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Okay, Venus?
Can’t resist passing this on from those cunning wallet-draining fiends at Network DVD: To celebrate the definitive release of Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5, Network have arranged a special event on Saturday 27 June at the Odeon Covent Garden. To open there will be a 35mm screening of ‘The Day The Earth Froze’, newly struck from…
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Killer Robots On The Bubble
Thanks to Piers Beckley for a heads-up to the fact that Josh Friedman, showrunner on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, has returned to blogging with this post on what it was like to be working on the Warners lot and waiting for word on his show’s fate. I watched all the episodes of Sarah Connor. Didn’t…
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The UK Writer in US TV (2)
They don’t get rid of me that easily. I’ve now joined ABC’s The Forgotten as co-executive producer, working as part of the team to bring creator Mark Friedman’s vision to the screen in the fall schedule. “The Forgotten Network” is a group of amateur detectives united in their quest to give names to unnamed victims,…
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The UK Writer in US TV
I’ve been urged to share my experience of writing for the American TV system as I’ve experienced it these past few months. Here’s how it went: 1. On the back of the Eleventh Hour remake I get an invite to meet the Bruckheimer gang, aka JBTV, to talk about developing something new, and at the…
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Rosemary and Laura Go Gothic
When Nick Elliot stepped down as Controller of ITV Drama, Director of Television Simon Shaps and new Drama Controller Laura Mackie announced the cancellation of a number of the channel’s successful shows in a kind of ‘image makeover’ favouring youth and ‘edginess’. Foyle’s War was one of the casualties, and Rosemary and Thyme was another…
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The Writers’ Guild at 50
Here’s a thing I didn’t know: if you’re a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and you sell a script in the US, the hefty WGA registration fee is waived. And WGA membership is a requirement over there, not an option. This just received from Tom Green: The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain…
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Squawk Like A Pirate
I’ve got mixed feelings about the jail terms and fines passed by the Swedish courts on the operators of the Pirate Bay filesharing setup. I’d have more sympathy over the sentencing if the guys in question weren’t such clanging assholes. Piracy is, by its very definition, a parasitic act, and the successful parasite is the…
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John Garforth
By the miracle of Google (and I can’t for the life of me remember what I was looking for at the time) this morning I discovered this, the personal website of one-time – or, more accurately, four-times – Avengers tie-in writer John Garforth. Garforth wrote four Avengers novels for Panther Books in 1967. Two years…
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David Stockton
Congratulations to David Stockton on winning the American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on the Eleventh Hour pilot. From the ASC’s website: “Cinematographers are people with unique abilities who accomplish extraordinary things under challenging circumstances,” said Christina Hendricks who presented the award to Stockton. The other nominees in the television movie/miniseries/pilot…
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Micropayment
The Guardian today quotes Tony Cohen, CEO of Fremantle Media, in a call for a micropayment system to cover the downloading of new and catch-up TV programming. “Cohen, revealing details of Fremantle Media’s submission to the Digital Britain report, said there was a case to look beyond the current charging mechanisms for TV shows on-demand…