Podcasts about Any Which Way You Can

We discuss William Lustig's 1988 film, "Maniac Cop" with guests Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum! We also talk about their latest comic series from Dark Horse Comics, "Minor Threats". What grindhouse filmmaker would best adapt this comic? What is it like working in an already established franchise vs creator owned comics? And why is Tom Atkins the sexiest man alive?Pick up your Minor Threats books at Dark Horse Comics!Movies DiscussedThe Honeymoon Killers (1970)The Lineup (1958)The Warriors (1979)Combat Shock (1984)Life is Hot in Cracktown (2009)Lawman (1971)Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)The Prowler (1951)On Dangerous Ground (1951)I Wake Up Screaming (1941)Ghoulies (1984)The Terminator (1984)Martin (1977)God Told Me To (1976)RatPfink and Boo Boo (1966)Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)The Fog (1980)Night of the Creeps (1986)Any Which Way You Can (1980)GETEVEN (1993)House 2: The Second Story (1987)Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987)New Nightmare (1994)Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street(2019)Christmas Evil (1980)Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

"I want a monkey. And I wanna do whatever I want."Antonio from The Cultworthy podcast joins for the second time for trucker time! Well, there is debate about what qualifies as a trucker movie. Interesting though that that all these movies were within the same six years of the 70s. What a decade! For trucks.0:00 -- Intro3:31 -- Duel31:41 -- White Line Fever49:27 --  Every Which Way But Loose1.09:21 -- Contact information1.12:08 -- Awards and rankings1.56:19 -- Future business (with Ammon on the horn!)2:04:00 -- Outro, and outtakesHey! Be sure to watch The Cheap Detective, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Croupier for next time!Hey! Leave us a voicemail at (801) 896-4542!Hey! Shop the Zazzle store!Hey! Hear The Cultworthy!Hey! Hear In Memoriam!Hey! Hear Fantasy Murder Love Triangle!Hey! Ben Affleck Armageddon commentary excerpt!Hey! Siskel liked Any Which Way You Can!Hey! Siskel didn't like Every Which Way But Loose!Hey! Let's hear a Lurleen song!Hey! Fascinating Every Which Way But Loose Trivia!Hey! See the White Line Fever Trailer from Hell!Hey! Subscribe in iTunes!Hey! Check out the Facebook page and vote on the next category!Hey! Check out Jon's YM&T Letterboxd list!Hey! Check out Roy's YM&T Letterboxd list!Hey! Email us at yoursminetheirspodcast@gmail.com! Send new topics! Send new theme songs!Download here!

On this week's APE-ril episode, the guys check back in with Philo, Orville and Clyde in the cigarette and bad beer-filled sequel, Any Which Way You Can! How are these fellas bareknuckle boxing in those tight slacks? How great was it back in the day when Truckers outranked Police in this country? And boy, oh boy, will this movie remind you to always check the car seat cushion before you sit down! PLUS: Behold! One of the wildest, most disgusting sex scenes in cinema history! Any Which Way You Can stars Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, William Smith, Harry Guardino, Ruth Gordon, Barry Corbin, Al Ruscio, and the late Buddha the Orangutan as Clyde; directed by Buddy Van Horn. DO NOT miss our WORLDWIDE virtual live show THIS THURSDAY, 4/20, where we're talking Peter Jackson's KING KONG, PLUS, doing a full hour, post-show Q&A after party! Can't make it the night of? No worries! The show AND after party are available for replay for a full week after! San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Brunswick, NJ—tickets are on sale now for our upcoming spring and summer shows! Check out the WHM Merch Store featuring new DILF Den, Grab-Ass & Cancer, SW Crispy Critters, MINGO! & WHAT IF Donna? designs!Advertise on We Hate Movies via Gumball.fmUnlock Exclusive Content!: http://www.patreon.com/wehatemoviesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beers to you, dear listener - it's a new episode of the show! Today we're joined by Managing Editor of The Film Stage, Nick Newman (@Nick_Newman), for a movie that's extremely stupid: Buddy Van Horn's Clint-and-Clyde sequel ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN. This one's got all the animal actor rights and Jackson Hole context you could want, plus three adult men politely complimenting each other on their appearance. What are you waiting for? Listen now! Topics include: legacy sequels, going to Europe to dodge labor laws, William Smith's strange pre-Hollywood career, calling our shot re: new Clint memes, Jake proposes legislation to require animals to have last names, strong predictions that Trump will never be indicted (lol), and much more. https://www.podcastyforme.com/ Follow Pod Casty For Me: https://twitter.com/podcastyforme https://www.instagram.com/podcastyforme/ https://www.youtube.com/@podcastyforme Artwork by Jeremy Allison: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyallisonart  

