A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When I was in 10 th grade, my third period English class was assigned to read Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird , a roman a clef based on the author’s childhood years in small-town Alabama during the Great Depression. Shortly before the – dreaded – test which was to be given after we had finished reading the book, the English department screened director Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film adaptation, which stars Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Frank Overton and William Windom, for all the sophomores assigned to read Lee’s novel that semester in my high school’s auditorium. As adapted by playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird is, like its literary source, a semiautobiographical story of a young Alabama girl’s early years in the fictitious town of Maycomb, centering on the events that take place over a three-year time-span. Standing in for Harper Lee is her alter e...

Movies have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.   Some of my earliest childhood memories center on little snippets of black-and-white movies I glimpsed while my parents watched television in the Florida room of our second Miami home; they are vague because I was less than two years old and my dad was still alive, but sometimes I still see, in my mind’s eye, little fragments of old John Wayne Westerns and war movies which my father had enjoyed. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my childhood relationship with the movies was one of the key influences during my formative years.   Because I had very few father figures beyond my maternal grandfather and several uncles before I entered junior high, I tended to mimic certain traits of actors and movie characters I admired.  I wanted to be as brave as John Wayne’s many cowboys and military heroes, as idealistic as Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, as dashing-and-daring as Errol Flynn and Clark Gab...

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet: Jack and Rose Redux? After the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s 1997 Academy Award-winning film Titanic , millions of its fans speculated if its two stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, would ever work together again, especially in a movie where they would be a couple again. What many Leo-Kate fans wanted to see on the silver screen was essentially a Titanic -like love story without the Titanic, which, like its real-life counterpart, had sunk after a collision with an iceberg several hundred miles off the Newfoundland coast. A direct sequel was out of the question; DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson was dead, and since Titanic lies in the historical fiction/romance genre and not science fiction, he could only have co-starred in such an unlikely project either in flashback sequences or as a figure in Kate Winslet’s character’s dreams. Finally, after a decade’s worth of reading Hollywood’s proverbial tea leaves for any signs of ...

Hunger Games, the eagerly-anticipated film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' 2008 best-selling novel, has set global box-office records, taking in $155 million in its first weekend as a theatrical release, according to figures published on the web site Collider.com. Directed and co-scripted (with Collins and Billy Ray) by Gary Ross, who co-wrote 1988's Big and had previously helmed Pleasantville  and Seabiscuit , The Hunger Games is the first installment in a trilogy of dystopian science fiction stories set in a North America where, after several disastrous events, the existing democratic nation states of the United States, Canada and Mexico have ceased to exist and have been replaced by the totalitarian country known as Panem. As in the best-selling Young Adults novel published by Scholastic - the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series - The Hunger Games presents us with a vision of an America gone seriously wrong.   Panem is ruled by the tyrannical ...

When I was 25 years old and still working toward an AA degree in Journalism/Mass Communications at what's now Miami-Dade College, I was accepted into the College Consortium for International Studies' Semester in Spain program. For 12 weeks in the Fall Term of the 1988-89 academic year, I lived and studied in Seville, Spain's third largest city, along with 41 other students from around the U.S. Not knowing what, exactly, I was getting myself into, I also volunteered to send dispatches from Seville to Catalyst , my home campus' student newspaper as its first foreign correspondent. Having had several years' worth of experience as a reporter and section editor, I thought that it would be a somewhat tricky but still manageable assignment, but in the days before the Internet and e-mail were available to the average person, it ended up being harder and more frustrating than I'd bargained for. Nevertheless, I did manage to, as we reporter types like to say, get...

After nearly nine years of being an online reviewer at both Amazon and Epinions (and, for a time, anyway, at the now-terrible Viewpoints), I have decided to compile some of my reviews and publish them in book form.  (We can't survive on IS income alone, right?)  I can't take the time or money to hire an agent or go through the process of sending out manuscripts to the big publishers in hope of getting published, so I decided to "self-publish" through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace (both Amazon companies). The book, Save Me the Aisle Seat , is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, and within a week it should be available in print at Amazon and maybe a few other places. I'd like to thank my friend Leigh Egan for her valuable assistance in completing this challenging project. I hate to have to shill my book like a medicine salesman selling snake oil, but if anyone here has a Kindle (of any model), please, please consider buying it!  It's price...

