Podcast appearances and mentions of Bob Weinstein

Flavors, fragrances, and the science behind what makes things smell and taste amazing—Karl and Erum explore this world with Bob Weinstein, a legend in the industry who has spent decades at Firmenich, Robertet, and now Bedoukian Research. Bob takes them on a journey from the early days of animal-derived scents (yes, civet was a thing) to the rise of biotech-powered ingredients that are shaping the future of sustainable fragrance and flavor. They get into the art and science of scent, the challenges of scaling biomanufacturing, and why companies, much like organisms, have to evolve to survive. Plus, Erum shares her experience making her own perfume—though Bob has some thoughts on her ingredient choices.Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing?Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.messaginglab.com/groweverything⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters: 00:00:00 – Ice, Snow, and a Birthday Glow 00:00:48 – Cabin Life and Petrochemicals at Work 00:02:37 – Brooklyn: Where Trivia Meets Fungi 00:04:38 – Fermentation Festival and the Science of Flavor 00:06:20 – Yeast, Beer, and Biotech's Brewing Future 00:07:00 – 90s Software Hype vs. Biotech's Moment 00:10:56 – Melanin, Gamma Rays, and Seeds for Space 00:12:27 – Unilever Shake-Up and What It Means for Biotech 00:13:44 – Robert Weinstein: The Science and Business of Scent 00:31:12 – Government, Industry, and the Fight for Innovation 00:32:00 – The Future of Plant-Based Ingredients 00:32:58 – How Legacy Companies Stay Relevant 00:35:25 – Surviving Economic Cycles in Business 00:36:49 – Bedoukian Research and the Next Chapter 00:39:32 – The Science of Smell: Fragrance, Musk, and Civet 00:45:15 – The Price of Smell: Why Some Scents Cost a Fortune 00:51:38 – Biotech Founders, Here's What You Need to Know 00:54:30 – Wrapping Up: Leadership, People, and Consumer DelightLinks and Resources: Robertet DSM- Firmenich  Bedoukian Berkeley Yeast FarmOne Avisa Myko Melatech  Melanin from the fungus  protects seeds from the effects of exposure to gamma radiation Inscripta  Aethera Biotech Research Institute for Fragrance Materials Fragrance Creators Association  Flavor Extract Manufacturers AssociationTopics Covered: Biotech beauty, flavors and fragrances, corporate leadership, perfume, taste, bioengineeringHave a question or comment? Message us here:Text or Call (804) 505-5553 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠  / ⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠Grow Everything⁠⁠Email: groweverything@messaginglab.comMusic by: NihiloreProduction by: Amplafy Media

In 2022, Portland residents voted to overhaul the city’s form of government. That includes using ranked choice voting to expand the number of seats on city council from five to 12. Another major change is the creation of four geographic districts in the city. Voters within each district will now elect three candidates to represent them on the new council. Thirty registered candidates are competing in District 4, which includes all of Portland west of the Willamette River, including Downtown, the Pearl District, Multnomah and Hillsdale neighborhoods. It also contains the inner southeast neighborhoods of Sellwood-Moreland, Eastmoreland, Reed and Ardenwald.  On Oct. 24, “Think Out Loud” convened a D4 candidates forum at John’s Marketplace in Multnomah Village. We invited the 13 candidates with the largest number of individual donors who contributed to their campaigns. They include: Eli Arnold, Olivia Clark, Lisa Freeman, Mitch Green, Chris Henry, Ben Hufford, Chad Lykins, Tony Morse, Stanley Penkin, Moses Ross, Sarah Silkie,  Bob Weinstein and Eric Zimmerman. 

Débarqué en force à Cannes par les frères Weinstein, Sin city adapté du roman graphique par l'auteur lui même Frank Miller et Robert Rodriguez a su marquer les esprits par son casting maboule, son côté néo-noir ultra stilysé, la sexualisation des actrices et sa violence abusé. Maintenant que nous avons tous passé notre brevet il y a plus de 15 ans, que reste t-il de ce film considéré comme un classique des années 2000. Basé sur le roman graphique sorti en 1991 Sin City de Frank Miller qui co-réalise le film. Produit par les deux plus gros tricards du système américain, Harvey Weinstein et son con de frère Bob Weinstein avec un budget de 40 millions de dollars via leur boîte de prod Dimension Films. A la production également et à la réalisation, au montage et à la photo Robert Rodriguez réalisateur de films classiques du cinéma américain, on lui doit Spy kids décrit comme un chef d'oeuvre postmoderne par Criterion Collection, The Faculty mieux que The Thing selon Eric Neuhoff du Figaro, et également Machete Kills qui selon les inrockuptibles, on aurait pu arrêter le cinéma après ce film.Sin City est une ville infestée de criminels, de flics ripoux et de femmes fatales. Hartigan interprété par Bruce Willis s'est juré de protéger Nancy joué par Jessica Alba, une strip-teaseuse qui l'a fait craquer. Marv surjoué par Mickey Rourke, un marginal brutal mais philosophe, part en mission pour venger la mort de son unique véritable amour, Goldie.Soutenez nous sur Patreon Forfait 3€ épisode en accès anticipé sans pub Forfait 5 € épisode en accès anticipé sans Pub + Accès aux Podcasts Exclusifs La liste de la Shitlist sur Senscritique https://www.senscritique.com/liste/la_shitlist/3657768?La liste de la Shitlist sur Letterboxd par WongKarWaifuhttps://boxd.it/pQN3eEnregistré en live sur notre chaîne twitch ABONNEZ-VOUS ! Rattrapez le live sur notre chaine youtubeChroniqueur.e.es : Marvin MONTES, Wonder VESPER, Emmanuel.le PEUDON et présenté par Luc LE GONIDECHost : Luc LE GONIDECMusique Jean Baptise BLAIS Montage et mixage son : Luc LE GONIDEC Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

https://www.bobforportland.comhttps://x.com/bob4portland?s=21https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/10/05/we-tried-to-imagine-how-voting-would-work-under-portlands-proposed-charter-reforms/https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/08/03/a-polling-result-never-seen-by-the-citys-charter-commission-show-portlanders-overwhelmingly-favored-placing-three-reforms-on-the-ballot-separately/https://www.portland.gov/transition/documents/july-public-comment-report/downloadhttps://www.portland.gov/bhr/class-comp/language-pay-differential-overviewhttps://x.com/rationalinpdx/status/1755673364184920355?s=46https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/portlands-police-staffing-crisis.pdfhttps://www.portland.gov/wheeler/homelessnesshttps://www.wweek.com/news/2023/02/01/they-left-portland-is-losing-some-of-its-biggest-fans/https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/02/07/internal-documents-show-multnomah-county-believes-it-cant-fund-free-preschool-for-all-kids-unless-it-raises-its-tax-by-08/?mc_cid=918eb72b72&mc_eid=6e4c39d97ahttps://x.com/rationalinpdx/status/1685542859058094081?s=46

This week on The Pod Charles Cinecast, presented by The Prince Charles Cinema, our hosts Jonathan Foster and Fil Freitas start knocking off local shopping malls, using Fil's Santa outfit from the cinema. The pair pose as a surly Santa and his oversized Elf, who by day try to stay sober enough to ask the kids what they want for Christmas, and by night rob the stores blind.It's the final week of NAUGHTY or NICE, and our Patreon backers were given the choice between two films from 2003 – BAD SANTA (Naughty) or ELF (Nice). Our listeners went 3-for-3 in the naughty camp, and decided to go for the drunken Santa Heist Movie! What could go wrong?Fresh off the success of Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff was tapped by Executive Producers Joel and Ethan Coen to turn their loose idea, that was adapted by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, into a big screen Christmas classic, starring Billy Bob Thornton. The only problem was, Bob Weinstein was the real boss, and he made things annoying for everyone. Join us, as we talk how this film was made, who the Coen's original envisioned starring in the film, and how there came to be three different versions of the film. And there is plenty of love to the scene stealing duo of two late-great actors, John Ritter and Bernie Mac. "I'm on my f***ing lunch break, OK?"If you enjoy the podcast, leave a Rating and Review! It really helps us out!As always, you can follow the Podcast on http://twitter.com/ThePCCPodcast and http://instagram.com/ThePCCPodcastIf you'd like to Support the Podcast and get Bonus Content, visit: http://patreon.com/ThePCCPodcastThis Podcast is produced by The Prince Charles Cinema and The Breadcrumbs Collective

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with screenwriter and author Neal Marshall Stevens about his new book on horror, “A Sense of Dread (Getting Under The Skin of Horror Screenwriting).”LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Neal's book at Michael Wiese Productions: https://mwp.com/product-author/neal-marshall-stevens/Neal on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139605/Brian Forrest's Blog: https://toothpickings.medium.com/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastNeal Stevens Transcript JOHN: Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you? NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.) But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart. The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure. JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story. NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones. They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn't have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me. BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “ NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in. And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement. BRIAN: Do you still have some of them? NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore. BRIAN: I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work? NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows. JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling. NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far. JOHN: Did you make it that far? NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then. JOHN: That's brutal. NEAL: Yeah. JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you? NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room. And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters. And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monstersand our other projects?” And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters. And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror. BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't? NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand. Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well. BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you? NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror. Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked. JOHN: Why do you think that is with you? NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal. It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through the ringer, watching that opening. And after that opening, the movie was never that violent again. He never showed anything like that again.And you didn't have to, because you—having seen that opening scene, you were—you were so blown out of your seats. You said, “I'm watching a movie where anything could happen to anyone.” And that was a kind of really intelligent and that kind of thoughtful use of violence is what George Romero was always able to do. It was understanding how graphic images can affect the psychology of the viewer. JOHN: Do you think it's also that with Romero's films, they're actually about something, whereas a slasher film is really just about a body count, but with Romero, he always had another thing going. NEAL: Well, of course, I mean, no movie that isn't about anything is ever going to really, from my perspective, be worth watching. But I mean, even a movie like Hostel, which is exceptionally violent and harrowing, is certainly about something. And I think Eli Roth's movies, which get a really bad rap, are very much about something. He's got something to say with his depictions of violence and his images. Not necessarily to my taste. I certainly wouldn't say that he's not, he's making movies that are certainly about something. He's not a dumb filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination. JOHN: So, you work on Monsters, and then what happens? NEAL: I worked on Monsters. I worked there for around six years, and then they were acquired by a big studio, and they were shut down. And so, I was out of work. I'd known a woman named Debbie Dion from Full Moon. I figured, well, I'll give that a shot. I'll call her up and see, maybe I could write for a Full Moon. And so, I gave her a shot. I, you know, reintroduced myself and said, you know, “I'm looking to see if I could get some job, maybe writing features for Full Moon Entertainment, Charlie Band's company.” And they said, “Well, we pay around $3,000 for a feature.” And I said, “Well, I got paid more than that for writing an episode of Monsters. That doesn't seem like such a good deal.” And then my unemployment insurance ran out. BRIAN: Suddenly it's a very good deal. NEAL: Sounds like suddenly a very good deal. But, you know, I made it very clear that money buys one draft, and if you want to rewrite, you got to pay me again, because I knew what development was like, where they just expect draft after draft after draft, and I'd say, “I can't do that, that doesn't make any sense.” And also, having worked for Monsters, I had learned to write really fast. I could write a pass on a Monsters episode in two days, so I knew that I could write fast, because these were 80-page scripts. And so, I started writing for Full Moon, and over the course of like the next few years, I wrote something like... 50 or 60 features for Charlie Band. And a lot of them got made, because they're not wasting money on movies that don't get made. Tons of them got made. And in the midst of doing that, I was, you know, whenever I got a break writing a full movie, I would write spec scripts, you know, in the hopes I could sell something of my own that wasn't for $3,000. I didn't have an agent at that point. I didn't have a manager at that point. And so, I'm not really good making cold calls to people. It's not my thing. I just like to sit, write my scripts. I'd come home one day, and I saw my wife was on the phone having this long conversation with someone. When she was done, I said, “Well, who was that?” “Oh yeah. I called up to order something.” I said, “So she's really good at getting on the phone and talking to people and calling them.” And so, I convinced her to be my manager. So, she agreed. She changed, you know, she went out under her maiden name. She managed to get an option on a science fiction script that I'd written that, I mean, it was ultimately bought. It was never made. And then I decided, you know what? Horror is really my bread and butter writing for Charlie Band. But I don't really have a horror spec. And most of what was out those days in horror didn't really scare me that much. I should really write a script that would scare me. So, I wrote a script called Deader, which I thought had all the stuff in it that I thought was really scary. And Judy went out with that script, sent it to a bunch of people, sent it to some folks at Stan Winston's company, as they had a development deal. The producer that she talked to really liked it, asked if he could sort of slip it to some people. He did, he sent it to someone, a producer at Dimension, it's based in New York, and he really liked it. And they showed it to Bob Weinstein. Bob Weinstein called us on Sunday. Am I half awake? Talk to Judy. Because they didn't know that Judy was my wife. He said, “This is the best goddamn script I've read. I'm like three quarters away. Come in on Monday and we'll talk about it.” So, we came in on Monday and they bought the script. And of course, at that point, it sort of went all over town. And for a very short period of time, it was like the flavor of the month and everyone loved me. And I got myself an agent and got myself like three pictures. And as I was a really big, big to-do. From that, I also got 13 Ghosts. I had like a really big opinion of myself after, after that sale. JOHN: Has that been tempered since then? NEAL: I kind of got the opinion that like, wow, selling scripts is easy. People wanted to hire me because that script was super hot and was all over town. I learned subsequently there are flavors in writers, and I was like that flavor of the month. That fades and then you have to really do a lot more work to get things sold. That was a hard lesson to learn. But I've managed to keep working over the years. I've written many scripts, sold some, and it's been a decent career. BRIAN: I was just wondering, you were having all the success writing screenplays, when did you decide to make a jump to writing a book? NEAL: Over the last five or six years, I've been teaching. A woman that I knew from NYU, actually, Dorothy Rumpolsky had been instrumental in starting a screenwriting program at David Lynch Institute for Cinematic Studies. And she realized at one point that she had a number of students who wanted to work in a horror. She remembered me back from NYU many years ago. So, she got in touch with me and wanted to know if I was interested in mentoring those students. And I said, absolutely. I done some other online teaching at other places. And so, the way it works is, you fly out for an opening few days where you meet the students. And then you fly back to where you come from. They go back to where they come from. And it's all done remotely, the mentoring. And so, I've been doing that now for five or six years. And during that kind of get together, you meet a bunch of guest lecturers and other teachers, other mentors. And a number of those people had written books for Michael Wiese productions. And, in the course of chatting, they suggested, well, you, you know, “You have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of horror and horror cinema. That might be a good book for Michael Wiese. Give them a call and see if you can come up with a pitch and an interesting take on it.” And so I did, and I called them and they responded. And so we were off to the races. JOHN: The book is really, maybe delightful is the wrong word, but it's a captivating book because as you read through it—you have outlined breaking down our different types of fears—you can immediately in your mind go, “Oh, that's what that movie was doing. Oh, that was that. That's what was happening there.” What was your research process like? NEAL: I think that the research kind of developed over the decades as I studied what made movies scary and what was working, not only in the movies that I was watching, but in the movies that I was writing. I mean, in the same way that when you work as a screenwriter, it becomes almost second nature to try to figure out what was working and what wasn't. Talking to fellow filmmakers and screenwriters, you have to say, “How many times do you watch a movie?” And a lot of times I will watch a movie 8, 10, 20 times. And there's a process that works when you watch a movie that many times, where you say “Certain things will work every time you watch a movie.”In the same way that you can watch a comedy and you can laugh every single time as certain things comes up. And other times, you start seeing the nuts and bolts and say, “Well, this is always working and here they're just connecting stuff.” And you start saying, “Ah, I get it. I see what they're doing. I see how they're taking this piece that works and this other piece that works and they couldn't quite, they kind of, they found some connective tissue to stick it together. I see exactly what they're doing.” And you start understanding—whether you're watching a comedy or you're watching a drama or you're watching a scary movie—they knew exactly how to make this thing scary. And this is how they're doing it. And they understood exactly how to make this thing scary. And it's like, ah, this is what they're using. Whether it is a spider crawling on someone, that's always going to work. Or, “Oh, I see, this is just a jump scare.” And the jump scare is, I understand, that's just, because a big bang, a loud noise, a hand reaching in from, that's just, that's always going to work. It's going to work no matter what. It's just a kind of placeholder scare, because they couldn't think of anything better. And there are movies where it's just jump scares. And you can always use a jump scare. You can sneak up on a cat and jab it and it'll jump. It's an instinctive response. And if a movie is just relying on jump scares, you know it's because they don't have anything better. They haven't got any deeper than just having the phone ring and they turn up the soundtrack. You can always get an audience to jump by putting a loud sound on the soundtrack. JOHN: Is there an example you can think of though, where there is a jump scare that you think is a genuinely good, effective jump scare? NEAL: I can think of a movie that has two really excellent jump scares. John Carpenter's The Thing. When the doctor's giving the electric shock to the guy's chest, and the chest opens and slams shut on his hand. Didn't expect it.That's a super great jump scare. It is perfectly integrated into that scene. Everyone jumps, but it's also a brilliant continuation of that scene. Second jump scare, when MacReady is testing everyone's blood. And saying, “We're going to do you next,” puts the needle in, and that thing jumps out of the Petri dish.Fantastic jump scare. We didn't see it coming. Everyone jumps. And it's again, it's perfectly integrated into that scene. So, two brilliant jump scares in what's already an incredibly brilliant movie. BRIAN: I remember watching the commentary on Jaws and Spielberg said he got greedy with his jump scares. He had the moment towards the end of the film, you remember that Jaws comes out of the water while it's being chummed. And he said he got this great reaction from the audience, and he wanted one more. And he went back, and he added in the scene earlier where the corpse face comes through the hole. And he said he never got the audience to react as well to the shark after he added in that corpse face coming through the hole of the ship. And I wondered, do you think there's a point of diminishing returns with jump scares in one movie? NEAL: I think there absolutely is. I mean—and I have no end of admiration for Jaws. I think it may be one of the most brilliant movies ever, and it certainly has stood the test of time. JOHN: So, we've each come armed with some movies here that I thought it would be fun to talk about them with you, so that you could sort of delve into the different types of fear that are outlined in the book and we'll just sort ofcheckerboard back and forth here. I'm going to start with one of my favorite sense of dread movies, and that's Don't Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, directed by Nick Roeg which I saw way too young. First R rated movie I saw. I remember I knew that it was supposed to be really scary, and I went with my older brother, and we were standing in line and the seven o'clock show was letting out. And I said to my brother, “Well, it can't be that scary. They're not saying anything.” Not realizing that they had all been stunned into silence about the last five minutes of that movie. So, what are your thoughts on Don't Look Now and where does that fit? NEAL: When I talk about the sense of dread, which is what my book is about, it's the notion of those aspects of our lives that we think of as safe and secure and dependable and sacred being suddenly or unexpectedly penetrated by the unknown or the unnatural, the unexpected. And you have to say, well, what are the things that we depend on? We depend on our homes. We depend on our families. And so that relationship of parent and child, what violates that? And the loss of a child, loss is already wrenching. And so, this sense of parents having lost a child, but then this notion that, well, maybe not, maybe the child is still out there somewhere, is so deeply disturbing. And so this weird, this quest, this pursuit in them. And meanwhile, in the background, you have the sense of a killer, of killings going on. This really disturbing notion of the woman's half decayed body being pulled out of the water is just as an image is—and again, the notion of human body being reduced to mere flesh—it's deeply disturbing. And nakedness, coupled with decay, it's deeply disturbing. And all of this sort of happening in the background. We don't quite know how these pieces connect. The notion that the search for the child and the notion that there's a killer on the loose. We know, because the nature of cinematic storytelling is telling us that somehow these things are going to connect, because, I mean, in the real world, there are countless thousands of things drifting around that don't necessarily hook up. But we know that one thing is going to collide with another. And so, there's this growing sense of profound unease, because we know, somehow, this child in this Red Riding Hood cape is wandering around, it's like, is this the child? Is the child going to become embroiled in this? But what we don't, certainly don't expect is the ending that confronts us in the finale, which is so incredibly, the reversal is so terrifying and so hits us in the face of that sense of innocence—revealed in such a terrifying way—is the essence of dread. Where we expect to find innocence, we find a nightmare. JOHN: What's great about what Nick Roeg did there was—if you read Daphne du Maurier's short story—he basically shot the last paragraph of that short story. Cinematically, he figured out the way that she's laying out what's going on with Donald Sutherland's character at that moment. He figured out a way to make it cinematic. So, like you say, all the pieces suddenly fall into place in those last few seconds. And, like you said, we've been brought to this place, we had no idea that that's where it was going to turn. Neal, tell me about Enemy from Space, and what you like about that. NEAL: Enemy from Space is the second of the three Quatermass movie, adaptations of the serial. It's in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and all these other movies about human beings who are being invaded and infested by alien forces. In this case, over the past few years—but in the context of the story—there have been rains of these tiny little meteorites. Anyone who finds them, they crack open and what's inside infests human beings. And you can find these tiny little burn marks, these V shaped marks on them. And the parasites take them over and make them into these kind of human slaves. And the premise is they serve this larger being, this kind of group entity, and they proceed to start building these atmosphere plants, with the goal ultimately to turn the earth into a colony for these beings that come from outer space. But the notion of these human beings, they have infiltrated our government, infiltrated our community, and they gradually take people over, scary enough. And they have built this enormous plant that looks, he says, this looks just like this proposed lunar base with these giant atmospheric domes. A group of people managed to infiltrate one of these bases and he looks inside, manages to get close enough to look inside one of these domes and inside are the parasites. When they're released, they grow together into this thing that looks like a giant blob. That's what it looks like outside of the human hosts. And a bunch of these guys are trapped inside of the atmosphere of plant. And they realize this thing, they can't survive outside the human body. They need methane to breathe, because that's what their home planet is like. “What we need to do is we need to pump oxygen into this dome to kill this thing. That'll destroy it.” And voices come over to say, “Look, this guy's crazy. There's nothing inside this dome. You send some representatives over, we'll show you anything you want.” And Quatermass says, “You're crazy if you go over there, you're going to be infected. You're going to be taken over.” But they managed to divide, they send the guys over and Quatermass is pleading with them, “Listen, they're going to get on this speaker. They're going to tell you that everything is fine, but you can't listen. Don't listen to them, whatever you say.” And then they hear this sound. This hideous sound of screaming coming down the pipes, the pipes that they've been sending oxygen down to the dome. They say, “What the hell is that? What's going on?” And then they look, they see the pressure has gone way up. There's something wrong. And the pipe is burst, the pipe that's sending oxygen to this dome. And they say, “What is it? What's happened?” And they look and something is dripping down through the pipe. And they say, “What is it?” It's blood. They took the guys that they sent, and they pushed them into the pipe. They say those pipes have been blocked with human pulp in order to keep the oxygen from coming into the dome. That is one of the most, again, all you see is just these drops of blood coming out of the cracked pipe, but that has resonated as one of the most terrifying moments from any movie that I saw, again, as a little kid. I've seen the movie recently and it's still incredibly terrifying. And again, the architecture of this web of pipes, the cold black and white architecture, is horrifyingly chilling. And the notion of human beings being reduced to mere flesh, being used as material for blocking a pipe. And the pipe's only like, it's like this big. So, you can imagine this person shoved into a pipe is hideous. JOHN: It is available on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it after that. Brian, do you want to ask about folk horror? BRIAN: Actually, I was going to jump ahead just because of what Neal was just talking about. I thought this would dovetail nicely into a question I had about a fear of contagion. And you can wrap body horror into this. Movies like The Thing or 28 Days Later, or probably The Quatermas Experiment as well. How does that fear of our own bodies being infected or watching another body change or be infected in unnatural ways? How does that—I don't want to use the word appeal—but how does that appeal to our sense of dread? NEAL: Well, I think you also have to run back to one of the most common— whether it's psychological or physiological—which is obsessive compulsive disorder. You say, well, what exactly is obsessive compulsive disorder? We have built in grooming behaviors, whether it's cleaning our hands, we clean our skin. That's wired into us. And when you turn the dial up too far, that turns into obsessive compulsive, obsessive hand cleaning or scratching, itching, hair pulling, all that stuff. It's wired in behavior, in the same way that dogs will scratch, we will scratch. And so, all of that, we react to it in the same way that if you see a spot of dirt on someone's forehead, it's almost impossible to “Clean that thing off. Get rid of that thing.” I mean, we're built in a certain way to respond to distortions, infections, invasions, in the same way that if someone's eye is cocked to one side, we react to it. Someone's face is distorted. We react to it negatively. We have to work not to respond to it. It may be a bug, but it may be a feature, because we are built to respond to a diseased or distorted members of our community. It's a survival trait. And so, in some ways, horror movies respond to that. Distorted human beings, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Igor or anyone else who are distorted, deformed, limbless creatures—Freaks—are employed in horror movies in a variety of different ways. BRIAN: And it's a very different thing from seeing an arm chopped off versus seeing an arm with three hands that are all operating. Both of them is something happening to your body that you might revolt towards, but it's a very different reaction though, right? NEAL: It is, but it's—in a sense—it's all variations of the same thing. There's a central human norm, and that which varies from the human norm beyond a certain point triggers a reaction that says, “That's not the way it's supposed to be.” And it's just, eyes are too close together, eyes are too far apart, eyes are too big, or there's an extra one. There's one missing. We recoil from it. We recoil from something that is too different, too far off the norm. And of course, in strictly social terms, you can say, but why, why should we? We shouldn't really respond in that way to others who are too different. But we do respond that way, and it comes with the programming in a very real degree. JOHN: How does that connect, then, to another movie on your list, The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932? NEAL: I think it's central to that list. The notion of the difference between that which is human and that which is animal. And Moreau, who experiments with making animals into human beings, but not really. And the sort of terrifying revelation when our hero and the woman—who we know to be an animal woman, but she looks fundamentally human—escape out into the woods and come across the animal person village. And the realization to what extent Moreau has been experimenting. It's not just tens or dozens. The animal people just come flooding out of the woods. And it's just hundreds. And the extent and the depth and the kind of nightmarish quality, they're all different. They're all horrible. And it's just like, what has Moreau been doing? He experiments with these animals, gets them to a certain state, and then he just discards them and moves on to something else. This utterly careless, sadistic god of this army of nightmares. And you sort of see when they do their, you know, “Are we not men?” And you just see row upon row upon row of these hideous nightmare faces. And you just say, “My God, what has this guy been doing for years? Just making these monsters.” JOHN: It's a classically creepy movie. I do want to ask you about the classic ghost story movie, The Haunting, and what that says about our fears. If you can, maybe tie that into Ghostwatch, because there's a similar sort of thing going on there. NEAL: They're both intriguing. They both are opening us up to this notion of unseen nightmare forces, especially the original Haunting, which shows us nothing. All you ever see: Doorknob turning. A face that may or may not be in the wall. This horribly loud banging on the door. A moment where someone thinks that her hand is being held, but there's no one there. It is simply this notion of a house that is born bad, but never really fully explained. Again, you have this idea of the world itself that should be well behaved, that should be governed by comprehensible natural laws. But there's something deeper and darker and incapable of truly being understood, nevermind being controlled. And if you just prod it a little bit too much, you're going to open it up to forces that are utterly destructive and utterly malevolent. And in both of these cases, you have this man of science and his team that are going to find out. “We're going to find out for sure whether there really are ghosts, whether there really is a supernatural, whether it really is life after death. We're going to nail this down for science.” Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. These are things that are, that are not meant to be explored, not meant to be examined. Go back. BRIAN: I'm reminded of Van Helsing's sign off on the original Dracula, where he said, “Just remember, there really are such things in this world.” NEAL: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the same thing is true in some ways on a much more terrifying scale with Ghostwatch, where it's just, it's this kind of, “It's all just fun and Halloween, we're going to explore this. It's the most haunted house in Britain.” And it's broadcasters whose faces everyone knew at the time, and they were playing themselves. Going to this haunted house where you had these poltergeist phenomena. And we're all going to, “We're going to do it live and call in with your own experiences about being haunted.” And it all just goes so horribly wrong. JOHN: Now, Neal, I just watched that for the first time this week. Heard about it for years. I had no idea that those were real broadcasters. I thought they were really good actors. But to someone in Britain watching that, those are faces they saw all the time? NEAL: Yeah. Those are real broadcasters. They had their own shows. They were real, the real deal. JOHN: Wow. I highly recommend renting it because—it'll test your patience a little tiny bit, because it is quite banal for quite a while, as they lead you into it. But now this new bit of information that these are all faces that that audience who saw it, quote unquote, live that night, it's as terrifying as I imagined the Orson Welles' War the Worlds would have been. Because it seems very real. NEAL: And apparently the way they did it, is that there was a number you could call in. And if you called in that number, they would tell you, it's like, “Don't worry, this is all just a show.” But so many people were calling in, they couldn't get through. BRIAN: This really is War of the Worlds. NEAL: So, they never were able to get to that message that would tell them, don't worry, it's all just a show. So apparently it panicked the nation, because part of the premise was at a certain point, the ghost that was haunting the house got into the show. And so, the studio itself became haunted. It was really spectacularly well done. JOHN: It is. It's great. Let's just sort of wrap up here real quick with Neal, if you have any advice for beginning screenwriter about how to best create a really powerful and effective horror screenplay, any little tips. NEAL: Well, first of all, and I touched on this before, jump scares don't work on the page. You need the loud bang. You need the hand reaching in from the side. You describe that and it doesn't work. So, you have to rely on creating that sense of dread. And while writing screenplays, you have to keep things tight. The concept, the idea—in the same way comedy screenplays have to be funny—scary screenplays have to be scary. It has to be scary on the page. If it's not scary on the page, you're not going to sell the screenplay. And that's the fundamental trick. You got to make it scary on the page. JOHN: Excellent advice. All right, let's just quickly, each one of us, tell our listeners a recent favorite horror film that you've seen in the last couple years.I'll start with you, Brian. BRIAN: Just last night, I saw Haunting in Venice. And it worked because I had seen the other Kenneth Branagh/Agatha Christie adaptations, and I was very familiar with, and you know, you already know generally that kind of detective whodunit story: it's going to be very, you know, using logic and rationality.And when they had this episode that was sort of a one off—sort of a departure from that usual way that mysteries are solved—it was very effective. I think if I'd seen it without having already watched a bunch of Agatha Christie adaptations, I would have said, “Oh, that's an okay Halloween movie.” But having seen those other ones, it was an excellent Halloween movie. JOHN: Excellent. That's on my list. The movie I would recommend, which really surprised me, my wife literally dragged me to it because it was a French film called Final Cut, which is a French remake of a Japanese film called One Cut of the Dead. At about the 30-minute mark, I was ready to walk out, and I thought, why are we watching this? And then they took us on a ride for the next hour that, it's a really good ride. It's called Final Cut. BRIAN: And this is not to be confused with the Robin Williams Final Cut from... ? JOHN: Not to be confused with that, no. Or if you can go back to the original and watch the Japanese version. But what's great about the French version is they are literally remaking the Japanese version, to the point where they've made all the characters have Japanese names. Which the French people struggle with enormously. It's a highly effective film. Neal, how about you? Take us home. NEAL: Okay. It's not a new movie, but I just saw it very recently. It is a Chilean stop motion animated film called The Wolf House. It describes the adventures of a young Chilean woman who escapes from a repressive German colony and ends up in this bizarre house in which she blends into the walls. She's escaped with two pigs who grow up with her in this house, but again, nothing, no way in which I describe it is going to convey to you how deeply disturbing and chilling this movie is. It really is quite indescribably bizarre and disturbing and just well worth your time to watch. It's not quite like any other movie I've ever seen.

We finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot. ----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 complete our look back at the 1980s theatrical releases for Miramax Films. And, for the final time, a reminder that we are not celebrating Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but reminiscing about the movies they had no involvement in making. We cannot talk about cinema in the 1980s without talking about Miramax, and I really wanted to get it out of the way, once and for all.   As we left Part 4, Miramax was on its way to winning its first Academy Award, Billie August's Pelle the Conquerer, the Scandinavian film that would be second film in a row from Denmark that would win for Best Foreign Language Film.   In fact, the first two films Miramax would release in 1989, the Australian film Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train and the Anthony Perkins slasher film Edge of Sanity, would not arrive in theatres until the Friday after the Academy Awards ceremony that year, which was being held on the last Wednesday in March.   Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train stars Wendy Hughes, the talented Australian actress who, sadly, is best remembered today as Lt. Commander Nella Daren, one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's few love interests, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Jenny, a prostitute working a weekend train to Sydney, who is seduced by a man on the train, unaware that he plans on tricking her to kill someone for him. Colin Friels, another great Aussie actor who unfortunately is best known for playing the corrupt head of Strack Industries in Sam Raimi's Darkman, plays the unnamed man who will do anything to get what he wants.   Director Bob Ellis and his co-screenwriter Denny Lawrence came up with the idea for the film while they themselves were traveling on a weekend train to Sydney, with the idea that each client the call girl met on the train would represent some part of the Australian male.   Funding the $2.5m film was really simple… provided they cast Hughes in the lead role. Ellis and Lawrence weren't against Hughes as an actress. Any film would be lucky to have her in the lead. They just felt she she didn't have the right kind of sex appeal for this specific character.   Miramax would open the film in six theatres, including the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles and the Fashion Village 8 in Orlando, on March 31st. There were two versions of the movie prepared, one that ran 130 minutes and the other just 91. Miramax would go with the 91 minute version of the film for the American release, and most of the critics would note how clunky and confusing the film felt, although one critic for the Village Voice would have some kind words for Ms. Hughes' performance.   Whether it was because moviegoers were too busy seeing the winners of the just announced Academy Awards, including Best Picture winner Rain Man, or because this weekend was also the opening weekend of the new Major League Baseball season, or just turned off by the reviews, attendance at the theatres playing Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train was as empty as a train dining car at three in the morning. The Beverly Center alone would account for a third of the movie's opening weekend gross of $19,268. After a second weekend at the same six theatres pocketing just $14,382, this train stalled out, never to arrive at another station.   Their other March 31st release, Edge of Sanity, is notable for two things and only two things: it would be the first film Miramax would release under their genre specialty label, Millimeter Films, which would eventually evolve into Dimension Films in the next decade, and it would be the final feature film to star Anthony Perkins before his passing in 1992.   The film is yet another retelling of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, with the bonus story twist that Hyde was actually Jack the Ripper. As Jekyll, Perkins looks exactly as you'd expect a mid-fifties Norman Bates to look. As Hyde, Perkins is made to look like he's a backup keyboardist for the first Nine Inch Nails tour. Head Like a Hole would have been an appropriate song for the end credits, had the song or Pretty Hate Machine been released by that time, with its lyrics about bowing down before the one you serve and getting what you deserve.   Edge of Sanity would open in Atlanta and Indianapolis on March 31st. And like so many other Miramax releases in the 1980s, they did not initially announce any grosses for the film. That is, until its fourth weekend of release, when the film's theatre count had fallen to just six, down from the previous week's previously unannounced 35, grossing just $9,832. Miramax would not release grosses for the film again, with a final total of just $102,219.   Now when I started this series, I said that none of the films Miramax released in the 1980s were made by Miramax, but this next film would become the closest they would get during the decade.   In July 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when the married Profumo began a sexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was very short-lived, either ending, depending on the source, in August 1961 or December 1961. Unbeknownst to Profumo, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy at the same time.   No one was the wiser on any of this until December 1962, when a shooting incident involving two other men Keeler had been involved with led the press to start looking into Keeler's life. While it was never proven that his affair with Keeler was responsible for any breaches of national security, John Profumo was forced to resign from his position in June 1963, and the scandal would take down most of the Torie government with him. Prime Minister Macmillan would resign due to “health reasons” in October 1963, and the Labour Party would take control of the British government when the next elections were held in October 1964.   Scandal was originally planned in the mid-1980s as a three-part, five-hour miniseries by Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas and American music producer turned movie producer Joe Boyd. The BBC would commit to finance a two-part, three-hour miniseries,  until someone at the network found an old memo from the time of the Profumo scandal that forbade them from making any productions about it. Channel 4, which had been producing quality shows and movies for several years since their start in 1982, was approached, but rejected the series on the grounds of taste.   Palace Pictures, a British production company who had already produced three films for Neil Jordan including Mona Lisa, was willing to finance the script, provided it could be whittled down to a two hour movie. Originally budgeted at 3.2m British pounds, the costs would rise as they started the casting process.  John Hurt, twice Oscar-nominated for his roles in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, would sign on to play Stephen Ward, a British osteopath who acted as Christine Keeler's… well… pimp, for lack of a better word. Ian McKellen, a respected actor on British stages and screens but still years away from finding mainstream global success in the X-Men movies, would sign on to play John Profumo. Joanne Whaley, who had filmed the yet to be released at that time Willow with her soon to be husband Val Kilmer, would get her first starring role as Keeler, and Bridget Fonda, who was quickly making a name for herself in the film world after being featured in Aria, would play Mandy Rice-Davies, the best friend and co-worker of Keeler's.   To save money, Palace Pictures would sign thirty-year-old Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones to direct, after seeing a short film he had made called The Riveter. But even with the neophyte feature filmmaker, Palace still needed about $2.35m to be able to fully finance the film. And they knew exactly who to go to.   Stephen Woolley, the co-founder of Palace Pictures and the main producer on the film, would fly from London to New York City to personally pitch Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Woolley felt that of all the independent distributors in America, they would be the ones most attracted to the sexual and controversial nature of the story. A day later, Woolley was back on a plane to London. The Weinsteins had agreed to purchase the American distribution rights to Scandal for $2.35m.   The film would spend two months shooting in the London area through the summer of 1988. Christine Keeler had no interest in the film, and refused to meet the now Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to talk about the affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies was more than happy to Bridget Fonda about her life, although the meetings between the two women were so secret, they would not come out until Woolley eulogized Rice-Davies after her 2014 death.   Although Harvey and Bob would be given co-executive producers on the film, Miramax was not a production company on the film. This, however, did not stop Harvey from flying to London multiple times, usually when he was made aware of some sexy scene that was going to shoot the following day, and try to insinuate himself into the film's making. At one point, Woolley decided to take a weekend off from the production, and actually did put Harvey in charge. That weekend's shoot would include a skinny-dipping scene featuring the Christine Keeler character, but when Whaley-Kilmer learned Harvey was going to be there, she told the director that she could not do the nudity in the scene. Her new husband was objecting to it, she told them. Harvey, not skipping a beat, found a lookalike for the actress who would be willing to bare all as a body double, and the scene would begin shooting a few hours later. Whaley-Kilmer watched the shoot from just behind the camera, and stopped the shoot a few minutes later. She was not happy that the body double's posterior was notably larger than her own, and didn't want audiences to think she had that much junk in her trunk. The body double was paid for her day, and Whaley-Kilmer finished the rest of the scene herself.   Caton-Jones and his editing team worked on shaping the film through the fall, and would screen his first edit of the film for Palace Pictures and the Weinsteins in November 1988. And while Harvey was very happy with the cut, he still asked the production team for a different edit for American audiences, noting that most Americans had no idea who Profumo or Keeler or Rice-Davies were, and that Americans would need to understand the story more right out of the first frame. Caton-Jones didn't want to cut a single frame, but he would work with Harvey to build an American-friendly cut.   While he was in London in November 1988, he would meet with the producers of another British film that was in pre-production at the time that would become another important film to the growth of the company, but we're not quite at that part of the story yet. We'll circle around to that film soon.   One of the things Harvey was most looking forward to going in to 1989 was the expected battle with the MPAA ratings board over Scandal. Ever since he had seen the brouhaha over Angel Heart's X rating two years earlier, he had been looking for a similar battle. He thought he had it with Aria in 1988, but he knew he definitely had it now.   And he'd be right.   In early March, just a few weeks before the film's planned April 21st opening day, the MPAA slapped an X rating on Scandal. The MPAA usually does not tell filmmakers or distributors what needs to be cut, in order to avoid accusations of actual censorship, but according to Harvey, they told him exactly what needed to be cut to get an R: a two second shot during an orgy scene, where it appears two background characters are having unsimulated sex.   So what did Harvey do?   He spent weeks complaining to the press about MPAA censorship, generating millions in free publicity for the film, all the while already having a close-up shot of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer's Christine Keeler watching the orgy but not participating in it, ready to replace the objectionable shot.   A few weeks later, Miramax screened the “edited” film to the MPAA and secured the R rating, and the film would open on 94 screens, including 28 each in the New York City and Los Angeles metro regions, on April 28th.   And while the reviews for the film were mostly great, audiences were drawn to the film for the Miramax-manufactured controversy as well as the key art for the film, a picture of a potentially naked Joanne Whaley-Kilmer sitting backwards in a chair, a mimic of a very famous photo Christine Keeler herself took to promote a movie about the Profumo affair she appeared in a few years after the events. I'll have a picture of both the Scandal poster and the Christine Keeler photo on this episode's page at The80sMoviePodcast.com   Five other movies would open that weekend, including the James Belushi comedy K-9 and the Kevin Bacon drama Criminal Law, and Scandal, with $658k worth of ticket sales, would have the second best per screen average of the five new openers, just a few hundred dollars below the new Holly Hunter movie Miss Firecracker, which only opened on six screens.   In its second weekend, Scandal would expand its run to 214 playdates, and make its debut in the national top ten, coming in tenth place with $981k. That would be more than the second week of the Patrick Dempsey rom-com Loverboy, even though Loverboy was playing on 5x as many screens.   In weekend number three, Scandal would have its best overall gross and top ten placement, coming in seventh with $1.22m from 346 screens. Scandal would start to slowly fade after that, falling back out of the top ten in its sixth week, but Miramax would wisely keep the screen count under 375, because Scandal wasn't going to play well in all areas of the country. After nearly five months in theatres, Miramax would have its biggest film to date. Scandal would gross $8.8m.   The second release from Millimeter Films was The Return of the Swamp Thing. And if you needed a reason why the 1980s was not a good time for comic book movies, here you are. The Return of the Swamp Thing took most of what made the character interesting in his comic series, and most of what was good from the 1982 Wes Craven adaptation, and decided “Hey, you know what would bring the kids in? Camp! Camp unseen in a comic book adaptation since the 1960s Batman series. They loved it then, they'll love it now!”   They did not love it now.   Heather Locklear, between her stints on T.J. Hooker and Melrose Place, plays the step-daughter of Louis Jourdan's evil Dr. Arcane from the first film, who heads down to the Florida swaps to confront dear old once presumed dead stepdad. He in turns kidnaps his stepdaughter and decides to do some of his genetic experiments on her, until she is rescued by Swamp Thing, one of Dr. Arcane's former co-workers who got turned into the gooey anti-hero in the first movie.   The film co-stars Sarah Douglas from Superman 1 and 2 as Dr. Arcane's assistant, Dick Durock reprising his role as Swamp Thing from the first film, and 1980s B-movie goddess Monique Gabrielle as Miss Poinsettia.   For director Jim Wynorski, this was his sixth movie as a director, and at $3m, one of the highest budgeted movies he would ever make. He's directed 107 movies since 1984, most of them low budget direct to video movies with titles like The Bare Wench Project and Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, although he does have one genuine horror classic under his belt, the 1986 sci-fi tinged Chopping Maul with Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton.   Wynorski suggested in a late 1990s DVD commentary for the film that he didn't particularly enjoy making the film, and had a difficult time directing Louis Jourdan, to the point that outside of calling “action” and “cut,” the two didn't speak to each other by the end of the shoot.   The Return of Swamp Thing would open in 123 theatres in the United States on May 12th, including 28 in the New York City metro region, 26 in the Los Angeles area, 15 in Detroit, and a handful of theatres in Phoenix, San Francisco. And, strangely, the newspaper ads would include an actual positive quote from none other than Roger Ebert, who said on Siskel & Ebert that he enjoyed himself, and that it was good to have Swamp Thing back. Siskel would not reciprocate his balcony partner's thumb up. But Siskel was about the only person who was positive on the return of Swamp Thing, and that box office would suffer. In its first three days, the film would gross just $119,200. After a couple more dismal weeks in theatres, The Return of Swamp Thing would be pulled from distribution, with a final gross of just $275k.   Fun fact: The Return of Swamp Thing was produced by Michael E. Uslan, whose next production, another adaptation of a DC Comics character, would arrive in theatres not six weeks later and become the biggest film of the summer. In fact, Uslan has been a producer or executive producer on every Batman-related movie and television show since 1989, from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan to Zack Snyder to Matt Reeves, and from LEGO movies to Joker. He also, because of his ownership of the movie rights to Swamp Thing, got the movie screen rights, but not the television screen rights, to John Constantine.   Miramax didn't have too much time to worry about The Return of Swamp Thing's release, as it was happening while the Brothers Weinstein were at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. They had two primary goals at Cannes that year:   To buy American distribution rights to any movie that would increase their standing in the cinematic worldview, which they would achieve by picking up an Italian dramedy called, at the time, New Paradise Cinema, which was competing for the Palme D'Or with a Miramax pickup from Sundance back in January. Promote that very film, which did end up winning the Palme D'Or.   Ever since he was a kid, Steven Soderbergh wanted to be a filmmaker. Growing up in Baton Rouge, LA in the late 1970s, he would enroll in the LSU film animation class, even though he was only 15 and not yet a high school graduate. After graduating high school, he decided to move to Hollywood to break into the film industry, renting an above-garage room from Stephen Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker best known as the father of Jake and Maggie, but after a few freelance editing jobs, Soderbergh packed up his things and headed home to Baton Rouge.   Someone at Atco Records saw one of Soderbergh's short films, and hired him to direct a concert movie for one of their biggest bands at the time, Yes, who was enjoying a major comeback thanks to their 1983 triple platinum selling album, 90125. The concert film, called 9012Live, would premiere on MTV in late 1985, and it would be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.   Soderbergh would use the money he earned from that project, $7,500, to make Winston, a 12 minute black and white short about sexual deception that he would, over the course of an eight day driving trip from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles, expand to a full length screen that he would call sex, lies and videotape. In later years, Soderbergh would admit that part of the story is autobiographical, but not the part you might think. Instead of the lead, Graham, an impotent but still sexually perverse late twentysomething who likes to tape women talking about their sexual fantasies for his own pleasure later, Soderbergh based the husband John, the unsophisticated lawyer who cheats on his wife with her sister, on himself, although there would be a bit of Graham that borrows from the filmmaker. Like his lead character, Soderbergh did sell off most of his possessions and hit the road to live a different life.   When he finished the script, he sent it out into the wilds of Hollywood. Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and husband of Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle, would read it and sign on as an executive producer. Soderbergh had wanted to shoot the film in black and white, like he had with the Winston short that lead to the creation of this screenplay, but he and Mason had trouble getting anyone to commit to the project, even with only a projected budget of $200,000. For a hot moment, it looked like Universal might sign on to make the film, but they would eventually pass.   Robert Newmyer, who had left his job as a vice president of production and acquisitions at Columbia Pictures to start his own production company, signed on as a producer, and helped to convince Soderbergh to shoot the film in color, and cast some name actors in the leading roles. Once he acquiesced, Richard Branson's Virgin Vision agreed to put up $540k of the newly budgeted $1.2m film, while RCA/Columbia Home Video would put up the remaining $660k.   Soderbergh and his casting director, Deborah Aquila, would begin their casting search in New York, where they would meet with, amongst others, Andie MacDowell, who had already starred in two major Hollywood pictures, 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and 1985's St. Elmo's Fire, but was still considered more of a top model than an actress, and Laura San Giacomo, who had recently graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh and would be making her feature debut. Moving on to Los Angeles, Soderbergh and Aquila would cast James Spader, who had made a name for himself as a mostly bad guy in 80s teen movies like Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero, but had never been the lead in a drama like this. At Spader's suggestion, the pair met with Peter Gallagher, who was supposed to become a star nearly a decade earlier from his starring role in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker, but had mostly been playing supporting roles in television shows and movies for most of the decade.   In order to keep the budget down, Soderbergh, the producers, cinematographer Walt Lloyd and the four main cast members agreed to get paid their guild minimums in exchange for a 50/50 profit participation split with RCA/Columbia once the film recouped its costs.   The production would spend a week in rehearsals in Baton Rouge, before the thirty day shoot began on August 1st, 1988. On most days, the shoot was unbearable for many, as temperatures would reach as high as 110 degrees outside, but there were a couple days lost to what cinematographer Lloyd said was “biblical rains.” But the shoot completed as scheduled, and Soderbergh got to the task of editing right away. He knew he only had about eight weeks to get a cut ready if the film was going to be submitted to the 1989 U.S. Film Festival, now better known as Sundance. He did get a temporary cut of the film ready for submission, with a not quite final sound mix, and the film was accepted to the festival. It would make its world premiere on January 25th, 1989, in Park City UT, and as soon as the first screening was completed, the bids from distributors came rolling in. Larry Estes, the head of RCA/Columbia Home Video, would field more than a dozen submissions before the end of the night, but only one distributor was ready to make a deal right then and there.   Bob Weinstein wasn't totally sold on the film, but he loved the ending, and he loved that the word “sex” not only was in the title but lead the title. He knew that title alone would sell the movie. Harvey, who was still in New York the next morning, called Estes to make an appointment to meet in 24 hours. When he and Estes met, he brought with him three poster mockups the marketing department had prepared, and told Estes he wasn't going to go back to New York until he had a contract signed, and vowed to beat any other deal offered by $100,000. Island Pictures, who had made their name releasing movies like Stop Making Sense, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, The Trip to Bountiful and She's Gotta Have It, offered $1m for the distribution rights, plus a 30% distribution fee and a guaranteed $1m prints and advertising budget. Estes called Harvey up and told him what it would take to make the deal. $1.1m for the distribution rights, which needed to paid up front, a $1m P&A budget, to be put in escrow upon the signing of the contract until the film was released, a 30% distribution fee, no cutting of the film whatsoever once Soderbergh turns in his final cut, they would need to provide financial information for the films costs and returns once a month because of the profit participation contracts, and the Weinsteins would have to hire Ira Deutchman, who had spent nearly 15 years in the independent film world, doing marketing for Cinema 5, co-founding United Artists Classics, and co-founding Cinecom Pictures before opening his own company to act as a producers rep and marketer. And the Weinsteins would not only have to do exactly what Deutchman wanted, they'd have to pay for his services too.   The contract was signed a few weeks later.   The first move Miramax would make was to get Soderbergh's final cut of the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, where it would be accepted to compete in the main competition. Which you kind of already know what happened, because that's what I lead with. The film would win the Palme D'Or, and Spader would be awarded the festival's award for Best Actor. It was very rare at the time, and really still is, for any film to be awarded more than one prize, so winning two was really a coup for the film and for Miramax, especially when many critics attending the festival felt Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was the better film.   In March, Miramax expected the film to make around $5-10m, which would net the company a small profit on the film. After Cannes, they were hopeful for a $15m gross.   They never expected what would happen next.   On August 4th, sex, lies, and videotape would open on four screens, at the Cinema Studio in New York City, and at the AMC Century 14, the Cineplex Beverly Center 13 and the Mann Westwood 4 in Los Angeles. Three prime theatres and the best they could do in one of the then most competitive zones in all America. Remember, it's still the Summer 1989 movie season, filled with hits like Batman, Dead Poets Society, Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Lethal Weapon 2, Parenthood, Turner & Hooch, and When Harry Met Sally. An independent distributor even getting one screen at the least attractive theatre in Westwood was a major get. And despite the fact that this movie wasn't really a summertime movie per se, the film would gross an incredible $156k in its first weekend from just these four theatres. Its nearly $40k per screen average would be 5x higher than the next closest film, Parenthood.   In its second weekend, the film would expand to 28 theatres, and would bring in over $600k in ticket sales, its per screen average of $21,527 nearly triple its closest competitor, Parenthood again. The company would keep spending small, as it slowly expanded the film each successive week. Forty theatres in its third week, and 101 in its fourth. The numbers held strong, and in its fifth week, Labor Day weekend, the film would have its first big expansion, playing in 347 theatres. The film would enter the top ten for the first time, despite playing in 500 to 1500 fewer theatres than the other films in the top ten. In its ninth weekend, the film would expand to its biggest screen count, 534, before slowly drawing down as the other major Oscar contenders started their theatrical runs. The film would continue to play through the Oscar season of 1989, and when it finally left theatres in May 1989, its final gross would be an astounding $24.7m.   Now, remember a few moments ago when I said that Miramax needed to provide financial statements every month for the profit participation contracts of Soderbergh, the producers, the cinematographer and the four lead actors? The film was so profitable for everyone so quickly that RCA/Columbia made its first profit participation payouts on October 17th, barely ten weeks after the film's opening.   That same week, Soderbergh also made what was at the time the largest deal with a book publisher for the writer/director's annotated version of the screenplay, which would also include his notes created during the creation of the film. That $75,000 deal would be more than he got paid to make the movie as the writer and the director and the editor, not counting the profit participation checks.   During the awards season, sex, lies, and videotape was considered to be one of the Oscars front runners for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and at least two acting nominations. The film would be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress by the Golden Globes, and it would win the Spirit Awards for Best Picture, Soderbergh for Best Director, McDowell for Best Actress, and San Giacomo for Best Supporting Actress. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, the film would only receive one nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. The same total and category as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which many people also felt had a chance for a Best Picture and Best Director nomination. Both films would lose out to Tom Shulman's screenplay for Dead Poet's Society.   The success of sex, lies, and videotape would launch Steven Soderbergh into one of the quirkiest Hollywood careers ever seen, including becoming the first and only director ever to be nominated twice for Best Director in the same year by the Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America, in 2001 for directing Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He would win the Oscar for directing Traffic.   Lost in the excitement of sex, lies, and videotape was The Little Thief, a French movie that had an unfortunate start as the screenplay François Truffaut was working on when he passed away in 1984 at the age of just 52.   Directed by Claude Miller, whose principal mentor was Truffaut, The Little Thief starred seventeen year old Charlotte Gainsbourg as Janine, a young woman in post-World War II France who commits a series of larcenies to support her dreams of becoming wealthy.   The film was a modest success in France when it opened in December 1988, but its American release date of August 25th, 1989, was set months in advance. So when it was obvious sex, lies, and videotape was going to be a bigger hit than they originally anticipated, it was too late for Miramax to pause the release of The Little Thief.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City, and buoyed by favorable reviews from every major critic in town, The Little Thief would see $39,931 worth of ticket sales in its first seven days, setting a new house record at the theatre for the year. In its second week, the gross would only drop $47. For the entire week. And when it opened at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles, its opening week gross of $30,654 would also set a new house record for the year.   The film would expand slowly but surely over the next several weeks, often in single screen playdates in major markets, but it would never play on more than twenty-four screens in any given week. And after four months in theatres, The Little Thief, the last movie created one of the greatest film writers the world had ever seen, would only gross $1.056m in the United States.   The next three releases from Miramax were all sent out under the Millimeter Films banner.   The first, a supernatural erotic drama called The Girl in a Swing, was about an English antiques dealer who travels to Copenhagen where he meets and falls in love with a mysterious German-born secretary, whom he marries, only to discover a darker side to his new bride. Rupert Frazer, who played Christian Bale's dad in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, plays the antique dealer, while Meg Tilly the mysterious new bride.   Filmed over a five week schedule in London and Copenhagen during May and June 1988, some online sources say the film first opened somewhere in California in December 1988, but I cannot find a single theatre not only in California but anywhere in the United States that played the film before its September 29th, 1989 opening date.   Roger Ebert didn't like the film, and wished Meg Tilly's “genuinely original performance” was in a better movie. Opening in 26 theatres, including six theatres each in New York City and Los Angeles, and spurred on by an intriguing key art for the film that featured a presumed naked Tilly on a swing looking seductively at the camera while a notice underneath her warns that No One Under 18 Will Be Admitted To The Theatre, The Girl in a Swing would gross $102k, good enough for 35th place nationally that week. And that's about the best it would do. The film would limp along, moving from market to market over the course of the next three months, and when its theatrical run was complete, it could only manage about $747k in ticket sales.   We'll quickly burn through the next two Millimeter Films releases, which came out a week apart from each other and didn't amount to much.   Animal Behavior was a rather unfunny comedy featuring some very good actors who probably signed on for a very different movie than the one that came to be. Karen Allen, Miss Marion Ravenwood herself, stars as Alex, a biologist who, like Dr. Jane Goodall, develops a “new” way to communicate with chimpanzees via sign language. Armand Assante plays a cellist who pursues the good doctor, and Holly Hunter plays the cellist's neighbor, who Alex mistakes for his wife.   