Welcome to our first episode of the new year, which is also our first episode of Season 5. Thank you for continuing to join us on this amazing journey. On today's episode, we head back to Christmas of 1980, when pop music superstar Neil Diamond would be making his feature acting debut in a new version of The Jazz Singer. ----more---- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, this is The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   It's 2023, which means we are starting our fifth season. And for our first episode of this new season, we're going back to the end of 1980, to take a look back at what was supposed to be the launch of a new phase in the career of one of music's biggest stars. That musical star was Neil Diamond, and this would end up becoming his one and only attempt to act in a motion picture.   We're talking about The Jazz Singer.   As I have said time and time again, I don't really have a plan for this show. I talk about the movies and subjects I talk about often on a whim. I'll hear about something and I'll be reminded of something, and a few days later, I've got an episode researched, written, recorded, edited and out there in the world. As I was working on the previous episode, about The War of the Roses just before my trip to Thailand, I saw a video of Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline on opening night of A Beautiful Noise, a new Broadway musical about the life and music of Mr. Diamond. I hadn't noticed Diamond had stopped performing live five years earlier due to a diagnosis of Parkinson's, and it was very touching to watch a thousand people joyously singing along with the man.   But as I was watching that video, I was reminded of The Jazz Singer, a movie we previously covered very lightly three years ago as part of our episode on the distribution company Associated Film Distribution. I was reminded that I haven't seen the movie in over forty years, even though I remember rather enjoying it when it opened in theatres in December 1980. I think I saw it four or five times over the course of a month, and I even went out and bought the soundtrack album, which I easily listened to a hundred times before the start of summer.   But we're getting ahead of ourselves yet again.   The Jazz Singer began its life in 1917, when Samson Raphaelson, a twenty-three year old undergraduate at the University of Illinois, attended a performance of Robinson Crusoe, Jr., in Champaign, IL. The star of that show was thirty-year-old Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew who had been a popular performer on Broadway stages for fifteen years by this point, regularly performing in blackface. After graduation, Raphaelson would become an advertising executive in New York City, but on the side, he would write stories. One short story, called “The Day of Atonement,” would be a thinly fictionalized account of Al Jolson's life. It would be published in Everybody's Magazine in January 1922.   At the encouragement of his secretary at the advertising firm, Raphaelson would adapted his story into a play, which would be produced on Broadway in September 1925 with a new title…   The Jazz Singer.   Ironically, for a Broadway show based on the early life of Al Jolson, Jolson was not a part of the production. The part of Jake Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who finds success on Broadway with the Anglicized named Jack Robin, would be played by George Jessel. The play would be a minor hit, running for 303 performances on Broadway before closing in June 1926, and Warner Brothers would buy the movie rights the same week the show closed. George Jessel would be signed to play his stage role in the movie version. The film was scheduled to go into production in May 1927.   There are a number of reasons why Jessel would not end up making the movie. After the success of two Warner movies in 1926 using Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc system that could play music synchronized to a motion picture, Warner Brothers reconcieved The Jazz Singer as a sound movie, but not just a movie with music synchronized to the images on screen, but a “talkie,” where, for the first time for a motion picture, actual dialogue and vocal songs would be synchronized to the pictures on screen. When he learned about this development, Jessel demanded more money.    The Warner Brothers refused.   Then Jessel had some concerns about the solvency of the studio. These would be valid concerns, as Harry Warner, the eldest of the four eponymous brothers who ran the studio, had sold nearly $4m worth of his personal stock to keep the company afloat just a few months earlier.   But what ended up driving Jessel away was a major change screenwriter Alfred A. Cohen made when adapting the original story and the play into the screenplay. Instead of leaving the theatre and becoming a cantor like his father, as it was written for the stage, the movie would end with Jack Robin performing on Broadway in blackface while his mom cheers him on from one of the box seats.   With Jessel off the project, Warner would naturally turn to… Eddie Cantor. Like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor was a Jew of Russian descent, although, unlike Jolson, he had been born in New York City. Like Jolson, he had been a star on Broadway for years, regularly performing in and writing songs for Florenz Ziegfeld' annual Follies shows. And like Jolson, Cantor would regularly appear on stage in blackface. But Cantor, a friend of Jessel's, instead offered to help the studio get Jessel back on the movie. The studio instead went to their third choice…   Al Jolson.   You know. The guy whose life inspired the darn story to begin with.   Many years later, film historian Robert Carringer would note that, in 1927, George Jessel was a vaudeville comedian with one successful play and one modestly successful movie to his credit, while Jolson was one of the biggest stars in America. In fact, when The Vitaphone Company was trying to convince American studios to try their sound-on-disc system for movies, they would hire Jolson in the fall of 1926 for a ten minute test film. It would be the success of the short film, titled A Plantation Act and featuring Jolson in blackface singing three songs, that would convince Warners to take a chance with The Jazz Singer as the first quote unquote talkie film.   I'll have a link to A Plantation Act on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, if you're interested in seeing it.   Al Jolson signed on to play the character inspired by himself for $75,000 in May 1927, the equivalent to $1.28m today. Filming would be pushed back to June 1927, in part due to Jolson still being on tour with another show until the end of the month. Warners would begin production on the film in New York City in late June, starting with second unit shots of the Lower East Side and The Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, shooting as much as they could until Jolson arrived on set on July 11th.   Now, while the film has been regularly touted for nearly a century now as the first talking motion picture, the truth is, there's very little verbal dialogue in the film. The vast majority of dialogue in the movie was still handled with the traditional silent movie use of caption cards, and the very few scenes featuring what would be synchronized dialogue were saved for the end of production, due to the complexity of how those scenes would be captured. But the film would finish shooting in mid-September.   The $422k movie would have its world premiere at the Warner Brothers theatre in New York City not three weeks later, on October 6th, 1927, where the film would become a sensation. Sadly, none of the Warner Brothers would attend the premiere, as Sam Warner, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone at the studio, had died of pneumonia the night before the premiere, and his remaining brothers stayed in Los Angeles for the funeral. The reviews were outstanding, and the film would bring more than $2.5m in rental fees back to the studio.   At the first Academy Awards, held in May 1929 to honor the films released between August 1927 and July 1928, The Jazz Singer was deemed ineligible for the two highest awards, Outstanding Production, now known as Best Picture, and Unique and Artistic Production, which would only be awarded this one time, on the grounds that it would have been unfair to a sound picture compete against all the other silent films. Ironically, by the time the second Academy Awards were handed out, in April 1930, silent films would practically be a thing of the past. The success of The Jazz Singer had been that much a tectonic shift in the industry. The film would receive one Oscar nomination, for Alfred Cohn's screenplay adaptation, while the Warner Brothers would be given a special award for producing The Jazz Singer, the “pioneer outstanding talking picture which has revolutionized the industry,” as the inscription on the award read.   There would be a remake of The Jazz Singer produced in 1952, starring Danny Thomas as Korean War veteran who, thankfully, leaves the blackface in the past, and a one-hour television adaptation of the story in 1959, starring Jerry Lewis. And if that sounds strange to you, Jerry Lewis, at the height of his post-Lewis and Martin success, playing a man torn between his desire to be a successful performer and his shattered relationship with his cantor father… well, you can see it for yourself, if you desire, on the page for this episode on our website. It is as strange as it sounds.   At this point, we're going to fast forward a number of years in our story.   In the 1970s, Neil Diamond became one of the biggest musical stars in America. While he wanted to be a singer, Diamond would get his first big success in music in the 1960s as a songwriter, including writing two songs that would become big hits for The Monkees: I'm a Believer and A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.   And really quickly, let me throw out a weird coincidence here… Bob Rafelson, the creator of The Monkees who would go on to produce and/or direct such films as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, was the nephew of Samson Raphaelson, the man who wrote the original story on which The Jazz Singer is based.   Anyway, after finding success as a songwriter, Diamond would become a major singing star with hits like Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon, Sweet Caroline, and Song Sung Blue. And in another weird coincidence, by 1972, Neil Diamond would become the first performer since Al Jolson to stage a one-man show at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway.   By 1976, Neil Diamond is hosting specials on television, and one person who would see one of Diamond's television specials was a guy named Jerry Leider, an executive at Warner Brothers in charge of foreign feature production. Leider sees something in Diamond that just night be suited for the movies, not unlike Elvis Presley or Barbra Streisand, who in 1976 just happens to be the star of a remake of A Star Is Born for Warner Brothers that is cleaning up at the box office and at records stores nationwide. Leider is so convinced Neil Diamond has that X Factor, that unquantifiable thing that turns mere mortals into superstars, that Leider quits his job at Warners to start his own movie production company, wrestling the story rights to The Jazz Singer from Warner Brothers and United Artists, both of whom claimed ownership of the story, so he can make his own version with Diamond as the star.   So, naturally, a former Warners Brothers executive wanting to remake one of the most iconic movies in the Warner Brothers library is going to set it up at Warner Brothers, right?   Nope!   In the fall of 1977, Leider makes a deal with MGM to make the movie. Diamond signs on to play the lead, even before a script is written, and screenwriter Stephen H. Foreman is brought in to update the vaudeville-based original story into the modern day while incorporating Diamond's strengths as a songwriter to inform the story. But just before the film was set to shoot in September 1978, MGM would drop the movie, as some executives were worried the film would be perceived as being, and I am quoting Mr. Foreman here, “too Jewish.”   American Film Distribution, the American distribution arm of British production companies ITC and EMI, would pick the film up in turnaround, and set a May 1979 production start date. Sidney J. Furie, the Canadian filmmaker who had directed Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, would be hired to direct, and Jacqueline Bisset was pursued to play the lead female role, but her agent priced their client out of the running. Deborah Raffin would be cast instead. And to help bring the kids in, the producers would sign Sir Laurence Olivier to play Diamond's father, Cantor Rabinovitch. Sir Larry would get a cool million dollars for ten weeks of work.   There would, as always is with the case of making movies, be setbacks that would further delay the start of production. First, Diamond would hurt his back at the end of 1978, and needed to go in for surgery in early January 1979. Although Diamond had already written and recorded all the music that was going to be used in the movie, AFD considered replacing Diamond with Barry Manilow, who had also never starred in a movie before, but they would stick with their original star.   After nearly a year of rest, Diamond was ready to begin, and cameras would roll on the $10m production on January 7th, 1980. And, as always is with the case of making movies, there would be more setbacks as soon as production began. Diamond, uniquely aware of just how little training he had as an actor, struggled to find his place on set, especially when working with an actor of Sir Laurence Olivier's stature. Director Furie, who was never satisfied with the screenplay, ordered writer Foreman to come up with new scenes that would help lessen the burden Diamond was placing on himself and the production. The writer would balk at almost every single suggestion, and eventually walked off the film.   Herbert Baker, an old school screenwriter who had worked on several of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies, was brought in to punch up the script, but he would end up completely rewriting the film, even though the movie had been in production for a few weeks. Baker and Furie would spend every moment the director wasn't actively working on set reworking the story, changing the Deborah Raffin character so much she would leave the production. Her friend Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, would take over the role, after Cher, Liza Minnelli and Donna Summer were considered.   Sensing an out of control production, Sir Lew Grade, the British media titan owner of AFD, decided a change was needed. He would shut the production down on March 3rd, 1980, and fire director Furie. While Baker continued to work on the script, Sir Grade would find a new director in Richard Fleischer, the journeyman filmmaker whose credits in the 1950s and 1960s included such films as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Compulsion, Fantastic Voyage and Doctor Doolittle, but had fallen out of favor with most studios after a string of flops. In fact, this would be the second film in a year where Fleischer was hired to replace another director during the middle of production, having replaced Richard C. Sarafian on the action-adventure film Ashanti in 1979.   