Podcasts about China Girl

Parmi les figures qui ont forgé la légende des années 80, la plus foisonnante des décennies de l'histoire de la musique populaire, la présence de David Bowie est inévitable, incontournable et pourtant la plus étonnante. Inattendue je devrais dire. En tout cas en 1983. Pourquoi ? Ben il faudrait qu'on y retourne, je vous emmène ?En ce printemps 83 où on en a plus que pour Michael Jackson, U2 et Simple Minds, bref une nouvelle aube sonore et musicale, David Bowie a tout de l'artiste des années 70 où il a brillé partout. Au point qu'il est le modèle de toute cette nouvelle génération nommée New Wave qui lui a tout piqué ou presque. Est-ce pour cela qu'il a disparu depuis trois ans ? Non. Ou en tout cas pas uniquement. C'est vrai que David a un problème avec tous ces clones de lui. Il a l'impression de se voir et de s'entendre partout. Mais bon, il y a aussi eu l'assassinat de son pote John Lennon à New York alors qu'il était lui-même sur scène à deux pas de là et qui a engendré une peur bleue de se montrer en public. Et puis enfin un gros problème de relation avec sa maison de disques qu'il a dû régler. Et malgré cette longue absence, qui pourrait imaginer que de tous les albums de David Bowie, ce fameux Let's dance est de tous, celui qui a été le moins préparé et le plus vite exécuté. David n'a écrit que cinq nouvelles chansons en trois ans quand il approche des portes du studio d'enregistrement. L'option de tout écrire en une nuit en absorbant des substances illicites appartenant au passé, il lui reste celle des fonds de tiroir, ce qu'il fait en reprenant une chanson qu'il a enregistrée quelques mois plus tôt avec Giorgio Moroder pour un film d'horreur esthétique mais de série B passé plus ou moins inaperçu en dehors des couloirs du BIFF à Bruxelles et des vidéoclubs. C'est ainsi qu'il ressort également un titre dont il a coécrit la musique avec son ami Iggy Pop pour le premier album solo qu'il a produit pour lui … en 1977, encore les 70's. Ah c'est qu'il s'amuse toujours avec Iggy qui est probablement son seul ami ; il l'avait d'ailleurs emmené dans ses valises quand il avait quitté Los Angeles au milieu de la décennie, pour Paris, puis Berlin. C'est là qu'ils avaient écrit cette chanson qui, au départ, n'a rien d'une bluette puisqu'elle fait référence à la coke et à l'héroïne. C'est d'ailleurs cela qui amuse beaucoup Nile Rodgers, le producteur de Let's Dance : faire de cette China Girl un titre pop à prendre au premier degré comme le prouvera le vidéoclip. Et il fait bien vu l'incroyable succès qu'elle va rencontrer en cette année 1983.Comme Nile le dira plus tard : il m'est souvent arrivé de savoir que la chanson que j'enregistrais allait faire un tube. Comme cette fois où on a fait écouter “Le Freak” à notre maison de disques. Ils n'y ont pas cru et pourtant c'est le single le plus vendu de leur histoire. C'était le cas aussi pour le “We are family” de Sister Sledge mais pas pour “China Girl”. Nile a ainsi poussé Bowie à sortir Let's dance en premier. Bowie n'y croyait pas, il avait tort. Lui, il voulait sortir China Girl en premier. Les deux ont eu raison et ont eu tort, mais heureusement pas au même moment. Résultat, deux tubes successifs et un Bowie au sommet, qui marque la décennie de son empreinte, imposant une nouveau look et regagnant en cette année 1983 tout l'argent qu'il avait perdu dans les années 70.

Léman était l'invité du Double Expresso RTL2 ce vendredi 25 avril. Le chanteur est venu présenter son single "Les étoiles", sorti le 24 janvier dernier, qu'il a interprété en live pour les auditeurs de RTL2. Actuellement en tournée, il montera sur la scène de La Cigale à Paris le 30 octobre prochain, et sera également à l'affiche du Festival de Nîmes le 11 juillet en première partie de Michel Polnareff. L'info du matin - Erika Moulet et Sylvain Alexis ont présenté un patch capable de deviner les émotions humaines, idéal pour mieux cerner les gens autour de vous. Le winner du jour : - En Espagne, un homme s'est présenté à la police, chemise déchirée, affirmant avoir été kidnappé... simplement pour éviter d'expliquer à sa femme ce qu'il avait fait de sa nuit. - Un producteur japonais de 33 ans, fan du boys band Chocorabi, s'est offert une Ferrari à 250 000 € après 10 ans d'économies... qui a pris feu lors de sa première sortie. Le flashback d'avril 1983 - Sortie de l'album "Let's Dance" de David Bowie, avec les titres "Modern Love", "China Girl" et "Let's Dance". Les savoirs inutiles : - Avant de désigner une partie de l'anatomie masculine en argot, le mot « braquemart » désignait une épée courte et large utilisée au Moyen Âge, portée à la ceinture. Le jeu surprise : Julien de Nantes repart avec une enceinte MINO T de Lexon. La banque RTL2 : - Alexia de Toutainville vers Caen gagne 250 €. - Gaëlle de Poitiers gagne 400 €. Distribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Get ready to have triple vision. That's like being drunk twice with one eye closed. We only ask that you try and take that same patience you might have when drunk as we go over this. Because it's going to sound a little repetitive but this will have a payoff. We start with China Girl(1942). Johnny Williams is an American reporter who's freelancing in China during the breakout of WWII. He escapes the Japanese and runs off to an unoccupied China to wheel an deal among people. He gets caught up by a girl and drawn into fighting against the Japanese after they bomb her school. Also there's a traitorous … Continue reading "Popcorn Pulse 233: China Girl"

Vamos con nuestro alien favorito, David Bowie, y un tema que es una de las cimas pop de su cancionero: China Girl. Ricardo Portman nos cuenta su historia. Escucharemos China Girl, China Girl (Live at VH1 Storytellers), Shake It, Let’s Dance y Modern Love + Bonus track. Recuerden que nuestros programas los pueden escuchar también en: Nuestra web https://ecosdelvinilo.com/ Radio M7 (Córdoba) lunes 18:00 y sábados 17:00. Distancia Radio (Córdoba) jueves y sábados 19:00 Radio Free Rock (Cartagena) viernes 18:00. Radio Hierbabuena (Lima, Perú) jueves 20:00 (hora Perú)

