There’s still time to make plans:
Author: Herbie J Pilato
Writer, Author, Producer, Actor, Singer/Songwriter, Lover of Life
Herbie J Pilato: Clarifying the Criteria for Classic TV Re-Imaginings
by Herbie J Pilato
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).
Herbie J Pilato: Why I Found SPY Offensive
by Herbie J Pilato
Except 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.
Herbie J Pilato Gives Us the Lowdown on Laura Petrie and Mary Richards
by Herbie J Pilato
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were two kinds of people: Those who loved watching Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961-1966), and those who loved watching Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-1977, and which was officially titled just Mary Tyler Moore).
Moore’s married Mrs. Petrie and single Ms. Richards were and remain monumental and groundbreaking television characters of their respective eras.
In real life, Moore has seen her share of personal struggles. She has battled Type 1 diabetes, admitted to excessive plastic surgery, and has married three times. Her first husband was Richard Carlton Meeker (1955-1961), with whom she had a son named Richie who committed suicide. She partnered with second spouse, Grant Tinker (1962-1981), and together they incorporated MTM Enterprises, a powerhouse TV production company responsible for a slate of hits in the 1970s and 1980s (including The Bob Newhart Show, Hill Street Blues, and other successes including Rhoda, Phyllis and Lou Grant—all three spun-off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show). But after their two-time failure to resurrect the variety show format in her favor (with a CBS skit comedy show in 1978 simply titled Mary, which was revised in 1979 as The Mary Tyler Moore Hour), their marriage crumbled.
Herbie J Pilato: I owe my career to David Gerrold
by Herbie J Pilato
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