Podcasts about American Film Market

Welcome to Monsters on the Edge, a show exploring creatures at the edge of our reality in forests, cities, skies, and waters. We examine these creatures and talk to the researchers studying them.Joining us on this week's show:Daniel Lee Barnett is just 15 years old and is a Bigfoot Researcher, Podcaster, Author, Director and Conference Organizer. Daniel, is an autistic teenager with a profound love for cryptozoology, from Bigfoot to the Exmoor Beast, Daniel's passion drives him to explore the outdoors, interview global experts, and delve into the mysteries of cryptids. Supported by his family and professional researchers, Daniel's journey offers a unique lens into the world of cryptozoology. He currently has a documentary that will be released on popular formats in a couple of weeks called My Bigfoot Life and it's about his Bigfoot journey and encouraging people and families to get out into nature. This documentary is being featured at Cannes Film Festival this year as well as the American Film Market and European Film Market. Daniel will also be appearing on upcoming television show “Legend Seekers”.My Bigfoot Life BOOK:https://www.amazon.com/Bigfoot-Life-Daniel-Lee-Barnett/dp/1909488712Mythical Legends Podcasthttps://mythical-legends.yolasite.com/Click that play button, and let's unravel the mysteries of the UNTOLD! Remember to like, share, and subscribe to our channel to stay updated on all the latest discoveries and adventures. See you there!Join Barnaby Jones each Monday on the Untold Radio Network Live at 12pm Central – 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern. Come and Join the live discussion next week. Please subscribe.We have ten different Professional Podcasts on all the things you like. New favorite shows drop each day only on the UNTOLD RADIO NETWORKTo find out more about Barnaby Jones and his team, (Cryptids, Anomalies, and the Paranormal Society) visit their website www.WisconsinCAPS.comMake sure you share and Subscribe to the CAPS YouTube Channel as wellhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs7ifB9Ur7x2C3VqTzVmjNQ

So much as happened since last year! Pigville's short film 'New Followers' is having a successful festival run and Harley went to Vegas to attend the American Film Market and will be going to Hong Kong too. After getting caught up on filmmaking the show devolves into a two hour debate about Elon Musk. Enjoy! Watch I Survived a Zombie Holocaust: https://linktr.ee/zombieholocaustfilm Watch Older here: https://linktr.ee/olderthemovie Support us on Patreon: http://bit.ly/PigvillePatreon Make a one-off donation: http://bit.ly/BuyUsABeer Useful podcast links: https://linktr.ee/TheGuyandHarleyPodcast Watch Immi The Vegan here: https://linktr.ee/ImmiTheVegan Watch No Caller ID here: https://bit.ly/NCIDPigville Invest with Stake: https://bit.ly/JoinStake Invest with Sharesies: http://bit.ly/SharesiesNZ ~ Guy and Harley

In this episode, I share my experience participating in the American Film Market's Pitch Competition and the valuable lessons I learned about pitching film and TV projects effectively. Whether you're pitching a feature film or a series, these 10 essential elements will help you craft a compelling, concise, and market-ready 2-minute pitch. From creating a captivating hook to highlighting your unique selling point, this guide is packed with actionable advice to help you stand out to buyers and investors. Lessons Covered: • Start with a Captivating Hook: Open with a powerful statement or question that immediately grabs attention and sets the tone. • Create a Compelling Logline: Summarize your story in one polished sentence that highlights the core plot and stakes. • Highlight Your Unique Selling Point (USP): Explain what makes your project stand out—whether it's the story, animation style, or market appeal. • Introduce Key Characters: Briefly describe the protagonist and a couple of key supporting characters, focusing on their arcs or unique traits. • Establish High Stakes: Clearly outline what's at risk and why it matters, creating urgency and emotional investment. • Define Audience and Market Appeal: Specify who the film is for and how it fits into the current market landscape. • Describe the Artistic Vision: Highlight the tone, visual style, or unique storytelling approach to make your project memorable. • Use Industry Comparisons: Reference successful films or creators to help buyers contextualize your project's potential. • Share Key Production Details: Mention the budget, timeline, and any notable collaborators to show your project's feasibility. • End with a Confident Call to Action: Conclude with a clear invitation to discuss next steps, demonstrating belief in your project. Bonus Tip: Practice, practice, practice! Ensure your pitch flows naturally, stays conversational, and is under two minutes while hitting all the key points. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe! Yours truly, Phil Svitek Filmmaker, author, podcaster & 360 Creative Coach ⁠http://philsvitek.com⁠

Join me for an inside look at our recent journey to the American Film Market 2024 in Las Vegas and the Animation World Summit! In this vlog, I share how we prepared for both events, including the serendipitous opportunity to attend the Animation World Summit put on by Animation Magazine right before AFM. I break down the key differences between the two, our strategic use of Cinando, and the planning that went into crafting over 300 personalized emails to set up key meetings. From scheduling sessions to making the most of AFM once we arrived, you'll get a firsthand view of the hard work and excitement that goes into a successful film market experience! Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe! Yours truly, Phil Svitek Filmmaker, author, podcaster & 360 Creative Coach ⁠http://philsvitek.com⁠

Send us a textFrom Brooklyn Roots to UK Beats,  I am so excited to chat with trailblazing music producer  The Angel , whose remarkable career in the Music industry has seen her crafting scores for iconic films like "Boiler Room" and the upcoming "Heist 88," all while owning her creative identity through Devilishly Good Productions and Super Crucial Recordings. Hear firsthand about our collaboration on the documentary "Lives Beyond Motion," set to make waves at the American Film Market. We are proud executive producers and distribution reps of this amazing piece on the world of dance from the male dancer perspective. The Angel shares her experiences as a female producer in the 90s and her seamless transition into film and television composition. With a playful nod to her moniker, she talks about the challenges and triumphs of owning her music masters and the importance of championing fellow artists. From her beginnings with Delicious Vinyl to releasing a long-shelved album from the acid jazz era, The Angel's story is an ode to creativity and resilience in the face of industry challenges.The Angel also provides insights into the complexities of music licensing for indie filmmakers and the competitive nature of the composing industry. Discover her entrepreneurial mindset and how she balances art with business, taking control of her brand to ensure authentic representation. Influenced by her mother's determination, The Angel has naturally embraced opportunities, defying expectations and paving the way for future generations. As we anticipate the release of "Heist 88," with its score echoing the vibrant 80s club scene, therefore don't stop here, check out her sound at the link below.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0029500/https://www.theangelsoundclash.comAbout your Host- Alexia MelocchiBuy My Book - An Insiders Secret: Mastering the Hollywood PathAlexia Melocchi - WebsiteThe Heart of Show Business - WebsiteLittle Studio Films - WebsiteShop Our Merchandise!TwitterInstagramFacebookLinkedInThanks for listening! Follow us on X, Instagram and Facebook and on the podcast's official site www.theheartofshowbusiness.com

Join me as I recap my LA Comic Con 2024 panel experience, sharing insights from the event and looking ahead to the American Film Market. I'll also dive into how I'm prepping for a pitch presentation, practicing networking strategies, and my takeaways from Emerson College's Voice Over 101 how-to event. Plus, I'll discuss the latest script revisions for my project and our very first table read! Check out our LA Comic Con 2024 panel called The Film Animation Process: From Concept To Screen (https://youtu.be/Sa8uIhFbBLg). Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe! Yours truly, Phil Svitek Filmmaker, author, podcaster & 360 Creative Coach ⁠http://philsvitek.com⁠

Learn how to secure the best distribution deal for your film with these expert tips! In this podcast, we discuss the importance of meeting sales agents and distributors face-to-face at major film markets like the EFM in Berlin, Cannes Marché in France, and the American Film Market. Can't attend a market? Use Cinando.com to find the right acquisitions contacts at top companies. We also cover how to research distributors by looking at their track record and targeting those that specialize in your film's genre. Get your movie noticed and land the best distribution deal with these insider strategies! ——————————— VISIT FILMMAKING STUFF https://filmmakingstuff.com ACCESS EXCLUSIVE COMMUNITY Https://www.filmmakingstuffHQ.com GET THE BACKYARD BLOCKBUSTER BLUEPRINT https://www.filmmakingstuffhq.com/backyard-blockbuster-blueprint-info/ ———————————

AFM 2024: Why You Should Attend the American Film Market in Vegas | Filmmaking Stuff Podcast In this insightful episode of the Filmmaking Stuff Podcast, host Tom Malloy dives into the significance of the American Film Market (AFM) 2024, which is moving to Las Vegas. Whether you've attended AFM when it was in downtown LA, Santa Monica, or even online during the pandemic, the core essence of this crucial film industry event remains unchanged. Tom discusses when the right time is to attend AFM and why it's a must for filmmakers, whether you have a completed film, a screenplay, or just an idea. He highlights the invaluable networking opportunities, the educational panels with industry experts, and how simply being present can set the foundation for future projects. Discover why AFM is the easiest of the major film markets to access and how it can help you sell your film, make key industry connections, and plant the seeds for your future success. Whether you're an indie filmmaker, producer, or screenwriter, this episode will give you the insights you need to make the most of AFM 2024. Subscribe to the Filmmaking Stuff Podcast for more actionable tips, tactics, and inspiring stories to help you bring your film projects to life. Take action and make your movie now!

In this vlog episode, I recap our recent writer's retreat, which ended up more like a writer's room session but still productive. The intense experience involved scrutinizing every idea on its merits and defending them to gain buy-in. I share insights on this challenging but rewarding process. I also discuss our preparations for the American Film Market and Comic-Con LA, as registrations are now open. Additionally, I celebrate the anniversary of the premiere of my film "Finding Love in Bogota" on June 20, 2022, and share my recent interview on the Bladcast about the film (https://www.youtube.com/live/YOaq0dabzsQ?si=41ButFkPQYarPMNK). Furthermore, I delve into the idea that we're trying to bypass work and thought in general. Finally, I consider how what we consider political discourse is merely baseline news knowledge in other countries. I emphasize the importance of not framing laws as wins or losses for any political party. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe! Yours truly, Phil Svitek Filmmaker, author, podcaster & 360 Creative Coach ⁠http://philsvitek.com⁠

In this vlog episode, I provide an update on our animation process, focusing on the crucial shot layout phase. This step involves planning and blocking out shots based on storyboards and animatics, determining composition, camera angles, and staging before animation and assets are finalized. Next, I talk about our upcoming writing retreat, where we'll spend at least two days revising the script. I share tips on the physical endurance required to write for 12 hours a day and how to maintain focus and creativity during intense writing sessions. I also discuss our strategic planning for the American Film Market (https://americanfilmmarket.com/how-to-work-the-afm/), aiming to maximize our project's potential and outreach. On the entertainment front, I share my thoughts on "Ghostlight," a Sundance film about a construction worker whose life starts to mirror the drama in a local theater production of "Romeo and Juliet." Additionally, I reflect on the beauty of "Inside Out 2" and my excitement for the Euro 2024 games. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe! Yours truly, Phil Svitek Filmmaker, author, podcaster & 360 Creative Coach ⁠http://philsvitek.com⁠

This week Ken welcomes writer, director, producer Rolfe Kanefsky (There's Nothing Out There, Nightmare Man, Pool Boy Nightmare) to the show. Ken and Rolfe discuss Fangoria, Gorezone, the Catch 22 of trying to get a distributer without press and press without distribution, Brett Piper, going to film school, Hampshire College, watching horror on TV, Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, making a Russian movie into an American movie, My Family Treasure, Dee Wallace, moving to LA and staring over, directing soft core films, parodies, Playboy's Inside Out, USA Network, The Hitchhiker, Playboy TV, Tomorrow by Midnight, the lost film, Clerks, Mad TV, Seizure, starting in B movies, making movies for Life Time, the shower scene joke, Friday the 13th Part 8 Jason Takes Manhattan, Rolfe's father's editing career, Times Square, 42nd St, Troma, Troma's War, Full Moon, Roger Corman, trying to beat Spielberg, student films, Emmanuelle, The Killer Eye, Dave DeCouteau, meeting Tiffany Sheepis at The American FIlm Market, The Hazing, director proof scripts, 11 day shoots, the strange structure of Life Time movies, The Blackroom, Bus Party to Hell, getting credit or not, shooting in Bulgaria, pitching, liking thrillers, Satan's Cheerleaders, Mephisto Waltz, Race with the Devil, Night Gallery, earning your R rating, following the formula, family films, making a musica, socks vs patches, rehearsing sex scenes, intimacy contracts, streaming sites, There's Nothing Out There, Goonies, One and the Gun, Art of the Dead, Nightmare Demon, and working with big name actors. 

To no one's surprise, Elon Musk's Boring Company is in the news again as Steve Hill, CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, throws his support behind the Vegas Loop's expansion amid safety concerns. Also, a member of the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents is facing calls to resign after doubling down on comments aimed at trans athletes and the American Film Market moving to Vegas revives hopes for a Hollywood 2.0. Hosts Sarah Lohman and Dayvid Figler are joined by thelist.vegas publisher Andrew Kiraly to round up this week's news. We're on social media! Follow us @CityCastVegas on Instagram. You can also call or text us at 702-514-0719. Want some more Las Vegas news? Then make sure to sign up for our morning newsletter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Filmmaking Stuff Podcast, 'Simply Selling Your Film,' you'll discover the essentials for successfully marketing and selling your independent film.  Learn how choosing a marketable genre and maintaining a realistic budget can significantly impact your film's success. Understand how having a recognizable cast or influencers can enhance your film's appeal and marketability. You'll also uncover the crucial role a compelling script plays in attracting a strong and talented team. I'll guide you through the intricacies of navigating prominent film markets like the American Film Market and the European Film Market.  These platforms are vital for connecting with sales agents and distributors. This episode is tailored for indie filmmakers like you seeking to sell your film efficiently and effectively. 

Join Tom Malloy as he breaks down his top three lessons from this year's American Film Market. Get the inside scoop on what's new in indie film, from funding to getting your movie out there and making connections that count. Whether you're making your first film or your fifth, tune in to get the real deal on making movies today.

Pilar Alessandra is the director of the screenwriting and TV writing program On the Page®, host of the popular On the Page Podcast and author of the top-selling book “The Coffee Break Screenwriter.”Pilar started her career as Senior Story Analyst at DreamWorks SKG and, in 2001, opened the On the Page Writers' Studio in Los Angeles. Her students and clients have written for The Walking Dead, Modern Family, Grey's Anatomy, Lost and Family Guy. They've sold features and pitches to Warner Bros, DreamWorks, Disney and Sony and have won the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship, Austin Screenwriting Competition and Warner Bros. TV Writing Workshop.In addition to her private classes taught out of the On the Page Writers' Studio, Pilar has trained writers at DreamWorks, Disney Animation, ABC, CBS and regularly moderates the Pitch Conference at the American Film Market. Pilar has traveled the world teaching in London, Dublin, Beijing, Warsaw, Lisbon and Cape Town, training writers, animators, producers and show runners in the art of writing, story telling and pitching.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/2664729/advertisement

FILMBRANSCHPODDEN - A PART OF ACASTING VEM: Jakob Abrahamsson YRKE: VD för tre bolag inom filmbranschen SÄSONG: 1  EPISOD: 7 EN PODD AV: Simon Kölle www.linktr.ee/simonkolle Om episoden:  Jakob Abrahamsson är VD för Distributionsbolaget NonStop Entertainment, VD för Bio & Bistro Capitol och VD för produktionsbolaget Mylla Films. Med stor kärlek till film och ett entreprenöriellt sinne berättar Jakob om sin mångsidiga karriär och hur det är att driva sina tre bolag. När episoden spelades in var Anette Novak VD på Svenska filminstitutet. SPONSRAD AV: Ritualen -  www.ritualen.com NÄMNER BLAND ANNAT:  Bio Capitol, NonStop Entertainment, Mylla Films, Otänkbart att jobba med film, Hitchcock, hyrde filmer, Casablanca, Västertorp, Bodils Video, Silverscreen, Fruängen, Video Nord, Hornstull, Walter video, video invest, KTH, Filmvetenskap, Stockholm Filmskola, Regi, Stockholm Filmfestival, Tidnigen Cinema, Midnattsvisningar, Hong Kong-film, Ringu 1 och 2, Popcorn festivalen, Abbe, Patrik Andersson, Anna Lindström på Lucky Dogs, Nicola på Njuta, Programansvarig, Tonårskomedier, thrillers, drama, B-action, mix av filmer, Tarantino, anti-censur, Skärholmens loppmarknad, Laserdisc,  Carl Göran Andersson, Ignas Scheynius, Turner Broadcasting, Warner, Kabelkanal, ComHem, Abonemang, Discovery, HBO, Searching for Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul, Möten i London, HR, Ekonomi, Underchefer, Köpa NonStop, Flytta ut samma dag, Jag är Ingrid, Fin start, Tvod, EST, VOD, SVOD, Hyr och köp-video, Streaming, Netflix, AVOD, FVOD, Sälja till TV, Köpa rättigheter, Tidsbestämda rättigheter, Värderingen, Discounted cashflow, Köpa sälja bolag, filmhistoria, Grosshandlare i filmrättigheter, Göteborg Film festival, Sundance, Nordic Film Market, American Film Market, Paris Rendezvous, Berlin Film Festival, European Film Market, MIPTV, International Television Market, Cannes, London Screenings, Venedig film festival, Toronto Film festival,  MIPCOM, Ekosystemet inom Indiependent film, Röda Mattan, Pre Sales, mer om filmfestivaler, Buda på projekt, Svårt att göra film i Sverige utan att ha många med dig, Nordisk film och tv fond, Finansiering av film, Pitchar, EPK, digibeta-Kassett, Stärka kreatörer, Mylla och NonStop, Scanbox, Aurora, flera hattar, NonStop sist i kön för Mylla, MG, Mestadels roligt, VD för Bio Capitol, Permitering, B-Reel, Lisa Langseth, Pernilla August, TV-serier, Midsommar, Ari Aster, Datapunkter, Estimat, väldigt hemliga i Sverige med data och tittarsiffror, FilmWeb, Dungeons and Dragons, Filmbudget, Box Office, Streamingplattformer hemlar, Status på svenska filmbranschen, Kalibrerat om branschen,Allmän kostnadskontrollvåg, VIAPLAY, Beställare kommer beställa mindre, pendeln håller långsamt på att svänga tillbaka till långfilm, Barbiefilmen, självförtroende, nedåtgående spiral, Sonet, Josef Fares,  Johan Falk, Göta Kanal, Sällskapsresan, Joker, Strul, En runda till, Solsidan, Ove, Felix Herngren, Lasse Åberg, Feed, Bränn alla mina brev, Scandinavian Content Group, Svensk genre, Avgrunden, Katastroffilm, Vinterberg, Ruben Östlund, Anna Croneman, Riktning och initiativ och mod, Top Gun 2, Genreberättande, Låt den rätte komma in, Efti, Carl Molinder, Gräns, Art House, Nordic Noir, FLX, Gräva där man står, Internationell marknad i bakhuvudet, Dalarna, Norberg, Mormor, Harold and Maude, The Graduate, Cinemateket, If you want to sing out, sänka priset på medlemskort, Mission impossible,  Klassiker och specialvisningar, After Sun, Kärlek och Avund, War Pony, Disco Boy, Bruce Willis, Art House, Snabba Cash, Streamingintäkter, Ledarskap, Förtroende, Tillit, Trygghet, Hållbarhet, This is England, Mark Herbert, Shane Meadows, Warp X, Inside Pictures, David Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future, Naked Lunch, The name of the game, Julia Short, UIP, Polygram, 12 apornas armé, Mentor, att ha egen bio, Svenska filminstitutet, Anna Serner, Anette Novak, Öronbedövande tystnad, en kraft för kontinuitet och reaktivitet, SVT Drama, Mikael Marcimain, Tyst från kulturpolitiken, Werner Herzhog, Egghead Republic, Galna på bästa sätt, Per Faxneld, Ockultism, public intellectual, It Follows, Den där Mary

