A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On August 2, 1994, the Los Angeles-based label Milan Entertainment released Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on compact disc and cassette. The album presents 10 selections from composer/conductor James Horner's score for Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel. Reflecting the film's focus on a covert military operation in Colombia against a notorious drug trafficker loosely based on Pablo Escobar, Horner's music is more martial and eerie than his previous score for another Clancy-based film, Patriot Games.  The late Horner (who died in a single-plane crash on June 22, 1995) had written a score that in album form would have contained 31 tracks for a grand total of 88 minutes' worth of music, but like most record labels, Milan only released an album with a running time of only 50minutes and 35 seconds. (19 years later, Intrada Records, a label that specializes in film and TV music albums, release...

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...

As a fan of classical-styled film scores, I've developed an affinity for the works of various composers who work mostly in this genre. Topmost among these artists is, of course, John Williams, but as moviegoers and music lovers know, there are other composers who enhance the moving images we see on those theater screens with their compositions. I first became aware of the late James Horner when Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kha n premiered in June of 1982. Director Nicholas Meyer, anxious to give his entry in the Star Trek franchise its own identity apart from the less-than-acclaimed first motion picture, commissioned the young Horner to write a score that evoked the nautical traditions Meyer wanted to infuse into his vision of Starfleet and the starship Enterprise . He asked for, and got, music that calls to mind seagoing sailing frigates and the age of Horatio Hornblower, albeit with a 23rd Century backdrop of dueling starships. Considering Horner's penchant for composing sco...

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) It is February 1998. 33-year-old Jim Garraty is a respected history professor and bestselling author who lives in New York City. Popular with both students and readers, Jim seems to have it all. Fame, a nice apartment in Manhattan, and a reputation as one of the best World War II historians in the U.S. But when he gets a cryptic email from his best friend from high school, Jim is forced to relive his past - and a trip to his home town of Miami reopens old wounds he thought had healed long ago. Q.: How - or why - did you choose your characters' names? Did you go through a phone book and choose names at random or did you name Jim, Marty, and Mark after people you know? A.: Jim Garraty - or as Stephen King would put it, my I-guy - was, in every iteration of the story (from a CRW-2001 assignment to finished product), Jim Garraty. I'm not sure why I chose James/Jim/Jimmy as his first name; I just knew that...