Podcast appearances and mentions of Colin Higgins

To put a finishing touch on this year's Revenge Month, our 661st episode has some fun with Colin Higgins' feminist comedy where a mediocre man gets major comeuppance for treating the women in his office so badly. If only Nine To Five was as funny as its reputation says it is. The tonal problems are partly because this started out as a serious look at how hard women have it in the workplace. Flawed or not, we DID enjoy the flick. It helps that Higgins knows how to tell a good story and his 3 stars make a great team. Jane Fonda was at her peak of stardom in this period (although she gave herself the worst role of the 3 main characters), while Lily Tomlin is the ultra-competent heart of the group. It's Dolly Parton's charm and effervescence that steal the movie though. So don't poison your boss' coffee, even if he IS a sexist, lying, egotistical, hypocritical bigot. Just dial up Have You Ever Seen's back-and-forth about Nine To Five. Well, Actually: at the 15:40 mark, the line "Roz imagines" should have been "Vi imagines". Pour yourself a cup of ambition known as Sparkplug Coffee and get yourself a 20% discount by using our "HYES" promo code. Go to "sparkplug.coffee/hyes". Rate our podcast and write a review, but also subscribe. Find us on YouTube (@hyesellis in the 'Tube's search bar) and subscribe/comment/like there as well. We'd be happy to get an email from you. It's "haveyoueverseenpodcast@gmail.com". On social media, Ryan is "@moviefiend51" on Twi-X and "ryan-ellis" on Bluesky, while Bev is "@bevellisellis" on Twi-X and "bevellisellis" on Bluesky.

Gruber, Georg www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Lesart

Gruber, Georg www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Lesart

Gruber, Georg www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Lesart

Hello, and welcome to an all-new Films for the Void, episode #92! In this episode, Eric and Landon take a look at two very different films about sex work: Colin Higgins' 1982 film THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS and Sean Baker's 2024 film ANORA - all on the latest episode of Films for the Void!TIME STAMPS00:04:48 Anora00:23:01 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas01:08:40 Eric's Recommendation for Next EpisodeTWITTER: @films_void$3/MONTH PATREON: patreon.com/films_voidLANDON'S TWITTER @igotdefevermanLANDON'S INSTAGRAM @duhfeverLANDON'S LETTERBOXD @landondefeverERIC'S TWITTER @ericwiththehairERIC'S INSTAGRAM @ericwiththebeardERIC'S LETTERBOXD @ericwiththehairArtwork by Annie CurleTheme Music by Meghan GoveEdited by Landon Defever

Writer and musician Tara Giancaspro joins Kat and A.C. for a rootin' tootin' rip-roarin' review of Colin Higgins' 1982 movie musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. We get lost in the fun and charm of the music, dancing, and wigs! We delight in the beauty of Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds! And we get caught up in a discussion of whether a movie like this could be made today, with its light-hearted treatment of sex workers being unfairly persecuted. Plus, an unhinged installment of the "what's wrong with me" game returns, as we decide which famous men we'd let watch our drinks.Discussed in this episode:Feminist Frequency Radio's 2020 episode about 9 to 5DC-based harm reduction organization HIPSFind Tara:twitter.com/sweatylamarrtaragiancaspro.substack.comsweatylamarrmusic.bandcamp.comFind Kat:twitter.com/kat_ex_machinaletterboxd.com/katexmachinaFind AC:instagram.com/aclambertyletterboxd.com/aclambertyFind Us:Support our PatreonOur WebsiteSubscribe to FFR on Apple PodcastsTwitterInstagramNEW: Letterboxd

