A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 screenpla...

One of the tragedies of the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case – and there are many of them, believe me – is that it has revealed, once again, the seamier side of the American mindset, particularly when it comes to the concepts of justice and “mob rule.” To be sure, there are certain points about the case that everyone seems to agree on.  Trayvon Martin, a 16-year-old adolescent was shot and killed by 26-year-old volunteer community crime watchman George Zimmerman on the early evening of February 26, 2012 in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.  There was a confrontation of some sort, there was a scuffle, and Zimmerman did fire a single shot from a pistol he was licensed to carry, a shot which killed the teenager. Unfortunately for those of us who have been following the case from a long distance, the whole sad incident is still shrouded in a fog of uncertainty.  Very few people in the gated community actually saw what happened, and like many similar occurrence...

Gulf War book is among the best on the subject   Written: Dec 15 '03 Pros: Reads like a Tom Clancy novel. Cons: Maybe there ought to be a revised edition with comments on Gulf War II The Bottom Line: If you like well-written military history books that read like novels, this is worth reading! 13 years and two Administrations ago, the entire world watched as the first President Bush marshaled a global coalition to confront Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and gave him an ultimatum: leave Kuwait by Jan. 15, 1991, or we'll force you out. Three months had passed since Iraq had invaded its tiny but rich neighbor, claiming the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields just across the border. In reality, as Rick Atkinson points out in Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, Saddam was strong-arming his way out of repaying loans made to Iraq by Kuwait and other moderate Arab countries during his disastrous war with Iran. He may have also been angered by OPEC's...

When most people think of the American strategic bombing offensive against Germany during World War II, usually they see in their imagination the graceful lines of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force. Hollywood epics such as Twelve O'Clock High, Command Decision and Memphis Belle reinforce our collective memory of the Flying Forts taking off from Britain on their perilous daylight raids over Hitler's Third Reich, risking life and limb and machine to destroy Germany's industrial capacity and help hasten the end of the war.  While the B-17 did, indeed, contribute to the Allied victory in Europe, its dominant role as the U.S. Army Air Force's strategic bomber was a creation of public relations and the media's attention on the "sexy" Flying Fortress. The true workhorse of the daylight bombing campaign over Germany was the ungainly Consolidated B-24, aptly given the name Liberator.  As the late Stephen E. Ambrose wrote in The Wild...

The Hurt Locker (2009) There is, apparently, a simple rule-of-thumb (at least for those folks who keep track of these things) that war movies, no matter how well-made they may be, simply do not attract huge audiences to theaters in times of war. Certainly, people who are old enough to remember World War II and its immediate aftermath can make a good case that this is not always the case and that many of them, whether they were adults or kids at the time, watched movies such as  Air Force, Back to Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, Sahara, The Flying Tigers  and  A Walk in the Sun , not to mention the various newsreels and government-produced propaganda films. That having been said, movies about America's post-World War II conflicts made while the bullets were flying and the soldiers, sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and Air Force personnel were in harm's way often flopped or were less-than-critically acclaimed.  (John Wayne's  The Green Berets  may be liked b...

Summer of ’42 (1971) Part One: An Overview of Summer of '42 Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant. In everyone's life, I often think, there is a  Summer of '42  (or '52, or '62, and so on....), a time in which we discover the joys and sorrows of growing up...and falling in love. There are hijinks and pranks, jokes and playful insults...and always the bonds of friendship. But sometimes, in those days of discovery and self-awareness, we feel the angst of that first attraction, the bittersweet highs and lows of falling seriously in love for the first time – sometimes with the right person, sometimes not. And of course, we feel the heartbreak of losing that cherished love...wondering what on Earth happened. Based on an actual event i...

When Universal Pictures rolled out writer-director Paul Greengrass’  United 93  in 2006, I was not sure if I would ever see it.  I certainly didn’t see it in theaters that year, and I did not rush to order it from Amazon when it was available on DVD a few months later.  Like millions of my fellow Americans, I was apprehensive about seeing a recreation of the events of September 11, 2001, and specifically about the efforts of 40 passengers and crewmembers to wrest back control of the hijacked airliner from four Al Qaeda terrorists before it hits its intended target in Washington, DC.  While I did not – and still do not – think my own reluctance came from the movie being released only five years after the events of 9-11, I didn’t want to have nightmares about United 93 the way I did back in the fall of 2001.  I was watching  Good Morning America  on that day (having tuned in a few minutes after the first plane hit the Twin Towers) and I st...