A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On Quora, an anonymous member asks: If '11.22.63' was a movie, do you think it deserves more than 1 star? From what I understand,  11.22.63  was going to be a feature film (aka “theatrically-released movie”), but the people involved (the late Jonathan Demme had optioned it) had an incredibly hard time adapting it into a viable screenplay.  11/22/63  (the novel) is a long and exquisitely detailed book, so the film version was abandoned. Fortunately, J.J. Abrams is a huge fan of the book, and when he emailed Stephen King to say how much he’d loved it, he also mentioned that it should be made into a miniseries. © 2011 Scribner (I love that book cover!) So…J.J. Abrams, James Franco, Stephen King, and Bridgette Carpenter teamed up and produced  11.22.63  for the Hulu streaming network. Not as a movie, but as a nine-part series. © 2016 Hulu  (This guy doesn’t look like Lee Harvey Oswald as much as Gary Oldman did in  JFK,...

In 2011, even before Scribner (a division of Simon & Schuster) published Stephen King's time travel novel  11/22/63, director Jonathan Demme ( The Silence of the Lambs ) announced that he had acquired the film rights. He was intrigued by its premise - a 21st Century high school English teacher travels back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Demme would write the screenplay and direct the feature film, while King would be the project's executive producer. It was a good idea on paper, but the reality was something entirely different. According to Rolling Stone's Andy Greene, "[t]he book...had  a rather rocky first step on its road to the screen. Director Jonathan Demme was the first license to it, though King had complete veto power over every aspect of the project. "He was pretty adamant that it be a theatrical film," says the bestselling author. "It was like, 'Jon, I don't kno...

Miramax Films Director John Dahl’s “The Great Raid” is a World War II film that is in turns an old-fashioned war movie and a realistic depiction of a military action that actually took place. Written by Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, “The Great Raid” depicts a successful U.S.-Filipino raid in early 1945 on a Japanese prisoner of war (POW) camp to free 500 American survivors of 1942’s infamous Bataan Death March. Based on the books  The Great Raid on Cabanatuan  by William Breuer and  Ghost Soldiers  by Hampton Sides, “The Great Raid” stars Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielsen, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Marton Csokas, Motoki Kobayashi, Gotaro Tsunashima, Sam Worthington, and Dale Dye. “The Great Raid” starts on a gruesome note by depicting the massacre of American POWs by Japanese forces on the island of Palawan in late 1944. The Japanese were not signatories of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, and their military code,...

On August 9, Warner Home Video will release the Blu-ray (BD) and DVD edition of “11.22.63,” Hulu’s eight-part miniseries based on Stephen King’s 2011 best-selling time travel novel “ 11/22/63. ” Warner Home Video Co-executive produced by King and J.J. Abrams (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Lost”), the highly-anticipated adaptation of the award-winning book follows the odyssey of Jake Epping (James Franco) as he travels back to the early 1960s to prevent President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. The limited-run series originally aired on Hulu’s subscription service between February 15 and April 4, and consists of eight episodes: ·         The Rabbit Hole ·         The Kill Floor ·         Other Voices, Other Rooms ·         The Eyes of Texas ·         Th...