Join hosts Nathan Blackwell and Krissy Lenz as they dive into the groundbreaking 1980 workplace comedy 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton in her film debut. This feminist revenge fantasy became the first female-led film to break $100 million at the box office, but does it hold up today?The hosts explore how the film starts as a grounded workplace drama about three women dealing with their sexist boss (Dabney Coleman) before taking several unexpected turns into screwball comedy territory. After a marijuana-fueled evening of revenge fantasies, the story evolves into an outrageous caper involving suspected poisoning, stolen corpses, and an elaborate kidnapping scheme.While the movie's pacing occasionally drags and some scenes feel theatrical, the incredible chemistry between the three leads keeps the film engaging. The hosts give particular praise to Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin's performances, noting how naturally they take to their roles. The film's workplace reform message - including equal pay, flexible hours, and daycare - remains surprisingly relevant, even if some of the comedy feels dated.Key Topics Discussed:The iconic opening credits sequence set to Dolly Parton's 9 to 5How the film shifts from office satire to madcap comedyEach character's elaborate fantasy sequence for getting revenge on their bossThe progressive workplace changes implemented by the womenSterling Hayden's cameo as the Chairman of the BoardThe film's influence on workplace comedy genreDeep cut recommendations including Sorry to Bother You and the British version of The OfficeDiscussion of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin's later collaboration on Grace and FrankieNathan and Krissy rate the film 7 out of 10 "typewriters," agreeing that while some scenes drag and the tone shifts dramatically, 9 to 5 remains an entertaining time capsule of 1980s workplace culture and feminist comedy. Whether you're revisiting this classic or discovering it for the first time, there's plenty to appreciate in this pioneering film that helped pave the way for women-led comedies. --We couldn't do this without your support of The Most Excellent 80s Movies Podcast! Thank you!Join now for: $5/Month • $55/year • Learn More

Brandon welcome Emmett Stanton back to the podcast to take a look at one of the most successful comedies of the 1980s. 9 to 5 placed a comedic spotlight on the plight of working women in America. The film, directed by Colin Higgins, segues from satire to full out farce. Brandon and Emmett discuss the powerhouse trio of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton (in her film debut). They also pay tribute to the late, great Dabney Coleman whose portrayal of Mr. Hart walks the line between villain and sympathetic scoundrel. 

Sexist, Egotistical, Lying, Hypocritical, Bigot Brandon welcomes Emmett Stanton back to the podcast to take a look at one of the most successful comedies of the 1980s. 9 to 5 placed a comedic spotlight on the plight of working women in America. The film, directed by Colin Higgins, segues from satire to full out farce. … Continue reading Ep. 242- 9 to 5 →

Colin Higgins has just arrived back home after an incredible performance at the Paralympic Games in Paris. We'll hear about his experience.

Two days to go before the Paralympic Games begin in Paris and five athletes from this province will compete, including Rothesay's Colin Higgins. We'll speak with Colin about his hopes as a member of Canada's men's wheelchair basketball team.

Written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby, scored by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Harold and Maude is a wonderful piece of counter-culture from early New Hollywood, and honestly, a better ode to freedom than most of what came out of the "America Lost and Found: The BBS Story" boxset of foundational New Hollywood works we watched a few months ago.

A book editor witnesses a murder during a cross-country trip, and is plunged into a Hitchcockian world of murder and intrigue. Eventually Richard Pryor shows up, and we get some unfortunate blackface. What can I say, it's the 1970s. Starring Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh, Patrick McGoohan, Ned Beatty, Ray Walston, Scatman Crothers, and Richard Kiel. Written by Colin Higgins. Directed by Arthur Hiller.

What do you get if you combine the most divisive woman in 1970s America, the least divisive woman in modern America, and a comedy legend? You get an absolute treat, at least if it goes as well as 9 to 5 did. Colin Higgins's film brings together Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin in a class-conscious romp about three women who kidnap their sexist pig of a boss and find the office runs a lot better without him. It's basically The Communist Manifesto with a thumping C&W theme song. This week, Graham treats himself after self-harming with The Idol by getting back together with Jeff to talk about this lasting classic of early '80s Hollywood. Prepare for an in-depth comparison of the many beards of Sterling Hayden, an appreciation of Jane Fonda's shrewdly against-type performance, and our pitch for a Dolly Parton horror movie. Patreon - what a way to make a living! Subscribe today and you can hear Graham and Aidan talking about Fred Durst's The Fanatic in an exclusive Pop Screen episode, plus our end-of-month round-up podcast Last Night..., written reviews of The X-Files and Red Dwarf, classic far eastern genre cinema reconsidered in Fantastic Asia, and more. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for more. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pop-screen/message