Send us a text- Folge 76: Covers in den 80ern-  Wir klären in dieser Folge ein für alle Mal:Welche Künstler war in den 80ern mit sechs Coverversionen in den deutschen Single-Charts?Warum war China Girl von David Bowie gar keine richtige Cover-Version obwohl der Song zuvor von Iggy Pop veröffentlicht worden war?Warum ist Only you in der Version der Flying Pickets gar kein Acapella-Song?Von welcher Band aus den 60ern wurden in den 80ern gleich mehrere Songs von mehreren Interpreten gecovert, die alle ein Hit wurden? - Schickt uns eure besten Liebeslieder der 80er – am besten zusammen mit der Story, was ihr dabei erlebt habt – an christian@purwienundkowa.com oder postet sie unter https://www.facebook.com/purwienundkowa. - Fun facts, hard facts & Nerd Facts Dave Stewart hatte 1981 mit Barbara Gaskin einen Nr. 1 Hit mit It's my party. Dieser Dave Stewart (aka David Lloyd Stewart) ist allerdings mit dem Dave Stewart von den Eurythmics (aka David Allen Stewart) weder verwandt noch verschwägert.Hier die Originalversion von Locomotion von Kyle Minogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xiHfuyGVkEUnd ihr seid selbst schuld, wenn ihr das anschaut, aber hier ist Nur ein Clown von Echo Echo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sPys-4lrYg  - LinksPodcast Disko 80: https://disko80.buzzsprout.comRSS-Feed: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1754816.rssDisko 80 bei Replay.fm: listen.replay.fm/tunein-aac-hdHomepage: http://www.purwienundkowa.comAktuelle CD von Purwien & Kowa: https://ffm.to/puk5Musik von Purwien & Kowa: https://purwienkowa.bandcamp.comBücher von Purwien & Kowa: https://amzn.to/2W9Ftj8Videos von Purwien & Kowa: https://bit.ly/3QVfTbRFollow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/purwienundkowaSpotify-Playlist Folge 76: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/109PYqqE3NM4UPhUoKLkqQ?si=d8ef154d41cf4ca2

Roeselien Wekker ontving Kelly-Qian van Binsbergen in Soul Stories. Kelly-Qian werd als baby geadopteerd uit China en groeide op in West-Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, wat haar een unieke kijk op identiteit en culturele integratie geeft. Met een passie voor het onderzoeken van complexe en beladen onderwerpen weet Kelly-Qian deze met humor en originaliteit toegankelijk te maken voor een breed publiek. Met haar debuut documentaireserie 'De Afhaalchinees' werd ze genomineerd voor de Zilveren Nipkowschijf 2024, de Dutch Directors Guild, won ze de Meestervertellers-award voor beste verhalende journalistiek en geselecteerd voor de NFF 2024 regiedebuut. Begin november brengt ze haar nieuwe serie 'Sexotisch' uit die inzichten geeft op raciale en seksuele vooroordelen. Wil je de songtekst van de liedjes nog eens terug lezen? Dat kan via: David Bowie - China Girl [Intro] Oh-oh-oh-oh, little China Girl Oh-oh-oh-oh, little China Girl [Verse 1] I could escape this feeling with my China Girl I feel a wreck without my little China Girl I hear her heart beating loud as thunder Saw the stars crashing [Verse 2] I'm a mess without my little China Girl Wake up in the mornings, where's my little China Girl? I hear her hearts beating loud as thunder I saw the stars crashing down [Chorus] I'm feeling tragic like I'm Marlon Brando When I look at my China Girl I could pretend that nothing really meant too much When I look at my China Girl [Verse 3] I stumble into town just like a sacred cow Visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone It's in the white of my eyes [Bridge] My little china girl You shouldn't mess with me I'll ruin everything you are You know, I'll give you television I'll give you eyes of blue I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world [Chorus] And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby, just you shut your mouth She says... shh She says... shh She says... [Chorus] And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby, just you shut your mouth And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby, just you shut your mouth She says... shh She says... [Outro] Oh-oh-oh-oh, little China Girl Oh-oh-oh-oh, little China Girl Oh-oh-oh-oh, little China Girl Oh-oh-oh-oh, little China Girl Allen Stone - Warriors https://genius.com/Allen-stone-warriors-lyrics Christina Aguilera - Hurt https://genius.com/Christina-aguilera-hurt-lyrics Bobby Womack - California Dreamin' https://genius.com/Bobby-womack-california-dreamin-lyrics In Soul Stories ontvangt presentatrice Roeselien Wekker prominente tafelgasten die hun levenslessen en persoonlijke verhaal delen aan de hand van livemuziek en songteksten. Haar radioprogramma is een verlengstuk van wie ze is en wat zij als boodschap de wereld in wil brengen: "Be yourself, everyone else is already taken." Een prachtig adagium van Oscar Wilde. Roeselien Wekker Roeselien Wekker, als dubbelbloed geboren en getogen Amsterdamse, had al snel een passie voor dans, zang en muziek. Na het afronden van haar opleiding aan het Institute for Performing Arts van Lucia Marthas, was ze 15 jaar professioneel theater- en televisie artieste. Als rode draad door haar leven gaat spiritualiteit, haar eigen zoektocht naar identiteit en muziek. Identiteit en communicatie is de fundering van haar werk als gespreksleider en trainer geworden. Daarnaast is zij adviseur diversiteit en inclusie. Soul Stories is elke tweede donderdag van de maand tussen 18:00 en 19:00 uur te beluisteren op GoodLIFE Radio of terug te luisteren via alle bekende podcastkanalen.

MODERN LOVE (1983) SOUND & VISION (1977) YOUNG AMERICANS (1975) ABSOLUTE BEGGINERS (1986) DANCING IN THE STREETS (1985) FIVE YEARS (1971) QUICKSAND (1971) UNDER PRESSURE (1981) TONIGHT (1984) THIS IS NOT AMERICA (1985) CHINA GIRL (1983)

Brian and Murdock dissect the tall tale about that one time David Bowie hit on Axl Rose's girlfriend – and then might have HIT Axl, too. Support the show on Patreon See the show on YouTube Visit the show on Instagram Visit the show on Facebook SHOW NOTES: https://www.loudersound.com/features/when-axl-rose-fought-david-bowie https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-sexuality-mick-jagger-affair/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/rip-david-bowie-gavin-haynes-828/ https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/26/susan-sarandon-past-sexual-relationship-david-bowie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_(1983_film) https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/tina-turner-credits-david-bowie-with-saving-her-career-in-resurfaced-interview/DOPXLTZXJFD2PMTF2MWAI76W5Q/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Sane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeves_Gabrels https://americansongwriter.com/remember-when-david-bowie-formed-a-band-and-got-loud-with-tin-machine/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Girl_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Dance_(David_Bowie_album) https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/i-played-the-track-with-my-eyes-closed-and-i-would-see-him-the-cure-guitarist-reeves-gabrels-talks-recording-with-and-after-david-bowie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_So_Easy_(Guns_N%27_Roses_song) https://www.revolvermag.com/music/watch-guns-n-roses-long-lost-its-so-easy-video-deemed-too-racy-mtv/ https://ultimateclassicrock.com/guns-n-roses-its-so-easy/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Arkeen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appetite_for_Destruction https://www.imdb.com/list/ls023409901/ https://bid.juliensaucti

