A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

One of the interesting things about Clint Eastwood's  Letters from Iwo Jima  isn't so much that it's a cinematic rarity - an American-produced movie with a mostly-Japanese dialog soundtrack that qualified for a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film - but rather a celluloid bookend to another film by the same director,  Flags of Our Fathers . Both films, released a few months apart in the fall of 2006, graphically depict the Battle of Iwo Jima (code named Operation Detachment by the Americans) from two different perspectives - the U.S. side's in  Flags of Our Fathers , and the Japanese defenders' in  Letters from Iwo Jima . Considering the high cost of making an effects-heavy film, a less ambitious director-producer team might have chosen to "do" an Iwo Jima-based film in the same semi-documentary format used by Darryl F. Zanuck and Joseph E. Levine in  A Longest Day  and  A Bridge Too Far , which tell the stories of D-Day and Ope...

In 2003, two years after the successful first run of HBO's  Band of Brothers,  a World War II-set miniseries based on the late Stephen E. Ambrose's non-fiction book about a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division that saw action in Normandy, Holland, the Battle of the Bulge and captured Hitler's Eagle Nest in southern Germany, its executive producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, began working on a similar project which focused on the "other war" America fought on the far side of the world against Japan. Before his untimely death in 2002, Ambrose had begun to outline a book about the Navy sailors and Marines who had participated in every offensive action against the Japanese Empire, starting from the 1942 landings at Guadalcanal and ending in the bloody 1945 struggle for Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands. However, Ambrose - weakened by his losing battle with cancer - found that the war in the Pacific was far more comple...