Animal Behavior was filmed in 1984, and 1985, and 1987, and 1988. The initial production was directed by Jenny Bowen with the assistance of Robert Redford and The Sundance Institute, thanks to her debut film, 1981's Street Music featuring Elizabeth Daily. It's unknown why Bowen and her cinematographer husband Richard Bowen left the project, but when filming resumed again and again and again, those scenes were directed by the film's producer, Kjehl Rasmussen.   Because Bowen was not a member of the DGA at the time, she was not able to petition the guild for the use of the Alan Smithee pseudonym, a process that is automatically triggered whenever a director is let go of a project and filming continues with its producer taking the reigns as director. But she was able to get the production to use a pseudonym anyway for the director's credit, H. Anne Riley, while also giving Richard Bowen a pseudonym of his own for his work on the film, David Spellvin.   Opening on 24 screens on October 27th, Animal Behavior would come in 50th place in its opening weekend, grossing just $20,361. The New York film critics ripped the film apart, and there wouldn't be a second weekend for the film.   The following Friday, November 3rd, saw the release of The Stepfather II, a rushed together sequel to 1987's The Stepfather, which itself wasn't a big hit in theatres but found a very quick and receptive audience on cable.   Despite dying at the end of the first film, Terry O'Quinn's Jerry is somehow still alive, and institutionalized in Northern Washington state. He escapes and heads down to Los Angeles, where he assumes the identity of a recently deceased publisher, Gene Clifford, but instead passes himself off as a psychiatrist. Jerry, now Gene, begins to court his neighbor Carol, and the whole crazy story plays out again. Meg Foster plays the neighbor Carol, and Jonathan Brandis is her son.    Director Jeff Burr had made a name for himself with his 1987 horror anthology film From a Whisper to a Scream, featuring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager and Terry Kiser, and from all accounts, had a very smooth shooting process with this film. The trouble began when he turned in his cut to the producers. The producers were happy with the film, but when they sent it to Miramax, the American distributors, they were rather unhappy with the almost bloodless slasher film. They demanded reshoots, which Burr and O'Quinn refused to participate in. They brought in a new director, Doug Campbell, to handle the reshoots, which are easy to spot in the final film because they look and feel completely different from the scenes they're spliced into.   When it opened, The Stepfather II actually grossed slightly more than the first film did, earning $279k from 100 screens, compared to $260k for The Stepfather from 105 screens. But unlike the first film, which had some decent reviews when it opened, the sequel was a complete mess. To this day, it's still one of the few films to have a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Stepfather II would limp its way through theatres during the Christmas holiday season, ending its run with a $1.5m gross.   But it would be their final film of the decade that would dictate their course for at least the first part of the 1990s.   Remember when I said earlier in the episode that Harvey Weinstein meant with the producers of another British film while in London for Scandal? We're at that film now, a film you probably know.   My Left Foot.   By November 1988, actor Daniel Day-Lewis had starred in several movies including James Ivory's A Room With a View and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He had even been the lead in a major Hollywood studio film, Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars, a very good film that unfortunately got caught up in the brouhaha over the exit of the studio head who greenlit the film, David Puttnam.   The film's director, Jim Sheridan, had never directed a movie before. He had become involved in stage production during his time at the University College in Dublin in the late 1960s, where he worked with future filmmaker Neil Jordan, and had spent nearly a decade after graduation doing stage work in Ireland and Canada, before settling in New York City in the early 1980s. Sheridan would go to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where one of his classmates was Spike Lee, and return to Ireland after graduating. He was nearly forty, married with two pre-teen daughters, and he needed to make a statement with his first film.   He would find that story in the autobiography of Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, whose spirit and creativity could not be contained by his severe cerebral palsy. Along with Irish actor and writer Shane Connaughton, Sheridan wrote a screenplay that could be a powerhouse film made on a very tight budget of less than a million dollars.   Daniel Day-Lewis was sent a copy of the script, in the hopes he would be intrigued enough to take almost no money to play a physically demanding role. He read the opening pages, which had the adult Christy Brown putting a record on a record player and dropping the needle on to the record with his left foot, and thought to himself it would be impossible to film. That intrigued him, and he signed on. But during filming in January and February of 1989, most of the scenes were shot using mirrors, as Day-Lewis couldn't do the scenes with his left foot. He could do them with his right foot, hence the mirrors.   As a method actor, Day-Lewis remained in character as Christy Brown for the entire two month shoot. From costume fittings and makeup in the morning, to getting the actor on set, to moving him around between shots, there were crew members assigned to assist the actor as if they were Christy Brown's caretakers themselves, including feeding him during breaks in shooting. A rumor debunked by the actor years later said Day-Lewis had broken two ribs during production because of how hunched down he needed to be in his crude prop wheelchair to properly play the character.   The actor had done a lot of prep work to play the role, including spending time at the Sandymount School Clinic where the young Christy Brown got his education, and much of his performance was molded on those young people.   While Miramax had acquired the American distribution rights to the film before it went into production, and those funds went into the production of the film, the film was not produced by Miramax, nor were the Weinsteins given any kind of executive producer credit, as they were able to get themselves on Scandal.   My Left Foot would make its world premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival on September 4th, 1989, followed soon thereafter by screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th and the New York Film Festival on September 23rd. Across the board, critics and audiences were in love with the movie, and with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. Jim Sheridan would receive a special prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for his direction, and Day-Lewis would win the festival's award for Best Actor. However, as the film played the festival circuit, another name would start to pop up. Brenda Fricker, a little known Irish actress who played Christy Brown's supportive but long-suffering mother Bridget, would pile up as many positive notices and awards as Day-Lewis. Although there was no Best Supporting Actress Award at the Montreal Film Festival, the judges felt her performance was deserving of some kind of attention, so they would create a Special Mention of the Jury Award to honor her.   Now, some sources online will tell you the film made its world premiere in Dublin on February 24th, 1989, based on a passage in a biography about Daniel Day-Lewis, but that would be impossible as the film would still be in production for two more days, and wasn't fully edited or scored by then.   I'm not sure when it first opened in the United Kingdom other than sometime in early 1990, but My Left Foot would have its commercial theatre debut in America on November 10th, when opened at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City and the Century City 14 in Los Angeles. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would, in the very opening paragraph of her review, note that one shouldn't see My Left Foot for some kind of moral uplift or spiritual merit badge, but because of your pure love of great moviemaking. Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times spends most of his words praising Day-Lewis and Sheridan for making a film that is polite and non-judgmental.    Interestingly, Miramax went with an ad campaign that completely excluded any explanation of who Christy Brown was or why the film is titled the way it is. 70% of the ad space is taken from pull quotes from many of the top critics of the day, 20% with the title of the film, and 10% with a picture of Daniel Day-Lewis, clean shaven and full tooth smile, which I don't recall happening once in the movie, next to an obviously added-in picture of one of his co-stars that is more camera-friendly than Brenda Fricker or Fiona Shaw.   Whatever reasons people went to see the film, they flocked to the two theatres playing the film that weekend. It's $20,582 per screen average would be second only to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, which had opened two days earlier, earning slightly more than $1,000 per screen than My Left Foot.   In week two, My Left Foot would gross another $35,133 from those two theatres, and it would overtake Henry V for the highest per screen average. In week three, Thanksgiving weekend, both Henry V and My Left Foot saw a a double digit increase in grosses despite not adding any theatres, and the latter film would hold on to the highest per screen average again, although the difference would only be $302. And this would continue for weeks. In the film's sixth week of release, it would get a boost in attention by being awarded Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle. Daniel Day-Lewis would be named Best Actor that week by both the New York critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while Fricker would win the Best Supporting Actress award from the latter group.   But even then, Miramax refused to budge on expanding the film until its seventh week of release, Christmas weekend, when My Left Foot finally moved into cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Its $135k gross that weekend was good, but it was starting to lose ground to other Oscar hopefuls like Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, Enemies: A Love Story, and Glory.   And even though the film continued to rack up award win after award win, nomination after nomination, from the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild and the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, Miramax still held firm on not expanding the film into more than 100 theatres nationwide until its 16th week in theatres, February 16th, 1990, two days after the announcement of the nominees for the 62nd Annual Academy Awards. While Daniel Day-Lewis's nomination for Best Actor was virtually assured and Brenda Fricker was practically a given, the film would pick up three other nominations, including surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Jim Sheridan and co-writer Shane Connaughton would also get picked for Best Adapted Screenplay.   Miramax also picked up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape, and a Best Foreign Language Film nod for the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso, which, thanks to the specific rules for that category, a film could get a nomination before actually opening in theatres in America, which Miramax would rush to do with Paradiso the week after its nomination was announced.   The 62nd Academy Awards ceremony would be best remembered today as being the first Oscar show to be hosted by Billy Crystal, and for being considerably better than the previous year's ceremony, a mess of a show best remembered as being the one with a 12 minute opening musical segment that included Rob Lowe singing Proud Mary to an actress playing Snow White and another nine minute musical segment featuring a slew of expected future Oscar winners that, to date, feature exact zero Oscar nominees, both which rank as amongst the worst things to ever happen to the Oscars awards show.   The ceremony, held on March 26th, would see My Left Foot win two awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, as well as Cinema Paradiso for Best Foreign Film. The following weekend, March 30th, would see Miramax expand My Left Foot to 510 theatres, its widest point of release, and see the film made the national top ten and earn more than a million dollars for its one and only time during its eight month run.   The film would lose steam pretty quickly after its post-win bump, but it would eek out a modest run that ended with $14.75m in ticket sales just in the United States. Not bad for a little Irish movie with no major stars that cost less than a million dollars to make.   Of course, the early 90s would see Miramax fly to unimagined heights. In all of the 80s, Miramax would release 39 movies. They would release 30 films alone in 1991. They would release the first movies from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. They'd release some of the best films from some of the best filmmakers in the world, including Woody Allen, Pedro Almadovar, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Atom Egoyan, Steven Frears, Peter Greenaway, Peter Jackson, Neil Jordan, Chen Kaige, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von Trier, and Zhang Yimou. In 1993, the Mexican dramedy Like Water for Chocolate would become the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America, and it would play in some theatres, including my theatre, the NuWilshire in Santa Monica, continuously for more than a year.   If you've listened to the whole series on the 1980s movies of Miramax Films, there are two things I hope you take away. First, I hope you discovered at least one film you hadn't heard of before and you might be interested in searching out. The second is the reminder that neither Bob nor Harvey Weinstein will profit in any way if you give any of the movies talked about in this series a chance. They sold Miramax to Disney in June 1993. They left Miramax in September 2005. Many of the contracts for the movies the company released in the 80s and 90s expired decades ago, with the rights reverting back to their original producers, none of whom made any deals with the Weinsteins once they got their rights back.   Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence in upstate New York after being found guilty in 2020 of two sexual assaults. Once he completes that sentence, he'll be spending another 16 years in prison in California, after he was convicted of three sexual assaults that happened in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013. And if the 71 year old makes it to 107 years old, he may have to serve time in England for two sexual assaults that happened in August 1996. That case is still working its way through the British legal system.   Bob Weinstein has kept a low profile since his brother's proclivities first became public knowledge in October 2017, although he would also be accused of sexual harassment by a show runner for the brothers' Spike TV-aired adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Mist, several days after the bombshell articles came out about his brother. However, Bob's lawyer, the powerful attorney to the stars Bert Fields, deny the allegations, and it appears nothing has occurred legally since the accusations were made.   A few weeks after the start of the MeToo movement that sparked up in the aftermath of the accusations of his brother's actions, Bob Weinstein denied having any knowledge of the nearly thirty years of documented sexual abuse at the hands of his brother, but did allow to an interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter that he had barely spoken to Harvey over the previous five years, saying he could no longer take Harvey's cheating, lying and general attitude towards everyone.   And with that, we conclude our journey with Miramax Films. While I am sure Bob and Harvey will likely pop up again in future episodes, they'll be minor characters at best, and we'll never have to focus on anything they did ever again.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 119 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 finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot. ----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 complete our look back at the 1980s theatrical releases for Miramax Films. And, for the final time, a reminder that we are not celebrating Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but reminiscing about the movies they had no involvement in making. We cannot talk about cinema in the 1980s without talking about Miramax, and I really wanted to get it out of the way, once and for all.   As we left Part 4, Miramax was on its way to winning its first Academy Award, Billie August's Pelle the Conquerer, the Scandinavian film that would be second film in a row from Denmark that would win for Best Foreign Language Film.   In fact, the first two films Miramax would release in 1989, the Australian film Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train and the Anthony Perkins slasher film Edge of Sanity, would not arrive in theatres until the Friday after the Academy Awards ceremony that year, which was being held on the last Wednesday in March.   Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train stars Wendy Hughes, the talented Australian actress who, sadly, is best remembered today as Lt. Commander Nella Daren, one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's few love interests, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Jenny, a prostitute working a weekend train to Sydney, who is seduced by a man on the train, unaware that he plans on tricking her to kill someone for him. Colin Friels, another great Aussie actor who unfortunately is best known for playing the corrupt head of Strack Industries in Sam Raimi's Darkman, plays the unnamed man who will do anything to get what he wants.   Director Bob Ellis and his co-screenwriter Denny Lawrence came up with the idea for the film while they themselves were traveling on a weekend train to Sydney, with the idea that each client the call girl met on the train would represent some part of the Australian male.   Funding the $2.5m film was really simple… provided they cast Hughes in the lead role. Ellis and Lawrence weren't against Hughes as an actress. Any film would be lucky to have her in the lead. They just felt she she didn't have the right kind of sex appeal for this specific character.   Miramax would open the film in six theatres, including the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles and the Fashion Village 8 in Orlando, on March 31st. There were two versions of the movie prepared, one that ran 130 minutes and the other just 91. Miramax would go with the 91 minute version of the film for the American release, and most of the critics would note how clunky and confusing the film felt, although one critic for the Village Voice would have some kind words for Ms. Hughes' performance.   Whether it was because moviegoers were too busy seeing the winners of the just announced Academy Awards, including Best Picture winner Rain Man, or because this weekend was also the opening weekend of the new Major League Baseball season, or just turned off by the reviews, attendance at the theatres playing Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train was as empty as a train dining car at three in the morning. The Beverly Center alone would account for a third of the movie's opening weekend gross of $19,268. After a second weekend at the same six theatres pocketing just $14,382, this train stalled out, never to arrive at another station.   Their other March 31st release, Edge of Sanity, is notable for two things and only two things: it would be the first film Miramax would release under their genre specialty label, Millimeter Films, which would eventually evolve into Dimension Films in the next decade, and it would be the final feature film to star Anthony Perkins before his passing in 1992.   The film is yet another retelling of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, with the bonus story twist that Hyde was actually Jack the Ripper. As Jekyll, Perkins looks exactly as you'd expect a mid-fifties Norman Bates to look. As Hyde, Perkins is made to look like he's a backup keyboardist for the first Nine Inch Nails tour. Head Like a Hole would have been an appropriate song for the end credits, had the song or Pretty Hate Machine been released by that time, with its lyrics about bowing down before the one you serve and getting what you deserve.   Edge of Sanity would open in Atlanta and Indianapolis on March 31st. And like so many other Miramax releases in the 1980s, they did not initially announce any grosses for the film. That is, until its fourth weekend of release, when the film's theatre count had fallen to just six, down from the previous week's previously unannounced 35, grossing just $9,832. Miramax would not release grosses for the film again, with a final total of just $102,219.   Now when I started this series, I said that none of the films Miramax released in the 1980s were made by Miramax, but this next film would become the closest they would get during the decade.   In July 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when the married Profumo began a sexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was very short-lived, either ending, depending on the source, in August 1961 or December 1961. Unbeknownst to Profumo, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy at the same time.   No one was the wiser on any of this until December 1962, when a shooting incident involving two other men Keeler had been involved with led the press to start looking into Keeler's life. While it was never proven that his affair with Keeler was responsible for any breaches of national security, John Profumo was forced to resign from his position in June 1963, and the scandal would take down most of the Torie government with him. Prime Minister Macmillan would resign due to “health reasons” in October 1963, and the Labour Party would take control of the British government when the next elections were held in October 1964.   Scandal was originally planned in the mid-1980s as a three-part, five-hour miniseries by Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas and American music producer turned movie producer Joe Boyd. The BBC would commit to finance a two-part, three-hour miniseries,  until someone at the network found an old memo from the time of the Profumo scandal that forbade them from making any productions about it. Channel 4, which had been producing quality shows and movies for several years since their start in 1982, was approached, but rejected the series on the grounds of taste.   Palace Pictures, a British production company who had already produced three films for Neil Jordan including Mona Lisa, was willing to finance the script, provided it could be whittled down to a two hour movie. Originally budgeted at 3.2m British pounds, the costs would rise as they started the casting process.  John Hurt, twice Oscar-nominated for his roles in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, would sign on to play Stephen Ward, a British osteopath who acted as Christine Keeler's… well… pimp, for lack of a better word. Ian McKellen, a respected actor on British stages and screens but still years away from finding mainstream global success in the X-Men movies, would sign on to play John Profumo. Joanne Whaley, who had filmed the yet to be released at that time Willow with her soon to be husband Val Kilmer, would get her first starring role as Keeler, and Bridget Fonda, who was quickly making a name for herself in the film world after being featured in Aria, would play Mandy Rice-Davies, the best friend and co-worker of Keeler's.   To save money, Palace Pictures would sign thirty-year-old Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones to direct, after seeing a short film he had made called The Riveter. But even with the neophyte feature filmmaker, Palace still needed about $2.35m to be able to fully finance the film. And they knew exactly who to go to.   Stephen Woolley, the co-founder of Palace Pictures and the main producer on the film, would fly from London to New York City to personally pitch Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Woolley felt that of all the independent distributors in America, they would be the ones most attracted to the sexual and controversial nature of the story. A day later, Woolley was back on a plane to London. The Weinsteins had agreed to purchase the American distribution rights to Scandal for $2.35m.   The film would spend two months shooting in the London area through the summer of 1988. Christine Keeler had no interest in the film, and refused to meet the now Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to talk about the affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies was more than happy to Bridget Fonda about her life, although the meetings between the two women were so secret, they would not come out until Woolley eulogized Rice-Davies after her 2014 death.   Although Harvey and Bob would be given co-executive producers on the film, Miramax was not a production company on the film. This, however, did not stop Harvey from flying to London multiple times, usually when he was made aware of some sexy scene that was going to shoot the following day, and try to insinuate himself into the film's making. At one point, Woolley decided to take a weekend off from the production, and actually did put Harvey in charge. That weekend's shoot would include a skinny-dipping scene featuring the Christine Keeler character, but when Whaley-Kilmer learned Harvey was going to be there, she told the director that she could not do the nudity in the scene. Her new husband was objecting to it, she told them. Harvey, not skipping a beat, found a lookalike for the actress who would be willing to bare all as a body double, and the scene would begin shooting a few hours later. Whaley-Kilmer watched the shoot from just behind the camera, and stopped the shoot a few minutes later. She was not happy that the body double's posterior was notably larger than her own, and didn't want audiences to think she had that much junk in her trunk. The body double was paid for her day, and Whaley-Kilmer finished the rest of the scene herself.   Caton-Jones and his editing team worked on shaping the film through the fall, and would screen his first edit of the film for Palace Pictures and the Weinsteins in November 1988. And while Harvey was very happy with the cut, he still asked the production team for a different edit for American audiences, noting that most Americans had no idea who Profumo or Keeler or Rice-Davies were, and that Americans would need to understand the story more right out of the first frame. Caton-Jones didn't want to cut a single frame, but he would work with Harvey to build an American-friendly cut.   While he was in London in November 1988, he would meet with the producers of another British film that was in pre-production at the time that would become another important film to the growth of the company, but we're not quite at that part of the story yet. We'll circle around to that film soon.   One of the things Harvey was most looking forward to going in to 1989 was the expected battle with the MPAA ratings board over Scandal. Ever since he had seen the brouhaha over Angel Heart's X rating two years earlier, he had been looking for a similar battle. He thought he had it with Aria in 1988, but he knew he definitely had it now.   And he'd be right.   In early March, just a few weeks before the film's planned April 21st opening day, the MPAA slapped an X rating on Scandal. The MPAA usually does not tell filmmakers or distributors what needs to be cut, in order to avoid accusations of actual censorship, but according to Harvey, they told him exactly what needed to be cut to get an R: a two second shot during an orgy scene, where it appears two background characters are having unsimulated sex.   So what did Harvey do?   He spent weeks complaining to the press about MPAA censorship, generating millions in free publicity for the film, all the while already having a close-up shot of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer's Christine Keeler watching the orgy but not participating in it, ready to replace the objectionable shot.   A few weeks later, Miramax screened the “edited” film to the MPAA and secured the R rating, and the film would open on 94 screens, including 28 each in the New York City and Los Angeles metro regions, on April 28th.   And while the reviews for the film were mostly great, audiences were drawn to the film for the Miramax-manufactured controversy as well as the key art for the film, a picture of a potentially naked Joanne Whaley-Kilmer sitting backwards in a chair, a mimic of a very famous photo Christine Keeler herself took to promote a movie about the Profumo affair she appeared in a few years after the events. I'll have a picture of both the Scandal poster and the Christine Keeler photo on this episode's page at The80sMoviePodcast.com   Five other movies would open that weekend, including the James Belushi comedy K-9 and the Kevin Bacon drama Criminal Law, and Scandal, with $658k worth of ticket sales, would have the second best per screen average of the five new openers, just a few hundred dollars below the new Holly Hunter movie Miss Firecracker, which only opened on six screens.   In its second weekend, Scandal would expand its run to 214 playdates, and make its debut in the national top ten, coming in tenth place with $981k. That would be more than the second week of the Patrick Dempsey rom-com Loverboy, even though Loverboy was playing on 5x as many screens.   In weekend number three, Scandal would have its best overall gross and top ten placement, coming in seventh with $1.22m from 346 screens. Scandal would start to slowly fade after that, falling back out of the top ten in its sixth week, but Miramax would wisely keep the screen count under 375, because Scandal wasn't going to play well in all areas of the country. After nearly five months in theatres, Miramax would have its biggest film to date. Scandal would gross $8.8m.   The second release from Millimeter Films was The Return of the Swamp Thing. And if you needed a reason why the 1980s was not a good time for comic book movies, here you are. The Return of the Swamp Thing took most of what made the character interesting in his comic series, and most of what was good from the 1982 Wes Craven adaptation, and decided “Hey, you know what would bring the kids in? Camp! Camp unseen in a comic book adaptation since the 1960s Batman series. They loved it then, they'll love it now!”   They did not love it now.   Heather Locklear, between her stints on T.J. Hooker and Melrose Place, plays the step-daughter of Louis Jourdan's evil Dr. Arcane from the first film, who heads down to the Florida swaps to confront dear old once presumed dead stepdad. He in turns kidnaps his stepdaughter and decides to do some of his genetic experiments on her, until she is rescued by Swamp Thing, one of Dr. Arcane's former co-workers who got turned into the gooey anti-hero in the first movie.   The film co-stars Sarah Douglas from Superman 1 and 2 as Dr. Arcane's assistant, Dick Durock reprising his role as Swamp Thing from the first film, and 1980s B-movie goddess Monique Gabrielle as Miss Poinsettia.   For director Jim Wynorski, this was his sixth movie as a director, and at $3m, one of the highest budgeted movies he would ever make. He's directed 107 movies since 1984, most of them low budget direct to video movies with titles like The Bare Wench Project and Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, although he does have one genuine horror classic under his belt, the 1986 sci-fi tinged Chopping Maul with Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton.   Wynorski suggested in a late 1990s DVD commentary for the film that he didn't particularly enjoy making the film, and had a difficult time directing Louis Jourdan, to the point that outside of calling “action” and “cut,” the two didn't speak to each other by the end of the shoot.   The Return of Swamp Thing would open in 123 theatres in the United States on May 12th, including 28 in the New York City metro region, 26 in the Los Angeles area, 15 in Detroit, and a handful of theatres in Phoenix, San Francisco. And, strangely, the newspaper ads would include an actual positive quote from none other than Roger Ebert, who said on Siskel & Ebert that he enjoyed himself, and that it was good to have Swamp Thing back. Siskel would not reciprocate his balcony partner's thumb up. But Siskel was about the only person who was positive on the return of Swamp Thing, and that box office would suffer. In its first three days, the film would gross just $119,200. After a couple more dismal weeks in theatres, The Return of Swamp Thing would be pulled from distribution, with a final gross of just $275k.   