I've heard of middle-school productions that simply omit the second act and end with "happily ever after."

I don't see how they could do it with the Narrator (who in act 2 of the show briefly enters the action himself). I believe the only way Into the Woods can work at all on screen is a total rethinking, as happened in the case of Amadeus. In that case the playwright (Peter Shaffer) did the screenplay, and likewise the Woo…

Unfortunately it's not on the soundtrack album (or at least it wasn't on the LP).

I knew The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was in trouble before it was released, when I saw it being promoted on the side of a USPS delivery truck.

" 'The Golden Age Of Ballooning' is like Flying Circus, but it isn’t Flying Circus, and I don’t just mean that the Naked Organist, Announcer, and It’s Man are nowhere to be seen."

The last time I happened to see An Unmarried Woman (on broadcast TV, intact for the most part) I thought the same thing - even though I recalled seeing it in the theater in 1978 and enjoying it a lot then, mainly because the actors were so good. Mazursky not only directed Art Carney to his Best Actor award, he also…

Philip K. Dick would have said that the new series will be occurring in orthogonal time (relative to the Breaking Bad timeline).

My favorite ending of a Columbo is the one I taped more than 20 years ago: Jackie Cooper as a politician who'd rigged an assassination attempt on himself as a cover-up for a murder. As fas as I know, it's the only one in which Columbo says "You're under arrest, sir" - it's the final line of the episode, followed by…

The solution is obvious, no?
Avoid the song copyright issue by using only music written by others, like the 2000 TV movie Hendrix that featured performances of "Hey Joe," "Wild Thing," "The Star-Spangled Banner," etc., but nothing written by Jimi. In the NBC version the Beatles wouldn't be songwriters at all; they…

Given the above entry, which I enjoyed, I wonder whether you'd consider treating each chapter of The Meaning of Life with its own individual essay. (Although if you omitted "The Crimson Permanent Assurance" it would be OK by me.)

Don't mince words, Jack. What do you really think?

The first-season arrangement of the Mannix theme was the best. Search for it and you'll be rewarded. Intertect gave him a cool car to drive, too - a customized first-generation front-wheel-drive Olds Toronado.

There's no way any version of 2010, directed by Hyams or anyone else, could have turned out to be as memorable a film as 2001 - unless it had a script that diverged wildly from Clarke's preexisting 2010 novel. I did enjoy the movie when I was sitting in the theater - the individual performances by Lithgow, Balaban, et…

A small nitpick, given that this posting alone makes me want to watch the entire series from the beginning (and I've ever only seen one early episode): "when Roger picked up the phone while watching the footage from the moon…" suggests a lack of awareness that this was live video from the moon that people were…

No time to read 301 earlier remarks, but did anyone else notice you could see their breath when Diane and Kalinda had their outdoor conversation? Pretty damn cold for high school graduation season.

Has the Library of Congress done this sort of research with 8-track tape cartridges, and if so, where can I obtain the preservation advice thus derived, which I so desperately need for my own collection?

Dulles is inconvenient, all right. Although a new line of the Metro rail system is being built to go there, it will take years more to complete and will still require switching from an existing line. By contrast, National is just across the river from DC, is easier to drive to, and has had a Metro stop since 1977;…

I thought the famous prompt from Nancy was several years later: "Tell them we are doing everything we can," which was heard during the reelection campaign (see www.nytimes.com/1984/08/19/….

With respect to "It's bad enough we gave him an airport":

I first (and last) heard "It's Gonna Rain" as the soundtrack for an experimental dance piece at Jacob's Pillow in Becket MA, on the outdoor stage - a bare platform with sunset behind it. The result was memorable, but I'm not sure how I'd like it without the dancing.