A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2015 Warner Bros./Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios The Hobbit Motion Picture Trilogy Nine years after director Peter Jackson concluded his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy with the Academy Award-winning epic The Return of the King, Warner Bros. released The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Starring Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, and Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield, this 2012 fantasy film is the first installment of an ambitious trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel, The Hobbit. An Unexpected Journey was followed by The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in 2013. A year later, Warner Bros. closed the story arc with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The Hobbit Motion Picture Trilogy is the prequel to Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien’s three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings. Thematically, The Hobbit is faithful to the spirit of Tolkien’s book, the script by Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three But it was in the third season that ( Star Trek: The Next Generation ) began to come into its own, at least in part due to the arrival of Michael Piller as head of the writing staff. Piller had both written and produced for the TV series “Simon & Simon”…. Says Piller, “I can’t claim full credit (for the success); we had a lot of good writers here. I will claim credit for my contribution, which is that I just have an idea for what I think makes a good dramatic story….”  -  J.M. Dillard,  Star Trek – Where No One Has Gone Before: A History in Pictures The third season of Gene Roddenberry’s  Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST-TNG)  was yet another period of transition for the series, albeit one with good portents rather than bad ones. Maurice Hurley, one of the show’s co-executive producers, left the staff, as did several other writers, including Michael Wagner.  Meanwhile, Roddenberry, the series’ creator, took less of an act

On September 18, 2012, almost a year after Lucasfilm Limited (LFL) and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray, LFL and Paramount Pictures released Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures, a five-disc box set which, for the first time ever, includes all four Indy films in the Blu-ray format. Like its Star Wars counterpart, Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures features each of the George Lucas-produced, Steven Spielberg films ( Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ) on its own Blu-ray disc, along with a fifth disc which contains a mix of all-new extra features and "carryovers" from the 2003 and 2008 DVD sets. I've been a fan of "the Man in the Hat" since Raiders was released in June of 1981, and even though I already own the four films of the series and the three Adventures of Young Indiana Jone