Elmore Leonard always said, and I paraphrase, “don’t write the parts that no one reads (skips over).” Here is the written down version. It’s weird though, about stuff like that. I know some readers that like the backdrops, but a good writer knows when enough is enough. Some don’t and drop too much,…
Category: blogs
The Manchurian Candidate – Book to Movie
Brainwashing! Most people familiar with the subject think that Edward Hunter invented the term in the 1950s. Hunter was an American writer, a journalist, intelligence agent and at one time an authority on psychological warfare. Hunter is usually acknowledged as having invented the word “brain washing,” in a newspaper article in 1950. But, the original…
White Hunter, Black Heart – Book to Movie
Some people read books, watch TV and movies to completely escape into them. Some people read and watch, and enjoy more the backstories and the how-the-sausage-was-made, manufacturing of these works. “Look at that stunt!” “Did the actors get along? “ “I heard the author…” “On that scene, they said that Marlon Brando did…”. It would…
Dick Marcinko Navy Seal
December, 2021. Dick Marcinko dead at 81. For a while, when I ran Close Quarter Combat Magazine in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was friends with Navy Seal Harry Constance of the “Good To Go,” book. As a result of knowing Harry, some of those visits I met Dick Marcinko through Harry and…
The Dirty Dozen – Book to Movie
Run the filthy, dirty numbers… 13 filthy paratroopers. 12 dirty soldiers. 2 magazine articles. 4 related books. 1 Theater movie. 3 TV movies. 1 TV series. That’s the backbone progression for the popular Dirty Dozen book-to-movie, then movie-to-book evolution, and a concept then followed and reworked into dozens of other TV shows, movies and…
Riders of the Purple Sage – Book to Movie
Zane Grey. They might not have read a Zane Grey western, or read any western for that matter! But, it is hard to imagine any reader of books, any kind of books, not knowing of the western author Zane Grey. How? How would they know? After all, he did die of heart failure in 1939….
Soylent Green – Book to Movie
BOOKS TO MOVIES “Make Room, Make Room” to “Soylent Green” Soylent Green is….2022? Dystopia. Distopian. Distopa-demic. One of the “topias,” and the opposite of utopia is the definition of dystopia – “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” We hear that a…
The November Man – Book to Movie
BOOKS TO MOVIES Somewhere between the slow, boring Lecarre spy stories and the non-stop, shoot ‘em up Pendleton’s Executioner series, you’ll find floating around the rather unsung…The November Man books and single movie. In the book series Peter Devereaux was deemed the deadliest assassin in the CIA. The spy world dubbed him “The November Man,”…
Presumed Innocent – Book to Movie
The book and movie entertainment world can muster quite a list of courtroom dramas. Professor Wikipedia testifies that a “trial film’ is a subgenre of the legal-courtroom drama that encompasses films that are centered on a civil or criminal trial, typically a trial by jury.” Such a list would take up this whole essay. Kill…
The Son – Book to Movie
Book to Film The Son By Phillip Meyer “How much do I love The Son? Let me count the ways” (sorry Shakespeare!). Are we tired of hearing the words, “epic?” And “sweeping?” Oh, and how’s about “sprawling!” Yeah. Then how can I condense the plot of the book and the TV, 2 season, mini-series of…