Shadow and Act

This weekend's box office numbers were pretty tepid. Breaking Dawn fever is finally cooling down and nothing else really caught fire with the public this weekend.

The story goes that in 1986 African-American female writer Sophia Stewart submitted a manuscript titled, THE THIRD EYE, to a science fiction comic book contest that was sponsored by the Wachowski Brothers from an ad that was placed in a national magazine. She never heard from them and her manuscript was never returned. Years later, in 1999, when the first MATRIX film was released Stewart recognized that her work had been appropriated by the Wachowski Brothers and she filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement in 2003 against them, Warner Bros., Joel Silver, Village Roadshow Entertainment, James Cameron, Gale Ann Hurd and THE TERMINATOR franchise. Now every three or four years after she had filed the lawsuit contradictory stories are circulated on the internet about her either having won the lawsuit (in 2004) or that the lawsuit had been dismissed (in 2005). And just as recently as December 10th 2011, other websites including www.brandnewz.com have announced that Miss. Stewart has won a multi-billion dollar settlement for copyright infringement against the MATRIX franchise and THE TERMINATOR franchise. She allegedly won her lawsuit based on the fact that,”according to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original [Matrix] film, in an attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement.” (1)

Few people know that before he became famous with hip-hop and the movies O'Shea Jackson (AKA Ice Cube) studied architectual design in Arizona back in the late 80's

By now, S&A readers should be more than a little familiar with actress Zawe Ashton, and the numerous projects she's been a part of that have been highlighted on this site.  Just yesterday, Tambay provided us with 2 new clips from Ashton's upcoming film Dreams Of A Life, directed by Carol Morley.  I had the great pleasure of speaking with Ashton this week,  for a revealing interview that provided answers to some very pressing questions.