johnnyA926a in Onstage_1 asks: Any chances of a Xena Movie or anything to that effect?
DishDiva says: Lucy says: I have warmed to that idea but nobody knows who technically owns the rights.
MSN Chat With Lucy Lawless, 13 February 2004, Chat Transcript
Lucy Lawless, who starred in six seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess, told SCI FI Wire that a proposed Xena movie remains caught in a legal haggle.
»I think a movie would be great, and I'd love to do it,« Lawless said in an interivew. »I've been wanting to do it for years.« But, she added: »Nobody can agree who owns the rights, and it's a big fat pain in the ass.«
Sci Fi Wire, 18 August 2005, Article 32071 - Xena Movie Still in Limbo
Disclaiming the Shades...
a series by Jürgen Anders
Okay, at least I'm not the only one left wondering. So, to everyone out there reading this, no copyright infringement whatsoever is intended, and this project is emphatically not for profit.
First of all, everything Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and everything else that has permeated my pop-cultural upbringing is owned by »who technically owns the rights,« and in this, »who« as well as »nobody,« the latter including myself, may be subject to change without notice.
Thanks to the relentless efforts of many unsung heroes in marketing and distribution, my pop-cultural upbringing also includes a lot of music, and by this, I mean really a lot, and certainly a few more TV and Big Screen products, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, Wilde Engel, countless BBC and Discovery Channel documentaries, a few local ones, too, and all the short stories, magazines, newspapers and books that have wound their way into my brain. Not just starting with those that tricked several extremely patient and forgiving teachers into trying to teach me English. At least, I thus hope most of what has remained of it in my everyday use as written or spoken word is rightly copyrighted by textbook producers.
For the remainder, I would like to take this opportunity to thank, in order of appearance, countless members of NATO forces sharing the mud and the drizzly cold of my autumnal childhood playgrounds in the backward and remote woodlands of the Fulda Gap, central Germany (West, at the time), all my relatives from here to the antipodes (pretty much any route you'd like to take), and a lot of friends, on and off-line (dito).
Copyright is, as a great many press statements state in many a great wording, exclusively intended to protect the intellectual property of creative minds, not just because it is what ultimately buys them their bread, with the help of all the many dilligent people mentioned above. As I said, it doesn't do that for me, buying any kind of bread whatsoever, most of all; that said, there are several hundred kinds of bread available around here. And I'm quite happy about that it doesn't, because I already suffer from one real job in which this whole concept of actually owning what you think, imagine, invent, come up with, are skilled enough to do, giving credit to the person who actually does it hands on, is utterly absent, and I don't want another job of that kind, nor do I want anyone else to suffer that. It may be hard to imagine, credits do continue amaze me. Every time I tape a documentary or movie from TV, I keep them on the tape, if the station lets me, that is, because I've never seen something like that on any kind of everyday product I've come in contact with, for example in a DVD player user's manual.
That's why I have given it a honest effort to compile them for these little diddies, honest meaning I continuously kept tabs of it all the time writing, that is quite a large bit of that spent on the project in the past five years, and included the best information I could safely obtain, shining light into quite a few dusted over corners in the back of my mind, to reconstruct where things and thoughts might have come from. This wasn't always easy, because, just for a start, people don't give credit easily. Not at all, for example, for a TV show, where they are usually cut off after the end of the content, or squeezed into an unreadably narrowed and speeded up roll-through at the very edge of the screen to make room for something to advertise on most of it, or for a song you've just heard on the radio, being looped day by day for weeks, and that despite the fact that presenters do generously take the time to talk into its beginning and end; unlike on all the the old tapes I still have, back from the old times when they used to give you title and interpret, at least, if not the bards... oops, songwriters, before or after the music itself, so on those, I could write that down, at least.
With this in mind, if you want to do the creative mind justice, and go on an adventure holiday, the ideal way to combine both is go to a place where they sell those songs legally, and try to take notes from the back covers if you can't afford to buy them all right away. I did try that. Once. Never again. After all the honest answers, which took quite a while because there were many questions, they still thought I was after them for some copyright violation on somebody else's behalf. Well, thank you; lesson learned. But I'd still appreciate more information for updates of the credits on that part.
After reading Lucy Lawless' answer, as given above, I at least felt a little better, and I hope you will find what you need with the credits I can give, on the internet, because, thankfully, about the first two pages of hits you get on every search engine I know will by now give you a fair cross-section of all the vendors who are legally allowed to collect the license fees for all the artists who made all these wonderful things owned by »who technically owns the rights,« and »nobody« certainly doesn't include the accountants there, I'm perfectly sure.
Support your favourite artists, buy their products!
