IT SORT OF came out of nowhere, years later, in an interview with the U.K. magazine Radio Times. After a successful reinvention of the Doctor Who franchise in 2005, star Christopher Eccleston rather mysteriously bowed out at the end of the first season. The official announcement cited a grueling production schedule and Eccleston’s fear of being typecast. The BBC later retracted its statement and admitted it hadn’t spoken to Eccleston before it was issued.

And that’s where things remained until Eccleston’s Radio Times interview this week in the run-up to his role in the upcoming BBC biopic Lennon Naked. He tells the magazine he left the successful series because, “I was open-minded but I decided after my experience on the first series that I didn’t want to do any more. I didn’t enjoy the environment and the culture that we, the cast and crew, had to work in.”

Eccleston doesn’t explain what he found so objectionable about the environment and the culture, just that he “wasn’t comfortable.” He continues, “I thought ‘If I stay in this job, I’m going to have to blind myself to certain things that I thought were wrong.’ And I think it’s more important to be your own man than be successful, so I left.”

The Code That Dare Not Speak Its Name

The environment? Certain things? That were wrong? All these sound like code words for Something That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Especially when you consider that the “culture” was set by the show’s executive producer at the time, Russell T. Davies, notorious for his very gay Queer as Folk and for introducing the most overt gay references in the formerly staid Doctor Who franchise.

While it’s certainly troubling that Eccleston may have had some issues with appearing on a show that had him kissing another guy, it’s more troubling that this is topic is still Too Shameful to Discuss Openly. And not just by him. The narrative in the media is that Eccleston is “finally” revealing why he left the show.

Except he really hasn’t. All his vague terms are very “wink and a nod” in nature, and the media coverage is reciprocating by dutifully quoting him without really challenging what’s behind the quotes. Nobody — including the media — wants to simply say, Russell T. Davies made Doctor Who too gay for Christopher Eccleston.

If that’s not what you meant, Mr. Eccleston, perhaps you should clarify? That’s what Radio Times, the BBC and everyone else who’s covering the hell out of this story should be asking. But they haven’t. No one’s calling him to account for his comments and what lies behind them. And that’s a failure of the media, not just Christopher Eccleston.

Next: Up to the Fans to Discuss the Real Issue »

LOS ANGELES — What if you woke up one day at summer camp to discover all the adults had disappeared? That’s how the kids’ adventure series, eScape, begins when it comes to the Web this summer, producers announced today.

Created by Mike Feurstein of New York-based MovieQuest Productions and co-produced by Runic Films, eScape tells the story of a group of campers seemingly abandoned by their counselors. They soon discover they are trapped in a video game that grants them amazing abilities. But in the real world, this game is the object of a power struggle between powerful corporations and mysterious military interests.

The first three seasons of eScape will premiere on the Web this summer on its Web site, www.eScapeTheSeries.com. A trailer and a preview of the show are available on the site now.

The show tells a great story in the same vein as Lost. Young and older viewers alike connect with its characters’ struggles to make the right life choices in the face of adventure, danger and unimaginable odds. — Series creator Mike Feurstein

eScape’s third season is currently in production in and around Albany, N.Y., starring local actors and school children. The students also worked behind the scenes to help produce the series.

“Wide release of eScape this summer will introduce viewers to the space- and time-bending world of the show,” said Runic Films producer Ben Alpi.  “It’s a world we plan to continue to explore.”

eScape is the latest project from Runic Films, which comprises the creative team behind the Web series Star Trek: Phase II, winner of TV Guide’s Online Video Award for Science Fiction, and nominee for the Hugo and Nebula awards — science fiction’s highest honors.

Alpi, who had contributed visual effects to the first two seasons of eScape, introduced series creator Feurstein to his Runic partners — writer-producer Carlos Pedraza, cinematographer David Berry, and visual effects artists Joël Bellucci and Matt Jolly — after their recent departure from the Trek series.

Watch the Trailer

Feurstein and his young filmmakers have produced movies that have won gold medals in New York state competitions and top prizes in regional film contests. Feurstein himself earned Best Local Filmmaker kudos in readers’ polls from the Albany, N.Y., Times Union, and the Metroland newsweekly. He has also produced an international educational DVD series on autism, contributed to the blockbuster award-winning Guitar Hero video game and owns Cucumber Alley, a film lighting rental company.

“Ben, Carlos and the rest of the Runic guys came aboard to help make the third season of eScape the best yet,” Feurstein said, “and its release on the Web is an exceptional showcase for the cast and crew.”

Runic Films is a production and entertainment company developing original properties for Web, film and television. Now located in Los Angeles, Runic was founded by two brothers in New York, and has grown to a staff of award-winning writers, directors, artists and technicians. Dedicated to upholding the rich traditions of storytelling, Runic Films harnesses cutting-edge technology and visual effects to create amazing worlds for dramatic tales grounded in humanity.

Based in historic Schenectady, N.Y., MovieQuest Productions is a motion picture production company dedicated to offering young people educational opportunities to create quality films.

