A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover art by Home Box Office, Inc. (C) 2010 NAL Caliber Books   Pros:  Interesting concept; vivid anecdotes; compelling characters Cons:  None After the phenomenal success of their HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers,  executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turned to their friend Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the book they had just adapted for TV, and started thinking about future World War II projects they could collaborate on. The Second World War, after all, was a topic Ambrose knew backwards and forwards from his stint as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's official biographer and his subsequent career as a history professor. Ike had - before entering politics in 1952 - been one of America's top generals during the war, rising to the title of Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and five-star general before the end of hostilities in 1945, so it was not a stretch for Ambrose to pen several best-selling books about the U.S. ...

The Pacific  is what I like to call a “cinematic bookend” to the Emmy Award-winning 2001 HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers.  It’s not a sequel because it doesn’t follow Army soldiers in the European Theater of Operations. It’s more of a “companion series” because it’s about three Marines (John Basilone, Robert Leckie, and Eugene Sledge) and their experiences in the war against Japan. Because Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman teamed up with most of the writers, producers, and directors of  Band of Brothers,  the 2010 miniseries was not made to compete with the earlier show. It was made in part to address Pacific War veterans’ concerns that Hanks and Spielberg focused on the ETO  twice  in less than three years ( Saving Private Ryan  was released in 1998) and that  their  story wasn’t being told. (This, too, was a complaint that the late Stephen Ambrose received after he wrote a series of books about the war in Europe. He ...

In 2003, two years after the successful first run of HBO's  Band of Brothers,  a World War II-set miniseries based on the late Stephen E. Ambrose's non-fiction book about a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division that saw action in Normandy, Holland, the Battle of the Bulge and captured Hitler's Eagle Nest in southern Germany, its executive producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, began working on a similar project which focused on the "other war" America fought on the far side of the world against Japan. Before his untimely death in 2002, Ambrose had begun to outline a book about the Navy sailors and Marines who had participated in every offensive action against the Japanese Empire, starting from the 1942 landings at Guadalcanal and ending in the bloody 1945 struggle for Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands. However, Ambrose - weakened by his losing battle with cancer - found that the war in the Pacific was far more comple...