Nevertheless I do dare, explicitly excluding all else as explained above, to add the lawyers' favourite smiley at the end, to whatever might be left of these stories after subtracting all that may consciously or not have influenced me.
That is why this project or its parts must not be stored, copied or transmitted in any way without this disclaimer, and the credits, which are therefore an integral part of the split stories, and given in a seperate file to be added to all but the last segment of each packet, if used separately.
Important Health Warning
This production includes mindless boredom, double standards, secrecy, liars, banditry, terrorists, imperalists, strong language, spin doctoring, propaganda, censorship, crime, violence in all its forms including all-out war, collateral damage, weapons of mass destruction in all their forms, conventional weapons of all kinds, landmines, no respect whatsoever for any kind of human rights, drugs, organized crime, organized religion, many living gods, rape, and nudity.
If you happen to live on a planet called Earth - feel at home.
If not - find yourself a PG rating.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
And now, being a fair player, after reading and understanding all this carefully, you may proceed to the track and chapter selection menu below:
Shades of Grey
Black Feather on White Wings
Lies on the Ancient Crossroads
Little Kittens' Diary
Kill the Whale!
A few notes on these scrolls
...
Fifteen cars
And fifteen restless riders
Three conductors
And twenty-five sacks of mail
All along the southbound odyssey
...
There are no gods, there is no witchcraft, no magic. It's a real world out there. Everything in it can be touched, probed and examined. Nothing you can describe can't be described. Things further afield can be described based on the things you know, those closer to you. A description of what can be seen can not explain why there is existence. But what is existing. So step by step the space outlined by description widens, sometimes retracing its own footsteps to solidify its own ways with hindsight. It has done so ever since the advent of thinking, and with greater, ever accelerating speed since the invention of the written language, so the things once described, the thoughts once thought do not need to whither away any longer. Sometimes they do. Mostly when mankind decides to rip out its own mind, heart, and soul, and plunges itself into the Dark Ages. There have been a few, one of which is too many, and the written word was only the first in line to be murdered at the beginning of each. People soon followed its fate, women and children first. But the products of life are almost as tough as life itself. The Earth has been gentle to the ancient scrolls when people were not. She is so much less ignorant than we are, and so of the bright light seen by those who still believed in the Olympians a faint shimmer endured through the ages. A shimmer reflected by torn strips of papyrus on rubbish heaps, or stuffed into mummified crocodiles, or pasted together to make cartonage coffins. It laid the foundations from which the reawakening minds of the era known as Renaissance - literally meaning rebirth in the classic sense, being born again - expanded the clarity of pure description without the intent to explain deeper reasons into a higher power of reflection, called science. Describing something also means to describe how it changes under the powers of external forces, which thereby already have been described as well, or have to be in the process. Therefore the description becomes a prediction instantaneously which can be tested by experiment. Experiment can not prove a theory right, it can only prove a theory wrong. The reason for this is that there is the unknown. To do the experiment, one has to create the environment in which the described things can take place and the results, unexpected or not, can be seen clearly. Building a description from paper into reality is engineering, and its means are technologies. The roots of word itself, too, can be traced back to those who looked up at the Olympians, and then it meant art. Fine arts of an artist, the art of a craftswoman or man, the art of farming, the art of sailing, the art of hunting, the art of war. The art of Ares, the arts of Mars. Martial arts. War and passion have driven science and technology through all ages in the pursuit of happiness, peace and security in a very humble sense. The preachers' simplicities have stifled both of them time and again. Now mortals' arts are sufficient to let us fly among the planets, and to harvest and harness the very power of the sun itself, in all its forms, be it within the hearts of atoms or out in the bright light of day, then preserves of the Olympians themselves, and many dynasties like them. But every time we truly look at what we can describe, and only this, in the things around us, those literate not just in words, but also in the arts, realize how far we still can go on in the spirit of the Renaissance if we only choose to. How much wider the space of description is than the space of mastered arts, how much more there is to know even beyond both, and how different it is from all you know, what you expected from the existing descriptions before, to what you will find after the experiment. It teaches you humility.
