From Xverse.com: When co-screenwriters Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg share credit on the upcoming X-Men 3, it won't be just one of those WGA-arbitrated things: when these guys collaborate, they really collaborate.

 

From Yahoo! Groups: We liked this message posted to the Yahoo! dramatists group so much that we asked its author, Aurin Squire, for permission to post it here. In it he asks: "In the age of terrorism, war, exploding absurdities and hypocrisies, life-and-death struggles for freedom, love, liberty, life, rampant fanaticism, rising poverty and declining faith, why do most of the big plays premiering this fall seem like they're something out of a English tea room, pre-Wilde?"

 

From About.com: How faithful does an adapted screenplay have to be to the source material? Not very, says A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson.

 

From China News: English-language theatre faces an uphill battle finding an audience in China. This article dubs the premiere of Tong Li's The Power a "failure" because it drew only 25% of capacity. Mind you, that's 25% in a 1600-seat house; some theatres would kill for those numbers. Regardless, we salute playwright Tong Li (who will be familiar to denizens of various playwrights' lists on the web) for his history-making venture.

 

From Rotten Tomatoes: Can a 79-page "scriptment" really be worth 3 million bucks? If you're a studio exec and it saves you having to read the latest Whitley Streiber novel, the answer is apparently "yes."

 

From The Tacoma News-Tribune: This article asks a good question: given that Seattle's such a good theatre town, how come it doesn't do better with new plays? As usual, the answer (to the problem, at least) turns out to be that if playwrights want something done, they're going to have to do it themselves.