I’m sure the television business isn’t all that different from any other line of endeavor these days. Everybody’s just scrambling to keep up. This week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revamped its news services in an attempt to reach a wider audience, a younger audience, Hell, any audience. Our leading private network continued a process of trying to make itself the lead story and center of attention by embedding on camera personalities in the Olympic torch run. And the once har... Read Full Story
On the previous two occasions Canada has hosted the Olympics, I was thrilled by the prospect of the Games and filled with a mix of national pride and that “family of man” camaraderie the Olympic movement is supposed to symbolize. This time not so much. The official commencement of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games celebration was marked yesterday by the arrival of the Olympic torch in Victoria. Over the next 45 days the flame will be carried from one end of the country to the other (a... Read Full Story
Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper caused a frisson of outrage among the country’s chattering classes by stating that he didn’t watch Canadian television news. Many of these were the same people who had cheered vociferously when American President Barrack Obama declared that he didn’t watch the most popular newscast in his own country. Interesting comparison that, how one head of state is placing himself out of touch by not getting his news from the same sources as the majority... Read Full Story
When a screenwriter finishes a script, he doesn’t have to go to a lot of trouble making it presentable. # 5 Brads. 20 lb. Hammermill paper. Maybe a cardstock cover (I recommend “Proscript” – they come pre-punched). Some screenwriters, at the end of a series or later in their careers when they want to remind themselves that they actually had a career, will bind their produced scripts in leather with a gold imprint approximating the final product’s title font. The unproduced scripts stay in a d... Read Full Story
There was a little publicized but potentially game-changing event on the Internet last night. “Big Hollywood”, a site you can link to from my list on the far right – and to some also far right in their own show business outlook, held what they billed as the largest movie premiere in history, streaming Irish documentarians Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney’s “Not Evil Just Wrong”. McAleer and McElhinney’s film is a response to Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar winner, “An Inconvenient Truth”... Read Full Story
When I was a kid, Sunday mornings before you had to get ready for church were filled with the Funny Pages. The Regina Leader-Post, my newspaper of record at the time, actually didn’t publish a Sunday paper. But the Saturday edition came with a thick insert of full color cartoons that my brother and I stashed unread until the next morning. We’d get up and turn on the radio, where a couple of the local DJ’s would giggle and snicker and read the comics to you. They had theme songs for each sec... Read Full Story
“There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothin' I suppose. Little pitchers have big ears, Don't stop to count the years, Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios…” -- John Prine (“The Ballad of Sam Stone”) On Wednesday, I was invited to attend a conference ostensibly billed as my o... Read Full Story
Last week, it was David Letterman admitting to multiple “affairs” with members of his staff, including some of his female writers. This week, Jimmy Kimmel revealed he was sleeping with one of his writers. Simultaneously, the gossip pages were speculating that “Mad Men” creator Matt Weiner had decided to stop sleeping with one of his writers and she had subsequently left the show. Now, if one wanted to take this series of events less seriously, you could wonder: a) Wow, TV writers must r... Read Full Story
My apologies for the lack of posting this week, but it’s been kind of busy up here, just North of Hollywood North. First of all, my dog’s in-laws dropped over for the week. That’s my friend, Dusty, on the Left, her Mom on the right and Grandma sandwiched in the middle. Anybody who owns a dog knows they don’t really require that much work. Maybe less than an hour a day to do the actual feeding, watering and maintenance part. Walk and play time additional and often non-negotiable, of course. ... Read Full Story
