A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1984 U.S. Naval Institute Press In 1984, the Naval Institute Press published “The Hunt for Red October,” Tom Clancy’s Cold War-era novel about a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, Jack Ryan, who leads a group of Anglo-American naval officers on a classified mission in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Their task: to assist 26 disenchanted Soviet Navy officers commanded by Captain First Rank Marko Ramius in a mass defection to the West – and take possession of the Red Navy’s newest ballistic missile submarine. Clancy, who at the time owned a successful insurance agency in Maryland, was one of the first writers to have a work of fiction published by the Naval Institute Press. The Annapolis-based publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute is best known for non-fiction books and reference guides about the military – with a special focus on naval warfare, technology, and history. In 1984, when Clancy submitted his manuscript for “The Hunt for Red October” to the Pr...

(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...

One of the neat things about channel surfing on a hot, hazy and unusually lazy weekend afternoon is that sometimes infrequent TV watchers such as me can sometimes find new channels which have been added to the Expanded Basic lineup. Such was the case when, a few years ago I – purely by chance, mind you – was flipping through the channels on my family room television set when I noticed that Comcast (my cable provider) had added BBC America to the channel package I subscribe to.  This was a surprise to me – I don’t often scrutinize my bill for any lineup changes, and I don’t have the time to watch as much TV as I used to –  and I was kind of pleased even though at first I didn’t think it’d be too relevant to my TV-viewing tastes. That is, until I perused the then-current issue of  TV Guide  and noticed that BBC America supplanted Spike TV (the former TNN channel) as the go-to place to watch reruns of  Star Trek: The Next Generation,  the made-for-syndica...

(C) 2013 Quirk Books/Lucasfilm Ltd. We three, we happy three, we band of brothers, Shall fly unto the trench with throttles full! - William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Since 1976, writer-producer-director George Lucas’s Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ) has been adapted in various forms. Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Lucas’s screenplay was published six months before the film opened on May 25, 1977. Marvel Comics’ adaptation also preceded the movie’s premiere by a month. And in 1981, National Public Radio aired a 13-part radio drama scripted by the late science fiction novelist Brian Daley that expanded Lucas’s 124-minute space fantasy into a richer, more detailed six-and-a-half hour audio epic. Of course, Star Wars has inspired a plethora of parodies spanning a wide spectrum of of venues. Lucas’s tale of “a boy, a girl, and a galaxy” has been spoofed countless times on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, lampooned in humor magazines Crack’d and Mad, and by Me...