With Fleischer aboard, production on The Jazz Singer would resume in late March, and there was an immediate noticeable difference on set. Where Furie and many members of the crew would regularly defer to Diamond due to his stature as an entertainer, letting the singer spiral out of control if things weren't working right, Fleischer would calm the actor down and help work him back into the scene. Except for one scene, set in a recording studio, where Diamond's character needed to explode into anger. After a few takes that didn't go as well as he hoped, Diamond went into the recording booth where his movie band was stationed while Fleischer was resetting the shot, when the director noticed Diamond working himself into a rage. The director called “action,” and Diamond nailed the take as needed. When the director asked Diamond how he got to that moment, the singer said he was frustrated with himself that he wasn't hitting the scene right, and asked the band to play something that would make him angry. The band obliged.    What did they play?   A Barry Manilow song.   Despite the recasting of the leading female role, a change of director and a number of rewrites by two different writers during the production, the film was able to finish shooting at the end of April with only $3m added to the budget.   Associated Film would set a December 19th, 1980 release date for the film, while Capitol Records, owned at the time by EMI, would release the first single from the soundtrack, a soft-rock ballad called Love on the Rocks, in October, with the full soundtrack album arriving in stores a month later.   As expected for a new Neil Diamond song, Love on the Rocks was an immediate hit, climbing the charts all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.   Several days before the film opened in 241 theatres on December 19th, there was a huge, star-studded premiere at the Plitt Century Plaza Cinemas in Los Angeles. Peter Falk, Harvey Korman, Ed McMahon, Gregory Peck, Cesar Romero and Jon Voight were just a handful of the Hollywood community who came out to attend what was one of the biggest Hollywood premieres in years. That would seem to project a confidence in the movie from the distributor's standpoint.   Or so you'd think.   But as it turned out, The Jazz Singer was one of three movies Associated Film would release that day. Along with The Jazz Singer, they would release the British mystery film The Mirror Crack'd starring Angela Lansbury and Elizabeth Taylor, and the Richard Donner drama Inside Moves. Of the three movies, The Jazz Singer would gross the most that weekend, pulling in a modest $1.167m, versus The Mirror Crack'd's $608k from 340 screens, and Inside Moves's $201k from 67 screens.   But compared to Clint Eastwood's Any Which Way You Can, the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy, and Dolly Parton/Lily Tomlin/Jane Fonda comedy 9 to 5, it wasn't the best opening they could hope for.   But the film would continue to play… well, if not exceptional, at least it would hold on to its intended audience for a while. Sensing the film needed some help, Capitol Records released a second single from the soundtrack, another power ballad called Hello Again, in January 1981, which would become yet another top ten hit for Diamond. A third single, the pro-immigration power-pop song America, would arrive in April 1981 and go to number eight on the charts, but by then, the film was out of theatres with a respectable $27.12m in tickets sold.   Contemporary reviews of the film were rather negative, especially towards Diamond as an actor. Roger Ebert noted in his review that there were so many things wrong in the film that the review was threatening to become a list of cinematic atrocities. His review buddy Gene Siskel did praise Lucie Arnaz's performance, while pointing out how out of touch the new story was with the immigrant story told by the original film. Many critics would also point out the cringe-worthy homage to the original film, where Diamond unnecessarily performs in blackface, as well as Olivier's overacting.   I recently watched the film for the first time since 1981, and it's not a great movie by any measurable metric. Diamond isn't as bad an actor as the reviews make him out to be, especially considering he's essentially playing an altered version of himself, a successful pop singer, and Lucie Arnaz is fairly good. The single best performance in the film comes from Caitlin Adams, playing Jess's wife Rivka, who, for me, is the emotional center of the film. And yes, Olivier really goes all-in on the scenery chewing. At times, it's truly painful to watch this great actor spin out of control.   There would be a few awards nominations for the film, including acting nominations for Diamond and Arnaz at the 1981 Golden Globes, and a Grammy nomination for Best Soundtrack Album, but most of its quote unquote awards would come from the atrocious Golden Raspberry organization, which would name Diamond the Worst Actor of the year and Olivier the Worst Supporting Actor during its first quote unquote ceremony, which was held in some guy's living room.   Ironically but not so surprisingly, while the film would be vaguely profitable for its producers, it would be the soundtrack to the movie that would bring in the lion's share of the profits. On top of three hit singles, the soundtrack album would sell more than five million copies just in the United States in 1980 and 1981, and would also go platinum in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. While he would earn less than half a million dollars from the film, Diamond's cut of the soundtrack would net him a dollar per unit sold, earning him more than ten times his salary as an actor.   And although I fancied myself a punk and new wave kid at the end of 1980, I bought the soundtrack to The Jazz Singer, ostensibly as a gift for my mom, who loved Neil Diamond, but I easily wore out the grooves of the album listening to it over and over again. Of the ten new songs he wrote for the soundtrack, there's a good two or three additional tracks that weren't released as singles, including a short little ragtime-inspired ditty called On the Robert E. Lee, but America is the one song from the soundtrack I am still drawn to today. It's a weirdly uplifting song with its rhythmic “today” chants that end the song that just makes me feel good despite its inherent cheesiness.   After The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond would only appear as himself in a film. Lucie Arnaz would never quite have much of a career after the film, although she would work quote regularly in television during the 80s and 90s, including a short stint as the star of The Lucie Arnaz Show, which lasted six episodes in 1985 before being cancelled. Laurence Olivier would continue to play supporting roles in a series of not so great motion pictures and television movies and miniseries for several more years, until his passing in 1989. And director Richard Fleischer would make several bad movies, including Red Sonja and Million Dollar Mystery, until he retired from filmmaking in 1987.   As we noted in our February 2020 episode about AFD, the act of releasing three movies on the same day was a last, desperate move in order to pump some much needed capital into the company. And while The Jazz Singer would bring some money in, that wasn't enough to cover the losses from the other two movies released the same day, or several other underperforming films released earlier in the year such as the infamous Village People movie Can't Stop the Music and Raise the Titanic. Sir Lew Grade would close AFD down in early 1981, and sell several movies that were completed, in production or in pre-production to Universal Studios. Ironically, those movies might have saved the company had they been able to hang on a little longer, as they included such films as The Dark Crystal, Frances, On Golden Pond, Sophie's Choice and Tender Mercies.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 99 is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Neil Diamond and The Jazz Singer.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Welcome to our first episode of the new year, which is also our first episode of Season 5. Thank you for continuing to join us on this amazing journey. On today's episode, we head back to Christmas of 1980, when pop music superstar Neil Diamond would be making his feature acting debut in a new version of The Jazz Singer. ----more---- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, this is The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   It's 2023, which means we are starting our fifth season. And for our first episode of this new season, we're going back to the end of 1980, to take a look back at what was supposed to be the launch of a new phase in the career of one of music's biggest stars. That musical star was Neil Diamond, and this would end up becoming his one and only attempt to act in a motion picture.   We're talking about The Jazz Singer.   As I have said time and time again, I don't really have a plan for this show. I talk about the movies and subjects I talk about often on a whim. I'll hear about something and I'll be reminded of something, and a few days later, I've got an episode researched, written, recorded, edited and out there in the world. As I was working on the previous episode, about The War of the Roses just before my trip to Thailand, I saw a video of Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline on opening night of A Beautiful Noise, a new Broadway musical about the life and music of Mr. Diamond. I hadn't noticed Diamond had stopped performing live five years earlier due to a diagnosis of Parkinson's, and it was very touching to watch a thousand people joyously singing along with the man.   But as I was watching that video, I was reminded of The Jazz Singer, a movie we previously covered very lightly three years ago as part of our episode on the distribution company Associated Film Distribution. I was reminded that I haven't seen the movie in over forty years, even though I remember rather enjoying it when it opened in theatres in December 1980. I think I saw it four or five times over the course of a month, and I even went out and bought the soundtrack album, which I easily listened to a hundred times before the start of summer.   But we're getting ahead of ourselves yet again.   The Jazz Singer began its life in 1917, when Samson Raphaelson, a twenty-three year old undergraduate at the University of Illinois, attended a performance of Robinson Crusoe, Jr., in Champaign, IL. The star of that show was thirty-year-old Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew who had been a popular performer on Broadway stages for fifteen years by this point, regularly performing in blackface. After graduation, Raphaelson would become an advertising executive in New York City, but on the side, he would write stories. One short story, called “The Day of Atonement,” would be a thinly fictionalized account of Al Jolson's life. It would be published in Everybody's Magazine in January 1922.   At the encouragement of his secretary at the advertising firm, Raphaelson would adapted his story into a play, which would be produced on Broadway in September 1925 with a new title…   The Jazz Singer.   Ironically, for a Broadway show based on the early life of Al Jolson, Jolson was not a part of the production. The part of Jake Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who finds success on Broadway with the Anglicized named Jack Robin, would be played by George Jessel. The play would be a minor hit, running for 303 performances on Broadway before closing in June 1926, and Warner Brothers would buy the movie rights the same week the show closed. George Jessel would be signed to play his stage role in the movie version. The film was scheduled to go into production in May 1927.   There are a number of reasons why Jessel would not end up making the movie. After the success of two Warner movies in 1926 using Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc system that could play music synchronized to a motion picture, Warner Brothers reconcieved The Jazz Singer as a sound movie, but not just a movie with music synchronized to the images on screen, but a “talkie,” where, for the first time for a motion picture, actual dialogue and vocal songs would be synchronized to the pictures on screen. When he learned about this development, Jessel demanded more money.    The Warner Brothers refused.   Then Jessel had some concerns about the solvency of the studio. These would be valid concerns, as Harry Warner, the eldest of the four eponymous brothers who ran the studio, had sold nearly $4m worth of his personal stock to keep the company afloat just a few months earlier.   But what ended up driving Jessel away was a major change screenwriter Alfred A. Cohen made when adapting the original story and the play into the screenplay. Instead of leaving the theatre and becoming a cantor like his father, as it was written for the stage, the movie would end with Jack Robin performing on Broadway in blackface while his mom cheers him on from one of the box seats.   With Jessel off the project, Warner would naturally turn to… Eddie Cantor. Like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor was a Jew of Russian descent, although, unlike Jolson, he had been born in New York City. Like Jolson, he had been a star on Broadway for years, regularly performing in and writing songs for Florenz Ziegfeld' annual Follies shows. And like Jolson, Cantor would regularly appear on stage in blackface. But Cantor, a friend of Jessel's, instead offered to help the studio get Jessel back on the movie. The studio instead went to their third choice…   Al Jolson.   You know. The guy whose life inspired the darn story to begin with.   Many years later, film historian Robert Carringer would note that, in 1927, George Jessel was a vaudeville comedian with one successful play and one modestly successful movie to his credit, while Jolson was one of the biggest stars in America. In fact, when The Vitaphone Company was trying to convince American studios to try their sound-on-disc system for movies, they would hire Jolson in the fall of 1926 for a ten minute test film. It would be the success of the short film, titled A Plantation Act and featuring Jolson in blackface singing three songs, that would convince Warners to take a chance with The Jazz Singer as the first quote unquote talkie film.   I'll have a link to A Plantation Act on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, if you're interested in seeing it.   Al Jolson signed on to play the character inspired by himself for $75,000 in May 1927, the equivalent to $1.28m today. Filming would be pushed back to June 1927, in part due to Jolson still being on tour with another show until the end of the month. Warners would begin production on the film in New York City in late June, starting with second unit shots of the Lower East Side and The Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, shooting as much as they could until Jolson arrived on set on July 11th.   Now, while the film has been regularly touted for nearly a century now as the first talking motion picture, the truth is, there's very little verbal dialogue in the film. The vast majority of dialogue in the movie was still handled with the traditional silent movie use of caption cards, and the very few scenes featuring what would be synchronized dialogue were saved for the end of production, due to the complexity of how those scenes would be captured. But the film would finish shooting in mid-September.   The $422k movie would have its world premiere at the Warner Brothers theatre in New York City not three weeks later, on October 6th, 1927, where the film would become a sensation. Sadly, none of the Warner Brothers would attend the premiere, as Sam Warner, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone at the studio, had died of pneumonia the night before the premiere, and his remaining brothers stayed in Los Angeles for the funeral. The reviews were outstanding, and the film would bring more than $2.5m in rental fees back to the studio.   