Podcast appearances and mentions of Bruce Beresford

Norman Buckley is a prolific director whose work spans various networks, genres, and styles. Most recently, he executive produced and edited the short film STORAGE FEES. He is currently the co-executive producer/producing director on the Netflix show SWEET MAGNOLIAS. His previous credits include NCIS: HAWAII, PRETTY LITTLE LIARS, CHARMED, IN THE DARK, ZOO, QUANTICO, RIZZOLI AND ISLES, CHUCK, GOSSIP GIRL, AND THE OC. He was co-executive producer/producing director on PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: THE PERFECTIONISTS.After editing the pilot episode of THE OC in 2003, he began his directing career by helming six episodes of that series. He has gone on to direct over 140 episodes of television since then. His television movie THE PREGNANCY PROJECT won Best Primetime Program (Special or Movie of the Week) and Best Actress (Alexa Vega) at the 2012 Imagen Awards. His episode of THE OC “The Metamorphosis” was chosen by Entertainment Weekly magazine as one of the five best episodes of the series. His episode of GOSSIP GIRL “The Handmaiden's Tale” was chosen by Newsweek Magazine as one of the top ten television episodes of 2007.Buckley began working in the industry as an assistant editor on the Oscar-nominated films TENDER MERCIES, SILKWOOD, and PLACES IN THE HEART. He continued editing for a number of years on many films, television series, and TV movies. He worked with many outstanding directors, including Bruce Beresford, Robert Benton, Mike Nichols, Rob Reiner, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Richard Donner, J.S. Cardone, McG, Doug Liman, and Robert M. Young. He also learned the editing craft from some of the best film editors in the business, including Carol Littleton, Sam O'Steen, William Anderson, and Bob Leighton.He worked as an editor on many independent films at the Sundance, Toronto, and Telluride film festivals, including HAPPY, TEXAS, which he also associate-produced. Beginning in 2000, Buckley edited several television pilots, all of which were picked up to series, which led to his regular work in television.He has been nominated twice for an American Cinema Editors award: in 2003 for JOE AND MAX, for best-edited motion picture for non-commercial television, and he won the award in 2008 for the pilot of CHUCK, for best-edited one-hour series for commercial television.Buckley grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and studied history at the University of Texas at Arlington, before moving to Los Angeles where he would later graduate from the University of Southern California with a degree in Cinema/Television.He was an adjunct professor at the University of California Los Angeles film school, teaching both graduates and undergraduates.Norman Buckley was married to the late artist Davyd Whaley and he established The Davyd Whaley Foundation (davydwhaleyfoundation.org) to carry on Davyd's legacy by supporting emerging artists with annual grants. Most recently the Foundation has funded scholarships at the Art Students League in New York and the film school at UCLA, as well as providing funding for Art Division, Art of Elysium, and the Brentwood Art Center in Los Angeles. 

La cosa viene fuerte esta semana porque todavía colea el debate de Joker de la semana pasada. Con eso arrancamos, con vuestras aportaciones al mismo que siempre agradecemos enormemente. Pero de nuevo tenemos un programa cargadísimo de contenido. Héctor de los tres amigos se viene al podcast para charlar sobre el director australiano Bruce Beresford con una selección de películas super interesantes: El último bailarín de Mao, Consejo de Guerra y PAseando a la señorita Daisy entre otras. Y de ahí nos lanzamos a los estrenos de la semana donde brilla “La Sustancia” la película de terror que atragantó la cena de Miguel Angel y de la que no podemos dejar de gritar y recomendar, como también lo hacemos con la cinta animada “Robot Salvaje” que apartir de ahora será conocida como “la película que emocionó a Rocío Muñoz”. De ahí nos vamos a una de las sensaciones de Sitges “Strange Darling” que os recomendamos que veáis sin saber nada de la misma y provoca dudas ¿es una cinta anti mujeres? Por si todo esto fuera poco y por si el fin de semana preferís quedaros en casa a Netflix nos ha llegado la primera cinta de ficción de Maite Alberdi (El Agente Topo, la memoria infinita) que además representará a Chile en los Oscar con “El lugar de la otra” Mucho que contaros además en el cumpleaños de Miguel Ángel que lo ha decidido pasar con todos nosotros. ¡Que disfruten!

In this month's series, I'll share cases of vacations that turned deadly.  Even in the most serene and beautiful locations, murder never takes a holiday.   This week, an award-winning television producer, his beautiful and successful Brazilian-born wife, and young children take a family vacation to a tropical resort.  When Monica Beresford-Redman is found murdered just yards from their hotel suite, her husband becomes the main suspect.   Was the circumstantial evidence all pointing to Bruce Beresford-Redman as the murderer merely a series of coincidences or proof of his guilt?  Was he a victim of terrible luck, or did he resort to murder?    Sources:  48 Hours: Bruce Beresford-Redman: The Verdict, Season 28, Episode 22, 2015.  In the Matter of the EXTRADITION OF Bruce Ainsley BERESFORD-REDMAN. United States District Court, Ninth Circuit, California, C.D. California. Dec. 2, 2010.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Beresford-Redman https://abcnews.go.com/US/documents-detail-beresford-redman-death-mexico/story?id=12815694 https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/beresford-redman-cancun-murder-tv-producer/2419136/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7453793/Survivor-producer-jailed-wifes-death-spotted-release.html https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/a-survivor-producer-a-dead-2-755386/   Sponsors:  Lume - www.lumedeodorant.com - Use discount code ONCE    Links:  YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@OnceUponACrimePodcast CrimeCon UK - September 21st and 22nd in London. Get your discounted ticket by using my discount code ONCEUPON when you purchase your ticket at www.crimecon.co.uk. 

Filmmaker, critic, video essayist and author Scout Tafoya joins the show to discuss the work of undersung journeyman Bruce Beresford and his brilliant 1991 film 'Black Robe', a story of faith, the frontier, and the church as a pernicious vestige of the European colonial project. Set amidst the 17th Century French conquests of North America in modern-day Quebec, the film follows the titular Black Robe, Father Laforgue, a Jesuit Missionary tasked with bringing Christianity to the indigenous populations of the region. As he ventures deep into Huron territory with his company of Algonquin guides, the limits of his faith and reason are tested, as it becomes clear that his beliefs and the promises they supposedly carry can find no purchase with a people who have no need for them. Greenlit in the wake of the success of 'Dances With Wolves' and cashing in on an exceptional amount of goodwill Beresford had accrued after directing the Academy Award-winning 'Driving Miss Daisy', the film is a brilliant study of self-deception, and the profoundly human impulses of one's perceptions of the divine. We discuss Beresford as filmmaker, his history as a contemporary of Australian greats Peter Weir and George Miller, and why his work deserves an immediate and vast reappraisal. Then, we discuss 'Black Robe', its exacting observations of faith and imperialism, and its unusually sensitive and well-researched portrayals of indigenous American tribes. Finally, we talk about other films in the canon of great portrayals of faith and the frontier, including Michael Mann's gorgeous 'The Last of the Mohicans' and Martin Scorsese's late-period masterpiece 'Silence'. Follow Scout Tafoya on Twitter. Support Scout's video essay work and criticism on Patreon.Buy Scout's book 'But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century".Get access to all of our premium episodes and bonus content by becoming a Hit Factory Patron for just $5/month.....Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish. 

We continue #FebWARary with director Bruce Beresford's BREAKER MORANT, which covers the very well-known (to Americans) Second Boer War. We attempt to offer a small background on the War as we discuss this Academy Award-nominated film, which follows three soldiers court-martialed by their own military. Also, Erica discovers the movie was based on true events (but also, frustratingly, a play), Marc can't stop thinking about AGAINST ALL ODDS, and all three hosts reveal their own personal code. For more about this podcast, including our original t-shirts, head to www.newworldpicturespodcast.com. 

Uno dei miei miglior film di sempre. Ogni volta che lo vedo, mi commuove, mi emoziona, mi fa sorridere, mi fa stare bene. Daisy è un'anziana signora, ex insegnante, dell'alta borghesia. Non è cattiva, ma vuole le cose a modo suo e la sua testardaggine è cosa ben nota. A seguito di un incidente con l'auto, la donna sarà costretta ad usufruire dei servigi dello chauffeur di colore Hooke. Superate le diffidenze iniziali, tra i due si instaurerà una delicata e profonda amicizia, che durerà nel tempo. Jessica Tandy (premio Oscar) e Morgan Freeman sono perfetti nei loro ruoli e costruiscono una meravigliosa parabola di amicizia e rispetto, senza preoccuparsi del colore della pelle né dell'epoca in cui si vive. Una delle migliori colonne sonore di Hans Zimmer. Da vedere e rivedere senza sosta.

In this episode of the Cinema Australia Podcast, I'm joined by internationally-renowned filmmaker Scott Hicks for what I consider to be a very special interview.  Interviews like this are the exact reason I launched Cinema Australia just over ten years ago. I set out to capture Australian filmmaking stories, and th those that Scott shares here about his career are priceless. As a keen Australian film enthusiast, I spent most of this interview in a state of awe.  Scott shares previously untold stories here, such as the complete narrative behind the production of his unreleased tele-movie, Call Me Mr. Brown, and the time he tactfully guided a inebriated Bill Hunter back on track. Scott also talks about learning from filmmaking giants like Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford, his creative partnership with Australian acting legend Chris Haywood, and of course we talk about Shine.  Scott and I actually got so caught up talking about his career that we almost ran out of time to discuss his latest film, The Musical Mind… A Portrait in Process. We do get there eventually towards the end of the interview, so if you're here specifically for that, hang in there. An Emmy, Peabody and multiple AACTA award-winning filmmaker, Scott Hicks has also been nominated for two Academy Awards as Director and Writer, and British Academy Awards for Directing and Best Film. His documentary on Philip Glass was short-listed for Oscar® nomination and nominated for an Emmy. He was honoured as South Australian of the Year in 1999 and then as Australian of the Year for South Australia in 2008. Scott received a Doctorate of Letters and a Premier's Lifetime achievement award. Together with his close friend David Chiem, CEO of global company MindChamps, Scott formed MAY30 Entertainment to create quality entertainment for the international market. The Musical Mind… A Portrait in Process marks the first releases for MAY30. Sparked by the impending 25th anniversary of the Academy award-winning blockbuster Shine, The Musical Mind… A Portrait in Process explores the power of the musical brain. Featuring exclusive, intimate footage of super-star international musicians in their private worlds, it opens an intriguing portal into the musical mind. Anyway… enjoy.

