Kira writes: I just found out about this from Conlan Press, and hadn’t seen anything posted on ToRn… I really think it deserves attention. The fan community stood behind Tolkien in his royalties battle, and I think we owe it to Peter to do the same. I’ve only met him once and that was brief, but he is an amazing man who certainly doesn’t deserve this:
In the last two years, London-based Granada Media (a multibillion-dollar entertainment and news conglomerate) has sold over six hundred thousand DVDs and videotapes of THE LAST UNICORN. They’ve also made cable broadcast deals for it in several different countries, and they sold the live action remake rights for a quarter of a million dollars.
The film is based on Peter S. Beagle’s famous book. He also wrote the screenplay. The film is as good as it is because he put everything he had into it.
And you know what? Granada Media refuses to pay Peter what they owe him. They’ve made millions on his creativity. They owe him hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they won’t pay up. [More]
Actor Sean Astin knows what bipolar disorder can do to a person. His mother, actress Patty Duke, was diagnosed as bipolar in 1982 when she was 35. This was after she’d already suffered a lifetime of inexplicable euphoric highs and rock-bottom lows that characterize bipolar lives. As she once wrote, “I’d cry, it seemed, for years at a time.” Astin was 11 years old when her tantrums and mood swings were finally diagnosed, and now he’s campaigning to raise awareness of the disorder, particularly how friends and family can help diagnose it. “Family members are often times the first to really start to notice the early symptoms of the mania,” Astin says. Astin — whose resume includes “The Goonies,” “Lord of the Rings” and, today, “24” — spoke to amNewYork about bipolar disorder. [
More than 10,000 women voted for their pin-ups in a survey in March’s edition of New Woman magazine. The top 100 of which have been posted on independent.co.uk, Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom make the list. Mortensen cracks the top 50 at number 46 while Orlando Bloom almost reaches the top at number 3. Get the entire list here. [