At the first Academy Awards, held in May 1929 to honor the films released between August 1927 and July 1928, The Jazz Singer was deemed ineligible for the two highest awards, Outstanding Production, now known as Best Picture, and Unique and Artistic Production, which would only be awarded this one time, on the grounds that it would have been unfair to a sound picture compete against all the other silent films. Ironically, by the time the second Academy Awards were handed out, in April 1930, silent films would practically be a thing of the past. The success of The Jazz Singer had been that much a tectonic shift in the industry. The film would receive one Oscar nomination, for Alfred Cohn's screenplay adaptation, while the Warner Brothers would be given a special award for producing The Jazz Singer, the “pioneer outstanding talking picture which has revolutionized the industry,” as the inscription on the award read.   There would be a remake of The Jazz Singer produced in 1952, starring Danny Thomas as Korean War veteran who, thankfully, leaves the blackface in the past, and a one-hour television adaptation of the story in 1959, starring Jerry Lewis. And if that sounds strange to you, Jerry Lewis, at the height of his post-Lewis and Martin success, playing a man torn between his desire to be a successful performer and his shattered relationship with his cantor father… well, you can see it for yourself, if you desire, on the page for this episode on our website. It is as strange as it sounds.   At this point, we're going to fast forward a number of years in our story.   In the 1970s, Neil Diamond became one of the biggest musical stars in America. While he wanted to be a singer, Diamond would get his first big success in music in the 1960s as a songwriter, including writing two songs that would become big hits for The Monkees: I'm a Believer and A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.   And really quickly, let me throw out a weird coincidence here… Bob Rafelson, the creator of The Monkees who would go on to produce and/or direct such films as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, was the nephew of Samson Raphaelson, the man who wrote the original story on which The Jazz Singer is based.   Anyway, after finding success as a songwriter, Diamond would become a major singing star with hits like Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon, Sweet Caroline, and Song Sung Blue. And in another weird coincidence, by 1972, Neil Diamond would become the first performer since Al Jolson to stage a one-man show at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway.   By 1976, Neil Diamond is hosting specials on television, and one person who would see one of Diamond's television specials was a guy named Jerry Leider, an executive at Warner Brothers in charge of foreign feature production. Leider sees something in Diamond that just night be suited for the movies, not unlike Elvis Presley or Barbra Streisand, who in 1976 just happens to be the star of a remake of A Star Is Born for Warner Brothers that is cleaning up at the box office and at records stores nationwide. Leider is so convinced Neil Diamond has that X Factor, that unquantifiable thing that turns mere mortals into superstars, that Leider quits his job at Warners to start his own movie production company, wrestling the story rights to The Jazz Singer from Warner Brothers and United Artists, both of whom claimed ownership of the story, so he can make his own version with Diamond as the star.   So, naturally, a former Warners Brothers executive wanting to remake one of the most iconic movies in the Warner Brothers library is going to set it up at Warner Brothers, right?   Nope!   In the fall of 1977, Leider makes a deal with MGM to make the movie. Diamond signs on to play the lead, even before a script is written, and screenwriter Stephen H. Foreman is brought in to update the vaudeville-based original story into the modern day while incorporating Diamond's strengths as a songwriter to inform the story. But just before the film was set to shoot in September 1978, MGM would drop the movie, as some executives were worried the film would be perceived as being, and I am quoting Mr. Foreman here, “too Jewish.”   American Film Distribution, the American distribution arm of British production companies ITC and EMI, would pick the film up in turnaround, and set a May 1979 production start date. Sidney J. Furie, the Canadian filmmaker who had directed Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, would be hired to direct, and Jacqueline Bisset was pursued to play the lead female role, but her agent priced their client out of the running. Deborah Raffin would be cast instead. And to help bring the kids in, the producers would sign Sir Laurence Olivier to play Diamond's father, Cantor Rabinovitch. Sir Larry would get a cool million dollars for ten weeks of work.   There would, as always is with the case of making movies, be setbacks that would further delay the start of production. First, Diamond would hurt his back at the end of 1978, and needed to go in for surgery in early January 1979. Although Diamond had already written and recorded all the music that was going to be used in the movie, AFD considered replacing Diamond with Barry Manilow, who had also never starred in a movie before, but they would stick with their original star.   After nearly a year of rest, Diamond was ready to begin, and cameras would roll on the $10m production on January 7th, 1980. And, as always is with the case of making movies, there would be more setbacks as soon as production began. Diamond, uniquely aware of just how little training he had as an actor, struggled to find his place on set, especially when working with an actor of Sir Laurence Olivier's stature. Director Furie, who was never satisfied with the screenplay, ordered writer Foreman to come up with new scenes that would help lessen the burden Diamond was placing on himself and the production. The writer would balk at almost every single suggestion, and eventually walked off the film.   Herbert Baker, an old school screenwriter who had worked on several of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies, was brought in to punch up the script, but he would end up completely rewriting the film, even though the movie had been in production for a few weeks. Baker and Furie would spend every moment the director wasn't actively working on set reworking the story, changing the Deborah Raffin character so much she would leave the production. Her friend Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, would take over the role, after Cher, Liza Minnelli and Donna Summer were considered.   Sensing an out of control production, Sir Lew Grade, the British media titan owner of AFD, decided a change was needed. He would shut the production down on March 3rd, 1980, and fire director Furie. While Baker continued to work on the script, Sir Grade would find a new director in Richard Fleischer, the journeyman filmmaker whose credits in the 1950s and 1960s included such films as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Compulsion, Fantastic Voyage and Doctor Doolittle, but had fallen out of favor with most studios after a string of flops. In fact, this would be the second film in a year where Fleischer was hired to replace another director during the middle of production, having replaced Richard C. Sarafian on the action-adventure film Ashanti in 1979.   With Fleischer aboard, production on The Jazz Singer would resume in late March, and there was an immediate noticeable difference on set. Where Furie and many members of the crew would regularly defer to Diamond due to his stature as an entertainer, letting the singer spiral out of control if things weren't working right, Fleischer would calm the actor down and help work him back into the scene. Except for one scene, set in a recording studio, where Diamond's character needed to explode into anger. After a few takes that didn't go as well as he hoped, Diamond went into the recording booth where his movie band was stationed while Fleischer was resetting the shot, when the director noticed Diamond working himself into a rage. The director called “action,” and Diamond nailed the take as needed. When the director asked Diamond how he got to that moment, the singer said he was frustrated with himself that he wasn't hitting the scene right, and asked the band to play something that would make him angry. The band obliged.    What did they play?   A Barry Manilow song.   Despite the recasting of the leading female role, a change of director and a number of rewrites by two different writers during the production, the film was able to finish shooting at the end of April with only $3m added to the budget.   Associated Film would set a December 19th, 1980 release date for the film, while Capitol Records, owned at the time by EMI, would release the first single from the soundtrack, a soft-rock ballad called Love on the Rocks, in October, with the full soundtrack album arriving in stores a month later.   As expected for a new Neil Diamond song, Love on the Rocks was an immediate hit, climbing the charts all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.   Several days before the film opened in 241 theatres on December 19th, there was a huge, star-studded premiere at the Plitt Century Plaza Cinemas in Los Angeles. Peter Falk, Harvey Korman, Ed McMahon, Gregory Peck, Cesar Romero and Jon Voight were just a handful of the Hollywood community who came out to attend what was one of the biggest Hollywood premieres in years. That would seem to project a confidence in the movie from the distributor's standpoint.   Or so you'd think.   But as it turned out, The Jazz Singer was one of three movies Associated Film would release that day. Along with The Jazz Singer, they would release the British mystery film The Mirror Crack'd starring Angela Lansbury and Elizabeth Taylor, and the Richard Donner drama Inside Moves. Of the three movies, The Jazz Singer would gross the most that weekend, pulling in a modest $1.167m, versus The Mirror Crack'd's $608k from 340 screens, and Inside Moves's $201k from 67 screens.   But compared to Clint Eastwood's Any Which Way You Can, the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy, and Dolly Parton/Lily Tomlin/Jane Fonda comedy 9 to 5, it wasn't the best opening they could hope for.   But the film would continue to play… well, if not exceptional, at least it would hold on to its intended audience for a while. Sensing the film needed some help, Capitol Records released a second single from the soundtrack, another power ballad called Hello Again, in January 1981, which would become yet another top ten hit for Diamond. A third single, the pro-immigration power-pop song America, would arrive in April 1981 and go to number eight on the charts, but by then, the film was out of theatres with a respectable $27.12m in tickets sold.   Contemporary reviews of the film were rather negative, especially towards Diamond as an actor. Roger Ebert noted in his review that there were so many things wrong in the film that the review was threatening to become a list of cinematic atrocities. His review buddy Gene Siskel did praise Lucie Arnaz's performance, while pointing out how out of touch the new story was with the immigrant story told by the original film. Many critics would also point out the cringe-worthy homage to the original film, where Diamond unnecessarily performs in blackface, as well as Olivier's overacting.   I recently watched the film for the first time since 1981, and it's not a great movie by any measurable metric. Diamond isn't as bad an actor as the reviews make him out to be, especially considering he's essentially playing an altered version of himself, a successful pop singer, and Lucie Arnaz is fairly good. The single best performance in the film comes from Caitlin Adams, playing Jess's wife Rivka, who, for me, is the emotional center of the film. And yes, Olivier really goes all-in on the scenery chewing. At times, it's truly painful to watch this great actor spin out of control.   There would be a few awards nominations for the film, including acting nominations for Diamond and Arnaz at the 1981 Golden Globes, and a Grammy nomination for Best Soundtrack Album, but most of its quote unquote awards would come from the atrocious Golden Raspberry organization, which would name Diamond the Worst Actor of the year and Olivier the Worst Supporting Actor during its first quote unquote ceremony, which was held in some guy's living room.   Ironically but not so surprisingly, while the film would be vaguely profitable for its producers, it would be the soundtrack to the movie that would bring in the lion's share of the profits. On top of three hit singles, the soundtrack album would sell more than five million copies just in the United States in 1980 and 1981, and would also go platinum in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. While he would earn less than half a million dollars from the film, Diamond's cut of the soundtrack would net him a dollar per unit sold, earning him more than ten times his salary as an actor.   And although I fancied myself a punk and new wave kid at the end of 1980, I bought the soundtrack to The Jazz Singer, ostensibly as a gift for my mom, who loved Neil Diamond, but I easily wore out the grooves of the album listening to it over and over again. Of the ten new songs he wrote for the soundtrack, there's a good two or three additional tracks that weren't released as singles, including a short little ragtime-inspired ditty called On the Robert E. Lee, but America is the one song from the soundtrack I am still drawn to today. It's a weirdly uplifting song with its rhythmic “today” chants that end the song that just makes me feel good despite its inherent cheesiness.   After The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond would only appear as himself in a film. Lucie Arnaz would never quite have much of a career after the film, although she would work quote regularly in television during the 80s and 90s, including a short stint as the star of The Lucie Arnaz Show, which lasted six episodes in 1985 before being cancelled. Laurence Olivier would continue to play supporting roles in a series of not so great motion pictures and television movies and miniseries for several more years, until his passing in 1989. And director Richard Fleischer would make several bad movies, including Red Sonja and Million Dollar Mystery, until he retired from filmmaking in 1987.   As we noted in our February 2020 episode about AFD, the act of releasing three movies on the same day was a last, desperate move in order to pump some much needed capital into the company. And while The Jazz Singer would bring some money in, that wasn't enough to cover the losses from the other two movies released the same day, or several other underperforming films released earlier in the year such as the infamous Village People movie Can't Stop the Music and Raise the Titanic. Sir Lew Grade would close AFD down in early 1981, and sell several movies that were completed, in production or in pre-production to Universal Studios. Ironically, those movies might have saved the company had they been able to hang on a little longer, as they included such films as The Dark Crystal, Frances, On Golden Pond, Sophie's Choice and Tender Mercies.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 99 is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Neil Diamond and The Jazz Singer.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