We had to South Africa this week with Bruce Beresford's 1980 Second Boer War epic, Breaker Morant!Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ScuttlebuttMovieReviewsInstagram- https://www.instagram.com/scuttlebuttreviews/?hl=enYoutube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwbgZzUyQc--6MUwA_CtFvQPatreon -https://www.patreon.com/Scuttlebuttpodcast

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

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

This episode examines Breaker Morant, the 1980 Australian New Wave film depicting the military trial of Harry ("Breaker") Morant and two other Australian soldiers for war crimes committed during the Second Boer War in South Africa. The film, directed by Bruce Beresford, offers a gripping account of the trial and raises a host of questions about law and justice during wartime--questions that are as relevant today as they were when the trial took place more than a century ago. I am joined on this episode by veteran attorney Michel Paradis, who has served as military defense counsel in landmark war crimes trials at Guantanamo Bay and who has written widely about issues of international law and military justice. Michel is a lecturer at Columbia Law School in New York and a partner at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP. Timestamps:0:00       Introduction    6:15     An age-old question: Can you deny justice to the guilty?8:04     Breaker Morant as both courtroom drama and western9:14     Who was Harry "Breaker" Morant?9:54     A new kind of war?12:08   People who commit atrocities don't usually think they're the bad guys15:10   The superior orders defense20:22   The politics of war crimes trial28:28   The defense lawyer as hero in legal dramas37:36   Did the defendants get a fair trial?40:00   The law of reprisals46:20   Echoes of the My Lai massacre case49:17   Defense counsel's closing: War changes men's nature50:44   The Australian New Wave51:49   The trial's aftermath57:24   Why should everyone see this film?Further reading:Boslaugh, Sarah, “'Breaker Morant' Is an Epic Tale, Set during the Boer War,” Pop Matters (Oct. 15, 2015), https://www.popmatters.com/breaker-morant-2495479235.htmlBuckmaster, Luke, “'Breaker Morant': rewatching classic Australian films,” The Guardian (June 19, 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/film/australia-culture-blog/2014/jun/19/breaker-morant-rewatching-classic-australian-filmsDavies, Glenn, “Criminal or hero: The life of ‘Breaker' Morant,” Independent Australia (Mar. 4, 2022), https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/criminal-or-hero-the-life-of-breaker-morant,16113Gardner, Susan, “Can you imagine anything more Australian?: Bruce Beresford's 'Breaker Morant'” Kunapipi, vol. 3, issue 1 (1981), https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1094&context=kunapipiSinyard, Neil, “'Breaker Morant': Scapegoats of Empire,” The Criterion Collection (Sept. 23, 2015), https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3713-breaker-morant-scapegoats-of-empire        Law on Film is created and produced by Jonathan Hafetz. Jonathan is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has written many books and articles about the law. He has litigated important cases to protect civil liberties and human rights while working at the ACLU and other organizations. Jonathan is a huge film buff and has been watching, studying, and talking about movies for as long as he can remember. For more information about Jonathan, here's a link to his bio: https://law.shu.edu/faculty/full-time/jonathan-hafetz.cfmYou can contact him at jonathanhafetz@gmail.comYou can follow him on X (Twitter) @jonathanhafetz You can follow the podcast on X (Twitter) @LawOnFilm

After a hiatus of several months, See Hear podcast is back to fill your earholes with discussion of music-centric films and interviews with directors of such films. For episode 102, the focus is on Tender Mercies, the 1983 film starring Robert Duvall about an ex country singer who's trying to find some semblance of normality after an existence of alcoholism, music industry ego and domestic violence. It's a theme that's been tackled before in a myriad of films, but as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. It's written by Horton Foote (script writer for To Kill a Mockingbird) and directed by Bruce Beresford, a director previously known more for his films about Australian machismo than the sensitive, quiet subject matter that pervades Tender Mercies. Tim is still on break (coming back soon I'm assured). This film was Bernie's pick but was also not available to record. Sadly, after this recording, he informed me that he's leaving the show. I'm going to miss his input. So onto the good news. Friend of the show Kerry Gately Fristoe was recruited for this episode as special guest, but had so much fun that she will now be a permanent member of the See Hear crew. I'm absolutely thrilled she's agreed to join. This episode isn't her debut with the show, but it is the start of a new era of See Hear. Please tune in and giver her a warm welcome. WE'RE BACK!!!!!! Spread the word.....please..... If you've been enjoying the show, please consider giving us a favourable review on iTunes and let your friends know that our show exists. If you don't enjoy the show, tell your adversaries to tune in. We don't care who listens..... See Hear is proudly part of the Pantheon Network of music podcasts. Check out all the other wonderful shows at http://pantheonpodcasts.com Send us feedback via email at seehearpodcast@gmail.com Join the Facebook group at http://facebook.com/groups/seehearpodcast You can download the show by searching for See Hear on whatever podcast app you favour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a hiatus of several months, See Hear podcast is back to fill your earholes with discussion of music-centric films and interviews with directors of such films. For episode 102, the focus is on Tender Mercies, the 1983 film starring Robert Duvall about an ex country singer who's trying to find some semblance of normality after an existence of alcoholism, music industry ego and domestic violence. It's a theme that's been tackled before in a myriad of films, but as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. It's written by Horton Foote (script writer for To Kill a Mockingbird) and directed by Bruce Beresford, a director previously known more for his films about Australian machismo than the sensitive, quiet subject matter that pervades Tender Mercies. Tim is still on break (coming back soon I'm assured). This film was Bernie's pick but was also not available to record. Sadly, after this recording, he informed me that he's leaving the show. I'm going to miss his input. So onto the good news. Friend of the show Kerry Gately Fristoe was recruited for this episode as special guest, but had so much fun that she will now be a permanent member of the See Hear crew. I'm absolutely thrilled she's agreed to join. This episode isn't her debut with the show, but it is the start of a new era of See Hear. Please tune in and giver her a warm welcome. WE'RE BACK!!!!!! Spread the word.....please..... If you've been enjoying the show, please consider giving us a favourable review on iTunes and let your friends know that our show exists. If you don't enjoy the show, tell your adversaries to tune in. We don't care who listens..... See Hear is proudly part of the Pantheon Network of music podcasts. Check out all the other wonderful shows at http://pantheonpodcasts.com Send us feedback via email at seehearpodcast@gmail.com Join the Facebook group at http://facebook.com/groups/seehearpodcast You can download the show by searching for See Hear on whatever podcast app you favour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dans ce nouvel épisode de “*Tu L'As Vu ?*”, le trio Gravlax - Papa(Gubi)da et Casa s'est penché sur le numéro hors-série du magazine “Première” sorti en juillet 2015 : “*Les 100 chefs-d'œuvre que vous n'avez pas vus*”. Chaque membre du trio y a pioché un film qui a attiré sa curiosité, en espérant que cela attire la votre ;) Les 3 films au programme de cet épisode sont : 5'10 : Le film de Casa : “Idiocracy” de Mike Judge (2006) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=109539.html 49'30 Le film de Gubi : “Shotgun Stories” de Jeff Nichols (2007 ; SPOILERS à partir de ) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=129490.html 1h35 Le film de Gravlax : “Riki-Oh : The story of Riki-Oh” de Ngai Choi Lam (1991) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=136062.html Les recommandations et films liés : Casa :“Anchorman, présentateur vedette : La légende de Ron Burgundy” d'Adam McKay (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=52861.html“The Big Short : Le casse du siècle” d'Adam McKay (2015) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=227900.html “Vice” d'Adam McKay (2018) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=251903.html “Don't Look Up - Déni Cosmique” d'Adam McKay (2021) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=281330.html Gubi : “Summertime” de Matthew Gordon (2010) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=190068.html“Le plus sauvage d'entre tous” de Martin Ritt (1963) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=51105.html Gravlax : “L'incroyable Burt Wonderstone" de Don Scarpino (2013) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=138724.htmlL'anime “Riki-Oh : Wall of Hell” de Tetsu Dezaki (1989) :https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3296930/L'anime “Riki-Oh 2 : Child of Destruction” de Tetsu Dezaki (1990) :https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203074/ Quelques autres films proposés dans le numéro de Première sur les Chefs-d'oeuvre méconnus :“La bête de guerre” de Kevin Reynolds (1988) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=44582.html“All the boys love Mandy Lane” de Jonathan Levine (2006) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=129716.html“Millennium Actress” de Satoshi Kon (2002) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=41241.html“Rolling Thunder - Légitime Violence” de John Flynn (1977) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=46995.html“Sorcerer” de William Friedkin (1977) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=10403.html“Team America - Police du monde” de Trey Parker et Matt Stone (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=57826.html“The Swimmer - Le Plongeon” de Frank Perry (1968) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=12621.html“Traître sur commande” de Martin Ritt (1970) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=33412.html“Vorace” d'Antonia Bird (1999) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=20116.html“Lorenzo” de George Miller (1992) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=35570.html“El Chuncho” de Damiano Damiani (1967) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=10164.html“Wake in Fright” de Ted Kotcheff (1971) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=6796.html“Napoleon Dynamite” de Jared Hess (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=57431.html“Birth” de Jonathan Glazer (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=48084.html“Babe, le cochon devenu berger” de Chris Noonan (1996) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=13894.html Liens évoqués durant l'épisode : Le site de Gubi sur le cinéma : https://gubicine.wordpress.com/ Page du site “Flavorwire” sur le test “Qui l'a dit ? Trump ou Camacho, le président d'Idiocracy ?” :https://www.flavorwire.com/537887/who-said-it-presidential-hopeful-donald-trump-or-idiocracy-president-camachoLa nouvelle qui a le même postulat de base qu' “Idiocracy” : “La longue marche des cornichons” ( Cyril M. Kornbluth ; 1951 ; connue aussi sous le titre “Crétins en marche” ) :https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Longue_Marche_des_cornichonsLe DVD dont parle Gubi avec les premiers courts métrages des réalisateurs connus “Le court des grands” ( 2005 ; EuropaCorp ) :https://www.fnac.com/a1748580/Le-Court-des-grands-DVD-Zone-2L'excellente vidéo de la non moins formidable chaîne YouTube “Le Coin du Bis” sur les films de Catégorie 3 :https://youtu.be/BtLZgm5k4akVidéo d'Azz l'Épouvantail sur “Riki-Oh” :https://youtu.be/TM2lb3605OoVidéo de notre pitcher “Dan vous jase” de la chaîne YouTube “HorreurFM” sur “Riki-Oh” :https://youtu.be/IPZdanMYgmELe film “The Cat” du réalisateur de “Riki-Oh” (1992) en 2 parties (sans sous-titres) :https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xs1fzfhttps://www.dailymotion.com/video/xs1gwhLa fausse suite de “Riki-Oh” : “Super Powerful Man” (2003 ; sans sous-titres) :https://youtu.be/MOhbLC4eK3EL'épisode du podcast de Mergrin “Planète of the tapes” dans lequel Gravlax a parlé notamment de “Canicule” d'Yves Boisset (1984) :https://audioactif.fr/pott/2022/09/25/episode-41-beauce-et-post-apo/L'épisode du premier podcast de Gravlax “Pellicules et Pourritures Nobles” sur “Canicule” d'Yves Boisset (1984) :https://podcloud.fr/podcast/pellicules-et-pourritures-nobles/episode/episode-01-canicule-dyves-boisset-1984-slash-nom-dune-b-dot-dot-dot-quel-film-version-1-dot-5 Films évoqués durant l'épisode : “Les Chiens” d'Alain Jessua (1979) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=8573.html“Les Diables” de Ken Russell (1971) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=1841.html“L'homme qui voulait savoir” de George Sluizer (1988) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=115820.html“L'étrangleur de Rillington Place” de Richard Fleischer (1971) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=3334.html“Mister Nobody” de Jaco van Dormael (2009) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=130128.html“Requiem pour un massacre” d'Elem Klimov (1985) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=2688.html“Katie Tippel” de Paul Verhoeven (1975) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=132120.html"Turkish Delight” de Paul Verhoeven (1973) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=9134.htmlLa série d'animation “Beavis & Butt-Head” de Mike Judge (1993-2011) :https://www.allocine.fr/series/ficheserie_gen_cserie=6392.html“35 heures, c'est déjà trop” (Office Space)" de Mike Judge (1999) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=28716.html“2001 : L'Odyssée de l'Espace” de Stanley Kubrick (1969) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=27442.htmlLa série d'animation “Les rois du Texas” (King of the Hill)" de Mike Judge et Greg Daniels (1997-2009) :https://www.allocine.fr/series/ficheserie_gen_cserie=3169.html“Tonnerre sous les Tropiques” de Ben Stiller (2008) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=59011.html“Madagascar 2” d'Eric Darnell et Tom McGrath (2008) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=59011.html“Men In Black 3” de Barry Sonnenfeld (2012) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=139622.html“Holmes & Watson” d'Etan Cohen (2018) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=249524.html“Les Bad Guys” de Pierre Perifel (2022) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=263272.html“Les vacances de Mister Bean” de Steve Bendelack (2007) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=111207.html“Next” de Lee Tamahori (2007) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=26561.html“J'veux pas que tu t'en ailles” de Bernard Jeanjean (2006) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=110758.html“Retour à la fac” de Todd Phillips (2003) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=41507.html“La famille Tenenbaum” de Wes Anderson (2001) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=29188.html“Charlie et ses drôles de dames” de McG (2000) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=27119.html“La revanche d'une blonde” de Robert Luketic (2001) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=29006.html“Motel” de Nimrod Antal (2007) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=111421.html“Scream 2” de Wes Craven (1997) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=18102.html“Rushmore” de Wes Anderson (1998) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=21344.html“Retour à Zombieland” de Ruben Fleischer (2019) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=176293.html“Gasoline Alley” d'Edward Drake (2022) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=290945.html“Mes meilleures amies” de Paul Feig (2011) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=180286.htmlLa série “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” de Michael Schur et Dan Goor (2013-2021) :https://www.allocine.fr/series/ficheserie_gen_cserie=11542.html“F.B.I. Fausses Blondes Infiltrées” de Keenen Ivory Wayans (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=54456.htmlLa série “Veep”de David Mandel et Armando Iannucci (2012-2019) :https://www.allocine.fr/series/ficheserie_gen_cserie=9435.html“Midnight Special” de Jeff Nichols (2016) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=221391.html“Mud” de Jeff Nichols (2012) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=196628.htmlLe DVD “Le court des grands” (2005) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=109345.html“Yellow Rock” de Nick Vallelonga (2011) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=217900.html“Joe” de David Gordon Green (2013) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=212468.html“Dressé pour vivre - The Hawk is dying” de Julian Goldberger (2006) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=109794.html“Short Cuts” de Robert Altman (1993) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=9031.html“Le nouveau monde” de Terrence Malick (2005) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=56147.html“Tree of Life” de Terrence Malick (2011) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=132244.html“À la merveille” de Terrence Malick (2012) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=178063.html“Song to Song” de Terrence Malick (2017) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=196965.html“Knight of Cups” de Terrence Malick (2015) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=199057.html“Tendre bonheur” de Bruce Beresford (1983) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=42791.html“La Balade Sauvage” de Terrence Malick (1973) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=15801.html“Lawrence d'Arabie” de David Lean (1962) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=4749.html“Un jour sans fin” d'Harold Ramis (1993) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=8066.html“Bug” de William Friedkin (2006) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=57476.html“Loving” de Jeff Nichols (2016) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=237773.html“Take Shelter” de Jeff Nichols (2011) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=189944.html“The Bikeriders” de Jeff Nichols (2023) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=306937.html“Love” de Gaspar Noé (2015) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=231786.html“The Neon Demon” de Nicolas Winding Refn (2016) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=232793.html“Le Dernier Duel” de Ridley Scott (2021) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=233330.html“Side by Side - La révolution digitale” de Christopher Kenneally (2012) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=201777.html“A History of Violence” de David Cronenberg (2005) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=55982.html“Primer” de Shane Carruth (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=58126.html“Collision” de Paul Haggis (2004) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=54587.html“Deadwood, le film” de Daniel Minahan (2019) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=266491.html“The Cat” de Ngai Choi Lam (1992) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=282243.html“Le professeur de kung-fu” de Chung Sun (1979) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=126694.html“Erotic Ghost Story” de Ngai Kai Lam (1987) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=204092.html“La 7ème Malédiction" de Ngai Choi Lam (1986) :https://www.senscritique.com/film/la_7eme_malediction/433853“Braindead” de Peter Jackson (1992) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=5311.html“Ebola Syndrome” d'Herman Yau (1996) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=119740.html“L'Enfer des Armes” de Tsui Hark (1980) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=11202.html“Camp 731 - Men Behind The Sun” de Tun Fei Mou (1988) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=136078.html“Les Chinois à Paris” de Jean Yanne (1974) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=33113.html“Apocalypse Now” de Francis Ford Coppola (1979) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=27061.html“Doctor Lamb” de Dan Lee et Billy Tang (1992) :https://www.senscritique.com/film/Doctor_Lamb/381683“Run & Kill” de Billy Tang (1993) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=204800.html“Red to Kill” de Billy Tang (1994) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=204762.html“The Untold Story” d'Herman Yau (1993) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=173891.html“The Raid 2” de Gareth Evans (2014) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=205295.html“Les Anges Gardiens” de Jean-Marie Poiré (1995) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=13115.html“Ip Man” de Wilson Yip (2008) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=146717.htmlL'anime “Ken le Survivant” de Tetsuo Hara (1984-87) :https://www.allocine.fr/series/ficheserie_gen_cserie=3938.html“North Star - La légende de Ken le Survivant” de Tony Randel (1995):https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=110146.html“Super Powerful Man” de Pak-Chi Muk (2003) :https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3297086/“Ong-Bak” de Prachya Pinkaew (2003) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=54106.html“Monster Hunter” de Paul W.S. Anderson (2020) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=212776.html“Wall-E” d'Andrew Stanton (2008) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=123734.html“La rue de la honte” de Kenji Mizoguchi (1956) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=4056.html“Ricky Bobby : Roi du circuit” d'Adam McKay (2006) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=108828.html“Frangins malgré eux” d'Adam Mc Kay (2008) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=124370.html“Le Bon Gros Géant” de Steven Spielberg (2016) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=197814.html“Ready Player One” de Steven Spielberg (2018) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=229831.htmlLa série “Freaks & Geeks” de Paul Feig (1999-2000) :https://www.allocine.fr/series/ficheserie_gen_cserie=629.html“Comment tuer son boss ?” de Seth Gordon (2011) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=111406.html“Comment tuer son boss ? 2” de Sean Anders (2014) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=201381.html“Spiderman : Homecoming” de Jon Watts (2017) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=209778.html“Vive les vacances” de Jonathan Goldstein et John Francis Daley (2015) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=173719.html“Game Night” de Jonathan Goldstein et John Francis Daley (2018) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=218449.html“Donjons et Dragons : L'honneur des voleurs” de Jonathan Goldstein et John Francis Daley (2023) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=221359.html“Donjons et Dragons” de Courtney Solomon (2000) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=27922.html“Jawbreaker” de Darren Stein (1999) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=20346.html“Canicule” d'Yves Boisset (1984) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=56618.html“Hors-La-Loi” de Robin Davis (1985) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=52499.html“Minuit dans le jardin du Bien et du Mal” de Clint Eastwood (1997) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=16351.html“Le salaire de la peur” d'Henri-Georges Clouzot (1952) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=2513.html“Rambo” de Ted Kotcheff (1982) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=2007.html“Under the Skin” de Jonathan Glazer (2013) :https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=187462.html Musique diffusée durant l'épisode : Générique “Loud Pop” (Gravlax)Frédéric Auger “Easy Morning”Buck Owens “Buckaroo”Pueblo Café “Nuevos Tiempos”Junior Wells “Hoodoo Man Blues”Theodore Shapiro ( B.O d'Idiocracy ) : “History Of Man - Garbage Avalanche” / “Future Shock” / “Looking For The Time Machine” / “Meet Joe Bauers” / “Trouble With The Law” / “Keep Painting” / “Dumb Angry Mobs” / “Death and Roses” / “Supreme Flames” / “Joe's Decision” / “New President” / “Right Bicep”Desmond Dekker “Baby Come Back”Doug Sahm “Nitty Gritty”Wildflowers : “We're a little messed up” / “Without Her” / “Stay For A Little While” / “How To Carry On”Thyra : “The One That Got Away” / “Get It Right” / “Closed Eyes”Humble Hay : “This Or That” / “Brave”Walking Hearts : “Take My Fears Away” / “Jessie”Chase Hughes “Don't Lose Heart”Nickolas Jones “An Hour Too Late”Fei-Lit Chan “Riki-Oh Theme”Julien Vonarb “Jungle Nights”Alain Governatori & Fabien Lagard “Colours”Ruban Sonore & Jérôme Coullet “Early Riser”Alexandre Prodhomme : “Night Glitch” / “Late Thought”Chukwumaka Woldeselassi Agu & JMB Reddington “Fallen”Dystosound “Love Yourself”Simon Di & Pascal Roussignol “Hung Up”J.C. Lemay “Vocoder Love”Julien Bourriaux “Galactic Catwalk”Nicolas Neidhart “Reaching Perfection”Lucero “Hold Me Close”Alex Wurman “Anchorman : the Legend of Ron Burgundy - End Title”Nicholas Britell : “Boring Old Banking” / “Don't Look Up - Main Title Suite”Alexandros Bazanis “Ararat Whispers”Lyle Workman : “Drillbotomy” / “Red Hot Coals” / “Wondersuite” / “Human Piñata”Max Sergeev “Other Rivers II” Morceau d'outro : Drive-By Truckers “Decoration Day” Liens vers les réseaux sociaux de Tu L'As Vu ? - Podcast Ciné : Chaîne YouTube TLV Podcast :https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoLK73hPXzMYGnZEYVRvAEQ Lien Twitter : https://twitter.com/TLVPodcast Page Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/M.Gravlax Page du podcast : https://podcloud.fr/podcast/tu-las-vu Page Sens Critique avec tous les films traités dans le podcast :https://www.senscritique.com/liste/Tous_les_films_traites_dans_notre_podcast_Tu_l_as_vu_venez_n/2716388

