A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

I first saw Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Western”  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  when it was broadcast by the ABC television network as a Sunday Night Movie feature back in the day when the home video revolution was still a decade away and the Big Three TV networks devoted some of their prime time schedule to air not-quite-new-but-not-quite-old theatrical movies.   Because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time and wasn’t educated about movies or the film industry, I was not aware that  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  was the third chapter of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (which also included A Fistful of Dollars  and  For a Few Dollars More ) or that it was originally an Italian-made flick (shot on locations in Spain and southern Italy) titled  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo  (literally, “The good, the ugly, the bad").  Of course, because I was so young I didn’t quite understand all the nuances – visual and thematic – of L...

In 2003, two years after the successful first run of HBO's  Band of Brothers,  a World War II-set miniseries based on the late Stephen E. Ambrose's non-fiction book about a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division that saw action in Normandy, Holland, the Battle of the Bulge and captured Hitler's Eagle Nest in southern Germany, its executive producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, began working on a similar project which focused on the "other war" America fought on the far side of the world against Japan. Before his untimely death in 2002, Ambrose had begun to outline a book about the Navy sailors and Marines who had participated in every offensive action against the Japanese Empire, starting from the 1942 landings at Guadalcanal and ending in the bloody 1945 struggle for Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands. However, Ambrose - weakened by his losing battle with cancer - found that the war in the Pacific was far more comple...

When I was a 25-year-old college sophomore and majoring in Journalism/Mass Communications, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take part in an overseas-study program co-sponsored by Miami-Dade Community College’s Foreign Language Department and the College Consortium for International Studies. At the time, I had just about taken most of the required courses for my Associate in Arts degree except math (my bete noir) and three credits’ worth of the foreign language pre-requisite. I had also, or so I thought, done everything I had set out to do as a reporter/editor at the campus student newspaper, so I was feeling a bit unmoored and restless without a plan for what I figured would be my final year on the staff. Looking back on it now, I’m not sure what, exactly, prompted me to sign up for the Semester in Spain program. Part of it, I’m sure, was a sense that this would be my best chance to go to Europe for a significant amount of time. Maybe it was my journalist’s instinctive...