Some context: Pitchford was born in Honolulu, where he attended Catholic schools, graduating in 1968 from Saint Louis High School. He began his performance career as an actor and a singer with the Honolulu Community Theatre (now Diamond Head Theatre), the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra and the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, among others. While studying at Yale University, Pitchford performed with numerous campus drama groups, but his focus gradually turned off-campus, where he worked with the Wooster Square Revival, an experimental theatre company that offered acting opportunities to recovering addicts and alcoholics. In 1969, Pitchford returned to Honolulu as an assistant to authors Faye Hammel and Sylvan Levey in updating the popular guidebook Hawai'i on $5 and $10 A Day, and researching Trans World Airlines' Budget Guide to Hawai'i, the first of a series of guidebooks that would eventually turn into the popular series TWA Getaway Guides.
As a result of performing his early songwriting efforts in cabarets around Manhattan, he was invited to write with such composers as Stephen Schwartz, Alan Menken and Rupert Holmes. In 1979, he collaborated with recording artist and cabaret performer Peter Allen to write new songs for Allen's one-man Broadway revue, Up In One.  With composer Michael Gore, Pitchford collaborated on three songs for Alan Parker's 1980 motion picture Fame; these were "Red Light," a disco hit for singer Linda Clifford; the symphonic/rock finale "I Sing the Body Electric;" and the title song "Fame," which became a multi-platinum, international best seller for Irene Cara. That song earned Gore and Pitchford an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year (1981). They also received a Grammy nomination for Best Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.  When Pitchford was signed by Warner Brothers Publishing (1981) he began collaborating with a variety of songwriters. Among the first songs whose lyrics he wrote in collaboration with composer Tom Snow was "Don't Call It Love," which was first recorded by Kim Carnes on her 1981 album Mistaken Identity; the selection charted in the U.S. country singles top-ten for Dolly Parton in 1985 and was named the BMI Country Song of the Year.  For the ill-fated 1981 movie The Legend of the Lone Ranger, Pitchford wrote a narrative ballad, "The Man In the Mask." This was spoken (throughout the movie) and sung (at its beginning and end) by Merle Haggard.  "You Should Hear How She Talks About You," another Snow/Pitchford composition, was a Top 5 hit for Melissa Manchester for which she won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1983. That same year, Pitchford, Kenny Loggins and Steve Perry wrote and composed "Don't Fight It," a Top 20 hit that was Grammy-nominated in the Best Pop Vocal Duo category. With musical director Michael Miller, he wrote the theme song for the weekly dance-music show Solid Gold (1980-88).
when did he start songwriting?
A: In 1979, he collaborated with recording artist and cabaret performer Peter Allen to write new songs for Allen's one-man Broadway revue, Up In One.
Some context: John Richard Pilger (; born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary film maker mainly based in the United Kingdom since 1962. Pilger has been a strong critic of American, Australian and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians. His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny (1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued with over fifty documentaries since then.
Pilger's film The Coming War on China premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016, and was shown on ITV at 10.40pm on Tuesday 6 December and on the Australian public broadcaster SBS on 16 April 2017. In the documentary, according to Pilger, "the evidence and witnesses warn that nuclear war is no longer a shadow, but a contingency. The greatest build-up of American-led military forces since the Second World War is well under way. They are on the western borders of Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, confronting China. Like the renewal of post-Soviet Russia, the rise of China as an economic power is declared an 'existential threat' to the divine right of the United States to rule and dominate human affairs".  "The first third told, and told well, the unforgivable, unconscionable tale of what has overtaken the Marshall Islanders since 1946, when the US first nuked the test site on Bikini Atoll" beginning an extended series of tests, wrote Euan Ferguson in The Observer. "Over the next 12 years they would unleash a total of 42.2 megatons. The islanders, as forensically proved by Pilger, were effectively guinea pigs for [the] effects of radiation". Ferguson wrote that the rest of the film "was a sane, sober, necessary, deeply troubling bucketful of worries". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote: "This is a gripping film, which though it comes close to excusing China ... does point out China's insecurities and political cruelties".  Although admiring the early sequences on the Marshall Islands, Kevin Maher in The Times was more dismissive. "Abandoning any interest in nuance or subtlety", Pilger claims "that American bases in the region are threatening China with a 'giant noose' around its neck". For Pilger, he writes, China is "a brilliant place with just some 'issues with human rights', but let's not go into that now" and his film's "lack of complexity is depressing".
Why was the war coming
A:
The Coming War on China premiered in the UK on Thursday 1 December 2016,