For the third season finale of Watch With Jen, I was thrilled and proud to welcome back one of my dearest pals and the hardest-working man in pod-business, Mr. Blake Howard.The brains behind the stellar One Heat Minute Productions that launched with an in-depth minute-by-minute investigation and appreciation of Michael Mann's "Heat," he's released numerous pods since, including "All The President's Minutes," "Josie and the Podcats," "Zodiac: Chronicle," and also, the excellent "Increment Vice," hosted by our good friend, the film essayist Travis Woods. With several more releasing now like "Miami Nice," "Rum and Rant," "Too Much Movie," plus essays on heist films at Vague Visages, his busy family life with his lovely wife and two young children, and a new career as a teacher, Blake Howard is one of the busiest and most talented people I know... and also, the nicest.In this thoughtful, funny, and passionate episode devoted to one of our favorite filmmakers, Blake and I discuss the career of Australian master director and recent honorary lifetime Oscar winner Peter Weir. Celebrating his diverse career of groundbreaking work that set a new bar for Australian film and helped kick off the country's new wave in the 1970s along with fellow directors like George Miller and Bruce Beresford, in this fast-paced conversation, we investigate what makes GALLIPOLI, WITNESS, and THE TRUMAN SHOW (still) so powerful, entertaining, and profound.Our final regular season episode of the year, Watch With Jen will be delivering a bonus Physical Media episode in mid to late December first for our Patreon subscribers (before making it available to all). We will also return in February of 2023 with Season 4 and have many exciting future installments in various planning stages that you're sure to love. Thank you so much for your loyalty, enthusiasm, and support, and for making this year our biggest yet.Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music ArchiveLogo: KateGabrielle.comOriginally Posted on Patreon (12/5/22) here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/75508099

For today's movie review:Robert Duvall plays an aging country singer who is trying to get his life back on track, in Bruce Beresford's Tender Mercies! Strum along with Adam and Andy as they discuss this 1983 Best Picture nominee that finally netted Duvall an Oscar!Check out Tender Mercies (1983)Show Notes:What We've Been Watching:Adam: Black Adam, The Sandman, Formula 1: Drive to SurviveAndy: Money Movers, Planes, Trains & AutomobilesChapters:(~0:00:00) Introduction(~0:00:44) Featured Review(~0:21:27) What We've Been Watching(~0:36:18) Up Next(~0:37:22) ClosingLike, comment, or subscribe if you'd want to see more episodes.Feel free to send us a question we can answer on the air to ReelShame@gmail.com or follow us on Instagram @ReelShame.

