Sunday, November 26, 2017

Worth a Look

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

Why Hari Kondabolu Takes on The Simpsons in New truTV Doc

The Mary Sue: In one scene of Hari Kondabolu’s truTV documentary The Problem With Apu, actor and former White House worker Kal Penn pauses before answering whether or not he’s regretted an acting role, and says he’s realizing that he’s not in a PR event. “I was wondering if anybody would love that as much as I did,” says Kondabolu when I bring it up, “That was for me and anybody who understood that it’s always the same thing.”
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Lawsuit Brought By Cosby Show Production Company Against Documentary Is The Reason We Have Fair Use

Techdirt: Looking through the history of our posts on the topics of fair use and fair dealing, you find plenty of examples for why these exceptions to copyright law are so important. These exceptions are, at their heart, designed to be boons to the public in the form of an increased output in creative expression, educational material, and public commentary on matters of public interest by untethering the more restrictive aspects of copyright law from those efforts. Without fair use and fair dealing, copyright laws are open for use as weapons of censorship against unwanted content, rather than being used for their original purpose of increasing expression and content. Still, in the history of those posts, you might struggle to find what you would consider the perfect example of why fair use laws are necessary.
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Monkey in the Middle.

This American Life: Nature photographer David Slater went to Indonesia. While he was there, he got some stunning photos of monkeys. What he couldn’t imagine was that he’d end up being sued, for copyright infringement, by one of the monkeys.
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Scenes from the green room: Playwrights on why they thrive in TV

LA Times: What follows is a sampling of their thoughts about why television is such an artistically satisfying medium, why more and more of them keep flocking to it, what they have learned about themselves as artists in the process, and how balancing a life between theater and TV is a near-impossible challenge that they will never, ever give up on.
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The State of Community Theater in Trump's America

www.clydefitchreport.com: Though I’m an artist and administrative director of a nonprofit community theater by trade, I rarely write about the arts for The Clyde Fitch Report; our esteemed founder likes my thoughts on politics for some reason. I get the occasional exception, however and this post is one of them. Last weekend, I attended the National Community Theatre Management Conference, sponsored by the American Association of Community Theatre, in Madison, WI. The conference was elucidating, energizing, exhausting and fascinating. I thought it would be interesting to check in with those of us who bring everyday theater to regular people and see how the social and political atmosphere in the US is affecting everything from our programming to our patronage.
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Worth a Look - Weinstein

And another five...


The 4 Redemption Narratives We Are Currently Using to Minimize This Sexual Harassment Hellscape

jezebel.com: “We shouldn’t close it off and say, ‘To hell with him, rot, and go away from us for the rest of your life.’ Let’s not do that. Let’s be bigger than that,” the actor Bryan Cranston recently said in an interview with the BBC. Cranston had been asked a hypothetical question about the return of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, two men whose abuses stand out, even in the Me Too moment, and his response was equally hypothetical. And yet, the question revealed that even in the middle of an ongoing reckoning with sexual harassment and assault, covering a range of industries, the narratives of second chances and redemption are already beginning to emerge.
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Rebel Wilson Shares Sexual Harassment Story: ‘I Will No Longer Be Polite’

Variety: Rebel Wilson opened up about her experiences with sexual harassment in the movie industry in a series of tweets posted Saturday morning, detailing two separate incidents in which men in the industry allegedly acted inappropriately towards her. In the first alleged incident, Wilson described a male star “in a position of power” asking her to go into a room with him and then “repeatedly asking [her] to stick [her] finger up his a–.” She added that his male friends attempted to film the incident on their iPhones while laughing.
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Tear Down the Boys’ Club That Protected Louis C.K.

www.vulture.com: At the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, there’s a table where the comics sit. It’s where they joke, debate, goof off, and ridicule their friends. As depicted on the FX series Louie, it’s the most fun place to be with the smartest, coolest comics in America. Every club has one, but the Comedy Cellar is the best club, and the table Louis C.K. sat at was the best table, occupied by the likes of Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Marc Maron. That table is the most important force in comedy. There are rarely women at that table. There are never gay men or trans people.
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How the Myth of the Artistic Genius Excuses the Abuse of Women

