Sunday, December 10, 2017

Worth a Look - Weinstein

And another five...

The Sexual-Abuse and Harassment Scandals Blowing Up on Broadway

thedailybeast: The young woman said she did not have stage fright. She was looking around the room to see if the alleged perpetrator of the sexual assault she had endured was there.

“I don’t say that just as a victim, but also a witness of an assault,” she said.


Lee Trull Accused of Misconduct

TheaterJones: In the Dallas Theater Center’s early seasons at the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, which opened in 2009, a Southern Methodist University student who performed at the theater says that Lee Trull, then a DTC casting director and a Hal and Diane Brierley Resident Acting Company member, repeatedly harassed her. At one point he “put his hand on my butt and grabbed it hard,” said the actress, who wishes to remain anonymous. This behavior continued—and worsened.


Experts: racketeering suit against Weinstein faces uphill legal battle

Business Insider: Six women on Wednesday filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and the companies associated with him, alleging that their coordinated efforts to cover up a pattern of egregious sexual misconduct amounted to racketeering.

The women accused Weinstein, The Weinstein Company, members of its board, and Miramax of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act, a law passed in 1970 that was designed to prosecute massive criminal enterprises like the Mafia.


Gretchen Carlson on Sexual Harassment Reckoning

Variety: As 2017 comes to a close, the landscape of sexual harassment claims and the manner in which companies are handling them are changing at breakneck speed.

Over the past 17 months, we’ve seen more and more women all across the country mustering the courage to speak out en masse, and amazingly, they’re no longer being instantly called liars and having their stories pushed aside.


Unmuffling a Culture of Silence

AMERICAN THEATRE: It begins innocently enough: A theatre artist asks another theatre artist to dinner. In an industry where ideas are discussed, and deals often made, in dimly lit restaurants, such meetings are considered essential for networking. Such was the case for a New York-based actor when the literary manager of a Tony-winning regional theatre asked her out for a post-show drink.

Worth a Look

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

Denver wants artists to live, work in safe spaces and has $300,000 to make it happen

The Denver Post: Denver Arts & Venues knows there are artists living and working in unsafe buildings and has set up a $300,000 fund to spur tenants and landlords to make repairs.


Black Bodies, White Writers

AMERICAN THEATRE: I felt my body tense up. A black man—rather, a mannequin of a black man—lay headless, forgotten, on the side of the stage. I wanted to leave the theatre, but as a critic I couldn’t. The show wasn’t over yet. Last month Elevator Repair Service premiered its adaptation of Measure for Measure at the Public Theater. Though the production would have otherwise been an inventive but harmlessly flawed take on one of Shakespeare’s notorious “problem plays,” whatever interesting or innovative elements the show introduced were quickly overshadowed by what struck me as its racial insensitivity.


Women in Leadership: It’s About Time

AMERICAN THEATRE: “Show of hands. How many people started their own scrappy theatre company with their friends from college?” asked Hana Sharif, associate artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage, during a plenary session at the Berkshire Leadership Summit. Half the room raised their hands. “That’s my story too,” she said. I laughed in recognition, because that is also how I started, and managing that company is still how I choose to spend my free time.


Appeals Court Rules 'NBA 2K' Players Lack Standing to Sue Over Face-Scanning

Hollywood Reporter: In the past few years thanks to various court decisions, it's become tougher to mount a class action lawsuit with appellate judges tightening what plaintiffs must show in order to have standing to sue. That's especially important as digital services collect all sorts of data on their users and as many worry about privacy breaches. The latest news on this front came Tuesday at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals as some of those who created personalized virtual basketball players in NBA 2K15 and NBA 2K16 got mostly bad news in their legal effort to sue video game maker Take-Two Interactive over biometric collection.In the past few years thanks to various court decisions, it's become tougher to mount a class action lawsuit with appellate judges tightening what plaintiffs must show in order to have standing to sue. That's especially important as digital services collect all sorts of data on their users and as many worry about privacy breaches. The latest news on this front came Tuesday at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals as some of those who created personalized virtual basketball players in NBA 2K15 and NBA 2K16 got mostly bad news in their legal effort to sue video game maker Take-Two Interactive over biometric collection.