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there's a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend's husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend's husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week's Variety touting the film's success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D'Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi's Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there's almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that's not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn't intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival's main prize, the Palme D'Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones's classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It's easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn't. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we're here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn't show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn't completely hate the film. But audiences didn't care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Canadian terrorists who must go on the run in the Canadian tundra after a deal goes down bad?   Kara Glover would play Helen, the arms dealer, and John Savage as Jeff, a British intelligence agent who helps Helen.   Caribe would first open in Detroit on May 20th, 1988. Can you guess what I'm going to say next?   Yep.   No reported grosses, no theatres playing the film tracked by Variety.   The following week, Caribe opens in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the 300 seat United Artists Theatre in San Francisco, and three theatres in the South Bay. While Miramax once again did not report grosses, the combined gross for the four theatres, according to Variety, was a weak $3,700. Compare that to Aria, which was playing at the Opera Plaza Cinemas in its third week in San Francisco, in an auditorium 40% smaller than the United Artist, grossing $5,300 on its own.   On June 3rd, Caribe would open at the AMC Fountain Square 14 in Nashville. One show only on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm. Miramax did not report grosses. Probably because people we going to see Willie Tyler and Lester at Zanie's down the street.   And again, it kept cycling around the country, one or two new playdates in each city it played in. Philadelphia in mid-June. Indianapolis in mid-July. Jersey City in late August. Always for one week, grosses never reported.   Miramax's first Swedish release of the year was called Mio, but this was truly an international production. The $4m film was co-produced by Swedish, Norwegian and Russian production companies, directed by a Russian, adapted from a Swedish book by an American screenwriter, scored by one of the members of ABBA, and starring actors from England, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.   Mio tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression. What makes this movie memorable today is that Mio's best friend is played by none other than Christian Bale, in his very first film.   The movie was shot in Moscow, Stockholm, the Crimea, Scotland, and outside Pripyat in the Northern part of what is now Ukraine, between March and July 1986. In fact, the cast and crew were shooting outside Pripyat on April 26th, when they got the call they needed to evacuate the area. It would be hours later when they would discover there had been a reactor core meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They would have to scramble to shoot in other locations away from Ukraine for a month, and when they were finally allowed to return, the area they were shooting in deemed to have not been adversely affected by the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history,, Geiger counters would be placed all over the sets, and every meal served by craft services would need to be read to make sure it wasn't contaminated.   After premiering at the Moscow Film Festival in July 1987 and the Norwegian Film Festival in August, Mio would open in Sweden on October 16th, 1987. The local critics would tear the film apart. They hated that the filmmakers had Anglicized the movie with British actors like Christopher Lee, Susannah York, Christian Bale and Nicholas Pickard, an eleven year old boy also making his film debut. They also hated how the filmmakers adapted the novel by the legendary Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking novels made her and her works world famous. Overall, they hated pretty much everything about it outside of Christopher Lee's performance and the production's design in the fantasy world.   Miramax most likely picked it up trying to emulate the success of The Neverending Story, which had opened to great success in most of the world in 1984. So it might seem kinda odd that when they would open the now titled The Land of Faraway in theatres, they wouldn't go wide but instead open it on one screen in Atlanta GA on June 10th, 1988. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety did not track Atlanta theatres that week. Two weeks later, they would open the film in Miami. How many theatres? Can't tell you. Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety was not tracking any of the theatres in Miami playing the film. But hey, Bull Durham did pretty good in Miami that week.   The film would next open in theatres in Los Angeles. This time, Miramax bought a quarter page ad in the Los Angeles Times on opening day to let people know the film existed. So we know it was playing on 18 screens that weekend. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses for the film. But on the two screens it played on that Variety was tracking, the combined gross was just $2,500.   There'd be other playdates. Kansas City and Minneapolis in mid-September. Vancouver, BC in early October. Palm Beach FL in mid October. Calgary AB and Fort Lauderdale in late October. Phoenix in mid November. And never once did Miramax report any grosses for it.   One week after Mio, Miramax would release a comedy called Going Undercover.   Now, if you listened to our March 2021 episode on Some Kind of Wonderful, you may remember be mentioning Lea Thompson taking the role of Amanda Jones in that film, a role she had turned down twice before, the week after Howard the Duck opened, because she was afraid she'd never get cast in a movie again. And while Some Kind of Wonderful wasn't as big a film as you'd expect from a John Hughes production, Thompson did indeed continue to work, and is still working to this day.   So if you were looking at a newspaper ad in several cities in June 1988 and saw her latest movie and wonder why she went back to making weird little movies.   She hadn't.   This was a movie she had made just before Back to the Future, in August and September 1984.   Originally titled Yellow Pages, the film starred film legend Jean Simmons as Maxine, a rich woman who has hired Chris Lemmon's private investigator Henry Brilliant to protect her stepdaughter Marigold during her trip to Copenhagen.   The director, James Clarke, had written the script specifically for Lemmon, tailoring his role to mimic various roles played by his famous father, Jack Lemmon, over the decades, and for Simmons. But Thompson was just one of a number of young actresses they looked at before making their casting choice.   Half of the $6m budget would come from a first-time British film producer, while the other half from a group of Danish investors wanting to lure more Hollywood productions to their area.   The shoot would be plagued by a number of problems. The shoot in Los Angeles coincided with the final days of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which would cut out using some of the best and most regularly used locations in the city, and a long-lasting heat wave that would make outdoor shoots unbearable for cast and crew. When they arrived in Copenhagen at the end of August, Denmark was going through an unusually heavy storm front that hung around for weeks.   Clarke would spend several months editing the film, longer than usual for a smaller production like this, but he in part was waiting to see how Back to the Future would do at the box office. If the film was a hit, and his leading actress was a major part of that, it could make it easier to sell his film to a distributor.   Or that was line of thinking.   Of course, Back to the Future was a hit, and Thompson received much praise for her comedic work on the film.   But that didn't make it any easier to sell his film.   The producer would set the first screenings for the film at the February 1986 American Film Market in Santa Monica, which caters not only to foreign distributors looking to acquire American movies for their markets, but helps independent filmmakers get their movies seen by American distributors.   As these screenings were for buyers by invitation only, there would be no reviews from the screenings, but one could guess that no one would hear about the film again until Miramax bought the American distribution rights to it in March 1988 tells us that maybe those screenings didn't go so well.   The film would get retitled Going Undercover, and would open in single screen playdates in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis and Tampa on June 17th. And as I've said too many times already, no reported grosses from Miramax, and only one theatre playing the film was being tracked by Variety, with Going Undercover earning $3,000 during its one week at the Century City 14 in Los Angeles.   In the June 22nd, 1988 issue of Variety, there was an article about Miramax securing a $25m line of credit in order to start producing their own films. Going Undercover is mentioned in the article about being one of Miramax's releases, without noting it had just been released that week or how well it did or did not do.   The Thin Blue Line would be Miramax's first non-music based documentary, and one that would truly change how documentaries were made.   Errol Morris had already made two bizarre but entertaining documentaries in the late 70s and early 80s. Gates of Heaven was shot in 1977, about a man who operated a failing pet cemetery in Northern California's Napa Valley. When Morris told his famous German filmmaking supporter Werner Herzog about the film, Herzog vowed to eat one of the shoes he was wearing that day if Morris could actually complete the film and have it shown in a public theatre. In April 1979, just before the documentary had its world premiere at UC Theatre in Berkeley, where Morris had studied philosophy, Herzog would spend the morning at Chez Pannise, the creators of the California Cuisine cooking style, boiling his shoes for five hours in garlic, herbs and stock. This event itself would be commemorated in a documentary short called, naturally, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank, which is a must watch on its own.   Because of the success of Gates of Heaven, Morris was able to quickly find financing for his next film, Nub City, which was originally supposed to be about the number of Vernon, Florida's citizens who have “accidentally” cut off their limbs, in order to collect the insurance money. But after several of those citizens threatened to kill Morris, and one of them tried to run down his cinematographer with their truck, Morris would rework the documentary, dropping the limb angle, no pun intended, and focus on the numerous eccentric people in the town. It would premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, and become a hit, for a documentary, when it was released in theatres in 1982.   But it would take Morris another six years after completing Vernon, Florida, to make another film. Part of it was having trouble lining up full funding to work on his next proposed movie, about James Grigson, a Texas forensic psychiatrist whose was nicknamed Doctor Death for being an expert witness for the prosecution in death penalty cases in Texas. Morris had gotten seed money for the documentary from PBS and the Endowment for Public Arts, but there was little else coming in while he worked on the film. In fact, Morris would get a PI license in New York and work cases for two years, using every penny he earned that wasn't going towards living expenses to keep the film afloat.   One of Morris's major problems for the film was that Grigson would not sit on camera for an interview, but would meet with Morris face to face to talk about the cases. During that meeting, the good doctor suggested to the filmmaker that he should research the killers he helped put away. And during that research, Morris would come across the case of one Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of killing Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976, even though another man, David Harris, was the police's initial suspect. For two years, Morris would fly back and forth between New York City and Texas, talking to and filming interviews with Adams and more than two hundred other people connected to the shooting and the trial. Morris had become convinced Adams was indeed innocent, and dropped the idea about Dr. Grigson to solely focus on the Robert Wood murder.   After showing the producers of PBS's American Playhouse some of the footage he had put together of the new direction of the film, they kicked in more funds so that Morris could shoot some re-enactment sequences outside New York City, as well as commission composer Phillip Glass to create a score for the film once it was completed. Documentaries at that time did not regularly use re-enactments, but Morris felt it was important to show how different personal accounts of the same moment can be misinterpreted or misremembered or outright manipulated to suppress the truth.   After the film completed its post-production in March 1988, The Thin Blue Line would have its world premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on March 18th, and word quickly spread Morris had something truly unique and special on his hands. The critic for Variety would note in the very first paragraph of his write up that the film employed “strikingly original formal devices to pull together diverse interviews, film clips, photo collages, and” and this is where it broke ground, “recreations of the crime from many points of view.”   Miramax would put together a full court press in order to get the rights to the film, which was announced during the opening days of the 1988 Cannes Film Festival in early May. An early hint on how the company was going to sell the film was by calling it a “non-fiction feature” instead of a documentary.   Miramax would send Morris out on a cross-country press tour in the weeks leading up to the film's August 26th opening date, but Morris, like many documentary filmmakers, was not used to being in the spotlight themselves, and was not as articulate about talking up his movies as the more seasoned directors and actors who've been on the promotion circuit for a while. After one interview, Harvey Weinstein would send Errol Morris a note.   “Heard your NPR interview and you were boring.”   Harvey would offer up several suggestions to help the filmmaker, including hyping the movie up as a real life mystery thriller rather than a documentary, and using shorter and clearer sentences when answering a question.   It was a clear gamble to release The Thin Blue Line in the final week of summer, and the film would need a lot of good will to stand out.   And it would get it.   The New York Times was so enthralled with the film, it would not only run a review from Janet Maslin, who would heap great praise on the film, but would also run a lengthy interview with Errol Morris right next to the review. The quarter page ad in the New York Times, several pages back, would tout positive quotes from Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, who had left The Village Voice for the then-new Premiere Magazine, Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine instead of Rolling Stone, and critics from the San Francisco Chronicle and, interestingly enough, the Dallas Morning News. The top of the ad was tagged with an intriguing tease: solving this mystery is going to be murder, with a second tag line underneath the key art and title, which called the film “a new kind of movie mystery.” Of the 15 New York area-based film critics for local newspapers, television and national magazines, 14 of them gave favorable reviews, while 1, Stephen Schiff of Vanity Fair, was ambivalent about it. Not one critic gave it a bad review.   New York audiences were hooked.   Opening in the 240 seat main house at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the movie grossed $30,945 its first three days. In its second weekend, the gross at the Lincoln Plaza would jump to $31k, and adding another $27,500 from its two theatre opening in Los Angeles and $15,800 from a single DC theatre that week. Third week in New York was a still good $21k, but the second week in Los Angeles fell to $10,500 and DC to $10k. And that's how it rolled out for several months, mostly single screen bookings in major cities not called Los Angeles or New York City, racking up some of the best reviews Miramax would receive to date, but never breaking out much outside the major cities. When it looked like Santa Cruz wasn't going to play the film, I drove to San Francisco to see it, just as my friends and I had for the opening day of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in mid-August. That's 75 miles each way, plus parking in San Francisco, just to see a movie. That's when you know you no longer just like movies but have developed a serious case of cinephilea. So when The Nickelodeon did open the film in late November, I did something I had never done with any documentary before.   I went and saw it again.   Second time around, I was still pissed off at the outrageous injustice heaped upon Randall Dale Adams for nothing more than being with and trusting the wrong person at the wrong time. But, thankfully, things would turn around for Adams in the coming weeks. On December 1st, it was reported that David Harris had recanted his testimony at Adams' trial, admitting he was alone when Officer Wood stopped his car. And on March 1st, 1989, after more than 15,000 people had signed the film's petition to revisit the decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams's conviction “based largely” on facts presented in the film.   The film would also find itself in several more controversies.   Despite being named The Best Documentary of the Year by a number of critics groups, the Documentary Branch of the  Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would not nominate the film, due in large part to the numerous reenactments presented throughout the film. Filmmaker Michael Apted, a member of the Directors Branch of the Academy, noted that the failure to acknowledge The Thin Blue Line was “one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the Academy,” while Roger Ebert added the slight was “the worst non-nomination of the year.” Despite the lack of a nomination, Errol Morris would attend the Oscars ceremony in March 1989, as a protest for his film being snubbed.   Morris would also, several months after Adams' release, find himself being sued by Adams, but not because of how he was portrayed in the film. During the making of the film, Morris had Adams sign a contract giving Morris the exclusive right to tell Adams's story, and Adams wanted, essentially, the right to tell his own story now that he was a free man. Morris and Adams would settle out of court, and Adams would regain his life rights.   Once the movie was played out in theatres, it had grossed $1.2m, which on the surface sounds like not a whole lot of money. Adjusted for inflation, that would only be $3.08m. But even unadjusted for inflation, it's still one of the 100 highest grossing documentaries of the past forty years. And it is one of just a handful of documentaries to become a part of the National Film Registry, for being a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film.”   Adams would live a quiet life after his release, working as an anti-death penalty advocate and marrying the sister of one of the death row inmates he was helping to exonerate. He would pass away from a brain tumor in October 2010 at a courthouse in Ohio not half an hour from where he was born and still lived, but he would so disappear from the spotlight after the movie was released that his passing wasn't even reported until June 2011.   Errol Morris would become one of the most celebrated documentarians of his generation, finally getting nominated for, and winning, an Oscar in 2003, for The Fog of War, about the life and times of Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War era. The Fog of War would also be added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Morris would become only the third documentarian, after D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, to have two films on the Registry.   In 1973, the senseless killings of five members of the Alday family in Donalsonville GA made international headlines. Four years later, Canadian documentarian Tex Fuller made an award-winning documentary about the case, called Murder One. For years, Fuller shopped around a screenplay telling the same story, but it would take nearly a decade for it to finally be sold, in part because Fuller was insistent that he also be the director. A small Canadian production company would fund the $1m CAD production, which would star Henry Thomas of E.T. fame as the fifteen year old narrator of the story, Billy Isaacs.   The shoot began in early October 1987 outside Toronto, but after a week of shooting, Fuller was fired, and was replaced by Graeme Campbell, a young and energetic filmmaker for whom Murder One would be his fourth movie directing gig of the year. Details are sketchy as to why Fuller was fired, but Thomas and his mother Carolyn would voice concerns with the producers about the new direction the film was taking under its new director.   The film would premiere in Canada in May 1988. When the film did well up North, Miramax took notice and purchased the American distribution rights.   Murder One would first open in America on two screens in Los Angeles on September 9th, 1988. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times noted that while the film itself wasn't very good, that it still sprung from the disturbing insight about the crazy reasons people cross of what should be impassable moral lines.   “No movie studio could have invented it!,” screamed the tagline on the poster and newspaper key art. “No writer could have imagined it! Because what happened that night became the most controversial in American history.”   That would draw limited interest from filmgoers in Tinseltown. The two theatres would gross a combined $7k in its first three days. Not great but far better than several other recent Miramax releases in the area.   Two weeks later, on September 23rd, Miramax would book Murder One into 20 theatres in the New York City metro region, as well as in Akron, Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianpolis, Nashville, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In New York, the film would actually get some good reviews from the Times and the Post as well as Peter Travers of People Magazine, but once again, Miramax would not report grosses for the film. Variety would note the combined gross for the film in New York City was only $25k.   In early October, the film would fall out of Variety's internal list of the 50 Top Grossing Films within the twenty markets they regularly tracked, with a final gross of just $87k. One market that Miramax deliberately did not book the film was anywhere near southwest Georgia, where the murders took place. The closest theatre that did play the film was more than 200 miles away.   Miramax would finish 1988 with two releases.   The first was Dakota, which would mark star Lou Diamond Phillips first time as a producer. He would star as a troubled teenager who takes a job on a Texas horse ranch to help pay of his debts, who becomes a sorta big brother to the ranch owner's young son, who has recently lost a leg to cancer, as he also falls for the rancher's daughter.   When the $1.1m budgeted film began production in Texas in June 1987, Phillips had already made La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, but neither had yet to be released into theatres. By the time filming ended five weeks later, La Bamba had just opened, and Phillips was on his way to becoming a star.   The main producers wanted director Fred Holmes to get the film through post-production as quickly as possible, to get it into theatres in the early part of 1988 to capitalize on the newfound success of their young star.    But that wouldn't happen.   Holmes wouldn't have the film ready until the end of February 1988, which was deemed acceptable because of the impending release of Stand and Deliver. In fact, the producers would schedule their first distributor screening of the film on March 14th, the Monday after Stand and Delivered opened, in the hopes that good box office for the film and good notices for Phillips would translate to higher distributor interest in their film, which sorta worked. None of the major studios would show for the screening, but a number of Indies would, including Miramax. Phillips would not attend the screening, as he was on location in New Mexico shooting Young Guns.   I can't find any reason why Miramax waited nearly nine months after they acquired Dakota to get it into theatres. It certainly wasn't Oscar bait, and screen availability would be scarce during the busy holiday movie season, which would see a number of popular, high profile releases like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Ernest Saves Christmas, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Scrooged, Tequila Sunrise, Twins and Working Girl. Which might explain why, when Miramax released the film into 18 theatres in the New York City area on December 2nd, they could only get three screens in all of Manhattan, the best being the nice but hardly first-rate Embassy 4 at Broadway and 47th. Or of the 22 screens in Los Angeles opening the film the same day, the best would be the tiny Westwood 4 next to UCLA or the Paramount in Hollywood, whose best days were back in the Eisenhower administration.   And, yet again, Miramax did not report grosses, and none of the theatres playing the film was tracked by Variety that week. The film would be gone after just one week. The Paramount, which would open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the 14th, opted to instead play a double feature of Clara's Heart, with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and the River Phoenix drama Running on Empty, even though neither film had been much of a hit.   Miramax's last film of the year would be the one that changed everything for them.   Pelle the Conquerer.   Adapted from a 1910 Danish book and directed by Billie August, whose previous film Twist and Shout had been released by Miramax in 1986, Pelle the Conquerer would be the first Danish or Swedish movie to star Max von Sydow in almost 15 years, having spent most of the 70s and 80s in Hollywood and London starring in a number of major movies including The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor, Flash Gordon,Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, and David Lynch's Dune. But because von Sydow would be making his return to his native cinema, August was able to secure $4.5m to make the film, one of the highest budgeted Scandinavian films to be made to date.   In the late 1850s, an elderly emigrant Lasse and his son Pelle leave their home in Sweden after the death of the boy's mother, wanting to build a new life on the Danish island of Bornholm. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his age and his son's youth. The pair are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers for being foreigners. The father falls into depression and alcoholism, the young boy befriends one of the bastard children of the farm owner as well as another Swedish farm worker, who dreams of conquering the world.   For the title character of Pelle, Billie August saw more than 3,000 Swedish boys before deciding to cast 11 year old Pelle Hvenegaard, who, like many boys in Sweden, had been named for the character he was now going to play on screen.   After six months of filming in the summer and fall of 1986, Billie August would finish editing Pelle the Conquerer in time for it to make its intended Christmas Day 1987 release date in Denmark and Sweden, where the film would be one of the biggest releases in either country for the entire decade. It would make its debut outside Scandinavia at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, where it had been invited to compete for the Palme D'Or. It would compete against a number of talented filmmakers who had come with some of the best films they would ever make, including Clint Eastwood with Bird, Claire Denis' Chocolat, István Szabó's Hanussen, Vincent Ward's The Navigator, and A Short Film About Killing, an expanded movie version of the fifth episode in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful miniseries Dekalog. Pelle would conquer them all, taking home the top prize from one of cinema's most revered film festivals.   Reviews for the film out of Cannes were almost universally excellent. Vincent Canby, the lead film critic for the New York Times for nearly twenty years by this point, wouldn't file his review until the end of the festival, in which he pointed out that a number of people at the festival were scandalized von Sydow had not also won the award for Best Actor.   Having previously worked with the company on his previous film's American release, August felt that Miramax would have what it took to make the film a success in the States.   Their first moves would be to schedule the film for a late December release, while securing a slot at that September's New York Film Festival. And once again, the critical consensus was highly positive, with only a small sampling of distractors.   The film would open first on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, December 21st, following by exclusive engagements in nine other cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, on the 23rd. But the opening week numbers weren't very good, just $46k from ten screens. And you can't really blame the film's two hour and forty-five minute running time. Little Dorrit, the two-part, four hour adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, had been out nine weeks at this point and was still making nearly 50% more per screen.   But after the new year, when more and more awards were hurled the film's way, including the National Board of Review naming it one of the best foreign films of the year and the Golden Globes awarding it their Best Foreign Language trophy, ticket sales would pick up.   Well, for a foreign film.   The week after the Motion Picture Academy awarded Pelle their award for Best Foreign Language Film, business for the film would pick up 35%, and a third of its $2m American gross would come after that win.   One of the things that surprised me while doing the research for this episode was learning that Max von Sydow had never been nominated for an Oscar until he was nominated for Best Actor for Pelle the Conquerer. You look at his credits over the years, and it's just mind blowing. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. The Virgin Spring. The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Emigrants. The Exorcist. The Three Days of the Condor. Surely there was one performance amongst those that deserved recognition.   I hate to keep going back to A24, but there's something about a company's first Oscar win that sends that company into the next level. A24 didn't really become A24 until 2016, when three of their movies won Oscars, including Brie Larson for Best Actress in Room. And Miramax didn't really become the Miramax we knew and once loved until its win for Pelle.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 117, the fifth and final part of our miniseries on Miramax Films, is released.     Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there's a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend's husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend's husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week's Variety touting the film's success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D'Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi's Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there's almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that's not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn't intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival's main prize, the Palme D'Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones's classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It's easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn't. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we're here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn't show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn't completely hate the film. But audiences didn't care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Canadian terrorists who must go on the run in the Canadian tundra after a deal goes down bad?   Kara Glover would play Helen, the arms dealer, and John Savage as Jeff, a British intelligence agent who helps Helen.   Caribe would first open in Detroit on May 20th, 1988. Can you guess what I'm going to say next?   Yep.   No reported grosses, no theatres playing the film tracked by Variety.   The following week, Caribe opens in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the 300 seat United Artists Theatre in San Francisco, and three theatres in the South Bay. While Miramax once again did not report grosses, the combined gross for the four theatres, according to Variety, was a weak $3,700. Compare that to Aria, which was playing at the Opera Plaza Cinemas in its third week in San Francisco, in an auditorium 40% smaller than the United Artist, grossing $5,300 on its own.   On June 3rd, Caribe would open at the AMC Fountain Square 14 in Nashville. One show only on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm. Miramax did not report grosses. Probably because people we going to see Willie Tyler and Lester at Zanie's down the street.   And again, it kept cycling around the country, one or two new playdates in each city it played in. Philadelphia in mid-June. Indianapolis in mid-July. Jersey City in late August. Always for one week, grosses never reported.   Miramax's first Swedish release of the year was called Mio, but this was truly an international production. The $4m film was co-produced by Swedish, Norwegian and Russian production companies, directed by a Russian, adapted from a Swedish book by an American screenwriter, scored by one of the members of ABBA, and starring actors from England, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.   Mio tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression. What makes this movie memorable today is that Mio's best friend is played by none other than Christian Bale, in his very first film.   The movie was shot in Moscow, Stockholm, the Crimea, Scotland, and outside Pripyat in the Northern part of what is now Ukraine, between March and July 1986. In fact, the cast and crew were shooting outside Pripyat on April 26th, when they got the call they needed to evacuate the area. It would be hours later when they would discover there had been a reactor core meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They would have to scramble to shoot in other locations away from Ukraine for a month, and when they were finally allowed to return, the area they were shooting in deemed to have not been adversely affected by the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history,, Geiger counters would be placed all over the sets, and every meal served by craft services would need to be read to make sure it wasn't contaminated.   After premiering at the Moscow Film Festival in July 1987 and the Norwegian Film Festival in August, Mio would open in Sweden on October 16th, 1987. The local critics would tear the film apart. They hated that the filmmakers had Anglicized the movie with British actors like Christopher Lee, Susannah York, Christian Bale and Nicholas Pickard, an eleven year old boy also making his film debut. They also hated how the filmmakers adapted the novel by the legendary Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking novels made her and her works world famous. Overall, they hated pretty much everything about it outside of Christopher Lee's performance and the production's design in the fantasy world.   Miramax most likely picked it up trying to emulate the success of The Neverending Story, which had opened to great success in most of the world in 1984. So it might seem kinda odd that when they would open the now titled The Land of Faraway in theatres, they wouldn't go wide but instead open it on one screen in Atlanta GA on June 10th, 1988. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety did not track Atlanta theatres that week. Two weeks later, they would open the film in Miami. How many theatres? Can't tell you. Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety was not tracking any of the theatres in Miami playing the film. But hey, Bull Durham did pretty good in Miami that week.   The film would next open in theatres in Los Angeles. This time, Miramax bought a quarter page ad in the Los Angeles Times on opening day to let people know the film existed. So we know it was playing on 18 screens that weekend. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses for the film. But on the two screens it played on that Variety was tracking, the combined gross was just $2,500.   There'd be other playdates. Kansas City and Minneapolis in mid-September. Vancouver, BC in early October. Palm Beach FL in mid October. Calgary AB and Fort Lauderdale in late October. Phoenix in mid November. And never once did Miramax report any grosses for it.   One week after Mio, Miramax would release a comedy called Going Undercover.   Now, if you listened to our March 2021 episode on Some Kind of Wonderful, you may remember be mentioning Lea Thompson taking the role of Amanda Jones in that film, a role she had turned down twice before, the week after Howard the Duck opened, because she was afraid she'd never get cast in a movie again. And while Some Kind of Wonderful wasn't as big a film as you'd expect from a John Hughes production, Thompson did indeed continue to work, and is still working to this day.   So if you were looking at a newspaper ad in several cities in June 1988 and saw her latest movie and wonder why she went back to making weird little movies.   She hadn't.   This was a movie she had made just before Back to the Future, in August and September 1984.   Originally titled Yellow Pages, the film starred film legend Jean Simmons as Maxine, a rich woman who has hired Chris Lemmon's private investigator Henry Brilliant to protect her stepdaughter Marigold during her trip to Copenhagen.   The director, James Clarke, had written the script specifically for Lemmon, tailoring his role to mimic various roles played by his famous father, Jack Lemmon, over the decades, and for Simmons. But Thompson was just one of a number of young actresses they looked at before making their casting choice.   Half of the $6m budget would come from a first-time British film producer, while the other half from a group of Danish investors wanting to lure more Hollywood productions to their area.   The shoot would be plagued by a number of problems. The shoot in Los Angeles coincided with the final days of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which would cut out using some of the best and most regularly used locations in the city, and a long-lasting heat wave that would make outdoor shoots unbearable for cast and crew. When they arrived in Copenhagen at the end of August, Denmark was going through an unusually heavy storm front that hung around for weeks.   Clarke would spend several months editing the film, longer than usual for a smaller production like this, but he in part was waiting to see how Back to the Future would do at the box office. If the film was a hit, and his leading actress was a major part of that, it could make it easier to sell his film to a distributor.   Or that was line of thinking.   Of course, Back to the Future was a hit, and Thompson received much praise for her comedic work on the film.   But that didn't make it any easier to sell his film.   The producer would set the first screenings for the film at the February 1986 American Film Market in Santa Monica, which caters not only to foreign distributors looking to acquire American movies for their markets, but helps independent filmmakers get their movies seen by American distributors.   As these screenings were for buyers by invitation only, there would be no reviews from the screenings, but one could guess that no one would hear about the film again until Miramax bought the American distribution rights to it in March 1988 tells us that maybe those screenings didn't go so well.   The film would get retitled Going Undercover, and would open in single screen playdates in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis and Tampa on June 17th. And as I've said too many times already, no reported grosses from Miramax, and only one theatre playing the film was being tracked by Variety, with Going Undercover earning $3,000 during its one week at the Century City 14 in Los Angeles.   In the June 22nd, 1988 issue of Variety, there was an article about Miramax securing a $25m line of credit in order to start producing their own films. Going Undercover is mentioned in the article about being one of Miramax's releases, without noting it had just been released that week or how well it did or did not do.   The Thin Blue Line would be Miramax's first non-music based documentary, and one that would truly change how documentaries were made.   Errol Morris had already made two bizarre but entertaining documentaries in the late 70s and early 80s. Gates of Heaven was shot in 1977, about a man who operated a failing pet cemetery in Northern California's Napa Valley. When Morris told his famous German filmmaking supporter Werner Herzog about the film, Herzog vowed to eat one of the shoes he was wearing that day if Morris could actually complete the film and have it shown in a public theatre. In April 1979, just before the documentary had its world premiere at UC Theatre in Berkeley, where Morris had studied philosophy, Herzog would spend the morning at Chez Pannise, the creators of the California Cuisine cooking style, boiling his shoes for five hours in garlic, herbs and stock. This event itself would be commemorated in a documentary short called, naturally, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank, which is a must watch on its own.   Because of the success of Gates of Heaven, Morris was able to quickly find financing for his next film, Nub City, which was originally supposed to be about the number of Vernon, Florida's citizens who have “accidentally” cut off their limbs, in order to collect the insurance money. But after several of those citizens threatened to kill Morris, and one of them tried to run down his cinematographer with their truck, Morris would rework the documentary, dropping the limb angle, no pun intended, and focus on the numerous eccentric people in the town. It would premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, and become a hit, for a documentary, when it was released in theatres in 1982.   But it would take Morris another six years after completing Vernon, Florida, to make another film. Part of it was having trouble lining up full funding to work on his next proposed movie, about James Grigson, a Texas forensic psychiatrist whose was nicknamed Doctor Death for being an expert witness for the prosecution in death penalty cases in Texas. Morris had gotten seed money for the documentary from PBS and the Endowment for Public Arts, but there was little else coming in while he worked on the film. In fact, Morris would get a PI license in New York and work cases for two years, using every penny he earned that wasn't going towards living expenses to keep the film afloat.   One of Morris's major problems for the film was that Grigson would not sit on camera for an interview, but would meet with Morris face to face to talk about the cases. During that meeting, the good doctor suggested to the filmmaker that he should research the killers he helped put away. And during that research, Morris would come across the case of one Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of killing Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976, even though another man, David Harris, was the police's initial suspect. For two years, Morris would fly back and forth between New York City and Texas, talking to and filming interviews with Adams and more than two hundred other people connected to the shooting and the trial. Morris had become convinced Adams was indeed innocent, and dropped the idea about Dr. Grigson to solely focus on the Robert Wood murder.   After showing the producers of PBS's American Playhouse some of the footage he had put together of the new direction of the film, they kicked in more funds so that Morris could shoot some re-enactment sequences outside New York City, as well as commission composer Phillip Glass to create a score for the film once it was completed. Documentaries at that time did not regularly use re-enactments, but Morris felt it was important to show how different personal accounts of the same moment can be misinterpreted or misremembered or outright manipulated to suppress the truth.   After the film completed its post-production in March 1988, The Thin Blue Line would have its world premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on March 18th, and word quickly spread Morris had something truly unique and special on his hands. The critic for Variety would note in the very first paragraph of his write up that the film employed “strikingly original formal devices to pull together diverse interviews, film clips, photo collages, and” and this is where it broke ground, “recreations of the crime from many points of view.”   Miramax would put together a full court press in order to get the rights to the film, which was announced during the opening days of the 1988 Cannes Film Festival in early May. An early hint on how the company was going to sell the film was by calling it a “non-fiction feature” instead of a documentary.   Miramax would send Morris out on a cross-country press tour in the weeks leading up to the film's August 26th opening date, but Morris, like many documentary filmmakers, was not used to being in the spotlight themselves, and was not as articulate about talking up his movies as the more seasoned directors and actors who've been on the promotion circuit for a while. After one interview, Harvey Weinstein would send Errol Morris a note.   “Heard your NPR interview and you were boring.”   Harvey would offer up several suggestions to help the filmmaker, including hyping the movie up as a real life mystery thriller rather than a documentary, and using shorter and clearer sentences when answering a question.   It was a clear gamble to release The Thin Blue Line in the final week of summer, and the film would need a lot of good will to stand out.   And it would get it.   The New York Times was so enthralled with the film, it would not only run a review from Janet Maslin, who would heap great praise on the film, but would also run a lengthy interview with Errol Morris right next to the review. The quarter page ad in the New York Times, several pages back, would tout positive quotes from Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, who had left The Village Voice for the then-new Premiere Magazine, Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine instead of Rolling Stone, and critics from the San Francisco Chronicle and, interestingly enough, the Dallas Morning News. The top of the ad was tagged with an intriguing tease: solving this mystery is going to be murder, with a second tag line underneath the key art and title, which called the film “a new kind of movie mystery.” Of the 15 New York area-based film critics for local newspapers, television and national magazines, 14 of them gave favorable reviews, while 1, Stephen Schiff of Vanity Fair, was ambivalent about it. Not one critic gave it a bad review.   New York audiences were hooked.   Opening in the 240 seat main house at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the movie grossed $30,945 its first three days. In its second weekend, the gross at the Lincoln Plaza would jump to $31k, and adding another $27,500 from its two theatre opening in Los Angeles and $15,800 from a single DC theatre that week. Third week in New York was a still good $21k, but the second week in Los Angeles fell to $10,500 and DC to $10k. And that's how it rolled out for several months, mostly single screen bookings in major cities not called Los Angeles or New York City, racking up some of the best reviews Miramax would receive to date, but never breaking out much outside the major cities. When it looked like Santa Cruz wasn't going to play the film, I drove to San Francisco to see it, just as my friends and I had for the opening day of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in mid-August. That's 75 miles each way, plus parking in San Francisco, just to see a movie. That's when you know you no longer just like movies but have developed a serious case of cinephilea. So when The Nickelodeon did open the film in late November, I did something I had never done with any documentary before.   I went and saw it again.   Second time around, I was still pissed off at the outrageous injustice heaped upon Randall Dale Adams for nothing more than being with and trusting the wrong person at the wrong time. But, thankfully, things would turn around for Adams in the coming weeks. On December 1st, it was reported that David Harris had recanted his testimony at Adams' trial, admitting he was alone when Officer Wood stopped his car. And on March 1st, 1989, after more than 15,000 people had signed the film's petition to revisit the decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams's conviction “based largely” on facts presented in the film.   The film would also find itself in several more controversies.   Despite being named The Best Documentary of the Year by a number of critics groups, the Documentary Branch of the  Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would not nominate the film, due in large part to the numerous reenactments presented throughout the film. Filmmaker Michael Apted, a member of the Directors Branch of the Academy, noted that the failure to acknowledge The Thin Blue Line was “one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the Academy,” while Roger Ebert added the slight was “the worst non-nomination of the year.” Despite the lack of a nomination, Errol Morris would attend the Oscars ceremony in March 1989, as a protest for his film being snubbed.   Morris would also, several months after Adams' release, find himself being sued by Adams, but not because of how he was portrayed in the film. During the making of the film, Morris had Adams sign a contract giving Morris the exclusive right to tell Adams's story, and Adams wanted, essentially, the right to tell his own story now that he was a free man. Morris and Adams would settle out of court, and Adams would regain his life rights.   Once the movie was played out in theatres, it had grossed $1.2m, which on the surface sounds like not a whole lot of money. Adjusted for inflation, that would only be $3.08m. But even unadjusted for inflation, it's still one of the 100 highest grossing documentaries of the past forty years. And it is one of just a handful of documentaries to become a part of the National Film Registry, for being a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film.”   Adams would live a quiet life after his release, working as an anti-death penalty advocate and marrying the sister of one of the death row inmates he was helping to exonerate. He would pass away from a brain tumor in October 2010 at a courthouse in Ohio not half an hour from where he was born and still lived, but he would so disappear from the spotlight after the movie was released that his passing wasn't even reported until June 2011.   Errol Morris would become one of the most celebrated documentarians of his generation, finally getting nominated for, and winning, an Oscar in 2003, for The Fog of War, about the life and times of Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War era. The Fog of War would also be added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Morris would become only the third documentarian, after D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, to have two films on the Registry.   In 1973, the senseless killings of five members of the Alday family in Donalsonville GA made international headlines. Four years later, Canadian documentarian Tex Fuller made an award-winning documentary about the case, called Murder One. For years, Fuller shopped around a screenplay telling the same story, but it would take nearly a decade for it to finally be sold, in part because Fuller was insistent that he also be the director. A small Canadian production company would fund the $1m CAD production, which would star Henry Thomas of E.T. fame as the fifteen year old narrator of the story, Billy Isaacs.   The shoot began in early October 1987 outside Toronto, but after a week of shooting, Fuller was fired, and was replaced by Graeme Campbell, a young and energetic filmmaker for whom Murder One would be his fourth movie directing gig of the year. Details are sketchy as to why Fuller was fired, but Thomas and his mother Carolyn would voice concerns with the producers about the new direction the film was taking under its new director.   The film would premiere in Canada in May 1988. When the film did well up North, Miramax took notice and purchased the American distribution rights.   Murder One would first open in America on two screens in Los Angeles on September 9th, 1988. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times noted that while the film itself wasn't very good, that it still sprung from the disturbing insight about the crazy reasons people cross of what should be impassable moral lines.   “No movie studio could have invented it!,” screamed the tagline on the poster and newspaper key art. “No writer could have imagined it! Because what happened that night became the most controversial in American history.”   That would draw limited interest from filmgoers in Tinseltown. The two theatres would gross a combined $7k in its first three days. Not great but far better than several other recent Miramax releases in the area.   Two weeks later, on September 23rd, Miramax would book Murder One into 20 theatres in the New York City metro region, as well as in Akron, Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianpolis, Nashville, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In New York, the film would actually get some good reviews from the Times and the Post as well as Peter Travers of People Magazine, but once again, Miramax would not report grosses for the film. Variety would note the combined gross for the film in New York City was only $25k.   In early October, the film would fall out of Variety's internal list of the 50 Top Grossing Films within the twenty markets they regularly tracked, with a final gross of just $87k. One market that Miramax deliberately did not book the film was anywhere near southwest Georgia, where the murders took place. The closest theatre that did play the film was more than 200 miles away.   Miramax would finish 1988 with two releases.   The first was Dakota, which would mark star Lou Diamond Phillips first time as a producer. He would star as a troubled teenager who takes a job on a Texas horse ranch to help pay of his debts, who becomes a sorta big brother to the ranch owner's young son, who has recently lost a leg to cancer, as he also falls for the rancher's daughter.   When the $1.1m budgeted film began production in Texas in June 1987, Phillips had already made La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, but neither had yet to be released into theatres. By the time filming ended five weeks later, La Bamba had just opened, and Phillips was on his way to becoming a star.   The main producers wanted director Fred Holmes to get the film through post-production as quickly as possible, to get it into theatres in the early part of 1988 to capitalize on the newfound success of their young star.    But that wouldn't happen.   Holmes wouldn't have the film ready until the end of February 1988, which was deemed acceptable because of the impending release of Stand and Deliver. In fact, the producers would schedule their first distributor screening of the film on March 14th, the Monday after Stand and Delivered opened, in the hopes that good box office for the film and good notices for Phillips would translate to higher distributor interest in their film, which sorta worked. None of the major studios would show for the screening, but a number of Indies would, including Miramax. Phillips would not attend the screening, as he was on location in New Mexico shooting Young Guns.   I can't find any reason why Miramax waited nearly nine months after they acquired Dakota to get it into theatres. It certainly wasn't Oscar bait, and screen availability would be scarce during the busy holiday movie season, which would see a number of popular, high profile releases like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Ernest Saves Christmas, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Scrooged, Tequila Sunrise, Twins and Working Girl. Which might explain why, when Miramax released the film into 18 theatres in the New York City area on December 2nd, they could only get three screens in all of Manhattan, the best being the nice but hardly first-rate Embassy 4 at Broadway and 47th. Or of the 22 screens in Los Angeles opening the film the same day, the best would be the tiny Westwood 4 next to UCLA or the Paramount in Hollywood, whose best days were back in the Eisenhower administration.   And, yet again, Miramax did not report grosses, and none of the theatres playing the film was tracked by Variety that week. The film would be gone after just one week. The Paramount, which would open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the 14th, opted to instead play a double feature of Clara's Heart, with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and the River Phoenix drama Running on Empty, even though neither film had been much of a hit.   Miramax's last film of the year would be the one that changed everything for them.   Pelle the Conquerer.   Adapted from a 1910 Danish book and directed by Billie August, whose previous film Twist and Shout had been released by Miramax in 1986, Pelle the Conquerer would be the first Danish or Swedish movie to star Max von Sydow in almost 15 years, having spent most of the 70s and 80s in Hollywood and London starring in a number of major movies including The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor, Flash Gordon,Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, and David Lynch's Dune. But because von Sydow would be making his return to his native cinema, August was able to secure $4.5m to make the film, one of the highest budgeted Scandinavian films to be made to date.   In the late 1850s, an elderly emigrant Lasse and his son Pelle leave their home in Sweden after the death of the boy's mother, wanting to build a new life on the Danish island of Bornholm. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his age and his son's youth. The pair are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers for being foreigners. The father falls into depression and alcoholism, the young boy befriends one of the bastard children of the farm owner as well as another Swedish farm worker, who dreams of conquering the world.   For the title character of Pelle, Billie August saw more than 3,000 Swedish boys before deciding to cast 11 year old Pelle Hvenegaard, who, like many boys in Sweden, had been named for the character he was now going to play on screen.   After six months of filming in the summer and fall of 1986, Billie August would finish editing Pelle the Conquerer in time for it to make its intended Christmas Day 1987 release date in Denmark and Sweden, where the film would be one of the biggest releases in either country for the entire decade. It would make its debut outside Scandinavia at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, where it had been invited to compete for the Palme D'Or. It would compete against a number of talented filmmakers who had come with some of the best films they would ever make, including Clint Eastwood with Bird, Claire Denis' Chocolat, István Szabó's Hanussen, Vincent Ward's The Navigator, and A Short Film About Killing, an expanded movie version of the fifth episode in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful miniseries Dekalog. Pelle would conquer them all, taking home the top prize from one of cinema's most revered film festivals.   Reviews for the film out of Cannes were almost universally excellent. Vincent Canby, the lead film critic for the New York Times for nearly twenty years by this point, wouldn't file his review until the end of the festival, in which he pointed out that a number of people at the festival were scandalized von Sydow had not also won the award for Best Actor.   Having previously worked with the company on his previous film's American release, August felt that Miramax would have what it took to make the film a success in the States.   Their first moves would be to schedule the film for a late December release, while securing a slot at that September's New York Film Festival. And once again, the critical consensus was highly positive, with only a small sampling of distractors.   The film would open first on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, December 21st, following by exclusive engagements in nine other cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, on the 23rd. But the opening week numbers weren't very good, just $46k from ten screens. And you can't really blame the film's two hour and forty-five minute running time. Little Dorrit, the two-part, four hour adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, had been out nine weeks at this point and was still making nearly 50% more per screen.   But after the new year, when more and more awards were hurled the film's way, including the National Board of Review naming it one of the best foreign films of the year and the Golden Globes awarding it their Best Foreign Language trophy, ticket sales would pick up.   Well, for a foreign film.   The week after the Motion Picture Academy awarded Pelle their award for Best Foreign Language Film, business for the film would pick up 35%, and a third of its $2m American gross would come after that win.   One of the things that surprised me while doing the research for this episode was learning that Max von Sydow had never been nominated for an Oscar until he was nominated for Best Actor for Pelle the Conquerer. You look at his credits over the years, and it's just mind blowing. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. The Virgin Spring. The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Emigrants. The Exorcist. The Three Days of the Condor. Surely there was one performance amongst those that deserved recognition.   I hate to keep going back to A24, but there's something about a company's first Oscar win that sends that company into the next level. A24 didn't really become A24 until 2016, when three of their movies won Oscars, including Brie Larson for Best Actress in Room. And Miramax didn't really become the Miramax we knew and once loved until its win for Pelle.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 117, the fifth and final part of our miniseries on Miramax Films, is released.     Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Pilar Alessandra is the director of the screenwriting and TV writing program On the Page®, host of the popular On the Page Podcast and author of the top-selling book “The Coffee Break Screenwriter.”Pilar started her career as Senior Story Analyst at DreamWorks SKG and, in 2001, opened the On the Page Writers' Studio in Los Angeles.Her students and clients have written for The Walking Dead, Modern Family, Grey's Anatomy, Lost and Family Guy. They've sold features and pitches to Warner Bros, DreamWorks, Disney and Sony and have won the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship, Austin Screenwriting Competition and Warner Bros. TV Writing Workshop.In addition to her private classes taught out of the On the Page Writers' Studio, Pilar has trained writers at DreamWorks, Disney Animation, ABC, CBS and regularly moderates the Pitch Conference at the American Film Market.Pilar has traveled the world teaching in London, Dublin, Beijing, Warsaw, Lisbon and Cape Town, training writers, animators, producers and show runners in the art of writing, story telling and pitching.