NYTimes.com: Can we now do away with the idea of “separating the art from the artist”? Whenever a creative type (usually a man) is accused of mistreating people (usually women), a call arises to prevent those pesky biographical details from sneaking into our assessments of the artist’s work. But the Hollywood players accused of sexual harassment or worse — Harvey Weinstein, James Toback, Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K., to name a few from the ever-expanding list — have never seemed too interested in separating their art from their misdeeds. We’re learning more every day about how the entertainment industry has been shaped by their abuses of power. It’s time to consider how their art has been, too.
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Ty Stiklorius: Sexual Harrassment Plagues Male-Dominated Music Industry

Amplify: Ty Stiklorius once worked with a young artist who was so traumatized by sexual harassment from music industry executives that she gave up a chance to write a hit pop song and instead walked away from the business. “It’s a pervasive issue,” Stiklorius said at the Billboard Annual Touring Conference and Awards this week. “She reported it. Nothing was done.”
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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Worth a Look

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

This week Tiffany Haddish makes “Saturday Night Live” history. That’s not funny

Salon.com: One sparkle in a week made out of smiling turd emojis was this astounding tweet from Tiffany Haddish, who is hosting “Saturday Night Live” on November 12. “Can you believe I will be the very #first black female comedian host?!?”
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Safe Rooms at Concerts After Route 91 Shooting: Are Secured Spaces the Future of Concert Security?

Amplify: Tommy Goff got a call two years ago that gave him pause. On the line, he said, was a rep for a superstar touring musician who had safety concerns and wanted to set up a panic room during a show. A similar call from another well-known performer soon followed. Goff, the owner of B’Safe Shelters of Cheyenne, Wyoming, had for years been providing weatherproof and bulletproof safe rooms for Fortune 500 companies like Southwest Airlines and NBC – but until then had never considered offering a portable safe room for those in the music industry.
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Directors Guild Finds ‘Some Progress’ in TV Hiring Practices of Women, Minorities

Variety: The television industry has made some improvements in the hiring of women and minority directors, a new report from the Directors Guild of America shows. The report, released Tuesday, shows the percentage of episodes directed by ethnic minorities rising by 3 percentage points to a record 22% of all episodes, while the percentage directed by women went up 4 points to 21% of all episodes, another all-time high.
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The Wall Group Keeps Hollywood Groomed and Red-Carpet Ready

Variety: As awards season approaches, no company’s presence will be felt on the red carpet more than The Wall Group, the artist management agency that represents one of the largest armies of stylists, manicurists, makeup artists and hair stylists readying the stars for their moment in the spotlight.
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Working in the Theatre: In the Field - Environmental Design

YouTube: All set design is about creating a world, and at Serenbe Playhouse, it’s about creating a living world inside another living world, which is nature. In this premiere episode of Working in the Theatre: In the Field, we take a look inside the process of environmental design at this amazing site-specific theatre company.
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Worth a Look - Weinstein

Really hard to cut down to five stories on this subject this week...

Hundreds Flock to ‘Take Back the Workplace’ and ‘Me Too’ Survivors’ Marches in Hollywood

Variety: Hundreds of sexual assault, harassment, and abuse survivors and their supporters turned out for the “Take Back the Workplace” and #MeToo survivors’ marches Sunday in Hollywood.

