 1500’s (“El Nuevo de Mundo” by Lope de Vega); the first to be staged in America itself was in 1794 (“Columbus, or The Discovery of America. A Historical Play” by Thomas Morton) – yet even as far back as 1858, the theatrical treatment was far less than worshipful of the Italian explorer of the New World.

Posted by David at 10/10/2017 12:24:00 PM

I’m a Coward

www.thecut.com: I’m a coward.

Years ago, I went to a meeting in a hotel room with a powerful man. We started talking. He asked me about my sexual past, and I laughed and told some funny stories. I expect to talk about relationships and love and sex in meetings, since that’s what I write about. It was just the way he was asking me — he was pushing for details. I was suddenly aware of how alone I was in that room. Then he pointed to the bed next to us and said, “You know there’s a bed in here.” Like a young Dorothy Parker, with eloquence and wit beyond my years, I responded: “Yeah. I see that! Cool bed, man!”

Posted by David at 10/12/2017 11:59:00 AM

Library trolls copyright zealots by naming collection after Sonny Bono

Ars Technica: The Internet Archive is an online library known for pushing the boundaries of copyright law to promote public access to obscure works, including classic video games and historic images. Now the organization is taking advantage of a little-noticed provision of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to publish complete copies of out-of-print books published between 1923 and 1941. The group hopes that the move will inspire other libraries to follow its lead, making hundreds of thousands of books from the mid-20th Century available for download.

Posted by David at 10/13/2017 12:10:00 PM

Worth A Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Las Vegas shootings raise doubts about safety of live entertainment

www.usatoday.com: Is live entertainment safe in the era of mass shootings, concert-hall bombings and terrorism of all sorts? Some security experts are ringing alarm bells — again.

But could even the best emergency preparedness plan have prevented what happened in Las Vegas or ameliorated the chaotic aftermath? Some security consultants think the tragedy at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival might have been a one-off.

Posted by David at 10/03/2017 12:53:00 PM

Why LeBron James Doesn’t Own the Rights to His Tattoos

www.artsy.net: LeBron James has three NBA championship rings, a house with a bowling alley, and sponsorship deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But does “King James” own the rights to the tattoos on his own skin?

That question is prompted by an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit in New York, one of only a few suits to raise the legally murky issue of whether companies like movie and video game studios must pay to license the the work of tattoo artists the way they would pay for using a pop song, even if that tattoo is permanently inked on a person’s body.

Posted by David at 10/04/2017 10:39:00 AM

Women to Watch 2017: Women Behind the Scenes

THE INTERVAL: Last year, we did a feature called “Women to Watch” where we asked women who had been featured on The Interval to recommend some emerging theatre artists who they thought deserved more attention. When thinking about how we wanted to do the feature this year, we decided to switch our focus and spotlight women working behind the scenes in theatre. From publicists to agents to literary managers, it takes a village to make a piece of theatre happen, and there are many talented women in those positions that deserve to have their work in the spotlight.

Posted by David at 10/05/2017 12:29:00 PM

Staples Center to Offer Complimentary Sensory Safety Kits For Guests

Amplify: Staples Center is offering kits to fans with disabilities to improve the experience at the venue. The Los Angeles arena has created sensory safety kits for individuals affected by autism, PTSD or other sensory-related issues.

Posted by David at 10/03/2017 12:31:00 PM

Watch Aaron Draplin design a logo in 15 minutes

Boing Boing: It's fun to watch an A-list designer like Aaron Draplin (creator of Field Notes notebooks) how he goes about designing a new logo. Here, he was challenged to design a logo for a concrete foundation company. He starts by just writing the name of the company with pencil and paper (not on a computer) and sees what the letters suggest.

Posted by David at 10/05/2017 12:31:00 PM

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Standing ovation for the arts community

Houston Chronicle: Hurricane Harvey struck the downtown arts district both above and below the belt. Not only did water inundate the streets and force its way through the front door of the Houston Ballet's Center for Dance on Preston, it also rushed underground into the parking garage below Jones Plaza. Fetid stormwaters lapped at stranded cars and eventually forced their way into sections of the maze-like tunnel system that undergirds downtown. From there, it filled the basement housing the electrical equipment and props at the Alley Theatre.

Posted by David at 9/25/2017 11:43:00 AM

Yearlong SAG-AFTRA + Video Game Strike Reaches Tentative End

Backstage: The longest strike in SAG-AFTRA’s history came to a close early Saturday morning with union negotiators reaching an agreement with 11 major video game companies over compensation, transparency, and vocal stress reduction.

In a statement released yesterday, SAG-AFTRA outlined the nature of the tentative agreement.

Posted by David at 9/27/2017 12:11:00 PM

Why The World Needs Maker Faire

Medium: Since Maker Faire Bay Area, I have had the privilege of participating in vibrant Maker Faires in Barcelona, Xi’an (in China), Singapore, Tokyo, and Moscow. Also, during that time, we did something of a test-run of a Maker Faire in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Maker Faires have spread around the world — over 200 this year in 40 countries. This weekend the World Maker Faire takes place in New York City for the eighth time.

Posted by David at 9/26/2017 11:00:00 AM

Supertitles Galore At The 2017 Avignon Festival: Necessary Or Not?

The Theatre Times: I’ve recently returned from the Avignon Festival where I’m sure I saw more shows with supertitles than ever before. As a supertitle artist myself and having just finished a translation of a book on supertitles for the theatre, my experience in Avignon has made me even more aware of the important role supertitles must play even if the challenge of reading them can be frustrating and annoying, to say the least.

Posted by David at 9/25/2017 11:45:00 AM

A Rigged System

LinkedIn: A long time ago, the live events industry did not have all the safety regulations in place that you see today. An audiovisual company could go into a hotel with truss and motors, and rig the equipment for the show. Regulations were lax, prices were reasonable, and companies were given freedom to put on events without many restrictions. Unfortunately, there are many potential hazards in live show environments, and minimal safety regulations can lead to accidents if an equipment provider is not properly trained. Ultimately, hotels realized that hoisting heavy equipment over people’s heads posed a serious safety and liability issue, and began to implement restrictions that gave them control over rigging in their venues. While added safety is critical, a new era of rigging was born where complete control by the venue opened the door for price gouging and exploitation of the system.

Posted by David at 9/29/2017 12:09:00 PM