CLL #2177 (feat. Rob Schneider) 02/02/2004 – Monday Night Show Source – Tucker Stream Recording (2004) with a Fan Stream Recording (2004) Patch This episode is 100% complete with a medium audio upgrade, Rob returns to the show for his 4th appearance on CLL, they discuss his new film ‘The Animal’ and working with primates. Rob brags about working with animal abuser Bobby Berosini and his crimes against nature while sidestepping the murder of Orangutan actor Buddha and the on-set (Any Which Way You Can) assaults allowed to be perpetrated on Manis by Bobby and the complicit cast and crew. He probably changed his ways and learned his lesson by the time he worked on ‘The Animal’ though. Most fans describe this episode as “meh” once again listen and decide Read More →

Duncan and Lex have known each other for years, and when it comes to movie taste, they think they know each other pretty well. Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time puts them to the test. Each episode one picks a film that the other hasn't seen in the hopes of blowing their mind.It's time for Lex's first pick and he drops The Gauntlet on Duncan. Directed by (and starring) Clint Eastwood, this is oft-overlooked hunk of action is thin on story and heavy on vibe. Prelude to the absurd Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can franchise (yep, the orangutan movies), this so-'70s cop-on-a-mission story also stars longtime lover and collaborator Sondra Locke. The chemistry crackles, but is it enough to blow Duncan's mind? And will Lex's rep make it through the gauntlet?Buckle up and armor up the bus 'cause bullets will fly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

