A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

John Adams (2008) Written by: Kirk Ellis & Michelle Ashford Based on: John Adams, by David McCullough Directed by: Tom Hooper Starring: Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, Stephen Dillane, David Morse, Danny Huston, Sarah Polley, Tom Wilkinson, Rufus Sewell, Justin Theroux, Guy Henry On June 16, 2009, HBO Home Entertainment released the DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD) home media editions of its Emmy-winning miniseries John Adams. Produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman ( Band of Brothers ), this HBO Films/Playtone production is an adaptation of historian David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of one of America's most influential yet least understood Founding Fathers and the second President of the United States. Written by Kirk Ellis ( Sons of Liberty, Into the West ) and Michelle Ashford ( Masters of Sex, The Pacific ) and directed by Tom Hooper ( The King's Speech, Elizabeth I ), John Adams originally aired on HBO between March 16 and April 20, 2008, and...

From the Earth to the Moon finally gets the Blu-ray treatment. © 2019 Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment  Yesterday marked the 50th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the third manned flight to the Moon and the first to land on Earth's closest celestial neighbor and only natural satellite. There were the usual commemorative segments on the morning and evening newscasts, and social media was littered with tributes to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  Fittingly, Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment chose July 16, 2019 as the "drop date" for the long-awaited Blu-ray disc (BD) set of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part docudrama about mankind's greatest adventure: Project Apollo.  Produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer, From the Earth to the Moon premiered on HBO in the spring of 1998, seven months before the 30th Anniversary of Apollo 8's historic "first...

On Quora, Cory Dun asks: How realistic is the miniseries Band of Brothers as far as the airborne divisions are concerned? Was Easy Company a real parachute infantry company? I replied: Cover of the 2001 "miniseries tie-in" edition. © 2001 Home Box Office and Simon & Schuster Band of Brothers  is a 10-part adaptation of Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1992 non-fiction book  Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Nest,  which itself was a companion book to his 1988 book  Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944.  Based primarily on interviews with surviving E (or Easy) Company veterans, correspondence, unit histories, diaries, and other resources,  Band of Brothers  was a look at a light infantry unit (albeit an elite one) that fought in many of the major campaigns in Northwest Europe from D-Day all the way to V-E Day (May 8, 1945) and through the summer of 1945. Because it is a dramatization of a non-fiction b...

The Signature Edition reissue 5-DVD box set. © 1998, 2005 Home Box Office and Imagine Entertainment. President John F. Kennedy: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this time period will be more impressive to Mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space. And none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. On April 5, 1998, HBO broadcast "Can We Do This?" — the first episode of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part miniseries about Project Apollo, the U.S. manned space program tasked to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's challenge of placing "a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth" before 1970. Based mostly on Andrew Chaikin's 1994 book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts , From the Earth to the Moon follows the professional and person...

Before James Horner died at the age of 61 on June 22, 2015 in a single-fatality plane crash in California's Los Padres National Forest, he had composed over 100 film scores, including the Academy Award-winning music for director James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which included that year's Oscar-winning Best Original Song, "My Heart Will Go On." Throughout his 27-year-long career as a composer and orchestrator, Horner earned eight more Best Original Score Oscar nominations, won two Golden Globes, three Satellite Awards from the International Press Agency, and three Saturn Awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. Among the eight Oscar-nominated scores in Horner's filmography is the one for director Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, a dramatization about the April 1970 lunar mission which nearly ended in tragedy as a result of a catastrophic explosion of an oxygen tank aboard the spacecraft's Command/Service Module (CSM). ...

One of the truly outstanding scores composed for a television series was the late Michael Kamen's music for the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers , a 10-part adaptation of the late Stephen E. Ambrose's eponymous non-fiction book about E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Executive produced by Ambrose, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg, this monumental miniseries follows an elite light infantry unit from its training stages at Camp Toccoa, GA to the 11-month campaign in Northwest Europe, starting from the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 to the surrender of Germany and E Company's capture of Hitler's private "Eagle's Nest" in Bavaria. When I finally saw the first episodes of Band of Brothers on the History Channel 14 years ago and heard the strains of the "Main Theme" (Track 1), the credits had not finished rolling, and because the style was similar to John Williams' music for Savin...

On September 23, 2007, the 300-plus member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired A Necessary War, the first of seven episodes of The War: A Ken Burns Film. Produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, this 15-hours-long documentary series tells the story of how four American towns – Waterbury, CT, Mobile, AL, Luverne, MN, and Sacramento, CA – and their citizens experienced World War II. Written by Burns’ long-time collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward ( The Civil War, Baseball, Prohibition, and The Vietnam War ), The War is a bottom-to-top look at the Second World War as told by now-elderly members of what former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest Generation.” They are a cross-section of American society who experienced “the War” either in far-flung theaters of operation around the world or on the home front back in the States. Their stories – some of which are wryly humorous, and some of which are simply horrifying – reflect The War’s tagline: In ex...