The event kicked off around 10 a.m. and featured several speakers who shared stories of why sexual abuse prevention matters in front of a red “Take Back the Workplace” banner.
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Old Vic's Kate Varah: 'There are grey areas'

WhatsOnStage.com: The Old Vic Theatre's executive director has spoken about the theatre's investigation into allegations made about Kevin Spacey's behaviour while he was artistic director at the theatre, and the problems with the theatre's reporting processes.
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Louis C.K. and Separating Artists From Their Work

www.vulture.com: After the news broke about Louis C.K. and sexual misconduct, my mind ran over C.K.’s work, his stand-up, his curmudgeonly late-night appearances, his intimate, formally adventurous TV works, and my thoughts landed on someone else. I thought about Lena Dunham. They’ve been linked in my mind for years, ever since I saw someone give a paper on the way both creators have used the familiar shape of a TV season to create innovative, boundary-pushing stories. Suddenly the comparison took on a new flavor — Dunham’s Girls was always a brilliant, challenging work, and it always became a referendum on her. It was occasionally framed as an indictment of all people her age; it was sometimes focused on a particular portrait of people who live in Brooklyn; it was sometimes seen as a show about the myopia of white feminism. But it was almost inescapably seen as a show about Dunham herself.
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So ... When Are We All Going to Apologize to Megan Fox?

The Mary Sue: n a recent interview with Prestige Hong Kong, Megan Fox made comments about the way women are undervalued in film. She was incredibly on point, and I couldn’t help but think about how her career has gone. Megan Fox is an actress with a very mixed public reception, and a limited filmography despite her being fan-cast in multiple projects for years. In many ways, Fox has been dealt a bad hand when it comes to her public image because for much of her career was defined by the lecherous gaze of one man, and once he cut her off, no one tried to help her.
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To The Men Who Are Not Responsible For My Problem

Andrea Grimes – Medium: Today, I tagged eleven men — friends of mine, mostly — at the end of a long tweet thread, asking them to reach out to a popular Texas music critic who these eleven men follow on Twitter. I figured they follow him, so they at least know he exists — which is more than I knew when I woke up this morning. The critic had said a gross thing about Louis C.K., about how his jokes are more valuable than the women he sexually abused, and I asked for these eleven men to talk to this critic about what a gross thing he had said, and maybe explain to him why it was wrong. I did this because men who endorse and perpetuate rape culture do not care what women think — but they might listen to other men, guys they respect. This critic doesn’t care what I think, but maybe he cares what a few prominent men in the Texas journalism industry think. I don’t know. It was sort of a shot in the dark, because I’m sort of running out of ideas on how to end rape culture all by myself without bothering the men in my life too much about it.
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Monday, November 13, 2017

Worth a Look

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

Nearly a year later, video game voice actors end their strike

Ars Technica: Nearly a year after voting to strike against 11 major video game publishers, voice actors in the SAG-AFTRA union voted overwhelmingly to approve a tentative agreement that will get them back to work for at least the next three years.
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Actors' Equity Treasurer: Proposed Tax Bill Would Harm Thousands of Actors, Stage Managers

www.broadwayworld.com: Sandra Karas, an actress, tax attorney and the Treasurer of Actors' Equity Association, the labor union for actors and stage managers on Broadway and across the nation, released the following statement on behalf of the union after news reports that a tax bill introduced in the House of Representatives today would eliminate a variety of itemized deductions
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What Is Censorship? The Tale of Michael Weller's "Buyer Beware"

www.clydefitchreport.com: Yesterday morning I read up on Brandeis University’s decision to cancel a production of Michael Weller’s new play, Buyer Beware. Or at least that’s how the Boston Globe framed its reporting, echoed by The New York Times. I discovered later, however, that while the Globe’s headline clearly aimed to do what a good headline does — quicken the pulse — to characterize the matter as “Brandeis cancels play amid protests over racism” feels more a case of spin than spleen. I write this post as we mark one year since the US elected the single greatest purveyor of false narratives since P.T. Barnum started counting suckers. The Brandeis-Weller brouhaha should remind us that narratives, whether false or shaded, don’t just bubble up from the D.C. swamp. They happen in the arts, too.
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Did ‘Thomas and Sally’ Romanticize a Master/Slave Relationship?

