A couple of apologies

First, I should apologize for not realizing that in this month's TCM Spotlight on southern writers, John Grisham would be sitting down with Robert Osborne to be presenting the movies, much in the way Osborne sits down with a Guest Programmer or with Sally Field when he does the Essentials. I'm mildly surprised by this, since I always figured the main point of the monthly spotlight was to have somebody else present it in order to lower Osborne's workload. After all, the guy is 83 years old.

I should also apologize for the lack of full-length posts on movies in the past few weeks. I've been blogging for close to eight years now, which means that a lot of movies that I might like to blog about, I already have. I was also going to write about something earlier this week, but it turned out that the movie I had in mind was one that I thought was going to be on FXM Retro this week, but in fact won't be showing up again until next week. So that post is going to have to wait.

And there are a couple of lesser deaths that probably deserve a passing mention, although they're people who will only get a brife photo in the annual TCM Remembers parade of the dead that will be come on in December. First up is Colin Welland, who died on Monday at the age of 81. Welland won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay to Chariots of Fire. The other one, also a screenwriter, is Melissa Mathison, who was nominated for an Oscar for her screenplay to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. She also wrote the screenplay to The Black Stallion, and is the mother to two of Harrison Ford's children from their 20-year marriage.