When I started taking journalism courses at a local college in the mid-1980s, I was under the impression that I was well-prepared to be a college-level writer for the campus’ student newspaper.  I had studied the basics of news writing, reporting, editing, and page makeup for two years in high school, and I had been a section editor during my sophomore and senior years.  I even earned A’s consistently in my journalism courses. So imagine my surprise, two years after I had graduated from high school, when I stepped into my JOU 1100 classroom for the first time and felt as though I had actually studied just enough to get by in class but had much more to learn. It’s possible that I felt that way because I had added Prof. Townsend’s class two days into the Fall term (my Pell Grant had just been approved and I needed to become a full-time student, so I added Basic Reporting and Introduction to Radio and Television to my schedule) and was nervous.  Perhaps I was keenly...

As the White House, the Pentagon and the various intelligence-gathering agencies of the United States focus their attention on such threats as Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadist groups, the rise of China as an emerging Asian superpower, the growing instability in the Middle East as a result of last year’s Arab Spring popular revolts and Russia’s apparent turn toward autocratic rule by Vladimir Putin, it is important to remain vigilant to national security threats from within the Western Hemisphere. Even as President Barack Obama’s national security team seeks to reduce the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan after more than a decade of fighting the extremist Islamic group known as the Taliban – a struggle complicated by Pakistan’s less-than-enthusiastic attitudes toward U.S. objectives in the region – and American defense budgets undergo cutbacks, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other left-leaning Latin American leaders are forging alliances with Iran and other anti-American...

Although Richard Rodgers will always be remembered for his brilliant musical theater collaborations with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, particularly with the latter (South Pacific, The Sound of Music), he also had a successful career as a composer of incidental music, and Victory at Sea is perhaps his best-known orchestral score.  Rodgers composed 13 hours' worth of music for  Victory at Sea,  NBC-TV's 26-episode documentary which premiered in 1952 and was a staple of the pre-cable late night hours on independent televisions such as WCIX-TV in Miami. Each episode ran for 30 minutes and focused primarily on the U.S. Navy's participation in the then-still recent Second World War, from the fight against German U-boats in the North Atlantic to the fierce struggle for domination of the Pacific between American and Japanese fleets.  Renowned conductor and arranger Robert Russell Bennett's name has forever been linked with Rodgers' Victory at Sea score, for i...

An Odd Couple For most of his life, Washington was in love with a woman named Sally Fairfax, wife of George William Fairfax -- Washington's neighbor and best friend. Although his passions for the worldly and beautiful Sally probably never waned, Washington settled for a much more practical match: the widow Martha Custis, whose considerable holdings made him the wealthy gentleman he longed to be. The two were married in January 1759 and made an odd couple indeed -- George, a giant for his time at about 6' 2", towered over his portly bride, whose head didn't make it to his shoulders.   -- Cormac O'Brien,  Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents: What Your Teachers Never Told You About the Men of the White House   Do you remember your American History classes in high school or college? Remember having to take notes full of dry facts and statistics about such topics as the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Smoot-Hawley Act,...

Just as Cornelius Ryan’s three major works about World War II (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far) focus on the last 11 months of the conflict in Europe, the late Gordon W. Prange and his collaborators Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon zeroed in on the Pearl Harbor saga and its aftermath. No less than five major books by Prange and Co. deal with the series of events that occurred before, during, and after. Of these, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor is the first and most important volume.  At Dawn We Slept covers nearly the entire 12-month period leading up to the “day of infamy” that marked America’s entry into World War II. It provides amazing insights into both the Japanese and American mindsets, and, most important, explodes the revisionists’ myth that Japan’s attack succeeded because President Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld critical information from Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii.  Prange researched the Pearl Harbor affair...

The Bottom Line  The battle of Okinawa is briskly, briefly discussed in this episode of  Victory at Sea   Since 1952, when NBC first aired its 26-part  Victory at Sea  series of 30-minute documentaries about the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, it has been a staple of both broadcast and cable channels. Millions of viewers in the U.S. and elsewhere have seen at least a few episodes of writer-producer Henry Salomon's ode to the sailors and Marines who fought and often died fighting their German, Italian, and Japanese counterparts for control of the world's oceans. Because battles on the air, land, and sea aren't scripted for the cinematographers as if for a Hollywood production, any major documentary about World War II is, in essence, a montage of shots and snippets of 35-mm film photographed by combat photographers stationed on different ships, aircraft, and military installations. There is actually precious little continuous footage of entire single n...