A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On June 22, 1961 – by coincidence, the 20th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union – writer-producer Carl Foreman’s  The Guns of Navarone  premiered in the United States. Not only was it the first of several adaptations of novels by Scottish writer Alistair MacLean to become big-budget action-adventure movies, but it also marked the return of Foreman, who had been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s as one of the Hollywood Ten, to the limelight of the movie industry after years of working anonymously for more than a decade.  Starring Gregory Peck as Capt. Keith Mallory, David Niven as Corporal Miller, Anthony Quinn as Andrea Stavros, and Anthony Quayle as Maj. Roy Franklin,  The Guns of Navarone  tells the exciting – if at times a bit implausible – tale of a small Allied commando team tasked with one hell of a mission: Infiltrate the German-occupied island of Navarone in the Aegean Sea, avoid detection, and blow up a pair of large radar-controlled c

World War II, for good or ill, has been the backdrop for hundreds – if not thousands – of movies produced by all the nations which participated in it even as it was being waged. Of course, though “combat” films along the lines of A Walk in the Sun, Battleground, The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan often come to mind when the term World War II movie is mentioned, the genre actually straddles quite a few other film styles that aren’t restricted to movies about battles, campaigns or the hardware of the war.  Many love stories, dramas, comedies and even science fiction films have been set or partially set during World War II. Naturally, the sheer scope of World War II – fought on three continents and involving millions of combatants – and its more or less unambiguous “good versus evil” nature resulted in the near-mythologizing of certain events by Hollywood and writers of fiction. One of the most popular subgenres of World War II films is the “sabotage and commando r

On November 4, 2008, roughly seven years after Lucasfilm Limited and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the two-disc DVD set of  Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace  and slightly four years after the unveiling of the somewhat controversial  Star Wars Trilogy  box set, the two companies went ahead and issued the first box set of  Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy  in tandem with a redesigned  Star Wars Trilogy  box set comprised of the 2006 Limited Edition DVDs which contain – due to high demand from fans – both the enhanced Special Edition and original theatrical release versions of  A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back  and  Return of the Jedi . For some reason, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment waited a bit over three years to produce a box set of the Prequels –  Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Episode II: Attack of the Clones  and  Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  – which had previously been released in separate 2-DVD sets. (A careful search of eith

When most of us talk about the genre labeled "science fiction"  or "sci-fi," we often associate it with such movies or franchises as  Independence Day, Star Trek  and/or  Star Wars , with perhaps a nod to Stanley Kubrick's  2001: A Space Odyssey  and Steven Spielberg's  Close Encounters of the Third Kind  thrown in almost as a distracted coda. Star Wars,  of course, isn't  true  science fiction; George Lucas's multimedia franchise is better described as "space-fantasy" or "space opera" and is instead a high tech update of the old  Flash Gordon  and  Buck Rogers  serials of the 1930s and early 1940s.   Gene Roddenberry's  Star Trek  (and its various spin-offs) is closer to true science fiction but it's still more of an action-adventure tale gussied up with plausible but still fantastical advanced technology (warp drive, subspace communications and transporters) which is designed to get around the limits of physics a

Whenever movie producers such as Mace Neufeld ( The Hunt for Red October ) or the triumvirate of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Barrie M. Osborne ( The Lord of the Rings ) announce that they are going to adapt a literary work for the silver screen, most of us say something like, “That’s great, but I bet it won’t be as good as the book.” Of course, if you go into screenwriting or even just read books about the process of writing for the film industry, you quickly learn that the business of adaptation isn’t simply changing the original prose format of a book (fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter) into the more concise one used in movie scripts.  Instead, you have to write your screenplay with a keen eye for the  visual  aspects of the story, as well as making tons of compromises that will allow you to keep  thematic ideas  from the book close to what the original author intended when he or she wrote the book without giving your producer a screenplay that will result in a very

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines In 1991, as Terminator 2: Judgment Day' s end titles faded to black and the theater's lights came back up, we were left to believe that Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), her son John (Edward Furlong) and a reprogrammed Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) had not only defeated the advanced T-1000 Terminator which had been trying to "terminate" the future leader of the human resistance against the murderous Skynet computer network, but also changed history by preventing the development of Skynet itself. After all, the formidable trio had destroyed the Cyberdine Corporation's main lab, Skynet's "father," Dr. Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), was dead, and all traces of the original Terminator – the mangled arm, the strange chip that Dyson had reverse engineered, and the T-101's CPU itself – had been melted in a vat of of hot liquid metal, along with that formidable pair of good/evil Terminators. End of movie, end of story, ri

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science-fiction film  2001: A Space Odyssey,  he and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name. Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was  Will you ever do a follow-up to  2001 ? Kubrick wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after  2001  were  A Clockwork Orange  and penning the basic story idea for  A.I.,  and even that he turned over to his friend Steven Spielberg a few years before his death in 1999. Clarke, on the other hand, at first demurred from doing a literary sequel, but in 1982 his novel  2010: Odyssey Tw

When I bought my first true "attach to a television set" DVD player (as opposed to a DVD-ROM drive on my PC) in the fall of 2000, I purchased it not only because my DVD collection was growing and I needed to play the 10 or so movies I had at the time on some other venue than my computer, but also with the expectation that George Lucas and 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment would release the original  Star Wars Trilogy  on this wonderful new format.  After all, the 1977-1983 trio ( Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi ) had been released on all the other home video formats, including Betamax and VHS videotape and the "father of the DVD," the laserdisc. Indeed, the  Star Wars Trilogy  has the distinction of being the most reissued film set in video history, starting with each film's first initial VHS release in the mid-1980s, then various box set re-releases since, ranging from CBS-Fox's circa 1988 "plain vanilla"