A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2021 Harry N. Abrams/Abrams Books & 20th Century Studios   Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s Friday, February 4, 2022, and here in Lithia, Florida, it is a nice winter afternoon, Florida style. After a few days of near-freezing temperatures, we’re now in a warming trend. Outside, the temperature is 85˚F (29˚C) under partly sunny skies. With humidity at 57% and the wind blowing from the south-southwest, the heat index is 86˚F. Winter it may be, meteorologically and astronomically speaking, but it certainly feels like summer here. Well, as I sit here I’m keeping an eye on my Amazon account and the progress of my latest order. Yesterday I bought a copy of Laurent Bouzerau’s West Side Story: The Making of the Steven Spielberg Film. Published last November by Harry N. Abrams, a New York-based publishing company that specializes in books about art and entertainment, this is a 256-page, fully-illustrated behind the scenes account of how (and why) Steven Spielberg directed a secon...

In the summer of 1984, British-based Polydor Records released Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, an 11-track album with selections from composer-conductor John Williams’ score for the second chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. The album was issued in three formats – vinyl long-play (LP), audio cassette, and the then-new compact disc (CD) – but due to the limitations of how much content a single LP record can hold, Polydor and Maestro Williams – who is credited as the album producer – chose only 40 minutes’ worth of music from his score for the 118-minutes-long film. The resulting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom soundtrack was a “sampler” of action cues and leitmotivs from the film, including Short Round’s Theme, Fast Streets of Shanghai, and the film’s dazzling opening number – Kate Capshaw’s cover – in Mandarin Chinese – of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. However, due to Polydor’s decision to release the soundtrack as a single LP album...

On Tuesday, April 17, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released Steven Spielberg's 2017 political/historical thriller The Post on Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K UHD Blu-ray. Starring Academy Award-winning actors Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and the newspaper's dogged editor Ben Bradlee, The Post dramatizes the duo's 1971 decision to publish "the Pentagon Papers" in defiance of the secretive - and vindictive - Nixon Administration. (C) 2018 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment OSCAR ® winners Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks team up for the first time in this thrilling film based on a true story. Determined to uphold the nation’s civil liberties, Katharine Graham (Streep), publisher of The Washington Post, and hard-nosed editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks) join forces to expose a decades-long cover-up. But the two must risk their careers –– and their freedom –– to bring truth to light in this powerful film wit...

Since the late 1970s, so many Star Wars movie tie-ins have been published that they’d fill a Star Destroyer’s cargo hold. From novelizations of the screenplays to comic books, radio dramatizations, and even parodies, the publishing industry has given Star Wars fans different means to explore George Lucas’s original six-film space fantasy saga and Star Wars: The Force Awakens over the past 39 years. With less than five months to go before the premiere of Disney/Lucasfilm’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, let’s explore the brightest shining stars of the Star Wars literary tie-in universe: Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, George Lucas (ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster. Published by Del Rey in December 1976 with cover art by conceptual artist, Foster’s adaptation of Lucas’s fourth draft of the Star Wars screenplay gave the world its first peek of that galaxy far, far away. The novel sold moderately well before the film opened in May 1977. After Star Wars became...

(C) 2015 Quirk Books Since the late 1970s, so many Star Wars movie tie-ins have been published that they’d fill a Star Destroyer’s cargo hold. From novelizations of the screenplays to comic books, radio dramatizations, and even parodies, the publishing industry has given Star Wars fans different means to explore George Lucas’s original six-film space fantasy saga and Star Wars: The Force Awakens over the past 39 years. With less than five months to go before the premiere of Disney/Lucasfilm’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, let’s explore the brightest shining stars of the Star Wars literary tie-in universe: Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, George Lucas (ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster. Published by Del Rey in December 1976 with cover art by conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, Foster’s adaptation of Lucas’s fourth draft of the Star Wars screenplay gave the world its first peek of that galaxy far, far away. The novel sold moderately well before the film ope...