Welcome to Entertainment News Briefs.
Author Michael Korda has written a new book called "Curtain."
Some readers say the book is tacky and disgusting.
Korda prefers to call his tantalizing novel about the world's most famous theater
couple a romantic tragedy.
And there is no secret about the identity of the book's cast;
the characters in "Curtain" include Sir Laurence Olivier, glamorous
Felicia Lisle,
comedian Danny Kaye and showman Marty Quick.
What "Curtain" is really about, Korda said, is how Scarlet O'Hara
became Blanche DuBois.
The hit Fox series "The Simpsons" has been drawing fire the past
few months over its portrayal of life in a nuclear power plant.
The U.S. Council for Energy, an industry information group, says the show makes
plant workers look like bungling idiots.
Ralph Nader, the month's consumer activist, wrote to "The Simpsons" team,
saying that nuclear mishaps
such as those portrayed in the series are happening in real life.
Bela Fleck and The Flecktones band seem to be paving a new road of sound for
the future.
Musician Bela Fleck is moving the banjo out of bluegrass and into jazz.
Fleck has teamed up with three other people who provide the sounds of keyboards,
bass and drums.
This combination gives The Flecktones a mix of bop and funky jazz.
The band played a two-hour set at Deep Ellum's Trees nightclub Friday night
and not one note of it sounded like bluegrass.
Last week's South by Southwest Music and Media Conference was the most successful
yet in the event's five-year history.
The event gives musicians, journalists and industry executives an opportunity
to meet and check out aspiring talent.
3,000 participants attended the annual event.
The conference coordinator Lewis Black says, "You don't want it to get
too big"
"
because the conference would lose its intimacy."
Many people say that at the rate of South by Southwest Music and Media Conference
is growing,
the event can become like the New York New Music Seminar,
which is criticized for cutting participant interaction.
And Tom Eyen's "Women Behind Bars" shoves the lyric conventions of
women's prison film into count parody.
To give the sixties female convict movie maximum impact,
Eyen focuses on lesbianism, a sadistic cellblock matron, the racially stereotyped
inmates and
naive newcomer[s] and the bad taste in clothes.
Well that wraps it up for Entertainment News Briefs; I'm Debbie Denmon, thanks for joining me.