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gothiccharmschool:

Peter Capaldi as Jonathan Harker, Daniel Day-Lewis as Dracula, Half Moon Theatre, Stepney,1984.

(Seen on the twitter of MrGodfrey.)

WOW SO MAYBE THIS IS (at least part of) THE REASON WHY David Geffen (and/or others in charge) wanted Daniel Day-Lewis to play Lestat in movie!IWTV. 

Apparently Cruise was approached by Geffen through Creative Artists Agency head Michael Ovitz after leading contender Daniel Day-Lewis declined the part.

Entertainment Weekly July 30, 1993

And you know what I can totes see DD-L being great as Lestat… but he probably felt like Been There Done That, having already played a vampire *cries* but I’ll console myself to the fact that he was also older and maybe too old for the role, too

PS. @gothiccharmschool, let me know when your time machine is up and running, we gotta see this show!

I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.

Anne Rice, Entertainment Weekly (August 5, 2016)

So, @roselioncourt​ brings this article to our attention, and I think the relevant quote is above, but there’s a little more about AR’s interest in Atlantis in there.

The relevance is that AR had been working on this Atlantis book and added VC into it later. We’ll see how well that works, but this is an answer to the question, “Atlantis… what?”

[X revised]

riverofwhispers:

lucifuge5:

tygermama:

gothiccharmschool:

What? WHAT? I don’t even know. But I’ll read it. Of course I will. 

this looks like it will be the finest crack in all the land and I can’t wait to read it!

Wow. I’m legit O_o about this.

@i-want-my-iwtv

THIS IS NOT A DRILL

I’m gonna read this book w/ a classy adult beverage within arm’s reach. But I have to say, after reading the excerpt, it could actually be a fun read. We don’t have to accept it as canon, just a fun read nonetheless. AU fanfic. 

My prediction, based on discussions outside of tumblr, is that it will be Amel narrating the story of Atlantis to Lestat for 75% of the book and then Lestat adventuring and finding the place itself for 25% of the book. WE SHALL SEE.

Hit the jump for the excerpt (which is linked above but I wanted to put it here under a cut for some kind of greedy collector reason idk TODAY IS A RED LETTER DAY.)

Proem

In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. It was a chorus as mighty as the wind and the waves, all those voices of the dying. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken.

I woke, in the dark, unable to leave the coffin in the vault in which I slept for fear that the setting sun would burn the young ones.

I held the root now of the great vampire vine on which I was once only another exotic blossom. And if I were cut, or bruised or burned, all the other vampires on the vine would know the pain.

Would the root itself suffer? The root thinks and feels and speaks when he wants to speak. And the root has always suffered. Only gradually had I come to realize it — how profound was the suffering of the root.

Without moving my lips, I asked him: “Amel, what was that city? Where did the dream come from?”

He gave me no answer. But I knew he was there. I could feel the warm pressure on the back of my neck that always meant he was there. He had not gone off along the many branches of the great vine to dream with another.

I saw the dying city again. I could have sworn I heard his voice crying out as the city was broken open.

“Amel, what does this mean? What is this city?”

We would lie together in the dark for an hour like this. Only then would it be safe for me to throw back the coffin lid and walk out of the crypt to see a sky beyond the windows full of safe and tiny stars. I have never taken much comfort from the stars, even though I’ve called us the children of the moon and the stars.

We are the vampires of the world, and I’ve called us many such names.

“Amel, answer me.”

Scent of satin, old wood. I like seasoned and venerable things, coffins padded for the sleep of the dead. And the close warm air around me. Why shouldn’t a vampire love such things? This is my marble vault, my place, my candles. This is the crypt beneath my castle, my home.

I thought I heard him sigh.

“Then you did see it, you did dream it too.”

“I don’t dream when you do!” he answered. He was cross. “I am not confined here while you sleep. I go where I want to go.” Was this true?

But he had seen it, and now I saw the city flashing bright again in the very midst of its destruction. Suddenly it was more terrible than I could bear. It was as if I saw the myriad souls of the dead released from their bodies rising in a vapor.

He was seeing it. I knew he was. And he had seen it when I dreamed of it.

After a while, he gave me the truth. I’d come to know the tone of his secret voice when he admitted the truth.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I don’t know what it means.” His sigh again. “I don’t want to see it.”

The next night and the night after he was to say the same thing.

And when I look back on those dreams I wonder how long we might have gone on without ever knowing any of it.

Would we have been better off if we had never discovered the meaning of what we saw?

Would it have mattered?

Everything has changed for us, and yet nothing has changed at all, and the stars beyond the windows of my castle on the hill confide nothing. But then the stars never do, do they? It’s the doom of beings to read patterns in the stars, to give them names, to cherish their slowly shifting positions and clusters. But the stars never say a word.

He was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know. But the dream had struck a chord of fear in his heart. And the more I dreamed of that city falling into the sea, the more I was certain I heard his weeping.

