The Drunk Projectionist

In 32 Sounds, director Sam Green listens. He listens to the last male bird of a dying species chirp for a mate that will never arrive. He listens to a man who can almost hear the voices of dead lovers and friends. He listens to a musician who burned a piano in her youth for art and now records underwater sounds. And he spends a day with a foley artist who manipulates a shammy to mimic the sounds of fighting, fucking and feasting.In this episode, we talk to Green and Joanna Fang, a foley artist who worked on Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), Clifford the Big Red Dog, In the Heights and other films.

In 32 Sounds, director Sam Green listens. He listens to the last male bird of a dying species chirp for a mate that will never arrive. He listens to a man who can almost hear the voices of dead lovers and friends. He listens to a musician who burned a piano in her youth for art and now records underwater sounds. And he spends a day with a foley artist who manipulates a shammy to mimic the sounds of fighting, fucking and feasting.In this episode, we talk to Green and Joanna Fang, a foley artist who worked on Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), Clifford the Big Red Dog, In the Heights and other films.

In "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," author James Curtis chronicles the silent star's private life and pictures, including The General, One Week, The Navigator and Steamboat Bill, Jr. But it's Keaton's days as a performer that captivated me so we begin the episode with tales from the vaudeville stage, including details about which foot Buster's father preferred to kick him with.

On this episode we open our ears to the sounds of silent films with an audio documentary about musicians who compose new scores to movies from a century ago. These composers are smitten with the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, early Alfred Hitchcock and others. Before the doc, we open with one man's obsession with the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin."

Before he was Sonny the shopkeeper in Do the Right Thing, or Mike Yanagita in Fargo, or Nescaffier in The French Dispatch, Stephen Park was a confused college student.His father was a doctor. So naturally, Park enrolled in a lot of science classes at Boston University. But it never really clicked.“After my second year, I was on academic probation,” he says.After transferring to SUNY Binghamton, he continued to struggle. Just before dropping out of college, his girlfriend suggested he take a semester full of classes he wanted to take, not classes he thought his family expected him to take.So he signed up for four theater classes: acting, mime, voice, body work. He loved it.“It didn't feel like school. I had associated school with pain and torture and things I didn't like to do,” he says. “It was alien to me to be having fun and enjoying what I was doing.”In this episode, we talk with Stephen Park about his journey as an actor, how he suggested changes to his character in Do the Right Thing, and much, much more.

GF1.That's what the New Jersey gangsters on The Sopranos called the film. To everyone else, it was The Godfather, a 1972 film that saved Paramount Pictures and catapulted the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton to the stratosphere. It also reintroduced a struggling Marlon Brando to the world.In this episode, I interview Mark Seal, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of the Godfather, recently published by Simon and Schuster. The book chronicles the unlikely rise of writer Mario Puzo (author of The Godfather novel), gambling habits, mob connections, Hollywood feuds, casting disputes, on-the-set backstabbing. The more one reads, the more one wonders how the damn thing turned out so well.

Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt. In this episode, it's Shaft.

Inspired by John Wayne, a Texas dishwasher named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) buys a cowboy hat, boots and leather jacket for his new life as a New York sex worker. He figures women will be into that. It turns out, gay men are really into it. After getting off a bus, Joe rents a room and begins wandering around Manhattan. At every turn, New Yorkers pick his pocket, including Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a coughing, limping, streetwise hustler who takes $20 off of the naive Buck.In this episode, I interview Glenn Frankel, the author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, about the classic film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Released with an X rating in 1969, the movie was a surprise hit for United Artists and director John Schlesinger.

Bloody. Unnerving. Thrilling. Thirty-plus years after its release, Goodfellas still packs a punch. Or should I say a kick in the head? Martin Scorsese directed the movie. Based on Wiseguy, a book by Nicholas Pileggi about the gangster Henry Hill, Goodfellas stars Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Lorraine Bracco. The movie is renowned for its tracking shots, a wise-cracking and crazy-violent Joe Pesci, a shocking opening, complex and shifting storytelling and a heady mix of intimidating Italian guys. In this episode, I interview Glenn Kenny, the author of Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas about what he learned while researching and writing his book. Kenny is a film critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times and RogerEbert.com.

