I am shocked — SHOCKED — to find that TV journalism is scripted, shallow eye candy.

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• I doubt this has the impact they want it to have. No one under 40 watches local news and looking at the locations of Sinclair owned stations...it's not a bastion of liberal America. It's almost all red state conservative areas anyway. They know this crap would never get eyeballs in a place like Chicago.

• I stopped watching TV news in 2001.

• Currently reading A. C. Crispin’s “V: The Visitors” (made into a famous miniseries and then television series decades later). Seeing this video supercut, after reading about a Visitor-forced statement of highly similar kind, was eerie.

  • I think the only movie I can differentiate from shooting script versus movie is Beetlejuice, just because they wrote a plot-heavy script and threw it out in production, replacing almost the entire script with improvised dialogue and surrealist set-pieces.

  • Memories of reading the Star Wars novelization, and Splinter of the MInd's Eye (1978, what would have been a lower-budget Star Wars movie, scrapped when Lucas got a huge budget for Empire). For some reason I read the novelization of The Black Hole, too. I was a bookish child.

  • I remember reading Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Aliens and concluding he must have been writing from the script, because he had Burke being sarcastic with the line about building a campfire and singing songs, while in the movie Paul Reiser actually delivered the line pretty straight.

  • You’re undoubtedly right- I had read an article recently about the era in which sci fi novels and television/films were developed concurrently and almost always diverged from each other; one author killed her protagonist somewhat spectacularly before the book’s climax, was then told that was going to be a recurring character on the series, and refused to rewrite.

  • I'm pretty sure the miniseries came first, then the novel. As a teenager I wrote a letter to Ann Crispin, in part because the death of one of my favorite V characters was handled almost parenthetically in the novel: "The weeks that followed were full ones. So-and-so died on a raid." I think I also complained that in one of her Star Trek novels, she overcapitalized. (E.g. "On the way to the Biology Lab, the Captain encountered the Chief Grammarian.") Crispin put me in touch with her editor, who ended up critiquing some of my short fiction (for $25, as I recall).