26 By Corwin aired on CBS Radio August 31, 1941 Episode 17. In this story, a poor young woman is moved to want everything she is exposed to in popular culture with a hilarious outcome. The series was able to make fun of the products that sponsored most shows because they were allowed to run without sponsorship. Norman Corwin created this script which stars Elsa Lanchester as Mary and Ruth Gordon as the fairy in The Columbia Workshop by Corwin Elsa Lanchester was in the movie The Bride of Frankenstein. Ruth Gordon was an American actress, screenwriter, and playwright. She began her career performing on the stage at age 19. Known for her nasal voice and distinctive personality, Gordon gained international recognition and critical acclaim for film roles that continued into her 70s and 80s. Her later work included performances in Rosemary's Baby (1968), What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice (1969), Where's Poppa? (1970), Harold and Maude (1971), Every Which Way but Loose (1978), and Any Which Way You Can (1980).

David Worth is an American cinematographer and film director. He contributed as cinematographer to more than twenty films, including Bloodsport, Any Which Way You Can and Bronco Billy. He also directed films including Warrior of the Lost World, Lady Dragon and Hard Knocks. He directed the 1989 film Kickboxer

Chris and Adam once again return in another ‘Spotlight Reflection' show, where they reflect on movies from their past and see if they are still as good as they remember them, or do they not fare as well re-watching as an older adult?  In this show, they chat about Any Which Way You Can from 1980...have you listened to their previous show about Every Which Way But Loose? Make sure to visit www.60MW.co.uk for news, reviews, podcasts, how to join our World Tour, and a very easy way to leave us a review. Thank you for listening.

In this bonus Ape-isode, Jack and Geoff finally finish off Clint Eastwood's orangutan duology with a look at Any Which Way You Can! The movie was a smash hit in 1980, and it hits pretty hard here too, as our hosts—along with guests Barm and Sean Davis—marvel at its shaggy, shambling charms and surprising horniness. They also touch upon Canadian chocolate bars, Apecast favorite Deep Roy, and the usual digressions. You will BELIEVE an ape can scrap a Merc!

This week's episode is dedicated to the late great character actor William Smith. We talk about his amazing career on the big screen and on television, and we watch a William Smith film festival featuring the 1980 Clint Eastwood monkey movie "Any Which Way You Can," the 1970 biker action flick "The Losers" and the 1978 pro wrestling drama "Blood & Guts." Listen now!

S3 E10 HORNY PINK APE. Buddy Van Horn was a legendary stuntman (doubled for Eastwood numerous times) and stunt coordinator (Million Dollar Baby, baby!) but he also directed what may be the least essential of films in Eastwood's 65 year filmography. This week we coincidentally get two of those films, 1980's ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN and 1989's PINK CADILLAC. Any Which Way You Can brings the whole gang back from Every Which Way But Loose and sets them on another comedic adventure not at all dissimilar to the first one except maybe with even less on its mind. Clyde is in it so you know what's what. Enjoy as Jack, who slept through 90% of this movie, clearly thinks Ken is making up the plot up as they go along. But, nope, there is some weird stuff in this thing. Also there is a lot of camera punching. We love Clint punching the camera. Where is THAT supercut, YouTube?Then marvel at the sizzling hot synopsis of the never-made third Which Way film, Either Which Way You Go, which would have also been directed by Van Horn in '85 had Ruth Gordon not sadly passed away. Pink Cadillac, on the other hand, is not dissimilar to podcast not-fave The Gauntlet, right down to the Nevada setting.  A comedy-adventure about a mismatched couple with a group of bad guys trying to get them. But Caddy has Bernadette Peters instead of Sondra Locke. There is that. Who doesn't like Bernadette Peters? Simply adorable and an American icon! Is that enough to keep things afloat? What is the signature Buddy Van Horn shot, anyway? Find out in this episode! Ken and Jack are joined by NO ONE this episode because we couldn't find any guests who wanted to sit through these two cinematic sensations.  ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN 00:03:12EITHER WHICH WAY YOU GO 00:35:25PINK CADILLAC 00:41:48

Corbin began his career as a Shakespearean actor in the 1960s, but today he is more likely to be seen in the role of the local sheriff, military leader, or some other authority figure, though on occasion, he has effectively portrayed murderous villains, as well. To moviegoers, he is well remembered as General Beringer in WarGames, John Travolta's uncle Bob Davis in Urban Cowboy, co-starring with Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can, or Roscoe Brown, July Johnson's bumbling deputy in the acclaimed Western Lonesome Dove. In 1983–1984, Corbin played Merit Sawyer in the NBC television series Boone. Corbin's role was that of a stern father to the young actor Tom Byrd, who played Boone Sawyer, an aspiring singer. The program was set in rural Tennessee during the 1950s and was created by Earl Hamner, who had great success earlier with CBS's The Waltons.In 1994, Corbin narrated the acclaimed TBS documentary MoonShot, telling the story of the 1960s space race from the first-person viewpoint of Mercury Seven astronaut Deke Slayton. In 2007, he played the character Clay Johnson, father of Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson on The Closer series.[5] In 2003, Corbin co-starred with Northern Exposure castmate John Cullum in Blackwater Elegy, an award-winning short film written by Matthew Porter and co-directed by Porter and Joe O'Brien.From 2003–2008, Corbin played Whitey Durham, the basketball coach for the Tree Hill Ravens on The WB/CW teenager drama series One Tree Hill.[5] He also had a role in 2007's Oscar-winning film No Country for Old Men.In 2014, Corbin worked with Tracey Birdsall[7] on Dawn of the Crescent Moon,[8] followed by working alongside her for the science fiction films At the Edge of Time (2016)[9] and The Time War (2017).[10]In 2020, Corbin had a recurring guest role as Everett Acker in Better Call Saul.