Were you a fan of the TV show Silicon Valley? If so, make sure to check out this podcast episode featuring John Altschuler, one of the show's creators.Show NotesJohn Altschuler IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1014365/John Altschuler Wikipedia -  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_AltschulerJohn Schuler Emmys - https://www.emmys.com/bios/john-altschulerMichael's Online Screenwriting Course - https://michaeljamin.com/courseFree Screenwriting Lesson - https://michaeljamin.com/freeJoin My Watchlist - https://michaeljamin.com/watchlistAutomated Transcription:John Altschuler (00:00:00):And I got back from delivering pizzas. And this is like, we didn't even have an answering machine. Okay? This is like we had no money or whatever. I get back, my phone's ringing and I, I remember it was about four in the afternoon and I, I pick it up and I can I speak to John Altschuler and I go, this is, this is he? And he goes, this is Mad Simmons. No, his rats. I think this rats, you know, this is rats of Soman. And he goes, money talks. What have you got? . Okay. I'll be like, what is, I got your dollar beer bill right here. What have you got?Michael Jamin (00:00:33):You're listening to Screenwriters. Need to hear this with Michael. Janet.(00:00:41):Hello everyone. Welcome back to Screenwriters. Need to hear this. I'm Michael Jamin, and I have another great guest today that I don't know how many people are listening. I have thousands and thousands of listeners. And I'm telling you, not one of them is deserving to hear this man speak because this guy, the credits, his credits. And I'm gonna start off by saying, say, welcome to my show. It's John Altschuler. I'm gonna give him the proper introduction. He's my friend, but also many times he's been my boss and this guy, he, he was the, he ran, he and his partner, Dave Krinsky, ran King of the Hill for many years. They created Silicon Court, co-created Silicon Valley, their movie credits, or they also created The Good Family. Do you remember that show? They, they ran Beavers and Butthead for a while. They, they're in credits in they created, wait, did I say Silicon Valley? Yes. Their movie credits are included. Well geez,John Altschuler (00:01:31):John Henry, I'll tell you, blades of Glory,Michael Jamin (00:01:34):My Tongue, blades of Glory. But also produced X Track. And and they ran Lopez on I think that was tbs. Where was that? Tb?John Altschuler (00:01:44):That was Viacom, yeah,Michael Jamin (00:01:46):. And, and I worked on it. I don't remember what, but never . But John, thank you so much for the coming to the show. This is a go, this is gonna be a great one because John is one of, first of all, lemme start from the beginning cause I'm not even sure if I know all this. Like, when did you decide you wanted to be a writer?John Altschuler (00:02:03):You know it's interesting because I think, I would say when I was 10 or 12, Uhhuh , I was one of those kids from our age that comedy was everything. Okay. And back then you had three networks and you were just like, oh my God. You know, the, you know George Carlin is going to be on this show and you just get 10 minutes of it, you know? And so I always loved comedy and I always kind of loved the deep dive into comedy. And then, but so it, it always was kind of important to me. And then I went to the University of North Carolina and I majored my dad. You know, I come from an academic family, so I majored in anthropology and economics Uhhuh. But I was really interested in writing. Now my thing was, well, I didn't think that I should major in, you know, writing for screen, whatever, you know, whatever.(00:03:06): Because I kind of thought you learned by doing Uhhuh , and I wanted an academic degree. But what happened in college is that at Carolina, at the time, we had an incredibly bad communications department. Okay. It was so bad that I'm not making this up. They had equipment in the basement that students weren't allowed to use because they might break it. Yeah. Okay. Literally not allowed to use it. Okay. . So, but this these people who I knew started S T V Student television using cable access cuz they have to provide it and da da and Dave and I and our friend David Palmer, were just vultures and like, all these guys did really hard work. They got the campus to, you know, the university put up money and they got cable. And we just showed up and took all the cameras and, and filmed our stupid comedy show. Know, probably you're, you're familiar with Friday the 13th, the stage musical, and Bonnie and Clyde and Ted and Alice and, and Point and Wave you.Michael Jamin (00:04:12):And so you, I, this is obviously, cause I, I don't know this cause I haven't visited the Library of Congress re recentlyJohn Altschuler (00:04:18): Yes. With the Smithsonian.Michael Jamin (00:04:20):But, so with these, like, these were a single camera show that you acted, did you act in as well?John Altschuler (00:04:24):Oh yeah, yeah. It was me, Dave, Dave Krinsky, and this guy David Palmer. And we did a half hour comedy show just while we were, you know, in school. And then when we graduated, it was, I, I was like, well, I had an econ degree, which means, and not a graduate degree. I didn't. So it was kinda like, well, you go work as a teller in a bank, there's not much you could do. And I was like, you know what? I want to, I want to, I think I'm interested in writing. And my mom, who is, she passed away, like going to 99 years old. I I was like, I think I wanna do it. She goes, well, why wouldn't you? You know? And I was like, you know, go out to California. You're, you're young, you're stupid. If it doesn't work, you just come back.(00:05:06):There's no, and Amazon was like, oh, she's right. And so from North Carolina though, so graduated. Yeah. And what Dave and I did is we basically both worked service jobs in Chapel Hill to save up money to come to California. And in the interim, I had this idea, and actually it was a, it turned out to be a, a pretty important one is I was like, let's get published. Okay? Now, back then they had these things called books. Okay. You know, you didn't have the internet and you went to the library and it was a book called The Writer's Market. And it was, yeah, it was every magazine and what they're, you know, so we're looking up, you know, well, where could we get comedy stuff published? And there were only, there weren't many outlets. There was just, national Lampoon was the only national Humor magazine.(00:05:59):Playboy did humorous pieces. And then after that it was just porn because they were all trying to maintain First Amendment thread. So they would publish articles. So like, I remember there was like something called Nut Nugget and Smut in the Butt, . And we were like, okay, let's start with National Lampoon, and then when we get rejected, we'll end up hopefully getting published by Smut in the butt. Okay. So what happened, is that we start with National Lampoon. So I, I find them in the, the Writer's Query, and I mean, and the writer's market, and it says specifically National Lampoon does not accept any unsolicited material. Right? Okay. So now you probably know this about, I'm a little off the beaten path kinda guy. And so I'm like, well, you know, Dave and I had come up with a bunch of ideas. And so what I did was I put a letter together and explaining an incredibly snotty, sarcastic terms, how important you are at Nash Lampoon.(00:07:02):And, you know, your time is so valuable. So here I'm, I, I'm, I'm enclosing something for your time. And I enclosed a dollar bill with the letter Uhhuh . And, and I sent it to the managing editor Chris Simmons, and then his son Mad Simmons. No, mad Simmons was the, the managing editor. He, he invented the Diner's card. Okay. He invented the credit card. Right. And then bought National Ha as a large Wow. Mad Simmons, Chris Simmons and Ratso Sloman. So I sent it out the, and I swear to God I was, I, I worked, I delivered pizzas and worked at a Chinese restaurant as a waiter, and I got back from delivering pizzas. And this is like, we didn't even have an answering machine. Okay? This is like, we had no money or whatever. I get back my phones ring, and I, I remember it was about four in the afternoon, and I, I pick it up and I can I speak to John Altschuler and I go, this is, this is he?(00:08:01):And he goes, this is Matt Simmons? No, his rats, I think it was Rats told, you know, this is rats slow. And he goes, money talks . What have you got? . Okay. I'm be like, what is, I got your dollar beer bill right here. What have you got? And so, right off the bat, I just started pitching. And he goes, okay, okay. We, we had one idea about, there was this woman named Kathy, Evelyn Smith, who went to jail. She was the one who was with John Belushi when he overdosed. Okay. Okay. Now, he was a freaking drug addict. He was gonna die. Okay? But they blamed her because she supplied some drugs and da da da. And so the thesis of the article is that all she was getting out of prison, and Hollywood was terrified because of her, her abilities to make them do things they don't wanna do.(00:08:52):You know, like Richard Pryor says, she made me set fire to myself, freebasing. And they, and they're all like, so they liked that. So wrote that and it got published. Now, back then, national Lampoon was a big deal. Yeah. Animal House had ju had come out just a few years before National was vacation and Stripes. Mm-Hmm. all in a freaking row. So us being published by National Lampoon coming out Hollywood, it opened up huge doors. I mean, go ahead. No, I'm, I, I'm, I didn't know. I'm surprised. So what kind of doors did it open? Well, like, for example okay. So you can't be shy. Okay? It, it, it's simply nobody's gonna do it for you. As I sometimes tell kids, nobody wants you here. Nobody wants you to do, there's plenty of people doing and nobody's looking for. Let's get one more. Okay.(00:09:41):But I'd gotten the name of an agent at C a a, Lance Tendler, and Lance Tener was in the music and of ca but I didn't know anybody. Right? So I, I said, and you know, here's the thing. If you show some manners and take a little bit of time, it's a big, it's a big deal. So I sent him nice letter, explained, well, this is what we're trying to do. And he ended up giving it to a colleague, and the colleague said, well, I C A A was a, I mean, that's who where I am now after, you know, 30 years. But at the time, I mean, they were the biggest deal. Like, you know, nobody could get ripped by and blah, blah. But they offered to pass our material on, and one of the people they passed it on to was a producer named Neil Maritz.(00:10:26):Now Neil, Neil Maritz ended up producing all the Fast and Furious movies. Right? Okay. And he had not gotten a movie made yet, and so he loved National Lamp and he jumped on it. So our first producer was this guy Neil Maritz. And our first agent, no, no, he was a producer. Okay. The agent sent our stuff to him. Oh, I see, okay. And so that was kind of an in, and he was a hustler and kind of new. And so, and he is actually a nice guy. He really is. Like, he's, he's very Hollywood, but kind of in a way that you miss. But he wasn't, he wasn't a, he wasn't toxic. He was like a, a good sort that really wanted it to work out. And so that was our, our end. And then it's kind of funny because we were trying, okay.(00:11:18):We moved to Burbank, California, and Dave and I, my part, we, we got a a two bedroom, one bath apartment in the Valley, $625 a month, no air conditioning. Okay. Right. And I mean, it was freaking brutal , because, you know, you'd have Yes, I can imagine. Oh, yeah. You know, it'd be like a hundred degrees and a Yeah. You know and I worked room service up at Universal, and Dave was a bellman, and I finally got a connection after six months of being a PA on a movie. And that was like, huge, right? Like, oh my God. You know? So I'm a, I'm a pa and and what movie was that? It was called Miracle Mile. And the, it was not a good movie, but it was directed by a really nice guy, talented writer, g you know, actually some people like Miracle Mile, I don't know.(00:12:13):Not me. But but he was a good guy. His name is Steve Dejak. And he he ended up being like, I, I just sort of worked. And he, he was a good sort. But that led to being a pa on a movie called Tort Song Trilogy, which was produced by Howard Gottfried. Right. And Howard Gottfried produced network and altered states. And so there's something that Dave and I learned is that p I'm really cheap, okay? Because I came up with no money didn't have Wealthy f . It was all, I, I was on my own now, my parents were great, just didn't have money. Okay? So what I found is that writing is expensive, because if you're writing, you're not making money. Mm-Hmm. . Okay. And I figured out that every day to write cost me back then about 60 to 80 bucks because I could live on nothing.(00:13:11):Right. But I needed about 60, 80 bucks a day to get, you know, to, to survive. That's what I needed to make. And what I found is I would work these PA jobs, and I found that I could work for a month to write for a month. It was almost one to one. And it was interesting because when I was a interest, I've said that three times, it was interesting to me, you know, that when I was working as a pa I also tell the youngins this is that if you are a pa, just don't be insane. If you're an intern, don't be out of your mind, okay? Because if you are not crazy, and you make your boss's life that much easier, right? They love you. Yeah. I mean, they love you. And so all I did on Torch, on Trilogy is I made sure that Howard Gottfried always had a coffee cup in his hand.(00:14:02):I anything, if there was an errand there, be run, it was done like hours before it needed to be done. And I just did my job. And one time Howard was walking by and he goes, John, John, John, look, you don't wanna be a pa. What do you, what do you wanna be? I go, well, I wanna be a writer. He's like, well, I know something about writers, you know, because he was Patty CHAI's producer. He goes, let me read what you got. Okay? So I gave him something that we were working on, and it was interesting. It was interesting. He, he, he says, this isn't gonna sell Uhhuh. You write five, five scripts. He goes, if, if you write five scripts, you are going to sell it. And I swear to God, the fifth script sold, because you need to write, fail, write, fail, write, fail. And he read it and he goes, you know what? There's some stuff here you need to, he goes five times.Michael Jamin (00:14:56):Right.John Altschuler (00:14:57):That's what, that's what it took. And so that was the break was a, an idea that I had, it's something I'd read, read something in the, the Wall Street Journal, one of those things about like, you only use one-tenth of your brain power, right? And this idea was like, well, what if these scientists unlocked the other nine-tenths? But it didn't make you smart, it just made you this throbbing biological mess. You can hear everything and it bef while you're raining. And in't that was called Brain Man, right? And we sold that, and that was our entree into Hollywood.Michael Jamin (00:15:35):You see, one thing I wanna interrupt is that for the most people who were listening, they don't know this, but John is easily the most entrepreneurial writer that I know. Many writers. Like, he makes his own path. And so this is just, this is, okay. I'm not surprised at all that, I mean, but then, okay, so then you sold that. Then what, what happened after that?John Altschuler (00:15:53):Well, back then, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, you literally could only work either TV or features Uhhuh. . Okay. Mo they were completely separate as a, and I just liked comedy. I liked it. Like I didn't care if it was, but that made no sense to anybody. Okay. They were like, no, no. And to the point where agents would get into fights mm-hmm. if a movie client did TV or Vice, because it was taking money out of their pocket. Right. You know, I gotta give, Ari was one of the early guys who was like, no, no, no, we gotta, we gotta, we need everybody. Everybody's gotta be working to bring money to me, . So, so we gotta share, you know? But it was very divided. So we started out with a, in the movie business, and, you know, we would, we would sell a pitch or every year, year and a half.(00:16:51):Yeah. You know, and just, we were just sort of hanging in there. And this was sort of odd. The phone again, is that I remember, okay. Got down to 92. Do, and this is about steering your own ship. Okay? Yeah. We got down to $92 and had a meeting with an a comedian called Pauly Shore. And Pauly Shore was a huge deal back then. He was a, you know, comedian and he had this character, the Weasel, and he was like and oddly enough, his manager was and his our manager now. Okay. So we go into this meeting and it was like, now if you knew Polly Shore, he is, this is Guy blah. And this is very eighties you know, it might have been 90, but whatever. So I had this idea, the Sound of Music, but instead of Julie Andrews, it's Poll Shore is the nanny to all these kids.(00:17:49):Okay? Very simple. Okay. So I just said, well, here's this idea. And the executive that knew I loved it, oh, go in. You gotta pitch, you gotta pitch Polly. Okay? So Dave and I go in to pitch Polly's Shore, and you know, I've actually heard he is a good guy. This, this was not . We, we go in and I, I, it was so vivid is that he kinda looks at it and he is like, well, I don't know Michael Rotenberg, that these guys kind of greasy. And like, you know, okay, I have this thing. We've had a very rough ride, is that I do my job, okay. I've had an executive while we're pitching, get up and leave the room. Mm-Hmm. I just keep pitching, okay. Because I'm gonna do my job. Okay. That's all I can control is what I do. So these guys are kind of greasy and just hear what they have to say.(00:18:39):So I go, sound of Music. So I've done it, and he is like, what sound of, why would I want the sound of Music? I don't know what that is. No, this I'm not doing a music video, man. I'm doing a movie. And, and I remember Rotenberg going, Polly, you know, sound of Music, okay, it's on every year, you know? And he is like, oh no. He like, ah, man, this is all I want, man. Is it? So I'm gonna go like in England, I might say like, Cheerio chap. And then like, maybe you send me to Germany and I'll maybe wear those funny leather pants and go, you know, Hey, hi. You know? And so we leave that meeting and it was just like, what the fuck? Yeah. It was just crazy . And we get, I, I check on the agent and she goes, they wanna hire you.(00:19:28):And I'm like, what? Now here's the thing. People have different views of careers. I've always believed that if I made one misstep my career's over, because I'm kind of a snob. So I'm kind of like, you know, well, you know, and I was sitting there going like, well, I know who does Polish Shore movies, okay. I can't be the guy who does Polys shore movies because I didn't drive, you know, in my car, didn't have air conditioning either, you know, across and work for three a three years as a pa break in to be that guy. Now I got nothing against it. There's a place in it. But I knew that I would never ever get out of that. Yeah, okay. Some people can, some people can then, you know, have Academy Award-winning careers, you know, but not me. I knew it. So I said, well, call the agent.(00:20:21):I don't wanna do it. And Agent turns, she says, don't worry. Okay, so what do you mean? Okay, what do I do? She says, I'm gonna ask for so much money that they'll pass. No problem. Cuz I, now, this was for New Line Cinema who, who I, and Dave and I literally moved the furniture into their offices. Okay. Wow. We were, when I was a PA for Georgetown Sure. It was for New Line. So we sort of know, knew these people, you know. And so we, I get, again, with the phone call, I get a phone call and I pick it up and it's a guy just starts yelling, who the fuck do you think you are? ? Who the fuck do you think? I'm like, well, wait, is this John? I'm like, yeah, who the fuck do you think you are passing on Polly Shore?(00:21:08):I'm like, we, we didn't pass on Polly Shore. He goes, oh yeah. Like, we're gonna pay you 400,000 fucking dollars. No fucking wait. You're gonna do it and you're gonna do it for what you should get paid. And I'm like we didn't do it. Okay. And I'm glad that we didn't do it because it would've been probably the end of who knows You, you, you make with whatever you, you do. But we ended up not doing it. And then went back to being a pa and I never had any doubts about it. But then what happened is an executive at H B O named Carolyn Strauss, who actually was a producer of game of Thrones, and she was the, the head of H B O for a, for a little while. And the, she was the head of their scripted, and, and she really liked a, a, a screenplay that Dave and I wrote.(00:22:01):Mm-Hmm. and she, she said, you know, Hey, would you consider working in television? And David, I like, yeah, nobody will let us, you know? And, and she's like, well, if you'll consider it, can I, there's a new show that H B O has with this writer, Adam Resnick. Now Adam Resnick, as I said, maybe the greatest guy I've ever met in Hollywood outside of Michael Jamin. He's, he's extremely funny, extremely talented, extremely nice. Okay. Everything you want. Okay. So we get on the phone with him and we basically talked about The Godfather for an hour, hour and 15. And we get off and, and you know, we only had one phone day. What do you think? He likes The Godfather. said, I like the Godfather. I think, you know, I don't know. And then they say, we get a call, he wants to hire us, and will you guys move to New York?(00:22:56):Now, this is the good thing about living below your means or at your means, is that we're like, well, yeah, we'll move to New York. And then they go, will you move in three days? Okay. And it's like, yeah. So literally locked the apartment in Burbank on the corner of Pass Avenue in Verdugo. And three days later we're in the Ed Sullivan Theater. It was produced by David Letterman. Right. So we were in the Letterman offices with an o overlooking Broadway three days later. Wow. And, you know and that was interesting because writing for TV was such a huge win for us because we'd written screenplays and sold screenplays, but nothing had been made. Right. You don't learn anything when things aren't made. Mm-Hmm. . So being, and also Adam was such a great, generous guy, and the staff was me, Dave, and this guy, Vince Calandra.(00:23:53):There was no staff. So we were allowed to do every, you know, everything, but you would see things that you think are written, well, not playing. And now it wasn't, it wasn't a com it was a con, it was comedic, but it wasn't a joke driven show by any stretch. But you, that was the high life, right? That was the high life. Yeah. But you learned by doing, it's all about doing. And I've told, you know, executive for years, if you wanna rewrite them, you don't hire a movie. You guy, you gotta hire TV guys, because like Dave and I have rerun, rewritten, run, probably 300 rewrites. Okay. That means you, you, you put it up there, you keep what matters. You lose what's screwing things up, and you gotta make it better. Okay. And I think we're particularly good at it of some people, the only way they know how to rewrite is by throwing everything away, which is a waste.(00:24:52):Right. It's, it's a waste of time and you lose good things. But if you want to have your movies rewritten, higher TV writers, because what Dave and I learned through working and TV is you just see it again and again and again. And I always tell people like, the most remarkable thing about comedy is that there is something that you like, you know, Dave and I ran King of the Hill for eight years, you know, and there were, there's both sides of it. Is that, you know, we're, we are the last decision makers, okay? So they're things that we are convinced are gonna kill. Okay. Thi this is so freaking funny, we can't wait. And so the table read happens. Mm-Hmm. And everybody, and you're, and you're not laughing . Okay. And you're like, what? Because you can't make yourself laugh. Yeah. You know, there, there's one guy who worked on King of the Hill, and he had this trick, he, he sort of very nice guy, but very political in a way that he knew how to go to make a laugh happen.(00:26:01):Mm-Hmm. , I think you learned that on SNL or something. You , you know, and that would, but you can't make yourself laugh. And then on the other hand, there'd be a joke that I would condescendingly agree to put on, you know, and Dave, shall We slum with this? And, and, and then the the roof comes off. Yeah. And you're like, you just don't know. It's, it's dark magic. I mean, that's part of magic. But did, no, you joined King, who, was it season two or one, were you Oh, season one. We, we, we, we came in during the first, you know, the, the first run, they were just, they, they, they had broadcast one or two episodes, but, you know, in animation. So we worked on episode three for all, you know, all through. And we're the , this is awful. But Dave and I we're the only ones who worked on that show, except for, I mean, the actors, 13 Seasons David are the only ones like beginning to, yeah. It's it was a lot.Michael Jamin (00:27:08):And tell me about, cause I was, I was there for it. But when you got the, when you guys got the bump to run the show, I mean, what, that was a big, that's a big step in any writer's career.John Altschuler (00:27:16):Well, you know what, what it boils down to is you should always be ready. Uhhuh , you just gotta be ready. And what happened, the wheels had come off King of the Hill for various reasons. And the episodes simply weren't the being delivered. It was, it was, they were gonna cancel the show. And w it was a very weird combination of we were working these incredibly long hours one time, like almost, I think we worked three days without going home one time, two and a half. AndMichael Jamin (00:27:47):I remember there were jack hammering in the lobby while we were trying to sleep in on the fourth floor. Oh yeah. You remember that?John Altschuler (00:27:54):Oh my God. Yeah. So it was just awful. And what Dave and I, we just wanted to go home. Yeah. So we just on our own with a few writers, let's go write an episode because there, it just wasn't happening. And so we wrote an episode and what's interesting is that the show was gonna be canceled and they had no choice because there was a script. We gotta do it. And it played great. Right? And so then, well, they needed another script and they needed another. And what happened, and this is because of Mike Judge, is that it, we were just doing it in the like, oh, let's go, let's go get it done. And it was so gratifying because we liked the show a lot. Yeah. We loved the show. And to see it go off the rails to get it moving again. And basically Mike Judge found out that we were writing all this scripts not by ourselves. Right. With all theri You were there, you know, with all the writers just putting, and they he just said, I'm not doing another year unless John and Dave are running the show. Now. We were very low on the totem pole. Okay. No,Michael Jamin (00:29:02):You were No, you were, you were, weJohn Altschuler (00:29:04):Were co-producers.Michael Jamin (00:29:04):You were co-producers at that point.John Altschuler (00:29:06):Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Believe me, I know. It turned in, it turned into a big problem with Fox because we saved the show. All we asked to take over and run it was to get paid what other people have been paid. And they're like, well, no, we'll give you a 15% bump from no producer. And you're just like, no.Michael Jamin (00:29:29):Hey, it's Michael Jamin. If you like my videos and you want me to email them to you for free, join my watch list. Every Friday I send out my top three videos. These are for writers, actors, creative types. You could, whenever you want, I'm not gonna spam you and it's absolutely free. Just go to michaeljamin.com/watchlist.John Altschuler (00:29:53):There. Apparently there's still animosity to us, cuz we were seen as arrogant mm-hmm. for that.Michael Jamin (00:29:58):Right. Well, you got paid, you gotta get paid, paid this suck guy.John Altschuler (00:30:02):Yeah.Michael Jamin (00:30:02):Yeah. You guys did it for many years and then they canceled the show. Then they, they brought it back and then you were back in charge of it again for the final circum excuses.John Altschuler (00:30:10):Well, yeah, yeah. So they, they kept, Dave and I kept it, kept it alive, is that they, they tried to cancel it two more times. Right. But we kept the, like we just, we always delivered the show on time and the ratings kept going up so they literally couldn't cancel it. They tried a total of three times. Yeah. And then it, there's something kind of interesting to us that a lot of people don't understand is that the last episode, one thing I always said, like, well you didn't do this, you didn't tie it up, you didn't do that. You didn't have, you know, these people there is that. I decided I'm not making the last episode. Okay. If this is the last episode, great. But we had been canceled. Right. The last two. So I'm like, I'm gonna make an episode. That could be the last episode, but I'm not the one putting the, I'm not gonna be the one who puts the, you know,Michael Jamin (00:31:05):Nail the coffin. Right. Because you wanna keep it goingJohn Altschuler (00:31:08):. Well, but I also didn't feel like that was the right thing to do is that, you know, we didn't create it Uhhuh, you know, and I was just like, you know and Mike was good with that. He would've been, he was okay with killing it, you know, he was like, you know, he was, you know, done. But I'm, I'm, yeah. So anyway, that, that was the run of King of the Hill. But what's great about doing that is by learning how to rewrite and also it was a three act show. It helped our movie writing dramatically. Yeah. And so while we were running King of the Hill, we wrote Blades of Glory and got that in production, which we, we simply wouldn't have had the skills Yep. To do it without all of that. The foundations from all those rewrites.Michael Jamin (00:31:57):I was just, I used telling people just the other day, if you wanna be a feature writer starting TV, so you learn Yes. Three act structure, you learn how to do it. And I said exactly what you said, you know, five minutes ago, which was we, we did, we sold the movie a couple movies and the exec said I wish all feature writers were as easy as TV writers. You know, because nothing's precious.John Altschuler (00:32:17):Nothing's precious.Michael Jamin (00:32:17):Rewrite it. Well, fine. Yeah. As long as I can check I'll rewrite it. You know. Well,John Altschuler (00:32:21):I always tell people like, it doesn't disappear, appear, put it to the side, it can always come back. Yeah. You know, be because, and if it co if it makes its way back fine but you don't care by then, you tend to like better. Cuz obstacles, you know how like people who don't have obstacles, you'll like, how'd that piece of shit get made? You know, or you know how it got made, but why is it so bad? It's cause you didn't have obstacles. Right. You always need people going, huh. What? Huh? Wait, because then you got to justify yourself and then you gotta bulletproof it and you gotta try harder. That's how something gets, gets good.Michael Jamin (00:32:59):Yeah. And then what, how did, how did Silicon Valley come about?John Altschuler (00:33:04):Silicon Valley happened because I was reading a book about Steve Jobs by Howard Isaacson. Okay. And I remember reading this book about Steve Jobs and there was this paragraph just a, and it was about Bill Gates making fun of Steve Jobs because the asshole can't even write code. And I'm sitting there, I was on a plane and I remember laughing, reading this going, that's freaking funny. The guy created the biggest brand name in the history of the world. Right. And there's some other guy going, what an asshole. You can't write code. And I was just like, well that's freaking funny. And so then I didn't even know really what writing code meant. Right. So I was like asked my brother who's an engineer and my brother-in-law is in an engineer. Everybody is engineers. And then, so I was like, well, there's something here.(00:33:58):Okay. And then we went up to Silicon Valley to do a little r and d cuz it's like, okay, there's something important here. Couldn't quite put my finger on it. And it was hilarious cuz I was able to get, we got meetings with these tech executives mm-hmm. . Okay. And three out of three said they want, look, we're not, we're not trying to make money. We're trying to make the world a better place. Mm-Hmm. we're just trying to make, and, and, and I was like, that's freaking funny. I remember telling Mike, I was like, Mike, this is, this is a freaking gold mine nobody. They just wanna make the world a better place. Yeah. One place that we, we we met with, they're not there anymore. That's when we, most of the things that you see through the first season, were just from that one trip because you're like, there was a guy number seven and you're like number seven.(00:34:51): And it turns out in Silicon Valley your importance was the lowest, how low your number was because that's how the number you were hired. Right. He was number seven at Microsoft. You know, whatever the hell it was, I don't, you know, so number sevens there. And then this company was, you know how, I can't even remember. I got, I'm sure I got the Snapchat gives you 15 seconds. Okay. We're gonna give you nine. Okay. And I remember going well, wait, so is less a proprietary concept? Absolutely. . They're like, okay, so your whole and these offices overlooked San Francisco Bay, they were fund on and they're pick being, we give you less. Right. and so you're like, well this is ripe for the taking. Yeah. Because self-important. You know, like the original pitch it was in there was like basically never a history of the world.(00:35:49):Have these guys been in charge? Yeah. You know, it's like nerd, you know, nerds in, in charge and there's an angry vibe, kind of an underlying insecurity, which is funny. You know, the, if, if you , when we went into production, the, the, the name of the you always have to have a holding company for a production. Right. And if you look at the end, it says, you know, s b H productions, that's the company that made Silicon Valley. It's because we were flying in and I, I looked down and I turned to my, I go, ah, the ship Brown Hills of Silicon Valley. And so when they, they said, what's the production name? I went, how about SB H productions and how funny. Yeah. So that was Silicon Valley. You know, one, one thing interesting about Silicon Valley I think was that we, we, Dave and I is, is, we met Thomas Middleditch, who was the star of it.(00:36:50):He had an animated show that we helped him with where he drew it and did all the voices. Oh, I good. Yeah. And so when we had this idea, I was like, well, let's write it for him. Okay. Because he was the right age. He was really heavy into gaming and we didn't know that age group, like kind of who, so we wrote it for him. As a matter of fact, the original name was Thomas Pecking of Richard's character because pecking is Thomas Mill ditches. Ma mom's maiden name pecking. Well, that's kind of funny. And so we wanted him, but HBO o didn't want him. Nobody wanted him. And I remember, you know, some thought, they thought, oh, he is too old or whatever. And I'm like, you know, I I tell you, you can't, you don't cast a 22 year old as a 22 year old these days.(00:37:43):He's gotta be older. So I remember he had like a full beard and we had like, we were doing casting. I said, Thomas shave the goddamn beard and get down there. And we, we kept running him up the flagpole and then every he was the best. Yeah. So, you know, so that, you know, that that was, and Silicon Valley was good because what not to, you know, that aren't we great? But we had done animated half hour, we had done live action features, you know, succeeded. This was live action tv. So we kind of like, okay guys, we've done it. You know, and which is, there aren't a lot of people who have succeeded in various moments, which it's inter to me, I often get asked like, well, what, what's, what's the, what's the length of, you know, this project and I don't care. Mm-Hmm. , if it's a half hour, you go, you, you make adjustments. If it's an hour, it, it's just, it's a, it's dr it's a dramatic concept. Right. If I got 15 minutes, I divide it up differently. Right. So we have the skills to do that if that from grinding it in these different arenas.Michael Jamin (00:39:00):Now how so, given that the industry's changed so much, so, you know, even since we, since both of us started, like what do you tell, what do you tell new writers? Or what, how do you see, like, how do you see making it now?John Altschuler (00:39:12):Yeah. That, that's tough because it's so different. It used to be, I would say easy to tell. Like I went, you know, to N C and I would say, well, go to la Just go to LA and start working. Because once you're working, you're around other creative people, you kind of, you know, you get in the mix a bit. You, you, you learn who's doing what. That's not LA's not LA anymore. You know, every people are in Atlanta, people are in New Mexico, PE every, everybody's spread out. Mm-Hmm. . So, and then the biggest difference is difference is that you would write a spec script just to show that like in TV or even in in features, you would write a feature script to sell. Right. For a million dollars. Okay. And there was such a hunger for the next big script that they were, oh my God, we were, nobody's officer NK Krinsky have a new speck.(00:40:08):And it's like, we haven't even got anything made. Okay. But they, they were like all on it. And then, or in TV you would write from a hit show, cheers, Seinfeld, you know, whatever in episode just to show what you could do. Cause everybody knew those shows. Right. So now you really can't write a spec because nobody sees any shows. I mean, I think Hill Silicon Valley's a hit. Right. And people have written specs of it, but most people haven't seen it. So you can't, you can't do that. You have to do original work. So the good and bad of the now is that you have to write an original pilot for tv. And actually, what I tell a lot of people starting to say, you gotta make something. Mm-Hmm. . Okay. And I, I'm not a fan of what, there are some really good examples of this, like insecure where Isa Ra makes her own stuff and then it transitions.(00:41:12):Okay. But what we've ended up with in general are, is a failure of craft, is that if everybody does, if you have to do everything mm-hmm. , the writing's not as good. The directing's not as good, everything's not as good. So there's a little bit of a sloppiness to the media a bit, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's worse. Mm-Hmm. . So I think now you gotta make something, you gotta either make a web series or do some pieces and put 'em out there. Yeah. So even if they're not seen at, unless you at least you have them and you can compile them and send them to somebody because nobody cat, sorry. Nobody knows what anything is. So you go, well here's my my pieces from my you know, reviewed on Collider or whatever. No. Nobody knows. Right. so, but you really gotta do it.Michael Jamin (00:42:12):Right. You gotta, you gotta put yourself on Hu Hustle. And, but I still think it's important to come to LA Cause I still think that this is where people are and you know, this is your, this, you, you get involved, you get, you have a graduating class of people. Yes. Whoever, whatever group you're in, that's your, that's the class you're in.John Altschuler (00:42:28):Well, I, I think you're right because now, but you're talking about writing specifically. Yes. Because Hollywood is still the brain center. Right. And this is where all the improv groups are and all that. So it's there for me, the MEU simply not there. Because what I always liked is that see, costume designers are talented and creative set designers are talented and creative. It, they used to all be around you. Now they can't afford to live in la Wow. So they live in Atlanta and the entry jobs are not as plentiful as they used to be. Like, I mean, they always wanted somebody to feed the beasts. Like, you could get a job as a pa, you could be an assistant that you could do, you know what you want. So that's a little different. But I do agree with you that if you're gonna live somewhere and you wanna write, LA is probably the best place to be.Michael Jamin (00:43:24):One thing I wanna mention is that even now, like I said, you're, you're so entrepreneurial, even now, it's like you don't wait for projects. So many people are like, oh, well, they're asking Hollywood for permission. Yeah. I make my script, read my script, you know, and even like now, you don't ask any anybody for permission. You're out there, you're getting, I know you're traveling to Europe to set some deals up. I'm like, you're constantly hustling for your next job. And look what you've done. You'd think that it would all f you know, nothing falls on your plate. You have to hustle for it,John Altschuler (00:43:53):You know? Yes. And the, you know, well, first of all, I'm, I'm more entertained by, by this I've moved a lot of the things that I'm doing and that David and I are doing to Europe mm-hmm. , you know, like for example, the Gangsters Guide to Sobriety, which you can see backwards. Okay. It was an idea that we could have sold as a, a pitch. And I was like, well, we already cracked it. Let's write it as a book. Because then everybody, ip ip, well then we own the ip. So now we, it's about this gangster and Irish gangster moved to America total re re drug addict dealer charming guy. It's very Scorsese like, but he basically got sober. And I liked all the stories of his horrid past, but I also liked his stories of getting clean. And so he kind of put those together.(00:44:51):It's like you go through 12 steps in aa. This has 12 chapters, so now we're long, we, we were going to do it in America. And then realize, you know what, he's Irish. Let's check out Ireland. Mm-Hmm. . And it's just a little bit fresher to have an Irish company backing us with Irish talent. Mm-Hmm. and doing it as a co-production. And so that's what we're doing in Italy. That's what we're doing in France. The I got the rights to this book, which you can see backwards burning down the house. Uhhuh , which is about the the pump movement in East Berlin before the fall of the wall. Right. And so I'm going to Germany in two weeks. Interesting. You know? Yeah. Because, you know, look, the fact is nobody's gonna do it for you. And the what I like about Europe is that you can talk about the projects more here. Issue one is always race. Issue two is gender identification is, then it's politic. And then, oh yeah. There's an idea in there somewhere. And that gets a little bit grinding when you just wanna talk about what, how cool this project is.Michael Jamin (00:46:06):I wanna mention by the way that your, that first book, the Gangsters Guide is based on a true story. So you had that guy. Yeah. And then, and it's like, that book is now available on Amazon. Everyone goes, check it out. Read it. It's, it's, it's fascinating.John Altschuler (00:46:18):So he, it, it, it's really great. And what's nice is that it's an elevating story, but it's, it, it's pretty damn harrowing. But it is, you know, you know, he survives. So there's a positivity to it. Like he says, like, I just want people to know because Ri Richie Stevens, who it's his life. Like I, I'm not telling anybody what to do. I don't have the answers. I just want them to know if somebody's fucked up as me, can survive and get clean and move on with his life. Anybody can,Michael Jamin (00:46:50):And these meetings in Europe, cuz you know, you're a writer, producer, but you're, you're, you're setting these up yourself. I mean, how are you reaching out to people?John Altschuler (00:46:57):You know what, here's the thing, luck, but also you just take what you have is that during the pandemic, for an odd reason, we ended up in Rome mm-hmm. . And because we, my wife's a psychologist. Our daughter was, hadn't gotten accepted to the school in high school, which Oh, that was great. And everything went freaking haywire, obviously. And so we're like, well, there's nothing going on here. Let's go to Rome. So we're in Rome and it's all locked down. Yeah. And somebody, oh, you should meet this woman Kissy Duggan. Now she was a standup comedian in la She's lived in Rome for over 20 years. She's married, has two kids. And and I connected with her and she started Women in film for Italy. Oh wow. And then I start kind of going, well wait, what's missing here? And I'm looking at Italy as a marketplace and I'm in it. Yeah. And people like me usually aren't there. Right. So people who go to Europe don't tend to have credits. They recognize. Yes. So it's, it it, well theyMichael Jamin (00:48:02):Recognize you. I mean No, not you. They recognize your work.John Altschuler (00:48:05):They recognize my work. Right. Yes. That's not who usually shows up. Right. Usually it's, it's people who have failed and are trying to go, oh. Whereas I'm going, you know what, what if we do this as an Italian American co-production? But Italy first, like I, these twins who I worked with a lot, one of them lived in bologna for seven years working in Tati. And his job was to come in and help turn Ducati. Right. Now, if you spend any time in Italy, it's, it's, it's wonderful and ridiculous because they are the most inefficient society ever and the most blessed. So you sit there and you go like, well, they gotta change, but they don't wanna change and they don't know how to change. Right. And that conflict makes for a really good comedic stew.Michael Jamin (00:48:58):Interesting.John Altschuler (00:48:59):So, you know, like we, we took a biotech project that was really ripe for America and we're like, you know what? We were, you know, while I was in Europe, went to London, met with this great company called Rough Cut. And he is like, it's biotech do it in Cambridge. So we're like, okay, let's set it in Cambridge cuz it's a little more, you know, sounds jaded, but we've kind of . It's not that we don't love doing stuff here, but we've done it. Right. You know, so it's kinda like, all right, well let's do another TV show here. Eh, this is all like, kind of fresh and fun. And also there's a real shortage of writers in Europe. Mm-Hmm. . So you're kinda like, okay. You know, it's just, it's just a fun vibe. Like why I like talking to students is why I like being in Europe is that there's kind of a, you're bringing people along for the ride. IsMichael Jamin (00:49:54):Krinsky going with you on this next trip?John Altschuler (00:49:56):He is not, you know, the, the, he, he is very tolerant of this is all just my crazy bo I get bored easily and Dave's just real like, ah, that sounds great. So yeah. Cause I kinda, it's sort of free moving, like, okay, I'm doing this, you know. But I would say that Dave is 105% supportive of my European adventures.Michael Jamin (00:50:26):So you have a lot of meetings set up then, basically.John Altschuler (00:50:28):Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm gonna be in Berlin for a week and then what's kind of nice about Europe is that the Italian company, they come to Berlin. There's the Bur Berlin Alley. It's a film, European film market in Berlin, then it's Venice, then it's Khan. Right. Rome and then the American Film Market. And so they just sort of, and that's how business is done. Right. So I'm meet, I work with this Luxembourg producer, Bernard Micheaux. He has a mo, he, he got two Academy Award nominations for documentary called Collective. That was great. And he's probably, there's a good chance he'll get an Academy Award nomination for his new movie Corsage Uhhuh . But it's all fun. Yeah. I mean, I know it sounds stupid, but you know, I didn't drive a car without air conditioning across the country and then work as a pa three years to be miserable. Right, right. And you know, we, we've, I don't know if this is untoward, Michael, but I've had this conversation where you, you do everything possible to figure out how to break into the business and then everything possible, figure out how to get outMichael Jamin (00:51:37):. Yes. That's, I mean, I've heard Yes, that's, yes. There's some truth to that . That's so funny. Wow. Wow. This is so interesting. So is there any other, any other advice you, you, you can share with people who are listening to this? I mean, I think you're so, he's such an interesting person to talk to. And like I said, you've been a great boss but a great friend over over the years. But it's because you also, like I said, have this entrepreneurial spirit where you're not doing it the way everyone else is doing necessarily. So,John Altschuler (00:52:08):Well, you know what, here's the thing. On one hand, being off the grid in my outlook has sometimes hurt Dave and I. Cause I kind of, I kind of lead, you know, and Dave is okay with that, you know. But as Dave points out, we wouldn't have anything if you didn't kind of like, well here's the even comedically you worked on King Hill with me. Everything has to be turned on its head. Okay. So if you, you, you got it. Everybody thinks this. Well no, let's do that. Right. And to me, that's the essence of comedy. That's the epi essence of drama. One of the problems I have with entertainment now is that there's this weird belief that everybody, that there's a right and a wrong and , I'm always go, everything's wrong. You know, you think those, you think this is good. Guess what? Oh, you think it's bad? Guess what? Throwing curve balls. Right. which is what I like to see. I like being surprised.Michael Jamin (00:53:09):Yeah.John Altschuler (00:53:09):So now, so the only advice I have is that it's what you always hear. You go, well write, write what you know, what the hell is right. What you know me Well now more than ever, it has to be specific. It has to be your story. Mm-Hmm. your journey. It's the only thing that you own. Yeah. Is your mindset and your experience. So you mine that. Now Jeremy, you probably had to listen to, you know, I talk and like every, like one time my judge goes, we got 150 episodes outta what pisses John Al Schuler off. And it's kinda true. HeMichael Jamin (00:53:49):Say that .John Altschuler (00:53:50):Yeah. He's like, because I'd sit there and I'd go, you know what veterinarians, they piss me off. And so I funnel my experience of taking my cat and them going WellMichael Jamin (00:54:03):That's so funny that he said that. But, but, but that was your, that's always been your take. It's your even on, even on Lopez, when we work together, it's it's like your, your take on what's going on in society. It was like, and, and the absurdity and that,John Altschuler (00:54:16):Well, everything, everything absurd. Cuz people, like, sometimes the the tone of what we do doesn't make sense to people. Because if you read just the synopsis of King Hill episodes, they'd sound, someone would sound pretty horrible. Uhhuh , they'd sound like offensive. But we're not in the offensive business. Okay. We're in the entertainment business. And so if there is a message, it's gotta be at least two or three levels deep. Yeah. You know, that's another problem is that people are coming out swinging with like, well this is my episode, this is my series about racism being bad. Uhhuh . Well that means that you're under the impression that there is a large population that thinks racism is good. Right. Okay. Well that's cuz you don't know anything. Like I lived in a trailer park and actually I have a whole, we have a project to imagined based on when I was 15, I lived in a mobile home that I owned by myself.(00:55:19):And I didn't see how the other half lived. I lived how the other half lived. And guess what, they're not a bunch of racist, horrible people that are gonna shoot. Now, they may shoot you , but there's, but there's a good and bad to them, to them running around with guns is then you start going, you know what, there's a human experience that is universal. And one of the problems is everybody these days has their team. And I don't like teams. You know, I, I I really hate teams. I don't think, you know, liberals like they drive me fucking nuts. Mm-Hmm. right wing. Like I like And it's, this used to be the job of comedy is that you're supposed to make fun of power. Yeah. Okay. Right. Well, you know, it's like, you know, the Matt and Trey from South Park, the, they're really nice and they're really great guys. Cause they're like, yeah, you probably get asked a lot, what side are you on? Mm-Hmm. . And it's like, I'm on the side of comedy. Right. It's not like comedy is a religion to me. I think it matters. I think it has to be cared for. And when I see people thinking that comedy means getting an applause line on a late night show, cuz you go Trump mad, that's not comedy. Right. You know, you gotta work.Michael Jamin (00:56:37):Interesting. That's wonderful. What? Yeah, I mean, I even Lopez, season two, it was, it was all about his quest for relevance. And we're like, what does that even mean,John Altschuler (00:56:47):? Well you, but you know what it, what it meant to me was everybody's trying, like, the world changed. Okay. Yeah. And he, he, there he is like 60 years old or whatever, and the world changed. And he was relevant because he existed. Right. Okay. And you were on tv, it was like, Seinfeld. Why did people watch? Cause it's on tv. Okay. Then relevance. Relevance became this phrase where Well, okay, but what's rel because there was no other metric. Right? There weren't, there weren't ratings, there weren't, people weren't, these companies weren't trying to make money. It was all about relevance. Yeah. So, if you remember, that was part of the, the comedy of nobody knows what relevance means yet. That's what was driving everybody.Michael Jamin (00:57:31):Yeah. We had fun that season. That was fun. Really was a great,John Altschuler (00:57:34):Okay. Well, well to your Michael Jamin is not only him and his partner Sievert, they're pros. Okay. Now, what is a pro and a pro is somebody who has the skills to do whatever you want them to do. Okay. So if you want something hacky and crappy and they're working for you, right. They'll do it. They'll do a really good version of it. But if you don't want something hacking and crappy, they can do that. They have the skills to do what you want. So you guys have always been a delight to work with, but also specifically on the set because you, you're, you know that you're quick. Yeah. You're quick. And it, the, the interesting thing, cuz I'm like, you guys, when I work for other people, they're the boss. Yes. I have no problem with that. I have no problem. As a matter of fact, my wife is like, like if I could work for myself, I would a hundred percent do it.(00:58:33):Cause then I wouldn't have the headaches of running things. But in our business, you often work for assholes who are unhappy and don't wanna go home to their wives. So you're, you're, you're, you're stuck. But you guys are always great because, you know, you have the skills, you're funniest shit. But we never, we always knew eight, you don't, you're not gonna try to e stab us in the back, but if it had to be done, you were gonna get it done. Yeah. So professionalism is key. But you, you guys wrote one of my favorite scripts ever, which was theMichael Jamin (00:59:08):What wasJohn Altschuler (00:59:08):That? The of the, the the garden. Now if you read that, you should, you should reread it because you did not understand how good it was. I remember, I remember you turning it in like, and, and you know, everybody's self-effacing when they turn something in. Right. But you were like, eh, you know, you and Steve were like, and if you reread that, you could be nothing but proud because it's like Anir story. Yeah. And it just builds and builds to the point where Bobby and Hank have murdered this thing. They gotta cover it up, but it's beautifully written.Michael Jamin (00:59:48):And Hank is selling out his son. .John Altschuler (00:59:51):. Exactly. You know, but you, you took him along for the ride. So yeah, no, you guys are, you, you're, you're truly, I don't know, pros, IMichael Jamin (01:00:02):Say this, I say this a lot. It's like the job of anybody who's not the job of showrunners is the hardest job there is. And it's stressful. And so everyone else is, my opinion of everyone else's job is to make the best version of the show that the showrunner wants to make. Right. And everything else is subjective. But who's to say it's better or worse? It doesn't matter. Your job is to serve the showman. They get to decide and, and great. It works out great if you can, as soon as you can accept that you'll be happy.John Altschuler (01:00:28):Well, and, and that was one of the big problems in our industry, is that nobody knows how shows get on the air. Mm-Hmm. . So they don't realize that when you get right down to it, if you are gonna hire somebody, all that matters is the showrunner. Right. Cause there are great writers, but you don't know how the script got there. So many people have gotten good jobs off of scripts that Dave and I had to write from beginning to end, but our name's not on it.Michael Jamin (01:01:01):You know, I I've heard that complaint from other store runners on other shows as well. So you're not, soJohn Altschuler (01:01:05):What happens is, like, remember everybody off of Seinfeld got these huge deals, but all that matters is Larry David, you know, and it was like, you know, the, and the the other thing that's kind of funny is that we would be asked to do a lot of writers round tables. Okay. Where, you know, big, big comedians, a big movies. And they'd ask, and they'd get tables together where you go through the script and pitch jokes on 'em. Okay. And they, Hey, do you know some good people that you could bring in? I'd go, well, yeah. And I one, this was literally the, the, my response and the answers like, well, do you want the guys and the girls the every literally, cause we had a lot of women, they're like, do you want the people who actually can deliver? Or do you want names? Mm-Hmm. . Oh, we want namesMichael Jamin (01:01:51):. He said that to you.John Altschuler (01:01:54):Yes. It's like all they want is to go, whoa. Yeah, we got, we got Neil Simon. Yeah. We've got the ghost of William Faulkner. We've got, you know, they, they don't want people to actually nail it because, so the inside of a staff is, it's inside baseball that nobody really knows what's going on.Michael Jamin (01:02:15):It's funny you say that. Oh no. Oh, it's so heartbreaking. John Altschuler (01:02:20):. It's a tough, ugly business.Michael Jamin (01:02:22):It really is. Well, that's a good place to end. John it. Thank you so much. Let's plug your book again so that people can go out and get it on Amazon. There it is Backwards.John Altschuler (01:02:32):The Gangsters Guide to Sobriety My Life in 12 Steps.Michael Jamin (01:02:36):Yep. Go out and run it. I gotta copy you in my house. Was great. So yeah, John, thank you again so much. It's and I'll see, you can tell k Crisco I'm gonna have from on next at some point just to, so we get the, the other version of the story.John Altschuler (01:02:48):Yeah, exactly. What, what he said. What?Michael Jamin (01:02:50):Yeah. . Why would he say that? . All right man. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you. It was a fun episode. Thank you for listening. And yeah, until the next week. Thanks so much. Bye-Bye.Phil Hudson (01:03:02):This has been an episode of Screenwriters. Need to Hear This with Michael Jamin. If you'd like to support this podcast, please consider subscribing, leaving your review and sharing this podcast with someone who needs to hear today's subject. For free daily screenwriting tips, follow Michael on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok @MichaelJaminWriter. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at @PhilAHudson. This episode was produced by Phil Hudson and edited by Dallas Crane. Until next time, keep writing.

