The book to read on the subject came out in 1988, entitled Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case. There was plenty of blame to go around in the failure to convict Landis, unfortunately. The book ends with the news that Landis is planning to film A Confederacy of Dunces - something I'm very glad…

I think Michael Keaton stopped being culturally relevant around the time of Jack Frost.

SciFi (when it was SciFi) at least once showed "Cavender Is Coming" without the laugh track - it wasn't so bad that way.

I find the finale to be too contrived to really enjoy (although when I first viewed it in spring 1994 I had no complaints). As much as I enjoy John DeLancie as Q, I would have preferred that the writers undertake a real challenge, one with no special effects whatever: simply an ongoing poker game with the main cast…

Many third-season episodes IMHO were worse than "Assignment: Earth," which at least had attempts at humor. Whereas the second season had at least three outright comedies - "The Trouble with Tribbles," "A Piece of the Action," and "I, Mudd," plus the drinking scenes in "By Any Other Name" - the third season had not a…

The screenplay published in Esquire also came out as a mass-market paperback in 1971 (Award Books) including a selection of photos and other material from the press kit plus an interview with Monte Hellman; I've owned a (coverless) copy ever since. There's a foldout color ad for Kent Menthol cigarettes bound into it,…

Actually, in "Plato's Stepchildren" the Enterprise officers discover that kironide, a substance in the planet's vegetation, gives the locals (except for Michael Dunn's character) telekinetic powers; McCoy isolates some kironide and injects Kirk and Spock so that they all can get out from under the locals' (virtual)…

Timescape was also the title of a really excellent 1980 novel by Gregory Benford - presumably the same title was chosen for the TNG episode because it sounded neat, but actually the title fits the novel better. Highly recommended. Summary at http://sbfonline.com/15b2.htm.

Veniero's
I get to Manhattan very infrequently, and the southern end even less often (every 10 to 15 years or so), but never forget to go to Veniero's.

New York, New York
I saw this upon its premiere in 1977, having become a Scorsese fan the year before with Taxi Driver; I also have a VHS of the "restored" version that expands on the theatrical version by including the entire Happy Endings film-within-a-film starring Liza Minnelli's character and Larry Kert (the…

I've seen Can't Stop the Music on TV and know that my teenage daughters would love the YMCA production number - by the way, it was "Discoland: Where the Music Never Ends" (not "Sleeps") during production, so the book may have it wrong.

I can think of a FICTIONAL girl who liked the Planet of the Apes movies, Donna in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly:

Unfortunately, the first example I could think of to add to your list is not good at all: Sphere (based on an equally disappointing Crichton novel). A great premise, though - Earth-based spaceship of the future discovered on the ocean floor; perhaps a better story could be developed from a similar setup.

2010
This one took a strange left turn only because ANY sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey would have done so, even one based on a sequel novel written by Arthur C. Clarke himself, as this was. Unfortunately, the movie (which I saw first-run in 1984), although it was entertaining moment-to-moment, had none of the majesty…

I remember seeing that novelization - I think it was the first Bond movie to have one, having diverged so completely from the source material that reissuing the original Fleming novel Moonraker wasn't an option. It was entitled (how's this for creativity) "James Bond and Moonraker."

"It was too self-aware…"? The Magicians is a very recent novel. Many decades' worth of fantasy novels and series are out there in the world. How could a book that spends so much time in this genre NOT be written with such self-awareness (a natural consequence of being aware of all those predecessors)?

I liked American Beauty (maybe if I were 20 years younger I wouldn't) - Allison Janney was the mother of the Wes Bentley character (Ricky Fitts) and the wife of the Chris Cooper character (Col. Frank Fitts, USMC, retired).

I actually saw Robin Williams being funny, once - it was at the end of a mid-1980s TV appearance, when he performed Bruce Springsteen's song "Fire" (best known in the Pointer Sisters version) as sung by Elmer Fudd. Incontestably funny.

The orbiting satellite in the 2001 jump cut
"Some have speculated that the satellite is a nuclear device aimed at the planet…" Evidently the filmmakers themselves thought of the spacecraft in the jump cut as an orbiting nuclear bomb - see the Wikipedia article on 2001, the section entitled "Military nature of orbiting…

Irreconcilable Differences
I hadn't heard that Irreconcilable Differences had any basis in the Bogdanovich-Platt split, nor that they'd had any children. That movie is a lot of fun. It includes my favorite Sharon Stone role; she's the actress whom the director (Ryan O'Neal) leaves his wife (Shelley Long) for, and he…