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What’s Going On?

The Writers’ Strike, of course. But there does seem to be a tiny glimmer of hope that something will get resolved. David Letterman (update: and now Jon Stewart) has negotiated with the Writer’s Guild to return to production with his team of writers. Letterman seems concerned that his other employees aren’t collecting paychecks and that this thing would continue to drag on unless someone did something to alleviate the writers’ concerns. The Guild has decided to talk with production companies on a company-by-company basis.

Also, Advertisers Feel Heat from Writers Strike, and Alex Chadwick asks Washington Post television columnist Tom Shales about what’s worth watching on television as the writers strike drags on.

John August has written the best synopsis of Why Writers Get Residuals

On the heels of a new release of Blade Runner (1982), NPR’s All Things Considered talks with Ridley Scott. His final cut version of the landmark film is coming out. He explains that he and Harrison Ford disagreed about whether Decker was a replicant or not. Good stuff here, including a disagreement between Ridley and actor Harrison Ford. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, but Ridley’s Blade Runner is way better than the book its based on, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The book does a round-about way of addressing philosophical questions about personhood that the movie portrays straight-on.

Following on the huge success of three X-Men movies, Marvel is branching out into stories that only feature individual characters, titled X-Men Origins. The first one will be X-Men Origins: Wolverine and it starts filming in 3 weeks. Excellent.

Season 4 of Lost will begin airing in February.

One of my favorite shows from the summer, Psych, will return on January 11 with 6 episodes. Plus, probably because of the writers strike and its huge success on the USA Network, network parent NBC has decided to move the show after this season to the mother ship. Also moving to NBC is Monk. We’ll see if Burn Notice gets moved as well.

Noteworthy

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, David Kushner writes about one of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy has risen to new fame by having his newest book, The Road (review), featured as a book of the week by Oprah and his No Country For Old Men made into a feature film. These days, McCarthy hangs out at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico where he gets to contemplate the end of the world.

Ellen Degeneres recently visited the northern Arizona town of Flagstaff for an episode of her show. While there, she joined a Northern Arizona philosophy class and didn’t quite get it. Go figure.

Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody discuss the anatomy of a scene from the now released movie Juno.