These adaptations of four 1974 episodes of the BBC1 comedy series, The Liver Birds, feature the two incompatible Liverpudlian girls, Beryl and Sandra. What they have in common are a tiny flat, boyfriend problems, and a passion for the latest fashion.

"The Pleasures of Structure "starts from the premise that the ability to develop a well understood and articulated story structure is the most important skill a screenwriter can develop. For example, good structure requires a great premise and rigorous character development. Without clear character motivations and goals--which are themselves indicative of key structural beats--your story is going exactly nowhere. Using the simple and flexible 'W' model of screenplay structure developed in the prequel "Write What You Don't Know," Hoxter sets this out as its starting point. This model is tested against a range of examples which are chosen to explore the flexibility not only of that model but of movie storytelling more generally. Writers and students often worry that they are asked to work 'to formula'. This book will test that formula to breaking point. For example, the first case study will offer the example of a well written, professional, mainstream movie against which our later and more adventurous examples can be compared. So the lessons we learn examining the animated family adventure movie "How To Train Your Dragon "lead us directly to ask questions of our second case study, the acclaimed Swedish vampire movie "Lat den Ratte Komma In "("Let The Right One In"). Both movies have protagonists with the same basic problem, the same goal, and they use the same basic structure to tell their stories. Of course they are very different films and they work on their audiences in very different ways. Our linked case studies will expose how simple choices, like reversing the order of elements of the protagonist's transformational arc and shifting ownership of key story beats, has an enormous impact on how we respond to a structural model that is otherwise functionally identical.

This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that rely upon temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold the narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time play in contemporary programming, but the implications of its sometimes disorienting presence.

Drawing upon the fields of cultural studies, television scholarship, and literary studies, as well as overarching theories concerning postmodernity and narratology, "Time in Television Narrative" offers some critical suggestions. The increasing number of of television programs concerned with time may stem from any and all of the following: recent scientific approaches to quantum physics and temporality; new conceptions of history and posthistory; or trends in late-capitalistic production and consumption, in the new culture of instantaneity, or in the recent trauma culture amplified after the September 11 attacks. In short, these televisual time experiments may very well be an aesthetic response to the climate from which they derive. These essays analyze both ends of this continuum and also attend to another crucial variable: the television viewer watching this new temporal play.

Nadezhda Ptushkina's plays reflect her keen interest in constructing multidimensional characters that reflect the myriad ways people are affected by today's turbulent world. Often writing strong female roles, she does not shy away from exploring the sometimes tragic implications that lie behind her comical, almost farcical scenes. Ptushkina questions the nature of love, and explores the boundaries between the spiritual and the base, the constructive and the destructive, that lie within every human being. Conflict between the sexes constitutes the core of Ptushkina's plays, in which she warns the audience against confusing sex and love. Ptushkina rejects any notion that men and women are the same, seeing gender differences rather than personality differences as the main source of tension between men and women. Her plays thus dwell on this 'battle of the sexes' and the resulting lack of respect for women that she sees in today's Russia.In this new translation, western readers have a chance to discover why Ptushkina's work holds such wide appeal in the Russian theatre.

This is an examination of "The Night of the Hunter," Charles Laughton's only outing as a film director. It looks at the symbolism of the piece, at Willa, her throat cut sitting in the Model-T Ford, and the Preacher, a silhouetted threat on the horizon.

Director Martin Scorsese, the legendary storyteller, decided to make his first-ever 3D film based on the Brian Selznick illustrated novel which he read four years ago, immediately connected to, and then shared with his youngest daughter. In reading books to my daughter, we re-experience the work. So it's like rediscovering the work of art again, but through the eyes of a child. He decided to turn to a different film format, and screenwriter John Logan was chosen to turn Selznick's words and illustrations and transform them into a screenplay. He had to cut and change some elements of the book, but, as Selznick says in his introduction: John performed a kind of magic trick. He took my story and turned it inside out. He turned it into a story that feels like it was always meant to be a movie, and yet he also took the time to celebrate books [and] all happens in the context of a gigantic, glorious, heartfelt, cinematic masterpiece just makes it all the more meaningful. "Hugo" is the astonishing adventure of a wily and resourceful boy whose quest to unlock a secret left to him by his father will transform Hugo and all those around him, and reveal a safe and loving place he can call home. Scorsese has assembled an impressive acting ensemble comprised of rising new talent working alongside venerated stars of the stage and motion pictures, including Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Helen McCrory, Christopher Lee, Richard Griffiths, Frances De La Tour, Michael Stuhlbarg, and with Jude Law.

Jerry. George. Elaine. Kramer.

We've followed their misadventures for nearly ten years on Thursday nights. Here, finally, are the scripts of the first two seasons that will take you back to the beginning of Seinfeld.

Featuring the first 17 episodes ever aired, The Seinfeld Scripts contains all the great lines that have kept us laughing for years: the pilot episode, "The Seinfeld Chronicles," where it all began; George introduces his importer/exporter altar ego Art Vanderlay in "The Stakeout"; Kramer becomes obsessed with cantaloupe in "The Ex-Girlfriend"; Jerry and George meet Elaine's dad in "The Jacket"; is Jerry responsible for a poor Polish woman's death when he makes "The Pony Remark"?; Jerry and Elaine decide to become intimate again in "The Deal"; what will George do when he is banned from the executive bathroom in "The Revenge"?; and Jerry, George, and Elaine wait for a table in "The Chinese Restaurant."

It's all here: the award-winning writing of Seinfeld, "the defining sitcom of our age". Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.

Elaine: My roommate has Lyme disease.
Jerry: Lyme disease? I thought she had Epstein-Barr syndrome?
Elaine: She has this in addition to Epstein-Barr. It's like Epstein-Barr with a twist of Lyme disease.

George: She calls me up at my office she says, "We have to talk."
Jerry: The four worst words in the English language.

Kramer: What a body. Yeeaaah...that's for me.
Jerry: Yeah and you're just what she's looking for, too--a stranger, leering through a pair of binoculars ten floors up.

A child's wish melds the soul of a kind-hearted simpleton to a toy BEAR. Secret for three generations the GUARDIAN wakes in time of need. Surviving the sinking of the TITANIC the BEAR passes into the hands of the JEWISH community. Aboard the rescue ship CARPATHIA it travels on...to the gas chambers of AUSCHWITZ. The BEAR brings with it...A HISTORY OF FEAR.

An 1876 Californian tale of a Coast Miwok Warrior named 'Quentin' AKA 'Naked Spurs'. In the present... a YOUNG ARTIST creates a Wild West diorama and tells the seriously tall tale of NAKED SPURS his great-great grandfather. As the streaking inmate of San Quentin penitentiary 'Naked Spurs' must run for his life along with other criminals; this is one story he can not run away from. NAKED SPURS is the plausible tale of the BEAT THE BOUNTY competition, a contest attracting the fastest guns in the west to the largest man-hunt in history.