"What I inhaled at The New Yorker was a culture of attention. So for example, there had been - she's no longer with us anymore - there had been a kind of super copy editor named Eleanor Gould. And she would do, at some late stage of a piece's editing - and there are many layers to the editing - what was called a Gould proof. And she had been there for decades and decades. She had been there when Harold Ross was around. And these proofs taught you so much about repetition and indirection and all the muck that can enter bad prose if you aren't careful. This woman could've found a mistake in a stop sign. I have a copy of a proof in which she found four mistakes in a three-word sentence. I'm not kidding around."It's pretty expansive and covers recent successes and failures, including around the lead up to the 00s Iraq War. There's a podcast here and a transcript if you want to skim.
"Later in the year, there will be new seasons on Poetry and Theatre. The Theatre festival includes Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins starring in a new adaptation of the drama The Dresser on BBC Two and new drama strand Dialogues, bringing together exceptional writing and acting talent to BBC Four.Plans from the specific to the vague as ever. Might have been useful to mention that The Dresser has a playwright, Ronald Harwood, and that it's not some random choice, The Dresser is about a touring theatre company. Oh and there's already a film version with a screenplay written by Harwood himself, so this isn't like plucking Sir Thomas More off the shelf and doing a version of that. As ever, then, this looks like a commitment to theatre within certain limits.
"In a new partnership with the Arts Council of England, we’ll be working with theatres and theatre companies to explore new ways of making and broadcasting theatre on the BBC.
"And across the English Regions, we will be following 11 local theatres over the next six months as they tackle an array of challenges - on stage and off."
"The poetry season will include a profile of the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy; a special on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; a drama adaptation of Simon Armitage’s long poem, Black Roses and Performance Poets In Their Own Words."If all of this seems a touch mealy-mouthed, it looked with Malfi from the Globe like there was going to be a real transformation in the BBC's attitude to theatre. But apart from some crumbs during Edinburgh nothing has changed that much. Drama on television is still new television work and literary adaptations. Anything filmed on a stage is an opera or ballet. Far cry from the 70s when etc etc etc
"The extra who is playing the florist [in the beginning of the film] is pregnant. We put a little pad in her tummy. And one of the things you will see later in the movie is when Meg is buying flowers at that florist, there’s a little sign in the window that says, “It’s a girl.”"I wonder what the film must look like to later audiences, where the process of email amounts to wading through pages of messages from Amazon trying to sell you things and in my case PR emails for London galleries I'll never visit. The closest we have now are Facebook messages and Twitter DMs, but neither, I suspect, prompt the florid paragraphs which we and the characters in the film used to write.
"Don’t worry kids though, it’s not canonical."If you say so. I've never thought it wasn't. As the TARDIS Datacore explains, There's a reference to it in the Virgin New Adventure First Frontier which suggests the Doctor was well aware he was walking around in a soap opera. If you accept that the Eastender therein was some kind of Auton simulacrum (explaining Pauline) or some such, it's perfectly fine. Even if you don't, it could be the usual time differential business which leads Doctors to forget some moments when they have met up (ala The Day of the Doctor). Either way, it may be rubbish, but it still counts.
It's for teenagers, because it has a genuinely, I believe, sophisticated morale structure than most films aimed at that age group, and without it being explicitly Christian, I do think it has that theme running through it.It's worth reading for Higson's rebuttle. Well played Higson.
When the Green Goblin takes Spider-Man up and shows him New York City and says, "My boy, this could be yours if you join me in this wicked project" is reminiscent of the Bible.
And the final scene is the renunciation scene. It's an affirmation of celibacy and vocation.
Well..he's done it again!#EddieRedmayne gets #Bafta4BestActor!Who'd av thort eh?1st play with #yourstruly.12yrs on?x pic.twitter.com/WZLV1UrlQF
— Louis Emerick (@thelouisemerick) February 8, 2015
And once production is over, how do you tackle all the scenes you’ve now strung together?Auteur theory tends to consider films in relation to the director or producer or even studio in regards to modes of production. Averick has only really worked with Ava DuVernay, but on a wider note, I wonder about the extent to which you can tell whose edited a film through watching, if there are particular editing styles.