We continue our look back at the movies released by independent distributor Vestron Pictures, focusing on their 1988 releases. ----more---- The movies discussed on this episode, all released by Vestron Pictures in 1988 unless otherwise noted, include: Amsterdamned (Dick Maas) And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim) The Beat (Paul Mones) Burning Secret (Andrew Birkin) Call Me (Sollace Mitchell) The Family (Ettore Scola) Gothic (Ken Russell, 1987) The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell) Midnight Crossing (Roger Holzberg) Paramedics (Stuart Margolin) The Pointsman (Jos Stelling) Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell) Promised Land (Michael Hoffman) The Unholy (Camilo Vila) Waxwork (Anthony Hickox)   TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was celebrating the best year of its two year history. Dirty Dancing had become one of the most beloved movies of the year, and Anna was becoming a major awards contender, thanks to a powerhouse performance by veteran actress Sally Kirkland. And at the 60th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the films of 1987, Dirty Dancing would win the Oscar for Best Original Song, while Anna would be nominated for Best Actress, and The Dead for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costumes.   Surely, things could only go up from there, right?   Welcome to Part Two of our miniseries.   But before we get started, I'm issuing a rare mea culpa. I need to add another Vestron movie which I completely missed on the previous episode, because it factors in to today's episode. Which, of course, starts before our story begins.   In the 1970s, there were very few filmmakers like the flamboyant Ken Russell. So unique a visual storyteller was Russell, it's nigh impossible to accurately describe him in a verbal or textual manner. Those who have seen The Devils, Tommy or Altered States know just how special Russell was as a filmmaker. By the late 1980s, the hits had dried up, and Russell was in a different kind of artistic stage, wanting to make somewhat faithful adaptations of late 19th and early 20th century UK authors. Vestron was looking to work with some prestigious filmmakers, to help build their cache in the filmmaking community, and Russell saw the opportunity to hopefully find a new home with this new distributor not unlike the one he had with Warner Brothers in the early 70s that brought forth several of his strongest movies.   In June 1986, Russell began production on a gothic horror film entitled, appropriately enough, Gothic, which depicted a fictionalized version of a real life meeting between Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairemont at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, hosted by Lord Byron, from which historians believe both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John William Polidori's The Vampyre were inspired.   And you want to talk about a movie with a great cast. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, Natasha Richardson, in her first ever movie, as Mary Shelley, Timothy Spall as John William Polidori, and Dexter Fletcher.   Although the film was produced through MGM, and distributed by the company in Europe, they would not release the film in America, fearing American audiences wouldn't get it. So Vestron would swoop in and acquire the American theatrical rights.   Incidentally, the film did not do very well in American theatres. Opening at the Cinema 1 in midtown Manhattan on April 10th, 1987, the film would sell $45,000 worth of tickets in its first three days, one of the best grosses of any single screen in the city. But the film would end up grossing only $916k after three months in theatres.   BUT…   The movie would do quite well for Vestron on home video, enough so that Vestron would sign on to produce Russell's next three movies. The first of those will be coming up very soon.   Vestron's 1988 release schedule began on January 22nd with the release of two films.   The first was Michael Hoffman's Promised Land. In 1982, Hoffman's first film, Privileged, was the first film to made through the Oxford Film Foundation, and was notable for being the first screen appearances for Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs, the first film scored by future Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman, and was shepherded into production by none other than John Schlesinger, the Oscar winning director of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman's second film, the Scottish comedy Restless Natives, was part of the 1980s Scottish New Wave film movement that also included Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, and was the only film to be scored by the Scottish rock band Big Country.   Promised Land was one of the first films to be developed by the Sundance Institute, in 1984, and when it was finally produced in 1986, would include Robert Redford as one of its executive producers. The film would follow two recent local high school graduates, Hancock and Danny, whose lives would intersect again with disastrous results several years after graduation. The cast features two young actors destined to become stars, in Keifer Sutherland and Meg Ryan, as well as Jason Gedrick, Tracy Pollan, and Jay Underwood. Shot in Reno and around the Sundance Institute outside Park City, Utah during the early winter months of 1987, Promised Land would make its world premiere at the prestigious Deauville Film Festival in September 1987, but would lose its original distributor, New World Pictures around the same time. Vestron would swoop in to grab the distribution rights, and set it for a January 22nd, 1988 release, just after its American debut at the then U.S. Film Festival, which is now known as the Sundance Film Festival.    Convenient, eh?   Opening on six screens in , the film would gross $31k in its first three days. The film would continue to slowly roll out into more major markets, but with a lack of stellar reviews, and a cast that wouldn't be more famous for at least another year and a half, Vestron would never push the film out to more than 67 theaters, and it would quickly disappear with only $316k worth of tickets sold.   The other movie Vestron opened on January 22nd was Ettore Scale's The Family, which was Italy's submission to that year's Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. The great Vittorio Gassman stars as a retired college professor who reminisces about his life and his family over the course of the twentieth century. Featuring a cast of great international actors including Fanny Ardant, Philip Noiret, Stefania Sandrelli and Ricky Tognazzi, The Family would win every major film award in Italy, and it would indeed be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, but in America, it would only play in a handful of theatres for about two months, unable to gross even $350k.   When is a remake not a remake? When French filmmaker Roger Vadim, who shot to international fame in 1956 with his movie And God Created Woman, decided to give a generational and international spin on his most famous work. And a completely different story, as to not resemble his original work in any form outside of the general brushstrokes of both being about a young, pretty, sexually liberated young woman.   Instead of Bridget Bardot, we get Rebecca De Mornay, who was never able to parlay her starring role in Risky Business to any kind of stardom the way one-time boyfriend Tom Cruise had. And if there was any American woman in the United States in 1988 who could bring in a certain demographic to see her traipse around New Mexico au natural, it would be Rebecca De Mornay. But as we saw with Kathleen Turner in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion in 1984 and Ellen Barkin in Mary Lambert's Siesta in 1987, American audiences were still rather prudish when it came to seeing a certain kind of female empowered sexuality on screen, and when the film opened at 385 theatres on March 4th, it would open to barely a $1,000 per screen average. And God Created Woman would be gone from theatres after only three weeks and $717k in ticket sales.   Vestron would next release a Dutch film called The Pointsman, about a French woman who accidentally gets off at the wrong train station in a remote Dutch village, and a local railwayman who, unable to speak the other person's language, develop a strange relationship while she waits for another train that never arrives.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on New York's Upper West Side on April 8th, the film would gross $7,000 in its first week, which in and of itself isn't all that bad for a mostly silent Dutch film. Except there was another Dutch film in the marketplace already, one that was getting much better reviews, and was the official Dutch entry into that year's Best Foreign Language Film race. That film, Babette's Feast, was becoming something more than just a movie. Restaurants across the country were creating menus based on the meals served in the film, and in its sixth week of release in New York City that weekend, had grossed four times as much as The Pointsman, despite the fact that the theatre playing Babette's Feast, the Cinema Studio 1, sat only 65 more people than the Lincoln Plaza 1. The following week, The Pointsman would drop to $6k in ticket sales, while Babette's Feast's audience grew another $6k over the previous week. After a third lackluster week, The Pointsman was gone from the Lincoln Plaza, and would never play in another theatre in America.   In the mid-80s, British actor Ben Cross was still trying to capitalize on his having been one of the leads in the 1981 Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire, and was sharing a home with his wife and children, as well as Camilo Vila, a filmmaker looking for his first big break in features after two well-received short films made in his native Cuba before he defected in the early 1980s. When Vila was offered the chance to direct The Unholy, about a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans who finds himself battling a demonic force after being appointed to a new parish, he would walk down the hall of his shared home and offered his roomie the lead role.   Along with Ned Beatty, William Russ, Hal Holbrook and British actor Trevor Howard in his final film, The Unholy would begin two weeks of exterior filming in New Orleans on October 27th, 1986, before moving to a studio in Miami for seven more weeks. The film would open in 1189 theatres, Vestron's widest opening to date, on April 22nd, and would open in seventh place with $2.35m in ticket sales. By its second week in theatres, it would fall to eleventh place with a $1.24m gross. But with the Summer Movie Season quickly creeping up on the calendar, The Unholy would suffer the same fate as most horror films, making the drop to dollar houses after two weeks, as to make room for such dreck as Sunset, Blake Edwards' lamentable Bruce Willis/James Garner riff on Hollywood and cowboys in the late 1920s, and the pointless sequel to Critters before screens got gobbled up by Rambo III on Memorial Day weekend. It would earn a bit more than $6m at the box office.   When Gothic didn't perform well in American theatres, Ken Russell thought his career was over. As we mentioned earlier, the American home video store saved his career, as least for the time being.    The first film Russell would make for Vestron proper was Salome's Last Dance, based on an 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, which itself was based on a story from the New Testament. Russell's script would add a framing device as a way for movie audiences to get into this most theatrical of stories.   On Guy Fawkes Day in London in 1892, Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, arrive late at a friend's brothel, where the author is treated to a surprise performance of his play Salome, which has recently been banned from being performed at all in England by Lord Chamberlain. All of the actors in his special performance are played by the prostitutes of the brothel and their clients, and the scenes of the play are intertwined with Wilde's escapades at the brothel that night.   We didn't know it at the time, but Salome's Last Dance would be the penultimate film performance for Academy Award winning actress Glenda Jackson, who would retire to go into politics in England a couple years later, after working with Russell on another film, which we'll get to in a moment. About the only other actor you might recognize in the film is David Doyle, of all people, the American actor best known for playing Bosley on Charlie's Angels.   Like Gothic, Salome's Last Dance would not do very well in theatres, grossing less than half a million dollars after three months, but would find an appreciative audience on home video.   The most interesting thing about Roger Holzberg's Midnight Crossing is the writer and director himself. Holzberg started in the entertainment industry as a playwright, then designed the props and weapons for Albert Pyun's 1982 film The Sword and the Sorcerer, before moving on to direct the second unit team on Pyun's 1985 film Radioactive Dreams. After making this film, Holzberg would have a cancer scare, and pivot to health care, creating a number of technological advancements to help evolve patient treatment, including the Infusionarium, a media setup which helps children with cancer cope with treatment by asking them questions designed to determine what setting would be most comforting to them, and then using virtual reality technology and live events to immerse them in such an environment during treatment.   That's pretty darn cool, actually.   Midnight Crossing stars Faye Dunaway and Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti in his first major movie role as a couple who team with another couple, played by Kim Cattrall and John Laughlin, who go hunting for treasure supposedly buried between Florida and Cuba.   The film would open in 419 theaters on May 11th, 1988, and gross a paltry $673k in its first three days, putting it 15th on the list of box office grosses for the week, $23k more than Three Men and a Baby, which was playing on 538 screens in its 25th week of release. In its second week, Midnight Crossing would lose more than a third of its theatres, and the weekend gross would fall to just $232k. The third week would be even worse, dropping to just 67 theatres and $43k in ticket sales. After a few weeks at a handful of dollar houses, the film would be history with just $1.3m in the bank. Leonard Klady, then writing for the Los Angeles Times, would note in a January 1989 article about the 1988 box office that Midnight Crossing's box office to budget ratio of 0.26 was the tenth worst ratio for any major or mini-major studio, ahead of And God Created Woman's 8th worst ratio of .155 but behind other stinkers like Caddyshack II.   The forgotten erotic thriller Call Me sounds like a twist on the 1984 Alan Rudolph romantic comedy Choose Me, but instead of Genevieve Bujold we get Patricia Charbonneau, and instead of a meet cute involving singles at a bar in Los Angeles, we get a murder mystery involving a New York City journalist who gets involved with a mysterious caller after she witnesses a murder at a bar due to a case of mistaken identity.   The film's not very good, but the supporting cast is great, including Steve Buscemi, Patti D'Arbanville, Stephen McHattie and David Straithairn.   Opening on 24 screens in major markets on May 20th, Call Me would open to horrible reviews, lead by Siskel and Ebert's thumbs facing downward, and only $58,348 worth of tickets sold in its first three days. After five weeks in theatres, Vestron hung up on Call Me with just $252k in the kitty.   Vestron would open two movies on June 3rd, one in a very limited release, and one in a moderate national release.   There are a lot of obscure titles in these two episodes, and probably the most obscure is Paul Mones' The Beat. The film followed a young man named Billy Kane, played by William McNamara in his film debut, who moves into a rough neighborhood controlled by several gangs, who tries to help make his new area a better place by teaching them about poetry. John Savage from The Deer Hunter plays a teacher, and future writer and director Reggie Rock Bythewood plays one of the troubled youths whose life is turned around through the written and spoken word.   The production team was top notch. Producer Julia Phillips was one of the few women to ever win a Best Picture Oscar when she and her then husband Michael Phillips produced The Sting in 1973. Phillips was assisted on the film by two young men who were making their first movie. Jon Kilik would go on to produce or co-produce every Spike Lee movie from Do the Right Thing to Da 5 Bloods, except for BlackkKlansman, while Nick Weschler would produce sex, lies and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, The Player and Requiem for a Dream, amongst dozens of major films. And the film's cinematographer, Tom DiCillo, would move into the director's chair in 1991 with Johnny Suede, which gave Brad Pitt his first lead role.   The Beat would be shot on location in New York City in the summer of 1986, and it would make its world premiere at the Cannes Film Market in May 1987. But it would be another thirteen months before the film arrived in theatres.   Opening on seven screens in Los Angeles and New York City on June 3rd, The Beat would gross just $7,168 in its first three days.  There would not be a second week for The Beat. It would make its way onto home video in early 1989, and that's the last time the film was seen for nearly thirty years, until the film was picked up by a number of streaming services.   Vestron's streak of bad luck continued with the comedy Paramedics starring George Newbern and Christopher McDonald. The only feature film directed by Stuart Margolin, best known as Angel on the 1970s TV series The Rockford Files, Newbern and McDonald play two… well, paramedics… who are sent by boss, as punishment, from their cushy uptown gig to a troubled district at the edge of the city, where they discover two other paramedics are running a cadavers for dollars scheme, harvesting organs from dead bodies to the black market.   Here again we have a great supporting cast who deserve to be in a better movie, including character actor John P. Ryan, James Noble from Benson, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs from Welcome Back Kotter, the great Ray Walston, and one-time Playboy Playmate Karen Witter, who plays a sort of angel of death.   Opening on 301 screens nationwide, Paramedics would only gross $149,577 in its first three days, the worst per screen average of any movie playing in at least 100 theatres that weekend. Vestron stopped tracking the film after just three days.   Two weeks later, on June 17th, Vestron released a comedy horror film that should have done better. Waxwork was an interesting idea, a group of college students who have some strange encounters with the wax figures at a local museum, but that's not exactly why it should have been more popular. It was the cast that should have brought audiences in. On one side, you had a group of well-known younger actors like Deborah Foreman from Valley Girl, Zack Gailligan from Gremlins, Michelle Johnson from Blame It on Rio, and Miles O'Keeffe from Sword of the Valiant. On the other hand, you had a group of seasoned veterans from popular television shows and movies, such as Patrick Macnee from the popular 1960s British TV show The Avengers, John Rhys-Davies from the Indiana Jones movies, and David Warner, from The Omen and Time after Time and Time Bandits and Tron.   But if I want to be completely honest, this was not a movie to release in the early part of summer. While I'm a firm believer that the right movie can find an audience no matter when it's released, Waxwork was absolutely a prime candidate for an early October release. Throughout the 1980s, we saw a number of horror movies, and especially horror comedies, released in the summer season that just did not hit with audiences. So it would be of little surprise when Waxwork grossed less than a million dollars during its theatrical run. And it should be of little surprise that the film would become popular enough on home video to warrant a sequel, which would add more popular sci-fi and horror actors like Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation, David Carradine and even Bruce Campbell. But by 1992, when Waxwork 2 was released, Vestron was long since closed.   The second Ken Russell movie made for Vestron was The Lair of the White Worm, based on a 1911 novel by Bram Stoker, the author's final published book before his death the following year. The story follows the residents in and around a rural English manor that are tormented by an ancient priestess after the skull of a serpent she worships is unearthed by an archaeologist.   Russell would offer the role of Sylvia Marsh, the enigmatic Lady who is actually an immortal priestess to an ancient snake god, to Tilda Swinton, who at this point of her career had already racked up a substantial resume in film after only two years, but she would decline. Instead, the role would go to Amanda Donohoe, the British actress best known at the time for her appearances in a pair of Adam Ant videos earlier in the decade. And the supporting cast would include Peter Capaldi, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, and the under-appreciated Sammi Davis, who was simply amazing in Mona Lisa, A Prayer for the Dying and John Boorman's Hope and Glory.   The $2m would come together fairly quickly. Vestron and Russell would agree on the film in late 1987, the script would be approved by January 1988, filming would begin in England in February, and the completed film would have its world premiere at the Montreal Film Festival before the end of August.   When the film arrived in American theatres starting on October 21st, many critics would embrace the director's deliberate camp qualities and anachronisms. But audiences, who maybe weren't used to Russell's style of filmmaking, did not embrace the film quite so much. New Yorkers would buy $31k worth of tickets in its opening weekend at the D. W. Griffith and 8th Street Playhouse, and the film would perform well in its opening weeks in major markets, but the film would never quite break out, earning just $1.2m after ten weeks in theatres. But, again, home video would save the day, as the film would become one of the bigger rental titles in 1989.   If you were a teenager in the early 80s, as I was, you may remember a Dutch horror film called The Lift. Or, at the very least, you remember the key art on the VHS box, of a man who has his head stuck in between the doors of an elevator, while the potential viewer is warned to take the stairs, take the stairs, for God's sake, take the stairs. It was an impressive debut film for Dick Maas, but it was one that would place an albatross around the neck of his career.   One of his follow ups to The Lift, called Amsterdamned, would follow a police detective who is searching for a serial killer in his home town, who uses the canals of the Dutch capital to keep himself hidden. When the detective gets too close to solving the identity of the murderer, the killer sends a message by killing the detective's girlfriend, which, if the killer had ever seen a movie before, he should have known you never do. You never make it personal for the cop, because he's gonna take you down even worse.   When the film's producers brought the film to the American Film Market in early 1988, it would become one of the most talked about films, and Vestron would pick up the American distribution rights for a cool half a million dollars. The film would open on six screens in the US on November 25th, including the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills but not in New York City, but a $15k first weekend gross would seal its fate almost immediately. The film would play for another four weeks in theatres, playing on 18 screens at its widest, but it would end its run shortly after the start of of the year with only $62,044 in tickets sold.   The final Vestron Pictures release of 1988 was Andrew Birkin's Burning Secret. Birkin, the brother of French singer and actress Jane Birkin, would co-write the screenplay for this adaptation of a 1913 short story by Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, about a about an American diplomat's son who befriends a mysterious baron while staying at an Austrian spa during the 1920s. According to Birkin in a 2021 interview, making the movie was somewhat of a nightmare, as his leading actors, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway, did not like each other, and their lack of comfort with each other would bleed into their performances, which is fatal for a film about two people who are supposed to passionately burn for each other.   Opening on 16 screens in major markets on Thursday, December 22nd, Burning Secret would only gross $27k in its first four days. The film would actually see a post-Christmas bump, as it would lose a screen but see its gross jump to $40k. But after the first of the year, as it was obvious reviews were not going to save the film and awards consideration was non-existent, the film would close after three weeks with only $104k worth of tickets sold.   By the end of 1988, Vestron was facing bankruptcy. The major distributors had learned the lessons independents like Vestron had taught them about selling more volumes of tapes by lowering the price, to make movies collectables and have people curate their own video library. Top titles were harder to come by, and studios were no longer giving up home video rights to the movies they acquired from third-party producers.   Like many of the distributors we've spoken about before, and will undoubtedly speak of again, Vestron had too much success with one movie too quickly, and learned the wrong lessons about growth. If you look at the independent distribution world of 2023, you'll see companies like A24 that have learned that lesson. Stay lean and mean, don't go too wide too quickly, try not to spend too much money on a movie, no matter who the filmmaker is and how good of a relationship you have with them. A24 worked with Robert Eggers on The Witch and The Lighthouse, but when he wanted to spend $70-90m to make The Northman, A24 tapped out early, and Focus Features ended up losing millions on the film. Focus, the “indie” label for Universal Studios, can weather a huge loss like The Northman because they are a part of a multinational, multimedia conglomerate.   This didn't mean Vestron was going to quit quite yet, but, spoiler alert, they'll be gone soon enough.   In fact, and in case you are newer to the podcast and haven't listen to many of the previous episodes, none of the independent distribution companies that began and/or saw their best years in the 1980s that we've covered so far or will be covering in the future, exist in the same form they existed in back then.    New Line still exists, but it's now a label within Warner Brothers instead of being an independent distributor. Ditto Orion, which is now just a specialty label within MGM/UA. The Samuel Goldwyn Company is still around and still distributes movies, but it was bought by Orion Pictures the year before Orion was bought by MGM/UA, so it too is now just a specialty label, within another specialty label. Miramax today is just a holding company for the movies the company made before they were sold off to Disney, before Disney sold them off to a hedge fund, who sold Miramax off to another hedge fund.    Atlantic is gone. New World is gone. Cannon is gone. Hemdale is gone. Cinecom is gone. Island Films is gone. Alive Films is gone. Concorde Films is gone. MCEG is gone. CineTel is gone. Crown International is gone. Lorimar is gone. New Century/Vista is gone. Skouras Films is gone. Cineplex Odeon Films is gone.   Not one of them survived.   The same can pretty much be said for the independent distributors created in the 1990s, save Lionsgate, but I'll leave that for another podcast to tackle.   As for the Vestron story, we'll continue that one next week, because there are still a dozen more movies to talk about, as well as the end of the line for the once high flying company.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

