Category: Entertainment Industry

Read Madonna to Co-Write, Direct Her Own Biopic by Borys Kit ( Hollywood Reporter)
Diablo Cody is co-writing the "untold true story" that will be produced by Amy Pascal.

There are so many untold and inspiring stories and who better to tell it than me. ❧

Of course there will be a huge amount of bias from her perspective.
Annotated on September 17, 2020 at 12:18PM

Madonna being front and center to guide her own biopic should not be a surprise from anyone who has followed her career. But it is noteworthy since most biopics, when based on people or musical acts, tend to have their subjects as consultants and executive producers, involved mainly from rights points of view. This has been the case with recent hits Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody. ❧

And I think she’s learned from Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody that if you’re heavily involved in making and producing your own biopic, it’s unlikely anyone else will do one anytime soon and you’ll be able to control not only the immediate narrative, but also the long term narrative (at least within popular culture).
Annotated on September 17, 2020 at 12:23PM

Kanye West apparently tweeted screenshots of one of his contracts with Def Jam in 2012 this morning. While it may seem crazy and odd, this is the sort of data that doesn’t get leaked within the entertainment industry very often. I’m curious to see how the level of the details released shifts the balance of power to artists in the future since surely this contract would represent one of the higher levels of performer contract in the business at the moment.

A&R and business affairs executives are sure to hate this for the coming year(s). It would be nice if more artists shared these sorts of points in public to help out others without the level of legal representation that Kanye has.

I also wonder if/when these sorts of contracts will have non-disclosure clauses in them to help protect the labels? It may start today if artists aren’t careful.

Watched Dune - Official Trailer (2020) Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya from YouTube
Check out the first trailer for Denis Villeneuve's eagerly anticipated adaptation of sci-fi classic, Dune.
Looks intriguing as a remake. Missing all of the 60’s/70’s pseudo kitsch from the 80’s version. No hint of influence from Barbarella or the Flash Gordon movies.
Read Tombstone (typography) (Wikipedia)
In mathematics, the tombstone, halmos, end-of-proof, or Q.E.D. symbol "∎" (or "□") is a symbol used to denote the end of a proof, in place of the traditional abbreviation "Q.E.D." for the Latin phrase "quod erat demonstrandum", meaning "which was to be demonstrated". In magazines, it is one of the various symbols used to indicate the end of an article. In Unicode, it is represented as character U+220E ∎ END OF PROOF (HTML ∎). Its graphic form varies, as it may be a hollow or filled rectangle or square.
Read Academy Establishes Representation and Inclusion Standards for Oscars® Eligibility (Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars® eligibility in the Best Picture category, as part of its Academy Aperture...
Long overdue and could have been an even higher bar, particularly on the studio side.
Watched Mind yer Scots - Dr Michael Dempster full interview from YouTube
Dr Michael Dempster - Full Interview. Speaking to 'The Big Night In' Dr Dempster discusses the origins of the Scots language, Scots in popular culture, place names, common attitudes and various initiatives to encourage people to use and understand their own Scots tongue.
Interesting note about the TV show Shetland and the language used and how it was affected by the BBC as a production entity.

Mention around 23 minutes about the Anglicization of Scots words that not only don’t make sense, but remove the relationship between the people and their land.

Read a thread by Liz (threadreaderapp.com)
Read 5 Excellent YA Books About Selkies by Abby Hargreaves
If books about mermaids aren’t really your thing and you’re looking for something a bit earthier, you might be interested in selkie lore. For the uninitiated, selkies come from Scottish folklore, stemming particularly from the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland. Selkies, a kind of mythical creature that shapeshifts from a seal to a human form. In many examples of selkie legends, part of the lore typically involves a woman selkie who loses her pelt to a man of the land. When this happens, she is tied to him so long as she is unable to find her pelt, and therefore unable to return to her seal form and her ocean habitat. These six YA books about selkies drop readers into stormy seaside towns, sparkling ocean depths, and treacherous rocky crags.
Apparently this is a “thing”? I’m going to download a sample of one and give it a try.
Read How to find the editor of a book by Erin Mayer (Book Riot)
As readers, we love books. We also recognize that books are about more than the author’s name on the front cover. Books wouldn’t exist without authors, but so much goes into publishing your favorite titles. From publicity to copyediting and book design, the publishing world is vast and varied. Have you ever wondered how to find the editor of a book? It’s actually super easy most of the time.
This didn’t have as much useful advice as I would have hoped.
Read How an unknown British actress played a role in the downfall of two Hollywood moguls by Stacy Perman (Los Angeles Times)
Ron Meyer, the former vice chairman of NBCUniversal, was the second mogul embroiled in a sex scandal with Charlotte Kirk to be toppled in less than two years.
I got sidetracked tonight and jumped into the rabbithole that is Pollen and Racket, which I’ve been tempted to look into for several years for simultaneously publishing both websites and books. 

In just a few minutes in a quick demo, I’ve been able to build a local website. This seems a bit easier than I had initially expected, but there’s still a way to go…

Watched Anatomy of a Great Faculty Website by Steve RyanSteve Ryan from WPCampus 2020 Online - July 29-30 - Where WordPress meets Higher Education

Within higher education, requests to build websites for individual faculty members sit at the absolute bottom of the work queue for most marketing/communications teams. If this type of product is offered at all, it typically uses a self-service model; the institution will provide the platform while the faculty member will provide the content. And while this is the most sustainable model for most small and mid-sized web teams, it tends to produce multiple websites that are ineffective at communicating even simple messages. Worse, they have a high tendency to become the poorest reflections of the institution with a high rate of abandonment or misuse.

Let's fix that tendency together. With a careful examination of what really matters to faculty members who are looking to create and maintain their own websites, we can begin to build better sites. With better sites (and a little luck), you can start to derive value from the project at the bottom of your work pile.

Together we'll talk about:

  • A simple analysis of the types of content that you'll typically find within a faculty website.
  • A "wish list" for the types of content that you (as a marketer) would really like to see from these types of sites.
  • A working example of a theme that delivers on these key concepts and adds some "quick wins" which makes for a better experience.
  • How to leverage the capabilities of WordPress multisite to produce more value from collections of these type of sites.

This is an awesome little session at WPCampus 2020 Online. (Video for it available shortly.) It reminds me a lot of the Drupal project Open Scholar that does something similar. I can see it being useful for folks in the Domain of One’s Own space.

I totally want to start using something like this myself to not only test it out, but to build in the proper microformats v2 mark up so that it’s IndieWeb friendly. Perhaps a project at the planned IWC Pop-up Theme raising session?