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Dumping Miss Daisy
I saw the first Pushing Daisies when it was leaked pre-air in 2007. I thought it made a great mini-movie but couldn’t see the long-running series potential in it. Series tend to follow formula and spread their invention, and this did neither. The second episode surprised and convinced me. It was the second episode that…
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On Happy Endings
Well, there’s happy endings and happy endings. When Robin Williams was making Mrs Doubtfire there was studio pressure to conclude the story with a reconciliation of the divorced parents and a restoration of the broken family unit. Which probably would have prevailed (as the same reconciliation fantasy did in both versions of The Parent Trap)…
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Tarzan the Silent
A heads-up regarding the dirt-cheap DVDs available from Alpha Video, a company whose output I can best describe as ‘glorious tat’; a lot of public domain stuff and many titles that would be below most commercial distributors’ radar, but I wish they’d been around when my dad was alive so I could have bought him…
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Friday Night Crusoe
Forwarded to me by Avrum Jacobson: At its first of several upfront presentations to advertisers today at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York, NBC outlined its 2008-2009 season based on a 52-week schedule. The network will introduce the 52-week lineup this fall with a slate of new original programs and continually add other new originals…
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The Brimstone Boys
More from The Hollywood Reporter on developments in the US version of Eleventh Hour. I have to tell you, the trade press is where most of my information is coming from. Any direct involvement I might have had in the production was precluded by the exclusivity clause in my Crusoe deal, made within a couple…
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Interview
I’ve been away on Crusoe business – two good days with the incoming writers followed by three equally productive days scouting locations for the UK scenes – and I find on my return that the WGGB site now carries the interview that Tom Green conducted with me back in January. (No word of Crusoe in…
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A Book by its Cover (2)
In the comments section of A Book by its Cover, Gail Renard wrote: “Oddly enough, I first read Thunderball and a few other James Bonds when I was 10. Do you think he was the Harry Potter of our generation?” Dammit, yes! Why didn’t I think of that? Potter may be children’s fiction openly read…
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Third Acts in Writers’ Lives
While we’re on a thriller theme… I’ve always thought of Bond as a ’60s phenomenon but of Fleming as a ’50s writer. A quick check shows that he died in 1963, the same year that Gavin Lyall turned to full-time writing. Lyall was my favourite of the postwar adventure writers, though Alistair Maclean was probably…
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A Book by its Cover
In a recent piece in The Financial Times, James Lovegrove cites Raymond Hawkey’s 1963 Pan cover for Thunderball as one of the all-time greatest paperback designs. (In case you’re not familiar with it, those ‘bullet hits’ are actual holes in the cover.) I so agree… although for me it’s one of those cases where your…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
