This Sunday, I’m being lazier than usual. Part of that’s procrastination. This is the day I clean out the garage so there’s somewhere to park the car come winter. Where does all this crap come from? Where the hell is it supposed to go? So, in lingering over a second cup of coffee, I listened to CBC Sunday Edition instead and heard a reprise of one of their old shows. (Guess somebody’s being lazy over there too). But their repeated program had a special meaning for me, because of the reacti... Read Full Story
So, it’s Saturday and I’m reading the morning paper – happy to be at the end of a week where it became clearer that not much is going to happen in the Canadian television business until this whole “carriage fees” issue gets settled and the Canadian Media Fund issues its new guidelines for funding programming here. So – like April. We’re basically in tread water mode until April. Oh, there’ll still be some stuff getting made. And we’ve now got no excuse for not working on that script we’ve ... Read Full Story
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
