A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover Design by Howard Fritzson. Photos (C) 1977, 1980, 1983 by Lucasfilm Ltd. (C) 1990 CBS Records Some day I’m going to build a recording studio with a sound as live as if it were inside a cathedral! – George Lucas to composer John Williams after the recording sessions for The Empire Strikes Back score, 1980 Official Sony Classical Video: Star Wars - Main Title In March of 1990, Star Wars creator George Lucas hired 90 San Francisco Bay area classical musicians and created a one-time ensemble which he called The Skywalker Symphony Orchestra. Between March 19 and 20, Lucas, composer-conductor John Williams, and a recording team led by producer Thomas Z. Shepard worked with this unique group of players at the brand-new recording studio in Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, located in Marin County, California. The result was Sony Classical’s John Williams Conducts John Williams: The Star Wars Trilogy – Star Wars * The Empire Strikes Back * Return of the Jedi, a 13-track compila

Slipcover for John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999. Designed by Roxanne Slimak. (C) 1999 Sony Classical/Sony Masterworks Official Sony Classical Video: The Reivers: Main Theme On November 2, 1999, Sony Classical released John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999, a two-disc collection of movie themes and event-related orchestral works composed and conducted by the five-time Academy Award-winning composer and Laureate Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Culled from various recordings with different ensembles – including the aforementioned BPO and the Tanglewood, Boston, London, and even Skywalker Symphony Orchestras, this popular recording celebrates the first 30 years of Maestro Williams’ stellar – and ongoing – career as the go-to master of film scores and commissioned “special events” orchestral pieces. Produced by Laraine Perri and designed by Sony artist Roxanne Slimak, John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 distributes 28 themes and “special events” compositions by

(C) 2011 A&E Home Video WWII in HD: In November of 2009, History aired a 10-episode miniseries titled simply WWII in HD, which was "shot and remastered in high definition" and culled from - as the package blurb puts it - "three thousand hours of color film few knew existed" from several countries' archives. Essentially, producer Lou Reda and writers Matthew Ginsburg, Bruce Kennedy and Liz Reph take a page from the Ken Burns playbook and follow the wartime experiences of 12 American men and women who participate in World War II either as combatants (Jack Werner, Shelby Westbrook), caregivers (Jane Wandrey) or reporters (Robert Sherrod, Richard Tregaskis) from Pearl Harbor Day to VJ Day. The narrative, which combines color footage collected over a two-year world-wide search in Allied and Axis archives, interviews with now-elderly veterans and dramatic readings from the 12 "characters'" letters and journals to recreate as vividly as poss

Inning 5: Shadow Ball (1930-1940) Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns Throughout America, and even on the baseball diamonds in New York's Central Park, thousands of homeless people build shantytowns called "Hoovervilles." More than ever, America needs heroes. And even as it struggles to make it through the Depression, baseball provides them.  But the heroes do not come only from the Major Leagues. The Negro Leagues bring baseball to towns the Major Leagues ignore...to people the Major Leagues spurn. To delight the fans, they develop an elaborate warm-up routine in pantomime; throwing and hitting an invisible ball so convincingly spectators can't believe it's not real. It's called "shadow ball." In the fall of 1994, Major League Baseball was crippled by a players' strike that prematurely ended that year's season at the midway point and led to the cancellation of the '94 World Series. Millions of fans of the national pa

Cover design for Bantam Books: Belina Huey. (C) 2005 Bantam Books, a division of Penguin Random House World War II is now three quarters of a century away in our collective memory. All of the great or infamous military and civilian leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George Patton, Takeo Kurita, and William F. Halsey – are long dead. The elderly veterans that in the U.S. are dying at a rate of 2000 men and women a day are now the junior officers and enlisted men who were then the youngest. In a decade or so, the last people to have lived during history’s largest and bloodiest clash of arms will be gone, leaving only the historical record and a plethora of monuments as reminders of those turbulent, violent years. Since the 1980s, when authors like Max Hastings,   Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Antony Beevor, and Carlo D’Este kicked off the renaissance of popular World War II history writing, many fine books have been publishe