A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Before James Horner died at the age of 61 on June 22, 2015 in a single-fatality plane crash in California's Los Padres National Forest, he had composed over 100 film scores, including the Academy Award-winning music for director James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which included that year's Oscar-winning Best Original Song, "My Heart Will Go On." Throughout his 27-year-long career as a composer and orchestrator, Horner earned eight more Best Original Score Oscar nominations, won two Golden Globes, three Satellite Awards from the International Press Agency, and three Saturn Awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. Among the eight Oscar-nominated scores in Horner's filmography is the one for director Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, a dramatization about the April 1970 lunar mission which nearly ended in tragedy as a result of a catastrophic explosion of an oxygen tank aboard the spacecraft's Command/Service Module (CSM).

(c) 1983 Warner Bros.  Writer-director Philip Kaufman’s “The Right Stuff” is a rousing adaptation of author Tom Wolfe’s eponymous non-fiction bestseller about the beginning of America’s space program. Starring Sam Shepard, Ed Harris, Barbara Hershey, Fred Ward, Scott Glenn, Veronica Cartwright, Dennis Quaid, Pamela Reed, Mary Jo Deschanel, and Lance Henriksen, “The Right Stuff” dramatizes how a top secret military aircraft evaluation project evolved into the highly publicized manned space endeavor named Project Mercury. Set between Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager’s (Shepard) “breaking of the sound barrier” in October 1947 and astronaut Gordon Cooper’s (Quaid) “Faith 7” Mercury mission in May 1963, “The Right Stuff” is an epic film that successfully blends historical drama, fantastic special effects, and great performances. And although “The Right Stuff” wasn’t a box office success – it only earned $21.1 million, which was less than its $27 million budget – it was widely h