In 1986, I began writing my first book, The Bewitched Book, about the classic 1960s TV show starring Elizabeth Montgomery.
After five initial rejections from several well-known magazines to have it first previewed as an article, I went on to find an agent.
After receiving over 25 rejection letters from various literary agencies of every level, I found an agent who believed in me and my idea.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Herbie J Pilato’s new book, DASHING, DARING AND DEBONAIR: TV’s Top Male Icons from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, published by Taylor Trade Publishing, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.
The Great Bird of the Galaxy.
That’s how the iconic Gene Roddenberry, who died October 4, 1991, is mostly remembered. As the creator of the original Star Trek, its initial TV follow-up, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and ultimately the subsequent and ongoing legacy of sequels and remakes for both the big and small screen, Roddenberry’s uplifting and majestic vision of the future will forever live long and prosper. A pilot in the US Army during World War II, Roddenberry would decades later become one of the first people to be “buried” in space. It all seemed to fit.
It’s all over the recent Bionic press:
Mark Wahlberg will take the lead in The Six Billion Dollar Man, a theatrical motion picture based on the original 1973-1978 ABC-TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, which featured Lee Majors as the super-human cyborg Col. Steve Austin.
In recent years, television remakes appeared on the big and small screens. Reimaginings of Knight Rider, The Bionic Woman, The Munsters, and Ironside, among others, have failed to win-over home-viewers, while a new Wonder Woman did not make it past event the pilot stage. At the movies, classic-TV-to-feature-film adaptations have done hit (Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels, The Fugitive), and miss (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Lone Ranger, Dark Shadows, the latter two featuring Johnny Depp in heavy white-face make-up).
by Herbie J PilatoExcept for the overt, excessive, grotesque, and bloody violence that pervades and apparently has to be part of every movie-going experience today (drama or comedy, horror, adventure or otherwise), everything visual about SPY is beautiful, including it’s dynamic leading leading, Melissa McCarthy, and her co-stars Jude Law, Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart, Jason Strathram, Bobby Cannavale, and Peter Serafinowicz.
Unfortunately, their beauty gets lost each and every time one of them opens their mouths.
As a result, what could have been one of the most perfect adventure-secret agent feature films this side of the best of James Bond on the big-screen is instead disturbing.
Decades ago, when I was just a young lad growing up in Rochester, New York, I used to frequent with my parents the Wegmans supermarket in Gates Chili, New York, a suburb of Rochester.
Today, Wegmans is a mega-store that is known around the country (and in some parts of the world!) as one of the finest grocery establishments in existence.
It was then (circa 1970), too, if on a somewhat smaller scale
