Up until the time I entered middle school, that murderer of illusions, I believed in spirits of the air, sea and earth. My family home was a rocky plot on a lagoon, so all three categories were at hand. The stones were enchanted and had names. There was definitely a...

It's not so important whether or not Jeffrey Robinov, head of production for Warner Brothers, actually said, "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." It's that there's no surprise in it.

In 1997 I wrote and directed All I Wanna Do, a little $5 million...

It surprised me when I learned that my 21-year-old daughter and her friends envied me for my adolescence in the 60's. I'd gotten used to being reviled as a baby boomer - the generation most people wish would go away and stop taking up so much space, the generation that's...

I attended a private screening the other night of Paul Haggis' The Valley of Elah. To those of us who are Biblically challenged, Elah was the place where David went out with his slingshot to meet the giant Goliath. The point of this adventure, in Haggis' film, is not that...

Okay, I am an astrology nut. I'm not inclined to apologize for it. I could give a lofty explanation: as a writer, I enjoy the point of view, parsing human existence from a mythological perspective, the vantage of the gods: Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc. But the more usual reason has...

In 1971, my partner Howard Smith and I went on an indelible odyssey into Pentacostal America, at a time when the born-again faith was still marginal, seemingly a holdover from the Depression-era "old-time religion" revivals. New Yorkers clothed as Christian brethren, we were traveling in disguise in order to shoot...