We continue our look back at the movies released by independent distributor Vestron Pictures, focusing on their 1988 releases. ----more---- The movies discussed on this episode, all released by Vestron Pictures in 1988 unless otherwise noted, include: Amsterdamned (Dick Maas) And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim) The Beat (Paul Mones) Burning Secret (Andrew Birkin) Call Me (Sollace Mitchell) The Family (Ettore Scola) Gothic (Ken Russell, 1987) The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell) Midnight Crossing (Roger Holzberg) Paramedics (Stuart Margolin) The Pointsman (Jos Stelling) Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell) Promised Land (Michael Hoffman) The Unholy (Camilo Vila) Waxwork (Anthony Hickox)   TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was celebrating the best year of its two year history. Dirty Dancing had become one of the most beloved movies of the year, and Anna was becoming a major awards contender, thanks to a powerhouse performance by veteran actress Sally Kirkland. And at the 60th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the films of 1987, Dirty Dancing would win the Oscar for Best Original Song, while Anna would be nominated for Best Actress, and The Dead for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costumes.   Surely, things could only go up from there, right?   Welcome to Part Two of our miniseries.   But before we get started, I'm issuing a rare mea culpa. I need to add another Vestron movie which I completely missed on the previous episode, because it factors in to today's episode. Which, of course, starts before our story begins.   In the 1970s, there were very few filmmakers like the flamboyant Ken Russell. So unique a visual storyteller was Russell, it's nigh impossible to accurately describe him in a verbal or textual manner. Those who have seen The Devils, Tommy or Altered States know just how special Russell was as a filmmaker. By the late 1980s, the hits had dried up, and Russell was in a different kind of artistic stage, wanting to make somewhat faithful adaptations of late 19th and early 20th century UK authors. Vestron was looking to work with some prestigious filmmakers, to help build their cache in the filmmaking community, and Russell saw the opportunity to hopefully find a new home with this new distributor not unlike the one he had with Warner Brothers in the early 70s that brought forth several of his strongest movies.   In June 1986, Russell began production on a gothic horror film entitled, appropriately enough, Gothic, which depicted a fictionalized version of a real life meeting between Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairemont at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, hosted by Lord Byron, from which historians believe both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John William Polidori's The Vampyre were inspired.   And you want to talk about a movie with a great cast. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, Natasha Richardson, in her first ever movie, as Mary Shelley, Timothy Spall as John William Polidori, and Dexter Fletcher.   Although the film was produced through MGM, and distributed by the company in Europe, they would not release the film in America, fearing American audiences wouldn't get it. So Vestron would swoop in and acquire the American theatrical rights.   Incidentally, the film did not do very well in American theatres. Opening at the Cinema 1 in midtown Manhattan on April 10th, 1987, the film would sell $45,000 worth of tickets in its first three days, one of the best grosses of any single screen in the city. But the film would end up grossing only $916k after three months in theatres.   BUT…   The movie would do quite well for Vestron on home video, enough so that Vestron would sign on to produce Russell's next three movies. The first of those will be coming up very soon.   Vestron's 1988 release schedule began on January 22nd with the release of two films.   The first was Michael Hoffman's Promised Land. In 1982, Hoffman's first film, Privileged, was the first film to made through the Oxford Film Foundation, and was notable for being the first screen appearances for Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs, the first film scored by future Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman, and was shepherded into production by none other than John Schlesinger, the Oscar winning director of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman's second film, the Scottish comedy Restless Natives, was part of the 1980s Scottish New Wave film movement that also included Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, and was the only film to be scored by the Scottish rock band Big Country.   Promised Land was one of the first films to be developed by the Sundance Institute, in 1984, and when it was finally produced in 1986, would include Robert Redford as one of its executive producers. The film would follow two recent local high school graduates, Hancock and Danny, whose lives would intersect again with disastrous results several years after graduation. The cast features two young actors destined to become stars, in Keifer Sutherland and Meg Ryan, as well as Jason Gedrick, Tracy Pollan, and Jay Underwood. Shot in Reno and around the Sundance Institute outside Park City, Utah during the early winter months of 1987, Promised Land would make its world premiere at the prestigious Deauville Film Festival in September 1987, but would lose its original distributor, New World Pictures around the same time. Vestron would swoop in to grab the distribution rights, and set it for a January 22nd, 1988 release, just after its American debut at the then U.S. Film Festival, which is now known as the Sundance Film Festival.    Convenient, eh?   Opening on six screens in , the film would gross $31k in its first three days. The film would continue to slowly roll out into more major markets, but with a lack of stellar reviews, and a cast that wouldn't be more famous for at least another year and a half, Vestron would never push the film out to more than 67 theaters, and it would quickly disappear with only $316k worth of tickets sold.   The other movie Vestron opened on January 22nd was Ettore Scale's The Family, which was Italy's submission to that year's Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. The great Vittorio Gassman stars as a retired college professor who reminisces about his life and his family over the course of the twentieth century. Featuring a cast of great international actors including Fanny Ardant, Philip Noiret, Stefania Sandrelli and Ricky Tognazzi, The Family would win every major film award in Italy, and it would indeed be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, but in America, it would only play in a handful of theatres for about two months, unable to gross even $350k.   When is a remake not a remake? When French filmmaker Roger Vadim, who shot to international fame in 1956 with his movie And God Created Woman, decided to give a generational and international spin on his most famous work. And a completely different story, as to not resemble his original work in any form outside of the general brushstrokes of both being about a young, pretty, sexually liberated young woman.   Instead of Bridget Bardot, we get Rebecca De Mornay, who was never able to parlay her starring role in Risky Business to any kind of stardom the way one-time boyfriend Tom Cruise had. And if there was any American woman in the United States in 1988 who could bring in a certain demographic to see her traipse around New Mexico au natural, it would be Rebecca De Mornay. But as we saw with Kathleen Turner in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion in 1984 and Ellen Barkin in Mary Lambert's Siesta in 1987, American audiences were still rather prudish when it came to seeing a certain kind of female empowered sexuality on screen, and when the film opened at 385 theatres on March 4th, it would open to barely a $1,000 per screen average. And God Created Woman would be gone from theatres after only three weeks and $717k in ticket sales.   Vestron would next release a Dutch film called The Pointsman, about a French woman who accidentally gets off at the wrong train station in a remote Dutch village, and a local railwayman who, unable to speak the other person's language, develop a strange relationship while she waits for another train that never arrives.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on New York's Upper West Side on April 8th, the film would gross $7,000 in its first week, which in and of itself isn't all that bad for a mostly silent Dutch film. Except there was another Dutch film in the marketplace already, one that was getting much better reviews, and was the official Dutch entry into that year's Best Foreign Language Film race. That film, Babette's Feast, was becoming something more than just a movie. Restaurants across the country were creating menus based on the meals served in the film, and in its sixth week of release in New York City that weekend, had grossed four times as much as The Pointsman, despite the fact that the theatre playing Babette's Feast, the Cinema Studio 1, sat only 65 more people than the Lincoln Plaza 1. The following week, The Pointsman would drop to $6k in ticket sales, while Babette's Feast's audience grew another $6k over the previous week. After a third lackluster week, The Pointsman was gone from the Lincoln Plaza, and would never play in another theatre in America.   In the mid-80s, British actor Ben Cross was still trying to capitalize on his having been one of the leads in the 1981 Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire, and was sharing a home with his wife and children, as well as Camilo Vila, a filmmaker looking for his first big break in features after two well-received short films made in his native Cuba before he defected in the early 1980s. When Vila was offered the chance to direct The Unholy, about a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans who finds himself battling a demonic force after being appointed to a new parish, he would walk down the hall of his shared home and offered his roomie the lead role.   Along with Ned Beatty, William Russ, Hal Holbrook and British actor Trevor Howard in his final film, The Unholy would begin two weeks of exterior filming in New Orleans on October 27th, 1986, before moving to a studio in Miami for seven more weeks. The film would open in 1189 theatres, Vestron's widest opening to date, on April 22nd, and would open in seventh place with $2.35m in ticket sales. By its second week in theatres, it would fall to eleventh place with a $1.24m gross. But with the Summer Movie Season quickly creeping up on the calendar, The Unholy would suffer the same fate as most horror films, making the drop to dollar houses after two weeks, as to make room for such dreck as Sunset, Blake Edwards' lamentable Bruce Willis/James Garner riff on Hollywood and cowboys in the late 1920s, and the pointless sequel to Critters before screens got gobbled up by Rambo III on Memorial Day weekend. It would earn a bit more than $6m at the box office.   When Gothic didn't perform well in American theatres, Ken Russell thought his career was over. As we mentioned earlier, the American home video store saved his career, as least for the time being.    The first film Russell would make for Vestron proper was Salome's Last Dance, based on an 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, which itself was based on a story from the New Testament. Russell's script would add a framing device as a way for movie audiences to get into this most theatrical of stories.   On Guy Fawkes Day in London in 1892, Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, arrive late at a friend's brothel, where the author is treated to a surprise performance of his play Salome, which has recently been banned from being performed at all in England by Lord Chamberlain. All of the actors in his special performance are played by the prostitutes of the brothel and their clients, and the scenes of the play are intertwined with Wilde's escapades at the brothel that night.   We didn't know it at the time, but Salome's Last Dance would be the penultimate film performance for Academy Award winning actress Glenda Jackson, who would retire to go into politics in England a couple years later, after working with Russell on another film, which we'll get to in a moment. About the only other actor you might recognize in the film is David Doyle, of all people, the American actor best known for playing Bosley on Charlie's Angels.   Like Gothic, Salome's Last Dance would not do very well in theatres, grossing less than half a million dollars after three months, but would find an appreciative audience on home video.   The most interesting thing about Roger Holzberg's Midnight Crossing is the writer and director himself. Holzberg started in the entertainment industry as a playwright, then designed the props and weapons for Albert Pyun's 1982 film The Sword and the Sorcerer, before moving on to direct the second unit team on Pyun's 1985 film Radioactive Dreams. After making this film, Holzberg would have a cancer scare, and pivot to health care, creating a number of technological advancements to help evolve patient treatment, including the Infusionarium, a media setup which helps children with cancer cope with treatment by asking them questions designed to determine what setting would be most comforting to them, and then using virtual reality technology and live events to immerse them in such an environment during treatment.   That's pretty darn cool, actually.   Midnight Crossing stars Faye Dunaway and Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti in his first major movie role as a couple who team with another couple, played by Kim Cattrall and John Laughlin, who go hunting for treasure supposedly buried between Florida and Cuba.   The film would open in 419 theaters on May 11th, 1988, and gross a paltry $673k in its first three days, putting it 15th on the list of box office grosses for the week, $23k more than Three Men and a Baby, which was playing on 538 screens in its 25th week of release. In its second week, Midnight Crossing would lose more than a third of its theatres, and the weekend gross would fall to just $232k. The third week would be even worse, dropping to just 67 theatres and $43k in ticket sales. After a few weeks at a handful of dollar houses, the film would be history with just $1.3m in the bank. Leonard Klady, then writing for the Los Angeles Times, would note in a January 1989 article about the 1988 box office that Midnight Crossing's box office to budget ratio of 0.26 was the tenth worst ratio for any major or mini-major studio, ahead of And God Created Woman's 8th worst ratio of .155 but behind other stinkers like Caddyshack II.   The forgotten erotic thriller Call Me sounds like a twist on the 1984 Alan Rudolph romantic comedy Choose Me, but instead of Genevieve Bujold we get Patricia Charbonneau, and instead of a meet cute involving singles at a bar in Los Angeles, we get a murder mystery involving a New York City journalist who gets involved with a mysterious caller after she witnesses a murder at a bar due to a case of mistaken identity.   The film's not very good, but the supporting cast is great, including Steve Buscemi, Patti D'Arbanville, Stephen McHattie and David Straithairn.   Opening on 24 screens in major markets on May 20th, Call Me would open to horrible reviews, lead by Siskel and Ebert's thumbs facing downward, and only $58,348 worth of tickets sold in its first three days. After five weeks in theatres, Vestron hung up on Call Me with just $252k in the kitty.   Vestron would open two movies on June 3rd, one in a very limited release, and one in a moderate national release.   There are a lot of obscure titles in these two episodes, and probably the most obscure is Paul Mones' The Beat. The film followed a young man named Billy Kane, played by William McNamara in his film debut, who moves into a rough neighborhood controlled by several gangs, who tries to help make his new area a better place by teaching them about poetry. John Savage from The Deer Hunter plays a teacher, and future writer and director Reggie Rock Bythewood plays one of the troubled youths whose life is turned around through the written and spoken word.   The production team was top notch. Producer Julia Phillips was one of the few women to ever win a Best Picture Oscar when she and her then husband Michael Phillips produced The Sting in 1973. Phillips was assisted on the film by two young men who were making their first movie. Jon Kilik would go on to produce or co-produce every Spike Lee movie from Do the Right Thing to Da 5 Bloods, except for BlackkKlansman, while Nick Weschler would produce sex, lies and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, The Player and Requiem for a Dream, amongst dozens of major films. And the film's cinematographer, Tom DiCillo, would move into the director's chair in 1991 with Johnny Suede, which gave Brad Pitt his first lead role.   The Beat would be shot on location in New York City in the summer of 1986, and it would make its world premiere at the Cannes Film Market in May 1987. But it would be another thirteen months before the film arrived in theatres.   Opening on seven screens in Los Angeles and New York City on June 3rd, The Beat would gross just $7,168 in its first three days.  There would not be a second week for The Beat. It would make its way onto home video in early 1989, and that's the last time the film was seen for nearly thirty years, until the film was picked up by a number of streaming services.   Vestron's streak of bad luck continued with the comedy Paramedics starring George Newbern and Christopher McDonald. The only feature film directed by Stuart Margolin, best known as Angel on the 1970s TV series The Rockford Files, Newbern and McDonald play two… well, paramedics… who are sent by boss, as punishment, from their cushy uptown gig to a troubled district at the edge of the city, where they discover two other paramedics are running a cadavers for dollars scheme, harvesting organs from dead bodies to the black market.   Here again we have a great supporting cast who deserve to be in a better movie, including character actor John P. Ryan, James Noble from Benson, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs from Welcome Back Kotter, the great Ray Walston, and one-time Playboy Playmate Karen Witter, who plays a sort of angel of death.   Opening on 301 screens nationwide, Paramedics would only gross $149,577 in its first three days, the worst per screen average of any movie playing in at least 100 theatres that weekend. Vestron stopped tracking the film after just three days.   Two weeks later, on June 17th, Vestron released a comedy horror film that should have done better. Waxwork was an interesting idea, a group of college students who have some strange encounters with the wax figures at a local museum, but that's not exactly why it should have been more popular. It was the cast that should have brought audiences in. On one side, you had a group of well-known younger actors like Deborah Foreman from Valley Girl, Zack Gailligan from Gremlins, Michelle Johnson from Blame It on Rio, and Miles O'Keeffe from Sword of the Valiant. On the other hand, you had a group of seasoned veterans from popular television shows and movies, such as Patrick Macnee from the popular 1960s British TV show The Avengers, John Rhys-Davies from the Indiana Jones movies, and David Warner, from The Omen and Time after Time and Time Bandits and Tron.   But if I want to be completely honest, this was not a movie to release in the early part of summer. While I'm a firm believer that the right movie can find an audience no matter when it's released, Waxwork was absolutely a prime candidate for an early October release. Throughout the 1980s, we saw a number of horror movies, and especially horror comedies, released in the summer season that just did not hit with audiences. So it would be of little surprise when Waxwork grossed less than a million dollars during its theatrical run. And it should be of little surprise that the film would become popular enough on home video to warrant a sequel, which would add more popular sci-fi and horror actors like Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation, David Carradine and even Bruce Campbell. But by 1992, when Waxwork 2 was released, Vestron was long since closed.   The second Ken Russell movie made for Vestron was The Lair of the White Worm, based on a 1911 novel by Bram Stoker, the author's final published book before his death the following year. The story follows the residents in and around a rural English manor that are tormented by an ancient priestess after the skull of a serpent she worships is unearthed by an archaeologist.   Russell would offer the role of Sylvia Marsh, the enigmatic Lady who is actually an immortal priestess to an ancient snake god, to Tilda Swinton, who at this point of her career had already racked up a substantial resume in film after only two years, but she would decline. Instead, the role would go to Amanda Donohoe, the British actress best known at the time for her appearances in a pair of Adam Ant videos earlier in the decade. And the supporting cast would include Peter Capaldi, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, and the under-appreciated Sammi Davis, who was simply amazing in Mona Lisa, A Prayer for the Dying and John Boorman's Hope and Glory.   The $2m would come together fairly quickly. Vestron and Russell would agree on the film in late 1987, the script would be approved by January 1988, filming would begin in England in February, and the completed film would have its world premiere at the Montreal Film Festival before the end of August.   When the film arrived in American theatres starting on October 21st, many critics would embrace the director's deliberate camp qualities and anachronisms. But audiences, who maybe weren't used to Russell's style of filmmaking, did not embrace the film quite so much. New Yorkers would buy $31k worth of tickets in its opening weekend at the D. W. Griffith and 8th Street Playhouse, and the film would perform well in its opening weeks in major markets, but the film would never quite break out, earning just $1.2m after ten weeks in theatres. But, again, home video would save the day, as the film would become one of the bigger rental titles in 1989.   If you were a teenager in the early 80s, as I was, you may remember a Dutch horror film called The Lift. Or, at the very least, you remember the key art on the VHS box, of a man who has his head stuck in between the doors of an elevator, while the potential viewer is warned to take the stairs, take the stairs, for God's sake, take the stairs. It was an impressive debut film for Dick Maas, but it was one that would place an albatross around the neck of his career.   One of his follow ups to The Lift, called Amsterdamned, would follow a police detective who is searching for a serial killer in his home town, who uses the canals of the Dutch capital to keep himself hidden. When the detective gets too close to solving the identity of the murderer, the killer sends a message by killing the detective's girlfriend, which, if the killer had ever seen a movie before, he should have known you never do. You never make it personal for the cop, because he's gonna take you down even worse.   When the film's producers brought the film to the American Film Market in early 1988, it would become one of the most talked about films, and Vestron would pick up the American distribution rights for a cool half a million dollars. The film would open on six screens in the US on November 25th, including the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills but not in New York City, but a $15k first weekend gross would seal its fate almost immediately. The film would play for another four weeks in theatres, playing on 18 screens at its widest, but it would end its run shortly after the start of of the year with only $62,044 in tickets sold.   The final Vestron Pictures release of 1988 was Andrew Birkin's Burning Secret. Birkin, the brother of French singer and actress Jane Birkin, would co-write the screenplay for this adaptation of a 1913 short story by Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, about a about an American diplomat's son who befriends a mysterious baron while staying at an Austrian spa during the 1920s. According to Birkin in a 2021 interview, making the movie was somewhat of a nightmare, as his leading actors, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway, did not like each other, and their lack of comfort with each other would bleed into their performances, which is fatal for a film about two people who are supposed to passionately burn for each other.   Opening on 16 screens in major markets on Thursday, December 22nd, Burning Secret would only gross $27k in its first four days. The film would actually see a post-Christmas bump, as it would lose a screen but see its gross jump to $40k. But after the first of the year, as it was obvious reviews were not going to save the film and awards consideration was non-existent, the film would close after three weeks with only $104k worth of tickets sold.   By the end of 1988, Vestron was facing bankruptcy. The major distributors had learned the lessons independents like Vestron had taught them about selling more volumes of tapes by lowering the price, to make movies collectables and have people curate their own video library. Top titles were harder to come by, and studios were no longer giving up home video rights to the movies they acquired from third-party producers.   Like many of the distributors we've spoken about before, and will undoubtedly speak of again, Vestron had too much success with one movie too quickly, and learned the wrong lessons about growth. If you look at the independent distribution world of 2023, you'll see companies like A24 that have learned that lesson. Stay lean and mean, don't go too wide too quickly, try not to spend too much money on a movie, no matter who the filmmaker is and how good of a relationship you have with them. A24 worked with Robert Eggers on The Witch and The Lighthouse, but when he wanted to spend $70-90m to make The Northman, A24 tapped out early, and Focus Features ended up losing millions on the film. Focus, the “indie” label for Universal Studios, can weather a huge loss like The Northman because they are a part of a multinational, multimedia conglomerate.   This didn't mean Vestron was going to quit quite yet, but, spoiler alert, they'll be gone soon enough.   In fact, and in case you are newer to the podcast and haven't listen to many of the previous episodes, none of the independent distribution companies that began and/or saw their best years in the 1980s that we've covered so far or will be covering in the future, exist in the same form they existed in back then.    New Line still exists, but it's now a label within Warner Brothers instead of being an independent distributor. Ditto Orion, which is now just a specialty label within MGM/UA. The Samuel Goldwyn Company is still around and still distributes movies, but it was bought by Orion Pictures the year before Orion was bought by MGM/UA, so it too is now just a specialty label, within another specialty label. Miramax today is just a holding company for the movies the company made before they were sold off to Disney, before Disney sold them off to a hedge fund, who sold Miramax off to another hedge fund.    Atlantic is gone. New World is gone. Cannon is gone. Hemdale is gone. Cinecom is gone. Island Films is gone. Alive Films is gone. Concorde Films is gone. MCEG is gone. CineTel is gone. Crown International is gone. Lorimar is gone. New Century/Vista is gone. Skouras Films is gone. Cineplex Odeon Films is gone.   Not one of them survived.   The same can pretty much be said for the independent distributors created in the 1990s, save Lionsgate, but I'll leave that for another podcast to tackle.   As for the Vestron story, we'll continue that one next week, because there are still a dozen more movies to talk about, as well as the end of the line for the once high flying company.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