If you have ever listened to The Deucecast Movie Show, you'll know they celebrate great movies. And they celebrate bad movies too.  And after giving the Best of the Worst of the 2010s (with Lil G Ryfun), and Best of the Worst of the 2000s (With Kaufman & Upon a Star Jenn), and Best of the Worst of the 90s, it's time to go all the way back to the age of Disco and look at the greatest, favoritist flops of the 1970s. First up, Dave, Mikey, and #TwitterlessDrEarl invite in the legend, the famous, the infamous, award winning Voice of Cobb County, Scotty Ryfun!  They play a spirited round of Denzel, then turn their attention to the Top Five at Hand. The Best movies of the Worst movies of the 1970s, all movies coming in at 49% or under on the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter... plus some deep discussions on George Lucas' involvement in bad sequels... who really ran USA UP All Night... Every Which Way You Can But Loose... who actually wrote "Convoy"... Dave visiting a historical movie site on a field trip...  Plus, the movie assignments for this year's DaveSplosion!  1941 (for rental) Any Which Way You Can (for rental) Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (Amazon Prime) Beneath the Planets of the Apes (for rental) The Black Hole (Disney+) The Cheap Detective (Amazon Prime) Convoy (Amazon Prime) Damien: The Omen II (Starz) The Deep (Criterion Channel) Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (fubo) Every Which Way But Loose (for rental) The Fisher King (Roku Channel) Frogs (for rental) Gator (Vudu Free) Hercules in New York (Vudu Free) Jabberwocky (not streaming) Lolly-Madonna XXX (for rental) The Man with the Golden Gun (DirecTV) More American Graffiti (HBO Max) The Night They Saved Christmas (DirecTV) The Omen (Starz) Starcrash (Amazon Prime) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Hulu) The Villain (not streaming)

John Durrill is a name you probably don't know but here's just a bit about him and why you'll want to listen to his story.For almost six decades, award winning, songwriter John Durrill's works have been recorded by more than sixty major recording artists in the US and around the world. Frank Sinatra, Bette Midler, Cher, and Everly Brothers, Chicago, Ray Charles, Merle Haggard, The Statler Brothers, Joe Williams. Sarah Vaughn, Peggy Lee and Reba are a sampling of artists whose hits have sold over fifty million singles, albums, DVD's and CD's of John's compositions.As a former high school English teacher in Oklahoma John, along with his close friend Mike Rabon, formed "The Five Americans" in 1963. John, Mike and group member Norm Ezell, wrote and sang the Group's first top ten hit, "I See The Light", soon followed by the number on record "Western Union" selling over a million copies.In 1968 Durrill left the The Five Americans and joined the Internationally famous, instrumental group, "The Ventures" in Hollywood, California. Shortly after their mega hit "Hawaii 5-0", John co-wrote "Kyoto Doll" which was released by The Ventures in Japan and soon the multi million selling single became a standard recorded by scores of artists in the Far East. In March, 2008 The Ventures were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with John Mellencamp, Madonna, Leonard Cohen, and the Dave Clark Five.Besides his over fifty year affiliation with The Ventures, John is one of the Music Industry's most prolific songwriters. In 1970 he joined forces with one of Hollywood's all time, most successful, record producers, Snuff Garrett. Virtually every record project produced by Snuff had the Durrill name attached to it as a writer. During this period, John worked with Clint Eastwood writing songs and music backgrounds for five of Clint's popular films. His song "Misery and Gin", written for the movie "Bronco Billy" went on to become number one in the charts for legendary Merle Haggard. In Eastwood's "Any Which Way You Can", Durrill wrote five of the movies songs, one of them, "The Good Guys and The Band Guys" on camera in the film.John wrote for over twenty motion pictures and television series including "Smokey and The Bandit II", "Sharkey's Machine", "The Cannon Ball Movies", and "Reba".Over the years Cher has recorded five of Durrill's songs including her number on hit, "Dark Lady" and "I Saw A Man" and "He Danced With His Wife". The Everly Brothers' sang three of his compositions and Chicago's XXV Christmas CD included his song "Child's Prayer" which he co-wrote with Lee Loughnane, one of the founding members of the group.John continues to write and produce music, and when he can; he likes to visit Maui where I met him many years ago.

***Explicit*** This week on Monkey Movie Mondays, Chris and Benny watched the follow up to the Clint Eastwood classic Every Which Way But Loose, Any Which Way You Can! Produced in association with Radiohaver.com

Jackie and Dunlap on Clint Eastwood’s monkey movies Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. Geoffrey Lewis! Ruth Gordon! Sondra Locke! Toilet Cats! Palimony suits! Ratboy! Mel Tillis! Wild clams! Orangutan sex! Problematic bikers! And stay tuned to the end for the gross, troubling story of the Clydes. Theme by William Sherry Jr. Art by @stephenmullinax Any Which Way You Can and Every Which Way But Loose are available for rent on the major streaming services. Every Which Way But Loose trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB0PFiL9QV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFFr91atHqE Any Which Way You Can trailer:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukQ1Ov0PlM Ruth Gordon Oscar Win: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxsLNhH0yjA Sondra Locke One Too Many Women:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0isHE93Ou0g I Seek The Night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwrjKFQga28 Vanity Fair obituary:  https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/12/sondra-locke-obit LA Times Articles: Eastwood Undermined Locke’s Directing Career, Attorney Says: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-09-12-me-43029-story.html Eastwood Settles Fraud Suit with Ex-Lover Locke: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-09-25-mn-47374-story.html Washington Post Sharon Waxman article 20 Nov 1997: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1997/11/20/make-her-day/c88a1970-c896-48ba-b321-a63541d437b5/?noredirect=on Reviews of Sondra Locke’s memoir The Good The Bad and the Very Ugly: https://ew.com/article/1997/10/31/book-review-good-bad-and-very-ugly/ https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-688-15462-2 https://www.deseret.com/1998/1/5/19356125/locke-s-book-tells-the-good-the-bad-and-the-very-ugly Ratboy trailer:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYZnW3G89wY Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood: A Biography by Richard Schickel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004KABE10/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Clint: A Retrospective by Richard Schickel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004KABE10/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Clint Eastwood at 2012 Republican Convention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFF1_970l00 Gran Torino  theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MItMDkc343M Clint Eastwood and Ray Charles sing Beers to You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqzrHG8eEVc Manis, Buddha, & CJ Bobby Berosini scandal: https://news3lv.com/features/video-vault/video-vault-ringling-bros Clip of Bobby Berosini abusing orangutans backstage:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiKnVy7x3Wo LA Times piece by Rachel Ambramowitz 27 08 2008:  https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-aug-27-et-brief27-story.html Telegraph UK 07 Jul 2017: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/marcel-keiko-whatever-happened-film-tvs-famous-animal-stars/manis-buddha-clint-eastwood-orangutan-movies/ Mother Jones Feb 1997: https://books.google.com/books?id=eecDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT19&lpg=PT19&dq=movie+orangutan+nearly+died+in+real+life+abuse&source=bl&ots=NtKnlBK2kT&sig=ACfU3U2It7ToIi_j3MW5bNPWLd6rs_Mw6w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6gJLQhJLkAhW8GTQIHfb8AWcQ6AEwD3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false Clint Eastwood boards:  http://www.clinteastwood.org/forums/index.php?topic=2573.0 https://www.filmboards.com/board/p/1659967/ http://www.clinteastwood.org/forums/index.php?topic=10080.0 http://www.clinteastwood.org/forums/index.php?topic=6672.0   Coolasscinema.com Interview with Makeup Effects Artist and Author William Munns: http://www.coolasscinema.com/2015/03/an-interview-with-makeup-effects-artist.html Kenneth Decroo: http://www.mountain-news.com/mountain_living/article_9e46327a-2503-11e5-9dc8-d7ef7cf2569b.html Gentle Jungle headlines of other mishaps Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People: https://www.amazon.com/Visions-Caliban-Chimpanzees-Dale-Peterson/dp/0820322067 CJ and the Bare: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/07/23/CJ-AND-THE-BARE/2638364708800/ Eastwood Upstaged: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/01/16/Eastwood-Upstaged/1057348469200/ Really Big Star: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/12/02/REALLY-BIG-STAR/4341407653200/   Chantek, Chattanooga Escaped Orangutan https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/08/04/Monkey-business/1168428817600/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/08/04/Chantek-an-orangutan-taught-by-researchers-to-communicate-with/2440428817600/ Sibu the Orangutan fields prank calls https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/04/01/Sibu-the-Orangutan-fields-prank-calls/7896418021200/    