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Links

• eScape Web site http://www.eScapeTheSeries.com
• Runic Films http://www.runicfilms.com

It’s Oscar season! So here are my first thoughts on the competition, though with the caveat that there are a few of the nominated films I haven’t seen.

Best Picture

Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air. All in all, not a bad crop.

• Avatar certainly has momentum going in (here’s my review) but I don’t think it does everything it needs to to win Best Picture; its by-the-numbers story and gloss on characterization make it subpar. Its groundbreaking, gorgeous visuals won’t make up for that.
• Blind Side was heartfelt (heck, I cried), and I loved Sandra Bullock’s performance, but there’s nothing distinctive about it that would put it ahead of the other nominees.
• Inglourious Basterds was an inspired piece of filmmaking, featuring some nuanced and powerful performances; it’s certainly in the running, though its fantasy ending fizzled for me since we clearly know history says otherwise.
• Precious was precious (my review). Its depressing premise may relegate it to underdog status.
• Though I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker, I love the irony that James Cameron (Avatar) is up against this movie’s director, his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow.
• District 9? I liked it a lot, but let’s just leave it at “it’s an honor to be nominated.”
• I know critics have gone mad for An Education but nothing about its story made me want to cough up 10 bucks to go see it.
• Up? Wonderful, but I don’t see an animated film knocking off live-action performances of the kind represented in this list.
• Up in the Air was flawless, but I think its appeal is limited demographically.
• I meant to see A Serious Man since I’m a Coen Brothers fan but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I will before Oscar Night but I don’t see it upsetting any of the frontrunners.

Next: Best Actor and more »

We’re supposed to be inspired by films about resilient inner-city children who surmount the obstacles of their lives — poverty, physical and sexual abuse, illiteracy, the shackles of welfare — and certainly that’s the proposition of the film, Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.

But inspiration isn’t what you leave this film feeling. What distinguishes Precious is its ability to draw you in because of the expectations you’re likely to bring into the theater and then push them aside, sometimes violently and sometimes with a measure of sudden grace.

The film’s trailer certainly sets up the gloom you expect from this type of story, but the film itself subverts it through a set of fantasy sequences that are a two-edged sword for Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe). Her fantasy life helps her survive the depraved abuse she suffers at home but it also threatens to keep her from grabbing what few opportunities life tries to hand her.

This is not a feel-good movie. Blind Side is a feel-good movie with a tidy happy ending. Set in 1987 Harlem, Precious will make you feel a little dirty before you are allowed to wring a tiny, yet valuable, drop of refined hope from the raw and crude morass that is the life of its main character. Precious’ happiness is in no way guaranteed, and doom hangs in the air even at the film’s end.

Next: Words hurt. A lot. »

Tragedies on the scale of Haiti’s earthquake can leave us reeling, overwhelmed by too much information, and so much of it bad news. We can be left paralyzed. Technology has helped us more easily speed dollars to relief efforts but Haiti’s lack of infrastructure has made it difficult to supply that aid as quickly as the devastation there requires.

My friend, Kellie Walsh, is helping out by sorting through the noise to find some signal, by providing a Web site (thanks, WordPress) to document what’s happening as it happens so that context doesn’t get lost later when, as she puts it, “after the details and memories have grown hazy.”

Her site, Haiti Digital Bibliography, explains her aim, an important one in a world where we suffer not from too little information but too much.

In an effort to preserve a small slice of what happened and how the world responded in the days after the tragic earthquake … I’ve set up this site to compile a bibliography of digital resources about the event and its aftermath. Though a comprehensive list of all digital materials on the web would be impossible, I hope this currently random jumble of headlines can be organized into a bibliography that might later prove helpful to those who seek documentation and understanding of what happened in these frantic few days.

You can help her effort, contributing information and/or helping organize it. You can also donate money to various relief efforts. I’ve added links to three in the ad space throughout the Cosmic Sitcom, thanks to Kellie’s direction.

ABOVE Aerial photo of downtown Port au Prince, Haiti. Source: United Nations Development Program on Flickr.
Used under Creative Commons license.

My Photoshopped version of the original cover of Mark Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. The original cover is pictured on page 3.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — I took matters into my own hands when I discovered Mark Twain’s first book, long since in the public domain, is not available anywhere in electronic format. So I made my own.

My friends here have chosen as their year-long project reading all of Mark Twain’s works. First on the list is Twain’s debut book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, published in 1867.

Remarkably, while you can buy The Complete Mark Twain Collection (more than 300 of his works!) in Amazon’s Kindle marketplace for only 99 cents (viewable on Amazon’s free Kindle app for the iPhone), it turns out that version is somewhat less than complete. The collection omits nearly half the 27 stories and essays in the original Jumping Frog book.

Though I’ve generally liked what I’ve bought from the Kindle store to read on my iPhone, I was pretty disappointed in what I bought from Amazon this time around. But let me dispense with the details necessary to my fellow Twain-reading colleagues; I’ll continue with my tale in a forthcoming post.

