The author of the thriller The Parallax View has died at 86. If you haven’t seen the stirring, wonderfully dark 1974 movie version with Warren Beatty, please do check it out — it’s one of the earliest and best paranoid-conspiracy movies. (There’s a film-within-the-film that’s a small masterpiece in its own right — ostensibly a test of the emotional stability of the main character, it’s a jarring propagandistic montage that can serve as a time capsule of the American Century, its light and dark sides alike. An interesting essay about it can be found here.)
Update: That last link may be overloaded; but the actual montage can be watched on YouTube here. (Caution: I think it’s rather too intense for children.)