PART ONE Scott and Paul let you in on how you can score your own autographed copy of Steve Dorff's new memoir, I Wrote That One, Too. PART TWO - 02:45 mark Mother's Day is coming up soon! Paul counts down 5 of his favorite songs about moms before Scott lists 5 of his favorite songwriters who are also mothers. PART THREE - 12:11 mark Scott and Paul head over to Steve Dorff's house to get the inside scoop on why he sees color when he hears music; the reason that knowing how to write a great song is only half of songwriting success; how he accidentally wound up playing piano on a classic soul record; what he did to make Dusty Springfield throw a chair at him; how he bluffed his way into film scoring; the time he wrote one of the most iconic TV show theme songs of all time in just 15 minutes; and why he hears Boys II Men in his head when George Strait sings one of his biggest hits. ABOUT STEVE DORFF Steve’s Dorff’s songs have been recorded by hundreds of artists, earning him nominations for six Emmy awards and three Grammys. His first major success came with the soundtrack for the Clint Eastwood film Every Which Way But Loose, which yielded three #1 singles, including the title song. Similarly successful soundtrack albums would follow, such as: Bronco Billy, which earned him #1 hits with “Cowboys and Clowns” for Ronnie Milsap and “Bar Room Buddies,” a duet for Eastwood and Merle Haggard; Any Which Way You Can, which spawned a Top 10 hit of the same title for Glen Campbell; and Pure Country, which earned George Strait two #1 hits, “I Cross My Heart” and “Heartland.” In total, Dorff has written nine #1 country hits from motion pictures, more than any other songwriter in history. In addition to his soundtrack success, Dorff has written #1 hits including “I Just Fall in Love Again” for Anne Murray, “Through the Years” for Kenny Rogers, “Don’t Underestimate My Love For You” for Lee Greenwood, “Hypnotize the Moon” for Clay Walker, and “The Man in Love with You” for George Strait. Other artists who’ve recorded his songs include Barbra Streisand, The Carpenters, Celine Dion, Cher, Dolly Parton, Dusty Springfield, Garth Brooks, George Jones, Gladys Knight, Jackie Wilson, Kenny Loggins, Randy Travis, Ray Charles, Reba McEntire, Roy Rogers, Ringo Starr, Smokey Robinson, Whitney Houston,  and Willie Nelson. In addition to his songwriting, Dorff has scored countless films and TV shows, including Spenser: For Hire, Murphy Brown, The Singing Bee, Just the 10 of Us, Murder She Wrote, Major Dad, Reba, and Growing Pains, for which he composed the hit theme song “As Long as We Got Each Other.” In 2017 he published his memoir, I Wrote That One, Too: A Life in Songwriting from Willie to Whitney, and he’s a 2018 inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The monkey business never stops on Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast, as Nathan and Clint go ape for the second movie where Clint Eastwood drinks with a pet orangutan, 1980's Any Which Way You Can! Along the way, we pick up a friend - We Hate Movies' Eric Szyszka - to talk about ape torture, overly sexualized Ruth Gordons, and the erotic power of a good '70s mustache.  That's not all: Nathan and Clint break down the dire direct-to-Netflix action comedy Game Over, Man!; gush over the cult 80s film that celebrates both tae kwon do and friendship, Miami Connection; and do a dramatic reading of one of Nathan's...wordier comments on his Boondock Saints II review. Right turn, Clyde! 4:30 - A Dramatic Reading of A Particularly Ribald Comment from Nathan's Boondock Saints II Review 14:53 - Scalding Hot Takes: Game Over, Man! 32:28 - Control Nathan Rabin 4.0: Miami Connection 51:23 - Any Which Way You Can (w/Eric Szyszka of We Hate Movies) 1:28:42 - Mailbag 1:36:12 - Happy Places Follow us on Twitter (Nathan: @nathanrabin, Clint: @alcohollywood)! Pledge to our Patreon, and subscribe to us on iTunes Ask us questions at asknathanrabinshappycast@gmail.com! Theme Song by Jon Biegen

Oct 4th, 2015 Mega Eastwood! Outrageous Orangutans! Bare Knuckle Boxing Double Feature!!!   This week we look at the greatness of Clint Eastwood and Cort reveals an unhealthy hero worship of actor William Smith the all American BadAss!  Matt and Cort antagonize each other in lieu of real diverging opinions about the films for the sake of stupid argumentative juvenile behavior.  Matt gets angry when Cort knowingly calls Clyde the orangutan a monkey and proceeds to enact petty revenge when Cort attempts to use the phrase “monkey around” or any variation of that sort to crack wise against the coolest primate in existence.   Matt and Cort both wish to succumb to the will of our ape overlords so long as they are as awesome as Clyde! Every week an obsessed film collector, Cort will subject his unwilling test subject, Matt to films from Cort’s childhood viewing habits and personal collection.  Has a lifetime of movie watching damaged Cort’s young and impressionable mind?  Can Matt survive each week’s experiment unscathed?  Find out each week as we discover that physical wounds heal while cinematic ones don’t. Email feedback to Matt: psyopmatt@gmail.com.  Email feedback to Cort : cinemapsyopscort@gmail.com Find Cort on twitter: @Cort_PSYOP  Find Matt on twitter: @psyopmatt The post CINEPSYEP007 Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can appeared first on Legion.

A bare knuckled brawler (Clint Eastwood) fights in a championship of sorts.  It catches the kind of attention from Nazi gangs and the Jersey mob that you don't want.  Clyde the orangutan also stars in Any Which Way You Can.  It's opponet is about an author who follows a thief and winds up learning the ropes from him.  But he learns harsher lessons in the process.  Christopher Nolan's first movie:  Following.

In this week's episode, the gang gets in a bar brawl with Clint Eastwood and Clyde the Orangutan in the bare knuckle action flick, Every Which Way But Loose! How is Eastwood getting this ape into all these restaurants? Why does Beverly D'Angelo so easily agree to get in this creep's truck? And who on Earth asked for that much Ruth Gordon? PLUS: Eastwood's blood is boiling. Every Which Way But Loose stars Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, Beverly D'Angelo, Ruth Gordon and Manis the Orangutan as Clyde the Orangutan; directed by James Fargo. This is part one of a two-part podcrawl! Be sure to catch part two on Any Which Way You Can, hosted by The Flop House!

Legendary actor/director Clint Eastwood, winner of four Oscars and whose latest film “Hereafter” was named one of the best movies of 2010 by the National Board of Review, will be honored with a special tribute during this episode. Filmmaker David Worth, who was the director of photography on "Bronco Billy" and "Any Which Way You Can," discusses his experience working with Eastwood on those two movies. Plus film historian James Colt Harrison and Fausta Wertz, an Eastwood fan, also plan to join in this tribute to the iconic Hollywood star.

After the success of "Every Which Way But Loose" in 1978, you knew Clint and Clyde would come back for seconds. They come back in the form of "Any Which Way You Can" released in 1980. This time the fight is bigger, the laughs are bigger and the fun is a bare knuckle punch to the face. We talk at length about what this movie gets right and whether we think it matches up to the first movie. So hope into your vehicle and meet us in Jackson for biggest fight of the decade! Right turn, Clyde!Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy