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Orhan Pamuk Begins Trial in Turkey
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Bloomberg reports on the trial of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who is accused of "insulting his nation's identity" by writing about some history that the country doesn't wish to acknowledge. Pamuk's case is being watched closely around the world: Turkey's chance to join the European Union could be jeopardized if the outcome isn't in accordance with the EU's stance on civil and human rights.

Pamuk, who has said the country persecuted Armenians during World War I, is among 60 Turkish writers and publishers being prosecuted for their views. Should Istanbul's Sisli Court of First Instance find him guilty, Pamuk may be jailed for three years.

European Union Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn yesterday called the trial a "litmus test" of Turkey's commitment to the EU's criteria for membership. Existing laws don't provide sufficient protection for freedom of expression, he said.

"If they really end up putting Pamuk in jail then you might see the EU suspending membership negotiations," said Katinka Barysch of the London-based Center for European Reform, in a telephone interview Dec. 9. "I can't think of anything quite as drastic as locking people up for criticizing the state."

The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights has found Turkey in violation of European laws governing freedom of expression 33 times in the first 11 months of the year, up from last year's total of 20.

Nominations for best writing of a dramatic series went to HBO's "Deadwood" and "Six Feet Under," ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and "Lost," and NBC's "The West Wing." The sitcoms that got nods for best comedy series writing included some of the genre's most inventive fare: Fox's "Arrested Development," HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Entourage," and NBC's "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office."

In the last new category, reserved for best writing in a new series, nominees included UPN's "Everybody Hates Chris," ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," NBC's "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office," and HBO's "Rome."

Winners will be announced Feb. 4 at award ceremonies at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

Bringing the latest Steve Carell comedy to your local mall is a massive undertaking, requiring the streamlined coordination of studio development, production, marketing and distribution departments. So it isn't unusual when some of the finer details might fall through the cracks-say, the use of correct punctuation in a movie's title. The Velvet Blog would get the "copyeditor's twitch" every time it caught a glimpse of a poster or billboard for The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and see no hyphen where a hyphen should be. It wasn't until the oversight trickled down to the eagle-eyed home video department that someone finally caught the error and inserted the wayward linker onto the DVD cover. (Defamer held its nose and went along with the faulty punctuation in all previous posts, as we have a strict "official art is the word of God" policy.)

But were that the end of the story. A quick visit to the official < A HREF="http://www.the40yearoldvirgin.com/" target="new">website indicates the Universal new media department has yet to get the hyphen-adding memo (note correct hyphen usage). But look in the lower right hand corner and the soundtrack appears to have the hyphen, yet when you click through to the ordering page, the hyphen disappears once again!

Clearly, this on-again, off-again hyphen business is a fiendish, subliminal attempt by the studio to confuse consumers into adopting their new language, Universal English, a grammar-free gobbledegook that massages audiences away from the nonsensical words coming out of their actors' mouths, causing them instead to focus on the pretty pictures dancing across the screen in their latest offering, The Producer's [sic].

"The goal in combining the two newsrooms is to create a single 24-hour news organization that will inform and engage readers on multiple platforms," USA Today Editor Ken Paulson said in a statement announcing the move. "That means going beyond arm's-length collaboration. Starting today our goal is to begin conceiving and planning our coverage as one unit, thinking more strategically about the deployment of our newsgathering resources in a world in which news has become an on-demand commodity."

Spokesman Steve Anderson said the move does not increase or decrease staffing, but it does realign the management structure for more of a streamlined process.

Steven Spielberg: I cannot tell you how many people come over to me on the street and repeat almost verbatim the line the Martians say to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories: "You know, we like your earlier, funnier films."..... They'll say, "Why can't you get back to making E.T. or Raiders?" This is not from young people but from older people, who I guess grew up with the movies I made when I was a kid and they were kids too. So I'm bewitched by Woody Allen in the sense that I keep hearing this scene from Stardust Memories played out in my real life. It's very bedeviling.

..... I keep looking around for things, but then when I get the opportunity, say, to direct Harry Potter, I say no. When I get the opportunity to do something like Spider-Man, I say no. The films that are offered me that have childlike souls, I tend to say, "I've done that." I don't know if that just means I've grown up for good or whether something's going to come along that's going to make me say, "O.K., whatever I said to you is full of hot air, and the child lives in all of us until we die."