AMERICAN THEATRE: In a particularly disturbing moment in Thomas and Sally, a new play by Thomas Bradshaw, a 41-year-old Thomas Jefferson takes the 15-year-old Sally Hemings’s face in his hands and kisses her. “I love you, Sally,” he says. Then, without asking her permission, he starts to undress her. For actor Tara Pacheco, who played Hemings every night in the production at Marin Theatre Company (MTC), the moment was fraught. “She’s being kissed, and she’s not consenting to that initiated sexual relationship at all,” Pacheco explained recently. “She kissed him, but it’s the classic consenting to one thing doesn’t mean you’re consenting to something else.”
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New OSHA Training Requirement in Nevada for Entertainment Industry

www.hsi.com: Starting January 1, 2018, the State of Nevada will require specific workers in the entertainment industry to complete an OSHA 10-hour (non-supervisory employee) or an OSHA 30-hour (supervisory employee) safety and health general industry course and receive a completion card within 15 days of hire.
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Worth a Look - Weinstein

Five more articles...

L.A. District Attorney Launches Sexual Abuse Task Force for Entertainment Industry

Variety: Los Angeles District Attorney Sharon Lacey has created a task force of veteran prosecutors to deal with sexual abuse crimes in the entertainment industry.

Lacey made the announcement Thursday, adding that her office has not yet received any cases from law enforcement for criminal filing.
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Why Aaron Sorkin refused to write a crude Nicole Kidman sex scene

www.usatoday.com: Here's a prime example of how sexual harassment can be baked into the filmmaking experience.

Aaron Sorkin, speaking to USA TODAY about his directorial debut, Molly’s Game (in select theaters Dec. 25), starring Jessica Chastain, recalled the way he was once asked to script a Nicole Kidman sex scene for 1993’s Malice.
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Why I Stopped Watching Woody Allen Movies

Far Flungers | Roger Ebert: A few months back, on the heels of a scandal where someone was not punished for sexual assault in any way, a friend asked me what I felt would be an appropriate reckoning. “I at least want them to lose their job,” I said. “I want their lives to be disrupted, and I want others to see that if you do that to someone, your life is turned upside down, so you better not do that to someone.”
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Hollywood's History of Sexual Harassment

The Mary Sue: As we go through the news every day, it seems as though another male figure, whether he be an actor, producer, or director, is being accused of sexual harassment or assault. The sad reality is that there may be no end to the allegations because sexual assault in Hollywood is about as old as Hollywood itself.
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Sexual harassment affects nearly everyone: Poll

Business Insider: Sexual harassment in the workplace isn't an industry issue. Nor is it a toxic workplace issue. It's an issue that affects literally everyone.

A number of industries have been implicated in the wake of producer Harvey Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct, including Hollywood, politics, and sports. Before that, sexual harassment at work made headlines with tech's "bro-culture" problem. Before that, it was the media industry with Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly's oustings. And the list goes on.
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Monday, November 06, 2017

Worth a Look

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

What Is An Artist's Responsibility? The Question Of Trigger Warnings

The Theatre Times: My most common access need attending the theatre, after bringing a companion, is to sit at the end of an aisle, preferably close to the exit. This is to manage my anxiety, which fluctuates in intensity, and when booking a show weeks in advance, I don’t know how I’ll feel that day. It gives me the ability to make a quick exit if my anxiety flares up − it’s too loud for me today, too bright, too crowded. Or, if the show itself is too disturbing or triggering in its content. Triggering content is by far the top reason that I do make good use of my requested aisle seat to make a dash for fresh air and a place of calm.
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Female Freelancers Are Paid Way Less Than Men For The Same Creative Jobs

Fast Company: Gender-based wage discrimination in traditional business settings can be insidious because women who start out being paid less may be continuously offered less competitive raises or salaries when they change jobs. But many female entrepreneurs in creative fields—perhaps even those who think that owning their own business shelters from such bias—are actually seeing a similar disparity play out in a different way.
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Who Owns Marsha P. Johnson's Story?