On this episode, we travel back to 1984, and the days when a "young adult" novel included lots of drugs and partying and absolutely no sparkly vampires or dystopian warrior girls. We're talking about Jay McInerney's groundbreaking novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and its 1988 film version starring Michael J. Fox and Keifer Sutherland. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. The original 1984 front cover for Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City If you were a young adult in the late 1980s, there's a very good chance that you started reading more adult-y books thanks to an imprint called Vintage Contemporaries. Quality books at an affordable paperback price point, with their uniform and intrinsically 80s designed covers, bold cover and spine fonts, and mix of first-time writers and cult authors who never quite broke through to the mainstream, the Vintage Contemporary series would be an immediate hit when it was first launched in September 1984. The first set of releases would include such novels as Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Thomas McGuane's The Bushwhacked Piano, but the one that would set the bar for the entire series was the first novel by a twenty-nine year old former fact checker at the New Yorker magazine. The writer was Jay McInerney, and his novel was Bright Lights, Big City. The original 1984 front cover for Raymond Carver's Cathedral Bright Lights, Big City would set a template for twenty something writers in the 1980s. A protagonist not unlike the writer themselves, with a not-so-secret drug addiction, and often written in the second person, You, which was not a usual literary choice at the time. The nameless protagonist, You, is a divorced twenty-four year old wannabe writer who works as fact-checker at a major upscale magazine in New York City, for which he once dreamed of writing for. You is recently divorced from Amanda, an aspiring model he had met while going to school in Kansas City. You would move to New York City earlier in the year with her when her modeling career was starting to talk off. While in Paris for Fashion Week, Amanda called You to inform him their marriage was over, and that she was leaving him for another man. You continues to hope Amanda will return to him, and when it's clear she won't, he not only becomes obsessed with everything about her that left in their apartment, he begins to slide into reckless abandon at the clubs they used to frequent, and becoming heavily addicted to cocaine, which then affects his performance at work. A chance encounter with Amanda at an event in the city leads You to a public humiliation, which makes him starts to realize that his behavior is not because his wife left him, but a manifestation of the grief he still feels over his mother's passing the previous year. You had gotten married to a woman he hardly knew because he wanted to make his mother happy before she died, and he was still unconsciously grieving when his wife's leaving him triggered his downward spiral. Bright Lights, Big City was an immediate hit, one of the few paperback-only books to ever hit the New York Times best-seller chart. Within two years, the novel had sold more than 300,000 copies, and spawned a tidal wave of like-minded twentysomething writers becoming published. Bret Easton Ellis might have been able to get his first novel Less Than Zero published somewhere down the line, but it was McInerney's success that would cause Simon and Schuster to try and duplicate Vintage's success, which they would. Same with Tana Janowitz, whose 1986 novel Slaves of New York was picked up by Crown Publishers looking to replicate the success of McInerney and Ellis, despite her previous novel, 1981's American Dad, being completely ignored by the book buying public at that time. While the book took moments from his life, it wasn't necessarily autobiographical. For example, McInerney had been married to a fashion model in the early 1980s, but they would meet while he attended Syracuse University in the late 1970s. And yes, McInerney would do a lot of blow during his divorce from his wife, and yes, he would get fired from The New Yorker because of the effects of his drug addiction. Yes, he was partying pretty hard during the times that preceded the writing of his first novel. And yes, he would meet a young woman who would kinda rescue him and get him on the right path.  But there were a number of details about McInerney's life that were not used for the book. Like how the author studied writing with none other than Raymond Carver while studying creative writing at Syracuse, or how his family connections would allow him to submit blind stories to someone like George Plimpton at the Paris Review, and not only get the story read but published. And, naturally, any literary success was going to become a movie at some point. For Bright Lights, it would happen almost as soon as the novel was published. Robert Lawrence, a vice president at Columbia Pictures in his early thirties, had read the book nearly cover to cover in a single sitting, and envisioned a film that could be “The Graduate” of his generation, with maybe a bit of “Lost Weekend” thrown in. But the older executives at the studio balked at the idea, which they felt would be subversive and unconventional. They would, however, buy in when Lawrence was able to get mega-producer Jerry Weintraub to be a producer on the film, who in turn was able to get Joel Schumacher, who had just finished filming St. Elmo's Fire for the studio, to direct, and get Tom Cruise, who was still two years away from Top Gun and megastardom, to play the main character. McInerney was hired to write the script, and he and Schumacher and Cruise would even go on club crawls in New York City to help inform all of the atmosphere they were trying to capture with the film. In 1985, Weintraub would be hired by United Artists to become their new chief executive, and Bright Lights would be one of the properties he would be allowed to take with him to his new home. But since he was now an executive, Weintraub would need to hire a new producer to take the reigns on the picture. Enter Sydney Pollack. By 1985, Sydney Pollack was one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. With films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman and Tootsie under his belt, Pollock could get a film made, and get it seen by audiences. At least, as a director. At this point in his career, he had only ever produced one movie, Alan Rudolph's 1984 musical drama Songwriter, which despite being based on the life of Willie Nelson, and starring Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Rip Torn, barely grossed a tenth of its $8m budget. And Pollock at that moment was busy putting the finishing touches on his newest film, an African-based drama featuring Meryl Streep and longtime Pollock collaborator Robert Redford. That film, Out of Africa, would win seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, in March 1986, which would keep Pollock and his producing partner Mark Rosenberg's attention away from Bright Lights for several months. Once the hype on Out of Africa died down, Pollock and Rosenberg got to work getting Bright Lights, Big City made. Starting with hiring a new screenwriter, a new director, and a new leading actor. McInerney, Schumacher and Cruise had gotten tired of waiting. Ironically, Cruise would call on Pollock to direct another movie he was waiting to make, also based at United Artists, that he was going to star in alongside Dustin Hoffman. That movie, of course, is Rain Man, and we'll dive into that movie another time. Also ironically, Weintraub would not last long as the CEO of United Artists. Just five months after becoming the head of the studio, Weintraub would tire of the antics of Kirk Kerkorian, the owner of United Artists and its sister company, MGM, and step down. Kerkorian would not let Weintraub take any of the properties he brought from Columbia to his new home, the eponymously named mini-major he'd form with backing from Columbia. With a new studio head in place, Pollock started to look for a new director. He would discover that director in Joyce Chopra, who, after twenty years of making documentaries, made her first dramatic narrative in 1985. Smooth Talk was an incredible coming of age drama, based on a story by Joyce Carol Oates, that would make a star out of then seventeen-year-old Laura Dern. UA would not only hire her to direct the film but hire her husband, Tom Cole, who brilliantly adapted the Oates story that was the basis for Smooth Talk, to co-write the screenplay with his wife. While Cole was working on the script, Chopra would have her agent send a copy of McInerney's book to Michael J. Fox. This wasn't just some random decision. Chopra knew she needed a star for this movie, and Fox's agent just happened to be Chopra's agent. That'd be two commissions for the agent if it came together, and a copy of the book was delivered to Fox's dressing room on the Family Ties soundstage that very day. Fox loved the book, and agreed to do the film. After Alex P. Keaton and Marty McFly and other characters he had played that highlighted his good looks and pleasant demeanor, he was ready to play a darker, more morally ambiguous character. Since the production was scheduled around Fox's summer hiatus from the hit TV show, he was in. For Pollock and United Artists, this was a major coup, landing one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. But the project was originally going to be Toronto standing in for New York City for less than $7m with a lesser known cast. Now, it was going to be a $15m with not only Michael J. Fox but also Keifer Sutherland, who was cast as Tad, the best friend of the formerly named You, who would now known as Jamie Conway, and would be shot on location in New York City. The film would also feature Phoebe Cates as Jamie's model ex-wife, William Hickey, Kelly Lynch. But there was a major catch. The production would only have ten weeks to shoot with Fox, as he was due back in Los Angeles to begin production on the sixth season of Family Ties.  He wasn't going to do that thing he did making a movie and a television show at the same time like he did with Back to the Future and Family Ties in 1984 and 1985. Ten weeks and not a day more. Production on the film would begin on April 13th, 1987, to get as much of the film shot while Fox was still finishing Family Ties in Los Angeles. He would be joining the production at the end of the month. But Fox never get the chance to shoot with Chopra. After three weeks of production, Chopra, her husband, and her cinematographer James Glennon, who had also shot Smooth Talk, were dismissed from the film. The suits at United Artists were not happy with the Fox-less footage that was coming out of New York, and were not happy with the direction of the film. Cole and Chopra had removed much of the nightlife and drug life storyline, and focused more on the development of Jamie as a writer. Apparently, no one at the studio had read the final draft of the script before shooting began. Cole, the screenwriter, says it was Pollock, the producer, who requested the changes, but in the end, it would be not the Oscar-winning filmmaker producing the movie that would be released but the trio of newer creatives. Second unit footage would continue to shoot around New York City while the studio looked for a new director. Ironically, days after Chopra was fired, the Directors Guild of America had announced that if they were not able to sign a new agreement with the Producers Guild before the end of the current contract on June 30th, the directors were going on strike. So now United Artists were really under the gun. After considering such filmmakers as Belgian director Ulu Grosbard, who had directed Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro in Falling in Love, and Australian director Bruce Beresford, whose films had included Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, they would find their new director in James Bridges, whose filmography included such critical and financial success as The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy, but had two bombs in a row in 1984's Mike's Murder and 1985's Perfect. He needed a hit, and this was the first solid directing offer in three years. He'd spend the weekend after his hiring doing some minor recasting, including bringing in John Houseman, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in The Paper Chase, as well as Swoosie Kurtz, Oscar-winning actors Jason Robards and Dianne Weist, and Tracy Pollan, Fox's co-star on Family Ties, who would shortly after the filming of Bright Lights become Mrs. Michael J. Fox, although in the film, she would be cast not as a love interest to her real-life boyfriend's character but as the wife of Keifer Sutherland's character. After a week of rewriting McInerney's original draft of the screenplay from the Schumacher days, principal photography re-commenced on the film. And since Bridges would be working with famed cinematographer Gordon Willis, who had shot three previous movies with Bridges as well as the first two Godfather movies and every Woody Allen movie from Annie Hall to The Purple Rose of Cairo, it was also decided that none of Chopra's footage would be used. Everything would start back on square one. And because of the impending Directors Guild strike, he'd have only thirty-six days, a tad over five weeks, to film everything. One of the lobby cards from the movie version of Bright Lights, Big City And they were able to get it all done, thanks to some ingenious measures. One location, the Palladium concert hall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, would double as three different nightclubs, two discotheques and a dinner club. Instead of finding six different locations, which would loading cameras and lights from one location to another, moving hundreds of people as well, and then setting the lights and props again, over and over, all they would have to do is re-decorate the area to become the next thing they needed. Bridges would complete the film that day before the Directors Guild strike deadline, but the strike would never happen. But there would be some issue with the final writing credits. While Bridges had used McInerney's original screenplay as a jumping off point, the writer/director had really latched on to the mother's death as the emotional center of the movie. Bridges' own grandmother had passed away in 1986, and he found writing those scenes to be cathartic for his own unresolved issues. But despite the changes Bridges would make to the script, including adding such filmmaking tropes as flashbacks and voiceovers, and having the movie broken up into sections by the use of chapter titles being typed out on screen, the Writers Guild would give sole screenwriting credit to Jay McInerney. As post-production continued throughout the fall, the one topic no one involved in the production wanted to talk about or even acknowledge was the movie version of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero that rival studio 20th Century Fox had been making in Los Angeles. It had a smaller budget, a lesser known filmmaker, a lesser known cast lead by Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz, and a budget half the size. If their film was a hit, that could be good for this one. And if their film wasn't a hit? Well, Bright Lights was the trendsetter. It was the one that sold more copies. The one that saw its author featured in more magazines and television news shows. How well did Less Than Zero do when it was released into theatres on November 6th, 1987? Well, you're just going to have to wait until next week's episode. Unless you're listening months or years after they were published, and are listening to episodes in reverse order. Then you already know how it did, but let's just say it wasn't a hit but it wasn't really a dud either. Bridges would spend nearly six months putting his film together, most of which he would find enjoyable, but he would have trouble deciding which of two endings he shot would be used. His preferred ending saw Jamie wandering through the streets of New York City early one morning, after a long night of partying that included a confrontation with his ex-wife, where he decides that was the day he was going to get his life back on track but not knowing what he was going to do, but the studio asked for an alternative ending, one that features Jamie one year in the future, putting the finishing touches on his first novel, which we see is titled… wait for it… Bright Lights, Big City, while his new girlfriend stands behind him giving her approval. After several audience test screenings, the studio would decide to let Bridges have his ending. United Artists would an April 1st, 1988 release date, and would spend months gearing up the publicity machine. Fox and Pollan were busy finishing the final episodes of that season's Family Ties, and weren't as widely available for the publicity circuit outside of those based in Los Angeles. The studio wasn't too worried, though. Michael J. Fox's last movie, The Secret of My Success, had been released in April 1987, and had grossed $67m without his doing a lot of publicity for that one, either. Opening on 1196 screens, the film would only manage to gross $5.13m, putting it in third place behind the previous week's #1 film, Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick, and the Tim Burton comedy Beetlejuice, which despite opening on nearly 200 fewer screens would gross nearly $3m more. But the reviews were not great. Decent. Respectful. But not great. The New York-based critics, like David Ansen of Newsweek and Janet Maslin of the Times, would be kinder than most other critics, maybe because they didn't want to be seen knocking a film shot in their backyard. But one person would actually would praise the film and Michael J. Fox as an actor was Roger Ebert. But it wouldn't save the film. In its second week, the film would fall to fifth place, with $3.09m worth of tickets sold, and it would drop all the way to tenth place in its third week with just under $1.9m in ticket sales. Week four would see it fall to 16th place with only $862k worth of ticket sales. After that, United Artists would stop reporting grosses. The $17m film had grossed just $16.1m. Bright Lights, Big City was a milestone book for me, in large part because it made me a reader. Before Bright Lights, I read occasionally, mainly John Irving, preferring to spend most of my free time voraciously consuming every movie I could. After Bright Lights, I picked up every Vintage Contemporary book I could get my hands on. One of the checklists of Vintage Contemporary books listed in the back of a Vintage Contemporary book. And one thing that really helped out was the literal checklist of other books available from that imprint in the back of each book. Without those distinct covers, I don't know if I would have discovered some of my favorite authors like Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo and Richard Ford and Richard Russo. Even after the Vintage Contemporary line shut down years later, I continued to read. I still read today, although not as much as I would prefer. I have a podcast to work on. I remember when the movie came out that I wasn't all that thrilled with it, and it would be nearly 35 years before I revisited it again, for this episode. I can't say it's the 80s as I remember it, because I had never been to New York City by that point in my life, I had never, and still never have, done anything like cocaine. And I had only ever had like two relationships that could be considered anything of substance, let alone marriage and a divorce. But I am certain it's an 80s that I'm glad I didn't know. Mainly because Jamie's 80s seemed rather boring and inconsequential. Fox does the best he can with the material, but he is not the right person for the role. As I watched it again, I couldn't help but wonder what if the roles were reversed. What if Keifer Sutherland played Jamie and Michael J. Fox played the friend? That might have been a more interesting movie, but Sutherland was not yet at that level of stardom. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when Episode 95, on the novel and movie version of Less Than Zero is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Bright Lights, Big City, both the book and the movie, as well as other titles in the Vintage Contemporary book series. The full cover, back and front, of Richard Ford's 1986 The Sportswriter, which would be the first of four novels about Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist who becomes a sportswriter. The second book in the series, 1995's Independence Day, would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first of only two times the same book would win both awards the same year. 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 travel back to 1984, and the days when a "young adult" novel included lots of drugs and partying and absolutely no sparkly vampires or dystopian warrior girls. We're talking about Jay McInerney's groundbreaking novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and its 1988 film version starring Michael J. Fox and Keifer Sutherland. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. The original 1984 front cover for Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City If you were a young adult in the late 1980s, there's a very good chance that you started reading more adult-y books thanks to an imprint called Vintage Contemporaries. Quality books at an affordable paperback price point, with their uniform and intrinsically 80s designed covers, bold cover and spine fonts, and mix of first-time writers and cult authors who never quite broke through to the mainstream, the Vintage Contemporary series would be an immediate hit when it was first launched in September 1984. The first set of releases would include such novels as Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Thomas McGuane's The Bushwhacked Piano, but the one that would set the bar for the entire series was the first novel by a twenty-nine year old former fact checker at the New Yorker magazine. The writer was Jay McInerney, and his novel was Bright Lights, Big City. The original 1984 front cover for Raymond Carver's Cathedral Bright Lights, Big City would set a template for twenty something writers in the 1980s. A protagonist not unlike the writer themselves, with a not-so-secret drug addiction, and often written in the second person, You, which was not a usual literary choice at the time. The nameless protagonist, You, is a divorced twenty-four year old wannabe writer who works as fact-checker at a major upscale magazine in New York City, for which he once dreamed of writing for. You is recently divorced from Amanda, an aspiring model he had met while going to school in Kansas City. You would move to New York City earlier in the year with her when her modeling career was starting to talk off. While in Paris for Fashion Week, Amanda called You to inform him their marriage was over, and that she was leaving him for another man. You continues to hope Amanda will return to him, and when it's clear she won't, he not only becomes obsessed with everything about her that left in their apartment, he begins to slide into reckless abandon at the clubs they used to frequent, and becoming heavily addicted to cocaine, which then affects his performance at work. A chance encounter with Amanda at an event in the city leads You to a public humiliation, which makes him starts to realize that his behavior is not because his wife left him, but a manifestation of the grief he still feels over his mother's passing the previous year. You had gotten married to a woman he hardly knew because he wanted to make his mother happy before she died, and he was still unconsciously grieving when his wife's leaving him triggered his downward spiral. Bright Lights, Big City was an immediate hit, one of the few paperback-only books to ever hit the New York Times best-seller chart. Within two years, the novel had sold more than 300,000 copies, and spawned a tidal wave of like-minded twentysomething writers becoming published. Bret Easton Ellis might have been able to get his first novel Less Than Zero published somewhere down the line, but it was McInerney's success that would cause Simon and Schuster to try and duplicate Vintage's success, which they would. Same with Tana Janowitz, whose 1986 novel Slaves of New York was picked up by Crown Publishers looking to replicate the success of McInerney and Ellis, despite her previous novel, 1981's American Dad, being completely ignored by the book buying public at that time. While the book took moments from his life, it wasn't necessarily autobiographical. For example, McInerney had been married to a fashion model in the early 1980s, but they would meet while he attended Syracuse University in the late 1970s. And yes, McInerney would do a lot of blow during his divorce from his wife, and yes, he would get fired from The New Yorker because of the effects of his drug addiction. Yes, he was partying pretty hard during the times that preceded the writing of his first novel. And yes, he would meet a young woman who would kinda rescue him and get him on the right path.  But there were a number of details about McInerney's life that were not used for the book. Like how the author studied writing with none other than Raymond Carver while studying creative writing at Syracuse, or how his family connections would allow him to submit blind stories to someone like George Plimpton at the Paris Review, and not only get the story read but published. And, naturally, any literary success was going to become a movie at some point. For Bright Lights, it would happen almost as soon as the novel was published. Robert Lawrence, a vice president at Columbia Pictures in his early thirties, had read the book nearly cover to cover in a single sitting, and envisioned a film that could be “The Graduate” of his generation, with maybe a bit of “Lost Weekend” thrown in. But the older executives at the studio balked at the idea, which they felt would be subversive and unconventional. They would, however, buy in when Lawrence was able to get mega-producer Jerry Weintraub to be a producer on the film, who in turn was able to get Joel Schumacher, who had just finished filming St. Elmo's Fire for the studio, to direct, and get Tom Cruise, who was still two years away from Top Gun and megastardom, to play the main character. McInerney was hired to write the script, and he and Schumacher and Cruise would even go on club crawls in New York City to help inform all of the atmosphere they were trying to capture with the film. In 1985, Weintraub would be hired by United Artists to become their new chief executive, and Bright Lights would be one of the properties he would be allowed to take with him to his new home. But since he was now an executive, Weintraub would need to hire a new producer to take the reigns on the picture. Enter Sydney Pollack. By 1985, Sydney Pollack was one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. With films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman and Tootsie under his belt, Pollock could get a film made, and get it seen by audiences. At least, as a director. At this point in his career, he had only ever produced one movie, Alan Rudolph's 1984 musical drama Songwriter, which despite being based on the life of Willie Nelson, and starring Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Rip Torn, barely grossed a tenth of its $8m budget. And Pollock at that moment was busy putting the finishing touches on his newest film, an African-based drama featuring Meryl Streep and longtime Pollock collaborator Robert Redford. That film, Out of Africa, would win seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, in March 1986, which would keep Pollock and his producing partner Mark Rosenberg's attention away from Bright Lights for several months. Once the hype on Out of Africa died down, Pollock and Rosenberg got to work getting Bright Lights, Big City made. Starting with hiring a new screenwriter, a new director, and a new leading actor. McInerney, Schumacher and Cruise had gotten tired of waiting. Ironically, Cruise would call on Pollock to direct another movie he was waiting to make, also based at United Artists, that he was going to star in alongside Dustin Hoffman. That movie, of course, is Rain Man, and we'll dive into that movie another time. Also ironically, Weintraub would not last long as the CEO of United Artists. Just five months after becoming the head of the studio, Weintraub would tire of the antics of Kirk Kerkorian, the owner of United Artists and its sister company, MGM, and step down. Kerkorian would not let Weintraub take any of the properties he brought from Columbia to his new home, the eponymously named mini-major he'd form with backing from Columbia. With a new studio head in place, Pollock started to look for a new director. He would discover that director in Joyce Chopra, who, after twenty years of making documentaries, made her first dramatic narrative in 1985. Smooth Talk was an incredible coming of age drama, based on a story by Joyce Carol Oates, that would make a star out of then seventeen-year-old Laura Dern. UA would not only hire her to direct the film but hire her husband, Tom Cole, who brilliantly adapted the Oates story that was the basis for Smooth Talk, to co-write the screenplay with his wife. While Cole was working on the script, Chopra would have her agent send a copy of McInerney's book to Michael J. Fox. This wasn't just some random decision. Chopra knew she needed a star for this movie, and Fox's agent just happened to be Chopra's agent. That'd be two commissions for the agent if it came together, and a copy of the book was delivered to Fox's dressing room on the Family Ties soundstage that very day. Fox loved the book, and agreed to do the film. After Alex P. Keaton and Marty McFly and other characters he had played that highlighted his good looks and pleasant demeanor, he was ready to play a darker, more morally ambiguous character. Since the production was scheduled around Fox's summer hiatus from the hit TV show, he was in. For Pollock and United Artists, this was a major coup, landing one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. But the project was originally going to be Toronto standing in for New York City for less than $7m with a lesser known cast. Now, it was going to be a $15m with not only Michael J. Fox but also Keifer Sutherland, who was cast as Tad, the best friend of the formerly named You, who would now known as Jamie Conway, and would be shot on location in New York City. The film would also feature Phoebe Cates as Jamie's model ex-wife, William Hickey, Kelly Lynch. But there was a major catch. The production would only have ten weeks to shoot with Fox, as he was due back in Los Angeles to begin production on the sixth season of Family Ties.  He wasn't going to do that thing he did making a movie and a television show at the same time like he did with Back to the Future and Family Ties in 1984 and 1985. Ten weeks and not a day more. Production on the film would begin on April 13th, 1987, to get as much of the film shot while Fox was still finishing Family Ties in Los Angeles. He would be joining the production at the end of the month. But Fox never get the chance to shoot with Chopra. After three weeks of production, Chopra, her husband, and her cinematographer James Glennon, who had also shot Smooth Talk, were dismissed from the film. The suits at United Artists were not happy with the Fox-less footage that was coming out of New York, and were not happy with the direction of the film. Cole and Chopra had removed much of the nightlife and drug life storyline, and focused more on the development of Jamie as a writer. Apparently, no one at the studio had read the final draft of the script before shooting began. Cole, the screenwriter, says it was Pollock, the producer, who requested the changes, but in the end, it would be not the Oscar-winning filmmaker producing the movie that would be released but the trio of newer creatives. Second unit footage would continue to shoot around New York City while the studio looked for a new director. Ironically, days after Chopra was fired, the Directors Guild of America had announced that if they were not able to sign a new agreement with the Producers Guild before the end of the current contract on June 30th, the directors were going on strike. So now United Artists were really under the gun. After considering such filmmakers as Belgian director Ulu Grosbard, who had directed Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro in Falling in Love, and Australian director Bruce Beresford, whose films had included Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, they would find their new director in James Bridges, whose filmography included such critical and financial success as The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy, but had two bombs in a row in 1984's Mike's Murder and 1985's Perfect. He needed a hit, and this was the first solid directing offer in three years. He'd spend the weekend after his hiring doing some minor recasting, including bringing in John Houseman, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in The Paper Chase, as well as Swoosie Kurtz, Oscar-winning actors Jason Robards and Dianne Weist, and Tracy Pollan, Fox's co-star on Family Ties, who would shortly after the filming of Bright Lights become Mrs. Michael J. Fox, although in the film, she would be cast not as a love interest to her real-life boyfriend's character but as the wife of Keifer Sutherland's character. After a week of rewriting McInerney's original draft of the screenplay from the Schumacher days, principal photography re-commenced on the film. And since Bridges would be working with famed cinematographer Gordon Willis, who had shot three previous movies with Bridges as well as the first two Godfather movies and every Woody Allen movie from Annie Hall to The Purple Rose of Cairo, it was also decided that none of Chopra's footage would be used. Everything would start back on square one. And because of the impending Directors Guild strike, he'd have only thirty-six days, a tad over five weeks, to film everything. One of the lobby cards from the movie version of Bright Lights, Big City And they were able to get it all done, thanks to some ingenious measures. One location, the Palladium concert hall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, would double as three different nightclubs, two discotheques and a dinner club. Instead of finding six different locations, which would loading cameras and lights from one location to another, moving hundreds of people as well, and then setting the lights and props again, over and over, all they would have to do is re-decorate the area to become the next thing they needed. Bridges would complete the film that day before the Directors Guild strike deadline, but the strike would never happen. But there would be some issue with the final writing credits. While Bridges had used McInerney's original screenplay as a jumping off point, the writer/director had really latched on to the mother's death as the emotional center of the movie. Bridges' own grandmother had passed away in 1986, and he found writing those scenes to be cathartic for his own unresolved issues. But despite the changes Bridges would make to the script, including adding such filmmaking tropes as flashbacks and voiceovers, and having the movie broken up into sections by the use of chapter titles being typed out on screen, the Writers Guild would give sole screenwriting credit to Jay McInerney. As post-production continued throughout the fall, the one topic no one involved in the production wanted to talk about or even acknowledge was the movie version of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero that rival studio 20th Century Fox had been making in Los Angeles. It had a smaller budget, a lesser known filmmaker, a lesser known cast lead by Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz, and a budget half the size. If their film was a hit, that could be good for this one. And if their film wasn't a hit? Well, Bright Lights was the trendsetter. It was the one that sold more copies. The one that saw its author featured in more magazines and television news shows. How well did Less Than Zero do when it was released into theatres on November 6th, 1987? Well, you're just going to have to wait until next week's episode. Unless you're listening months or years after they were published, and are listening to episodes in reverse order. Then you already know how it did, but let's just say it wasn't a hit but it wasn't really a dud either. Bridges would spend nearly six months putting his film together, most of which he would find enjoyable, but he would have trouble deciding which of two endings he shot would be used. His preferred ending saw Jamie wandering through the streets of New York City early one morning, after a long night of partying that included a confrontation with his ex-wife, where he decides that was the day he was going to get his life back on track but not knowing what he was going to do, but the studio asked for an alternative ending, one that features Jamie one year in the future, putting the finishing touches on his first novel, which we see is titled… wait for it… Bright Lights, Big City, while his new girlfriend stands behind him giving her approval. After several audience test screenings, the studio would decide to let Bridges have his ending. United Artists would an April 1st, 1988 release date, and would spend months gearing up the publicity machine. Fox and Pollan were busy finishing the final episodes of that season's Family Ties, and weren't as widely available for the publicity circuit outside of those based in Los Angeles. The studio wasn't too worried, though. Michael J. Fox's last movie, The Secret of My Success, had been released in April 1987, and had grossed $67m without his doing a lot of publicity for that one, either. Opening on 1196 screens, the film would only manage to gross $5.13m, putting it in third place behind the previous week's #1 film, Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick, and the Tim Burton comedy Beetlejuice, which despite opening on nearly 200 fewer screens would gross nearly $3m more. But the reviews were not great. Decent. Respectful. But not great. The New York-based critics, like David Ansen of Newsweek and Janet Maslin of the Times, would be kinder than most other critics, maybe because they didn't want to be seen knocking a film shot in their backyard. But one person would actually would praise the film and Michael J. Fox as an actor was Roger Ebert. But it wouldn't save the film. In its second week, the film would fall to fifth place, with $3.09m worth of tickets sold, and it would drop all the way to tenth place in its third week with just under $1.9m in ticket sales. Week four would see it fall to 16th place with only $862k worth of ticket sales. After that, United Artists would stop reporting grosses. The $17m film had grossed just $16.1m. Bright Lights, Big City was a milestone book for me, in large part because it made me a reader. Before Bright Lights, I read occasionally, mainly John Irving, preferring to spend most of my free time voraciously consuming every movie I could. After Bright Lights, I picked up every Vintage Contemporary book I could get my hands on. One of the checklists of Vintage Contemporary books listed in the back of a Vintage Contemporary book. And one thing that really helped out was the literal checklist of other books available from that imprint in the back of each book. Without those distinct covers, I don't know if I would have discovered some of my favorite authors like Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo and Richard Ford and Richard Russo. Even after the Vintage Contemporary line shut down years later, I continued to read. I still read today, although not as much as I would prefer. I have a podcast to work on. I remember when the movie came out that I wasn't all that thrilled with it, and it would be nearly 35 years before I revisited it again, for this episode. I can't say it's the 80s as I remember it, because I had never been to New York City by that point in my life, I had never, and still never have, done anything like cocaine. And I had only ever had like two relationships that could be considered anything of substance, let alone marriage and a divorce. But I am certain it's an 80s that I'm glad I didn't know. Mainly because Jamie's 80s seemed rather boring and inconsequential. Fox does the best he can with the material, but he is not the right person for the role. As I watched it again, I couldn't help but wonder what if the roles were reversed. What if Keifer Sutherland played Jamie and Michael J. Fox played the friend? That might have been a more interesting movie, but Sutherland was not yet at that level of stardom. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when Episode 95, on the novel and movie version of Less Than Zero is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Bright Lights, Big City, both the book and the movie, as well as other titles in the Vintage Contemporary book series. The full cover, back and front, of Richard Ford's 1986 The Sportswriter, which would be the first of four novels about Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist who becomes a sportswriter. The second book in the series, 1995's Independence Day, would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first of only two times the same book would win both awards the same year. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.  

