A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

When I was a much younger  Star Wars  fan in my early teens, one of my hopes was that George Lucas would create a TV spinoff based on the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 as they faced off against the evil Darth Vader and the legions of the Empire. Of course, I had no idea that Lucas had made the film now known as  Episode IV: A New Hope  with two other films in mind, nor did I (being naive and unschooled in the business of filmmaking) realize how expensive it would have been to adapt  Star  Wars from the big screen to the little one and make it work as well as the late Larry Gelbart had done with the TV version  of M*A*S*H. After the disastrous one-time airing of the   misbegotten  Star Wars Holiday Special  in 1978 and the somewhat lackluster live-action set-on-Endor TV movies Lucasfilm released in the early 1980s, I realized that maybe  Star Wars   w...

Because World War II was the defining conflict of the 20th Century - its aftermath continues to shape our lives almost 70 years later - and because it was a globe-spanning conflict, it is not surprising that many filmmakers continue to chronicle those awfully bloody six years that ended over 50 million lives - most of them civilian lives. Some, of course, are big Hollywood recreations of actual battles ( The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far ) or fact-based miniseries along the lines of Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Others are fictional stories that range from the somber eulogy of Saving Private Ryan to the more action-oriented baubles a la The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare, both of which exemplify the Commando Raid Adventure sub-genre. Nevertheless, from the dawn of the Television Age back in the 1940s and ‘50s, the millions of feet of combat and propaganda footage shot by both the Axis and Allies have been mined for a plethora of documentaries made for television, st...