After nearly 20 years of non-involvement in filmmaking, last month I enthusiastically un-retired and worked (really worked!) on A Posthumous Woman, starring Lena Olin and Rosanna Arquette. Written/directed by my son, Zachary, and his fiancée, Magdalena Zyzak, and filmed at a remote location in the mountains above Silicon Valley, it is
Category Archives: Movies/Filmmaking
Two Lives in a Small Town
February 9, 2012 – 6:22 pm
The following, in Shonnie Brown’s “Neighbors” column, appeared in The Healdsburg Tribune, our local weekly, on February 9, 2012. [Most of the images were not in the original.] * * * * * Ann, born and raised in Casper, Wyoming, has the dubious distinction of attending high school with both Dick and Lynne Cheney and […]
Charlie Chan: Chinaman or Chinese Man
October 13, 2010 – 11:13 pm
In the October 28, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Richard Bernstein reviews Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang. As a child of the first television generation—I was six when we got ours in 1950—I devoured Laurel and Hardy, The […]
Sheiks on a Plane
May 6, 2010 – 3:19 pm
Ali Balak Qatlar Satif Luwi Qatlar On a balmy Saturday morning in late-1978, two 30-something brothers boarded a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight in Los Angeles. As they walked up the outdoor stairway into the PSA jet, the two men looked suspiciously like Arab terrorists during a time when Arab terrorism was non-existent. They were traveling […]
Avatar: Beautiful and Insidious
December 22, 2009 – 11:06 pm
Hundreds of millions of people will watch Avatar. They will walk out with an overwhelming neuronal experience, some of it very bad…and I suspect James Cameron is unaware of what he has done. This is not about the film’s B-movie plot; I railed about that here. Once the eye candy is consumed—and it is uniquely […]
Avatar: A Different Review
December 21, 2009 – 9:42 pm
What a movie! I could not find a single negative review. Everyone thinks this is a fantastic film in every regard. I don’t. Avatar—no doubt about it— takes filmmaking to new heights. The visuals are without parallel, and it is worth the ticket for the unprecendented, 3-D eye experience alone. But the story…
Short Film Winner–Cannes 2008
August 7, 2008 – 7:31 pm
Just watch. I need not comment. YouTube – Historia de un Letrero (Story of a Sign)
Looking Back at Filmmaking
July 3, 2008 – 10:53 pm
An elephant carries its baby for 22 months. I carried mine far longer. My baby was HEARTWOOD, a feature film. I first came to Hollywood in 1975, where I starved writing four-minute radio dramas for Vincent Price ($86 each), then suddenly (it took four years!) I became extraordinarily successful at getting film projects produced:
