A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season One       Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship  Enterprise.  Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.       Background   In the summer of 1986, Paramount Pictures was on a collective “high” about  Star Trek.   Much to the studio’s surprise, Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi TV show was now the company’s crown jewel franchise. It survived cancellation by the NBC TV network in 1969 by becoming a hit in syndication. In 1973,  Star Trek  returned briefly to network television via Filmation’s   Star Trek: The Animated Series .  Plans for theatrical films and TV movies came and went, but by 1977, plans were underway to launch an updated version of the show as the flagship of the Paramount Television Service.  The new series,  Star Tre...

Michael: My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Kay Adams: What was that? Michael: Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. When I was nine years old, my mom, older sister, and I saw Francis Ford Coppola's  The Godfather  at the now-gone Tropicaire Drive-In in Miami. The now-classic adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel about an aging  New York Mafia don's efforts to hand over his empire of crime to his favored son was a top draw, and Mom and Vicky were  curious about it. I don't know why they took me; I'm assuming that they couldn't find a babysitter, or perhaps they didn't think that it had any objectionable content. Because we had recently moved back to the States after living abroad for six years, I was still learning English, so I didn't understand any of the movie's plot, nuances, or the dialogue. I  was , however, freaked out by the two sce...