Posting a whimsical lighthearted column about the movie industry might not be a questionable move for a writer working in a country where approval, of the non-verifiable results from electronic voting machines, is almost unanimous despite an overwhelming number of recent news reports saying that Google and Facebook have been hacked.
The Oscar - Ceremony will arrive just as American politics and punditry are put on "pause" while waiting for the sequestration train wreck (Why didn't Obama just leave well enough alone and not put the wars back on the books?) to take center stage.
While living in tinseltown, there was one question that we were never able to ask let along get an authoritative answer from a qualified expert.
We would like to ask a simple binary choice question for two hypothetical film projects.
The first one would be this imaginary dream project: Shane Black is one of the very best script writers available. We get a script from him and it's going to be a downhill coast to the bank. So, hypothetically speaking, he hands us a "top of his game" script and then we ask the dean of the USC Film School to pick student actors and a crew from the junior class to film it.
Or
The most promising script writing student we can find delivers something that got him an A+ grade from a hard marking professor and then (magically) we get Martin Scorsese to direct, an Oscar - winning cinematographer to work the cameras, John Williams offers to toss a few tunes on the soundtrack and then Robert DeNiro and Merle Streep sign on to head an all star cast. They have to adhere strictly to the kid's script.
If, after those two projects are completed and you could only go to see one, which one would you choose?
Speaking of Robert DeNiro, we loved seeing him team up with
Al Pacino in "Heat" and that did good business.
So now we gotta ask: Will Brad
Pitt and Tom Cruise ever be matched up in one flick?
For that matter, wouldn't you love to see what would have happened if Clint Eastwood ever get to play opposite John Wayne?
Can you imagine a cop, played by Angelina Jolie, tracking down a master criminal played by Nicole Kidman? What if they both think Lenardo de Caprio is telling the truth when he tells each one "I want to spend the rest of my life with you"?
Speaking of Brad Pitt, when we were in Kalgoorlie (in the W. A. [Western Australia]) we met a guy whose uncle had written a kids book about two spies who were married to each other. Sounds like a flick Brad Pitt did with Angela Jolie, doesn't it? The last we heard the uncle was asking the Writers' Guild to consider the possibility that there might be grounds for a plagiarism suit. It's been awhile. We wonder how that worked out.
Did you like "Pritizi's Honor"?
Folks watching "Apocalypse Now" are supposed to know that it is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but didja know that Orson Well had a film based on the Conrad novel in development before he started "Citizen Kane"? The Wells project was never completed.
Which would be better for music fans: a new band gets to be the first to record a song written by the Glimmer Twins (Mick Jager and Keith Richards) or the Rolling Stones record a song that won an amateur song writing contest?
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