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February 25, 2009

The Year of Living Dangerously

One of my favorite movies, way back when Sigourney Weaver was stunningly beautiful and Mel Gibson wasn't antisemitic [or, at least *publicly* antisemitic], was The Year of Living Dangerously. At the time the movie was top of the box office, I was beginning a winter-session screenwriting class taught by Lester Cole, one of The Hollywood Ten and a founder of the Screen Writers Guild. The class was in San Francisco, a UC Berkeley extention course. Cole was very old at the time, and was more than a little out of it.

Cole had been a screenwriter at the time he was blacklisted for being Communist. At the time, I came to believe his most famous film was "Objective, Burma," but the faultless Internet tells me his final film, "Born Free" is it -- and I suppose that's so.

Anyway, back in 1983, Cole didn't like TYOLD, instead telling us that the 1976 movie The Big Bus was his idea of a very well-written film. Go figure.

All of what I've written is a bit of an excuse to post a YouTubing of the theme music to The Year of Living Dangerously, which I think is splendid, and appropriate to the tense nature of the movie.

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