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Red Right Hand: THE UNMAKING OF...
*He is not a secret agent. Not at all.

 

THE UNMAKING OF...

A good making-of feature or a really solid commentary is a great education tool for aspiring whatevers. Many are self-congratulatory, aren't-we-awesome promo fests. They're are, of course, exceptions. When Whedon does a solo commentary track of one of his written-&-directeds, they're usually a nice look into the mind behind the episode.

This week, a new edition of The Writer's Tale by Doctor Who's Russell T. Davies comes out and you're damned right I'm buying the same book twice. This time with 300 pages covering the production of the 2009 series of specials. I've heaped my praise on the first edition of this book previously, so I'll not repeat it other than to say that it is the absolute best look inside one writer's creative process I've ever seen and good reason to start watching the show, just to read the book.

But I love it when stuff goes wrong and the people behind it speak frankly. Something that seems to happen more in sci-fi. When there was an off episode of Battlestar, Ron Moore discussed it at length in his podcast commentaries ("Black Market" or "The Woman King" for instance). There was an extremely crappy one season spin-off of the Highlander series called The Raven. The commentaries in that DVD were a running commentary on the whys of that series suckitude. And I just finished watching a DVD feature where the actors and producers of Doctor Who circa 1984-87 discussed what went wrong with the entire run of the 6th Doctor.

David Eick missed that boat on the Bionic Woman DVD commentary.
©2024 Michael Patrick Sullivan
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