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Brokeback Mountain and Crash Win Writers Guild Awards
From: www.writerswrite.com

" The Writers Guild of America awarded honors to the screenwriters for the feature films Brokeback Mountain and Crash, increasing the chances of an Oscar for both films.

The guild gave its award for best adaptation to Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who wrote the script for "Brokeback Mountain" based on a short story by Annie Proulx. They won a Golden Globe for the work last month.

The gay western love story directed by Taiwan-born Ang Lee, which leads the Oscars race with eight nominations, beat out "Truman Capote," "The Constant Gardener," "A History of Violence" and "Syriana." Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco, the duo behind "Crash," took honors for best original screenplay. The Academy Awards will be handed out March 5 at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.

A spokesman for the cartoonists said: "They are in hiding around Denmark. Some of them are really, really scared. They don't want to see the pictures reprinted all over the world. We couldn't stop it. We tried, but we couldn't." Mogens Blicher Bjerregaard, president of the Danish Union of Journalists, told The Times: "They are keeping a very low profile. They are very concerned about their safety. They feel a big responsibility on their shoulders. It's blown up so big. It is tough for them."

The cartoonists' names were originally printed in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Flemming Rose, the paper's cultural editor, invited 25 newspaper cartoonists to draw a picture of Muhammad "how they saw him," after a children's author complained that cartoonists would only dare illustrate a book he was writing on the life of Muhammad if they could be anonymous. Twelve cartoonists responded, had their pictures printed in September, and were paid 800 Danish krone ( 73) each.

In an interview with a Swedish newspaper this week, some of the cartoonists expressed their doubts about the entire episode. "It felt a little like a lose-lose situation. If I said no, I was a coward who contributes to self-censorship. If I said yes, I became an irresponsible hate monger against Islam," one of the cartoonists said.

Another said: "I was actually angry when I first received the letter [from Jyllands-Posten]. I thought it was a really bad idea. At first I didn't want to participate, but then I talked it over with some friends from the Middle East, and they thought I should do it."

I think she would not necessarily approve of Mary Poppins," guesses Emma Thompson, who should know, having written "Nanny McPhee" and starred in the title role. "Nanny McPhee would think that getting large lamps out of carpet bags was a little bit show-offy. And helping children to tidy up their rooms by getting things to jump in the drawers would perhaps not be the thing that engendered most a sense of responsibility."

By phone from New York, Thompson says that responsibility, and the idea that children do not misbehave without motive, were central to her conception of the film, which is very loosely based on Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books from the '60s and '70s. (See review on Page 38.) In Thompson's reimagining, the Brown family -- a father (Colin Firth) and his seven children -- descends into wholesale chaos after the death of the children's mother. The little tykes have taken to, in contemporary parlance, acting out, which here takes the form of well-worn schemes to scare off potential nannies.

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"There's a fascinating Chinese proverb: If you are in a situation where it is possible not to be kind, then to be kind is inappropriate. I find that very interesting. As a British woman, I've been brought up to be kind all the time, that kindness is of paramount importance." But it can actually hinder development, she says, which may be why the Brown children's recovery from naughtiness involves not an ounce of kindness.

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What do the British know about parenting that we don't, Emma? And more to the point, why are they here and what are their intentions? "That's quite odd, isn't it? I'm having a think about that," Thompson says. In a blink the think is over: "Perhaps it's our propensity for rushing around the world telling people what to do. It's a sort of vestigial piece of Empire disguised as a nanny. Secretly, Britain is hoping to get America back by sending enough nannies in and slowly transmogrifying the culture. "They're spies."

The best-known female playwright of her generation, Ms. Wasserstein was a wellspring of strong leading roles for women in "The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and "The Sisters Rosenweig" (1993), among others. "It's where my imagination goes and sticks," she told The Washington Post in 1994. "Women's issues are still interesting enough to me to make me want to sit alone in a room and write." More than a decade later, she still was creating memorable female characters.

Her characters bear more than a passing resemblance to herself. They are feminist baby boomers, usually urban or suburban Jewish, seeking to have it all, even as they come to realize the futility of that desire. Heidi Holland, the feminist art historian who is the main character in "The Heidi Chronicles," is typical. Tracing her life from youth to adulthood, the play mirrors the evolution of the women's movement from its heady 1960s adolescence through the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s to the myth of the "superwoman" of the 1980s.

"When I wrote 'Heidi,' I was 35, I had just written a movie for Spielberg that didn't work out, I wasn't married and I was beginning to feel like the odd man out at baby showers," Ms. Wasserstein told People magazine in 1995. "I didn't know whether the sacrifices I had made were worth the road I was taking. So I decided to write a play about all that." "The Heidi Chronicles" won a Tony as best new play, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama and virtually every major New York theater award.

A Million Little Pieces publisher Doubleday, still smarting from its initial defense of Frey's best-selling book, is running an advertisement in today's USA TODAY apologizing to readers. And Riverhead, the publisher of Pieces sequel My Friend Leonard, is trying to distance itself from Frey. Riverhead is reconsidering a contract with Frey for future books and is referring inquiries about the authenticity of events in My Friend Leonard to the author.

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This month, Riverhead announced it had contracted with Frey for two more books, the first of which was to be a novel. Now, [Marilyn] Ducksworth says, "the ground has shifted. It's under discussion." Stephen Sheppard, a New York attorney who regularly deals with book contracts, says that all contracts with authors "contain provisions" and that publishers have "very extensive discretion in what they want to accept."

Meanwhile, Doubleday is attempting to "bear responsibility" for its culpability in the Million Little Pieces scandal. The ad in today's USA TODAY, which also will run in the Feb. 6 edition of Publishers Weekly, says that future book editions will have notes from the publisher and from Frey himself and that the jacket will indicate the change. Doubleday will not publish new copies until Frey submits his "author's note."

"He's currently working on it," Doubleday's David Drake says. "And we'd like to have it as soon as possible." Drake said Friday that the author's note would be published on the Random House website, randomhouse.com, as soon as Frey submits it. It had not been posted as of Sunday night.

The Time Warner Book Group is the fifth-largest U.S. book publisher, with authors including James Patterson and Malcolm Gladwell, Paris-based Lagardere and New York-based Time Warner said in e-mailed statements today.

Lagardere has been seeking media takeovers to lower the company's dependence on its stake in the maker of Airbus aircraft, and it acquired W.H. Smith Plc's Hodder Headline unit for 223 million pounds ($389 million) in September 2004. Time Warner has been selling divisions including its music unit to reduce debt, and said its book business needed the global "scale" of being part of a larger book publisher.

"This is a major step in fulfilling a Lagardere objective to create a balanced portfolio in three main languages, French, English and Spanish," said the statement from Lagardere, whose chief executive is Arnaud Lagardere.