The ladies of “The L Word” are back with their most ambitious season to date.

After a prolonged two-year sophomore slump, the fourth season has managed to jumpstart itself.

Taking on issues including the Iraq War, biphobia, late-bloomers, heterosexual privilege, transgender identity, Deaf culture, and class and race relations, the series runs the risk of addressing too much at once. But the story arcs progress comfortably over the first six episodes, careful not to overwhelm fans with too much politicking.

This is a deliberate move by the writers.

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SPUKHAUS PRODUCTIONS’ very own Joachim Reinhold went on Saturday afternoon to London in order to honour Mia Kirshner (‘24′, The L Word, The Black Dahlia etc) with this year’s “BREMEN MEDIA AWARD”. Time was really short and the video isn’t fully processed yet, but we are all very glad that Mia accepted this honour and found some time during her very tight shedule to receive the Stadtmusikanten statue. This is the first photo batch – more in good time.

As the “BREMEN MEDIA AWARD” is granted anually we will start our brand new website http://www.bremen-media-award.de shortly. There you will find the back ground story about why this award was created and our past and present winners. Starting in January 2007 you can vote online for our next bunch of nominees.

Source: A Writer’s Life Blog

EDIT: Mia received the award for her “outstanding performance in The L Word.” A video of her receiving this award is now online and can be viewed here.

The real standout in the cast, however, is Mia Kirshner (TV’s 24), who turns in a haunting, blisteringly effective performance as Short. Even though she is seen only in four key scenes, Kirshner’s performance is so evocative and searing that she should earn an Academy Award nomination, even though the movie is a disaster. Whenever she is on the screen, her performance is better than De Palma and his movie deserve.

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As with most reviews of The Black Dahlia, this video review (click on “Latest Programme” button in the sidebar located under the images of the two women to view) on the BBC News website is a scathing one, but also like other reviews, they praise Mia Kirshner’s performance as Elizabeth Short. Be sure and check it out when you have a free moment.

Thanks again to Mifunes for sending in the link.

Source: BBC News

Nearly 60 years old now, the Black Dahlia case continues to cast its pulpy mythic spell over Los Angeles culture. It represents a time and a place that only a few of the living can remember for real; for the rest of us, postwar L.A. is a world of black and white, of nocturnal jazz, of tough guys in fedoras and sultry dolls in heels. In short, it’s the world of classic film noir, made at the time, about the time.

Of course, everyone knows that those films rarely had pretensions to realism, let alone documentary truth. But with the passage of time they are the images that endure and shape our collective memories in a way that may never again be possible. A world of camcorders and 24-hour news provides detail that is harsh and overexposed, if no closer to the truth. Despite its notoriety, the O.J. Simpson case – with everything but the initial violent act transmitted in real time as it occurred – can never achieve the sort of mythic status that has grown up around the sad life and gruesome death of Elizabeth Short.

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Brian De Palma has made legendary crime and noir-ish thrillers, so adapting James Ellroy seems like a perfect fit for him. His film of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia combines all those elements – seedy gangsters, hard boiled detectives, violent crimes and a macabre sense of humor. He talked about that and more when I caught him out junketing for The Black Dahlia.

“But that’s the tone of the book,” said De Palma. “That very much exists in the book. I was just talking to some journalist about this is closer to Sunset Boulevard with the funeral of the monkey and when he arrives at Norma’s estate. It’s like, ‘Okay, how are we supposed to take that?’ I mean, you take Bill Holden’s kind of wry analysis of what he’s watching and this is very much true in this piece too because once you’re at the Linscotts, you’re in a nut house. These people are insane and the way that Ellroy wrote it is sort of like a comic opera. I don’t know how else to explain it, and so what I did in order to get that approach to the audience originally was to shoot the entrance in first person. I said, ‘Okay, you want to see these people? Let them look at you. Let Mrs. Linscott just look at you like you’re trash.’ ‘How is a policeman in my living room?’ So that was the adjustment that I made. When you have a dog stuffed with the newspaper with his first million dollars and Hilary [Swank] just started tosses it off like the weather, I mean, you go, ‘Wow. I’m in a looney bin here and everyone seems to think it’s quite normal.’ That exactly how I did it. It was very much in the tone of the Ellroy book”

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In his neo-noir mystery, “The Black Dahlia,” director Brian De Palma brings his camera into a morgue where the remains of the mutilated murder victim, Elizabeth Short, are displayed on an autopsy table. Through the director’s lens, we gaze with grim fascination at the grotesqueness of the crime, wondering not only who this woman was and how she met her fate but what twisted mind could carry out such a heinous murder?

In real life, Short’s remains were discovered on Jan. 15, 1947, by a passerby pushing a stroller past a vacant lot near 39th Street and Norton Avenue in Leimert Park, touching off a mystery that endures to this day.

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“What’s it like to work with Scarlett Johansson?” I may not be the most adept interviewer, but I’m not about to blow my twenty minutes with Brian De Palma at the historic Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles with so routine a query. Actually, it’s the director himself posing the question, only it’s with weary sarcasm and to no one in particular – a grim acknowledgment of the boilerplate interrogations he’ll be enduring all day at the hands of personalities from Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra and all the other glitzy, low-cal entertainment news shows.

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Citing “a ratings explosion in season 3″, Showtime announced today that it has ordered a fourth season of The L Word, the lesbian drama created by Ilene Chaiken.

“The L Word is without a doubt is one of Showtime’s true signature series,” said Showtime President Robert Greenblatt in a press release announcing the news.

The network has ordered 12 new episodes for the fourth season, set to begin production this summer and premiere on Showtime in 2007.

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Registration is open for the first network-sanctioned, collaborative writing event featuring fans developing a script for an existing series. Each week through March 31, 2006, millions of fans of The L Word will be invited online to write, read, rate and discuss short scenes based on an instructive “scene mission” provided by a member of the writing team from the hit cable series.

Fans submit their original scenes, the online community votes, and at the end of each week, the most popular fan-submitted scene will be added to the script in progress. The process will repeat each week with a new “scene mission” until the entire script is complete.

Registration is open at http://www.LwordFanisode.com. People who register prior to Feb. 3 have a chance to win a shopping spree from saks.com worth $5000.

Source: starpulse.com