A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Dust jacket illustration for the U.S. edition of Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. Design by Matt Yee. (C) 2015 Viking (a Penguin Random House imprint) On November 3, 2015, Penguin Random House UK imprint Viking published Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble , a book by historian Antony Beevor about the biggest battle fought in Western Europe during World War II. Officially known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, the engagement that began on December 16, 1944 and ended six weeks later is better known by its more popular nomenclature – the Battle of the Bulge. (The battle earned its nickname due to the bulge-shaped salient in Allied lines on situation maps – official and those published in U.S. and British newspapers during that cold, miserable, and violent winter battle.) Published in the U.S. as Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, the book is Beevor’s first World War II book that focuses on a campaign that was overwhelmingly a struggle between Adolf Hitler’s We...

He is always close at hand, in a very positive way, musically; he’s extremely fond of music. His greatest pleasure, he tells me…and I believe him…is the time when he can come sit on the stage and listen to the orchestra play as we accompany the film. – John Williams on Steven Spielberg, in an interview with Lukas Kendall Not too long ago in a country not so far away, adventurer-archeologist, Indiana Jones, embarked on a historically significant search for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Joining him on this supernatural treasure hunt was the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of composer John Williams. Were it not for many crucial bursts of dramatic symphonic accompaniment, Indiana Jones would surely have perished in a forbidding temple in South America or in the oppressive silence of the great Sahara Desert. – Steven Spielberg in his director’s note for the 1981 album of the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack In the spring of 1981, Columbia Records – which at the time...

(C) 1980 Ballantine Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. In November 1980, Ballantine Books, an imprint of New York-based publisher Random House, published The Empire Strikes Back Notebook, a large-format paperback book which presented the complete script for Star Wars – Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Edited by Diana Attias and Lindsay Smith (who later worked on Star Wars: The Radio Drama ), the book not only included the screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett; it also featured selected storyboards drawn by Lucasfilm artists involved in the making of The Empire Strikes Back, including Joe Johnston – who went on to become a successful director – and his assistant Nilo Rodis-Janero. Here at last is the complete script of the exciting continuation in the STAR WARS saga—THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Containing the dialogue and stage directions from the film, the script will take you—again and again—into the thrilling world of this space fantasy. Magnificently illustrating the scr...

On February 15, 1993, the Minnesota-based classical music record label Pro-Arte released Bach Meets the Beatles: Variations in the Style of Bach, an album of piano pieces that blend the music of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the Baroque composition style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Conceived and performed by pianist John Bayless, Bach Meets the Beatles presented 15 hit songs by the Fab Four, including All You Need is Love, Hey Jude, Something, And I Love Her, and Nowhere Man.  Official Video by Entertainment One Distribution: Imagine (John Lennon) A sequel to Bayless’ earlier Bach on Abbey Road, Bach Meets the Beatles was just one of many Beatles-classical music mashup recordings; Joshua Rifkin had done a more ambitious take on the Lennon-McCartney canon in his 1965 bestselling LP The Baroque Beatles Book, and Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra covered the “lads from Liverpool” in Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra Play the Beatles. Both records...

Art Design by Dennis Mukai and Peter Nomura (C) 1986 Philips Classics Productions “If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.” ― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night In 1985, Philips Classics Productions, the classical music label of Philips Records (now Decca) released Pops in Love: John Williams & the Boston Pops Orchestra, an 11-track album of light classical works by Gabriel Faure, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and others. The recording was first issued in two formats – vinyl long-play (LP) records and the then-new compact disc (CD) – in the United States. Later editions were on CD and manufactured in what was then West Germany. The West German CDs later made their way to American record stores and online emporiums such as CD Now and Amazon. Millions of people know that the Boston Pops are fun. You can see that from the television shows, hear it on 50 ye...