TVSquad

Every once in awhile, you come across something that reaches way back and scratches a memory you didn't now you had. This story did that. I remember years ago stumbling across Gary Jennings' massive tome Aztec. I had a thing for big, fat books; to me it felt like I was getting more for my money. Plus, I've always been a bit of a history buff, and so little was being discussed about the Aztecs in school.

So I dove into it, and the subsequent books in the series. It was fascinating and rich, and uniquely told. It is the biography of an old Aztec man as he told it to a Bishop. The Bishop, in turn, wrote the story in a series of letters to the Spanish King, and it is these letters that make up the chapters of the book.

The story was so unique and so uniquely told, I remember at the time thinking it would make a wonderful mini-series. And now, after all these years, that might just happen. Aztec has just been optioned for television as a possible mini-series. It's just too bad Jennings didn't live to see it.

(S19E15) "I'm not a nerd. I'm a jock who's too cool for sports." -- Bart Simpson

From the outside, the Family Simpson comprises a group of people who go from one wacky adventure to another. Yet, when you go beneath their four-fingered exteriors, each member of the family is actually fighting their own little battle. For Bart it's the fight against the establishment; for Marge it's finding order withing the disorder of her life; for Maggie it's getting through an entire day on one pacifier; and for Homer it is the philosophical dilemma of whether or not death brings forth life or life brings on death. That, or just trying to get between breakfast and lunch without starving to death...it really depends on the day.

John Milius, who wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now and also served as a writer and producer on the HBO series Rome, will be writing a miniseries about photojournalists in Vietnam, set to air on AMC. The miniseries will be called Saigon Bureau, and unfortunately that's all we know at this point.

I'm hoping for a miniseries in which all the photojournalists are similar to Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now: crazy, hopped up on drugs and ending every sentence with "maaaaaaaaan." Of course, that describes pretty much every movie Hopper made in the '70s, but what the hell, you go with what suits you.