A couple of obituaries

Several writers have died this week , and it's worth mentioning their connection to the movies.

Dennis Shryack died on Wednesday aged 80. He wrote the screenplay for the Clint Eastwood film Pale Rider, but also did Turner & Hooch, a movie I always mix up with Tango and Cash. Turner & Hooch has cop Tom Hanks adopting a murder victim's dog; complications ensue.

W.P. Kinsella died yesterday at the age of 81. He was a prolific author, but will probably be remembered for one story, "Shoeless Joe", since it was turned into the dreadfully mawkish film Field of Dreams.

The most prominent of the deaths would be that of playwright Edward Albee, who also died yesterday. Albee was 88. Albee's most famous plays is likely Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was turned into a movie that won Elizabeth Taylor another Oscar. Apparently, not too many of his plays have been turned into movies, although IMDb does list several TV filmings of his plays around the world; I'm not certain how much these are just filming what happened on a stage and how much these are cinematic since I haven't seen any of these foreign adaptations. However, one of his plays that was turned into a relatively prominent movie is A Delicate Balance, which received the all-star treatment in the early 1970s, with Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Lee Remick, and Joseph Cotten.