Edgar Rice Burroughs

High-profile studio remakes of "Poltergeist" and "Tarzan" are reportedly attracting the attentions of a pair of directors. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Sommers is in negotiations to co-write and direct the Warner Bros. take on "Tarzan,"...

June 18, 2008 At 82, Gore Vidal is America's most formidable man of letters. The page of previously published work included in the front matter of this latest volume -- "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" -- lists 24 novels, a nonfiction book, two...

It's 7:45 a.m., and 40 or 50 people are lustily chanting, "F-V-N-E-M? S-V-F-M! F-V-N-E-X? S-V-F-X!" over the remains of breakfast. This club has recited its mysterious "cryptogram" every Wednesday morning since 1925. The final line makes the secret...

Mark Fergus grew up in the shadows of Astoria's Kaufman-Astoria studios, the onetime incubator of an infant film industry, the place where Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson vamped silently, and Groucho Marx later made jokes about shooting an elephant...

He's been an animated hit, a television flop and a Broadway swinger, but could Tarzan be catching a vine back to the big screen? Producer Jerry Weintraub and Warner Bros. are hoping to start a new franchise based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs creation....

SUPERMAN IS BACK. Except, of course, he was never really gone. He's been there every week, in comic books and on animated TV shows. The "comeback" is aimed at a pop medium with greater cachet than DC Comics or Kids' WB television: It's the silver...

We are obsessed with real estate and always have been. For more than 125 years, Southern Californians have bought it, sold it, graded it, changed it, planted it, built on it, dreamed on it, torn it down and started all over again. We have pushed ourselves...

The sheer size of a Blue Angels fighter jet or the historic impact of a lunar module is likely to grab the attention of visitors to the Cradle of Aviation Museum, but don't forget about the "smaller” exhibits. With help from historian Edward Smits and...

1. TARZAN THE APE MAN (W.S. Van Dyke; 1932) 3 stars The first and most famous of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. Much of the original Edgar Rice Burroughs story -- about the castaway lord raised as an ape man -- is here, the jungle scenery...

Monday April 27, 1998      The Lost City of Opar, the very cradle of civilization, is found in "Tarzan and the Lost City," but the complex, compelling man called Tarzan is lost in this sequel to the 1984 "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the...

Perhaps Chicago has so few literary shrines because it has been home to so many writers. Towns with only one claim to fame canonize local heroes: Salinas, Calif., turned John Steinbeck's boyhood home into a museum, while Hannibal, Mo., devoted several...

The freeway has been a favorite metaphor for writers trying to fathom Los Angeles for so long that opinions about this town can be virtually divided into day and night views. The night watchers tend to celebrate its long streams of pale yellow light,...