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...well. Producer Richard Zanuck was filming Driving Miss Daisy a year ago when he heard about a first- time novelist peddling a manuscript based on her real-life experience as a Texas narcotics cop who got hooked on cocaine. By the time author Kim Wozencraft sold Rush to Random House for a $35,000 advance, Zanuck had already won the film rights for $1 million. The price was no fluke. Last month Tom Cruise paid about $1 million for the rights to Big Time, a novel by mystery writer Marcel Monticino...
FLASHBACKS: ON RETURNING TO VIETNAM by Morley Safer (Random House; $18.95). Visiting old battlegrounds and interviewing old soldiers, the veteran CBS correspondent reminds us of a time when the typewriter, not the portable hair dryer, was the essential tool of the TV journalist...
...Only in the sense that every species is. Since evolution has no inherent or predictable direction, if you could play life's tape again from any early point, you would get a completely different result that wouldn't include human beings. In that sense, every species' appearance is not random, because after it happens it is perfectly explainable, but it's unpredictable. The reason I call humans even more of an afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and so small. The splitting point between human ancestors and those that gave rise to chimps and gorillas...
...movie Doc Brown goes to a blackboard and draws a chart. The top line is history as it actually occurred. But if you make this teeny little change, which is Biff Tannen getting that sports almanac, then history veers off. It isn't that it is random that it happened the second way. You see, people mistakenly think that my book Wonderful Life is a claim that evolution is random, totally chaotic and unexplainable. That is not what historical explanation holds. It holds that what actually happened makes sense. It's just that what actually happened...
...stickball, leaves one unschooled in surprise; TV, unlike books, tells us when to stop and think. "The flow of messages from the instant everywhere," as Daniel Boorstin points out, "fills every niche in our consciousness, crowding out knowledge and understanding. For while knowledge is steady and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous." A consciousness born primarily of visuals can come terrifyingly close to that of the tape-recorder novels of the vid kids' most successful voice, Bret Easton Ellis, in which everyone's a speed freak and relationships last about as long as videos. Life, you might say, by remote...