Brian and Murdock dissect the tall tale about that one time David Bowie hit on Axl Rose’s girlfriend – and then might have HIT Axl, too. Support the show on Patreon. SHOW NOTES: https://www.loudersound.com/features/when-axl-rose-fought-david-bowie https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-sexuality-mick-jagger-affair/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/rip-david-bowie-gavin-haynes-828/ https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/26/susan-sarandon-past-sexual-relationship-david-bowie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_(1983_film) https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/tina-turner-credits-david-bowie-with-saving-her-career-in-resurfaced-interview/DOPXLTZXJFD2PMTF2MWAI76W5Q/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_Sane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeves_Gabrels https://americansongwriter.com/remember-when-david-bowie-formed-a-band-and-got-loud-with-tin-machine/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Girl_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Dance_(David_Bowie_album) https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/i-played-the-track-with-my-eyes-closed-and-i-would-see-him-the-cure-guitarist-reeves-gabrels-talks-recording-with-and-after-david-bowie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_So_Easy_(Guns_N%27_Roses_song) https://www.revolvermag.com/music/watch-guns-n-roses-long-lost-its-so-easy-video-deemed-too-racy-mtv/ https://ultimateclassicrock.com/guns-n-roses-its-so-easy/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Arkeen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appetite_for_Destruction https://www.imdb.com/list/ls023409901/ https://bid.juliensauctions.com/lot-details/index/catalog/110/lot/47337/AXL-ROSE-BREAK-UP-LETTERS-TO-ERIN-EVERLY https://grapevinefinearts.com/allnews3/erin-everly.html https://www.rocksoffmag.com/erin-everly-axl-rose/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riki_Rachtman https://cathousehollywood.com/pages/history https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-axl-rose-fight/ Axl after punch photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/GunsNRoses/comments/1dbd3fu/picture_of_axl_taken_after_getting_punched_by/ https://ultimateclassicrock.com/axl-rose-punch-david-bowie/

Les dudes rockent cette semaine avec Everybody Wants Some!!, une chronique à propos de straight viber en 1980. Aussi au programme: 1987 de Ricardo Trogi, China Girl d'Abel Ferrara et Twisters de Lee Isaac Chung!

Anfang der 80er sorgt David Bowie mit nackten Tatsachen im Musikvideo zu „China Girl“ für einen Skandal. Beinahe geht der Song unter, weil fast niemand den Clip spielen will. Wie der Song trotzdem ein großer Hit wird und was Iggy Pop damit zu tun hat, hört ihr in dieser Folge.

On this episode Phillip is joined by Rob Papp from The Cinemigos Podcast and The Circle of Jerks Podcast on YouTube. The two of them discuss Abel Ferrara's 1987 masterpiece China Girl. Phillip plays a clip of Tarantino talking about Abel Ferrara's movies. Then Phillip gives the general information about the movie. They then discuss the actors and the director. It's then time for Listener Opinions from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The two then discuss there thoughts on, and favorite parts, of the movie. It's another great discussion. They then answer the questions of whether they saw anything in this movie that Tarantino might have liked or used in a film? It's then time to individually rate the movie. Then they answer the question of whether they would buy, rent, or find this movie for free. Phillip then gives his Phil's Film Favorite of the Week; Argylle. Rob mentions what he has been watching, Then Phillip talks about what's coming up next week. Come back next week when Phillip will be joined by Paul Rowlands from Money Into Light and The Alternate Video Archives Facebook Page, for The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975). Thanks for listening. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/makingtarantinothepodcast/message

On this week's episode Phillip is joined by Erik Clapp of Cinema Force on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@cinemaforce1 and on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cinema_force/ to talk about 1988's Maniac Cop, 1990's Maniac Cop 2, and 1992's Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence. Something a little different for the podcast, 3 movies at once, but Tarantino actually likes the first 2 and they thought that they might as well do all 3. Check out Erik's YouTube channel for his Maniac Cop Retrospective. Phil starts the show out by giving the general information for the 3 movies, with some facts sprinkled in. It's then time for Listener Opinions from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The two discuss the movies and have a great conversation. They then talk about whether they notice anything from these movies that Tarantino might have liked or used in a movie. Then they rate all 3 movies, and answer whether they would buy, rent, or find these movies for free. Phillip then gives his Phil's Film Favorite of the Week; Metropolis (2001). Then Phillip talks about what's coming next week, when he will be joined by Rob Papp from The Cinemigos Podcast and The Circle of Jerks Podcast on YouTube to discuss Abel Ferrara's China Girl (1987). Thanks for listening. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/makingtarantinothepodcast/message

Trentanovesima puntata di Venus dedicata alle recenti elezioni in Turchia, dalle quali Erdogan è uscito fortemente ridimensionato. Il 31 marzo, 58 milioni di cittadini turchi sono stati chiamati alle urne per eleggere i sindaci di oltre 4000 città. Quale è stato l'esito di queste amministrative ce lo dice Beatrice Maroni, collaboratrice de il Millimetro, che ha approfondito questo argomento con un articolo pubblicato sul nostro sito.Nella seconda parte di Venus cambiamo argomento, con Stella Saccà, che direttamente da New York ci parla dei drammatici effetti del Fentanyl, conosciuta anche come China Girl, ossia la droga che trasforma chi ne fa uso in uno zombie.Contributi audio: euronews e BBC News

Fentanyl is fast becoming the scourge of America...we find out why it's known as "China Girl" and why it's production may be impossible to stopPlus: is it time to ban social media for children?And the Paris waiters kicking off the Paris OlympicsYour daily round-up of the biggest stories from across the world, as seen through the eyes of the Times of London. You can hear more of these stories on Times Radio, and read more at thetimes.co.uk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Music Story - David Bowie "China Girl"

