Finds Much Common Ground With Film
By Ryan McLendon
NEW YORK (AP) --On Tuesday morning, just before the 2010 Academy Award nominations were announced, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher couldn’t get his TV to work. He scrambled to his computer and searched for the online broadcast of the nominations, his ears perking up for his name to be called.
He found a feed and waited. “After the first couple of names were mentioned, I somehow didn’t think mine would be,” Fletcher said.
Seconds later, Fletcher’s name flashed across the screen. He was stunned. He was nominated for best adapted screenplay for “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” the story of a semi-literate teen girl from Harlem in 1987 that has captivated audiences since the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Precious is physically and sexually abused from infancy by her mother and stepfather. After Precious becomes pregnant again, she’s forced to leave school, her mother demanding she go on welfare.
But Precious resists. She wants a better life, one filled with education and love. With the help of a devoted teacher at an alternative school and a caring social worker, she weaves a new life from the tatters of her previous one.
The film has been nominated for best picture. Gabourey Sidibe is a best-actress nominee, Mo’Nique, best supporting actress, and Lee Daniels, best director.
Fletcher finds much common ground with “Precious.” His struggle to enter the entertainment industry resembles her humble beginnings. And through dedication, they both found their true calling. “Precious” was the first screenplay Fletcher had adapted, a job he given to him by Daniels after viewing his mid-’90s 23-minute short film “Magic Markers.”
“I really didn’t believe him,” Fletcher said. “I had heard ‘no’ so many times over the years that I thought even if he meant it, he said it too quickly.”
Fletcher said he fell in love with “Precious” from page one.
“It was such a complete and fulfilling experience. I was just cast under its spell.”
Fletcher was drawn to “Precious” because the story touches on some many common threads that connect all people. The marketing slogan used to promote the film, “We Are All Precious,” was an apropos way for the audience to identify with a girl whose life, from the outside, seems unremarkable. It’s the commonalities, the dreams, the ambition and the hardships that kept the audience — and Fletcher — clinging to “Precious.”
“I love stories that have such specific characters and specific places, yet are about things that are so universal,” he said.
Fletcher loves Precious — the character and the film — because he understands being invisible, an overarching theme in the story. Before “Precious,” his career was largely off the radar in the entertainment world. “I was searching for my voice and my place in the film industry,” he said. “In large part, she reminds me of myself.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More