January 2009 Archives

Bruce Springsteen is back.  His latest album -- "Working on a Dream" -- is acoustic and impressive.  The haunting in his voice is everlasting.

Curiously, one of the first jobs of the Obama Administration is to delay -- from February to June -- the switchover from analog TV to the beautiful HDTV broadcast format.  6.8% of Americans have allegedly not yet upgraded their televisions because the $40.00USD coupon program offered by the FCC ran out of money.

As your Script Professor, I created a Dramatic Writing group on Facebook, and one of our members asked me about the problem of writing about real people that you know.  How do you get around their ego that they think you cannot help but write about them?  What do you do about their determination to get paid for inspiring you?  Here are the thoughts I shared.

As the world of publishing changes, so too, does the way we create containers for content.  It used to be enough to have paper and ink.  Now we have a virtual world where mere replication is the business recipe of the day, but the real, inherent, power of original content is that it cannot really be contained because it is always transmogrifying into multiple, redistributable forms depending upon end user need and desire.  Content isn't king.  How the end user changes the content container is king.

Oprah bagged James Frey for "making up" his life story.  Now Oprah has been burned again, this time by a Jewish couple that unnecessarily faked their Holocaust suffering for fun and profit.