A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1996 Little, Brown and Company (a division of Hachette Book Group) On September 1, 1996, New York-based Little, Brown and Company published The West: An Illustrated History,  the companion volume to the Public Broadcasting Service's documentary miniseries The West: A Film by Stephen Ives , a project that was conceived and produced by Ken Burns . Written by historian Geoffrey C. Ward ( A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt ), The West: An Illustrated History is a lavishly illustrated and extremely readable history of America's westward expansion. starting with the arrival of the first Europeans in what is now the state of Texas and ending with the "taming of the West" in the 20th Century. The West: An Illustrated History follows the format of Ward's previous companion books for Burns' The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994): it is divided into eight chapters, one for each episode of The West in its broadcast edition. Comple...

American liberals hate this side of the American character.  (White Arkansas citizens protest the desegregation of Little Rock public schools in 1957.) An anonymous conservative (or a troll posing as one) recently asked this question on Quora: Why do liberals hate the United States? Before I answer this question, I’ll ask  you  this question: Why do conservatives spend so much time listening to Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, who are right-wing “commentators” (I call them propagandists) and are constantly pounding into people’s heads the same message over and over again:  Liberals are out to destroy America! Liberals are evil. Liberals want to turn the U.S. into a socialist hellhole. Seriously? Do you really believe this? (Apparently you do; otherwise, you would not ask this.) Now, for my answer. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not even a historian, even though that was my strong minor in college. N...

On June 27, 1995, three days before the theatrical release of director Ron Howard's Apollo 13, MCA Records dropped Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , a 78-minute-long soundtrack album that presents eight songs from the Apollo era (including James Brown's "Night Train" and Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" ), one 1990s cover of a pop standard ( Blue Moon by the South Florida retro-country band The Mavericks) seven tracks of dialogue recorded for the record by members of the cast, and seven tracks of composer James Horner's original Academy Award-nominated orchestral score for the film. Prior to the release of Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , Horner - who wrote the score to the Academy Award-nominated film based on Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger's Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 - had prepared a 59-minute-long "assembly" album for commercial release. This version of the soundtrack presented 12 t...

The Signature Edition reissue 5-DVD box set. © 1998, 2005 Home Box Office and Imagine Entertainment. President John F. Kennedy: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this time period will be more impressive to Mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. On April 5, 1998, HBO broadcast "Can We Do This?" — the first episode of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part miniseries about Project Apollo, the U.S. manned space program tasked to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's challenge of placing "a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth" before 1970. Based mostly on Andrew Chaikin's 1994 book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts , From the Earth to the Moon follows the professional and person...

The answer is simple. Adolf Hitler took a huge gamble….and lost. For the first two years of the Second World War, Hitler’s policy toward the U.S. was to hope that isolationism, anti-British sentiment in certain segments of the American public, and internal divisions would keep President Franklin D. Roosevelt too busy to enter the conflict before he had conquered the Soviet Union. He may have believed that FDR, who was clearly a supporter of Great Britain, would lose the 1940 Presidential election to a candidate who would be more accommodating to German hegemony in Europe. Hitler was none too thrilled when the Roosevelt Administration and a bipartisan Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and sent the U.S. Navy to escort convoys as far as Iceland. But even when this led to an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic, the German dictator still held off from declaring war on America. Why? Partly because Hitler suspected that it would take the...

“Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002) Also known as: “Star Trek X: Nemesis” Directed by Stuart Baird Screenplay by: John Logan Story by John Logan & Brent Spiner & Rick Berman Based upon “Star Trek” created by Gene Roddenberry Starring: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Tom Hardy, Ron Perlman “Star Trek: Nemesis” is the 10th feature film based on Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek” television series and the fourth to star the cast of the spin-off series “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”  Released on December 13, 2002 as a “generation’s final journey,” “Star Trek: Nemesis” ended the voyages of the Starship Enterprise-E on a less-than-glorious note and put Paramount Pictures’ movie franchise in deep-freeze for seven years. “A Generation’s Final Journey Begins” (Stardate 56844.9 - Earth Calendar Year 2379) Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Duty. A starship captain's life is filled with solemn duty....

This question appeared on my Quora feed today. I've answered variants of it on the questions-and-answers site several times already, but I haven't chosen a good topic for today's blog post, so here goes: To the people who voted for Clinton during the 2016 election, why did you choose to vote for her in the first place, and what do you think of the current president of the United States, Donald Trump? Do you support him now? I voted for Hillary Clinton because, after being a lawyer, First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, junior Senator from New York, and former Secretary of State, she was far more qualified, smarter, and far better prepared for the Presidency than Donald J. Trump. As for what I think of the current President: He is absolutely the worst President ever elected to the office. He’s a con man, a divisive person who - despite the public image he has cultivated as a dealmaker and successful businessman - is not as wealthy or successful as h...

© 2009 Discovery Networks. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."  –  President John F. Kennedy's Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,  May 25, 1961 July 20, 2019 marks the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11's successful mission to fulfill the late President John F. Kennedy's famous commitment of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before 1970. Half a century after astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the surface of Earth's nearest celestial neighbor, two generations have grown up with no direct experience of Projects Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo and have lived only peripherally aware of the now-defunct Space Shuttle and the still-active International Space Station.  And even for millions of people in the U.S. and other parts of the ...

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). ...

Hi, there, Dear Reader! Well, last time we talked, I told you what my plans were for this week regarding "A Certain Point of View." They were, you'll recall, modest in scope; I'm not working on any big literally projects at the moment, so I've pretty much decided to focus on the blog until I can get my shit together as a writer and crank out a story I can be proud of no matter what the format is; ideally I'd like to do a novel, but every time I've started working on one, I either listen to bad advice from well-meaning people or I become intimidated by the prospect. And, yes, I know; novels, short stories, and screenplays don't write themselves. Either I write one, or I should stop calling myself a writer and give up. I'd rather write one - even if it's bad - than admit defeat. But until I can figure out what story I want to tell, I'll stick to the blog and see if I can get it to the 1000-posts mark. Anyway, about those plans I announc...

Trade Paperback Edition cover art by Christopher Moeller. ©1997 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In 1996, almost a year before the theatrical release of  The Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition, Lucasfilm's marketing division conceived a massive multimedia campaign called Shadows of the Empire. Centered on Steve Perry's eponymous novel set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the project included an original soundtrack album, Nintendo video game, a set of Kenner/Hasbro action figures, a behind the scenes book by Mark Cotta Vaz, Topps trading cards, and even references to its events in Brian Daley's Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – The Radio Drama.   In Steve Perry's own words, the unofficial tagline for this massive campaign was "Everything but the movie." "Everything but the movie" included, naturally, a comics adaptation, and Dark Horse Comics – an Oregon-based publisher which at the time owned the licensing ri...