Conan + Andy, for sure - as long as he doesn't announce the show any longer. Made me and my wife turn it off every time, even though I was a big fan of the (1993-2000) Conan and Andy show.

Benjamin Braddock
No mention of The Graduate? Although none of it takes place while Benjamin is at college, his disillusionment after graduating is central to the plot. The way this is woven through the story is more explicit in Charles Webb's novel than in the largely faithful movie version. For example, here he is…

Regarding Gavin Bryars's "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet": On NPR around 1993, I heard a story about a 70-minute recording of this piece, with excerpts; it's built on some old tramp's singing of this short verse (including the title and only a few other phrases) and gradually adds full orchestration. At the end, the…

David Angell
…died on 9/11/01; you should know better, Sean.

Addams Family Values was the first and best movie Paul Rudnick ever wrote - so far, anyway. Hard to believe he was also responsible for that horrid Stepford Wives "comedy" remake. I agree that the Thanksgiving play was the highlight of AFV. Oh, and Robert Zemeckis wasn't involved despite a commenter above saying so.

I was full of anticipation for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it was announced, because as a kid I had the original 1964 hardcover with the great black-and-white drawings (still have it and my kids enjoy it too), and one exposure to the 1971 "Willy Wonka" adaptation was quite enough. Moreover, I was and am a…

The Zemeckis movie version of Carl Sagan's novel Contact has exactly this problem: After Jodie Foster's Ellie character goes through a close cousin of 2001's star gate, we are shown the higher-order aliens, taking the form of Ellie's late father (played by David Morse). Any such depiction, even if the aliens have…

The early-1970s Signet paperback THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke, gives lots of detail about how Clarke and Kubrick had gone through many ideas of how to show the aliens, before realizing that it would be best not to show them at all. The book consists mostly of discarded chapters from earlier versions of…

Lord Running Clam - I agree that Androids isn't as good as its reputation, and I'd even go so far as to say it shouldn't have been included in the Library of America PKD series. But the original theatrical release of the movie, as you say, needed the narration and happy ending to be jettisoned (for home video or for…

He never saw the finished movie, or anything close to it. Per Larry Sutin's 1989 biography Divine Invasions, the first and best of the books about Dick since his death, he was invited and went to see a "reel of special effects devised for the film" in November 1981. A few months earlier he had seen a TV program that…

I've been a PKD fan since the 1970s and learned of his death the old-fashioned way: by happening upon his obituary in the NY Times. It was only about three inches long; he wasn't yet particularly well known in the U.S.

The Graduate
Charles Webb's novel ends with the same uncertainty as the movie:

Special Bulletin
Special Bulletin, the TV movie in the form of a live newscast with anchors in a studio and on-the-scene reporters (and produced on videotape for added realism), was much scarier than The Day After. Anyone here who has seen it will never forget it. The Wikipedia entry seems fairly accurate.

The Heinlein story mentioned above (a novella, actually) is The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, a prewar story. Not at all typical of Heinlein, in two respects: (i) a well-written married couple at the center of the story, and (ii) an almost Dickian concern with what "real" reality consists of.

Hey, look, I realize that anyone who wants to see Clue today will end up seeing the home-video version with all three endings in sequence. But it's the original release(s) that presumably is/are being judged here in the "third-act triumphs" discussion. Of course the home video version had to include all three endings…

Um - you folks are aware, aren't you?, that only on home video do you see all three endings of Clue in sequence. For the original theatrical release, there were three different release prints; I remember seeing "Clue (A)," "Clue (B)," and "Clue (C)" in the newspaper movie listings. To see all three endings, you had to…

If you're talking "most of" in terms of number of stories, more than half of the "Future History" stories (not a term Heinlein originated) have already "happened." Of course, some of the stories that occur "later" cover many years of elapsed time, such as the novel Methuselah's Children; the events of the novellas…

Bester wrote several dozen great short stories and novellas as well - has no one here read "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," "Disappearing Act," "Fondly Fahrenheit," "5,271,009," etc.? Each of them is wittier than any 10 Bradbury stories.

One of my favorite exchanges, from the first Leah Brahms episode:

"The sort of everyman who would want to take a Rekall memory implant vacation": You mean, of course, the hero of the original 1966 P. K. Dick short story on which Total Recall was based, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." He even had a more suitably nebbishy name in the story: Quail, not Quaid.