Esta semana París inauguró la primera calle con el nombre del icono del rock David Bowie, fallecido en 2016, en presencia de personalidades del mundo musical, de la moda, autoridades parisinas, amigos y fans. La calle bautizada un tiempo “voie DZ/13”, que une el sitio histórico del Hospital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière y la estación Gare d'Austerlitz al barrio moderno de la Biblioteca Nacional de Francia (BNF), saltó a la fama al ser bautizada este 8 de enero con el nombre de la leyenda David Bowie.Según el anfitrión, Jérôme Coumet, alcalde del distrito 13 de París y fan del artista, esta calle será símbolo de un barrio multicultural y de la fuerte conexión entre el artista británico y París: “David Bowie amaba mucho Francia y particularmente París. Lo decía y lo repetía, fue aquí donde pidió la mano de su mujer”, precisó Coumet.“Sitio especialmente cultural”Según la leyenda, el primer concierto de David Bowie fuera de Inglaterra  tuvo lugar aquí en Paris, cuando tenía 18 años. Se trata de la primera calle en el mundo en homenajear a la leyenda del rock, padre de algunos de los más grandes éxitos internacionales, como “Life on Mars?”.“En este barrio hay barcos musicales (péniches) instalados en el Sena.  Hay una gran escuela de moda y diseño. Y, sobre todo, la Biblioteca Nacional de Francia fue el primer edificio construido en este lugar. Es un sitio especialmente cultural y para mí la presencia de David Bowie aquí tiene sentido”, subrayó el alcalde.Otra leyenda cuenta que David Bowie escribió la canción “China Girl” con Iggy Pop tras enamorarse en Francia de una mujer asiática. Las leyendas van pasando y la calle David Bowie nació para que quede su imprenta, siete años después de su muerte, el 10 de enero del 2016.

Miss Heard celebrates Season 5, Episode 224 with David Bowie's song “China Girl” and shared all the connections to Iggy Pop, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and American record producer and guitarist Nile Rodgers. You can listen to all our episodes at our website at: https://pod.co/miss-heard-song-lyrics Or iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify and many more platforms under Podcast name “Miss Heard Song Lyrics” Don't forget to subscribe/rate/review to help our Podcast in the ratings. Please consider supporting our little podcast via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissHeardSongLyrics or via PayPal at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/MissHeardSongLyrics #missheardsonglyrics #missheardsongs #missheardlyrics #misheardsonglyrics #misheardsongs        #misheardlyrics #IggyPop #DavidBowie #ChinaGirl #LetsDance #StevieRayVaughan #NileRodgers   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YC3sTbAPcU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Girl_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeling_Ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mallet_(director) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/20/how-david-bowies-china-girl-used-racism-to-fight-racism/

We talk about the movie China Girl, directed by Abel Ferrara and released in 1987

Welcome to a backstage pass to unravel the captivating story behind one of David Bowie's greatest hits: "China Girl." Join us in this episode as we explore the remarkable journey of this iconic song. In 1977, David Bowie decided to lend a helping hand to his friend Iggy Pop in recording his debut album. Bowie, well-acquainted with the studios at Château d'Hérouville near Paris, France, set up camp there with Iggy Pop. It was during their time at the château that they crossed paths with a French singer who was also working on his own album—Jacques Higelin. To accommodate this unexpected convergence of talent, Higelin and his Vietnamese partner, Kuêlan Nguyen, occupied a wing of the château. After intense recording sessions, it became customary for everyone to gather in the salon to unwind, drink, smoke, and engage in late-night improvisations. It is in this convivial atmosphere that David Bowie found himself enchanted by Kuêlan's presence, and in secret, they shared a few stolen kisses. Join us as we delve into the hidden layers of this encounter, the inspirations behind "China Girl," and the impact it had on David Bowie's musical journey. Gain insights into the cultural influences and personal connections that shaped the song's creation and understand its significance in the context of Bowie's discography. Whether you're a devoted David Bowie fan, an aficionado of iconic rock hits, or simply fascinated by the interplay between personal experiences and musical masterpieces, this episode will transport you into a world of creativity, passion, and cultural fusion.

In this episode, we discuss China Girl, Murder 8 and Toyko KP JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/raccoontweeties Join the discord! https://discord.gg/z7eSGTE6hG Follow Raccoon Tweeties on Social Media! https://linktr.ee/RaccoonTweeties  

Vor fast genau 40 Jahren veröffentlichte David Bowie "Let's Dance", sein kommerziell erfolgreichstes Album. Auf der Platte sind mit dem Titelsong "Let's Dance", "China Girl" und "Modern Love" auch drei der bekanntesten Singles von David Bowie. David Bowie ist wohl einer der einflussreichsten Musiker der Pop- und Rockgeschichte. Dem zu widersprechen würde sich vermutlich kaum jemand trauen. 26 veröffentlichte Studioalben und mehr als 140 Millionen verkaufte Tonträger stützen diese Aussage. Aber einen einflussreichen Musiker macht auch aus, dass er sich traut, neue Dinge auszuprobieren und Dinge anders zu machen, als man es vielleicht erwartet. Genau das hat David Bowie auch mit seinem Album "Let's Dance" gemacht, dass er vor knapp 40 Jahren rausgebracht hat. "Let's Dance" ist nicht nur das kommerziell das erfolgreichste Album von David Bowie, sondern war anfangs auch durchaus umstritten. Das lag vor allem an dem Stilwechsel den Bowie mit diesem Album einläutete. Aus dem experimentellen David Bowie wurde (vordergründig) der Mainstream-Bowie, der sich auf "Let's Dance" eher der gefälligeren Popmusik zuwandte. Die 80er wurden für Bowie die Zeit mit den bunten Anzügen und der Neon-Frisur. Der neue Bowie-Sound lag zum einen an Bowie selbst, der das Album produziert hat und zum anderen an Star-Gitarrist Nile Rodgers, der zusammen mit Bowie an dem Album arbeitete. Nile Rodgers stammt ursprünglich aus der New Yorker Bronx. Er ist nicht nur Gitarrist und Musikproduzent sondern war auch Teil der Band "Chic", die mit ihrem Song "Le Freak" einen internationalen Hit landete. Als Musikproduzent arbeitete er neben David Bowie auch mit anderen Megastars wie Madonna, Duran Duran, INXS, Daft Punk oder Mick Jagger zusammen. __________ Über diese Songs vom Album “Let's Dance” wird im Podcast gesprochen 16:41 Mins – “Modern Love” 24:07 Mins – “China Girl” 35:08 Mins – “Let's Dance”  51:12 Mins – “Criminal World” 01:01:54 Mins – “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” __________ Über diese Songs wird außerdem im Podcast gesprochen 01:00 Mins – “Le Freak” von Chic 01:15 Mins – “We Are Family” von Sister Sledge 01:23 Mins – “Upside Down” von Diana Ross 24:19 Mins – “China Girl” von Iggy Pop und David Bowie  27:26 Mins – “Sweet Thing” von Rufus und Chaka Khan 28:17 Mins – “Under My Thumb” von The Rolling Stones  43:53 Mins – “Let's Dance” von Chris Montez  49:33 Mins – “Criminal World” von Metro  __________ Shownotes: Werbespot mit Bowie und Tina Turner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxlZYnFtqNI Offizielles Musikvideo “Let's Dance”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbD_kBJc_gI Offizielles Musikvideo “China Girl”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YC3sTbAPcU Online-Blog zu “China Girl”: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/china-girl/ Nile Rogers zu “Let's Dance”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlDCPCwVNUw __________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Schreibt uns an: meilensteine@swr.de

