A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1997 HighBridge Audio and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Blood of a Jedi Cast Han Solo (Perry King) Princess Leia Organa (Ann Sachs) Major Derlin  (Tom Virtue) See-Threepio (Anthony Daniels) Lando Calrissian (Arye Gross) Wedge Antilles (Jon Matthews) Gray Leader Green Leader Admiral Ackbar (Mark Adair Rios) Red Two Red Three Luke Skywalker (Joshua Fardon) Emperor Palpatine (Paul Hecht) Lord Darth Vader (Brock Peters) Bunker Commander Trooper #1 Control Room Voice Anakin Skywalker/Unmasked Vader (David Birney) Narrator (Ken Hiller)  Sound FX Roles Chewbacca Artoo-Detoo Wicket Glider Ewok Nien Numb Reviewer's Note: All quoted material is from the 1996 Del Rey book Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - The National Public Radio Dramatization.  This edition contains Brian Daley's complete radio play, which differs slightly from the version of the Radio Drama which aired on National Public Radio in 1996 and the origi

One of the interesting things about Clint Eastwood's  Letters from Iwo Jima  isn't so much that it's a cinematic rarity - an American-produced movie with a mostly-Japanese dialog soundtrack that qualified for a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film - but rather a celluloid bookend to another film by the same director,  Flags of Our Fathers . Both films, released a few months apart in the fall of 2006, graphically depict the Battle of Iwo Jima (code named Operation Detachment by the Americans) from two different perspectives - the U.S. side's in  Flags of Our Fathers , and the Japanese defenders' in  Letters from Iwo Jima . Considering the high cost of making an effects-heavy film, a less ambitious director-producer team might have chosen to "do" an Iwo Jima-based film in the same semi-documentary format used by Darryl F. Zanuck and Joseph E. Levine in  A Longest Day  and  A Bridge Too Far , which tell the stories of D-Day and Operation Ma

On February 23, 1945, D+4 of the battle for Iwo Jima (code-named Operation Detachment), five Marines and a Navy corpsman clambered up to the summit of Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano on the southern tip of the 7.5-square mile island; with an altitude of 166 m (546 ft), Suribachi dominates the unusually flat terrain of Iwo Jima and, as such, was an important military objective – whoever held the high ground could direct artillery and mortar fire at any point on the small island located nearly 700 miles southeast of Tokyo. The five Marines - Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, along with their Navy medic, John “Doc” Bradley – were just a small fraction of the 110,000 members of the Fleet Marine Force that were involved in Operation Detachment, but as a result of what at the time they considered a routine – almost mundane – assignment, they became immortalized when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took one of the most famous pictur

(C) 1997 HighBridge Audio and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)   S o Turns a Galaxy, So Turns a Wheel Cast Luke Skywalker (Joshua Fardon)  Emperor Palpatine (Paul Hecht) Lord Darth Vader (Brock Peters) Han Solo (Perry King) See-Threepio (Anthony Daniels) Princess Leia Organa (Ann Sachs) Imperial Commander Imperial Scout #1 Imperial Scout #2 Major Derlin (Tom Virtue) Narrator: Ken Hiller Sound / FX Roles Artoo-Detoo Chewbacca Ewoks Teebo Vine Ewok Logray Cub Ewok Wicket  Paploo Reviewer's Note: All quoted material is from the 1996 Del Rey book Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - The National Public Radio Dramatization.  This edition contains Brian Daley's complete radio play, which differs slightly from the version of the Radio Drama which aired on National Public Radio in 1996 and the original 1990s HighBridge Audio cassette and compact disc editions. The version in Daley's script  was  recorded, but as with the original 1