Writer-director, Charlie Peters, was raised in New York City before spending his high school years at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England, where he was classmates with the director Charles Sturridge and actor Edward Duke.  Charlie then studied theater at the University of Connecticut and subsequently received a Schubert Fellowship to do graduate work in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University here in Pittsburgh.  While at CMU, his plays were acted by fellow students including Holly Hunter and Cherry Jones.  After graduating, he returned to New York to work as a playwright. His plays have been produced at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, Primary Stages, Playwrights Horizons, The Actors Theater of Louisville and The Edinburgh Festival.  In 1978, Charlie was brought to Los Angeles by Columbia Pictures as part of a program looking for new writers, a program that turned out to be little more than a publicity stunt to distract from the bad PR Columbia had received as a result of its head, David Begelman, embezzling money from various actors.  Charlie's first produced movie, Paternity, is based on a play he'd written while at CMU. It starred Burt Reynolds and was directed by David Steinberg.  He's had a dozen other movies pr oduced including Blame It On Rio directed by Stanley Donen, Kiss Me Goodbye directed by Robert Mulligan, and Her Alibi, directed by Bruce Beresford. He's also directed two of his own: Passed Away with Bob Hoskins, Maureen Stapleton and Frances McDormand and Music From Another Room with Jude Law and Brenda Blethyn. Charlie has doctored over forty other produced movies and many more unproduced ones.  Renee Zellweger won The Golden Bear Award at The Berlin Film Festival for the 2010 movie, My One and Only, that Charlie wrote. Hs most recent film was 5 Flights Up based on the novel by Jill Ciment, which starred no less than Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton.  