This week, we talk about the 1980s Marvel Cinematic Universe that could have been, and eventually was. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the undisputed king of intellectual property in the entertainment industry. As of February 9th, 2023, the day I record this episode, there have been thirty full length motion pictures part of the MCU in the past fifteen years, with a combined global ticket sales of $28 billion, as well as twenty television shows that have been seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is a entertainment juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon.   This comes as a total shock to many of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, who were witness of cheaply produced television shows featuring hokey special effects and a roster of has-beens and never weres in the cast. Superman was the king of superheroes at the movies, in large part because, believe it or not, there hadn't even been a movie based on a Marvel Comics character released into theatres until the summer of 1986. But not for lack of trying.   And that's what we're going to talk about today. A brief history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 1980s.       But first, as always, some backstory.   Now, I am not approaching this as a comic fan. When I was growing up in the 80s, I collected comics, but my collection was limited to Marvel's Star Wars series, Marvel's ROM The SpaceKnight, and Marvel's two-issue Blade Runner comic adaptation in 1982. So I apologize to Marvel comics fans if I relay some of this information incorrectly. I have tried to do my due diligence when it comes to my research.   Marvel Comics got its start as Timely Comics back in 1939. On August 31, 1939, Timely would release its first comic, titled Marvel Comics, which would feature a number of short stories featuring versions of characters that would become long-running staples of the eventual publishing house that would bear the comic's name, including The Angel, a version of The Human Torch who was actually an android hero, and Namor the Submariner, who was originally created for a unpublished comic that was supposed to be given to kids when they attended their local movie theatre during a Saturday matinee.   That comic issue would quickly sell out its initial 80,000 print run, as well as its second run, which would put another 800,000 copies out to the marketplace. The Vision would be another character introduced on the pages of Marvel Comics, in November 1940.   In December 1940, Timely would introduce their next big character, Captain America, who would find instant success thanks to its front cover depicting Cap punching Adolph Hitler square in the jaw, proving that Americans have loved seeing Nazis get punched in the face even a year before our country entered the World War II conflict. But there would be other popular characters created during this timeframe, including Black Widow, The Falcon, and The Invisible Man.   In 1941, Timely Comics would lose two of its best collaborators, artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, to rival company Detective Comics, and Timely owner Martin Goodman would promote one of his cousins, by marriage to his wife Jean no less, to become the interim editor of Timely Comics. A nineteen year old kid named Stanley Lieber, who would shorten his name to Stan Lee.   In 1951, Timely Comics would be rebranded at Atlas Comics, and would expand past superhero titles to include tales of crime, drama, espionage, horror, science fiction, war, western, and even romance comics.   Eventually, in 1961, Atlas Comics would rebrand once again as Marvel Comics, and would find great success by changing the focus of their stories from being aimed towards younger readers and towards a more sophisticated audience. It would be November 1961 when Marvel would introduce their first superhero team, The Fantastic Four, as well as a number of their most beloved characters including Black Panther, Carol Danvers, Iron Man, The Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Thor, as well as Professor X and many of the X-Men.   And as would be expected, Hollywood would come knocking. Warner Brothers would be in the best position to make comic book movies, as both they and DC Comics were owned by the same company beginning in 1969. But for Marvel, they would not be able to enjoy that kind of symbiotic relationship. Regularly strapped for cash, Stan Lee would often sell movie and television rights to a variety of Marvel characters to whomever came calling. First, Marvel would team with a variety of producers to create a series of animated television shows, starting with The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966, two different series based on The Fantastic Four, and both Spider-Man and Spider-Woman series.   But movies were a different matter.   The rights to make a Spider-Man television show, for example, was sold off to a production company called Danchuck, who teamed with CBS-TV to start airing the show in September of 1977, but Danchuck was able to find a loophole in their contract  that allowed them to release the two-hour pilot episode as a movie outside of the United States, which complicated the movie rights Marvel had already sold to another company.   Because the “movie” was a success around the world, CBS and Danchuck would release two more Spider-Man “movies” in 1978 and 1981. Eventually, the company that owned the Spider-Man movie rights to sell them to another company in the early 1980s, the legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, New World Pictures, founded and operated by the legendary independent B-movie producer and director Roger Corman. But shortly after Corman acquired the film rights to Spider-Man, he went and almost immediately sold them to another legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, Cannon Films.   Side note: Shortly after Corman sold the movie rights to Spider-Man to Cannon, Marvel Entertainment was sold to the company that also owned New World Pictures, although Corman himself had nothing to do with the deal itself. The owners of New World were hoping to merge the Marvel comic book characters with the studio's television and motion picture department, to create a sort of shared universe. But since so many of the better known characters like Spider-Man and Captain America had their movie and television rights sold off to the competition, it didn't seem like that was going to happen anytime soon, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself.   So for now, we're going to settle on May 1st, 1985. Cannon Films, who loved to spend money to make money, made a big statement in the pages of the industry trade publication Variety, when they bought nine full pages of advertising in the Cannes Market preview issue to announce that buyers around the world needed to get ready, because he was coming.   Spider-Man.   A live-action motion picture event, to be directed by Tobe Hooper, whose last movie, Poltergeist, re-ignited his directing career, that would be arriving in theatres for Christmas 1986. Cannon had made a name for themselves making cheapie teen comedies in their native Israel in the 1970s, and then brought that formula to America with films like The Last American Virgin, a remake of the first Lemon Popsicle movie that made them a success back home. Cannon would swerve into cheapie action movies with fallen stars like Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, and would prop up a new action star in Chuck Norris, as well as cheapie trend-chasing movies like Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. They had seen enough success in America where they could start spending even bigger, and Spider-Man was supposed to be their first big splash into the superhero movie genre. With that, they would hire Leslie Stevens, the creator of the cult TV series The Outer Limits, to write the screenplay.   There was just one small problem.   Neither Stevens nor Cannon head honcho Menachem Golan understood the Spider-Man character.   Golan thought Spider-Man was a half-spider/half-man creature, not unlike The Wolf Man, and instructed Stevens to follow that concept. Stevens' script would not really borrow from any of the comics' twenty plus year history. Peter Parker, who in this story is a twenty-something ID photographer for a corporation that probably would have been Oscorp if it were written by anyone else who had at least some familiarity with the comics, who becomes intentionally bombarded with gamma radiation by one of the scientists in one of the laboratories, turning Bruce Banner… I mean, Peter Parker, into a hairy eight-armed… yes, eight armed… hybrid human/spider monster. At first suicidal, Bruce… I mean, Peter, refuses to join forces with the scientist's other master race of mutants, forcing Peter to battle these other mutants in a basement lab to the death.   To say Stan Lee hated it would be an understatement.   Lee schooled Golan and Golan's partner at Cannon, cousin Yoram Globus, on what Spider-Man was supposed to be, demanded a new screenplay. Wanting to keep the head of Marvel Comics happy, because they had big plans not only for Spider-Man but a number of other Marvel characters, they would hire the screenwriting team of Ted Newsom and John Brancato, who had written a screenplay adaptation for Lee of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, to come up with a new script for Spider-Man.   Newsom and Brancato would write an origin story, featuring a teenage Peter Parker who must deal with his newfound powers while trying to maintain a regular high school existence, while going up against an evil scientist, Otto Octavius. But we'll come back to that later.   In that same May 1985 issue of Variety, amongst dozens of pages of ads for movies both completed and in development, including three other movies from Tobe Hooper, was a one-page ad for Captain America. No director or actor was attached to the project yet, but comic book writer James L. Silke, who had written the scripts for four other Cannon movies in the previous two years, was listed as the screenwriter.   By October 1985, Cannon was again trying to pre-sell foreign rights to make a Spider-Man movie, this time at the MIFED Film Market in Milan, Italy. Gone were Leslie Stevens and Tobe Hooper. Newsom and Brancato were the new credited writers, and Joseph Tito, the director of the Chuck Norris/Cannon movies Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A., was the new director. In a two-page ad for Captain America, the film would acquire a new director in Michael Winner, the director of the first three Death Wish movies.   And the pattern would continue every few months, from Cannes to MIFED to the American Film Market, and back to Cannes. A new writer would be attached. A new director. A new release date. By October 1987, after the twin failures of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe, Cannon had all but given up on a Captain America movie, and downshifted the budget on their proposed Spider-Man movie. Albert Pyun, whose ability to make any movie in any genre look far better than its budget should have allowed, was brought in to be the director of Spider-Man, from a new script written by Shepard Goldman.   Who?   Shepard Goldman, whose one and only credit on any motion picture was as one of three screenwriters on the 1988 Cannon movie Salsa.   Don't remember Salsa? That's okay. Neither does anyone else.   But we'll talk a lot more about Cannon Films down the road, because there's a lot to talk about when it comes to Cannon Films, although I will leave you with two related tidbits…   Do you remember the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Cyborg? Post-apocalyptic cyberpunk martial-arts action film where JCVD and everyone else in the movie have names like Gibson Rickenbacker, Fender Tremolo, Marshall Strat and Pearl Prophet for no damn good reason? Stupid movie, lots of fun. Anyway, Albert Pyun was supposed to shoot two movies back to back for Cannon Films in 1988, a sequel to Masters of the Universe, and Spider-Man. To save money, both movies would use many of the same sets and costumes, and Cannon had spent more than $2m building the sets and costumes at the old Dino DeLaurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, where David Lynch had shot Blue Velvet. But then Cannon ran into some cash flow issues, and lost the rights to both the He-Man toy line from Mattel and the Spider-Man characters they had licensed from Marvel. But ever the astute businessman, Cannon Films chairman Menahem Golan offered Pyun $500,000 to shoot any movie he wanted using the costumes and sets already created and paid for, provided Pyun could come up with a movie idea in a week. Pyun wrote the script to Cyborg in five days, and outside of some on-set alterations, that first draft would be the shooting script. The film would open in theatres in April 1989, and gross more than $10m in the United States alone.   A few months later, Golan would gone from Cannon Films. As part of his severance package, he would take one of the company's acquisitions, 21st Century Films, with him, as well as several projects, including Captain America. Albert Pyun never got to make his Spider-Man movie, but he would go into production on his Captain America in August 1989. But since the movie didn't get released in any form until it came out direct to video and cable in 1992, I'll leave it to podcasts devoted to 90s movies to tell you more about it. I've seen it. It's super easy to find on YouTube. It really sucks, although not as much as that 1994 version of The Fantastic Four that still hasn't been officially released nearly thirty years later.   There would also be attempts throughout the decade to make movies from the aforementioned Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer and Iron Man, from companies like New Line, 20th Century-Fox and Universal, but none of those would ever come to fruition in the 1980s.   But the one that would stick?   Of the more than 1,000 characters that had been featured in the pages of Marvel Comics over the course of forty years?   The one that would become the star of the first ever theatrically released motion picture based on a Marvel character?   Howard the Duck.   Howard the Duck was not your average Marvel superhero.   Howard the Duck wasn't even a superhero.   He was just some wise crackin', ill-tempered, anthropomorphic water fowl that was abducted away from his home on Duckworld and forced against his will to live with humans on Earth. Or, more specifically, first with the dirty humans of the Florida Everglades, and then Cleveland, and finally New York City.    Howard the Duck was metafiction and existentialist when neither of these things were in the zeitgeist. He smoked cigars, wore a suit and tie, and enjoy drinking a variety of libations and getting it on with the women, mostly his sometimes girlfriend Beverly.   The perfect character to be the subject of the very first Marvel movie.   A PG-rated movie.   Enter George Lucas.   In 1973, George Lucas had hit it big with his second film as a director, American Graffiti. Lucas had written the screenplay, based in part on his life as an eighteen year old car enthusiast about to graduate high school, with the help of a friend from his days at USC Film School, Willard Huyck, and Huyck's wife, Gloria Katz. Lucas wanted to show his appreciation for their help by producing a movie for them. Although there are variations to the story of how this came about, most sources say it was Huyck who would tell Lucas about this new comic book character, Howard the Duck, who piqued his classmate's interest by describing the comic as having elements of film noir and absurdism.   Because Universal dragged their feet on American Graffiti, not promoting it as well as they could have upon its initial release and only embracing the film when the public embraced its retro soundtrack, Lucas was not too keen on working with Universal again on his next project, a sci-fi movie he was calling The Journal of the Whills. And while they saw some potential in what they considered to be some minor kiddie movie, they didn't think Lucas could pull it off the way he was describing it for the budget he was asking for.   “What else you got, kid?” they'd ask.   Lucas had Huyck and Katz, and an idea for a live-action comic book movie about a talking duck.   Surprisingly, Universal did not slam the door shut in Lucas's face. They actually went for the idea, and worked with Lucas, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics and Howard's creator, Steve Gerber, to put a deal together to make it happen.   Almost right away, Gerber and the screenwriters, Huyck and Katz, would butt heads on practically every aspect of the movie's storyline. Katz just thought it was some funny story about a duck from outer space and his wacky adventures on Earth, Gerber was adamant that Howard the Duck was an existential joke, that the difference between life's most serious moments and its most incredibly dumb moments were only distinguishable by a moment's point of view. Huyck wanted to make a big special effects movie, while Katz thought it would be fun to set the story in Hawaii so she and her husband could have some fun while shooting there. The writers would spend years on their script, removing most everything that made the Howard the Duck comic book so enjoyable to its readers. Howard and his story would be played completely straight in the movie, leaning on subtle gags not unlike a Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movie, instead of embracing the surreal ridiculousness of the comics. They would write humongous effects-heavy set pieces, knowing they would have access to their producer's in-house special effects team, Industrial Light and Magic, instead of the comics' more cerebral endings. And they'd tone down the more risqué aspects of Howard's personality, figuring a more family-friendly movie would bring in more money at the box office.   It would take nearly twelve years for all the pieces to fall into place for Howard the Duck to begin filming. But in the spring of 1985, Universal finally gave the green light for Lucas and his tea to finally make the first live-action feature film based on a Marvel Comics character.   For Beverly, the filmmakers claimed to have looked at every young actress in Hollywood before deciding on twenty-four year old Lea Thompson, who after years of supporting roles in movies like Jaws 3-D, All the Right Moves and Red Dawn, had found success playing Michael J. Fox's mother in Back to the Future. Twenty-six year old Tim Robbins had only made two movies up to this point, at one of the frat boys in Fraternity Vacation and as one of the fighter pilots in Top Gun, and this was his first chance to play a leading role in a major motion picture. And Jeffrey Jones would be cast as the bad guy, the Dark Overlord, based upon his work in the 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus, although he would be coming to the set of Howard the Duck straight off of working on a John Hughes movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.   Howard the Duck would begin shooting on the Universal Studios lot of November 11th, 1985, and on the very first day of production, the duck puppet being used to film would have a major mechanical failure, not unlike the mechanical failure of the shark in Jaws that would force Steven Spielberg to become more creative with how he shot that character. George Lucas, who would be a hands-on producer, would suggest that maybe they could shoot other scenes not involving the duck, while his crew at ILM created a fully functional, life-sized animatronic duck costume for a little actor to wear on set. At first, the lead actor in the duck suit was a twelve-year old boy, but within days of his start on the film, he would develop a severe case of claustrophobia inside the costume. Ed Gale, originally hired to be the stuntman in the duck costume, would quickly take over the role. Since Gale could work longer hours than the child, due to the very restrictive laws surrounding child actors on movie and television sets, this would help keep the movie on a good production schedule, and make shooting the questionable love scenes between Howard and Beverly easier for Ms. Thompson, who was creeped out at the thought of seducing a pre-teen for a scene.   To keep the shoot on schedule, not only would the filmmakers employ a second shooting unit to shoot the scenes not involving the main actors, which is standard operating procedure on most movies, Lucas would supervise a third shooting unit that would shoot Robbins and Gale in one of the film's more climactic moments, when Howard and Phil are trying to escape being captured by the authorities by flying off on an ultralight plane. Most of this sequence would be shot in the town of Petaluma, California, on the same streets where Lucas had shot American Graffiti's iconic cruising scenes thirteen years earlier.   After a month-long shoot of the film's climax at a naval station in San Francisco, the film would end production on March 26th, 1986, leaving the $36m film barely four months to be put together in order to make its already set in stone August 1st, 1986, release date.   Being used to quick turnaround times, the effects teams working on the film would get all their shots completed with time to spare, not only because they were good at their jobs but they had the ability to start work before the film went into production. For the end sequence, when Jones' character had fully transformed into the Dark Overlord, master stop motion animator Phil Tippett, who had left ILM in 1984 to start his own effects studio specializing in that style of animation, had nearly a year to put together what would ultimately be less than two minutes of actual screen time.   As Beverly was a musician, Lucas would hire English musician and composer Thomas Dolby, whose 1982 single She Blinded Me With Science became a global smash hit, to write the songs for Cherry Bomb, the all-girl rock group lead by Lea Thompson's Beverly. Playing KC, the keyboardist for Cherry Bomb, Holly Robinson would book her first major acting role. For the music, Dolby would collaborate with Allee Willis, the co-writer of Earth Wind and Fire's September and Boogie Wonderland, and funk legend George Clinton. But despite this powerhouse musical trio, the songs for the band were not very good, and, with all due respect to Lea Thompson, not very well sung.   By August 1986, Universal Studios needed a hit. Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in March with Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, the first six films they released for the year were all disappointments at the box office and/or with the critics.    The Best of Times, a comedy featuring Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as two friends who try to recreate a high school football game which changed the direction of both their lives. Despite a script written by Ron Shelton, who would be nominated for an Oscar for his next screenplay, Bull Durham, and Robin Williams, the $12m film would gross less than $8m.    The Money Pit, a comedy with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, would end up grossing $37m against a $10m budget, but the movie was so bad, its first appearance on DVD wouldn't come until 2011, and only as part of a Tom Hanks Comedy Favorites Collection along with The ‘Burbs and Dragnet.   Legend, a dark fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Cruise, was supposed to be one of the biggest hits… of 1985. But Scott and the studio would fight over the film, with the director wanting them to release a two hour and five minute long version with a classical movie score by Jerry Goldsmith, while the studio eventually cut the film down an hour and twenty-nine minutes with a techno score by Tangerine Dream. Despite an amazing makeup job transforming Tim Curry into the Lord of Darkness as well as sumptuous costumes and cinematography, the $24.5m film would just miss recouping its production budget back in ticket sales.   Tom Cruise would become a superstar not three weeks later, when Paramount Pictures released Top Gun, directed by Ridley's little brother Tony Scott.   Sweet Liberty should have been a solid performer for the studio. Alan Alda, in his first movie since the end of MASH three years earlier, would write, direct and star in this comedy about a college history professor who must watch in disbelief as a Hollywood production comes to his small town to film the movie version of one of the books. The movie, which also starred Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Michelle Pfieffer and screen legend Lillian Gish, would get lost in the shuffle of other comedies that were already playing in theatres like Ferris Bueller and Short Circuit.   Legal Eagles was the movie to beat for the summer of 1986… at least on paper. Ivan Reitman's follow-up film to Ghostbusters would feature a cast that included Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, along with Brian Denny, Terence Stamp, and Brian Doyle-Murray, and was perhaps too much movie, being a legal romantic comedy mystery crime thriller.   Phew.   If I were to do an episode about agency packaging in the 1980s, the process when a talent agency like Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, put two or more of their clients together in a project not because it might be best for the movie but best for the agency that will collect a 10% commission from each client attached to the project, Legal Eagles would be the example of packaging gone too far. Ivan Reitman was a client of CAA. As were Redford,  and Winger, and Hannah. As was Bill Murray, who was originally cast in the Redford role. As were Jim Cash and Jack Epps, the screenwriters for the film. As was Tom Mankewicz, the co-writer of Superman and three Bond films, who was brought in to rewrite the script when Murray left and Redford came in. As was Frank Price, the chairman of Universal Pictures when the project was put together. All told, CAA would book more than $1.5m in commissions for themselves from all their clients working on the film.   And it sucked.   Despite the fact that it had almost no special effects, Legal Eagles would cost $40m to produce, one of the most expensive movies ever made to that point, nearly one and a half times the cost of Ghostbusters. The film would gross nearly $50m in the US, which would make it only the 14th highest grossing film of the year. Less than Stand By Me. Less than The Color of Money. Less than Down and Out in Beverly Hills.   And then there was Psycho III, the Anthony Perkins-directed slasher film that brought good old Norman Bates out of mothballs once again. An almost direct follow-up to Psycho II from 1983, the film neither embraced by horror film fans or critics, the film would only open in eighth place, despite the fact there hadn't been a horror movie in theatres for months, and its $14m gross would kill off any chance for a Psycho IV in theatres.   In late June, Universal would hold a series of test screenings for Howard the Duck. Depending on who you talk to, the test screenings either went really well, or went so bad that one of the writers would tear up negative response cards before they could be given to the score compilers, to goose the numbers up, pun only somewhat intended. I tend to believe the latter story, as it was fairly well reported at the time that the test screenings went so bad, Sid Sheinberg, the CEO of Universal, and Frank Price, the President of the studio, got into a fist fight in the lobby of one of the theatres running one of the test screenings, over who was to blame for this impending debacle.   And a debacle it was.   But just how bad?   So bad, copywriters from across the nation reveled in giddy glee over the chances to have a headline that read “‘Howard the Duck' Lays an Egg!”   And it did.   Well, sort of.   When it opened in 1554 theatres on August 1st, the film would gross $5.07m, the second best opener of the weekend, behind the sixth Friday the 13th entry, and above other new movies like the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason dramedy Nothing in Common and the cult film in the making Flight of the Navigator. And $5m in 1986 was a fairly decent if unspectacular opening weekend gross. The Fly was considered a massive success when it opened to $7m just two weeks later. Short Circuit, which had opened to $5.3m in May, was also lauded as being a hit right out of the gate.   And the reviews were pretty lousy. Gene Siskel gave the film only one star, calling it a stupid film with an unlikeable lead in the duck and special effects that were less impressive than a sparkler shoved into a birthday cake. Both Siskel and Ebert would give it the dreaded two thumbs down on their show. Leonard Maltin called the film hopeless. Today, the film only has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 81 reviews.   But despite the shellacking the film took, it wouldn't be all bad for several of the people involved in the making of the film.   Lea Thompson was so worried her career might be over after the opening weekend of the film, she accepted a role in the John Hughes movie Some Kind of Wonderful that she had turned down multiple times before. As I stated in our March 2021 episode about that movie, it's my favorite of all John Hughes movies, and it would lead to a happy ending for Thompson as well. Although the film was not a massive success, Thompson and the film's director, Howard Deutch, would fall in love during the making of the film. They would marry in 1989, have two daughters together, and as of the writing of this episode, they are still happily married.   For Tim Robbins, it showed filmmakers that he could handle a leading role in a movie. Within two years, he would be starring alongside Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, and he career would soar for the next three decades.   And for Ed Gale, his being able to act while in a full-body duck suit would lead him to be cast to play Chucky in the first two Child's Play movies as well as Bride of Chucky.   Years later, Entertainment Weekly would name Howard the Duck as the biggest pop culture failure of all time, ahead of such turkeys as NBC's wonderfully ridiculous 1979 show Supertrain, the infamous 1980 Western Heaven's Gate, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman's Ishtar, and the truly wretched 1978 Bee Gees movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.   But Howard the Duck, the character, not the movie, would enjoy a renaissance in 2014, when James Gunn included a CG-animated version of the character in the post-credit sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy. The character would show up again in the Disney animated Guardians television series, and in the 2021 Disney+ anthology series Marvel's What If…   There technically would be one other 1980s movie based on a Marvel character, Mark Goldblatt's version of The Punisher, featuring Dolph Lundgren as Frank Castle. Shot in Australia in 1988, the film was supposed to be released by New World Pictures in August of 1989. The company even sent out trailers to theatres that summer to help build awareness for the film, but New World's continued financial issues would put the film on hold until April 1991, when it was released directly to video by Live Entertainment.   It wouldn't be until the 1998 release of Blade, featuring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire, that movies based on Marvel Comics characters would finally be accepted by movie-going audiences. That would soon be followed by Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002, the success of both prompting Marvel to start putting together the team that would eventually give birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe we all know and love today.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 102, the first of two episodes about the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures, is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Howard the Duck, and the other movies, both existing and non-existent, we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