The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro)   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.   Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago?   For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt.   That was the logo of the disc's distributor.   Vestron Video.   A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it.   But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time.   The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company.   But what to call the company?   It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point.   At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future.   Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling.   The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet.   Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great.   Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night.    For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron.   They were doing pretty good.   And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever.   When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video.   It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars.   Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with.   In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made.   Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies.   Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build.   But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company.   Lots of money.   Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day.   It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution.   Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure.   Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000.   Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside.   And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year.   Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2.   The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner.   The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again.   In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco.   Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross.   Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week.   It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for.   Dirty Dancing.   Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname.   Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle.   But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it.   They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise.   To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special.   Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget.   For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials.   Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny.   Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role.   Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming.   Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released.   After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th.   Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance.   But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set.   The music.   Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film.   Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording.    The writer nailed all ten.   But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle.   The closing song.   While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.”   Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version.   The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there.   While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals.   With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably.   RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts.   When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts.   The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds.   But then a funny thing happened…   Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack.   Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place.   In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales.   Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better.   When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago.   On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong.   The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988.   Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets.   Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then.   Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola.   The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role.   New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.”   Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck.   But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales.   Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves.   Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo.   The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales.   And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting.   Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot.   One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either.   John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6.   The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres.   Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label.   The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film.   The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them.   After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run.   While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school.   People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years.   Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was.   Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right?   We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week.   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.

The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro)   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.   Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago?   For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt.   That was the logo of the disc's distributor.   Vestron Video.   A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it.   But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time.   The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company.   But what to call the company?   It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point.   At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future.   Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling.   The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet.   Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great.   Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night.    For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron.   They were doing pretty good.   And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever.   When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video.   It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars.   Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with.   In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made.   Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies.   Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build.   But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company.   Lots of money.   Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day.   It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution.   Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure.   Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000.   Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside.   And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year.   Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2.   The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner.   The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again.   In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco.   Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross.   Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week.   It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for.   Dirty Dancing.   Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname.   Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle.   But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it.   They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise.   To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special.   Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget.   For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials.   Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny.   Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role.   Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming.   Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released.   After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th.   Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance.   But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set.   The music.   Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film.   Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording.    The writer nailed all ten.   But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle.   The closing song.   While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.”   Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version.   The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there.   While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals.   With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably.   RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts.   When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts.   The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds.   But then a funny thing happened…   Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack.   Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place.   In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales.   Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better.   When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago.   On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong.   The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988.   Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets.   Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then.   Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola.   The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role.   New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.”   Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck.   But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales.   Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves.   Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo.   The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales.   And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting.   Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot.   One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either.   John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6.   The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres.   Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label.   The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film.   The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them.   After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run.   While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school.   People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years.   Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was.   Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right?   We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week.   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.

Dem Vinyl Boyz are back again this week to drop the needle on David Bowie's fifteenth studio album, 'Let's Dance'. This was Bowie's best selling album of his career, reaching number one on charts in numerous countries. This commercial success led David Bowie into becoming a major superstar and getting well recognized by the populous. On this album, Bowie apparently chose to only sing and played no instruments, instead he got some new players including Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan playing the lead guitar.  Let's Dance has been reviewed musically as a post-disco record, with elements of dance-rock, dance-pop and new wave. It holds three cover songs: Iggy Pop's "China Girl", which Bowie and Pop had recorded together for the latter's The Idiot (1977); Metro's "Criminal World"; and a reworking of "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", originally recorded by Bowie and Giorgio Moroder in 1982 for the film "Cat People". The album also contained four hit singles that were all commercial successes, but the air play of music videos for "Let's Dance" and "China Girl'' on MTV were one of the main sources for the success for this album. Overall this is one of Bowie's most captivating and successful albums of his career, selling over ten million copies worldwide. Thanks for tuning in and remember to like and subscribe !! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vamos con nuestro alien favorito, David Bowie, y un tema que es una de las cimas pop de su cancionero: China Girl. Ricardo Portman nos cuenta su historia. Escucharemos China Girl, China Girl (Live at VH1 Storytellers), Shake It, Let’s Dance y Modern Love + Bonus track. Espacio patrocinado por varios oyentes anónimos… ¡GRACIAS! Si os gusta el programa podéis apoyar Ecos del Vinilo Radio siendo patrocinadores ¡por lo que vale un café al mes! desde el botón azul de iVoox. Recuerden que nuestros programas los pueden escuchar también en: Nuestra web https://ecosdelvinilo.com Radio M7 (Córdoba) lunes 18:00 y sábados 17:00. Radio Free Rock (Cartagena) viernes 18:00. Generación Radio (Medellín, Colombia) jueves y domingos 19:00 (hora Col.) Radio Hierbabuena (Lima, Perú) jueves 20:00 (hora Perú)

Special David Bowie. Playlist: 1/ Young American (RLP Re-Edit) 2/ Fame (Mojo Filter revision) 3/ Fashion (US 12'' Promo) 4/ Golden Years (Tim Fuchs Edit) 5/ Heroes (original) 6/ Never Let Me Down (Dub Acapella) 7/ Let's Dance (Dj''S '' Remix) 8/ Under Pressure (V4YS Let Me Out Rework) with Queen 9/ Life On Mars (The Reflex Revision) 10/ This Is Not America (mikeandtess edit 4 mix) with Pat Metheny. 11/ Ashes to Ashes (Dave Mathmos rework) 12/ Rebel Rebel (The Reflex Revision) 13/ Dancing In The Street » (Steve Thompson Mix) with Mick Jagger 14/ China Girl (12 '' UltraTraxx Retro Mix)

