Notes from Dan on Dan Bronson — Author, Screenwriter

The End of the Affair

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Those of you who know me know that I’ve always been head over heels in love with the movies. I gave up the total security of a tenured professorship to come to Hollywood and ride the Tinseltown roller coaster. The dizzying up and downs did nothing to abate my passion for film. They simply fed my romantic obsession. But now, my friends, it is my sad duty to announce the end of the affair.

The Invisible Man

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last month I had the honor of opening the NoirCon convention of dark mystery writers and fans by introducing and commenting on a screening of Chinatown.

One of the questions I dealt with was the authorship of this, the greatest of all film noirs. The long-acknowledged writer of the screenplay is, of course, the celebrated Robert Towne. Legendary for his uncredited efforts on Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather and for his authorship of other masterworks like The Last Detail and Shampoo, Towne won the Academy Award for Best Writing for his work on Chinatown, but the story turns out to have been much more complicated than that.

Betcha Can’t Eat One

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently joined Writers of Kern and received a warm welcome from several of its members, among them Carla Joy Martin. Not long afterward, Carla surprised me with a thoughtful, beautifully written review of SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME. This, I told myself, is a woman of acute and perceptive mind and extraordinary good taste! Perhaps I should take a look at some of her poetry, so I ordered a copy of A KALEIDOSCOPE OF LOVE, a series of poems that tell the story of a love affair—its explosive beginning, its passionate progression, its painful end.

Hemingway: the God that Failed

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite moment in Sudden Impact, the fourth Dirty Harry Callahan movie, is an angry exchange between Bradford Dillman’s arrogant Captain Briggs and Eastwood’s Dirty Harry…

“Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am?”

“Yeah, you’re a legend in your own mind.”

Ernest Hemingway was a legend in his own time…and, it turns out, in his own mind—a fact well-documented in the recent Ken Burns documentary exploring the gap between the man and the self-created myth. As a teenager growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, I knew nothing of the man behind the mask. I knew only the myth.

The Woman in the Window

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I received an excited call from a friend the other night. “Do you have Netflix? Drop what you’re doing and check out THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW! It’s pure Hitchcock!”

Hmmm.

Based on the best-selling novel by A. J. Finn. Directed by ATONEMENT’s Joe Wright. Starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

I thought to myself, this has to be good.

It turned out I was wrong.

Publishing Today or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rejection

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when…

…publishers were privately owned and committed to finding and nurturing new talent.

…the days when aspiring writers could submit unsolicited manuscripts by tossing them through the open transom above a publisher’s office door and get both a reading and a response.

…the days when publishers often signed writers expecting to lose money on their first two or three books but so believing in their talent that they were willing to take the loss until the reading public discovered them and their work.

The Casting Couch — Then & Now

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I thought the best way to introduce something new–this website–might be to begin with something old–a blog I wrote several years ago. It concerns a long-standing Hollywood tradition: the casting couch, a piece of furniture still in use today but one which achieved its peak of popularity in the heyday of the studios. In fact, at that point in time, the couch was, in many ways, the measure of a man–his success, his wealth, his power. It was a mandatory item in the office furnishings of virtually every studio head in TinselTown, and it plays a major role in my upcoming novel, Someone To Watch Over Me, a book that confirms the timeworn but true adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”