This week, we talk about the 1980s Marvel Cinematic Universe that could have been, and eventually was. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the undisputed king of intellectual property in the entertainment industry. As of February 9th, 2023, the day I record this episode, there have been thirty full length motion pictures part of the MCU in the past fifteen years, with a combined global ticket sales of $28 billion, as well as twenty television shows that have been seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is a entertainment juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon.   This comes as a total shock to many of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, who were witness of cheaply produced television shows featuring hokey special effects and a roster of has-beens and never weres in the cast. Superman was the king of superheroes at the movies, in large part because, believe it or not, there hadn't even been a movie based on a Marvel Comics character released into theatres until the summer of 1986. But not for lack of trying.   And that's what we're going to talk about today. A brief history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 1980s.       But first, as always, some backstory.   Now, I am not approaching this as a comic fan. When I was growing up in the 80s, I collected comics, but my collection was limited to Marvel's Star Wars series, Marvel's ROM The SpaceKnight, and Marvel's two-issue Blade Runner comic adaptation in 1982. So I apologize to Marvel comics fans if I relay some of this information incorrectly. I have tried to do my due diligence when it comes to my research.   Marvel Comics got its start as Timely Comics back in 1939. On August 31, 1939, Timely would release its first comic, titled Marvel Comics, which would feature a number of short stories featuring versions of characters that would become long-running staples of the eventual publishing house that would bear the comic's name, including The Angel, a version of The Human Torch who was actually an android hero, and Namor the Submariner, who was originally created for a unpublished comic that was supposed to be given to kids when they attended their local movie theatre during a Saturday matinee.   That comic issue would quickly sell out its initial 80,000 print run, as well as its second run, which would put another 800,000 copies out to the marketplace. The Vision would be another character introduced on the pages of Marvel Comics, in November 1940.   In December 1940, Timely would introduce their next big character, Captain America, who would find instant success thanks to its front cover depicting Cap punching Adolph Hitler square in the jaw, proving that Americans have loved seeing Nazis get punched in the face even a year before our country entered the World War II conflict. But there would be other popular characters created during this timeframe, including Black Widow, The Falcon, and The Invisible Man.   In 1941, Timely Comics would lose two of its best collaborators, artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, to rival company Detective Comics, and Timely owner Martin Goodman would promote one of his cousins, by marriage to his wife Jean no less, to become the interim editor of Timely Comics. A nineteen year old kid named Stanley Lieber, who would shorten his name to Stan Lee.   In 1951, Timely Comics would be rebranded at Atlas Comics, and would expand past superhero titles to include tales of crime, drama, espionage, horror, science fiction, war, western, and even romance comics.   Eventually, in 1961, Atlas Comics would rebrand once again as Marvel Comics, and would find great success by changing the focus of their stories from being aimed towards younger readers and towards a more sophisticated audience. It would be November 1961 when Marvel would introduce their first superhero team, The Fantastic Four, as well as a number of their most beloved characters including Black Panther, Carol Danvers, Iron Man, The Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Thor, as well as Professor X and many of the X-Men.   And as would be expected, Hollywood would come knocking. Warner Brothers would be in the best position to make comic book movies, as both they and DC Comics were owned by the same company beginning in 1969. But for Marvel, they would not be able to enjoy that kind of symbiotic relationship. Regularly strapped for cash, Stan Lee would often sell movie and television rights to a variety of Marvel characters to whomever came calling. First, Marvel would team with a variety of producers to create a series of animated television shows, starting with The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966, two different series based on The Fantastic Four, and both Spider-Man and Spider-Woman series.   But movies were a different matter.   The rights to make a Spider-Man television show, for example, was sold off to a production company called Danchuck, who teamed with CBS-TV to start airing the show in September of 1977, but Danchuck was able to find a loophole in their contract  that allowed them to release the two-hour pilot episode as a movie outside of the United States, which complicated the movie rights Marvel had already sold to another company.   Because the “movie” was a success around the world, CBS and Danchuck would release two more Spider-Man “movies” in 1978 and 1981. Eventually, the company that owned the Spider-Man movie rights to sell them to another company in the early 1980s, the legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, New World Pictures, founded and operated by the legendary independent B-movie producer and director Roger Corman. But shortly after Corman acquired the film rights to Spider-Man, he went and almost immediately sold them to another legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, Cannon Films.   Side note: Shortly after Corman sold the movie rights to Spider-Man to Cannon, Marvel Entertainment was sold to the company that also owned New World Pictures, although Corman himself had nothing to do with the deal itself. The owners of New World were hoping to merge the Marvel comic book characters with the studio's television and motion picture department, to create a sort of shared universe. But since so many of the better known characters like Spider-Man and Captain America had their movie and television rights sold off to the competition, it didn't seem like that was going to happen anytime soon, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself.   So for now, we're going to settle on May 1st, 1985. Cannon Films, who loved to spend money to make money, made a big statement in the pages of the industry trade publication Variety, when they bought nine full pages of advertising in the Cannes Market preview issue to announce that buyers around the world needed to get ready, because he was coming.   Spider-Man.   A live-action motion picture event, to be directed by Tobe Hooper, whose last movie, Poltergeist, re-ignited his directing career, that would be arriving in theatres for Christmas 1986. Cannon had made a name for themselves making cheapie teen comedies in their native Israel in the 1970s, and then brought that formula to America with films like The Last American Virgin, a remake of the first Lemon Popsicle movie that made them a success back home. Cannon would swerve into cheapie action movies with fallen stars like Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, and would prop up a new action star in Chuck Norris, as well as cheapie trend-chasing movies like Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. They had seen enough success in America where they could start spending even bigger, and Spider-Man was supposed to be their first big splash into the superhero movie genre. With that, they would hire Leslie Stevens, the creator of the cult TV series The Outer Limits, to write the screenplay.   There was just one small problem.   Neither Stevens nor Cannon head honcho Menachem Golan understood the Spider-Man character.   Golan thought Spider-Man was a half-spider/half-man creature, not unlike The Wolf Man, and instructed Stevens to follow that concept. Stevens' script would not really borrow from any of the comics' twenty plus year history. Peter Parker, who in this story is a twenty-something ID photographer for a corporation that probably would have been Oscorp if it were written by anyone else who had at least some familiarity with the comics, who becomes intentionally bombarded with gamma radiation by one of the scientists in one of the laboratories, turning Bruce Banner… I mean, Peter Parker, into a hairy eight-armed… yes, eight armed… hybrid human/spider monster. At first suicidal, Bruce… I mean, Peter, refuses to join forces with the scientist's other master race of mutants, forcing Peter to battle these other mutants in a basement lab to the death.   To say Stan Lee hated it would be an understatement.   Lee schooled Golan and Golan's partner at Cannon, cousin Yoram Globus, on what Spider-Man was supposed to be, demanded a new screenplay. Wanting to keep the head of Marvel Comics happy, because they had big plans not only for Spider-Man but a number of other Marvel characters, they would hire the screenwriting team of Ted Newsom and John Brancato, who had written a screenplay adaptation for Lee of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, to come up with a new script for Spider-Man.   Newsom and Brancato would write an origin story, featuring a teenage Peter Parker who must deal with his newfound powers while trying to maintain a regular high school existence, while going up against an evil scientist, Otto Octavius. But we'll come back to that later.   In that same May 1985 issue of Variety, amongst dozens of pages of ads for movies both completed and in development, including three other movies from Tobe Hooper, was a one-page ad for Captain America. No director or actor was attached to the project yet, but comic book writer James L. Silke, who had written the scripts for four other Cannon movies in the previous two years, was listed as the screenwriter.   By October 1985, Cannon was again trying to pre-sell foreign rights to make a Spider-Man movie, this time at the MIFED Film Market in Milan, Italy. Gone were Leslie Stevens and Tobe Hooper. Newsom and Brancato were the new credited writers, and Joseph Tito, the director of the Chuck Norris/Cannon movies Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A., was the new director. In a two-page ad for Captain America, the film would acquire a new director in Michael Winner, the director of the first three Death Wish movies.   And the pattern would continue every few months, from Cannes to MIFED to the American Film Market, and back to Cannes. A new writer would be attached. A new director. A new release date. By October 1987, after the twin failures of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe, Cannon had all but given up on a Captain America movie, and downshifted the budget on their proposed Spider-Man movie. Albert Pyun, whose ability to make any movie in any genre look far better than its budget should have allowed, was brought in to be the director of Spider-Man, from a new script written by Shepard Goldman.   Who?   Shepard Goldman, whose one and only credit on any motion picture was as one of three screenwriters on the 1988 Cannon movie Salsa.   Don't remember Salsa? That's okay. Neither does anyone else.   But we'll talk a lot more about Cannon Films down the road, because there's a lot to talk about when it comes to Cannon Films, although I will leave you with two related tidbits…   Do you remember the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Cyborg? Post-apocalyptic cyberpunk martial-arts action film where JCVD and everyone else in the movie have names like Gibson Rickenbacker, Fender Tremolo, Marshall Strat and Pearl Prophet for no damn good reason? Stupid movie, lots of fun. Anyway, Albert Pyun was supposed to shoot two movies back to back for Cannon Films in 1988, a sequel to Masters of the Universe, and Spider-Man. To save money, both movies would use many of the same sets and costumes, and Cannon had spent more than $2m building the sets and costumes at the old Dino DeLaurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, where David Lynch had shot Blue Velvet. But then Cannon ran into some cash flow issues, and lost the rights to both the He-Man toy line from Mattel and the Spider-Man characters they had licensed from Marvel. But ever the astute businessman, Cannon Films chairman Menahem Golan offered Pyun $500,000 to shoot any movie he wanted using the costumes and sets already created and paid for, provided Pyun could come up with a movie idea in a week. Pyun wrote the script to Cyborg in five days, and outside of some on-set alterations, that first draft would be the shooting script. The film would open in theatres in April 1989, and gross more than $10m in the United States alone.   A few months later, Golan would gone from Cannon Films. As part of his severance package, he would take one of the company's acquisitions, 21st Century Films, with him, as well as several projects, including Captain America. Albert Pyun never got to make his Spider-Man movie, but he would go into production on his Captain America in August 1989. But since the movie didn't get released in any form until it came out direct to video and cable in 1992, I'll leave it to podcasts devoted to 90s movies to tell you more about it. I've seen it. It's super easy to find on YouTube. It really sucks, although not as much as that 1994 version of The Fantastic Four that still hasn't been officially released nearly thirty years later.   There would also be attempts throughout the decade to make movies from the aforementioned Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer and Iron Man, from companies like New Line, 20th Century-Fox and Universal, but none of those would ever come to fruition in the 1980s.   But the one that would stick?   Of the more than 1,000 characters that had been featured in the pages of Marvel Comics over the course of forty years?   The one that would become the star of the first ever theatrically released motion picture based on a Marvel character?   Howard the Duck.   Howard the Duck was not your average Marvel superhero.   Howard the Duck wasn't even a superhero.   He was just some wise crackin', ill-tempered, anthropomorphic water fowl that was abducted away from his home on Duckworld and forced against his will to live with humans on Earth. Or, more specifically, first with the dirty humans of the Florida Everglades, and then Cleveland, and finally New York City.    Howard the Duck was metafiction and existentialist when neither of these things were in the zeitgeist. He smoked cigars, wore a suit and tie, and enjoy drinking a variety of libations and getting it on with the women, mostly his sometimes girlfriend Beverly.   The perfect character to be the subject of the very first Marvel movie.   A PG-rated movie.   Enter George Lucas.   In 1973, George Lucas had hit it big with his second film as a director, American Graffiti. Lucas had written the screenplay, based in part on his life as an eighteen year old car enthusiast about to graduate high school, with the help of a friend from his days at USC Film School, Willard Huyck, and Huyck's wife, Gloria Katz. Lucas wanted to show his appreciation for their help by producing a movie for them. Although there are variations to the story of how this came about, most sources say it was Huyck who would tell Lucas about this new comic book character, Howard the Duck, who piqued his classmate's interest by describing the comic as having elements of film noir and absurdism.   Because Universal dragged their feet on American Graffiti, not promoting it as well as they could have upon its initial release and only embracing the film when the public embraced its retro soundtrack, Lucas was not too keen on working with Universal again on his next project, a sci-fi movie he was calling The Journal of the Whills. And while they saw some potential in what they considered to be some minor kiddie movie, they didn't think Lucas could pull it off the way he was describing it for the budget he was asking for.   “What else you got, kid?” they'd ask.   Lucas had Huyck and Katz, and an idea for a live-action comic book movie about a talking duck.   Surprisingly, Universal did not slam the door shut in Lucas's face. They actually went for the idea, and worked with Lucas, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics and Howard's creator, Steve Gerber, to put a deal together to make it happen.   Almost right away, Gerber and the screenwriters, Huyck and Katz, would butt heads on practically every aspect of the movie's storyline. Katz just thought it was some funny story about a duck from outer space and his wacky adventures on Earth, Gerber was adamant that Howard the Duck was an existential joke, that the difference between life's most serious moments and its most incredibly dumb moments were only distinguishable by a moment's point of view. Huyck wanted to make a big special effects movie, while Katz thought it would be fun to set the story in Hawaii so she and her husband could have some fun while shooting there. The writers would spend years on their script, removing most everything that made the Howard the Duck comic book so enjoyable to its readers. Howard and his story would be played completely straight in the movie, leaning on subtle gags not unlike a Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movie, instead of embracing the surreal ridiculousness of the comics. They would write humongous effects-heavy set pieces, knowing they would have access to their producer's in-house special effects team, Industrial Light and Magic, instead of the comics' more cerebral endings. And they'd tone down the more risqué aspects of Howard's personality, figuring a more family-friendly movie would bring in more money at the box office.   It would take nearly twelve years for all the pieces to fall into place for Howard the Duck to begin filming. But in the spring of 1985, Universal finally gave the green light for Lucas and his tea to finally make the first live-action feature film based on a Marvel Comics character.   For Beverly, the filmmakers claimed to have looked at every young actress in Hollywood before deciding on twenty-four year old Lea Thompson, who after years of supporting roles in movies like Jaws 3-D, All the Right Moves and Red Dawn, had found success playing Michael J. Fox's mother in Back to the Future. Twenty-six year old Tim Robbins had only made two movies up to this point, at one of the frat boys in Fraternity Vacation and as one of the fighter pilots in Top Gun, and this was his first chance to play a leading role in a major motion picture. And Jeffrey Jones would be cast as the bad guy, the Dark Overlord, based upon his work in the 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus, although he would be coming to the set of Howard the Duck straight off of working on a John Hughes movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.   Howard the Duck would begin shooting on the Universal Studios lot of November 11th, 1985, and on the very first day of production, the duck puppet being used to film would have a major mechanical failure, not unlike the mechanical failure of the shark in Jaws that would force Steven Spielberg to become more creative with how he shot that character. George Lucas, who would be a hands-on producer, would suggest that maybe they could shoot other scenes not involving the duck, while his crew at ILM created a fully functional, life-sized animatronic duck costume for a little actor to wear on set. At first, the lead actor in the duck suit was a twelve-year old boy, but within days of his start on the film, he would develop a severe case of claustrophobia inside the costume. Ed Gale, originally hired to be the stuntman in the duck costume, would quickly take over the role. Since Gale could work longer hours than the child, due to the very restrictive laws surrounding child actors on movie and television sets, this would help keep the movie on a good production schedule, and make shooting the questionable love scenes between Howard and Beverly easier for Ms. Thompson, who was creeped out at the thought of seducing a pre-teen for a scene.   To keep the shoot on schedule, not only would the filmmakers employ a second shooting unit to shoot the scenes not involving the main actors, which is standard operating procedure on most movies, Lucas would supervise a third shooting unit that would shoot Robbins and Gale in one of the film's more climactic moments, when Howard and Phil are trying to escape being captured by the authorities by flying off on an ultralight plane. Most of this sequence would be shot in the town of Petaluma, California, on the same streets where Lucas had shot American Graffiti's iconic cruising scenes thirteen years earlier.   After a month-long shoot of the film's climax at a naval station in San Francisco, the film would end production on March 26th, 1986, leaving the $36m film barely four months to be put together in order to make its already set in stone August 1st, 1986, release date.   Being used to quick turnaround times, the effects teams working on the film would get all their shots completed with time to spare, not only because they were good at their jobs but they had the ability to start work before the film went into production. For the end sequence, when Jones' character had fully transformed into the Dark Overlord, master stop motion animator Phil Tippett, who had left ILM in 1984 to start his own effects studio specializing in that style of animation, had nearly a year to put together what would ultimately be less than two minutes of actual screen time.   As Beverly was a musician, Lucas would hire English musician and composer Thomas Dolby, whose 1982 single She Blinded Me With Science became a global smash hit, to write the songs for Cherry Bomb, the all-girl rock group lead by Lea Thompson's Beverly. Playing KC, the keyboardist for Cherry Bomb, Holly Robinson would book her first major acting role. For the music, Dolby would collaborate with Allee Willis, the co-writer of Earth Wind and Fire's September and Boogie Wonderland, and funk legend George Clinton. But despite this powerhouse musical trio, the songs for the band were not very good, and, with all due respect to Lea Thompson, not very well sung.   By August 1986, Universal Studios needed a hit. Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in March with Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, the first six films they released for the year were all disappointments at the box office and/or with the critics.    The Best of Times, a comedy featuring Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as two friends who try to recreate a high school football game which changed the direction of both their lives. Despite a script written by Ron Shelton, who would be nominated for an Oscar for his next screenplay, Bull Durham, and Robin Williams, the $12m film would gross less than $8m.    The Money Pit, a comedy with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, would end up grossing $37m against a $10m budget, but the movie was so bad, its first appearance on DVD wouldn't come until 2011, and only as part of a Tom Hanks Comedy Favorites Collection along with The ‘Burbs and Dragnet.   Legend, a dark fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Cruise, was supposed to be one of the biggest hits… of 1985. But Scott and the studio would fight over the film, with the director wanting them to release a two hour and five minute long version with a classical movie score by Jerry Goldsmith, while the studio eventually cut the film down an hour and twenty-nine minutes with a techno score by Tangerine Dream. Despite an amazing makeup job transforming Tim Curry into the Lord of Darkness as well as sumptuous costumes and cinematography, the $24.5m film would just miss recouping its production budget back in ticket sales.   Tom Cruise would become a superstar not three weeks later, when Paramount Pictures released Top Gun, directed by Ridley's little brother Tony Scott.   Sweet Liberty should have been a solid performer for the studio. Alan Alda, in his first movie since the end of MASH three years earlier, would write, direct and star in this comedy about a college history professor who must watch in disbelief as a Hollywood production comes to his small town to film the movie version of one of the books. The movie, which also starred Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Michelle Pfieffer and screen legend Lillian Gish, would get lost in the shuffle of other comedies that were already playing in theatres like Ferris Bueller and Short Circuit.   Legal Eagles was the movie to beat for the summer of 1986… at least on paper. Ivan Reitman's follow-up film to Ghostbusters would feature a cast that included Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, along with Brian Denny, Terence Stamp, and Brian Doyle-Murray, and was perhaps too much movie, being a legal romantic comedy mystery crime thriller.   Phew.   If I were to do an episode about agency packaging in the 1980s, the process when a talent agency like Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, put two or more of their clients together in a project not because it might be best for the movie but best for the agency that will collect a 10% commission from each client attached to the project, Legal Eagles would be the example of packaging gone too far. Ivan Reitman was a client of CAA. As were Redford,  and Winger, and Hannah. As was Bill Murray, who was originally cast in the Redford role. As were Jim Cash and Jack Epps, the screenwriters for the film. As was Tom Mankewicz, the co-writer of Superman and three Bond films, who was brought in to rewrite the script when Murray left and Redford came in. As was Frank Price, the chairman of Universal Pictures when the project was put together. All told, CAA would book more than $1.5m in commissions for themselves from all their clients working on the film.   And it sucked.   Despite the fact that it had almost no special effects, Legal Eagles would cost $40m to produce, one of the most expensive movies ever made to that point, nearly one and a half times the cost of Ghostbusters. The film would gross nearly $50m in the US, which would make it only the 14th highest grossing film of the year. Less than Stand By Me. Less than The Color of Money. Less than Down and Out in Beverly Hills.   And then there was Psycho III, the Anthony Perkins-directed slasher film that brought good old Norman Bates out of mothballs once again. An almost direct follow-up to Psycho II from 1983, the film neither embraced by horror film fans or critics, the film would only open in eighth place, despite the fact there hadn't been a horror movie in theatres for months, and its $14m gross would kill off any chance for a Psycho IV in theatres.   In late June, Universal would hold a series of test screenings for Howard the Duck. Depending on who you talk to, the test screenings either went really well, or went so bad that one of the writers would tear up negative response cards before they could be given to the score compilers, to goose the numbers up, pun only somewhat intended. I tend to believe the latter story, as it was fairly well reported at the time that the test screenings went so bad, Sid Sheinberg, the CEO of Universal, and Frank Price, the President of the studio, got into a fist fight in the lobby of one of the theatres running one of the test screenings, over who was to blame for this impending debacle.   And a debacle it was.   But just how bad?   So bad, copywriters from across the nation reveled in giddy glee over the chances to have a headline that read “‘Howard the Duck' Lays an Egg!”   And it did.   Well, sort of.   When it opened in 1554 theatres on August 1st, the film would gross $5.07m, the second best opener of the weekend, behind the sixth Friday the 13th entry, and above other new movies like the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason dramedy Nothing in Common and the cult film in the making Flight of the Navigator. And $5m in 1986 was a fairly decent if unspectacular opening weekend gross. The Fly was considered a massive success when it opened to $7m just two weeks later. Short Circuit, which had opened to $5.3m in May, was also lauded as being a hit right out of the gate.   And the reviews were pretty lousy. Gene Siskel gave the film only one star, calling it a stupid film with an unlikeable lead in the duck and special effects that were less impressive than a sparkler shoved into a birthday cake. Both Siskel and Ebert would give it the dreaded two thumbs down on their show. Leonard Maltin called the film hopeless. Today, the film only has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 81 reviews.   But despite the shellacking the film took, it wouldn't be all bad for several of the people involved in the making of the film.   Lea Thompson was so worried her career might be over after the opening weekend of the film, she accepted a role in the John Hughes movie Some Kind of Wonderful that she had turned down multiple times before. As I stated in our March 2021 episode about that movie, it's my favorite of all John Hughes movies, and it would lead to a happy ending for Thompson as well. Although the film was not a massive success, Thompson and the film's director, Howard Deutch, would fall in love during the making of the film. They would marry in 1989, have two daughters together, and as of the writing of this episode, they are still happily married.   For Tim Robbins, it showed filmmakers that he could handle a leading role in a movie. Within two years, he would be starring alongside Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, and he career would soar for the next three decades.   And for Ed Gale, his being able to act while in a full-body duck suit would lead him to be cast to play Chucky in the first two Child's Play movies as well as Bride of Chucky.   Years later, Entertainment Weekly would name Howard the Duck as the biggest pop culture failure of all time, ahead of such turkeys as NBC's wonderfully ridiculous 1979 show Supertrain, the infamous 1980 Western Heaven's Gate, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman's Ishtar, and the truly wretched 1978 Bee Gees movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.   But Howard the Duck, the character, not the movie, would enjoy a renaissance in 2014, when James Gunn included a CG-animated version of the character in the post-credit sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy. The character would show up again in the Disney animated Guardians television series, and in the 2021 Disney+ anthology series Marvel's What If…   There technically would be one other 1980s movie based on a Marvel character, Mark Goldblatt's version of The Punisher, featuring Dolph Lundgren as Frank Castle. Shot in Australia in 1988, the film was supposed to be released by New World Pictures in August of 1989. The company even sent out trailers to theatres that summer to help build awareness for the film, but New World's continued financial issues would put the film on hold until April 1991, when it was released directly to video by Live Entertainment.   It wouldn't be until the 1998 release of Blade, featuring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire, that movies based on Marvel Comics characters would finally be accepted by movie-going audiences. That would soon be followed by Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002, the success of both prompting Marvel to start putting together the team that would eventually give birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe we all know and love today.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 102, the first of two episodes about the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures, is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Howard the Duck, and the other movies, both existing and non-existent, we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Today on the show, we have million-dollar screenwriter Diane Drake. Her produced original scripts include ONLY YOU, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Marisa Tomei, and WHAT WOMEN WANT, starring Mel Gibson. Her original script for ONLY YOU sold for $1 million, and WHAT WOMEN WANT is the second highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time (Box Office Mojo).In addition, both films have recently been remade in China, featuring major Chinese stars. And WHAT WOMEN WANT has recently been remade by Paramount Pictures as WHAT MEN WANT, with Taraji Henson starring in the Mel Gibson role.Diane, who is a member of the Writers Guild of America, recently authored her first book, Get Your Story Straight, a step-by-step guide to writing your screenplay.She has taught screenwriting through UCLA Extension Writers' Program and now offers story consulting and her own guided online course via her website.Diane has also been a speaker/instructor for The Austin Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Rocaberti Writers Retreat in Dordogne, France, the American Film Market, Scriptwriters Network, Phoenix Screenwriters Association, Stowe Story Labs, Romance Writers of America, Oklahoma Writers Federation, University Club, Storyboard Development Group and the Writers Store, among others; and a judge for the Humanitas Prize, the Austin Film Festival and the UCLA Writers Program.In this episode, we get into the nitty-gritty of being a screenwriter in Hollywood. Diane is very open about her experiences, the good and the terrible. If you want to be a working screenwriter in Hollywood, then get ready to take notes.Enjoy my eye-opening conversation with Diane Drake.