Benvenuti nella raccolta in formato Podcast delle puntate di #CloseUp, a cura di Matteo Righi, aka Houssy. #CloseUp è la rubrica di recensioni cinematografiche in onda su Radio Italia Anni 60 Emilia-Romagna.

Émission fraternité, trahisons et fidélité. Parfois les soirs de drame, il nous faut trouver la flamme qu'il faut, pour toucher les femmes qui nous tendent les mains. Nous ne sommes pas des héros, nos faux pas nous collent à la peau.dispo également sur le tubeAu programme cette semaine:* Breaker Morant, aka Héros ou salopards, de Bruce Beresford réédité chez Rimini Editions.* Leila et ses frères, nouvelle bombe de Saeed Roustaee.Coups de cœur:THOMAS: Les Raisins de la colère (Steinbeck) + revoir Les fantômes du chapelier (Chabrol)THIBAUT: Police (Pialalt) + The Kills (leur vie, leur oeuvre)DOC: revoir Coup de tête (Annaud)PLAYLISTPrégénérique / Extrait Breaker MorantJohn Edmond / The Spirit of Breaker MorantAngry Silence / The Best Place in the Sun 

It's a tribute to the great Linda Hamilton, and not a very good one! Yes, two out of three of these are a waste of her talents, but are they fun to watch? Debatable! BLACK MOON RISING (1986, Harley Cokliss) 21:21 SILENT FALL (1994, Bruce Beresford) 1:11:00 SHADOW CONSPIRACY (1997, George P. Cosmatos) 2:00:15