Fun fact: The Return of Swamp Thing was produced by Michael E. Uslan, whose next production, another adaptation of a DC Comics character, would arrive in theatres not six weeks later and become the biggest film of the summer. In fact, Uslan has been a producer or executive producer on every Batman-related movie and television show since 1989, from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan to Zack Snyder to Matt Reeves, and from LEGO movies to Joker. He also, because of his ownership of the movie rights to Swamp Thing, got the movie screen rights, but not the television screen rights, to John Constantine.   Miramax didn't have too much time to worry about The Return of Swamp Thing's release, as it was happening while the Brothers Weinstein were at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. They had two primary goals at Cannes that year:   To buy American distribution rights to any movie that would increase their standing in the cinematic worldview, which they would achieve by picking up an Italian dramedy called, at the time, New Paradise Cinema, which was competing for the Palme D'Or with a Miramax pickup from Sundance back in January. Promote that very film, which did end up winning the Palme D'Or.   Ever since he was a kid, Steven Soderbergh wanted to be a filmmaker. Growing up in Baton Rouge, LA in the late 1970s, he would enroll in the LSU film animation class, even though he was only 15 and not yet a high school graduate. After graduating high school, he decided to move to Hollywood to break into the film industry, renting an above-garage room from Stephen Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker best known as the father of Jake and Maggie, but after a few freelance editing jobs, Soderbergh packed up his things and headed home to Baton Rouge.   Someone at Atco Records saw one of Soderbergh's short films, and hired him to direct a concert movie for one of their biggest bands at the time, Yes, who was enjoying a major comeback thanks to their 1983 triple platinum selling album, 90125. The concert film, called 9012Live, would premiere on MTV in late 1985, and it would be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.   Soderbergh would use the money he earned from that project, $7,500, to make Winston, a 12 minute black and white short about sexual deception that he would, over the course of an eight day driving trip from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles, expand to a full length screen that he would call sex, lies and videotape. In later years, Soderbergh would admit that part of the story is autobiographical, but not the part you might think. Instead of the lead, Graham, an impotent but still sexually perverse late twentysomething who likes to tape women talking about their sexual fantasies for his own pleasure later, Soderbergh based the husband John, the unsophisticated lawyer who cheats on his wife with her sister, on himself, although there would be a bit of Graham that borrows from the filmmaker. Like his lead character, Soderbergh did sell off most of his possessions and hit the road to live a different life.   When he finished the script, he sent it out into the wilds of Hollywood. Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and husband of Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle, would read it and sign on as an executive producer. Soderbergh had wanted to shoot the film in black and white, like he had with the Winston short that lead to the creation of this screenplay, but he and Mason had trouble getting anyone to commit to the project, even with only a projected budget of $200,000. For a hot moment, it looked like Universal might sign on to make the film, but they would eventually pass.   Robert Newmyer, who had left his job as a vice president of production and acquisitions at Columbia Pictures to start his own production company, signed on as a producer, and helped to convince Soderbergh to shoot the film in color, and cast some name actors in the leading roles. Once he acquiesced, Richard Branson's Virgin Vision agreed to put up $540k of the newly budgeted $1.2m film, while RCA/Columbia Home Video would put up the remaining $660k.   Soderbergh and his casting director, Deborah Aquila, would begin their casting search in New York, where they would meet with, amongst others, Andie MacDowell, who had already starred in two major Hollywood pictures, 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and 1985's St. Elmo's Fire, but was still considered more of a top model than an actress, and Laura San Giacomo, who had recently graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh and would be making her feature debut. Moving on to Los Angeles, Soderbergh and Aquila would cast James Spader, who had made a name for himself as a mostly bad guy in 80s teen movies like Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero, but had never been the lead in a drama like this. At Spader's suggestion, the pair met with Peter Gallagher, who was supposed to become a star nearly a decade earlier from his starring role in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker, but had mostly been playing supporting roles in television shows and movies for most of the decade.   In order to keep the budget down, Soderbergh, the producers, cinematographer Walt Lloyd and the four main cast members agreed to get paid their guild minimums in exchange for a 50/50 profit participation split with RCA/Columbia once the film recouped its costs.   The production would spend a week in rehearsals in Baton Rouge, before the thirty day shoot began on August 1st, 1988. On most days, the shoot was unbearable for many, as temperatures would reach as high as 110 degrees outside, but there were a couple days lost to what cinematographer Lloyd said was “biblical rains.” But the shoot completed as scheduled, and Soderbergh got to the task of editing right away. He knew he only had about eight weeks to get a cut ready if the film was going to be submitted to the 1989 U.S. Film Festival, now better known as Sundance. He did get a temporary cut of the film ready for submission, with a not quite final sound mix, and the film was accepted to the festival. It would make its world premiere on January 25th, 1989, in Park City UT, and as soon as the first screening was completed, the bids from distributors came rolling in. Larry Estes, the head of RCA/Columbia Home Video, would field more than a dozen submissions before the end of the night, but only one distributor was ready to make a deal right then and there.   Bob Weinstein wasn't totally sold on the film, but he loved the ending, and he loved that the word “sex” not only was in the title but lead the title. He knew that title alone would sell the movie. Harvey, who was still in New York the next morning, called Estes to make an appointment to meet in 24 hours. When he and Estes met, he brought with him three poster mockups the marketing department had prepared, and told Estes he wasn't going to go back to New York until he had a contract signed, and vowed to beat any other deal offered by $100,000. Island Pictures, who had made their name releasing movies like Stop Making Sense, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, The Trip to Bountiful and She's Gotta Have It, offered $1m for the distribution rights, plus a 30% distribution fee and a guaranteed $1m prints and advertising budget. Estes called Harvey up and told him what it would take to make the deal. $1.1m for the distribution rights, which needed to paid up front, a $1m P&A budget, to be put in escrow upon the signing of the contract until the film was released, a 30% distribution fee, no cutting of the film whatsoever once Soderbergh turns in his final cut, they would need to provide financial information for the films costs and returns once a month because of the profit participation contracts, and the Weinsteins would have to hire Ira Deutchman, who had spent nearly 15 years in the independent film world, doing marketing for Cinema 5, co-founding United Artists Classics, and co-founding Cinecom Pictures before opening his own company to act as a producers rep and marketer. And the Weinsteins would not only have to do exactly what Deutchman wanted, they'd have to pay for his services too.   The contract was signed a few weeks later.   The first move Miramax would make was to get Soderbergh's final cut of the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, where it would be accepted to compete in the main competition. Which you kind of already know what happened, because that's what I lead with. The film would win the Palme D'Or, and Spader would be awarded the festival's award for Best Actor. It was very rare at the time, and really still is, for any film to be awarded more than one prize, so winning two was really a coup for the film and for Miramax, especially when many critics attending the festival felt Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was the better film.   In March, Miramax expected the film to make around $5-10m, which would net the company a small profit on the film. After Cannes, they were hopeful for a $15m gross.   They never expected what would happen next.   On August 4th, sex, lies, and videotape would open on four screens, at the Cinema Studio in New York City, and at the AMC Century 14, the Cineplex Beverly Center 13 and the Mann Westwood 4 in Los Angeles. Three prime theatres and the best they could do in one of the then most competitive zones in all America. Remember, it's still the Summer 1989 movie season, filled with hits like Batman, Dead Poets Society, Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Lethal Weapon 2, Parenthood, Turner & Hooch, and When Harry Met Sally. An independent distributor even getting one screen at the least attractive theatre in Westwood was a major get. And despite the fact that this movie wasn't really a summertime movie per se, the film would gross an incredible $156k in its first weekend from just these four theatres. Its nearly $40k per screen average would be 5x higher than the next closest film, Parenthood.   In its second weekend, the film would expand to 28 theatres, and would bring in over $600k in ticket sales, its per screen average of $21,527 nearly triple its closest competitor, Parenthood again. The company would keep spending small, as it slowly expanded the film each successive week. Forty theatres in its third week, and 101 in its fourth. The numbers held strong, and in its fifth week, Labor Day weekend, the film would have its first big expansion, playing in 347 theatres. The film would enter the top ten for the first time, despite playing in 500 to 1500 fewer theatres than the other films in the top ten. In its ninth weekend, the film would expand to its biggest screen count, 534, before slowly drawing down as the other major Oscar contenders started their theatrical runs. The film would continue to play through the Oscar season of 1989, and when it finally left theatres in May 1989, its final gross would be an astounding $24.7m.   Now, remember a few moments ago when I said that Miramax needed to provide financial statements every month for the profit participation contracts of Soderbergh, the producers, the cinematographer and the four lead actors? The film was so profitable for everyone so quickly that RCA/Columbia made its first profit participation payouts on October 17th, barely ten weeks after the film's opening.   That same week, Soderbergh also made what was at the time the largest deal with a book publisher for the writer/director's annotated version of the screenplay, which would also include his notes created during the creation of the film. That $75,000 deal would be more than he got paid to make the movie as the writer and the director and the editor, not counting the profit participation checks.   During the awards season, sex, lies, and videotape was considered to be one of the Oscars front runners for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and at least two acting nominations. The film would be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress by the Golden Globes, and it would win the Spirit Awards for Best Picture, Soderbergh for Best Director, McDowell for Best Actress, and San Giacomo for Best Supporting Actress. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, the film would only receive one nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. The same total and category as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which many people also felt had a chance for a Best Picture and Best Director nomination. Both films would lose out to Tom Shulman's screenplay for Dead Poet's Society.   The success of sex, lies, and videotape would launch Steven Soderbergh into one of the quirkiest Hollywood careers ever seen, including becoming the first and only director ever to be nominated twice for Best Director in the same year by the Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America, in 2001 for directing Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He would win the Oscar for directing Traffic.   Lost in the excitement of sex, lies, and videotape was The Little Thief, a French movie that had an unfortunate start as the screenplay François Truffaut was working on when he passed away in 1984 at the age of just 52.   Directed by Claude Miller, whose principal mentor was Truffaut, The Little Thief starred seventeen year old Charlotte Gainsbourg as Janine, a young woman in post-World War II France who commits a series of larcenies to support her dreams of becoming wealthy.   The film was a modest success in France when it opened in December 1988, but its American release date of August 25th, 1989, was set months in advance. So when it was obvious sex, lies, and videotape was going to be a bigger hit than they originally anticipated, it was too late for Miramax to pause the release of The Little Thief.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City, and buoyed by favorable reviews from every major critic in town, The Little Thief would see $39,931 worth of ticket sales in its first seven days, setting a new house record at the theatre for the year. In its second week, the gross would only drop $47. For the entire week. And when it opened at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles, its opening week gross of $30,654 would also set a new house record for the year.   The film would expand slowly but surely over the next several weeks, often in single screen playdates in major markets, but it would never play on more than twenty-four screens in any given week. And after four months in theatres, The Little Thief, the last movie created one of the greatest film writers the world had ever seen, would only gross $1.056m in the United States.   The next three releases from Miramax were all sent out under the Millimeter Films banner.   The first, a supernatural erotic drama called The Girl in a Swing, was about an English antiques dealer who travels to Copenhagen where he meets and falls in love with a mysterious German-born secretary, whom he marries, only to discover a darker side to his new bride. Rupert Frazer, who played Christian Bale's dad in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, plays the antique dealer, while Meg Tilly the mysterious new bride.   Filmed over a five week schedule in London and Copenhagen during May and June 1988, some online sources say the film first opened somewhere in California in December 1988, but I cannot find a single theatre not only in California but anywhere in the United States that played the film before its September 29th, 1989 opening date.   Roger Ebert didn't like the film, and wished Meg Tilly's “genuinely original performance” was in a better movie. Opening in 26 theatres, including six theatres each in New York City and Los Angeles, and spurred on by an intriguing key art for the film that featured a presumed naked Tilly on a swing looking seductively at the camera while a notice underneath her warns that No One Under 18 Will Be Admitted To The Theatre, The Girl in a Swing would gross $102k, good enough for 35th place nationally that week. And that's about the best it would do. The film would limp along, moving from market to market over the course of the next three months, and when its theatrical run was complete, it could only manage about $747k in ticket sales.   We'll quickly burn through the next two Millimeter Films releases, which came out a week apart from each other and didn't amount to much.   Animal Behavior was a rather unfunny comedy featuring some very good actors who probably signed on for a very different movie than the one that came to be. Karen Allen, Miss Marion Ravenwood herself, stars as Alex, a biologist who, like Dr. Jane Goodall, develops a “new” way to communicate with chimpanzees via sign language. Armand Assante plays a cellist who pursues the good doctor, and Holly Hunter plays the cellist's neighbor, who Alex mistakes for his wife.   Animal Behavior was filmed in 1984, and 1985, and 1987, and 1988. The initial production was directed by Jenny Bowen with the assistance of Robert Redford and The Sundance Institute, thanks to her debut film, 1981's Street Music featuring Elizabeth Daily. It's unknown why Bowen and her cinematographer husband Richard Bowen left the project, but when filming resumed again and again and again, those scenes were directed by the film's producer, Kjehl Rasmussen.   Because Bowen was not a member of the DGA at the time, she was not able to petition the guild for the use of the Alan Smithee pseudonym, a process that is automatically triggered whenever a director is let go of a project and filming continues with its producer taking the reigns as director. But she was able to get the production to use a pseudonym anyway for the director's credit, H. Anne Riley, while also giving Richard Bowen a pseudonym of his own for his work on the film, David Spellvin.   Opening on 24 screens on October 27th, Animal Behavior would come in 50th place in its opening weekend, grossing just $20,361. The New York film critics ripped the film apart, and there wouldn't be a second weekend for the film.   The following Friday, November 3rd, saw the release of The Stepfather II, a rushed together sequel to 1987's The Stepfather, which itself wasn't a big hit in theatres but found a very quick and receptive audience on cable.   Despite dying at the end of the first film, Terry O'Quinn's Jerry is somehow still alive, and institutionalized in Northern Washington state. He escapes and heads down to Los Angeles, where he assumes the identity of a recently deceased publisher, Gene Clifford, but instead passes himself off as a psychiatrist. Jerry, now Gene, begins to court his neighbor Carol, and the whole crazy story plays out again. Meg Foster plays the neighbor Carol, and Jonathan Brandis is her son.    Director Jeff Burr had made a name for himself with his 1987 horror anthology film From a Whisper to a Scream, featuring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager and Terry Kiser, and from all accounts, had a very smooth shooting process with this film. The trouble began when he turned in his cut to the producers. The producers were happy with the film, but when they sent it to Miramax, the American distributors, they were rather unhappy with the almost bloodless slasher film. They demanded reshoots, which Burr and O'Quinn refused to participate in. They brought in a new director, Doug Campbell, to handle the reshoots, which are easy to spot in the final film because they look and feel completely different from the scenes they're spliced into.   When it opened, The Stepfather II actually grossed slightly more than the first film did, earning $279k from 100 screens, compared to $260k for The Stepfather from 105 screens. But unlike the first film, which had some decent reviews when it opened, the sequel was a complete mess. To this day, it's still one of the few films to have a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Stepfather II would limp its way through theatres during the Christmas holiday season, ending its run with a $1.5m gross.   But it would be their final film of the decade that would dictate their course for at least the first part of the 1990s.   Remember when I said earlier in the episode that Harvey Weinstein meant with the producers of another British film while in London for Scandal? We're at that film now, a film you probably know.   My Left Foot.   By November 1988, actor Daniel Day-Lewis had starred in several movies including James Ivory's A Room With a View and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He had even been the lead in a major Hollywood studio film, Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars, a very good film that unfortunately got caught up in the brouhaha over the exit of the studio head who greenlit the film, David Puttnam.   The film's director, Jim Sheridan, had never directed a movie before. He had become involved in stage production during his time at the University College in Dublin in the late 1960s, where he worked with future filmmaker Neil Jordan, and had spent nearly a decade after graduation doing stage work in Ireland and Canada, before settling in New York City in the early 1980s. Sheridan would go to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where one of his classmates was Spike Lee, and return to Ireland after graduating. He was nearly forty, married with two pre-teen daughters, and he needed to make a statement with his first film.   He would find that story in the autobiography of Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, whose spirit and creativity could not be contained by his severe cerebral palsy. Along with Irish actor and writer Shane Connaughton, Sheridan wrote a screenplay that could be a powerhouse film made on a very tight budget of less than a million dollars.   Daniel Day-Lewis was sent a copy of the script, in the hopes he would be intrigued enough to take almost no money to play a physically demanding role. He read the opening pages, which had the adult Christy Brown putting a record on a record player and dropping the needle on to the record with his left foot, and thought to himself it would be impossible to film. That intrigued him, and he signed on. But during filming in January and February of 1989, most of the scenes were shot using mirrors, as Day-Lewis couldn't do the scenes with his left foot. He could do them with his right foot, hence the mirrors.   As a method actor, Day-Lewis remained in character as Christy Brown for the entire two month shoot. From costume fittings and makeup in the morning, to getting the actor on set, to moving him around between shots, there were crew members assigned to assist the actor as if they were Christy Brown's caretakers themselves, including feeding him during breaks in shooting. A rumor debunked by the actor years later said Day-Lewis had broken two ribs during production because of how hunched down he needed to be in his crude prop wheelchair to properly play the character.   The actor had done a lot of prep work to play the role, including spending time at the Sandymount School Clinic where the young Christy Brown got his education, and much of his performance was molded on those young people.   While Miramax had acquired the American distribution rights to the film before it went into production, and those funds went into the production of the film, the film was not produced by Miramax, nor were the Weinsteins given any kind of executive producer credit, as they were able to get themselves on Scandal.   My Left Foot would make its world premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival on September 4th, 1989, followed soon thereafter by screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th and the New York Film Festival on September 23rd. Across the board, critics and audiences were in love with the movie, and with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. Jim Sheridan would receive a special prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for his direction, and Day-Lewis would win the festival's award for Best Actor. However, as the film played the festival circuit, another name would start to pop up. Brenda Fricker, a little known Irish actress who played Christy Brown's supportive but long-suffering mother Bridget, would pile up as many positive notices and awards as Day-Lewis. Although there was no Best Supporting Actress Award at the Montreal Film Festival, the judges felt her performance was deserving of some kind of attention, so they would create a Special Mention of the Jury Award to honor her.   Now, some sources online will tell you the film made its world premiere in Dublin on February 24th, 1989, based on a passage in a biography about Daniel Day-Lewis, but that would be impossible as the film would still be in production for two more days, and wasn't fully edited or scored by then.   I'm not sure when it first opened in the United Kingdom other than sometime in early 1990, but My Left Foot would have its commercial theatre debut in America on November 10th, when opened at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City and the Century City 14 in Los Angeles. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would, in the very opening paragraph of her review, note that one shouldn't see My Left Foot for some kind of moral uplift or spiritual merit badge, but because of your pure love of great moviemaking. Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times spends most of his words praising Day-Lewis and Sheridan for making a film that is polite and non-judgmental.    Interestingly, Miramax went with an ad campaign that completely excluded any explanation of who Christy Brown was or why the film is titled the way it is. 70% of the ad space is taken from pull quotes from many of the top critics of the day, 20% with the title of the film, and 10% with a picture of Daniel Day-Lewis, clean shaven and full tooth smile, which I don't recall happening once in the movie, next to an obviously added-in picture of one of his co-stars that is more camera-friendly than Brenda Fricker or Fiona Shaw.   Whatever reasons people went to see the film, they flocked to the two theatres playing the film that weekend. It's $20,582 per screen average would be second only to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, which had opened two days earlier, earning slightly more than $1,000 per screen than My Left Foot.   In week two, My Left Foot would gross another $35,133 from those two theatres, and it would overtake Henry V for the highest per screen average. In week three, Thanksgiving weekend, both Henry V and My Left Foot saw a a double digit increase in grosses despite not adding any theatres, and the latter film would hold on to the highest per screen average again, although the difference would only be $302. And this would continue for weeks. In the film's sixth week of release, it would get a boost in attention by being awarded Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle. Daniel Day-Lewis would be named Best Actor that week by both the New York critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while Fricker would win the Best Supporting Actress award from the latter group.   But even then, Miramax refused to budge on expanding the film until its seventh week of release, Christmas weekend, when My Left Foot finally moved into cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Its $135k gross that weekend was good, but it was starting to lose ground to other Oscar hopefuls like Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, Enemies: A Love Story, and Glory.   And even though the film continued to rack up award win after award win, nomination after nomination, from the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild and the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, Miramax still held firm on not expanding the film into more than 100 theatres nationwide until its 16th week in theatres, February 16th, 1990, two days after the announcement of the nominees for the 62nd Annual Academy Awards. While Daniel Day-Lewis's nomination for Best Actor was virtually assured and Brenda Fricker was practically a given, the film would pick up three other nominations, including surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Jim Sheridan and co-writer Shane Connaughton would also get picked for Best Adapted Screenplay.   Miramax also picked up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape, and a Best Foreign Language Film nod for the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso, which, thanks to the specific rules for that category, a film could get a nomination before actually opening in theatres in America, which Miramax would rush to do with Paradiso the week after its nomination was announced.   The 62nd Academy Awards ceremony would be best remembered today as being the first Oscar show to be hosted by Billy Crystal, and for being considerably better than the previous year's ceremony, a mess of a show best remembered as being the one with a 12 minute opening musical segment that included Rob Lowe singing Proud Mary to an actress playing Snow White and another nine minute musical segment featuring a slew of expected future Oscar winners that, to date, feature exact zero Oscar nominees, both which rank as amongst the worst things to ever happen to the Oscars awards show.   The ceremony, held on March 26th, would see My Left Foot win two awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, as well as Cinema Paradiso for Best Foreign Film. The following weekend, March 30th, would see Miramax expand My Left Foot to 510 theatres, its widest point of release, and see the film made the national top ten and earn more than a million dollars for its one and only time during its eight month run.   The film would lose steam pretty quickly after its post-win bump, but it would eek out a modest run that ended with $14.75m in ticket sales just in the United States. Not bad for a little Irish movie with no major stars that cost less than a million dollars to make.   Of course, the early 90s would see Miramax fly to unimagined heights. In all of the 80s, Miramax would release 39 movies. They would release 30 films alone in 1991. They would release the first movies from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. They'd release some of the best films from some of the best filmmakers in the world, including Woody Allen, Pedro Almadovar, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Atom Egoyan, Steven Frears, Peter Greenaway, Peter Jackson, Neil Jordan, Chen Kaige, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von Trier, and Zhang Yimou. In 1993, the Mexican dramedy Like Water for Chocolate would become the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America, and it would play in some theatres, including my theatre, the NuWilshire in Santa Monica, continuously for more than a year.   If you've listened to the whole series on the 1980s movies of Miramax Films, there are two things I hope you take away. First, I hope you discovered at least one film you hadn't heard of before and you might be interested in searching out. The second is the reminder that neither Bob nor Harvey Weinstein will profit in any way if you give any of the movies talked about in this series a chance. They sold Miramax to Disney in June 1993. They left Miramax in September 2005. Many of the contracts for the movies the company released in the 80s and 90s expired decades ago, with the rights reverting back to their original producers, none of whom made any deals with the Weinsteins once they got their rights back.   Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence in upstate New York after being found guilty in 2020 of two sexual assaults. Once he completes that sentence, he'll be spending another 16 years in prison in California, after he was convicted of three sexual assaults that happened in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013. And if the 71 year old makes it to 107 years old, he may have to serve time in England for two sexual assaults that happened in August 1996. That case is still working its way through the British legal system.   Bob Weinstein has kept a low profile since his brother's proclivities first became public knowledge in October 2017, although he would also be accused of sexual harassment by a show runner for the brothers' Spike TV-aired adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Mist, several days after the bombshell articles came out about his brother. However, Bob's lawyer, the powerful attorney to the stars Bert Fields, deny the allegations, and it appears nothing has occurred legally since the accusations were made.   A few weeks after the start of the MeToo movement that sparked up in the aftermath of the accusations of his brother's actions, Bob Weinstein denied having any knowledge of the nearly thirty years of documented sexual abuse at the hands of his brother, but did allow to an interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter that he had barely spoken to Harvey over the previous five years, saying he could no longer take Harvey's cheating, lying and general attitude towards everyone.   And with that, we conclude our journey with Miramax Films. While I am sure Bob and Harvey will likely pop up again in future episodes, they'll be minor characters at best, and we'll never have to focus on anything they did ever again.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 119 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.

