People love Ashland. Ashland, Oregon appears, at first glance, to be a quintessential small American town.  It has a population of about twenty thousand and a compact, walkable downtown where the closest thing to a skyscraper is the Ashland Springs Hotel - once the tallest building between, depending on who you ask, either Sacramento and Eugene or San Francisco and Portland - which towers over the Main Street “skyline” but never reaches double-digit storeys. Within a few blocks from...

Film Independent, the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and Los Angeles Film Festival, has announced the screenwriters and film projects selected for its 10th annual Screenwriters Lab, sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, West. Taking place in Los Angeles from August 17 until September 16, the Screenwriters Lab is an intensive five-week incubator designed to help writers improve their craft, and take their current scripts to the next level in a nurturing, yet ch...

The Tribeca Film Festival today announced that My Life in Ruins, directed by Donald Petrie and written by Mike Reiss, will have a special presentation screening as the closing night film of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, presented by founding sponsor American Express. My Life in Ruins, a Fox Searchlight Pictures release, stars Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfuss, María Ádanez, Sheila Bernette, María Botto, Rachel Dratch, Alexis Georgoulis, Ralph Nossek, Bernice Stegers, and Harland Williams, an...