The oldest tech, theater, might be an antidote to the newest

San Francisco Chronicle: Think of this pitch to a room of venture capitalists: “What we’re proposing is a scalable, repeatable product that makes vital intellectual and emotional wisdom portable, communicable, and adaptable and memorable. Everyone will use it and keep using it for millennia. We call it: storytelling.”

Monday, December 04, 2017

Worth a Look

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

Does the DGA Even Understand What Counts as Inclusion?

The Mary Sue: The best thing about the current “Golden Age of Television” is that there’s so much of it. Sure, to us fans and consumers of content, it can seem a bit overwhelming, but every new TV show or limited series provides hundreds of jobs to hundreds of working professionals, many of them women, men of color, or members of other marginalized groups who are typically underemployed.


Why Plays About Sexual Assault Are Too Murky for Our Own Good

The New York Times: At the close of Anna Ziegler’s “Actually,” a play about an accusation of sexual misconduct on an Ivy League campus, a feather flutters down from the ceiling. That’s a feather meant to tip the scales of justice. (Scales don’t always work that way, but just go with it.) The stage goes dark before the feather lands.


Finding Your Creative Voice Again After Combat

The Atlantic: When I came home from my first deployment to Iraq, readjusting was literally impossible for me. I was a 33-year-old Army combat officer and I could no longer feel or see beauty in anything. And while I didn’t know how to leave the destructive path I was on, I also couldn’t stand to crush the hearts of my wife and children anymore. So, I temporarily moved out of my home and slept on various couches, more concerned with drinking than eating. When I would sit down to write, like I had done my entire life before deploying, I’d come up with nothing but blank pages. I had lost a lot of myself on the battlefield, it turned out. Large, significant pieces of who I was had been killed off somewhere in the desert, missing in action, never to come home.


Pink shoes, brown bodies: How dancers of color are fighting for representation

Salon.com: It was July 15, 2013, just two days after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.
The Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, a historically and predominantly black modern dance company from Denver, was performing "Southland" at the University of Florida. It's a work created by iconic, pioneering black choreographer Katherine Dunham in 1951 about lynchings in the U.S. South.

Can a transgender actor ever be just an “actor”?

Salon.com: Many accomplished artists — actors, musicians, writers — are able to transcend the attributes society attached to them that are, quite often, part of what made them famous in the first place. BeyoncĂ© is a black musician, for certain, and proud of it. But, by now, that does not circumscribe her value. Nor does Ellen DeGeneres' queerness make her just or only a queer talk-show host.

Worth A Look - Weinstein

Culled from more than a dozen this week...

“It’s Like A Petri Dish Festering”: Women In Hollywood On How To Fix Culture Of Abuse

www.fastcompany.com: As the sexual harassment scandals shake up Hollywood, most of the focus so far has been on rooting out perpetrators and establishing the scale and depth of the abuse—a process that is far from over. But increasingly, members of the entertainment industry are trying to look forward, beyond the ugly details of the scandals, to come up with solutions to, if not completely eradicate the problem of abuse, at least create a culture that will make it harder for predators to thrive.


To Hell With the Witch-Hunt Debate

The Atlantic: One of the principal pleasures of Mad Men, on rich display beginning with the pilot episode, was looking at all of the crazy things people used to be able to do in offices: smoke, drink, and—if they were male—grope and corner and sexually humiliate the women, who could either put up with it or quit.


What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

www.theparisreview.org: Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it’s back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.


Want to stop sexual abuse in the workplace? Unionize.

theweek.com: Since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke last month, torrents of women have come forward with credible charges of sexual harassment, bringing down veteran journalists, big-name directors, and powerful politicians across the country. But this necessary reckoning has also relied on newsworthiness. The headlines blare, and the offending man is forced to retreat. That model can cut down a Weinstein, but is unlikely to work against, say, a restaurant supervisor who's guilty of the same behavior.


Mike Schur & Damon Lindelof on Complicity in Hollywood

The Mary Sue: When we talk about sexual harassment and assault, we often talk about the role of men in the fight against these things. What can men do besides just, you know, not harassing and assaulting women? How can they stand up for women? How can they resist being complicit cogs in the nonstop misogyny machine?