Play and screenwriting tips and thoughts
How to make theatre in a land where people try to reassure you with the phrase, “no dramas”? How does the assumption that a lack of drama is good affect what theatre companies do with Australia’s playwrights? I have tried to answer that in this State of Play essay at australianplays.org
https://australianplays.org/no-dramas
Visit, read and cause a scene if you should care to
Bumped into a playwright friend recently and asked how she was doing.
She said she was three-quarters of the way through her play’s draft, and she was lost and didn’t know if it was crap or not.
I’m the sort of friend and fellow playwright who nodded enthusiastically and said, “That’s great!”
Now, why would I do something like that? Am I some sort of bullying psychopath? Continue reading “Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s crap (a few thoughts #16)”
All nations need to promote and protect the ability of their storytellers to share stories and to create new dreams.
Today, the Australian Writers Guild is holding a national day of action in the fight to keep Australian film and television production safe from a free trade deal that would only help those pushing cheap content already produced in other countries. The deal would also lead to the end of kids’ TV quotas, which have helped to spur on the production – and to international acclaim – of kids’ Australian TV classics such as Bananas in Pyjamas, The Wiggles and Round the Twist.
The AWG President, Jan Sardi, says:
‘As many of you will know, the right to tell our own stories from our own perspective and in our own voice is not something that just happened, it’s a battle that was fought by the Guild and the industry in the Make It Australian campaign of the 1970s. The battle was won, but the war to keep it Australian has never ended and it’s now entering a new, critical phase. Commercial TV broadcasters want to walk away from any requirement to create children’s content and are lobbying the government to abolish local content quotas. New players like Netflix, YouTube, Stan, ISPs and Telcos are making billions of dollars from the Australian market with no obligation to create local, original content for the Australian audiences it exploits.
If we let this happen there will be no more scripted drama, no kids’ TV and our screens will be flooded with foreign content and reality shows. We will lose our jobs, our unique Australian voice and our culture and because of the Free Trade Agreement, once it is gone, it is lost forever.
The time has come to fight again!’
Obviously, I agree with him.
I hope you have the time to support the campaign here.
As the page about me on Wikipedia says, I used to have a blog called Parachute of a Playwright, but that’s no more. I deleted the posts, but didn’t keep the url. If you go there these days, someone I don’t know is running it. My guess is by an incompetent robot made from hose material and cardboard. Not anybody related to me.
This part of this new site is for news, writing exercises and the odd bit of sharing.