Unlike other companies eaten up by the majors, Miramax has retained its personality and working practices almost intact since the Disney buy-out “The atmosphere at Miramax is… like a mobile cardiology unit: there’s a general sense of tension which is only broken up by moments of mania,” says Tina Brown, the former New Yorker editor who is now starting up a new magazine, Talk, for the Weinsteins.Everybody with Oscar ambitions has now been to the Miramax school of promotion. DreamWorks, for example, yanked Saving Private Ryan from distribution back in November before it had exhausted its first run and re-released it a few weeks ago to cash in, very successfully, on the Oscar hype. Everyone has their fancied stars and directors and writers running around giving interview after interview.In the excitement of Oscar fever, it seems the content of the competing films is a nicety that hardly matters any more.
After all, the smart money on the night won’t be on Tom Hanks or even Tom Stoppard or Ian McKellen, it’ll be on Bob and Harvey Weinstein.. Sir: I knew Rosemary Nelson only slightly but she made an instant impression on me as a warm and spirited woman. She said she should never have been a lawyer as she didn’t know how to pass injustice by Far better to have been a teacher Much less dangerous
Now we know how right she was. Her death is an awful blow to enormous numbers of people world-wide who knew her as a human rights campaigner and to the peace process itself. Our hearts go out to her family and friends.
This is no “ordinary” murder. When a solicitor can be blown to pieces for doing her job the concept of the rule of law is shaken to its very foundations. All the more so when unease about the role of the RUC, if not in the actual murder then certainly in the hate-campaign that laid the ground for it, persists.This is why there can be no immediate decommissioning.
It is also why an independent enquiry into exactly how this happened is now vital.NICK MARTIN-CLARKLondon N17. Sir: It is truly wonderful to see Jack Straw and his social exclusion team singing from the Adoption Forum’s hymn sheet (“Straw to act over crisis in adoption”, 13 March). We’ve been saying since our inception three years ago that the number of adoptions from care is scandalously low and leaves many thousands of children who remain in long-term care at serious risk of misery and failure for the rest of their lives.
We welcome, too, Mr Straw’s reforming zeal and the suggestion that the local authorities’ sovereignty over children will be at risk if they don’t pull up their socks and deliver a better deal. Another verse from our hymn.But how happy we would be if Mr Straw’s team also adopted our next verse: that the culture within social work will not change without outside enforcement. We need a watchdog with a very loud bark and encouragingly sharp teeth. If gas and electricity are worthy of independent but official hounds, surely children deserve nothing less.LIV O’HANLONDirectorThe Adoption ForumLondon SW8.
Sir: The “staggeringly masculine” New Statesman (Media, 16 March) is denounced by Natasha Walter for, in one recent issue, a “pathetic” 3 women contributors out of 23 (13.04 per cent) We should do better and we often do. Can The Independent improve on 15 female by-lines out of 122 (12.29 per cent) in the same issue as Ms Walter writes?
PETER WILBY
EditorNew StatesmanLondon SW1. Sir: I do not know which parts of the European Commission Stephen Castle is regularly in contact with, but to assert that “finding a Commissioner or indeed any Commission official in the office on a Friday afternoon is a surprise” is insulting and simply incorrect, as far as my own experience of the Commission is concerned (“Litany of fraud”, 16 March). As for three-hour lunches and lengthy rounds of golf, the notion is laughable. While some Commission staff may have the luxury of such pastimes, those that I work with are hard-working, conscientious and dedicated.
THOMAS McCLENAGHANBrussels. Sir: Reading your “Accidental Heroes” column on 13 March, I was intrigued to learn that Tony Warren had chosen an actor to play the manifestly feminine role of Ena Sharples in Coronation Street. Back to Shakespeare, or at least “Old Mother Riley”, I thought.