I liked Los Angeles for odd reasons. For one, there was no sense of community. You were really left to your own resources, spending this inordinate amount of time alone in a balloon of an automobile. I liked that a lot.

In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.

For thirty-five years, David Halberstam, an unsilent member of the Silent Generation, has contemplated America and its place in the world, casting his eye on big subjects - Vietnam, global economics, race, mass media, and the 1950s.

Being a professional screenwriter is perhaps the hardest occupation. Because nothing is ever yours and, by the nature of the medium, you are never ultimately responsible for your work. It can be interesting - if you have another outlet.

Anecdotes are factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss, often set in gilded venues and populated with familiar names as background atmosphere, purged of ambiguity in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing smoothly.

Were it not for Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey would be remembered, if at all, as a Bible-thumping midwestern Methodist windbag who neither played baseball on Sundays when he was a mediocre catcher for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders, nor attended games on the Sabbath as a baseball executive.

For interns at 'The Weekly Standard' or 'National Review,' where the martial instinct finds its most insistent voice, what Robert Kagan calls the military 'career path' is not widely seen as a plausible future. Pulling a trigger is what Jose, Tyrone, and Bubba do, not early admission students at the better private universities.

Share This Page