Lots of critics think that Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO has no peers. One woman begs to differ.

An interview with Brett Harvey, director of "Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo." After struggling with heroin and robbing stores as a teenager, Trejo spent years incarcerated in California prisons. After his release, he worked as a drug counselor. A fluke visit to a movie set resulted in Trejo landing a tiny role in "Runaway Train." More small roles followed, mostly as a badasses. The Los Angeles actor is best known for his roles in "Machete," "Con Air," "Dusk Till Dawn," and "Heat."

Georges Mourier describes Napoléon as “not just a masterpiece." The Cinémathèque Française restoration expert says the 1927 silent film "is also a monster piece.” Which is why, while working on a new restoration of the Abel Gance classic, Mourier never be alone with Napoléon. Instead, a collaborator will always be with him in the screening room as he grapples with the genius of Gance. In this episode of The Drunk Projectionist podcast, host Todd Melby and Mourier discuss the many versions of the movie, discuss the snowball fight scene, analyze the singing of the Marseillaise at the Club Des Cordeliers, and much more. Also here: https://bit.ly/2jQB3aw

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Albert Serra, the director of "The Death of Louis XIV." The opinionated and entertaining Serra discusses the film's origin as an art installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1:58), Louis XIV's agony (2:58), pre-filmmaking discussions with collaborators (4:00), how he gets five "magical" minutes every day when shooting (12:12), oworking with Jean-Pierre Leaud (13:10), the intelligence of actors (17:15), silent film star Harry Langdon (19:25), Andy Warhol's films (22:30), why he doesn't look at shots from inside the camera (26:00), the film's most important scene (33:33), the relationship between truth and beauty (42:50).

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Charles Burnett, director of "Killer of Sheep." Critic Terrence Rafferty of GQ called the film "one of the most striking debuts in movie history." The movie examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a teacup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife, holding his daughter.

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Frederick Wiseman director of "Titicut Follies," a 1967 documentary about a hospital for the criminally insane. In this interview with Todd Melby, he also reveals why he shot most of his movies on 16mm, how his films are structurally similar to plays and why he hates the term "cinema verite." In the interview, Wiseman discusses Jim's victimization at the hands of prison guards (5:20), Vladmir's case review (9:07), the limitations of documentaries (13:54), the importances of long scenes (17:28), the length of his films (20:03), on directing a theatrical production of "Happy Days" (24:45), on the advantages of shooting on 16mm (26:29), on recording sound and working with cinematographers (28:51), on other documentary filmmakers (29:31), and on "cinema verite" (29:58).

When the Coen Brothers released "Fargo" in 1996, pretty much all of North Dakota and Minnesota got upset. "We don't talk like that," they said. Well, the Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby is from North Dakota and he's here to tell you they do. In this episode, you'll hear an audio documentary he produced with Diane Richard. The doc features the film's dialect coach Elizabeth Himmelstein (7:00), actor William H. Macy (10:10) actor Stephen Park dissecting his Mike Yanagita role (15:30), marketing the city of Fargo to tourists (20:20), film professor Bob Cowgill (26:55), actor Bain Boehlke talks about his role as Mr. Mohra (30:50), female cops discuss Marge Gunderson (33:45), actor John Carroll Lynch on his role as Norm Gunderson (42:00), director Ethan Coen (44:45) and actor Tony Denman on his role as Scotty Lundegaard (46:15).

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Barbara Kopple, director of "Harlan County USA," her 1976 film about a Kentucky coal miner's strike Kopple talks about her nervy confrontation with a company-paid, strike-busting "gun thug" and a situation that turned violent on the picket line. “They kicked the Nagra [recorder]," Kopple says. "I had a long fish pole with a mic and I was just swinging it back at them.” Kopple also touches on many other subject during our interview, including the opening and closing shots of Harlan County USA, how she begged her parents to send more 16mm film so she could keep shooting, standing on picket lines even if she had no film in the camera and the importance of staying with a story, no matter how long it takes.

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Kelly Reichardt, director of "Certain Women" and "Wendy and Lucy." Riechardt discusses sound design, her love of trains, how men and women perceive scenes differently and other topics in her films.