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The hackers behind The Interview incident have elicited both anger and fear throughout the country. The PEN American Center has sent a letter addressed to the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, to protest against this act of censorship. The organization has posted the full piece on its website.

Besides various PEN executives and trustees, several high profile writers have also signed this note. Some of the participants include PEN president emeritus Salman Rushdie, novelist Neil Gaiman, children’s books illustrator Jules Feiffer, poet John Ashbery, and playwright Tony Kushner. Here’s an excerpt:

“PEN is appalled at the intrusive, criminal and profoundly menacing reprisals and threats that Sony Pictures has endured as a result of producing and planning to distribute The Interview. PEN has long stood with writers and creators who have suffered assaults aimed to suppress the dissemination of their ideas. We believe firmly that violence is never justified as a reaction to speech, no matter how offensive that speech may be to some.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In 2012, the Human Rights Campaign honored Goldman Sachs with an award at its annual dinner, while naming Lloyd Blankfein as its national corporate spokesman for same-sex marriage. In an obscene form of pink-washing in which every banker, sweatshop overlord and oil baron gets a gay star, HRC’s most recent report on “corporate equality” proudly concludes that a record 304 of the nation’s largest businesses—including Chevron, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Comcast, Google, Monsanto, Nike, Raytheon, Boeing, Target and General Electric—have a perfect rating on LGBT issues.

[I]t’s entirely conceivable that we will one day live miserably in a thoroughly ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can marry and serve openly in the Army and that's it. Capitalism, after all, can absorb a lot. Poverty, war, alienation, environmental destruction, colonialism, unequal development, boom/bust cycles, private property, individualism, commodity fetishism, the fetishization of the body, the fetishization of violence, guns, drugs, child abuse, underfunded and bad education (itself a form of child abuse)—these things are key to the successful functioning of the free market. Homophobia is not; the system could certainly accommodate demands for equal rights for homosexuals without danger to itself.

Who will win the Oscars for best adapted screenplay and screenplay? Below, we’ve linked to all the nominees in the top writing categories.

On Monday morning, this GalleyCat editor will talk about the screenplay winners along with a team of Oscar experts in a Google+ hangout. Here’s more about the virtual event:

Join GalleyCat’s Jason Boog, TVNewser’s Alex Weprin, FishbowlLA’s Richard Horgan and GoldDerby editor Tom O’Neil for a post-Oscars Google+ hangout. What book adaptations were snubbed? How did TV news cover it? Learn more about the history of the awards show and get the L.A. perspective.  All this and more on Monday, Feb. 25 at 11:30 a.m.  And we want to hear from you. With the hashtag #mbhangouts, send us your questions and comments on Twitter, Facebook or Google+

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Even Steven Spielberg can get a rejection letter. It seems that Daniel Day-Lewis—who plays Lincoln in Spielberg’s presidential Academy Award Dominated movie, originally did not want to play Abraham Lincoln. Spielberg didn’t let the rejection letter go to waste, he stowed it away for safekeeping and the letter showed up at the awards-podium as reading material last week.

Julie Miller reporter for Vanity Fair wrote, “Before presenting Day-Lewis with the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor, Speilberg read aloud the Oscar winner’s thoughtful brush-off.”

Here is Steven’s Rejection Letter:

Dear Steven,

It was a real pleasure just to sit and talk with you. I listened very carefully to what you had to say about this compelling history, and I’ve since read the script and found it in all the detail in which it describe these monumental events and in the compassionate portraits of all the principal characters, both powerful and moving. I can’t account for how at any given moment I feel the need to explore life as opposed to another, but I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice; that a subject coincides inexplicably with a very personal need and a very specific moment in time. In this case, as fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant. That’s how I feel now in spite of myself, and though I can’t be sure that this won’t change, I couldn’t dream of encouraging you to keep it open on a mere possibility. I do hope this makes sense Steven, I’m glad you’re making the film, I wish you the strength for it, and I send both my very best wishes and my sincere gratitude to you for having considered me.

Daniel Day-Lewis

What can we learn from this? Well, Spielberg didn’t give up. After receiving the letter, he recruited Tony Kushner to pen a new screenplay from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals—one that would earn Day-Lewis’s approval. Apparently he did, because Lincoln is positioned to run away with the Oscars in February.

So the next time you get a rejection letter, keep this story in mind and revise your manuscript. Revision does improve our work and sometimes we just need someone to pull our best out of us.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

The Theatre Communications Group will be publishing the Lincoln screenplay on January 22, 2013. Above, we’ve embedded the official trailer of the adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s nonfiction book.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tony Kushner adapted the book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, for Oscar-winning director Stephen Spielberg‘s latest silver screen flick. Goodwin has agreed to pen a foreword for the Lincoln publication. The book will contain eight pages of color photographs from the movie.

Here’s more from the release: “Kushner’s plays include Angels in America, Parts One and Two; A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul;Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the  Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The annual PEN World Voices literary festival, to be held this year from April 30 through May 6, will include Herta Muller, Martin Amis, Ludmila Ulitskaya, festival chairman Salman Rushdie and a contingent from the Middle East, as well as E.L. Doctorow, Jennifer Egan, Paul Auster and Claire Messud.