Reporters Safe

NEW YORK -- Richard Engel, NBC's chief foreign correspondent, was freed Monday from capture in Syria following a firefight, five days after being kidnapped.

NBC News president Steve Capus said in a statement Tuesday that Engel, 39, and his crew were freed unharmed after being taken by an unknown group. "We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country,” Capus said.

"It was a traumatic experience," Engel said Tuesday morning, during an appearance with his crew on the "Today" show from Antakya, Turkey. Engel appeared alongside producer Ghazi Balkiz and photographer John Kooistra.

"We're very happy to be here," Engel said. "We're in good health. We're OK. Everyone was great. NBC was fantastic in informing our families, keeping people up to date, keeping the story quiet."

I Can See Why Many of These Aren't Being Produced

2012's List of Unproduced Scripts Doing the Rounds in Hollywood

From i09:

The Black List is out! This is an annual list of the year's top unproduced screenplays — it once included Inglorious Basterds and The King's Speech. This year's list is positively stuffed with time traveling plots, alien encounters and survivalist films.

Hibernation
By Will Frank, Geneva Robertson-Dworet
A wrongly convicted inmate volunteers for a hibernation experiment in exchange for one day of parole every five years, which he uses to prove his innocence and search for his missing daughter across an increasingly futuristic landscape.

Story of Your Life
By 
Eric Heisserer, 
based on the short story by Ted Chiang
When alien crafts land around the world, a linguistics expert is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.

Americatown
By Ben Poole
In a China-dominated near future, a former LAPD officer attempts to save his family from destitution in Los Angeles by working for a crime lord in the American ghetto within a thriving Hong Kong.

Man of Tomorrow

By Jeremy Slater

In an alternate 1940s reality, the US Government makes a deal with an indestructible gangster to kill Hilter in exchange for the city of Chicago, which he will build into his own utopia. Unfortunately his model city never comes to fruition and both he and his Bureau liaison get much of the slack for destroying one of America's greatest cities and now the government wants him dead.

The Final Broadcast
By Chris Hutton, Eddie O'Keefe
A man takes a job as a radio broadcaster in a small town, only to discover that it is embedded with a radical group planning mass destruction in conjunction with an upcoming lunar eclipse.

The Survivalist
By Stephen Fingleton
Years after lack of resources result in much of the world's population dying off, a survivalist is living on a farm alone until a woman and her seventeen year old daughter show up looking for cover.

Our Name is Adam

By T.S. Nowlin

An astronaut travels back in time to enlist the help of his younger self.

The Portland Condition

By Dan Cohn, Jeremy Miller

Set against the backdrop of rainy Portland, Oregon, a young man finds himself falling in love for the first time – only to receive a letter from his future self, warning him of impending heartbreak.

Somacell

By Ashleigh Powell

A female prison guard in the future, where prisoners are rehabilitated with virtual reality, discovers a conspiracy that puts her loyalty into question.

Ground Control to Major Tom

By Jason Micallef

After nine years, a NASA communications expert reconnects with the astronaut she believed to be dead and helps rescue him from space.

Transcendence
By Jack Paglen
An epic love story set in a time where a dying scientist is able to upload his consciousness into the internet and fight the forces who are actively working against the existence of a singularity.

Almanac
By 
Jason Pagan, Andrew Stark

A group of high school kids discover how to time travel, but fail to recognize the potential consequences.

Peste
By Barbara Marshall
Following the outbreak of a virus that wipes out the majority of the human population, a teen documents her family's new life in quarantine and tries to protect her infected sister.


The Full 'Blacklist' site

GOT episodes just got longer

From EW.com:

The biggest production on TV of one of the biggest stories in fantasy is about to get a little, well, bigger.

The Game of Thrones team is creating a “super-sized” third season of the hit series.

With showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss tackling content from the first half (roughly) of author George R.R. Martin’s largest Song of Ice and Fire novel (the 973-page fan-favorite A Storm of Swords), the writer-producer duo are delivering slightly longer episodes to the network. There’s still 10, but you’ll get a little more each week than previous seasons.

“There’s almost another full episode’s worth of extra minutes spread across the season,” Weiss says. “One of the great liberties with HBO is we’re not forced to come in at a specific time. We can’t be under 50 minutes or over 60, but that gives us a lot of flexibility.”

A super-sized season, as befitting Storm of Swords,” Benioff adds.

In fact, the third season finale is expected to run more than an hour — a move that requires special permission from the network (previously, the show’s pilot and its second season finale exceeded an hour). Episodes are still being calibrated so exact times could change, but HBO and producers are confident the season will deliver more Thrones than ever before. Says HBO in a statement: “All 10 episodes gained a minute or two from past seasons with the finale very possibly exceeding 60 minutes.”

“So for people clamoring for another episode, it’s in there,” Weiss says. “It’s just been cut into tiny pieces.”