A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On August 2, 1994, the Los Angeles-based label Milan Entertainment released Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on compact disc and cassette. The album presents 10 selections from composer/conductor James Horner's score for Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel. Reflecting the film's focus on a covert military operation in Colombia against a notorious drug trafficker loosely based on Pablo Escobar, Horner's music is more martial and eerie than his previous score for another Clancy-based film, Patriot Games.  The late Horner (who died in a single-plane crash on June 22, 1995) had written a score that in album form would have contained 31 tracks for a grand total of 88 minutes' worth of music, but like most record labels, Milan only released an album with a running time of only 50minutes and 35 seconds. (19 years later, Intrada Records, a label that specializes in film and TV music albums, release

© 2005 Picador Books. Book cover photo credit: © Benjamin Lowy When the U.S. 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq on the morning of March 20, 2003 as part of the Army's V Corps at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson was one of the media pool members "embedded" with Maj. Gen. David Petraeus' headquarters. At the time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author ( An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 )  was still a senior editor at the Post and was chosen to observe the legendary division that had participated in many famous campaigns since its creation as a parachute unit during the Second World War. Now, having traded in their airplanes for helicopters as far back as the Vietnam War, the Screaming Eagles were on their way north to Baghdad, 12 years after the end of the first Persian Gulf War. Atkinson was no stranger to either the Army or reporting about the military. His fa

© 1977 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation  Star Wars  (as the film originally was titled) underwent many story changes from 1973 (when George Lucas first had to come up with his own space fantasy after Universal Pictures denied him permission to make a film version of  Flash Gordon ) all the way to 1976 (which is when principal photography began). Lucas went through four drafts of the  Star Wars  script before filming began, and in most of them, Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi survived and escaped from the Death Star with Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2. Up until the fourth unrevised draft, Ben lived on and stood by Leia’s side in the Rebel base during the climactic Battle of Yavin. However, Lucas (and perhaps even Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, the writers of the  American Graffiti  screenplay and uncredited script doctors for  Star Wars ) ,  realized that after having established that Obi-Wan was not only a veteran of the Clone Wars and a powerful

Fox News logo. © 2019 FNC and New Fox Why does Fox News constantly lie or state false information? Founded in 1996 by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch and led for much of its existence by the late Roger Ailes, Fox News Channel is  not  primarily a genuine journalistic organization. It has the name “Fox News Channel,” yes, but that’s partly to differentiate itself from its elder sibling, the Fox broadcast television network, which was also a brainchild of Mr. Murdoch and became America’s Fourth Network (after ABC, CBS, and NBC) in 1987. Mostly, though, “Fox News Channel” is essentially a propaganda outlet for the post-Reagan/Goldwater Republican Party. Its mission, per the concepts laid down by Messrs. Ailes and Murdoch, is to provide viewers with conservative opinion and some news content with a conservative slant (or, if you will, a bias). That’s why much of the cable channel’s programming in prime time (8–11 PM) features Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraha

© 2006 CBS Studios. Photo Credit: StarTrek.com On November 21, 2006, 40 years and two months after the premiere of Star Trek (or, as it is now known, Star Trek: The Original Series  or TOS), CBS DVD released Star Trek: The Animated Series: The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek  (also known as TAS) , a four-disc box set that presents all 22 episodes of the NBC Saturday morning cartoon series that continued the adventures of the USS Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk. The DVDs also feature audio and text commentary (on selected episodes), a behind-the-scenes documentary, a featurette about the links between TAS and other series in the Star Trek franchise, plus a timeline of the show. TAS was created in the early 1970s by Gene Roddenberry at the request of NBC, the U.S. television network which had broadcast the original live-action Star Trek series from 1966 until its premature cancellation in 1969. In an ironic twist, the same executives th

© 1996 Little, Brown and Company (a division of Hachette Book Group) On September 1, 1996, New York-based Little, Brown and Company published The West: An Illustrated History,  the companion volume to the Public Broadcasting Service's documentary miniseries The West: A Film by Stephen Ives , a project that was conceived and produced by Ken Burns . Written by historian Geoffrey C. Ward ( A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt ), The West: An Illustrated History is a lavishly illustrated and extremely readable history of America's westward expansion. starting with the arrival of the first Europeans in what is now the state of Texas and ending with the "taming of the West" in the 20th Century. The West: An Illustrated History follows the format of Ward's previous companion books for Burns' The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994): it is divided into eight chapters, one for each episode of The West in its broadcast edition. Complemen

American liberals hate this side of the American character.  (White Arkansas citizens protest the desegregation of Little Rock public schools in 1957.) An anonymous conservative (or a troll posing as one) recently asked this question on Quora: Why do liberals hate the United States? Before I answer this question, I’ll ask  you  this question: Why do conservatives spend so much time listening to Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, who are right-wing “commentators” (I call them propagandists) and are constantly pounding into people’s heads the same message over and over again:  Liberals are out to destroy America! Liberals are evil. Liberals want to turn the U.S. into a socialist hellhole. Seriously? Do you really believe this? (Apparently you do; otherwise, you would not ask this.) Now, for my answer. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not even a historian, even though that was my strong minor in college. Nevertheless, I’m we

On June 27, 1995, three days before the theatrical release of director Ron Howard's Apollo 13, MCA Records dropped Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , a 78-minute-long soundtrack album that presents eight songs from the Apollo era (including James Brown's "Night Train" and Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" ), one 1990s cover of a pop standard ( Blue Moon by the South Florida retro-country band The Mavericks) seven tracks of dialogue recorded for the record by members of the cast, and seven tracks of composer James Horner's original Academy Award-nominated orchestral score for the film. Prior to the release of Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , Horner - who wrote the score to the Academy Award-nominated film based on Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger's Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 - had prepared a 59-minute-long "assembly" album for commercial release. This version of the soundtrack presented 12 t

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

The answer is simple. Adolf Hitler took a huge gamble….and lost. For the first two years of the Second World War, Hitler’s policy toward the U.S. was to hope that isolationism, anti-British sentiment in certain segments of the American public, and internal divisions would keep President Franklin D. Roosevelt too busy to enter the conflict before he had conquered the Soviet Union. He may have believed that FDR, who was clearly a supporter of Great Britain, would lose the 1940 Presidential election to a candidate who would be more accommodating to German hegemony in Europe. Hitler was none too thrilled when the Roosevelt Administration and a bipartisan Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and sent the U.S. Navy to escort convoys as far as Iceland. But even when this led to an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic, the German dictator still held off from declaring war on America. Why? Partly because Hitler suspected that it would take the