A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

So Proudly We Hail! (1943)   It is May 1942.  Less than six months have passed since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Allied forces in the Pacific have endured defeat upon crushing defeat.  From Burma, Java, Wake Island, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rabaul and the Philippine Islands, the flag of the Rising Sun has replaced the Union Jack, the Dutch flag and the Stars and Stripes.  In Melbourne, Australia, a U.S. transport plane arrives with a group of recently-evacuated Army doctors, medics and  nurses aboard.  As they deplane, Lt. Janet Davidson (Claudette Colbert) is carried on a stretcher due to  her mental and physical exhaustion.  The nurses are then shipped Stateside aboard a Navy transport and given what amounts to first class treatment.  Most of them respond well to the care they receive, but “Davy” remains withdrawn and wheelchair-bound, perhaps haunted by her experiences during the sieges of Bataan and Corregidor.  Determ...

History is written by the winners. This axiom is so old and has been attributed to so many persons over the centuries - Pliny the Elder said something like this, and so have such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill - that it seems as though it's become ingrained in history buffs' DNA. Whether you accept the idea that history, indeed, is often written in such a way that it favors the viewpoint of the winning side of a conflict at the expense of the losers' or not, if you carefully watch war movies about World War II - especially those made before the late 1960s - there's no doubt that films made by the former Allied powers (China, France, Great Britain, the Union of Soviet Social Republics, the United States and their allies) tend to prove that the axiom is more or less true. For instance, if you are an average American movie watcher (not necessarily a war film buff), chances are tha...

In the late 1970s, prompted by the success of Douglas Adams' original sci-fi/comedy radio series  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,  the British Broadcasting Corporation's television department commissioned him and John Lloyd to adapt it into a six-episode miniseries. Adams, who had also worked for a while on the venerable  Dr. Who  TV series, had already adapted part of the radio series into a couple of novels ( The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  and  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe ) was notorious for being a procrastinator, so the project took a while in getting started. At first, the TV version of  Hitchiker's Guide  was going to be an animated series, but this idea was nixed in favor of giving viewers a live-action version featuring some of the original radio series' actors, particularly Simon Jones (Arthur Dent), Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod Beeblebrox), Stephen Moore (Marvin the Paranoid Android) and Peter...

FADE IN: INT. SOUTH MIAMI HIGH - MUSIC DEPARTMENT WING CORRIDOR - AFTERNOON We see JIM standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall opposite the closed door of South Miami Senior High's choral practice room. He looks a bit on edge and is trying to catch his breath after his sprint down the stairs from the second floor. As he stands there, the door swings open with a loud metallic squeak and two girls (MARIA and TERESA) step out of the chorus room. ANGLE ON MARIA AND TERESA We SEE two girls in their late teens, dressed in casual attire (jeans, blouses, comfortable shoes, etc. which are appropriate for a high school's dress code of the early 1980s.) MARIA is the clear "alpha" of the two, not just because she's taller and a tad more attractive than TERESA, but she's also the more outgoing and has presence. She smiles at JIM. BACK TO SCENE JIM looks at the two girls and smiles back politely in recognition, though he clearly simply wants to ...

Adapting a literary work, no matter if it's a novel, play, short story, poem or a non-fiction book or magazine article, is a process which requires a lot of careful analysis, patience and a knowledge of how film differs from the various written media. The biggest difference between, say, a novel and a movie derived from it is that though both tell essentially the same story and feature the same protagonists and antagonists, the form in which they're presented and (of course) "consumed" is very different. Take, for instance, Stephen King's It , a 1000-plus page doorstop of a novel which is set in two different time periods (1958 and 1985) and has a huge set of characters and situations, as well as a complex plot and a very "big" finale. Before ABC-TV aired the television miniseries based on the novel, my friends and I often wondered how such a huge novel could ever be adapted into a satisfying audio-visual experience. After all, It not only had a ...

Once I made the decision to adapt my short story - Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken - as a no-frills, just-to-see-if-I-can-do-this screenplay, I had to start thinking about the story’s structure and how best to approach it so it works well as a movie. One of the reasons for choosing this story instead of, say, my thinly-disguised recollections about my first time with a woman, was its simplicity. It is, in essence, a long flashback (with a dream sequence tacked on for good measure) set in June of 1983 during the main character’s/narrator’s last hours as a high school student, with a frame story set in what was “present day” in 1998. Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken has several built-in advantages that make it fairly easy to adapt, at least in theory. It has only a small set of main characters. There’s Jim, the narrator, a college professor and best-selling author in the frame story, and a Harvard-bound high school senior in the main body of the story. There’s Mark, his best friend ...