Director Tabitha Jackson was lucky in 2020 - her hiring was big news at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Then, of course, a global pandemic hit. "To say her inaugural year heading the most influential film festival in America was rife with unpredictable challenges is an understatement." - Los Angeles Times
Mance was "a buoyant, bluesy jazz pianist who worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington, before establishing himself as the leader of his own groups." - The New York Times
And what Emerald Fennell delivers - which is something different - in Promising Young Woman. "How do you write a revenge movie that feels like something real and that is based in real trauma and grief? Because I suppose the other thing with the revenge that we don’t talk about very much is revenge and vengeance aren’t good...
The chair, Pam Rorke Levy, says that despite controversy over the attempted sale of a Diego Rivera mural, among other things, "she has acted to save the school and that she was taking necessary steps in keeping one of the last remaining colleges on the West Coast exclusively dedicated to contemporary art in operation." - The New York Times
And, because of social media and marketing, it's making a serious comeback. The projects "are magnified again by technology, by the software that enables architects to visualise complex shapes and engineers to calculate them, by the photorealistic visualisation techniques that make a project seem physical before it is, by the construction techniques that turn these shapes into reality and,...
Michelle Burford has co-written, or really, written after many hours of absorbing interviews, quite a few celebrity memoirs. She calls herself a "story architect," and her name appears on the covers of the memoirs alongside the famous counterparts. But as a Black woman, she has to tell publishers not only to think of her for Black women's memoirs: "I’ve...
It's not going to be easy: "Genetic determinism is a fantasy tradition. ... As both a ruleset and a fantasy backdrop, D&D is in the business of translating these racial differences into numerical scores." - Wired
Can a novel be, or feel, contemporary without references to doomscrolling or at least brushing up against social media? "While the internet and mobile phones initially posed problems for fiction writers - not least for their potential to destroy traditional plots of desire and obstruction (chance encounters, missed connections, quests), the dangers of such instant gratification increasingly appear to...
Or at least AMC, despite its debt load and the damage from the coronavirus shutdowns. Adam Aron: "Some of my competitors, the ones caught up in the past, are saying that I’m the worst human being alive on the planet. ... But sometimes you have to stare change in the face, recognize that it has or soon will arrive,...
Despite the fact that the previous president was, himself, the product of show business, the arts seemed to mean nothing to him. "If artists were hostile to Trump’s policies, Trump’s White House — perhaps from a self-protective attitude of 'If I can’t have it, then I never wanted it' — was unusually inhospitable to or at best uninterested in...
You've heard "The Wellerman" by now, no doubt, since the Scottish postman who sang it a TikTok rendition of it went completely - ridiculously - viral. Now he's quit his job and earned a record contract. But how's that going to go? Viral stars and those who study them say "the hard part comes months later, when everyone has...
"Several parents raised concerns with Scottish Gymnastics a year ago over dance classes for eight to 12-year-olds at the prestigious Ballet West school in Taynuilt, Argyll. Allegations were made that children at Ballet West’s lower school were shouted at by coaches and 'body shamed,' causing distress and anxiety." - The Sunday Times (UK)
A survey of frequent theatregoers says that widespread vaccines are the only way most people will feel comfortable in the theatre - and, even with that, 94 percent of those surveyed said they still want mask requirement in place. - American Theatre
The official Star Wars account (and thus, Disney) is backing its Star Wars: The High Republic Show host Krystina Arielle, a Black woman who tweeted last summer in support of Black Lives Matter. - BBC
The producer of the Celebrating America gala had to be very cautious, and very (very) flexible: "Our plans were carved in Jello. Everything was moldable. In a way, it makes it tenfold harder, but in a way it’s a little freeing because you’re not stuck into shoehorning into the things that exist. The pandemic also caused us to figure...