Today's guest is Heather Hale, author of How to Work the Film and TV Markets: A Guide for Content Creators. Heather Hale is a film and television director, screenwriter and producer with over 50 hours of credits. She is currently under contract to direct an indie romantic comedy.She directed, produced and co-wrote the million dollar feature Absolute Killers (2011) which was marketed by distributors at Le Marche du Film and the American Film Market. She wrote the $5.5 million dollars Lifetime Original Movie The Courage to Love (2000) which starred Vanessa Williams, Stacy Keach, Gil Bellows and Diahann Carroll.Heather's new book How to Work the Film & TV Markets: A Guide for Content Creators was just published this summer by Focal Press/Routledge while her Story$elling: How to Develop, Market and Pitch Film & TV Projects will be published in 2018 by Michael Weise Productions.For over two decades, Heather has served as an international keynote speaker, teacher, moderator, panelist and custom workshop facilitator for film and TV markets, festivals, writers workshops, colleges and universities and Chambers of Commerce around the globe, including creative adventure weeklong retreats such as StoryTellers on WalkAbout.Enjoy my conversation with Heather Hale.

Kansas City, MO (November 16, 2022) – The awards were given for David Tittone's and David Torre's comedic TV Series, Daddy's Divas, about a recently widowed father of three daughters who struggles to keep his sanity. The Pilot for Daddy's Divas received the Award for Best Comedy Series Episode in Houston and Episode Five received the Award for Best Comedy Series Episode in Austin.Producer, Assistant Director, and Actress Christie Courville, who accepted the award in Austin, had this to say about the achievement: “I was very honored to represent Daddy's Divas, our amazingly talented cast and crew, and the incredible Kansas City film community. Mikel Fair does a fantastic job bringing filmmakers from all over the world together to celebrate comedy. I truly enjoyed being a part of it.” Daddy's Divas, produced by Paradise Lost Films, is the story of a widowed father and his three daughters, compounded by the escapades of his contemporary extended family. Director and Co-Writer David Tittone had this to say about receiving the awards for Best Comedy Series Episodes: “The Austin and Houston Comedy Film Festivals are truly world-class events. I am honored to accept these awards on behalf of the entire cast and crew of Daddy's Divas. Festival Director Mikel Fair is a champion of comedy and his festivals truly understand and embrace the importance of comedy in film and the positive impact comedic films have on society as a whole.” In winning these awards in Austin and Houston, Daddy's Divas joins comedy filmmakers, series creators and screenwriters from all over the world who submit their works with the goal of showcasing their creative products in Texas. These events, known collectively as the Film Festival Circuit, were founded by author and retired filmmaker Mikel Fair who worked on location in the Film and Television industry from 1999-2015. Los Angeles based Distributor and International Sales Agent Indie Rights acquired all worldwide rights for the award-winning series. They recently featured Daddy's Divas at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, California. Paradise Lost Films Executive and Daddy's Divas Line Producer Hannah Klinginsmith is thrilled the TV Series continues to receive recognition before the official release: "I am excited to see the success that Daddy's Divas continues to accrue. From its early stages until the final editing, I was continually amazed by the talent involved. I am honored to have my name attached to this project and am excited to see what the future has in store.”For more information visit Daddy's Divas Facebook page at Daddy's Divas | Facebook.

If you have ever looked into selling your film at a film market then you more than likely have heard of the North America's largest film market, AFM or the American Film Market.The American Film Market is a labyrinth of crazy characters, thieves, wannabes, filmmakers hustling their latest film, distributors, industry professionals and of course buyers and sellers from around the globe.My guest this week is Ben Yennie who has written the only real guide to this carnival called "The Guerilla Rep: American Film Market Distribution Success on No Budget." You should not go to the American Film Market or any film market for that matter without reading this book.Get Social with Indie Film Hustle:Facebook: Indie Film HustleTwitter: @indiefilmhustle Instagram: @ifilmhustleYouTube: Indie Film Hustle TVPodcast: IFH Podcast

I had the pleasure of being a moderator at the Austin Film Festival and an attendee at the American Film Market over the last few weeks and just wanted to share why you should consider attending both of these amazing events!

Max & Shayna celebrate the return of AFM while also tackling some common questions about page counts (assist to Lee Jessup) & determining when a new scene starts. Also, did you hear they found Santa?

In this episode Ryan talks with international sale agent DEVIN CARTER about how filmmakers can make the most of their American Film Market experience. He also shares five tips on how to find a sales agent to represent your feature film at AFM.

The American Film Market (AFM) is one of the largest and most important motion picture business events. It takes place each November in Santa Monica, California. This episode is for you if you are an independent filmmaker or want to get into the film industry. Tom Malloy shares five tips on making the most of AFM in it.

IFH - American Film Market 2022 Badge Giveaway Contest!! AFM Badge giveaway - Two Executive Plus Badges. It's a full 5-day badge with access to all the panels. https://americanfilmmarket.com/badges-prices/ that sell for $995 each. Below are rules: M

Today on the show we have Jonathan Wolf, the managing director of the American Film Market or AFM as it's known. The AFM has gone through many changes over the years. In recent years the world of film distribution has been turned upside down and AFM has been changing along with it. I have the honor to be moderating a panel on Micro-Budget Filmmaking at this year's AFM. The times they are a-changing​. I sit down at talk Netflix, streaming, OTT, self-distribution and how you can screen your film to hundreds of potential buyers at the AFM.Jonathan Wolf is Executive Vice President of the Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA®) and Managing Director of the American Film Market® (AFM®). The Independent Film & Television Alliance is the global trade association of independent producers and distributors of motion picture and television programming. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the organization represents and provides significant entertainment industry services to 125 member companies from 20 countries.Since his appointment in 1998, Mr. Wolf has guided the growth and repositioning of the American Film Market (AFM), the world's largest film market. A pivotal destination for independent filmmakers and business people from all over the world, the AFM is a global marketplace where more than $1 billion in motion picture production and distribution deals are closed each year.The eight-day Market hosts more than 8,000 industry professionals and screens more than 306feature films. Participants come from over 80 countries and include acquisition and development executives, agents, attorneys, directors, distributors, financiers, film commissioners, producers, writers, the world's press, and all those who provide services to the motion picture industry.If you want to sell your film then get ready to take some notes. Enjoy my conversation with Johnathan Wolf from the American Film Market.