Child actor Ronnie Howard got his first big break when Andy Griffith cast him as Opie on his CBS television series, “The Andy Griffith Show.” That was 1960, and Howard was 6 years old.
His next big break came two years later when Morton DaCosta cast him as Winthrop in the film version of Meredith Willson’s [...]

Did you love “Toy Story,” that terrific Pixar movie of 15 years ago? Then you’re going to love “Toy Story 3,” now out in 3-D.
It’s the story of what happens to Woody and Buzz and the other toys now that Andy is 17 and going off to college. The adventures and misadventures are bigger and [...]

My mention yesterday of the movie “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” got me to wondering about Peter Sellers. Sellers played Strangelove and two other characters in that 1964 Stanley Kubrick film.
Was Sellers a writer? Did he write any books?
Sadly, no.
He did write his own material in his [...]

Wow, what a response a couple weeks ago to my posting of pictures of flowers on Facebook.
The Asiatic lilies are blooming here in Marge’s garden in southern Wisconsin, so I shot a series of pictures and put them up in an album I titled “Lilies of the Field.” In the blurb, I said the album [...]

Just as Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is a reimagining, so is Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” a reimagining. The film opened on Christmas Day and last week came out on DVD.
Jeremy Brett, were he alive, would be aghast at the movie. Or maybe not. His Holmes series for the BBC, that many of us have [...]

The critics skewered the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie “Alice in Wonderland”, but audiences have loved it.
Proof? The box office take – more than $300 million in this country alone since the March 5 release date. It beat out all the other films that opened in March.
This is not Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, although it [...]

Three movies give me nightmares – but I love ’em – Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park”. The Freddy movies, the Friday the Thirteenth movies, and the other slasher films, they don’t interest me. I avoid them.
I watched “Jurassic Park” the other night, and I came away with a valuable lesson [...]

Did you read Jaws, Peter Benchley’s novel? Or did you see the movie?
The endings of the two are not the same, and there is a lesson here for us who are writers.
Benchley ends his book with the dead shark – Sheriff Brody killed it in the climactic scene – spiraling down to the bottom of [...]

One of the writers in my writers group included this book title, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, in a short story he had written. John is a creative soul with a quirky sense of humor, so I thought this book title he invented was exceedingly clever.
But John didn’t invent it. There really is a book out [...]

I met Carole Parker on Facebook.
I admit it, her profile picture – a woman with a gun – caught my eye. So I read her blurb: “I’m a Noir/Pulp/Hard-Boiled dame. A chain-smoking, hard-drinking, screenwriting beach babe, and all-around dangerous chick. If you’ve got the crime, I’ve got the time … for a price.”
Now doesn’t that [...]