Happy Bisexual Visability Week! Celebrate, as is tradition, the glorious 35th anniversaries of Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' (Sept.1987), Abel Ferrara's 'China Girl' (Sept.1987), and Uther Shite (Sept.1987), with your hosts, Uther Shite & Finn "Sound" Nicolas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This 2000s pop podcast is super honoured to catch up with Carolyn Owlett and Tisha Monique of The 411 to celebrate the group's incredible hits - ‘On My Knees' and ‘Dumb' - which were not only UK Top 5 smashes but also did numbers internationally across Europe and as far as Australia and China! Joel and David get into the British R&B group's formation, jet-setting career highlights and heartbreaking sudden drop following the release of their brilliant album “Between The Sheets”. Fan faves like ‘China Girl' and ‘Chance' get plenty of love! And we share a heartfelt chat about their experience and their journey to their glorious comeback this year at Mighty Hoopla and the future - including the upcoming 90s Baby Pop shows! Follow The 411: https://www.instagram.com/the411__official/ https://www.instagram.com/cazzarazza411/ https://www.instagram.com/tishamoniquemusic/ Follow Right Back At Ya! https://www.instagram.com/rightbackpod/ https://twitter.com/rightbackpod https://www.facebook.com/rightbackpod Check out our Spotify playlists https://open.spotify.com/user/1c3ks5jdh2x4j7jdg1o0aglwg Follow Joel https://www.instagram.com/dr_joelb/ https://twitter.com/DR_JoelB Follow David https://www.instagram.com/lovelimmy/ https://twitter.com/lovelimmy

Season two of What You Don't Know About launches this week. And Carly's first guest is China Girl, a humble kiwi model who experienced a short but intense romance with the one and only David Bowie. Follow the podcast below. https://linktr.ee/whatyoudontknowaboutSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After appearing in a 1983 David Bowie music video and experiencing a whirlwind romance with Bowie himself, Geeling Chings life changed forever. Carly sits down with the one and only China Girl.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We break the hiatus to catch up on everything like Gil's Iowa trip, SDCC announcements, Eric Adams, Black Panther Wakanda Forever, Marvel Comics Judgement Day, Will Smith, Chris Rock, The Bear, Gray Man, Angel, China Girl, Marvel Phase 5 & 6, Uncoupled, What We Do in the Shadows and much much more. This podcast is sponsored by Discount Comic Book Services http://www.dcbservice.com/index.aspx Instock Trades http://www.instocktrades.com/ This podcast is part of the TaylorNetwork which is a home to many great podcasts all available on Taylornetwork feed on Amazon Music, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher radio and also google play

We break the hiatus to catch up on everything like Gil's Iowa trip, SDCC announcements, Eric Adams, Black Panther Wakanda Forever, Marvel Comics Judgement Day, Will Smith, Chris Rock, The Bear, Gray Man, Angel, China Girl, Marvel Phase 5 & 6, Uncoupled, What We Do in the Shadows and much much more. This podcast is sponsored by Discount Comic Book Services http://www.dcbservice.com/index.aspx Instock Trades http://www.instocktrades.com/ This podcast is part of the TaylorNetwork which is a home to many great podcasts all available on Taylornetwork feed on Amazon Music, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher radio and also google play

durée : 00:04:21 - Tubes N' Co - par : Rebecca Manzoni, Ilinca Negulesco - C'était un jour de septembre 1977 à 6h du matin. Higelin connaît des doutes, sans chiqué, qui le mettent au tapis. "C'est de la merde". C'est ce que Jacques Higelin a dit à l'écoute du disque. La chanson "Pars" fait partie de l'album "No Man's land". Au départ, la chanson est une transe musicale de 20 minutes. Mais Laurent Thibaut, qui supervise les enregistrements fait des coupes. Et il met des bougies partout dans le studio, dans l'espoir que Higelin soit bien.En 1977, il a déjà eu plusieurs vies : dans le jazz, la chanson d'avant-garde, dans le rock, dont il a posé les fondamentaux, en France.Et là, au milieu des sons synthétiques, il reprend son accordéon pour une sorte de tango triste.Jusqu'à ce moment, où on entend une sorte de courte échelle qui le hisse.La scène se passe au Château d'Hérouville dans le Val de MarneLe Château d'Hérouville est le premier studio résidentiel au monde. Donc un lieu de vie où on enregistre et Higelin est installé dans la bergerie avec son fils et sa femme, Kuêlan Nguyen.La légende dit que Kuêlan a inspiré la chanson "China Girl" à Iggy Pop. "Pars" est le récit d'une rupture. Entre Jacques Higelin et cette femme.C'est LA déclaration d'amour ultimeSouffrir, laisser l'autre partir, et ajouter : "Quoiqu'il arrive, je serai toujours avec toi".Dans ces années 1977/1978, Alain Souchon chante "Allo Maman bobo". Et la presse fait sa une, je cite sur "L'homme nouveau". Comprenez : l'homme sensible.Et Jacques Higelin dans tout ça ? Un cour brisé. Mais jamais plaintif.Du panache et les yeux plein de larmes. Un chevalier magnifique.La maison de disque Pathé Marconi, trouve, je cite : "La musique insignifiante et le texte débile"."Pars" sort en 45 tours au cour de l'été 1978. Et la chanson passe à la radio.Et Jacques Higelin vit son tout premier tube, il a 38 ansBien des années plus tard, le 24 octobre 2015, Jacques Higelin est sur la scène de la Philharmonie de Paris.Beaucoup savent que ce sera le dernier concert de sa vie. "Pars" est donc la dernière chanson qu'il a interprétée sur scène, avec ses enfants qui le rejoignent."Pars", c'est l'histoire d'un homme amoureux qui accepte la liberté d'une femme."Pars", c'est tout ceux qui aiment et qui tentent d'accepter le départ d'un vivant. Vaille que vaille. Dans un banquet ultime.Le dernier vers magnifique de cette chanson dit : "Et reviens moi. Vite." - réalisé par : Khoï NGUYEN

David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and visions of swastikas.