I first realized it, if I can dare to claim that there is any such moment in a lifetime, when I had been running for about two hours through the woods one August morning well over a decade ago. I hadn't slept for over fifty-five hours and I carried some thirty pounds of kit on my back, and an empty assault rifle in my hands. The sun had just come up and glinted through the trees in a way that was painful to the eyes still accustomed to a dark and moonless night. For a fraction of a second, a spider's web the size of two hands, full of heavy dewdrops flashed living rainbows into the corners of my eyes as I hurried by. I couldn't stop to stand and stare, I had to follow fifty blokes ahead of me while fifty more pushed on behind me. All I could do was turn my eyes, barely my head. But it was enough to make me live on it alone for a fortnight, and in a way even longer, from time to time. Ever since that moment I loved the days all the others hated most. The days out there. The days that make good stories. Think of what really is to describe behind that spider's web. No cold, no rain, no thirst, no hunger, and no wet sleeping bag can kill this. It can only be killed with you. There is magic. There is witchcraft. Even though a mindless hand can tear it all apart in almighty ignorance, and less time than it takes to look at, passing by. So then, by this very act, and its practical consequences, for our intents and purposes, there are gods, too.
...
And rolls along past houses, farms, and fields
Passing trains that have no name
...
Later that Wednesday I learned that a few old men drunk on vodka had decided on Monday that they liked the idea of a coup d'état. It already was all over by then, the giant had been struck down and would soon crumble into its own feet of clay, and few of us even had had an inkling about what was going on. We had been called out a little earlier and missed the news on Monday morning, and everything else was only heard through the long grapevines of the supply lines. The world on the outside had changed. One on the inside, too. There is a reason to hate Mondays, sometimes. But sometimes the third day is a charm.
...
Dealing card games with the old man in the club car
Penny a point, an' no one keeping score
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor
...
Times have moved on, and yet, sometimes they're standing still for millennia on end. Nothing changes, and yet it changes at such a breakneck speed that it's almost impossible to follow.
...
And the sons of poor man porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their fathers' magic carpets made of steel
...
Quill and scroll have just set about to write down some older tales, all by their own right next to me, a precious scroll to be copied for a good friend. But the quill no longer has carried one of the great migrant birds across the beautiful face of the Earth before it was shed, and it no longer draws delicate lines of ink onto a fresh sheet of parchment with its wonderful smell and soft crackling sound. Instead, it is now a beam of light, focused and with all its billions and billions of photons moving in unison, and it blasts tiny bubbles into a film of carefully deposited metal vapour or painstakingly selected pigments embedded between two layers of perfectly clear crystallized refined petroleum. And the face of our beautiful planet is round, that of a tiny ball, a pale blue dot orbiting a placid star in the outer rim of the galaxy. But the lines it writes are still wrapped up into a tight roll to make it easier to carry, and the tiny Earth to those living on it is still indistinguishable from being infinitely big.
...
Mothers with their babes asleep
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel
...
The lure and individuality of ancient manuscripts with their brilliant illuminations may have disappeared, save from the numbered or limited editions of today's graphics design illustrators. Some of it remains in the unchangingly changing nature around us, while some has moved into the intricate and often hidden details of technology, and the best technology is indistinguishable from magic, it has once been said. You've never seen magic, true magic? Take a look around. It's mostly green, lives on sunshine and a breath of fresh air, or flies on its own feathers within both. Just for a tiny example.
But the magic of the contents remains, independent of the way of writing, and could manage to spread itself to so many more listeners now than in ancient times, if they'd only care to.
...
But all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rail still ain't heard the news
The conductor sings his songs again
The passengers will please refrain
This train got the disappearin' railroad blues
...
If they'd only care to. ... Listen. Watch. Right behind me, a box the size of an ancient Roman saddle bag constantly blares out the news of the world, for one half of every hour. The past three other halves, just to pick a convenient sample, told me of a warlord still at large ten years after a massacring war on a helpless and peaceful people, about another one who had his henchmen murder far more people in fifteen minutes than the most dreaded war criminals of all our own past ever got in a day, still on the run, too, and finally about a writer who bought a railway ticket to travel across half a continent to experience the kindness of the people who live there, and share the hardships they suffer, in search of a story.
It seems to me, the same characters are indeed eternally reborn. When I wrote Shades Of Grey in a stark raving mad raging bout of anger almost six years ago, I didn't recognize them until I was down to the writing of the very last few lines. Until then, it was just an original story, and one hardly intended for publication, for the very real kind of cruelty which was everywhere in it, except for in between the lines. The characters didn't even have names, and for some part of the writing, when it was still called Highride, I didn't even bother to specify their sex. They were just neutral nobodies thrown at will into the situation by the petty and cruel ancient god part of myself. There are gods, as I said. But some don't content themselves with writing, they do it for real.
More important to me, the characters never had a face until the curtain lifted itself from the stage, that is the parachute's silken canopy fell unto the clearing, revealing the pilot to my mind's eye... and I was seeing a very familiar young woman with emerald green eyes and blonde hair, standing there in an olive, greenish, brownish pilot's flight suit. Shaking from the shock of touchdown in reality. All of a sudden, as if ice crystals were spreading through a bowl of freezing water, the familiar faces painted themselves on the people in the clearing. And that was it. The whole story had changed without a single word being altered. Shook and froze me, too.