jezebel.com: Hours after Netflix released the documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson last Friday, director/trans activist/researcher Reina Gossett claimed the film was unfairly profiting off her ideas and work. The Netflix doc, directed by David France (whose 2012 doc How To Survive a Plague was nominated for an Academy Award), concerns LGBTQ civil rights pioneers Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, whom also are the focus of an as-yet-incomplete short film Gossett has been working on with Sasha Wortzel for several years, Happy Birthday Marsha! (It’s crucial to note that Rivera identified as transgender before her death in 2002, and that Johnson, who died in 1992 before the word transgender was really embraced discursively, identified as gay, a transvestite, and a drag queen. Nonetheless, both are considered by many as icons in the trans community.)
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What's It Like Being on the Autism Spectrum?

Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Of the many breakups, breakdowns, and breakthroughs featured in Uncommon Sense, Tectonic Theater Project's new play about people on the autism spectrum, cast member Andrew Duff's favorite scene involves "Noodle Night." Dan, who's on the spectrum, invites Sarah, who has no official diagnosis, to dinner, but when he has trouble using his fork, she tosses hers away and they both dig in with their hands, feeding each other, getting wildly playful, and ending up in a kiss. "It's a moment of connecting and understanding without a need for words," says Duff. "They accept each other for the way they are."
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Creating Saturday Night Live: Control Room

YouTube: Director Don Roy King and crew share how an episode goes from script to stage.
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Worth a Look - Weinstein

Harder to cull down to just five this week...

Surviving Sexual Harassment On Broadway, And Off: Guest Column

Deadline: Deadline asked three-time Tony nominated actress and writer Sherie Rene Scott, currently appearing off-Broadway opposite Jason Alexander in The Portuguese Kid, about her experience in dealing with sexual harassment and assault in the industry over the last two decades. It’s a subject that partly inspired Whorl Inside A Loop, the remarkable 2015 play she co-wrote and starred in.
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Linda Bloodworth-Thomason: I Knew About Harvey Weinstein. You Probably Did, Too

Hollywood Reporter: I always knew I wanted to be a writer. As luck would have it, my first three mentors were Hollywood giants Norman Lear, James L. Brooks and Larry Gelbart. These industry icons not only taught me everything I know about writing, they were also perfect gentlemen who never exuded even a hint of sexual impropriety. It wasn't until a few years later that I began to experience sexual harassment — the producer's hand rubbing my back inside my blouse during meetings; the studio exec who, on my first day, encouraged me to wear a bikini to work (sadly, I actually asked, "Why, is there a pool?"); the talent agent I literally had to wrestle to the ground in order to get out of his house. I didn't know then that this is a man's town, based mostly on male friendships. Forget those iconic letters that make up the Hollywood sign. It would be much more fitting if there was a giant penis casting a shadow over all the women who tirelessly endeavor to rise above this unpoliced playground for men.
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Against Allegedly

theconcourse.deadspin.com: There’s a word, and it’s quite short, for how the vast majority of information in this world is conveyed: Said. A person can say something. Multiple people can, together, say something. Old-timers in the newsroom will tell you that a document can’t say something because paper can’t talk, but that’s okay. Another, almost equally short word, stated, will do.
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Harvey Weinstein's Abuse Took Many Forms, As I Learned Firsthand

jezebel.com: I worked for Harvey Weinstein from May to August 2014. A successful independent film producer at the time, I had sold him two films in 2005, and produced over 20 altogether, 12 of them selections at Sundance. I was brought on to “fix” an ailing movie, Natalie Portman’s Jane Got a Gun, and then hired—ostensibly as a “fixer,” an “indie expert”—to help Harvey bring indie discipline and ingenuity to large films. When I left, I was paid for the duration of my contract and Harvey wrote me a complimentary letter, but my time there did not end well.
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5000 Artists Sign Open Letter Condemning Sexual Harassment In Their Industry

jezebel.com: Hundreds of artists have signed a letter condemning Knight Landesman, the publisher of Artforum, who resigned last Wednesday after being accused of sexual harassment by nine different women. A website for the letter opens on Jenny Holzer’s work, “Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise.”
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