A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1994 Houghton Mifflin/© 2006 Mariner Books. Cover design by Clifford Stoltze Design, Cover image: Photodisc In October of 1994, New York-based Houghton Mifflin published the first edition of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Written by retired Navy Captain Jim Lovell and science beat journalist Jeffrey Kluger, the book tells the story of Lovell's final - and star-crossed - space flight in April 1970: Apollo 13. Shortly after its publication, Imagine Entertainment founders Brian Grazer and Ron Howard bought the film rights and adapted the book as the 1995 movie Apollo 13.  As a result of the film's success, Houghton Mifflin changed the title from Lost Moon to Apollo 13 when it released the paperback edition to coincide with the film's theatrical premiere. Lovell, a Naval Aviator and test pilot before joining NASA as a member of the agency's Astronaut Group II - "the New Nine" - in 1962. As a result, Lovell and his eight colleagues (which i...

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...

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). ...