I'm not at all an imaginative writer. I basically just write down what I see, and I can't control it the least bit. Not a snowflake's chance in tartarus to try. It would be like trying to stop a speeding train by throwing a baked bean at the engine. I always find myself forced to take the full ride once I punch the ticket, and no-one ever tells me where the rails are going. Of recently, I think it was the dumbest thing I did for most of my life not to jump on the trains when they started rolling by their own devices. I stood on the platform for two and a half of my three or so conscious decades. Since somebody talked me into doing so when I was four or five, to stay. Stay real. Get real. Travel, I could do it then, perfectly. Slide in and out of the carriages softly and without haste. Maybe one day I'll be that good again. Like when I was four. But the trains, they told me, were not real. Just imagination, with a diminuitive 'just'. What's real, then? A scenery in the great outdoors? A movie set within it? The actors playing their characters? The light entering the camera? The latent image on the film? The silver crystallizing into the film's grain as it is developed? The racing beam of light that scans it line by line and frame by frame? The modulated airwaves carrying it into a TV set? Its image on the retina? The patterns of neural activity caused by it in the brain? The electrons travelling along the nerve cells there as one understands the story, watches the scenery? The same electrons moving as one just imagines? That's just about as real as it gets. With a capital 'just'. It could be described, given time and effort. Too many dreams and stories have vanished into the hazy distance, leaving only a fading vapour trail blown away from the rails, or a shrill signal echoing in the void.
Now I leave my old boots where I stood and watch them disappear in the distance as I push up the windows and settle into the rhythm of the rails. I'm glad it's no disappearing railroad blues. Good morning fantasy, how are ya? Say, don't you know me I'm your native son. I'm a writer who calls himself Jürgen Anders, and I'll be gone a billion miles before the day is done... There are wonderful folk songs, too, like that one by Arlo Guthrie about a train they call The City of New Orleans. It was on the very first record I ever owned. And mostly I don't have the last bit of an idea where my brain sometimes picks up the routes for the schedules it makes up. Neither do I have an idea of when the departure time is - this time it was 4:43 a.m., local time - or what the carriages will look like. At least, I can recall the diaries bulging under the masses of accounts and pictures reliably in times of being stuck in a place, so for the time being, of which I definitively don't have enough, the dark ink won't run dry, and the laser light will shine on.
A few more remarks remain to be written on this loose series of stories:
When you arrive at stations where the real world has given me something to sing about, and you find them too disturbing to bear, please don't read on. Close the windows and pull up the shades. Be assured that I share your feelings. It's why I'm writing on. It's my way to lock the doors on a charging demon.
In this world, cars don't blow up in a bright fireball when hit, punches hurt, people behind guns kill and others lie, and in both cases may continue to do so despite the convincing attempt to talk them out of it. Skills may be a gift to begin with, but still require honing, and a little muscle takes a lot of training. Survival of a fight requires everything you can get regardless of morality, and so much luck that you would wish to have played the lottery instead. Well then, think again: life is priceless, and there is none after one.
But here in these real paradises of ours and theirs, the sunrise shines just as warm, nature lends a helping hand if you don't waste your energies fighting her. Just like friends do. And love is true.
Sometimes you might meet a travelling bard with a romantic heart, a warrior princess haunted by the darkness in her past, strong Amazons, cruel warlords, mean thugs, intractable gods and their blind followers, somebody who slays those who suck the life blood out of others, or some other who just seems to be designed to be born to fight, yet other people who dig deep in secret files, and the innocent victim. If they look to you like other people's great ideas, that's what they are. And many great other people rightly hold a copyright on them. One which I don't intend, never intended and never will intend to infringe when I'm writing, which I don't do for any kind of profit. Just for my own healing. I just borrowed them all, I hope respectfully, and set them free to run as they maybe would like to do on their own, if they all of a sudden found themselves born into a real world much like ours today, although a little more fuzzy, geographically and historically speaking.
In both cases, it is not exactly the same thing, but all the similarities are definively intended, and no coincidence at all, and there may be even more than you see at a first glance.
Finally, if you'd only care to, at least don't get into the way of those who chose to walk through the fire to fight to at least try to right wrongs.
And most of all, help by all means at your disposal those who cared and chose to help.
...
I'll be gone five hundred miles
When the day is done.
V.1.2.0.3 - all stories, elements, designs, and other products of creativity not previously copyrighted or otherwise documented (c) J.A.2001-2006