The Thursday Shout-Out!

First, let us congratulate our good friend, Carl Salminen (gamears), because he sold a script to an indie studio! It’s a horror-teen-comedy and has been placed onto their shooting schedule for September, 2007! He also has his name up on the Internet Movie Database with Arun Vaidyanathan for their short, The Séance. Congratulations, Carl!

Second, you cannot miss MaryAn Batchellor’s Death of a Protagonist. Yeah, baby! I loved it! Here is Death Emancipatory:

“Sometimes, death is viewed as a last act of defiance but I don't think it's that simple. Thelma and Louise were used, exploited, mistreated and oppressed by men. Death was preferable to going to jail and once again, living under the control and at the mercy of men. Suicide is in character for them and not the cop out ending I expected. It's about taking control and breaking free of the real or perceived bonds on their lives, much the way Maggie Fitzgerald dies in Million Dollar Baby. She doesn't want to live the way anyone else tells her to and in the end, she fights for death rather than live as an invalid. In both these films, death is liberation. Death is control. Death is ownership.”

Great job, MaryAn.

And I have to give a shout-out to the always great Miriam Paschal, who posed the question on her new blog: “What is the difference between writing for a living and working for a living while writing?”

Jim Hill Media has a new article reviewing the book “Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers.” She was a notoriously difficult and unhappy woman. “Dick Sherman recalled how Walt Disney once deliberately dodged a meeting with P.L., telling his composer, ‘You handle her. I can't stand all of that negativism.’” There is also a new post on Brian Sibley’s blog talking about a couple of years he spent with P.L. Travers writing the sequel to Mary Poppins. What makes his post interesting reading were not only the ideas for the new story but also the man whom the studio insisted on playing the younger brother of Bert (The Chimney Sweeper). You won’t believe it.

I loved Dan Jardine’s post 5 For the Day: 180 Degrees.

And finally, another update to my Indy IV post – poor Frank Darabont talks to Chud about his wasted Indy IV draft. In the interview, he said:

“That was the most frustrating of all, and that was the straw that broke the back of me wanting to continue in that line of work. That was terrifically frustrating. I worked for over a year on that; I worked very close with Steven Spielberg. He was ecstatic with the result and was ready to shoot it two years ago. He was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you’re working on as much as I love the Indiana Jones films.

And then you have George Lucas read it and say, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so, I don’t like it.’ And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts. You can only waste so much time and so many years of your life on experiences like that, you can only get so emotionally invested and have the rug pulled out from under you before you say enough of that.”

Darabont does not believe Indy IV will happen. Neither do I.

We should be glad.