In dreams and waking hours he and I were bound as no two others. I loved him and he loved me. And I knew then as I know now that love is the only defense we ever have against the cold meaninglessness around us — the Savage Garden with its cries and songs, and the sea, the eternal sea, ready as ever to swallow all the towers ever created by human beings to reach Heaven. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things, says the Apostle. “And the greatest of these is love….”

I believed it and I believe in the old commandment of the poet-saint who wrote hundreds of years after the Apostle: “Love and do what you will.”

fyeahcopyright:

fyeahcopyright:

“If you have some fan-tastic fic, we’d love to read it. Send us your finest work and one winner will be published in the pages of EW and on EW.com.”

Yep, that’s a thing that Entertainment Weekly – who are generally a fandom-supportive magazine/website – is doing this month. January is Fanuary, and they’re focusing on fandoms, fan creativity (fic and art), fan theories and more.  

It’s definitely not the first time that a mainstream publication has focused on fanworks – look at the article on My Immortal in NY Magazine last summer, or about 90% of what happens at SDCC and NYCC. It’s also not the first time that a mainstream entity has encouraged fanworks submissions – Lucasfilm has hosted (”curated”) fan-film fests, Mtv and the BBC have showcased fanart in galleries and at comic-cons, Wattpad has worked with shows like Dig by hosting fanfic, etc.

And EW is owned by Time, Inc., which isn’t actually owned by Time Warner anymore, though there are still certain lingering licenses and relationships between the two companies. Whether you’re ok with – or excited by – Fanruary, think it’s a great way to get more readers, writers, artists and reccers interested in awesome fanworks and share squee, or if you think it’s a way for a major multinational to get clicks and free content from fandomers, or whether it’s irrelevant to you and your fannishness, the contest terms of use are a watershed moment for fanworks, because of parts of its Terms of Use; some sentences are awesome. Other parts are kind of weird. 

This bit is awesome: 

Entrant represents that any fan fiction submission and other materials submitted as part of Entrant’s Contest entry are original…

Before, say, 2013, it would be surprising for a mainstream publication to create a contest that is premised upon the fact (not the idea, not the theory, but the fact) that the fan fictions submitted therein is “original”. 

But given recent cases, including those, like Google Books that we’ve written about here, that’s become an accepted fact. A fanfic can be an original work. EW can ask for fanfic submissions that do not “infringe upon the rights of any third party” because it’s an accepted legal judgment that fanfic does not automatically infringe upon the rights of any third party. They didn’t ask for fic only based on works in the public domain, like Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austin. 

They ask the entrants to affirm that the entry does not “otherwise” infringe on any third party’s rights. The underpinning to this is that fanfiction is transformative, Fair Use and thus non-infringing. It says “fan fiction submission” – not just “submission”. By putting “fan fiction” into that sentence, they’re creating a situation where a court would have to use the standard meaning of “fan fiction”. Now, EW is obligated to accept whatever risk could vest, at least re what they eventually opt to publish.

It’s a good thing to have in your archives of Why Fanfic Is Noninfringing, basically, and we like archiving things that say that, especially when they come from big companies that are related to at least some of The Powers That Be. 

While we’ve seen some say that you’re handing over your story to EW if you enter the Fanuary contest, it appears that you’re actually not assigning it to EW or anyone else. The ToU for the contest says:

Entrant grants to Sponsor a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to edit, publish, promote, republish at any time in the future and otherwise use Entrant’s submitted fan fiction, along with Entrant’s name, likeness, biographical information, and any other information provided by Entrant, in any and all media for possible editorial, promotional or advertising purposes, without further permission, notice or compensation (except where prohibited by law).

Under this, they can do a lot with the story you submit, even if you don’t win, but they don’t have any exclusive rights to it just because you submit it to the contest – although it wouldn’t surprise us if the winner has to grant a broader license before they publish their story. 

However, the first paragraph says, “Entries become sole property of Sponsor and none will be acknowledged or returned.” @ew​, we think that someone might not have beta-read the contest rules, because the copyright license in the Rules contradicts the implication in the first paragraph, in a way that makes the first paragraph look poorly worded because it’s vague as to what the entry actually is. If @ew​ does a similar contest in the future, they may want to just say “No entries will be acknowledged or returned.” ETA: @rivkat discusses this issue here

ETA for clarification: In the US, a license or assignment of copyright can only be done in writing, and while a nonexclusive license (like the one spelled out in the Rules) can happen without a signature, as the Copyright Office says, a “transfer of copyright ownership … is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance
(for example, contract, bond, or deed) or a note or memorandum
of the transfer is in writing and is signed by the
owner of the rights conveyed or the owner’s duly authorized
agent.” See 17 U.S.C. § 204(a).

We don’t believe that submitting a contest entry constitutes a signing by the fic-writer; if it doesn’t, then there’s no assignment of the fic. There is, as we said, a non-exclusive license, but that means that after submission, the fic-writer can still do anything they want to with said story. 

[Updated Jan. 4, 2016 at 1:50 PM EST]

Glad to see @entertainmentweekly updated the rules as we recommended yesterday. More info via @themarysue http://www.themarysue.com/not-cool-ew-fanfic/