Hollywood is trying to change - but will audiences let it?

www.themeparkinsider.com: How did you feel when you read the news about John Lasseter? I've heard this many times over the past month, but if 2016 was the year when so many celebrities we loved died, then 2017 is the year when our love for so many celebrities died. That love dies in may ways: in anger, sadness, apathy or remorse. I've seen Disney fans react in all those ways, and more.

Mike Schur & Damon Lindelof on Complicity in Hollywood

The Mary Sue: When we talk about sexual harassment and assault, we often talk about the role of men in the fight against these things. What can men do besides just, you know, not harassing and assaulting women? How can they stand up for women? How can they resist being complicit cogs in the nonstop misogyny machine?

Ontario Drops Ticket Transparency Measure Under Industry Pressure

www.ticketnews.com: In a stunning shift, Ontario legislators removed a key consumer protection measure from its updates to ticketing laws in the Canadian province. According to The Globe and Mail, Liberal leadership in the province plans to introduce an amendment to remove a transparency provision that would remove requirements for ticket sellers to disclose the total number of tickets available to the public for a given event at least seven days before they went on sale.

TOH Top 100 Best New Home Products 2017

This Old House: How does a product make it into the TOH Top 100? Besides being introduced in the past year, it’s hard to pinpoint a rule that encompasses the entire list. We’re fans of products that cross off household to-dos, like a washing machine that can tackle two loads at once. Smart DIY solutions, like an easier, faster way to fix cracked concrete, make excellent finds. And some items? Well, they simply make life more enjoyable.

Polin Wins Four Brass Ring Awards at IAAPA Attractions Expo

InPark Magazine: At this year’s IAAPA Attractions Expo, Polin Waterparks brought home four Brass Ring Awards, recognized as among the most respected honors in the amusement industry.

Last year, Polin was honored with a Brass Ring for Best New Product for its Space Race waterslide, a first-of-its-kind waterslide that allows groups of riders to compete against one another. This year, Polin was recognized with four awards.

REPORT: There Are More TV Directors of Color Than Ever

Colorlines: A new report says that the number of television directors of color reached an all-time high during the 2016-2017 season. The Directors Guild of America (DGA) charts this growth in the “DGA 2016-2017 Episodic TV Diversity Report,” which it released yesterday (November 14). The annual report analyzes director demographics from all episodes produced during a given season. The latest version references 4,482 episodes—421 more than the previous report—to reach its conclusions.

VR headset sales are slowly rising out of the doldrums

Ars Technica: For all the hubbub and sometimes lofty predictions surrounding virtual reality's wide consumer launch last year, the immediate sales figures and impact of the technology have been decidedly muted. As hardware prices come down and software offerings begin to catch up, though, the market for high-end VR headsets is slowly creeping out of the doldrums.

TV Exec Sues Academy, Los Angeles And AEG for Emmy Fall

Pollstar: Nancy Lesser, HBO’s EVP of media and talent, filed a negligence lawsuit seeking more than $1 million against the Television Academy, the City of Los Angeles and AEG for injuries she received in a fall outside the Microsoft Theatre the night of the 2016 Emmys.

Building Ensembles Call for Wizardry on Both Sides of Camera

Variety: Every actor knows the old adage that there are no small parts, only small actors. And those who have worked in a group environment will agree that jobs are much more harmonious if everyone is in sync. For both of these ideas to jell, a production needs good casting directors: people who have the connections, knowledge and the sixth sense to suss out the best talent to fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is a stellar ensemble cast.

This warmhearted 40th 'Christmas Carol' now needs a makeover

Chicago Tribune: A quartet of Scrooges bowed together on the stage of the Goodman Theatre on Monday, part of the theater’s opening-night celebration of 40 years of “A Christmas Carol,” which the Goodman likes to position as a beloved holiday tradition of the kind where change not only is unnecessary but unwelcome. The Scrooges — Scroogi? — were surrounded by many previous cast members from a show that has played, the Goodman claims, to more than 1.5 million patrons over the years and employed a veritable plethora of Chicago’s finer thespians.