"Tender Mercies" (1983) is about a former successful musician named Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) who lost everything good in his life due to alcohol. When the film opens, he and a friend are staying in a motel, getting drunk and fighting while the proprietor, Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), and her young son, Carl (known as Sonny, played by Allan Hubbard), watch from their porch. When the friend skips out before paying the bill the next day, Mac offers to work for Rosa Lee in order to compensate for the room. She agrees, but tells him that he can't drink while he's working there. Thus begins Mac's slow streak of improving his life. He sticks with sobriety, marries Rosa Lee, and starts writing music again. It's the kind of movie that's not really plot-driven … more slice of life, at arm's length, character study about Mac's quiet redemption. Other highlights are Betty Buckley, who plays Mac's successful country star ex-wife, Dixie, and Ellen Barkin as Mac's estranged teen daughter, Sue Ann. The screenplay is written by Horton Foote, who won the best adapted screenplay Oscar for “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1962. He also won a best original screenplay Oscar for “Tender Mercies” in 1983 and has a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play, “The Young Man From Atlanta” and an Emmy for a TV adaptation of William Faulkner's “Old Man.” The director, Bruce Beresford (who we completely forgot to mention by name — sorry, Bruce), is probably best known for “Driving Miss Daisy” (1989), although my personal favorite film of his is “Double Jeopardy” (1999). Here are some things we mentioned during the episode and/or that we think you should check out: Norman K. Denzin's article in The Sociological Quarterly that provides a feminist close-reading of the film. Unfortunately, you need access to JSTOR to read it, but if you email me (lindsay@womaninrevolt.com), I can send you a copy. 1991 Robert Duvall interview on "Later with Bob Costas" 2002 Horton Foote interview at the Austin Film Festival Tess Harper presenting an award to Bruce Beresford at the 2010 Woodstock Film Festival Some interesting trivia: Duvall's only Oscar is for this film. He had been nominated for the following films (but did not win): “The Godfather” (1972), “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “The Great Santini” (1979), “The Apostle” (1997), “A Civil Action” (1998), and “The Judge” (2014). Duvall's contract stipulated that all of the songs had to be sung by him. “Over You,” the song Dixie performs at the Opry, was also nominated for an Oscar. Duvall wrote two of Mac's songs, "Fool's Waltz" and "I've Decided to Leave Here Forever.” Others were country classics and not written for the film. Universal Studio lost faith in the film after it performed poorly at test screenings. They also sort of ignored Willie Nelson's offers to promote the film. David Lynch was a contender for director at one point. Can you imagine this film with him at the helm? Actually, it probably would have been like “The Straight Story" (1999). The film was selected to screen in competition for the prestigious Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. Robert Duvall made his official cinema movie debut as Arthur "Boo" Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), whose screenplay was written by Horton Foote. Horton Foote and Duvall worked together on five projects: “TKAM,” William Faulkner's “Tomorrow” (1972), “Tender Mercies,” “The Midnight Caller” (play, 1958 debut), and “The Chase” (1966, based on his 1956 novel). Tess Harper and Bruce Beresford worked together on three films: “Tender Mercies,” “Crime of the Heart” (1986), and “Alibi” (1989).  Jeannine Oppewall was hired as art director. Beresford praised her as "absolutely brilliant," especially for her attention to very small details, "going from the curtains to the color of the quilts on the floors." It was Oppewall who named the motel Mariposa, Spanish for "butterfly," which symbolizes the spiritual resurrection Mac Sledge would experience there. Oppewall has four academy award nominations for best art direction:  "Seabiscuit" (2003), "LA Confidential" (1997), "Pleasantville" (1998), and "The Good Shepherd" (2006).

Il n'y a pas que le Cinéma dans la vie, il y a aussi la musique. On vous cause de musique country, et comme on ne se refait pas, on vous en cause via le Cinéma, notamment le fantastique et inédit documentaire Heartworn highways de James Szalapski la mini-série documentaire Country Music de Ken Burns, et les tout récemment édités Nashville Lady de Michael Apted (StudioCanal collection Make My Day) et Tendre bonheur de Bruce Beresford(Rimini éditions).Une émission réalisée avec l'aide de Thomas "white trash" Kiki.Agenda23 juin : Double programme Western italien au Cinéma Arvor3 juillet : Dernier film du Dimanche Soir de la saison au Cinéma Arvor (annonce du film à venir)été 2022 : Cycle "Police Partout" au Cinéma Arvor avec plein de joyeusetés.A mettre dans vos oreillesLa moitié poilue de l'émission cause des enjeux des salles Art et Essai chez Apéro Ciné, c'est ici. 

On this episode, we discuss one of the biggest hit films ever in Australian cinema, that was pretty much ignored in the rest of the world, Yahoo Serious' Young Einstein. ----more---- Yes, you read that right. Yahoo Serious was the name of the director of Young Einstein. And its main star. And it's co-writer, co-producer, supervising editor, and he even wrote and sang a song or two on the soundtrack. A true modern renaissance man. We also have a brief history of Australian cinema, the 1970s New Wave of filmmakers like Gillian Anderson, Bruce Beresford, George Miller and Peter Weir who would put Australia on the global cinematic map once and for all, and a scrappy art school student would make, and then remake, himself and his debut movie.

On this episode, we discuss one of the biggest hit films ever in Australian cinema, that was pretty much ignored in the rest of the world, Yahoo Serious' Young Einstein. ----more---- Yes, you read that right. Yahoo Serious was the name of the director of Young Einstein. And its main star. And it's co-writer, co-producer, supervising editor, and he even wrote and sang a song or two on the soundtrack. A true modern renaissance man. We also have a brief history of Australian cinema, the 1970s New Wave of filmmakers like Gillian Anderson, Bruce Beresford, George Miller and Peter Weir who would put Australia on the global cinematic map once and for all, and a scrappy art school student would make, and then remake, himself and his debut movie.

South Africa has a fascinating, complex, and often tragic history. From the migration of the Bantu to the settlements by the Dutch and British; from the Boar Wars to the fight to abolish apartheid, here in Episode 44, we explore the history of this geologically and culturally rich nation - a nation that is still striving to reach its full potential. Books:A History of South Africa by Frank WelshLong Walk to Freedom by Nelson MandelaHero of The Empire by Candice MillardCry, The Beloved Country by Alan PatonFilm:Zulu (1964) with Michael CaineBreaker Morant (1980) directed by Bruce Beresford

Ladies in Black (released in 2018) is an Australian comedy-drama film directed by Bruce Beresford. The film is based on the 1993 novel The Women in Black by Madeleine St John and tells the story of a group of department store employees in 1959 Sydney. Shankar Jeyapandian of 4EB Tamil analyses the film for “Namma Australia” series.  Part 4. April 2022. - ஆஸ்திரேலிய திரைப்படங்களை நாம் தமிழ் நேயர்களுக்கு அறிமுகம் செய்கிறோம். திரைப்படம்:  Ladies in Black (2018). இயக்கம்: Bruce Beresford. இந்த திரைப்படம் குறித்த அலசலை முன்வைக்கின்றவர் பிரிஸ்பேன் 4 EB தமிழ் ஒலியின் சங்கர் ஜெயபாண்டியன். திரைப்படம் – 4.

What do Georgetown University, St. Joseph's University, and Loyola University have in common (besides basketball)? They were all founded by the Jesuits, and the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church was highly instrumental in the phenomenon known as the Counter Reformation. Once Luther, Calvin and others challenged the authority and teachings of the Catholic Church, the Church had no choice but to respond to these accusations and alternative beliefs. Here in Episode 43, we dive into the Counter Reformation which began in the 1540's under Pope Paul III and ushered in many lasting changes in the Catholic Church.Episode Notes:·       Peter O'Toole played Pope Paul III in the Showtime series, The Tudors.·       Yes, a Jesuit did become Pope. He is the present pontifex maximus, Pope Francis I. Books:The Counter Reformation by A.G. DickensThe Reformation Crisis edited by Joel HurtsfieldThe Penguin Dictionary of English and European History, 1485-1789 by E. WilliamsKeepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy by Roger CollinsFilm:Black Robe (1991) directed by Bruce Beresford

The gang put a gun to his head in the middle of Times Square and pull the trigger this week, as they review Double Jeopardy (1999) Starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones. Did you know that you can't get tried for the same crime twice? Everyone knows this "true" fun fact after watching this late 90's thriller. Whether or not there is truth to this legal loophole or not, they made a whole movie about it. This has been rated as a certified "parents popcorn flick" by the guys, but is it worth your time? Tune in and find outhttp://www.MCFCpodcast.comEmail us at MCFCpodcast@gmail.com    Leave us a voicemail (209) 730-6010Joseph Navarro    Pete Abeytaand Tyler Noe    

It's hard to believe A Stitch in Time is Sasha Hadden's first film. He's made two short films and a documentary, and this film cements him as a serious talent and a filmmaker to keep an eye on. Here, Sasha discusses how he developed a passion for filmmaking at a young age thanks to his supportive mother, his love for Australian filmmaking great Bruce Beresford, and how he used this film as a training ground for emerging filmmakers. As a bonus, this episode also includes a ten minute chat with one of the film's stars - veteran Australian actor Belinda Giblin who plays Christine in the film. As one of Australia's most distinguished actors of stage and screen, most of you will know Belinda from her roles in Home and Away, Sons and Daughters, Good Guys Bad Guys, Heartbreak High, The Sullivans and A Country Practice.

We talk to two-time Oscar Nominee film Director Bruce Beresford about his films and experiences, and his cinematographer Peter James joins us to talk about Double Jeopardy now screening on Netflix.   Follow to receive every new episode: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-pbblog-8zDNGRf2NIOG-follower Download the Podbean Player App: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-app-iphone-android-mobile   ► FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/YourFilmPodcast ► YOUTUBE:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo95_Quaast5vCQZtbCTjzA Please send feedback or questions to: indiefilmpodcast@gmail.com  Show your support and please rate and review us on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-film-podcast/id1545805946 Romain Dagnan | The Film Podcast Theme Composer www.romaindagnan.com Every week 'The Film Podcast' interviews award winning and indie-film directors, cinematographers (DOP) film editors, actors and other cast and crew members to learn from their unique stories. 

Coming up this week we talk to film director Bruce Beresford about his films and experiences, and his experiences of working with Robert Duvall. Full interview coming soon.   Follow to receive every new episode: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-pbblog-8zDNGRf2NIOG-follower Download the Podbean Player App: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-app-iphone-android-mobile   ► FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/YourFilmPodcast ► YOUTUBE:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo95_Quaast5vCQZtbCTjzA Please send feedback or questions to: indiefilmpodcast@gmail.com  Show your support and please rate and review us on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-film-podcast/id1545805946 Romain Dagnan | The Film Podcast Theme Composer www.romaindagnan.com Every week 'The Film Podcast' interviews award winning and indie-film directors, cinematographers (DOP) film editors, actors and other cast and crew members to learn from their unique stories. 