On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.   But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.   But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.   During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.    Harvey himself.   Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.   And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.   I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.   And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.   Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.   I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.   As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did.   Okay, enough with the proselytizing.    I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now.   Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.   Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.   Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.   But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.   As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.   Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.   Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.   Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.   Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.   Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.   Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.   The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.   One slight problem, though.   The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.   It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.   But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.   The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.   But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.   When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.   So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.   Right?   You'd think.   Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982.   So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.   Right?   You'd think.   In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.   Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as  a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.   The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.   So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.   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.

On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.   But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.   But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.   During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.    Harvey himself.   Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.   And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.   I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.   And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.   Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.   I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.   As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did.   Okay, enough with the proselytizing.    I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now.   Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.   Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.   Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.   But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.   As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.   Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.   Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.   Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.   Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.   Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.   Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.   The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.   One slight problem, though.   The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.   It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.   But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.   The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.   But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.   When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.   So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.   Right?   You'd think.   Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982.   So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.   Right?   You'd think.   In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.   Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as  a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.   The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.   So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.   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.

“I'm sorry that things didn't work out with Brad Pitt, but being single, that's a pretty good fallback.” This week we take a closer look at the third installment of Wes Craven's Scream series: Scream 3! as well as briefly review the films we logged on our Letterboxd dairies in the past week. — TIME CODES: 00:00:00 - INTRO 00:01:30 - BASIC FACTS 00:03:05 - THE MEAT 01:07:03 - WHAT WE WATCHED — Scream 3 (2000) SOMEONE HAS TAKEN THEIR LOVE OF TRILOGIES ONE STEP TOO FAR. “As bodies begin dropping around the set of ‘Stab 3' — a movie sequel based on the gruesome Woodsboro killings — Sidney, Gale and Dewey are once again drawn into a game of horror movie mayhem.” Directed by Wes Craven and starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Foley, Lance Henriksen, and Matt Keeslar. Written by Ehren Kruger, edited by Patrick Lussier, cinematography by Peter Deming, score composed by Marco Beltrami, and produced by Cathy Konrad, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Williamson, and Marianne Maddalena. Find where to stream it here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/scream-3 — OUR LINKS: Recently Logged Main Webpage: https://anchor.fm/recentlylogged Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/30uy1 Micah's Stuff YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCqan1ouaFGl1XMt_6VrIzFg Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/AkCn Twitter: https://twitter.com/micah_grawey Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m_grawey_films/ Robbie's Stuff Website: https://robbiegrawey.com — EPISODE CREDITS: Recently Logged Podcast creators - Micah and Robert Grawey Hosts - Micah and Robert Grawey Songs used in this episode - Eyes Gone Wrong by Kevin MacLeod (Eyes Gone Wrong by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100362 | Artist: http://incompetech.com/), Day of Recon (Sting) by Max Surla_Media Right Productions, Ersatz Bossa (Sting) by John Deley and the 41 Players, Foreign Land (Sting) and Into the Depths (Sting) by Jingle Punks Editor - Robert Grawey Episode art designer - Robert Grawey Episode Description - Robert Grawey --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/recentlylogged/support