Meet the Woman Who Fought to Record and Preserve Broadway Shows

Playbill: he founder of Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—the industry’s tool for preservation of generations of live theatre—isn’t a former actor or director. She’s not a pedagogically trained theatre historian or the great-grandaughter of some theatrical icon. In the 1960s, Betty Corwin— then a mother of three living in Connecticut—was working as a volunteer at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx when she decided to apply for a training program within the psychiatric department to become a social worker. To apply, Corwin had to write an autobiography. In rediscovering her personal history, she found her future.

The Changing Face Of Gaming

www.forbes.com: While men are the more visible participants in the gaming industry, the vast majority of players on the choice-based storytelling platform Episode are female. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation,” said Cass Phillipps, who has the intriguing title of Director of Story at Episode.

Rahm Emanuel avoids the heat of the Chicago Bar Association's kitchen, Steinberg writes

chicago.suntimes.com: “Most politicians like to be skewered at some point,” said attorney Jeffrey M. Marks, producer of the Chicago Bar Association annual satiric revue, which opens Thursday. “They may not be happy how we skewer them.”

Marks said most people figure they’ve made it if they’re being made fun of. “We get senators, representatives, judges . . . .”

A 13-Year-Old Girl Is Not “All Grown Up” - Mara Wilson on the Sexualization of Child Actresses and Millie Bobby Brown

www.elle.com: is name was Don, or maybe Doug. He was a grown man, one I’d never met, and he wanted me to answer his fan letter. His writing was hard to read, but I could make out just enough: “I love your legs,” and “Can I have your lip print on the enclosed index card?”

Colorist Continues to Create Her Spectacular Hair Color Ideas

mymodernmet.com: For those who are creatively minded, anything can be a canvas for works of art—even hair. For years, we’ve marveled as women and men have transformed their conventionally-colored locks into brilliant forms of self-expression. In 2016, we featured hairstylist Ursula Goff’s take on hair art as she turned women's coifs into shimmering dye jobs that mimic fine art paintings like Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Monet’s Water Lilies.

Pittsburgh Opera presents The Long Walk: A memoir of war and its aftermath

Living Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Opera brings a gripping, contemporary American opera to the CAPA School Theater in Jeremy Howard Beck’s The Long Walk. With a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, The Long Walk is based on the book The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life that Follows by Brian Castner.

Billy Porter: The First Time I Refused to Keep Playing a Stereotype

The New York Times: I was 24 and starring, along with a bunch of marquee names, in the 1994 Broadway revival of “Grease,” prancing around like a Little Richard automaton on crack in 14 inches of clownish, neon-orange rubber hair; a white high-collared spacesuit; cha-cha heels; glittered face — and singing as high and as loud as I could.

Film Subsidies Are Real Losers

Reason.com: Put a question to any two economists and you will get three answers back. That old joke is not very funny, and it is even less accurate. On some topics economic analysts are, if not unanimous, at least largely in accord. Example: sports stadiums. As the St. Louis Fed pointed out earlier this year, 86 percent of economists agree that state and local governments "should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises." Study after study has found that giving public money to pro sports teams brings little to no return on the investment—and sometimes actually induces negative effects on the local economy.

Challenging the Narrative of Disability On Stage

HowlRound: My Asperger's is the last thing people see when I am on stage. If it's visible, it isn't an abnormality, hindrance, or liability like it is in the world outside the stage door. A lot of people think that people with Asperger's cannot read body language and pick up social cues. It would be unfair to say that theatre didn't teach me these skills because that is what creating theatre is all about. It would also be unfair to say that Asperger's prevents me from getting work. I have had scripts read and produced at theatres, and I can honestly tell you that Asperger’s Syndrome has greatly contributed to my professional life as a theatre artist.

Obsession: A lot of trees died for OK Go's new music video

Boing Boing: OK Go is known for their complicated, flashy music videos, so when the quirky four-man band launched "Obsession" Thursday, the internet took notice. With over a million views already, the video is an impressive visual feast that uses walls of printers (567 of them to be exact) spitting out sheets of paper as its backdrop.