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Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco, cowriters of the Oscar winning Crash this year picked up the Humanitas Prize Wednesday for writing the film judges said "[reaches] out with respect and compassion". The Humanitas screenwriting prize honours works in film and TV that 'liberate, enrich and unify society."
Other winners include the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth", "Quinceanera", the HBO film "The Girl in the Cafe" and Fox's medical series "House".
An upcoming book about M. Night Shyamalan's career is now circulating in galley form throughout Hollywood. The book: "The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale", set to hit the shelves the day before the premiere of the director's "Lady in the Water" notably is candid on the split between Shyamalan and his longtime studio patrons at Disney. According to the LA Times, the book reveals how the director's relationship with Disney production head President Nina Jacobson came to a disastrous halt over a fractious dinner during which Jacobson said she didn't 'get' the script that would later become "Lady in the Water". The dispute so coloured Shyamalan's psyche that he related to the book's author that he was hearing voices and seeing the faces of Disney executives in his dreams.
"Lady in the Water"'s premiere falls on July 21st.
During a May cross-country tour talking to 1600 producers, newly minted CBC brass announced they are looking for pitches.
CBC network programming executive director Kirstine Layfield, arts and entertainment executive director Fred Fuchs, and factual entertainment executive director Julie Bristow did a 10 city tour with the following shopping list:
- 11am weekday talk show
- A family drama for Sundays at 7pm
- Adult drama for weeknights at 9pm
- 11pm weeknight talk show
- Documentaries
- Original reality series
One promise CBC executives have made is a quicker response with a 'yes' or 'no' to producers. The bureaucracy-stricken public broadcaster has a tendency to leave producers in 'development hell.'
That being said, executive VP television Richard Stursberg told producers at the CFTPA's Prime Time conference in February that new dramas will be expected to pull down audiences of a million-plus and documentaries 800,000 - wildly ambitious targets by any measure, but numbers that had skeptics wondering if the pubcaster's cultural mandate would be forgotten in the process.
As a plus, though, to many producers, the CBC's new direction has opened the door for those who don't normally work with the pubcaster.
"I'm talking to the CBC for the first time in a long time," says Vancouver producer Julia Keatley (Godiva's, Cold Squad). "It's not that I didn't like the previous regime of people - they just weren't as interested in doing things like drama series as bigger specials."
Read more at Playback Magazine
With that, the CBC has also announced it's fall lineup. Included are a Canadian remake of the ABC reality show "The One" and an English version a Radio-Canada sitcom called "Rumours" produced by Moses Znaimer.
(CBC hasn't posted their fall schedule online yet)
Two months ago, Disney owned ABC tested putting already aired episodes of some of their shows, including favourites like Lost and Desperate Housewives, on their site for free downloads (from internet connections in US households only.) The shows had one three minute break for commercials which could not be skipped, unlike ITunes, who charges $1.99 for commercial-free episode downloads.
ABC now reports that the project was a huge success. Not only were their shows have over 11 million viewings in the first month of the program but an exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares to with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television.
A retooled program will resume with fall programming and Canadian broadcasters such as CTV and Global are in negotiations to launch a similar program for US shows in Canada. Currently CTV airs a similar program for Canadian shows like Robson Arms and Corner Gas.
The three big players in Canadian TV; CTV, Global and CHUM (CityTV, Space, Bravo. Muchmusic) held their Upfront presentations this week to woo advertisers to their new fall lineups. Here's the new stuff:
CTV will have 7 New Series in it's lineup including: Justice, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, Smith, The Class, Let's Rob and 30 Rock.
Canwest Global has opted for 14 new series including: Brother and Sisters, Standoff, Kidnapped, Shark, Vanished, Friday Night Lights, Sex Degrees. In midseason: The Black Donnelly's and Day Break.
The CHUM group of stations has introduced 5 new series included are: Duets, Jericho and Betty the Ugly
On The Web:
Article on CTV's Upfront
Article at CTV.ca
CTV's Fall Schedule (Scroll down to schedule)
Article on Global's Upfront
Global's Fall Schedule
Article on CHUM's Upfront
CHUM's press release on the new fall schedule
(All Article links are The Hollywood Reporter unless specified)
The US House of Representatives has passed legislation that will increase the fines broadcast radio and TV networks and stations for airing material the FCC deems indecent. 'The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act' now moves to President George Bush - who looks forward to signing - for final approval.
"I believe that government has a responsibility to help strengthen families," he said in a statement. "This legislation will make television and radio more family-friendly by allowing the FCC to impose stiffer fines on broadcasters who air obscene or indecent programming."
Congress voted 379-35 in favour of increasing the fines from $32,500 per incident to $325,000. While the bill had little opposition in the house, some lawmakers believe the bill goes too far and infringes on free speech.
"What is at stake here is freedom of speech and whether it will be nibbled to death by election-minded politicians and self-righteous Pietists," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said.
Tickets are on sale for "An Evening with Spike Lee" August 12th at the Orpheum. The director of "Do the Right Thing", "Malcolm X" "She's Gotta Have It" and "Jungle Fever" will be speaking on his work and politics. There will be a Q&A session following his talk. Tickets available from Ticketmaster.
Longtime writing partners Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are the interview subjects in the latest Creative Screenwriting magazine podcast. In the audio file - which you can download to your trusty iPod or iTunes player - Kurtzman and Orci talk about the progression of their career from becoming staffed on "Hercules" to working for JJ Abrams in "Alias" which lead to them writing under his direction in "Mission Impossible III" and will lead to them writing a pass for his upcoming Star Trek film. Along the way they talk about how working on a TV series prepared them for collaboration and taking notes; how each of them and JJ Abrams outlines; how they conceived "Mission Impossible III" as 'Marriage Impossible'; and their theories on how a page of a screenplay should look.
The CTV Network announced at it's upfront presentation to advertisers yesterday that they are now providing free online streams of its programming.
Currently only the Canadian shows like "Degrassi: The Next Generation", "Instant Star", "Corner Gas" and "Canadian Idol" are available along with news clips and sports. Interspersed into the shows will be 5 to 6 minutes of commercial content that viewers will not be able to fast forward.
CTV isn't streaming any of it's popular US shows yet, but hopes to negotiate deals with the US distributors.
The freeware script writing and preproduction suite CeltX is now beta 0.9.7. Made by developers based in Newfoundland, CeltX is an integrated suite of tools including screenwriting, asset database and breakdown, story development and collaborative work environment modules that has been in development for more than a year.
Beta 0.9.7 boasts several improvements over the previous version including a new project file system, reworked interface, additions to the writing module, and advanced asset breakdown forms to completely annotate the script for the preproduction phase.
Find out more about the release here.
The new beta can be downloaded here.
Feedback to the tool can be given in the active celtx forums: http://forums.celtx.com