A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Oh, God! (1977) Directed by: Carl Reiner Written by: Larry Gelbart, based on the novel by Avery Corman Starring: George Burns, John Denver, Teri Garr, Donald Pleasence, Paul Sorvino, David Ogden Stiers, Dinah Shore, Carl Reiner, Mario Machado, William Daniels, Titos Vandis, Barnard Hughes God: The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea. On October 7, 1977, Warner Bros. Pictures released director Carl Reiner's Oh, God!, a delightful and unexpectedly touching comedy starring George Burns as God and singer John Denver as a befuddled assistant supermarket manager chosen by the Almighty to deliver His message to a troubled, even skeptical humanity. Adapted by Larry Gelbart from Avery Corman's eponymous 1971 novel, Oh, God! is, as the late Roger Ebert wrote in his contemporary review, a " sly, civilized, quietly funny speculation on what might happen if God endeavored to present himself in the flesh yet once ...

In 1979, five years after the publication of his Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel The Seven Percent Solution and two before he directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Nicholas Meyer made his directorial debut with Time After Time.  Meyer got involved with this time travel thriller after his friend Karl Alexander, the author of the eponymous novel which inspired both the film and the recently canceled ABC TV series, showed him part of the manuscript and asked for a critique.  Nicholas Meyer was then best known as a novelist and budding screenwriter, and his Seven Percent Solution was widely admired by readers and critics alike. Intrigued by Alexander's concept - famous novelist H.G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper in 1970s San Francisco, Meyer bought the film rights; after Steve Hayes and Alexander wrote a screen story, Meyer then wrote a screenplay and eventually sold it to Warner Bros. with one condition: that he would be the film's director.   H.G. Wells: My name...

(C) 2010 Paramount Pictures Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure Box Set (2010) Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Many film critics and movie lovers consider director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now to be one of the best war movies ever made. The late Roger Ebert hailed Coppola’s original version as “one of the key films of the century,” while Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers calls the longer 2001 Apocalypse Now Redux “one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war.” In Apocalypse Now, Coppola and screenwriter John Milius ( Red Dawn ) take Joseph Conrad’s 1902 Africa-set novella Heart of Darkness and carried it forward in time to the hellish jungles of Southeast Asia.  The filmmakers depict 1960s era helicopter gunships flying into battle accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and change the narrator’s name from Marlow to Capt. Willard.  However, they keep Conrad’s haunting vision of a nig...

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...