“The way I see it, someone's out to make a sequel. You know, cash in on all the movie murder hoopla.” This week we take a closer look at the second installment of Wes Craven's Scream series: Scream 2! as well as briefly review the films we logged on our Letterboxd dairies in the past week. — TIME CODES: 00:00 - INTRO 03:13 - BASIC FACTS 05:52 - THE MEAT 48:19 - WHAT WE WATCHED — Scream 2 (1997) SOMEONE HAS TAKEN THEIR LOVE OF SEQUELS ONE STEP TOO FAR. “Two years after the terrifying events that occurred in Woodsboro, Sidney is now attending Windsor College in Cincinnati, and Gale Weathers' best selling book on Sidney's life has now been made into a major motion picture. When two college students are killed in a theatre while watching the new film ‘Stab', Sidney knows deep down that history is repeating itself.” Directed by Wes Craven and starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Jerry O'Connell, Timothy Olyphant, Jamie Kennedy, and Laurie Metcalf. Written by Kevin Williamson, edited by Patrick Lussier, cinematography by Peter Deming, score composed by Marco Beltrami, and produced by Cathy Konrad, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Williamson, Marianne Maddalena, Andrew Rona, Cary Granat, and Richard Potter. Find where to stream it here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/scream-2 — OUR LINKS: Recently Logged Main Webpage: https://anchor.fm/recentlylogged Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/30uy1 Micah's Stuff YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCqan1ouaFGl1XMt_6VrIzFg Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/AkCn Twitter: https://twitter.com/micah_grawey Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m_grawey_films/ Robbie's Stuff Website: https://robbiegrawey.com — EPISODE CREDITS: Recently Logged Podcast creators - Micah and Robert Grawey Hosts - Micah and Robert Grawey Songs used in this episode - Eyes Gone Wrong by Kevin MacLeod (Eyes Gone Wrong by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100362 | Artist: http://incompetech.com/), Day of Recon (Sting) by Max Surla_Media Right Productions, Ersatz Bossa (Sting) by John Deley and the 41 Players, Foreign Land (Sting) and Into the Depths (Sting) by Jingle Punks Editor - Robert Grawey Episode art designer - Robert Grawey Episode Description - Robert Grawey --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/recentlylogged/support

CursedWelcome to another episode of Out from the Horrorbox!Your lycanthrope host Dom sees the signs and digs into the movie Bob Weinstein said would "reinvent the werewolf genre", Cursed!Time StampsCursed - 01:28Casting - 07:38Production- 11:06Original Shooting Script - 20:34Final Thoughts - 37:00Outro - 39:53 Thanks for tuning into the podcast! If you liked this episode, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.You can follow the podcast on Twitter @horrorboxpod or check out Instagram  to follow the podcast @horrorboxpodcast. You can email us recommendations, personal or fictious stories, or anything else horror related at horrorboxpodcast@gmail.com. We'll see you next time and hear what comes Out from the Horrorbox!I have placed a link to the script breakdown written by Seth T. Miller. A Different Beast: The Original Script for 'Cursed'

The Mikes are bitten by something worse than a werewolf...studio interference!!!! It's (technically) https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000127/?ref_=tt_ov_dr (Wes Craven)'s aptly titled https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257516/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_7 (Cursed) on this next instalment of Forgotten Horror! In this 2005 werewolf film, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000207/?ref_=tt_ov_st (Christina Ricci) and https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0251986/?ref_=tt_ov_st (Jesse Eisenberg) play brother and sister who after a car accident involving a werewolf, start to feel themselves change and have to figure out a way to stop their curse before they become monsters themselves. Listen in as Mike Field and Mike Butler discuss how this film is an absolute hot mess; from the writing, to the story, to the pacing. Then the Mikes will discuss WHY this film is an absolute hot mess, and its name is https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0918424/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr11 (Bob Weinstein). The film was reshot twice with three different endings, special effects legend Rick Baker was let go from the project, Craven lost out on a directing job he was weeks away from filming, and numerous big named actors pulled out or were cut completely during these massive reshoots and rewrites. So, grab your silver bullets and flea collars, please notice the full moon to your left and say a prayer for https://www.forgottencinemapodcast.com/ (Forgotten Cinema). 00:00 - Introduction 02:13 - Film Summary 03:07 - Film Facts 11:13 - Film Discussion 43:19 - Critics Reviews 45:40 - Hollywood Owes Us Four Good Films 51:23 - Where to Find Us

After the mammoth success of THE CROW in 1994; of course a sequel was bound to happen. THE CROW CITY OF ANGELS (1996) looked promising at first (the book The Crow - City of Angels : A Diary of the Film promised a much better picture). The original intent was to create a very different kind of film when compared to the original, out of respect for the late Brandon Lee. Alas the Weinsteins (aka Harvey and Bob Weinstein aka meddling producers) got in there (again) and went scissor happy in the edit, structuring it to look more like a pale copy of the original instead of a film that stands on its own. Director Tim Pope and screenwriter David S. Goyer, eventually disowned the movie, as the final product did not represent their intended vision. Follow us behind the scenes as we get a taste of the sequel that could have been and figure out WTF Happened to this Horror Movie?! 

“What's your favorite scary movie?” This week we take a closer look at Wes Craven's biting slasher: Scream! as well as briefly review the films we logged on our Letterboxd dairies in the past week. — TIME CODES: 00:00 - INTRO 03:05 - BASIC FACTS 05:10 - THE MEAT 52:31 - WHAT WE WATCHED — Scream (1996) SOMEONE HAS TAKEN THEIR LOVE OF SCARY MOVIES ONE STEP TOO FAR. “A killer known as Ghostface begins killing off teenagers, and as the body count begins rising, one girl and her friends find themselves contemplating the ‘rules' of horror films as they find themselves living in a real-life one.” Directed by Wes Craven and starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich, and Jamie Kennedy. Written by Kevin Williamson, edited by Patrick Lussier, cinematography by Mark Irwin, score composed by Marco Beltrami, and produced by Cathy Konrad, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Cary Woods, Stuart M. Besser, Marianne Maddalena, and Cary Granat. Find where to stream it here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/scream-1 — OUR LINKS: Recently Logged Main Webpage: https://anchor.fm/recentlylogged Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/30uy1 Micah's Stuff YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCqan1ouaFGl1XMt_6VrIzFg Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/AkCn Twitter: https://twitter.com/micah_grawey Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m_grawey_films/ Robbie's Stuff Website: https://robbiegrawey.com — EPISODE CREDITS: Recently Logged Podcast creators - Micah and Robert Grawey Hosts - Micah and Robert Grawey Songs used in this episode - Eyes Gone Wrong by Kevin MacLeod (Eyes Gone Wrong by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100362 | Artist: http://incompetech.com/), Day of Recon (Sting) by Max Surla_Media Right Productions, Foreign Land (Sting) and Into the Depths (Sting) by Jingle Punks Editor - Robert Grawey Episode art designer - Robert Grawey Episode Description - Robert Grawey --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/recentlylogged/support

We continue our exploration of films stuck in Development Hell with the many attempts to adapt The Six Million Dollar Man to the silver screen. After a successful television run, 3 made-for-TV movies as recently as 1994, and influence that can be felt all throughout US pop culture, shouldn't a big screen version have worked? Join us for a tale of writer's block, unexpected contributors, executive musical chairs, a Weinstein, and another appearance in this series for Mark Wahlberg. Actually, that begs the question: what's going on with Mark Wahlberg's career? Listen with your bionic ears to get the whole story! CW: mention of Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault charges; mention of Mark Wahlberg's racist attack on an Asian man; mention of Mel Gibson's racism and antisemitism. Podcasts plugged in this episode: The Happy Hour Podcast (@HappyHourShow3 on Twitter); Talking SMAC (@TalkingSMACpod on Twitter) Be sure to check out the Happy Hour Podcast's attempt at the world record for the longest podcast record, starting at 10:00 AM on Friday 8/26/2022! We'll be appearing as guests around 7:00 PM that night and there will be appearances from TONS of other amazing indie podcasts. People & Stuff Mentioned In This Episode: The Bionic Woman, Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner, Richard Anderson, The Venture Bros, Punisher, Kevin Smith, Clerks, Mallrats, Kenner, Star Wars, The Toys That Made Us, Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, Lawrence Gordon, Paul W. S. Anderson, Steven E. de Souza, Event Horizon, Soldier, Resident Evil, K-Pax, Universal Pictures, Dimension Films, Miramax, Bob Weinstein, Mark Frost, David Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan, Smallville, Chris Rock, the Farrelly Brothers, Jim Carrey, Kick-Ass 2, Uwe Boll, BloodRayne, Warner Bros, Peter Berg, Lone Survivor, Shooter, The Departed, Scoob!, Damian Szifron, Daddy's Home, The Beaver, Martin Scorsese, Silence, Patty Jenkins, Wonder Woman 1894, Space Jam 2, The Green Knight, Simu Liu, Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, David Hughes, Wario, Waluigi --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/derazzled/support

Hey goons and happy Monday as Slashers Podcast continues this month of August with part 2 of our Wet Hot Slashers Summer. Today Jake, Doug, Jason and Ade dissect the garden shear slasher flick, The Burning. Written by Bob Weinstein and Peter Lawrence, and produced by the scum-sucking brother whose name need not be mentioned, the film follows a summer camp caretaker who is horribly burnt by a prank gone wrong, who then seeks revenge at the summer camp years later. The film was released in May of 1981 and stars Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Lou David, Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter and Fisher Stevens. While there are a ton of things wrong with this slasher flick, it is unique in the kills that Tom Savini cooks up, and does have some appeal. Would it make for a good remake if we take out all of the problems and keep practical effects? Let us know your thoughts! This is streaming on Tubi so if you haven't watched, we highly recommend it. If you ever have feedback or recommendations on future episodes, please let us know at slasherspod@gmail.com. You can always find us on our social media: Instagram, Twitter, Slasher App: @slasherspod Facebook: /slasherspod Reddit: u/slasherspod https://www.youtube.com/c/slasherspodcast You can find our merch, and links to all our online presence here: linktr.ee/slasherspod Theme song is I wanna Die by Mini Meltdowns. https://open.spotify.com/artist/5ZAk6lUDsaJj8EAhrhzZnh ; https://minimeltdowns.bandcamp.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/slasherspod/support

First slashing his way to the screen as a Bob Weinstein's assistant at Miramax Films, Richard Potter read Kevin Williamson's “Scary Movie” script one night, and insisted the film be made. He convinced Dimension Films to buy it, Wes Craven to direct it, the script was re-titled “Scream,” and the rest is horror movie history. He also developed legacy titles such as “Halloween,” “Hellraiser,” and “Highlander” into their biggest and most successful releases with “Halloween H20,” “Hellraiser: Bloodline” and “Highlander: The Final Dimension.” Other films to his name: “Scream 2,” “Mimic,” “The Crow: City of Angels,” “Nightwatch,” "Phantoms” and “Diciembres.”As an executive, Potter was Senior Vice President of Production and Development at Dimension, as well as Executive Vice President of Production and Development at Relatively Media. In this episode, he discusses The Beatles, the origin of the “Scream” franchise and why his “Night of the Animated Dead” serves as a love letter to George A. Romero's horror classic, “Night of the Living Dead.” 

Vi presenterar tio anledningar att se alla tio delarna i filmserien Hellraiser, i grund och botten baserad på Clive Barkers geniala roman The Hellbound Heart. Tomas frågar sig om originalfilmen är lika rik på uppslag som allsidiga analysfavoriten Candyman och Lars omsätter lättköpta universitetspoäng på tal om den populärlitterära genren bodice rippers. Vi pratar också om: Halloween, Pinhead, Jason Vorhees, Michael Meyers, Fredagen den 13, Stephen King, Maximum Overdrive, Ett hjärta åt helvetet, Caroline Grimwalker, Vertigo Förlag, tantsnusk, Frankenstein, Christopher Lee, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Peter Atkins, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Cradle of Filth, Terminator 2, Billy Joel, Metallica, Kill ‘Em All, Hellraiser: Bloodline, The Dog Company, Doug Bradley, Necronomicon, Evil Dead, Allen Smithee, Kevin Jaeger, Hellraiser: Inferno, Scott Derickson, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Se7en, Craig Sheffer, Nightbreed, Rancid, True Detective, Dimension Films, Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, The Burning, American Pie och så kanske lite för mycket om den för många helt intetsägande skådespelaren Sasha Barrese. Vi unnar oss: nostalgi och analys i en kärleksfull omslingring.

On this edition of Parallax Views, we've got a monster-sized treat of an episode to help you get in the spirit of the spooky season as Halloween approaches. Have you ever wondered about the movie magic that's employed to make some of your favorite horror movies? What are the behind-the-scenes secrets of special effects (SFX) and make-up effects (MUFX) in such frightful franchises as HELLRAISER, HALLOWEEN, CANDYMAN, BLADE, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, FEAST, THE EXORCIST, PUMKPKINHEAD, and PIRANHA? Joining us to shed light on that is a legend of the special make-up effects world and a true maestro of the macabre: Gary J. Tunnicliffe. He's worked on all the above-named properties and much more designing iconic kills and monsters in a massive slew of cinematic scarefests over the years and has many stories to tell in this previously unpublished conversation that run over 2+ hours and, hopefully, is a fascinating, rollicking ride throughout. Gary and I discuss how he got into make-up effects, applying make-up effects on Doug Bradley to bring to life the character of Pinhead in the Hellraiser movies, the trials and tribulations of applying make-up to actors for hours at a time, creating the climatic effects for Stephen Dorff's demise in BLADE, a gross-out story from Gary's puppeteering work on PIRANHA 3DD, designing kills in movies like HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS (and being brought in for reshoots on already complete movies like the aforementioned film), CGI and deep fakes, designing creatures like PUMPKINHEAD and the cenobite Angelique in HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE, working for colorful producer Bob Weinstein at Dimension Films, the making of a grisly, gory kill in Patrick Lussier's MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D, Gary's work on Renny Harlin's EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING, Gary's interpretation of Clive Barker's HELLRAISER, working with David Fincher on GONE GIRL, putting bees on actor Tony Todd in one of the CANDYMAN movies, and much, much more!

Writer/Director/Producer Joel Soisson (https://twitter.com/JoelSoisson) talks about his film “My Best Worst Adventure”. Video game legend Walter Day (https://thewalterdaycollection.com/) talks about his predictions for the future of gaming. 0:00 SEGMENT 1: Joel Soisson talks about his obsession with horror, racing Cambodian water buffalos, filming in southeast Asia, picking up a parasite, making “Dracula 2000” with Bob Weinstein, Christopher Plummer, and Gerard Butler, and what draws him to “The Prophecy” series. 16:15 SEGMENT 2: Joel Soisson talks about what makes him want to produce a film, what a producer does, why writing and directing is more fun than producing, wanting to be an animator and cinematographer, staying busy during COVID, and working on a “Magnificent Seven” remake with Danny Trejo. 28:23 SEGMENT 3: Walter Day talks about partnering with Old School Gamer Magazine at Planet Comicon's Planet Entertainment Zone (PEZ) where they held the Retro Gaming Olympics. Walter also discusses how every new game eventually becomes a retro game and how there have always been people who wanted to be professional gamers and people who wanted to watch them play. 41:18 SEGMENT 4: Walter Day talks about how meditation helped him visualize the future of video games, how Twin Galaxies helped legitimize competitive e-sports, video game addiction, how close we are to “Ready Player One” becoming real, and his favorite video game movies. Thanks to our sponsors Marcus Theatres (https://www.marcustheatres.com/) and Historic St. Charles, Missouri (https://www.discoverstcharles.com/) Amazon Affiliate Link - http://bit.ly/geektome Buy Me a Coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/3Y0D2iaZl Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/GeekToMeRadio Website - http://geektomeradio.com/ Podcast - https://anchor.fm/jamesenstall Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/GeekToMeRadio/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/geektomeradio Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/geektomeradio/ Producer - Joseph Vosevich https://twitter.com/Joey_Vee --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jamesenstall/support

We welcome Bob Weinstein, President at Robertet for a raw conversation on the turning points in his life that got him to where he is now and what drives him to keep going.

The low-budget horror film has always been a staple of the movie industry but back in 1980, a producer named Harvey Weinstein was desperate to get his shot in Hollywood so he decided to try his hand at creating a scary movie after hearing stories about the Cropsey legend in upstate New York. He pitched the idea to his producing partner Michael Cohl, who knew this was a potential hit after the success of films such as “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Halloween.” The initial pitch for the film took place prior to the success of “Friday the 13th,” although both movies share a somewhat similar premise involving a group of counselors getting hunted down at a kid's campground. Once the film was greenlit based on a treatment, a screenplay was written in just six weeks by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein before going into production. With the effects done by the legendary Tom Savini, a new slasher film was born. In the latest episode of Rewind of the Living Dead, we're going to pick up our garden shears and run into an abandoned mineshaft as we talk about the 1981 film “The Burning”… 

On this episode of the Development Hell podcast, Hollywood screenwriter Teddy Tenenbaum talks about writing a 2014 HELLRAISER project for Dimension Films. Teddy dishes the dirt on what it takes to get a horror movie made, his unlikely first encounter with Guillermo Del Toro, and what it was like working with Clive Barker on a television series about Ed and Lorraine Warren. Teddy also gets into the details about the plot behind his HELLRAISER concept (it’s wild), what it was like being shaded by Bob Weinstein, and when Dimension Films pitted his script against another written by Clive Barker himself. No tears please… even though this HELLRAISER project sounds like it would have been cool as all hell. Make sure to subscribe to Development Hell on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts!Development Hell is a proud member of the DREAD Podcast Network. Theme music by Drew Pidgeon Follow Teddy:Twitter - @teddytInstagram - teddytbaumFollow Development Hell:Twitter - @DevelHellPodInstagram - @DevelopmentHellPodFacebook - DevelopmentHellPoddevelhellpod.com

The Harvey and Bob Weinstein-directed 80's hodgepodge disaster PLAYING FOR KEEPS and Steve James' touching documentary tribute to Roger Ebert LIFE ITSELF are up to bat in this installment of Hard Out: Cinephiliacs, which inspired us to wax philosophical over not only Harvey's inhumanity but counterpoint Ebert's humanity.

Famous First Edition: New Fun Comics #1!Download Episode 397!NEW FUN COMICS 1, February 1935, was published on January 11, 1935. It contained 32 pages for the cover price of 10¢. Lloyd Jacquet was the editor. It was published by National Allied Publications, the company that would evolve into the DC Comics we know today.FAMOUS FIRST EDITION: NEW FUN COMICS #1 was published on May 19, 2020 for the cover price of $19.99.- (8:29) I review the book, JACKIE ORMES: THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN CARTOONIST by Nancy Goldstein, published by the University Of Michigan Press in 2019. This book was 226 pages long.- (11:45) MY PULL LIST, where I review the comic books that carried the November 2020 cover date, which were released during the month of September, and I received from Discount Comic Book Service.- (26:45) Before the reprint of NEW FUN COMICS 1, this FAMOUS FIRST EDITION  had two introductions. The first was titled, THE START OF SOMETHING BIG, written by comic book historian Jerry Bails for a previously planned reprint of this issue that was eventually never published.- (28:33) A SECOND INTRODUCTION was written by Roy Thomas, explaining why that first reprint never happened, and what the historical significance is of this issue.- (30:11) JACK WOOD, subtitled PANCH VILLA Part I, a western adventure was written and drawn by Lyman Anderson, according to Mike's Amazing World Of DC Comics. The Grand Comic Book Database gives this feature the subtitle as, DON NAGLES - CATTLE RUSTLER Part I, written by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and drawn by Lyman Anderson. Jack Wood rode into the sunset with his final appearance in ADVENTURE COMICS 42, September 1939.- (33:27) The adventure strip SANDRA OF THE SECRET SERVICE in THE GAVONIA AFFAIR part I, was written and drawn by Charles Flanders, according to Mike's Amazing World Of DC Comics, while the Grand Comic Book Database credits Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson as the writer and Charles Flanders as the artist. Sandra's final mission for the Secret Service would occur in MORE FUN COMICS 35, September 1935.- (34:11) The comic strip OSWALD RABBIT, which was written and drawn by John Lindermeyer, appeared on the bottom of the page. It filled the gap at the bottom of the page below not only SANDRA OF THE SECRET SERVICE, but many of the early features in this issue. Oswald made his final appearance in MORE FUN COMICS 7, January 1936, but would make various appearances in various titles for other comic book publishers.- (35:03) JIGGER AND GINGER, a teen humor strip, writer unknown, was drawn by Adolph Schus. They would make only one other appearance in NEW FUN COMICS 2, March 1935.- (35:50) The adventure strip BARRY O'NEIL, in FANG GOW OF CHINA part I, according to Mike's Amazing World Of DC Comics, was written by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and drawn by Lawrence Lariar. Barry's final adventure occurred in ADVENTURE COMICS 60, March 1941.- (37:17) THE MAGIC CRYSTAL OF HISTORY, a kid adventure strip, was written and drawn by Adolphe Barreaux. Bobby and Binks would take their final historical adventure via the Magic Crystal in MORE FUN COMICS 50, December 1939.- (38:45) The adventure strip WING BRADY: SOLDIER OF FORTUNE began with THE BEDOUINS part I. Mike's Amazing World Of DC Comics credits Henry Carl Kiefer (who signed his name as de Korosett, his wife's maiden name) as the writer and artist, while the Grand Comic Book Database lists Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson as the writer and Kiefer as the artist. Brady's final adventure occurred in MORE FUN COMICS 52, February 1941.- (40:19) Sir Walter Scott's IVANHOE was adapted to comic book form by Charles Flanders, according to Mike's Amazing World Of DC Comics, while the Grand Comic Book Database lists Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson as the writer of this adaption and Flanders as the artists. This adaption of IVANHOE ended with MORE FUN COMICS 27, December 1937.- (41:54) JUDGE PERKINS, a humor strip, was written and drawn by Bert Nelson Haig. The Judge would only have one more misadventure, in NEW FUN COMICS 2.- (42:57) The science fiction adventure, DON DRAKE ON THE PLANET SARO, was written by Ken Fitch and drawn by Joseph Clemmens Gretter, who signed his art as Clem Gretter. Drake had his final adventure in MORE FUN COMICS 17, January 1937.- (44:17) LOCO LUKE, a western humor strip, was written and drawn by Jack A. Warren. Loco Luke rode into the sunset after NEW FUN COMICS 4, May 1945.- (46:41) SPOOK RANCH was a western mystery story written by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, using the pseudonym Roger Furlong, with illustrations drawn by Charles Flanders. The story concluded in the next issue.- (46:41) SCRUB HARDY was a sports humor strip drawn by Joe Archibald. Hardy's sports career was cut short, only appearing again in NEW FUN COMICS 2.- (48:19) The sports adventure strip JACK ANDREWS ALL-AMERICAN BOY was written and drawn by Lyman Anderson. Andrews' sports career would only last through NEW FUN COMICS 6, October 1935.- (51:04) BATHYSPHERE - A MARTIAN DREAM, writer unknown, was an article about Dr. Beebe, who descended 3,000 feet in a bathysphere, and the equipment on board.- (51:59) SPORTS, an article written by Joe Archibald, was about the Toronto Maple Leafs and a brief history of the game of hockey.- (52:59) ON THE RADIO: THE DIAL TWISTER, maybe written by Lloyd Jacquet,  was an article asking readers to write the staff of NEW FUN COMICS and share their favorite radio shows, and the writer also shares some favorites.- (54:27) IN THE MOVIES: TALK OF THE TALKIES, writer unknown, described some of the upcoming films in 1935, including one involving the comic book cowboy Jack Wood, a movie serial titled RUSTLERS OF RED GAP (IMDb lists the final title as RUSTLERS OF RED DOG).- (55:24) MODEL AIRCRAFT, writer unknown, with illustrations drawn by Dick Loederer, was an article about how to make a model of the U.S. Navy plane Vought Corsair, one of the early planes that took off and landed on the first aircraft carriers.- (56:49) HOW TO BUILD HENDRICK HUDSON'S "HALF MOON", an article written and drawn by Robert Weinstein, about a 17th Century sailing ship.- (57:08) CAP'N ERIC, a sea adventure strip, was written and drawn by Robert Weinstein, who signed this feature Bob Weinstein.- (58:33) BUCKSKIN JIM: THE TRAILBLAZER, a western adventure, was written and drawn by Eugene Koscik, who signed his work as "K". Buckskin Jim rode off into the western sunset after MORE FUN COMICS 18, February 1937.- (1:01:28) The article POPULAR SCIENCE, writer unknown, had illustrations provided by Dick Loederer, who signed his work as "Loe". It covered three subjects, STREAMLINE TRAIN THAT TALKED, PUTTING THE SUN TO WORK, and A BIT OF MAGIC.- (1:03:06) STAMPS AND COINS, writer unknown, also had illustrations drawn by Dick Loederer, who again signed his work as "Loe". This article was divided into two sections, BEGINNING A COLLECTION, about stamps, and ABOUT COINS.- (1:03:50) The issue's final article was titled YOUNG HOMEMAKERS, writer unknown, also with illustrations provided by Dick "Loe" Loederer. This article provided advice about a well organized kitchen.- (1:04:39) AFTER SCHOOL, a kid humor strip, was written and drawn by Tom McNamara. Lefty and Slim had their last humorous adventure in NEW FUN COMICS 6, October 1935.- (1:05:43) CAVEMAN CAPERS, a prehistoric humor strip, was written and drawn by Dick Loederer. The fire went out for CAVEMAN CAPERS after NEW FUN COMICS 5, August 1935.- (1:06:42) FUN FILMS: TAD AMONG THE PIRATES, was written and drawn by Adolphe Barreaux. This feature was unique among the others in this issue. It was a series of strips that you could cut horizontally and tape together into a paper film strip, viewed through a paper backdrop drawn at the top of the page. Tad's final adventure occurred in NEW FUN COMICS 3, April 1935.- (1:07:20) BUBBY AND BEEVIL, a humor strip, was written and drawn by Dick Loederer. Bubby and Beevil's last misadventure was in NEW FUN COMICS 3, April 1935.(1:07:41) The animal humor strip PELION AND OSSA was written and drawn by John Lindermeyer, who signed his work as Kevin Hay. Their last adventure was also in NEW FUN COMICS 3, April 1935.- (1:08:35) This issue's final strip was the science fiction adventure 2023: SUPER POLICE, written by John Finch and drawn by Joseph Clemens Gretter, who signed his name as Clem Gretter. The Science Police investigated their last case in MORE FUN COMICS 14, October 1936.- (1:10:11) After the reprinted issue, there were a few essays to round out this book. The first was titled, THE MAJOR WHO MADECOMICS, about Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, written by his Granddaughter, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson. She provides a brief biography about her Grandfather, how his interests in life helped shape the features that were included in this first issue, and some of the talented comic book creators whose careers he helped influence.u - (1:10:38) NEW FUN 1 - THE CONTRIBUTORS, brief biographies of  most of the creators in this issue, also provided by Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, with special thanks to David Saunders for his original research.- (1:11:17) The book's final essay was titled, A TABLOID TRADITION CONTINUES, written by Editor Benjamin Le Clear, Manager of DC Comics Library Archives. He explains how and why this issues printed at tabloid size, and a brief history of the evolution of the size of comic books, and finally the origin of the FAMOUS FIRST EDITION series in the 1970's.- Next episode we return to our journey through the Silver Age Adventures of Superman with: SUPERMAN FAMILY COMIC BOOKS  COVER DATED MAY 1966: PART I: WORLD'S FINEST COMICS 157, PART II: SUPERMAN 186, PART III: SUPERMAN'S GIRL FRIEND LOIS LANE 65 & PART IV: ACTION COMICS 337 with ELSEWHERE IN DC COMICS' May or May/June 1966 titles.The home for THE SUPERMAN FAN PODCAST is http://thesupermanfanpodcast.blogspot.com. Send e-mail to supermanfanpodcast@gmail.com.You can join the SUPERMAN FAN PODCAST Group or Page on facebook, and follow the podcast on twitter @supermanpodcast. You can also keep track of the podcast on Tumblr, Medium, Flipboard, the Internet Archive, tunein, Stitcher, Amazon and Instagram.SUPERMAN FAN PODCAST is a proud member of:- The LEAGUE OF COMIC BOOK PODCASTERS and- The COMICS PODCAST NETWORK.The theme of this podcast is PLANS IN MOTION, composed by Kevin MacLeod, and part of the royalty free music library at http://incompetech.com. "Plans in Motion" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Superman and all related characters are trademark and copyright DC Comics. Any art shown on this podcast is for entertainment purposes only, and not for profit. I make no claims of ownership of these images, nor do I earn any money from this podcast.If you are interested in my artwork, go to wayfarerercomics.wordpress.com. I am available for commissions, so click on the Art Commissions tab for more information. If interested, send an e-mail to wayfarercomics@gmail.com.Thanks for listening to the SUPERMAN FAN PODCAST and, as always, thanks to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman!And don't forget to take care of each other out there.

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/blockbusting (https://www.patreon.com/blockbusting) JOIN THE OFFICIAL BLOCKBUSTING FACEBOOK GROUP: https://www.facebook.com/groups/blockbusting/ (https://www.facebook.com/groups/blockbusting/) LISTEN TO MY ALBUM: https://800pgr.lnk.to/Light (https://800PGR.lnk.to/Light) Jay (http://www.twitter.com/DietJay (@DietJay)) and Chuck (http://www.instagram.com/b12_chuck (@b12_chuck)) discuss Apollo 18, a found-footage fiasco about the least scary aliens in cinematic history that is both a terrible movie and an even more sickening easy cash grab for Bob Weinstein. Support this podcast

Darren Lynn Bousman chats with Nicholas Vince (HELLRAISER, NIGHTBREED); about finding a love of horror movies through ELVIRA, the directors he admires, how his script titled The Desperate became SAW 2,  his hate to friendship relationship with PAUL SORVINO on REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA, the nightmare of filming 11.11.11, pitching a Hellraiser remake with CLIVE BARKER to Bob Weinstein, filming DEATH OF ME in Thailand and SPRIAL with Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson, TENSION an immersive experience theatre piece and much, much more. Find out more at https://www.darrenlynnbousman.com

Six years after the release of Hellraiser: Hellworld, Dimension's Bob Weinstein discovered that the studio was about to lose the rights to the property. In three weeks, a skeleton crew of nobodies put together Hellraiser: Revelations, an ashcan copy for the ages.

