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…
Category: blogs
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…
L’ Amour’s Shalako – Book to Movie
Books to Movies: L’Amour’s Shalako How many books did Louis L’Amour write before he died in 1988 at the age of 80? 105 novels and other books, almost all of them westerns or set in the West. This one was written in 1962. It’s a western genre piece by a king of western genre…
Let Me Caution You About Lemmy Caution! Book to Movie
Let Me Caution You About Lemmy Caution – Book to Movie Would you just pick up James Bond and put him in a science fiction movie on another planet? In the 1960s, as a kid growing up in New York City we only had a few TV channels, but enough to show odd films once…