Bekannter Weise haben die beiden Halbzeit Protagonist:innen Raoul Schoregge und Inga Dietrich für ihren HALBZEIT Podcast die neue Rubrik ICH TRINKE OUZO - WAS MACHST DU SO entwickelt, um also auch in unser aller persönlicher Geschichten mehr Nachhaltigkeit zu bekommen. Unter diesem Motto interviewen sich Inga und Raoul unter anderem gegenseitig wie auch beide zusammen interessante Dritte oder Vierte. In den zukünftigen Episoden folgen also Gespräche über besondere Projekte aus den Bereichen Gott, Kunst, Theater, Politik und Welt. Im Mittelpunkt dieser aktuellen Folge steht Raouls neues Projekt China Girl, welches er mit dem Impresario Hermjo Klein verfolgt. Eine Show des Chinesischen Nationalcircus mit der Musik von David Bowie, welche schon zu Beginn der Pandemie hätte eigentlich Premiere haben sollen und sich bis jetzt irgendwie über die Runden gerettet hat um hoffentlich endlich im Herbst vor den verdienten vollen Theatern spielen zu können. Im intimen Plausch der Freunde gelingt es Inga Raoul in Plauderlaune über Inhalte, Hintergründe, Visionen, Erfolge und Niederlagen der letzten beiden Jahre mit diesem Projekt zu bringen. Der Zuhörer bekommt Einblicke in die Geschichten hinter der Geschichte. Inga fragt vorsichtig und bewegt nach, während Raoul sein Herz ausschüttet. Ganz im Dienste des Herren, der in diesem Fall ein chinesisches Mädchen ist. https://www.chinagirl-show.comhttps://www.raoulschoregge.de

Time for more wonderful plants with our Get Gardening co-conspirator Ian Roofe. He's Alan's right-hand man at East Ruston Old Vicarage and, at home, gardens a small plot in Norfolk (alongside stashing quite a lot of plants at his parents garden!) This week we've got a wonderful mix from shrubs to bulbs to Roses... PLANT LIST Deutzia gracilis 'Nikko' Camassia quamash Camassia leichtlinii subsp. leichtlinii Haloragis erecta 'Wellington Bronze' Hardenbergia violacea Acanthus sennii Lonicera x 'Clavey's Dwarf' Clematis viticella Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum 'Mariesii' Cornus 'Eddie's White Wonder' Cornus kousa 'Venus' Cornus kousa 'China Girl' Rosa 'Climbing Pompon de Paris' Clematis tangutica Dianthus 'Chomley Farran' Trochodendron aralioides Schefflera taiwaniana Rhaphithamnus spinosus Rosa banksiae 'Lutea' Rosa moyesii 'Geranium' Euphorbia characias Aconitum 'Bressingham Spire' Cerinthe major 'Purpurascens' Rosa Mundi Trachycarpus fortunei Ferula communis

Invité : Antoine Izambard, journaliste au magazine « Challenges », co-auteur avec Franck Renaud de « Trahisons à la DGSE » (Stock, 2021) 2:30 La genèse de l'enquête, et l'histoire d'Henri en Chine 24:30 La DGSE et le procès 29:30 Le retard français sur le renseignement chinois 38:00 La montée des opérations offensives chinoises et leur panel de méthodes 49:00 Points de comparaison avec les opérations russes et américaines 56:00 La montée en puissance du renseignement français et ses limites Extrait audio : David Bowie, « China Girl » sur l'album « Let's dance » (1983)

Visual artist Rowan Harrison joins me to put on our red shoes and dance the blues to David Bowie's 1983 post-disco, new wave, funk-pop masterpiece, Let's Dance. From Bowie's desire to make a solid dance record to his use of music videos as social commentary, we chat all about the album's infectious rhythms and massive success that led to Bowie's "Phil Collins years" that followed. Sharp suits and pompadours are not required, but they're definitely encouraged as we discuss an artist's evolution, the struggle to stay relevant, the challenges of innovation, and how we define mainstream in hindsight. Get to know Rowan Harrison: Rowan is an award-winning visual artist, arts instructor, and presenter of cultural affiliated arts programs working in the mediums of clay, illustrations and mixed media. He has been combining the ideals of passion, apprenticeship, and patience, presenting his artwork rooted in his Native American cultural heritage to communities and cities locally and abroad. Rowan is also an enthusiast and connoisseur of all things visual arts, music, film and popular culture.  Two Tribes Pottery Two Tribes pottery gallery Two Tribes pen and ink illustrations gallery Two Tribes other artwork gallery Take a class with Rowan Instagram @two_tribes_pottery -- Modern Love (Official Music Video) China Girl (Official Music Video) Let's Dance (Official Music Video) David Bowie gig memory map How David Bowie's ‘China Girl' used racism to fight racism K.I.T. www.theuntitledgenxpodcast.com Support the pod on Patreon! Instagram.com/theuntitledgenxpodcast Facebook.com/theuntitledgenxpodcast untitledgenxpodcast@gmail.com 

Oggi ascoltiamo la storia di un uomo navigato e preparato alla guerra, ma indifeso davanti alle strategie manipolatorie dei social.

David Bowie's China Girl is all woman now and still as fabulous as ever. Having always felt incredibly lucky, Geeling told Penny tales of landing the biggest gig of her life rolling naked with the Starman in the surf, starring as Jasmine Sage in the epic 80's glamour TV show Gloss and her enduring roles as a hospitality doyenne on the Auckland nightlife scene.  They chat her experience of a whirlwind romance with Bowie, of her nighttime hot flushes and of just how many frogs are looking to be kissed on Bumble. (Enjoy the restaurant noises in the background.)  Petition here: https://www.change.org/p/pharmac-fund-utrogestan-to-give-women-back-their-hormonesSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/pennyashton)

Clowns, Circus und China - diese drei Wörter mit "C" haben das Leben von Raoul Schoregge geprägt. Eigentlich sind es sogar vier. Denn als Clown "Coreggio" stand der gebürtige Münsterländer schon auf vielen Bühnen – darunter im Zirkus Krone und bei Sarrasani. Seit mehr als 20 Jahren ist er zudem Leiter des Chinesischen Nationalcircus. Die aktuelle Show heißt "China Girl". Diese Podcastepisode steht unter der Creative Commons-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0

Critics Inkoo Kang and Daniel Schroeder discuss two of Jane Campion's least regarded works, Top of the Lake: China Girl and The Portrait of a Lady. We talk about our unexpected disappointment with China Girl, how Campion didn't seem to care about telling the stories of women of color, and Gwendoline Christie's height. We were pleasantly surprised by Portrait, which when compared to her other less-than-loved movies doesn't stand out, but contains some consistently relevant Campion themes and a bunch of film school flourishes we couldn't help but love.Email us at allaboutfilmpod@gmail.com.