The Horror Queers eight-week camp marathon continues as Joe and Trace journey to Hollywood (barely escaping a car wreck on Mulholland Drive) to visit the hippest new night club since Planet Hollywood: Tinsel. That's right, they're discussing Wes Craven's Cursed! Joining them is Tim O'Leary, creator of the upcoming queer web series DEMONHUNTR! They will need all the help they can get to figure out just what this cobbled-together Frankenstein's monster of a film is trying to do.In what seems to be an ongoing trend with these campy movies, the boys discuss the very troubled production for Cursed at length, and try to determine just what the fuck Bob Weinstein was thinking when he demanded the script be re-written when 90% of the film had already been shot.No one, save for the always reliable Judy Greer, is having any fun in this movie. Kevin Williamson's script reads as if he was trying to one-up Scream 3's Hollywood satire (he fails). Poor Christina Ricci is handed some of the worst dialogue you'll ever hear ("Everybody's cursed, Jimmy. It's called life.").But hey, it's not all bad! Topics for discussion include Milo Ventimiglia's homo-repressed bully Bo, a werewolf giving Christina Ricci the middle finger and the longest plot summary ever. Oh, and man butts and cock socks. This Week's Game: Considering the film's many casting changes, pick one actor that you will substitute out for someone new in order to make this a more enjoyable (but not necessarily better) film.Questions? Comments? Snark? Connect with the boys on Twitter using the hashtag #HorrorQueers or like our Facebook page.> Trace: @tracedthurman> Joe: @bstolemyremote> Tim: @TimOLearyOnlineSupport the boys on PatreonCheck out the online articles on Bloody Disgusting See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It's been five years since Jesse Eisenberg dropped by the podcast so there's a lot of ground to cover in this fun fast paced conversation -- from his new film "The Art of Self-Defense", why it took ten years to get the gang back together for a "Zombieland" sequel, and that time Bob Weinstein threatened his life! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest Michael helps us watch Harvey & Bob Weinstein’s 1986 creation: “Playing for Keeps” We drop a horrorcore Juggalo rap, interview someone close to our district superintendent problem, issue a warning about 1-star ratings, and read our product reviews. We watch ½ of “Playing for Keeps” & predict how it ends. Written & Directed Listen now

Harvey Weinstein CBE is a former American film producer. He and his brother Bob Weinstein co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films, including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love, and garnered seven Tony Awards for a variety of plays and musicals, including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company, a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017. In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein, he was dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.By October 31, over 80 women had made allegations against Weinstein. The allegations triggered the "#MeToo" social media campaign and many similar sexual abuse allegations against and dismissals of powerful men around the world, called the "Weinstein effect". Information From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein Public Access America PublicAccessPod Productions #Not4Profit #Comedy #Entertainment #Learning #News #Religion #Spirituality #Storytelling #America #History #BigBrainPod #Podcast, #Education #harveyWeinstein Footage downloaded and edited by PublicAccessPod Podcast Link Review us Stitcher: http://goo.gl/XpKHWB Review us iTunes: https://goo.gl/soc7KG Subscribe GooglePlay: https://goo.gl/gPEDbf YouTube https://goo.gl/xrKbJb

Harvey Weinstein CBE is a former American film producer. He and his brother Bob Weinstein co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films, including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love, and garnered seven Tony Awards for a variety of plays and musicals, including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company, a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017. In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein, he was dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.By October 31, over 80 women had made allegations against Weinstein. The allegations triggered the "#MeToo" social media campaign and many similar sexual abuse allegations against and dismissals of powerful men around the world, called the "Weinstein effect". Information From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein Public Access America PublicAccessPod Productions #Not4Profit #Comedy #Entertainment #Learning #News #Religion #Spirituality #Storytelling #America #History #BigBrainPod #Podcast, #Education #harveyWeinstein Footage downloaded and edited by PublicAccessPod Podcast Link Review us Stitcher: http://goo.gl/XpKHWB Review us iTunes: https://goo.gl/soc7KG Subscribe GooglePlay: https://goo.gl/gPEDbf YouTube https://goo.gl/xrKbJb

Check the full version of these reports and individual reports at: https://www.newyorkmarketreports.com   This episode is brought to you by: http://www.theratnerteam.com   Welcome to the Manhattan Residential Sales Real Estate Market Report for the 4th quarter of 2017. Whether you already own or you’re looking to buy into the City’s fastest growing market, we’ll keep you up to date. You’re listening to New York’s Real Estate Market Update from the Ratner Team. Manhattan’s grandiose allure of culture, history and business continues to hold an enviable position in the real estate world for buyers and sellers alike. In our residential report, we’ll give you averages first, but keep listening for this quarter’s record high sales. With an average selling price of $1,897,503, Residential Manhattan’s prices held steady over last year’s ending quarter. Average price-per-square-foot, however, continues to drop, this time by an astonishing 20.6 percent down to $1,609 dollars. Residential sales may be steadfast as ever, but purchasers are getting more and more floor space for their buck. Total transactions tallied in at 5,280 this quarter, down 14.4 percent from a total of 6,027 sales in Q4 2016. Sales may be dropping, but prices are not, and we expect Manhattan to maintain this balance. The average sale pricing of new development condos dipped 16.8 percent in this final quarter to $4,062,036 – last year, that number was much closer to $5 million. Prices in this market are declining but the time it takes to sell is increasing, albeit slightly: the average time a development spends on the market is up around 190 days, compared to last year’s data of 181 days. The verdict for Manhattan’s existing condominium sales is only marginally more cheerful than new developments, with a 14.9 percent decrease from 2016. Average sale price for these properties ran around $2,654,848 in December 2017, compared to $3,121,095 dollars in 2016. However, the market time for existing condos has neither increased nor decreased, averaging 116 days. Co-op sales jumped just 1.6 percent this quarter, reporting an average sales price of $1,235,038 dollars in 2017. Market time increased fractionally as well, coming in at 79 days from 75 days this time last year. If you’re seeking a more stable market, co-ops continue to be worth a look. Of course, even with a 20.7 percent decrease, luxury property sales bring the most lucrative numbers this quarter. The average selling price of a luxury Manhattan property was $7,580,185, a rather steep dive from last year’s average of $9,558,062. This market is proving to reward those who may lack patience, however, as selling time is dropping: luxury properties were on the market for only 252 days this quarter, compared to nearly 300 days in Q4 2016. Across the board, the average recorded price discount was 0.1 percent.   Now for the top sales numbers for December 2017: The well-known neighborhood of Lincoln Square topped December’s single-family residential sales. The lovely Upper West Side brownstone at 39 West 70th Street sold for $15,000,000 – about $2,280 dollars per square foot – just prior to the close of the quarter. Previously owned by The Weinstein Company and Miramax Films co-founder Bob Weinstein, the home was originally listed at 19 million. Its ideal location just steps away from Central Park wasn’t even the main attraction of this property; a complete gut restoration, including five interior fireplaces and an extravagant combination home gym/indoor basketball half court, demanded an impressive price tag. In Central Midtown, the record condo sale for this quarter goes to a 432 Park Ave multi-sale that finalized for an almost inconceivable $91,125,497 -- just shy of breaking the record for NYC’s most expensive apartment sale ever. This recently-completed construction masterpiece is the tallest residential building in not only Manhattan but the entire Western hemisphere, and its top-floor apartments have claimed incredible prices the past few quarters. This combination sale of three properties on the 92nd and 93rd floors comes out to $22,913 per square foot. This December’s top co-op sold in Lenox Hill again for a solid $12,000,000. For bargain-seekers who still want Manhattan real estate, Washington Heights & Inwood are currently the least-expensive residential areas on the island – each square foot costs on average only $627 dollars. Average condos in these neighborhoods sold for $455,250 dollars, with average co-op sales only slightly lower at $472,500 dollars.     - If you like this information, the best way you can support us is with a 5-star rating. Share it with someone you know, and subscribe. We’ll put out new content and a whole new rental report every month and a new sales report every quarter. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram & YouTube.  Interested in getting a free market analysis of your Manhattan property, renting your vacant apartment, or simply acquiring an investment property? Email Us at Contact@TheRatnerTeam.com.  We’re full-time professionals and always here to help!   Don't forget to check our Brooklyn Made Blog and The Brooklyn Made Show. http://www.TheBrooklynMadeShow.com http://www.BrooklynMade.Blog

Story: Während ihres Urlaubs in Mexiko beschließen Kate und Lisa, dass sie neben Jungs und Partys noch ein weiteres Abenteuer erleben wollen – mit Haien tauchen. Leider entscheiden sich die Freundinnen für den falschen Ausflug. Was zunächst als eine einmalige Erfahrung beginnt, entpuppt sich schnell zum absoluten Horrortrip. Nachdem sich der Käfig vom Boot löst, stranden sie in 47 Metern Tiefe. Gefangen in ihrem rostigen Tiefseegefängnis beginnt ein Wettlauf gegen die Zeit. Umzingelt von weißen Haien müssen Kate und Lisa den Aufstieg zur Oberfläche schaffen, bevor ihnen der Sauerstoff ausgeht. DVD/Blu Ray-Release: 01.12.2017 (Universum Film GmbH) 47 Meters Down Genre: Horror, Thriller, Drama, Survival Land: USA 2016 Laufzeit: ca. 97 min. FSK: 16 Regie: Johannes Roberts Drehbuch: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera Kamera: Mark Silk Musik: tomandandy Produzenten: Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, James Harris, Mark Lane, ... Mit Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine, Chris Johnson, Yani Gellman, Santiago Segura, ... https://youtu.be/UM-dnEX0gyc

Story: Während ihres Urlaubs in Mexiko beschließen Kate und Lisa, dass sie neben Jungs und Partys noch ein weiteres Abenteuer erleben wollen – mit Haien tauchen. Leider entscheiden sich die Freundinnen für den falschen Ausflug. Was zunächst als eine einmalige Erfahrung beginnt, entpuppt sich schnell zum absoluten Horrortrip. Nachdem sich der Käfig vom Boot löst, stranden sie in 47 Metern Tiefe. Gefangen in ihrem rostigen Tiefseegefängnis beginnt ein Wettlauf gegen die Zeit. Umzingelt von weißen Haien müssen Kate und Lisa den Aufstieg zur Oberfläche schaffen, bevor ihnen der Sauerstoff ausgeht. DVD/Blu Ray-Release: 01.12.2017 (Universum Film GmbH) 47 Meters Down Genre: Horror, Thriller, Drama, Survival Land: USA 2016 Laufzeit: ca. 97 min. FSK: 16 Regie: Johannes Roberts Drehbuch: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera Kamera: Mark Silk Musik: tomandandy Produzenten: Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, James Harris, Mark Lane, ... Mit Mandy Moore, Claire Holt, Matthew Modine, Chris Johnson, Yani Gellman, Santiago Segura, ... https://youtu.be/UM-dnEX0gyc

Schumer and Pelosi pull out of budget meeting with Trump over lunch. Post Weinstein Sexual Predator Tally. James Toback 238, Weinstein 80+, Charlie Rose 9, Glenn Thrush 4, Jeffrey Tambor 2, Al Franken 4, Matt Zimmerman 1+, Andrew Kreisberg 19, Louis C.K. 5, Steven Seagal 3, Ed Westwick 2, Brett Ratner 7, Dustin Hoffman 2, Jeremy Piven several, Michael Oreskes 8, Kevin Spacey many, Mark Halperin 12, George H.W. Bush 7, Terry Richardson many many, Leon Wieseltier many, John Besh many, Bob Weinstein 1, Oliver Stone 1+1, Roy Price 1, Ben Affleck 2. Linda Tripp tells all about what Bill Clinton was really like. General Flynn lawyers are meeting with special counsel.. Is Jeff Bezos and Amazon too big? Connor's WTF Amazon email. Meredith Corp. join with Koch brothers to buy Time Inc. for $2.8 billion. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle get engaged and look to get married in May, 2018, at Windsor Castle. Sen. Schumer home DNA customers sold to 3rd parties. Hawaii reactivates attack warning sirens due to North Korean threats. Kim Jong Un shoots off a missile this morning and may now have full nuclear capabilities, calls Japan's leader a headless chicken. Campaign staffers at Roy Moore event pushes Fox News cameras away. MSNBC's Joy Reed calls rural minorities a core threat will always have power over urban majority. For a list of source links, visit http://therightleftchronicles.com/podcasts/963/dueling-dialogues-podcast-ep-44/

00:50 Schumer and Pelosi pull out of budget meeting with Trump over lunch today. 02:25 On today's show: Post Weinstein Sexual Predator Tally. James Toback 238, Weinstein 80+, Charlie Rose 9, Glenn Thrush 4, Jeffrey Tambor 2, Al Franken 4, Matt Zimmerman 1+, Andrew Kreisberg 19, Louis C.K. 5, Steven Seagal 3, Ed Westwick 2, Brett Ratner 7, Dustin Hoffman 2, Jeremy Piven several, Michael Oreskes 8, Kevin Spacey many, Mark Halperin 12, George H.W. Bush 7, Terry Richardson many many, Leon Wieseltier many, John Besh many, Bob Weinstein 1, Oliver Stone 1+1, Roy Price 1, Ben Affleck 2. 11:35 Linda Tripp tells all about what Bill Clinton was really like. 13:20 General Flynn lawyers are meeting with special counsel. 13:50 Is Jeff Bezos and Amazon too big? 14:55 Connor's WTF Amazon email. 19:45 Meredith Corp. join with Koch brothers to buy Time Inc. for $2.8 billion. 22:15 Prince Harry and Meghan Markle get engaged and look to get married in May, 2018, at Windsor Castle. 23:25 Sen. Schumer home DNA customers sold to 3rd parties. 24:35 Hawaii reactivates attack warning sirens due to North Korean threats. 24:45 Kim Jong Un shoots off a missile this morning and may now have full nuclear capabilities, calls Japan's leader a headless chicken. 26:45 Campaign staffers at Roy Moore event pushes Fox News cameras away. 27:20 MSNBC's Joy Reed calls rural minorities a core threat will always have power over urban majority. For a list of source links, visit http://therightleftchronicles.com/podcasts/963/dueling-dialogues-podcast-ep-44/

Schumer and Pelosi pull out of budget meeting with Trump over lunch.Post Weinstein Sexual Predator Tally. James Toback 238, Weinstein 80+, Charlie Rose 9, Glenn Thrush 4, Jeffrey Tambor 2, Al Franken 4, Matt Zimmerman 1+, Andrew Kreisberg 19, Louis C.K. 5, Steven Seagal 3, Ed Westwick 2, Brett Ratner 7, Dustin Hoffman 2, Jeremy Piven several, Michael Oreskes 8, Kevin Spacey many, Mark Halperin 12, George H.W. Bush 7, Terry Richardson many many, Leon Wieseltier many, John Besh many, Bob Weinstein 1, Oliver Stone 1+1, Roy Price 1, Ben Affleck 2.Linda Tripp tells all about what Bill Clinton was really like.General Flynn lawyers are meeting with special counsel..Is Jeff Bezos and Amazon too big? Connor's WTF Amazon email.Meredith Corp. join with Koch brothers to buy Time Inc. for $2.8 billion.Prince Harry and Meghan Markle get engaged and look to get married in May, 2018, at Windsor Castle.Sen. Schumer home DNA customers sold to 3rd parties.Hawaii reactivates attack warning sirens due to North Korean threats. Kim Jong Un shoots off a missile this morning and may now have full nuclear capabilities, calls Japan's leader a headless chicken.Campaign staffers at Roy Moore event pushes Fox News cameras away. MSNBC's Joy Reed calls rural minorities a core threat will always have power over urban majority.For a list of source links, visit http://therightleftchronicles.com/podcasts/963/dueling-dialogues-podcast-ep-44/

Blake Burman from Fox Business calls. Bob Weinstien now in trouble. Listeners calls.

Bob Weinstein is accused of sexual harassment now, Google calendar needs a change, and the NFL rejects rule change would force players to stand for national anthem.

First it was Harvey, now it's Bob, as in Bob Weinstein, who's being accused of sexual harassment.  Several off-duty Orange County sheriff's were in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival.  The deputies jumped into action.  Some were injured and have filed workers comp claims.  OC supervisors are reviewing those claims.  NFL owners are meeting in New York, discussing what to do about players kneeling during the National Anthem.  We talk to sports consultant Marc Ganis about today's meeting. See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bipartisan agreement on health care, Trump supports. Americans are getting fatter. Urban Word of the Day. Securing your information in wake of data breeches. Offensive halloween costumes. What have you had to sacrifice to make ends meet? What's Next: Travel Ban. Colin Kaepernick vs. the NFL. NFL owners meet to discuss anthem protests. Say What?? Bob Weinstein now accused of sexual harassment. Group wants to legalize a third gender option in California.

Bob Weinstein says the production company he started with his brother will continue, Dan and Amy's listeners helped come up with a new name. Jed Babbin is a former Pentagon Official and a contributor to the Washington Times and American Spectator. He joined Dan and Amy with reaction to the terror attack in Somalia and the bickering over hurricane response in Puerto Rico. Plus, Andrew McCarthy is a former Chief Assistant US Attorney and Contributing Editor at National Review. He joined Dan and Amy with reaction to President Trump's executive order on health care.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

12/14/2013 In this, our final episode of the Clive Barker Podcast for 2013 (probably) Ryan and Jose talk with Mark Miller, Vice President of Clive Barker's Seraphim Inc.  Skype played a trick on us, in that Mark was experiencing about a 5 second delay after Jose and I would talk. We tried to cut out these pauses from the episode, but some of that awkwardness bleeds through.  We've been trying to get Mark on the Podcast for a while now, and when we finally do, Skype acts like a jerk.  Anyway, we talk about a lot of upcoming projects such as the  Nightbreed Extended Cut by Shout! Factory, Hellraiser Comic, Next Testament, Thief of Always Movie.  Don't miss it! Show Notes:   Unabridged Audible Thief of Always: http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/The-Thief-of-Always-Audiobook/B00H7J4CK6/   Next Testament #6 December 18 : http://dailydead.com/exclusive-early-look-clive-barkers-next-testament-6/   Hellraiser The Dark Watch #11 December 18 http://brandonseifert.bigcartel.com/product/hellraiser-the-dark-watch-11 http://www.boom-studios.com/hellraiser-the-dark-watch-11.html   Live Painting Zoomen Bert Green 2006: http://www.clivebarker.info/livepainting.html   Vestamenti: Hellbound Hearts Cover   First Tales:  http://www.realclivebarker.com/firsttales/   Clive Barker presents: The Sickness http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/anti5er/clive-barker-presents-the-sickness-a-trailer-with   Trailer   Thief of Always on Audible http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/The-Thief-of-Always-Audiobook/B00H7J4CK6   Clive's announcement on facebook that he had a conversation with Bob Weinstein: https://www.facebook.com/officialclivebarker/posts/447369132038476   Floyd Hughes and his Puzzle Guardian art: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=494125617369218&set=a.441078266007287.1073741833.358765987571849&type=1&theater   The Labyrinth website is: https://www.facebook.com/LabyrinthWebsite http://www.labyrinth-website.com/index.html   It turns out the first ever book I got signed by Clive Barker, I gave away here on the Podcast, since it was a paperback.  Here's a picture from my second signing for Thief of Always, in Seattle.  At this signing, buying a book from Golden Age Collectibles in the Pike Place Market got you a place in line, and a ticket for the Clive Barker Q&A where he read the first chapter of the book.  It was amazing.   Mark Miller  Twitter: @markalanmiller Clive Barker Store Seraphim, Inc.   Bandwidth Provided by Ryan Danhauser, REMAX Associates of Fairbanks   web www.clivebarkercast.com iTunes (Leave a review!), Podomatic, XBOX Music Store, Tune-In Radio, Stitcher, Doubletwist, Blackberry and Pocketcast. Facebook and Join the Occupy Midian group Twitter: @BarkerCast | @OccupyMidian forum: www.clivebarkerfans.com/forum Theme by Colin Lacativa

By popular demand, your favorite cinematic jurists are back, and this time they've got New Jersey's own in their sights! Tom and Derrick evaluate the life and times of Kevin Smith, and try to determine if he is on the straight and narrow or walking down a potentially disastrous road. The Guys Outta Brooklyn defend the much-maligned Jersey Girl, talk about the hazard of making Jay and Silent Bob main characters, question whether Smith's relationship with Bob Weinstein helps or hurts him, and look at other issues. Plus, the first and maybe only BITD discussion on religion, and now waaaaaaaaay outdated speculation on Spider-Man 4. It's better than a stink palm, so get to clicking!

By popular demand, your favorite cinematic jurists are back, and this time they've got New Jersey's own in their sights! Tom and Derrick evaluate the life and times of Kevin Smith, and try to determine if he is on the straight and narrow or walking down a potentially disastrous road. The Guys Outta Brooklyn defend the much-maligned Jersey Girl, talk about the hazard of making Jay and Silent Bob main characters, question whether Smith's relationship with Bob Weinstein helps or hurts him, and look at other issues. Plus, the first and maybe only BITD discussion on religion, and now waaaaaaaaay outdated speculation on Spider-Man 4. It's better than a stink palm, so get to clicking!

By popular demand, your favorite cinematic jurists are back, and this time they've got New Jersey's own in their sights! Tom and Derrick evaluate the life and times of Kevin Smith, and try to determine if he is on the straight and narrow or walking down a potentially disastrous road. The Guys Outta Brooklyn defend the much-maligned Jersey Girl, talk about the hazard of making Jay and Silent Bob main characters, question whether Smith's relationship with Bob Weinstein helps or hurts him, and look at other issues. Plus, the first and maybe only BITD discussion on religion, and now waaaaaaaaay outdated speculation on Spider-Man 4. It's better than a stink palm, so get to clicking!

By popular demand, your favorite cinematic jurists are back, and this time they've got New Jersey's own in their sights! Tom and Derrick evaluate the life and times of Kevin Smith, and try to determine if he is on the straight and narrow or walking down a potentially disastrous road. The Guys Outta Brooklyn defend the much-maligned Jersey Girl, talk about the hazard of making Jay and Silent Bob main characters, question whether Smith's relationship with Bob Weinstein helps or hurts him, and look at other issues. Plus, the first and maybe only BITD discussion on religion, and now waaaaaaaaay outdated speculation on Spider-Man 4. It's better than a stink palm, so get to clicking!