A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Recently, novelist Harry Turtledove, the acclaimed author of Ruled Britannia, The Guns of the South, and many other alternate history stories, shared a whimsical Tweet with his followers which he titled #70sChristmasList: Harvest gold refrigerator Avocado stove Betamax Quadraphonic sound system English Leather, or maybe Brut Cargo pants for the guys Hot pants for the women Platform shoes A leisure suit A case of Miller Lite Or of US-brewed (aka ruined) Löwenbräu Taking inspiration from Mr. Turtledove and his amusing Tweet, I decided that I'd revisit the past four decades' worth of Christmases past and share my typical wish lists for each, starting with the 1970s and ending with the 2010s.  As I've pointed out in my previous posts in this series, these aren't real Christmas lists that I wrote and passed around. Indeed, I often bought most of the items herein, although on occasion I did get a few of them as presents during the holidays or for my birthday.  ...

On Quora, an anonymous member asks: If '11.22.63' was a movie, do you think it deserves more than 1 star? From what I understand,  11.22.63  was going to be a feature film (aka “theatrically-released movie”), but the people involved (the late Jonathan Demme had optioned it) had an incredibly hard time adapting it into a viable screenplay.  11/22/63  (the novel) is a long and exquisitely detailed book, so the film version was abandoned. Fortunately, J.J. Abrams is a huge fan of the book, and when he emailed Stephen King to say how much he’d loved it, he also mentioned that it should be made into a miniseries. © 2011 Scribner (I love that book cover!) So…J.J. Abrams, James Franco, Stephen King, and Bridgette Carpenter teamed up and produced  11.22.63  for the Hulu streaming network. Not as a movie, but as a nine-part series. © 2016 Hulu  (This guy doesn’t look like Lee Harvey Oswald as much as Gary Oldman did in  JFK,...

As a writer/reader, I’ve learned over the years to stop expecting book-to-movie adaptations to recreate novels, short stories, plays, or Broadway musicals with 100% fidelity. It is a nearly impossible task to translate a medium - such as literature - that concerns itself mostly with the internal, mental, and emotional processes of a story’s characters  perfectly  into another medium (film or TV) that is mostly visual and needs imagery and motion to tell a story. I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s 2011 novel. It was the first King novel I bought after a long drought (nearly 10 years) since I had bothered to get one of his books ( Wizard and Glass ). But when I found out that Stephen King had written a time travel story in which the protagonist’s task is to prevent JFK’s assassination, I was eager to see how Steve-O would pull that rabbit out of his magician’s hat. I read the novel in less than a week - a miracle of sorts, because at the time I had a lot going on in my li...

In 2011, even before Scribner (a division of Simon & Schuster) published Stephen King's time travel novel  11/22/63, director Jonathan Demme ( The Silence of the Lambs ) announced that he had acquired the film rights. He was intrigued by its premise - a 21st Century high school English teacher travels back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Demme would write the screenplay and direct the feature film, while King would be the project's executive producer. It was a good idea on paper, but the reality was something entirely different. According to Rolling Stone's Andy Greene, "[t]he book...had  a rather rocky first step on its road to the screen. Director Jonathan Demme was the first license to it, though King had complete veto power over every aspect of the project. "He was pretty adamant that it be a theatrical film," says the bestselling author. "It was like, 'Jon, I don't kno...

On August 9, Warner Home Video will release the Blu-ray (BD) and DVD edition of “11.22.63,” Hulu’s eight-part miniseries based on Stephen King’s 2011 best-selling time travel novel “ 11/22/63. ” Warner Home Video Co-executive produced by King and J.J. Abrams (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Lost”), the highly-anticipated adaptation of the award-winning book follows the odyssey of Jake Epping (James Franco) as he travels back to the early 1960s to prevent President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. The limited-run series originally aired on Hulu’s subscription service between February 15 and April 4, and consists of eight episodes: ·         The Rabbit Hole ·         The Kill Floor ·         Other Voices, Other Rooms ·         The Eyes of Texas ·         Th...

(This review was originally written for Amazon.com in November 2003 by Alex Diaz-Granados...me.  I've altered it slightly to mark the fact that 2013 will be the 50th Anniversary of JFK's assassination.)  Over the past 50 years, no event in American history has been so scrutinized or conjectured about than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Millions of words have been written about that tragic day in Dallas: Some point the finger of blame solely at Lee Harvey Oswald, while others weave a confusing web of conspiracy theories that accuse the Mafia, French criminals, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles and/or militarists in the government who wanted to expand America's role in Vietnam.  One of the best books on the Kennedy assassination is the late Jim Bishop's gripping The Day Kennedy Was Shot, a detailed hour-by-hour account of the events of November 22, 1963, starting with the President's 7:00 AM wake-up at Fort Worth's Hotel Texas and ends 20...