UNLOCK THE FULL EPISODE HERE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/59799824 MERCH: www.teepublic.com/stores/sleazoids?ref_id=17667 WEBSITE: www.sleazoidspodcast.com/ Pod Twitter: twitter.com/sleazoidspod Pod Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/SLEAZOIDS/ Josh's Twitter: twitter.com/thejoshl Josh's Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/thejoshl/ Jamie's Twitter: twitter.com/jamiemilleracas Jamie's Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/jamiemiller/

Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is released on 10 December - the director's long-delayed, big-budget remake of the influential screen classic, first released 60 years ago. Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode explore the cinematic connections sparked by this ground breaking musical film. West Side Story transplants Romeo & Juliet's star-crossed lovers and warring tribes from Renaissance Italy to mid-20th century Manhattan. Mark looks back at a couple of other movie takes on Shakespeare's love story with the help of their directors - Abel Ferrara on lost genre gem China Girl and Baz Luhrmann on his iconic 90s Romeo +Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. And Ellen investigates the authenticity of the gritty street musical, from West Side Story to YouTube hit Shiro's Story, with the help of actors Rita Moreno and Joivan Wade, and film historian Martha Shearer. We also hear what Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and national treasure Miriam Margolyes have been watching, as they share their Viewing Notes. Screenshot is Radio 4's guide through the ever-expanding universe of the moving image. Every episode, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode journey through the main streets and back roads connecting film, television and streaming over the last hundred years. Producer: Jane Long A Prospect Street production for BBC Radio 4

Ken is joined by "No Dogs in Space" host Carolina Hidalgo to discuss David Bowie and Iggy Pop's time in Berlin with a focus on 1977 and the release of FOUR landmark albums in ONE year. What led up to the pair needing to escape from LA? Why was Bowie so obsessed with the occult and black magic? Who exactly did Iggy write "China Girl" about? How did Brian Eno help create The Berlin Trilogy? It's a good one! Listen up and find out!

Barry and Abigail discuss Let's Dance by David Bowie and sample Golden Hour, Bavarian Dreams, Galaxy Starship, and Mk Ultra Cherry from Cultured Collective Brewing in Orange Park, Florida. There was a great debate about the song China Girl by David Bowie and Iggy Pop, which was a rerecording of China Girl by Iggy Pop. Barry bought Bowie's follow-up album, Tonight, based on the single Blue Jean, but was otherwise unimpressed. This was the last new David Bowie album Barry would buy until Blackstar, which was released just days before his death in 2016. Up next… See the World by Brett Dennen Follow Barry or Abigail on Untappd to see what we're drinking when we're not on mic! Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Website | Email us | Virtual Jukebox --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pops-on-hops-podcast/message

Welcome to The 80's Montage! (music, mateys and cool shit from the 80s) Your Hosts Jay Jovi & Sammy HardOn, singers from Australia's 80's tribute band Rewind 80's. We take you back to living in the 80's: music, artists, TV commercials and video clips. Episode 85: Turning Japanese - Asian Influences on Music in the 80's.  It's a ripper! Please rate, review and enjoy! Music licensed by APRA/AMCOS Theme music ©2019 M. Skerman see Facebook for links to videos & songs mentioned in this episode! Email: planet80sproductions@gmail.com Rewind 80's Band : www.rewind80sband.com Facebook : the80smontagepodcast twitter: 80_montage instagram : the80smontage Links from Episode 85: Turning Japanese - Asian Influences on Music in the 80's.Patreon Link With Thanks x https://www.patreon.com/the80smontagepodcast www.the80smontage.comLinks: Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Theme Original)https://youtu.be/LF9_9MZyQGo#CultureClub #MissMeBlind #VevoCulture Club - Miss Me Blind (Official Video)https://youtu.be/hFVuuRxM2VU#SiouxsieBanshees #HongKongGarden #VevoSiouxsie And The Banshees - Hong Kong Garden (Official Video)https://youtu.be/Y-l9GQJRl9Y#MurrayHead #OneNightInBangkok #VevoMurray Head - One Night In Bangkok "From CHESS" (Official Video)https://youtu.be/rgc_LRjlbTUAlphaville - Big In Japan (Official Music Video)https://youtu.be/tl6u2NASUzUJapan feat Ryuichi Sakamoto - Ghostshttps://youtu.be/n0hISrMV1W4Official video for China Girl by David Bowie.https://youtu.be/_YC3sTbAPcUChomp. Australian TV ad 1987https://youtu.be/BQUF100biQQDuran Duran - Save A Prayer (Official Music Video)https://youtu.be/6Uxc9eFcZyMKabuki the 3rd single from the debut album by Oz band Geisha 1985https://youtu.be/q510LYJOxqkThanks for listening! www.the80smontage.com

The media needs a villain and white men seem pretty good at this moment.  The latest claims are racism and increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.  What support do they have for these claims?  And are white guys being absolved by a sexual addiction defense?

Links www.youtube.com/mrparka https://www.instagram.com/mrparka/ https://twitter.com/mrparka00 http://www.screamingtoilet.com/dvd--blu-ray https://www.facebook.com/screamingpotty/ https://www.facebook.com/mrparka http://shutupbrandon.podbean.com/ https://www.facebook.com/screamingpotty/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/shut-up-brandon-podcast/id988229934?mt=2 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/podbean-70/shut-up-brandon-podcast Time Stamps Within a Minute “China Girl” Review– 0:36 “Streets of Vengeance” Review – 4:11 “Street Mobster” Review – 9:15 “Combat Shock” Review – 12:58 “Old Man of the Rooks” Review – 19:09 “House of the Dead” Review – 23:30 VHS Voyage “Attack of the Beast Creatures” Review – 29:25 “Madness of Many” Pick a Movie – 34:10 Pick a Movie Winner Drawing– 38:00 Q&A – 38:35 Update – 42:02 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1599563112/slaughterhouse-slumber-party-feature-film   Video Version – https://youtu.be/4F_LR35Gjsk                                                 Links of Interest More Info, Ask a Question, Enter Pick a movie, Written Review of “Streets of Vengeance” –  https://www.screamingtoilet.com/dvd--blu-ray/mrparkas-video-reviews-for-the-week-of-august-4th-episode-64   “China Girl” Vudu – https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/China-Girl/75140          Slasher Video Website – http://slashervideo.com/   Olive Films Website – https://olivefilms.com/   “Streets of Vengeance” Blu-Ray – https://olivefilms.com/product/streets-of-vengeance/   Arrow Video – https://arrowfilms.com/   “Street Mobster” Blu-Ray – https://mvdshop.com/products/street-mobster-blu-ray   Severin Films – https://severin-films.com/   “Combat Shock” Blu-Ray – https://severin-films.com/shop/combat-shock-blu-ray-package/   “Old Man of the Rooks” YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAn5LA97fgY&list=PLRq5RX2Bv_FmmWBCifzZyQS738zRZrTKG   Vinegar Syndrome Website – https://vinegarsyndrome.com/                          “House of the Dead” Blu-Ray – https://vinegarsyndrome.com/shop/house-of-the-dead-aka-alien-zone-slipcover/   “Attack of the