Instructions for the ’10 Twain St. Pete Book Club

Stanza is the leading ebook app for the iPhone and iPod Touch using the open-source ePub format.

To read the full ebook, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll need the following:

• The Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch app. It’s free in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes)
• The Stanza desktop app for Mac or Windows (download here)
• A WiFi network to which both your desktop computer and iPhone/iPod Touch have access. Don’t despair if this isn’t the case. Just contact me and I’ll walk you through an alternative.

Next: How to get the ebook and load it onto your iPhone/iPod Touch »

From a bulletin board for the Communication and Media program at the University of Minnesota. The funny part is that the “B.S.” bit was taped onto the Scientific & Technical Communication label — someone went out of their way to let you know.

I was honored to learn that TrekMovie.com, the leading Star Trek movie news site, named the Star Trek: Phase II production of my screenplay, “Blood and Fire, Part 2” the best Star Trek fan production of 2009.

That, along with Joss Whedon telling Rolling Stone that “World Enough and Time,” the Star Trek: Phase II production I co-executive produced, inspired him to create Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, made my year.

Rolling Stone, btw, named Phase II, which I wrote for and produced, one of their five must-watch Web series.

“Blood and Fire” is based on a script Gerrold originally authored for Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was never produced because its passing reference to a male couple aboard the Enterprise was considered too controversial by the producers.

I adapted the script for the original Trek series-based Phase II, expanding the story to include Captain Kirk’s nephew Peter as one part of the male couple. Interestingly, two decades later, that portrayal proved plenty controversial when “Blood and Fire, Part 1″ debuted a year ago.

Fortunately, Part 2′s release this past November was greeted by far fewer objections.

• A buzzword loses its usefulness when it’s used to substitute for real thinking rather than to illuminate it. (Reply on Twitter to @MaxMarmer) The end of the decade, apparently, has become the perfect time for bloggers to assess and assail popular and shark-jumping catchphrases. Here are two from Slate and from iCarly (I love this show!) creator Dan Schneider.
• As a result of Christmas weekend’s movie marathon, I was assailed by the same theater commercials over and again. The only one I really enjoyed was last year’s “Extended Family” Coke-Walmart commercial starring actor John Magaro as a charming and goofy holiday party host. I could only find one YouTube listing for the commercial, and one on MSNBC.

Click image to view ad (opens in new window).

The MSNBC story was about commercials in general. The YouTube listing (since removed because of a copyright claim) occasioned predictable leftie cynical spleen-venting about the corporate conspiracy by Coke and Walmart to lull us into a shopping stupor.

• Via my friend Ellen is this (Canadian!) blog entry, “Niche vs. Niche,” that explores the correct pronunciation for the word (nitch or neesh). Both, btw, are correct but the blogger puts down the way I say it (nitch) as coarse and unsophisticated. Funny. His way strikes me as snobbish and pretentious. Fancy that.
• Junkie1 explores my theory that Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Stiles (pictured at right) are the same person. See what you think, over at the Little Junkies blog.

Something’s rotten in America, if you believe Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. All the things that used to be right about the nation have been upended. By Adam Lambert, no less.

Yes, that pesky homosexual has breached the tacit cultural compromise that Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter, argues has kept the folks in the flyover states from rising up in revolt. Or maybe just revulsion.

At the heart of her argument is a recent poll that finds 55 percent of the public believe the country is on the “wrong track.” Despite the fact we’re in the worst economy since the Great Depression, Noonan believes this poll result must be about more than the economy.

And while 55 percent is not a figure we should be happy about, it doesn’t compare to the 80 percent who thought that in April 2008 under George W. Bush’s presidency, and that was before the bottom dropped out of the economy in fall 2008 during the presidential campaign.

To be fair, she admits the economy might have something to do with Americans’ recent turn to pessimism:

The economy has always had an impact on the general American mood, and the [NBC-Wall Street Journal] poll offered data to buttress the reader’s assumption that economic concerns are driving pessimism.

About ‘Other Things’

But let’s set that aside, she says, because:

Something tells me this isn’t all about money. It’s possible, and I can’t help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things. … Various polls [demonstrate] that those things may dwarf economic concerns. Americans are worried about the core and character of the American nation, and about our culture.

Never mind that Noonan doesn’t specify what polls discuss those ‘other things,’ nor does she specify what those polls actually demonstrate. Instead, she opts for the vague worry about the “core and character” of America and its culture. What better springboard for an attack on what she calls “the cultural left” than a non-specific anxiety that has likely been present during every economic downturn?

Indeed, when we abandon what all the data indicates is the greatest proximate cause for Americans’ worries, Noonan is left with a wide open field to cast about for whatever convenient straw man she cares to name. This time it’s the cultural tyranny imposed on “real” Americans (in Sarah Palin’s parlance) by the cultural left in the Big Cities — home, apparently, to all the fake Americans.

Next: We don’t care what you do in New York …