A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

After the cancellation by ABC of his ambitious and expensive television series,  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,  executive producer George Lucas tried several methods to save the show and give viewers - especially pre-teen kids and young adults - its trademark mix of education and entertainment. For instance, after ABC axed  Young Indy  from its lineup (citing the show's lavish budgets as its primary reason), Lucasfilm Limited produced four made-for-TV movies which aired on cable's Family Channel over a two-year period (1994-1996).  Another life-saving measure was the hiring of film editor T.M. Christopher, who not only had worked with Lucas as an editor on the Classic  Star Wars  Trilogy, but also with Milos Forman in cutting 1984's  Amadeus. Christopher (who also was involved in the 1997 updating of the original  Star Wars  films into their still controversial Special Edition versions)  was assigned to  re-edit 44 episod...

(C) 2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount Home Video In the early 1990s, after the success of  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , producer George Lucas came up with an ambitious project: a 70-episode live-action TV series chronicling the adventures of a young Henry (Indiana) Jones, Jr. as a pre-teen boy and a restless adolescent, taking the future archaeologist on a globetrotting journey of self-discovery and preparing him for his raid on the Lost Ark and other "rare antiquities" in the three Steven Spielberg-directed movies.  Lucas assembled a creative team that included top-notch writers (Frank Darabont, who would later write  The Shawshank Redemption  and  The Green Mile , wrote five episodes), directors (Mike Newell, Nicolas Roeg, Simon Wincer), and a crew that would later be better known for its work on the  Star Wars  prequels - designer Gavin Bocquet, cinematographer David Tattersall, editor Ben Burtt, and producer Rick McCallum, plus a s...

After the cancellation by ABC of his ambitious and expensive television series,  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,  executive producer George Lucas tried several methods to save the show and give viewers - especially pre-teen kids and young adults - its trademark mix of education and entertainment. For instance, after ABC axed  Young Indy  from its lineup (citing the show's lavish budgets as its primary reason), Lucasfilm Limited produced four made-for-TV movies which aired on cable's Family Channel over a two-year period (1994-1996).   Another life-saving measure was the hiring of film editor T.M. Christopher, who not only had worked with Lucas as an editor on the Classic  Star Wars  Trilogy, but also with Milos Forman in cutting 1984's  Amadeus. Christopher was tasked with re-editing 44 episodes of  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles  and fashioning 22 "movies" out of them by marrying chronologically-close stories togethe...

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Daredevils of the Desert Formats Available: VHS (1999) DVD (2007) Chapter 15: The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Daredevils of the Desert (Disc 8, Volume Two – The War Years) Written by: Frank Darabont Directed by: Simon Wincer Palestine : October 1917: Having completed several intelligence-gathering assignments in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, young Indiana Jones (Sean Patrick Flanery), known to his superiors in the Belgian army as Capt. Henri Defense, has been reassigned to the Middle East to assist the Allied war effort there. As in the African theater of operations, the Anglo-French endeavors in Arabia and Palestine are considered a “sideshow to the main show” of the battlefields in Europe; Britain wants to protect the Suez Canal and her links to India from interference by  the Central Powers, while France seeks to expend her sphere of influence in the region, aided and abetted by her British allies. To...

Although Mel Gibson's self-destructive behavior over the past decade or so may be ushering in a premature end to his days as a Hollywood star, there's no denying that the man has had considerable success as both an actor and filmmaker ever since he began his acting career in Australian television back in the late 1970s. One of Gibson's earliest co-starring roles on his way to stardom was 1981's  Gallipoli,  Peter Weir's somber look at the experiences of Australian soldiers during World War I as they fight and suffer horrendous casualties in the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of 1915. Weir, who wrote the story on which David Williamson's screenplay is based, doesn't set out to give the Gallipoli Campaign - which was devised by a young Winston Churchill as a way to knock Turkey out of the war and give the Allies unfettered access to the Black Sea - the traditional "recreation of a major battle" treatment a la  The Longest Day  or  A Brid...