Today's guest is Scott Hicks, the Australian film director and screenwriter. Best known for writing and directing Shine, the biopic of pianist David Helfgott, Scott received nominations for two Academy Awards. From Shine, Scott has gone on to direct many more films, such as No Reservations, The Lucky One, and Heart of Atlantis. On this episode we talk about Scott working early in his career with Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford, how a filmset is a tool for education by shadowing the work of masters, how the Australian film market differs from America's, the true impact of an image, and creating a message using visual language.    You can submit your questions to Ben here: https://www.speakpipe.com/BenFolds And check out the YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ix6szTyjg3vmx1sIj-Vfw See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Matthew Bates had this week's Patreon pick and went for the 1980 Australian movie, The Club. Neither Chris nor Dave have watched this one and the low budget didn't have good signs. But this one might just be a bit of gem! Directed by Bruce Beresford, written by David Williamson and starring Jack Thompson, Graham Kennedy and Frank Wilson. Check out Matt's YouTube on https://www.youtube.com/c/blackcountryvlogger. If you enjoy the show we have a Patreon, become a supporter. www.patreon.com/thevhsstrikesback Plot Summary: Boardroom and dressing-room intrigues spill onto the field at the Australian Rules football club. thevhsstrikesback@gmail.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thevhsstrikesback/support

Career Q&A with Betty Buckley. Moderated by Richard Ridge, Broadway World. Betty Buckley, who has been called “The Voice of Broadway,” is one of theater's most respected and legendary leading ladies. She is an actress/singer whose career spans theater, film, television and concert halls around the world. She most recently was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame for 2012. Betty Buckley won a Tony Award for her performance as Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS. She received her second Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a musical for her performance as Hesione in TRIUMPH OF LOVE, and an Olivier Award nomination for her critically acclaimed interpretation of Norma Desmond in the London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's SUNSET BOULEVARD, which she repeated to more rave reviews on Broadway. Her other Broadway credits include 1776, PIPPIN, SONG AND DANCE, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD and CARRIE. Off-Broadway credits include the world premiere of Horton Foote's THE OLD FRIENDS for which she received a Drama Desk Nomination in 2014, WHITE'S LIES, Lincoln Center's ELEGIES, the original NYSF production of EDWIN DROOD, THE EROS TRILOGY, JUNO SWANS and GETTING MY ACT TOGETHER AND TAKING IT ON THE ROAD. Regional credits include THE PERFECTIONSIT, GYPSY, THREEPENNY OPERA, CAMINO REAL, BUFFALO GAL, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE and THE OLD FRIENDS. She starred in the London production of DEAR WORLD in 2013 and PROMISES, PROMISES. She co-starred in M. Night Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING released in June 2008. Other films include her debut in Brian de Palma's screen version of Stephen King's CARRIE, Bruce Beresford's TENDER MERCIES, Roman Polanski's FRANTIC, Woody Allen's ANOTHER WOMAN and Lawrence Kasden's WYATT EARP. On television, Buckley appeared in THE PACIFIC for HBO and on the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006 and 1983. She also starred for three seasons in the HBO series OZ and as Abby Bradford in the hit series EIGHT IS ENOUGH. She has appeared as a guest star in numerous television series, miniseries and films for television including EVERGREEN, ROSES FOR THE RICH, the CBS series WITHOUT A TRACE, LAW & ORDER: SVU for NBC, ABC Family's PRETTY LITTLE LIARS and HBO's GETTING ON. She received her second Grammy Nomination for the audio book THE DIARIES OF ADAM AND EVE. For over forty years Ms. Buckley has been a teacher of scene study and song interpretation, giving workshops in Manhattan and various universities and performing arts conservatories around the country. She has been a faculty member in the theatre department of the University of Texas at Arlington, the T. Schreiber Studio in New York City and currently teaches at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX. In April of 2009, Ms. Buckley received the Texas Medal of Arts Award for Theater and was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame in 2007.

Imprint Companion is the only podcast on the Australian Internet about "DVD Culture."Hang onto your slipcases because Alexei Toliopoulos (Finding Drago, Total Reboot) and Blake Howard (One Heat Minute) team up to unbox, unpack and unveil upcoming releases from Australia's brand new boutique Blu-Ray label Imprint Films. This is the first episode of the September 2021 Imprint Films drop, and we're talking:Double Jeopardy with #1 fan Maria Lewis.Double Jeopardy (1999)Young Libby Parsons (Ashley Judd) is happy as a clam, and why not? She's got a loving, successful husband (Bruce Greenwood), an adorable son, and an island home to die for. One morning, after a romantic sailing expedition with her husband, Libby finds herself covered in blood. Her husband's missing, the boat resembles a murder scene, and there's a knife on the deck. One might stop right there and call for help; Libby, however, takes matters–or, more specifically, the knife–into her own hands, and the moment she does, there's the Coast Guard. Faster than you can say frame-up, Libby's been charged with murder and jailed, with her young son stripped from her custody.From acclaimed director Bruce Beresford comes this gripping thriller starring Ashley Judd & Tommy Lee Jones.Special Features and Technical Specs:1080p High definition presentationAudio Commentary by Film Historian Scott HarrisonThe Making of Double Jeopardy Showtime Double SpecialTheatrical TrailerEnglish Dolby Digital 2.0/5.1Aspect Ratio 2.35:1Theatrical TrailerOptional English subtitlesLimited Edition slipcase on the first 2000 copies with unique artwork.Imprint Collection # 66Blake Howard - Twitter & One Heat Minute Website Alexei Toliopoulos - Twitter & Total RebootVisit imprintfilms.com.au Maria Lewis WEBSITE: https://www.marialewis.com.au/TWITTER: @moviemazzSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/imprint-companion/donations

A Serious Disc Agreement is the only "serious" podcast on the Australian Internet about "Movie Disc Culture."Hang onto your slipcases because Alexei Toliopoulos (Finding Drago, Total Reboot) and Blake Howard (One Heat Minute) team up to unbox, unpack and unveil upcoming releases from Australia's brand new boutique Blu-Ray label Imprint Films. . This is the first episode of the September 2021 Imprint Films drop, and we're talking:Double Jeopardy with #1 fan Maria Lewis.Double Jeopardy (1999)Young Libby Parsons (Ashley Judd) is happy as a clam, and why not? She's got a loving, successful husband (Bruce Greenwood), an adorable son, and an island home to die for. One morning, after a romantic sailing expedition with her husband, Libby finds herself covered in blood. Her husband's missing, the boat resembles a murder scene, and there's a knife on the deck. One might stop right there and call for help; Libby, however, takes matters–or, more specifically, the knife–into her own hands, and the moment she does, there's the Coast Guard. Faster than you can say frame-up, Libby's been charged with murder and jailed, with her young son stripped from her custody.From acclaimed director Bruce Beresford comes this gripping thriller starring Ashley Judd & Tommy Lee Jones.Special Features and Technical Specs:1080p High definition presentationAudio Commentary by Film Historian Scott HarrisonThe Making of Double Jeopardy Showtime Double SpecialTheatrical TrailerEnglish Dolby Digital 2.0/5.1Aspect Ratio 2.35:1Theatrical TrailerOptional English subtitlesLimited Edition slipcase on the first 2000 copies with unique artwork.Imprint Collection # 66Blake Howard - Twitter & One Heat Minute Website Alexei Toliopoulos - Twitter & Total RebootVisit imprintfilms.com.au Maria Lewis WEBSITE: https://www.marialewis.com.au/TWITTER: @moviemazzSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/one-heat-minute-productions/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Greatly missed on TV screens, the nation's favourite film critics Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton reunite in this special conversation on Australian movie adaptations of books. The famously sparring duo settle back into their critics' chairs to discuss and debate Neil Armfield's Candy (starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish), Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, Simon Baker's Breath (based on Tim Winton's Miles Franklin Award–winning novel of the same name), Bruce Beresford's Ladies in Black, Robert Connolly's The Dry and Peter Weir's classic Picnic at Hanging Rock. Discover which films Margaret and David believe did justice to the original text, bested the books or lost their lustre when transposed from page to screen.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Original Air Date: Monday 12 July, 9 pm EasternDescription:Your friends in podcasting celebrate summer and the traditional "summer movie season" with a show full of great movie directors. First, Dean and Phil remember three groundbreaking directors in "Celebrity Deaths" - one of whom directed some of the best box office hits of the 70's, 80's and 90's, one of whom was a key figure in underground cinema and one of whom directed one of the greatest American movies of all time! Such titans of international cinema as Francois Truffaut and Sweden's Roy Andersson get their turns in the spotlight as well. Then, it turns out one of the greatest filmmakers of our era has purchased one of greatest movie theaters in the world. Dean and Phil discuss what this portends for the future of movie-going. Finally, one brand new movie release from Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh and one classic Australian film from Bruce Beresford get appraised, before a long-promised Aussie-themed edition of our Vintage Movie Ad game gets played!

Oscar nominee Bruce Beresford explains MacBeth the Opera and how VR is the new way to the see the Opera

Bruce Beresford, legendary screen director, talks about directing Melbourne Opera's production of ‘Macbeth' which will be broadcast live using VR technology; Internationally acclaimed performer Meow Meow discusses ‘Meow Meow's Pandemonium', her latest collaboration with the MSO; and Roshelle Fong and Keziah Warner, co-creators of ‘Poona' talk about their new work for Next Wave 2020, based on the controversial book, ‘Pauline Hanson: The Truth'.  With presenter Richard Watts.

On this episode, we discuss the sixty-second Best Picture Winner: “DRIVING MISS DAISY.”"Driving Miss Daisy" follows Daisy Werthan, an elderly Jewish widow living in Atlanta, who is determined to maintain her independence. However, when she crashes her car, her son, Boolie, arranges for her to have a chauffeur, an African-American driver named Hoke Colburn. Daisy and Hoke's relationship gets off to a rocky start, but they gradually form a close friendship over the years, one that transcends racial prejudices and social conventions. Directed by Bruce Beresford, the film stars Jessica Tandy as Daisy Werthan, Morgan Freeman as Hoke Colburn, Dan Aykroyd as Boolie Werthan and Patti LuPone as Florine Werthan.Here on The Envelope, we discuss & review every Best Picture Winner in the Academy Awards History. You can reach anyone here at TheEnvelopePodcast.com – Just go there to email us, check our bios, and keep up with the latest episode.

Part 2 of our 'Made in Melbourne' special looks at the films PATRICK (1978) dir. Richard Franklin; MAD MAX (1979) dir. George Miller; and THE CLUB (1980) dir. Bruce Beresford. With presenters Paul Anthony Nelson, Sally Christie, and Flick Ford.Website: https://www.rrr.org.au/explore/programs/primal-screenFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/primalscreenshow/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primal_screen_show/Twitter: https://twitter.com/primal_screen

Man Booker winning author Pat Barker on her retelling of Homer's Illiad The Silence of the Girls, stories and memoir by writers from marginalised backgrounds and we review the book to film adaptation of Ladies in Black by Bruce Beresford.

Is it only acceptable to post images of a disgusting menu item if you've actually imbibed said dish? Andrew thinks so, but there's no way Karl is putting that thing in his mouth. Plus, the discreet charms of the bourgeois Ladies in Black, the gorgeous Leave No Trace, and the delightfully offensive Bald Archy Prize. All in your favourite pop culture podcast from those two blokes in Melbourne, Australia. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Game of Thrones designer Deborah Riley on her Emmys win. Plus, Bruce Bereford talks about his new film Ladies in Black, and how cinema echoed the hopes and disappointments of The Prague Spring like no other artform.

Jen and Darren revisit a misfired art film from 1987! Aria is an omnibus film with segments directed by giants of the industry like Godard and Altman and genteel hacks like…Bruce Beresford. Who the hell is Bruce Beresford? Have You Seen This? BONUS episodes See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Driving Miss Daisy was a perfect story choice for Richard D. Zanuck to produce. Sure, it was difficult to get made but for a film that only cost $7.5 million dollars to produce, it raked in over $100 million at the domestic box office, putting it in the top 10 of the year with the likes of Batman and Lethal Weapon 2. Topping that off, it led Zanuck, along with his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, to win the Best Picture award at the Oscars.But this 1989 film, which deals with prejudice and friendship in the relationship between an old Jewish woman in the south and her African American driver, stands out for many people as a perfect example of what's wrong with the Oscars because it came out the same year as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a film that deals with race relations in a much more intense and direct way, and what many feel should have won the Best Picture award.Regardless of your position on which is the better film or which should have won, Bruce Beresford's film Driving Miss Daisy, written by Alfred Uhry based on his Pulitzer prize-winning play, is a beautiful, simple, and sweet story of two people who are the most unlikely to develop a friendship, yet they do just that. And it's heartwarming.Join us — Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — on this week's episode of Rash Pixel's Movies We Like as we discuss the amazing performances — Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, and Dan Aykroyd are all fantastic. We chat about what the film is saying about race and look at in context of the 25 years over which the story takes place. We look at the films it was up against at the Oscars that year (as well as those that weren't nominated). And we discuss the amazing or horrible Hans Zimmer music, depending on your taste for his 80s synthesized scores. It's a discussion that ranges all over the map as we talk about this wonderful film, the fourth in our Richard D. Zanuck series. We have a great time talking about it, and hope you have a great time listening to it. Listen in!