Then I get back to LA and I have a week or two to continue editing by myself without Ava, to finish the editor’s cut, trying to keep up. When they shoot three scenes in one day, I’m trying to edit three scenes in one day as well, which is hard to do, so you fall behind. So those couple weeks after you get back is your time to catch up. By no means is the editor’s cut great, but the movie’s at least put together, although it’s long and it’s rough. Then Ava comes in after two weeks, she watches the editor’s cut, then we go from there. Then it was five months for the two of us. We had our producers, Plan B, Oprah, and Paramount in dialogue and giving us feedback as well. It’s a collaborative experience, but mainly it’s Ava and I together."
"I've just phoned Lego. It was as you might expect an awesome experience. I mostly phoned Lego because I didn't want to have to try and fit the following into the comments box on the website and also to make sure that another person heard and to hear their reaction. Their reaction was that they thought it was a really innovative idea they'd not heard from anyone else. First of all I asked, "Have you heard of the television series Doctor Who?" He said that he had. Well of course he had. It's 2013 not 1994. Anyway, this is what I said next:Well, and I'm sure I had nothing to do with it but nevertheless, as you might have heard today:
"If Lego made Doctor Who Lego, then all Lego becomes Doctor Who Lego."
"BBC Worldwide and LEGO® have announced a deal to produce a range of Doctor Who Lego, based around a proposal made by fan Andrew Clark last year."So all Lego is Doctor Who Lego now and we all win. How this squares with Character's attempt to create a third-party non-compatible version we'll discover if anyone starts lawyering up, but I can't bare the excitement. Unless when it's finally released its poorly designed rubbish in which case we all lose. I have fears that they'll go for some nonsense riff on LEGO Friends because of the gender of the Doctor's usual companions but they wouldn't do that. Would they? Either way here's the announcement video which buries the headline and features an amazing pronunciation of The Avengers.
Audio Bless Lance Parkin. The opening narration to Benny's Story pretty much confirms the implication in The Dying Days, a whole twelve years after he wrote it, that the Time Lord and the archaeologist shared a "cup of tea" making her the only companion he's had that sort of relationship with (depending on how you view River Song). But it's not awkward, presumably because they're both adults, though Lisa and Paul make them brilliantly flirty anyway. The Doctor's asexuality across the series now all looks rather strange in retrospect particular the reticence over the Grace kisses, especially since he's clearly been married at least once and Susan has to have come from somewhere (unless looms, I suppose, but still). It's a bit of an orphan - there's no particularly useful place to put it narratively. For added confusion the Doctor references Brotherhood of the Daleks which featured 6th and Charley though he remembers it happening with someone called Mila substituting for the companion he hasn't met yet. As with Mary's Story, the possibility is left hanging at the end for more stories with Eighth and Bernice. Both of them are busy with other narratives at present but on the strength of this some further adventures would be most welcome.
Audio shada. Shada. SHADA! For a story which notoriously wasn’t completed on television, there are now a lot of alternative versions. Which is canonical now? All of them? None of them? In the context of this listen, the key moment for me turns out to be when Eighth mentions that he and Chronotis visited the Shelleys and Byron which either means they did after he dropped Mary off home, time’s been rewritten or the Doctor’s misremembering what happened in Mary’s Story, his mind replacing his older self due with the elder Time Lord due to Davros’s meddling as per Terra Firma. Unless I’m misremembering what happens in that story. Also although it was released after Neverland, it’s Lalla Romana’s first meeting with Eighth. I’ve always liked the way in adapting Douglas, Gary made sense of the Doctor returning to Cambridge to deal with unfinished business [my original review from back in 2003 is here and here's me writing about the Gareth Roberts adaptation in 2012].