We have been accused of, and admitted to, not giving the French League the attention it deserves. Since this season began, Colin Higgins hasn't left us much of a choice but to take notice.The key off-season signing for Les Aigles du Velay last summer, Colin has helped to establish them as the class of the domestic league and be dominant in their EuroCup campaign so far.The Canadian forward turns up in his jeans, wool socks and work boots, in the hopes that he won't get roped into anything. But we won't let him leave without getting the insider's perspective on a EuroCup 2 Finals that will see his team take on Hannover, Cantù and French rival Le Cannet just to make it into the semi-finals.Available now, wherever you get your podcasts! Get full access to Bench Units at benchunits.substack.com/subscribe

In which the Mister and I check out HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971), which we caught on the TCM app.  From director Hal Ashby and writer Colin Higgins, the film tells the story of Harold (Bud Cort), a rich, young man who is obsessed with death and creating macabre scenes to elicit a response from his mother (played by Vivian Pickles).  He meets with a shrink regularly and indulges in his favorite pastime, attending funerals.  It is here that he meets 79 year old Maude (Ruth Gordon), a woman who may not have had the easiest life but who has nonetheless grabbed life with both hands and really lived it to the fullest.  The more that Harold gets to know her, the more we as a viewer see him change.  At its core its a love story about very different people finding each other and forming a wondrous bond and enjoying their precious time together.  In keeping with tonight's theme of very different takes on the love story, this film clocks in at 1 h 31 m and is rated  PG.  Please note there are SPOILERS in this review. This episode of the podcast is dedicated to one of my oldest friends, a fantastic woman, an awesome friend and all around A1 human being - the lovely and amazing Suzette on her belated birthday. Opening intro music: GOAT by Wayne Jones, courtesy of YouTube Audio Library  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jokagoge/support

We begin Romance Month with one of the most unconventional romantic films of all time with one hell of a soundtrack: Harold and Maude. Adam's Corners Adam Long joins the episode to talk all about Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, and that soundtrack by Cat Stevens.Written by Colin Higgins as his senior film thesis, it follows the titular Harold and Maude, one obsessed with death, one obsessed with living life, as they fall in love. To say its an unconventional relationship may be to understate the genuine charm and magic of the film and its leads. For more Kulturecast episodes and podcasts guaranteed to be your new favorite audio obsession, check out Weirding Way Media at weirdingwaymedia.com.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.

On Season 9, Episode 5 of Paid in Puke, we're getting friendly with Colin Higgins' ("9 to 5") 1982 musical, "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas", based on the Broadway show by Larry L. King and Peter Masterson, which was in turn based on a real story published in Playboy! It stars Dolly Parton, Theresa Merritt, Dom DeLuise, Burt Reynolds, and a host of talented triple threats credited as "Chicken Ranch Girl".  There are, of course, some Hot Probs, but Dolly ain't one. Our National Treasure holds the floor, and even sneaks in her own song to round out the catchy soundtrack. Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast? You'll never guess which problematic film critic had some truly revealing criticisms about this film upon release (JK, it's always the same guy). Come on down and hang out with us as we sing the praises of the singular talent that is Dolly Parton.   

Elric, Brian and Phil dig into the January New Beverly Calendar with a sensational slate of films, including bringing some of our most requested crowd-pleasers back by popular demand, also celebrating the classic collaborations of Bette Davis and director William Wyler, and the comedies of superstar Dolly Parton with filmmaker Colin Higgins, plus dazzling Busby Berkeley musical spectaculars, vibrant I.B. Technicolor favorites, a tribute to Jeff Burr, a 5-film marathon of the complete Twilight Saga, and much, much more! Check out all things New Beverly here: https://thenewbev.com/ If You Enjoy the show, You can help support us at Pure Cinema by going to: https://www.patreon.com/purecinemapod

Wheelchair basketball player Colin Higgins took home a bronze medal from the Parapan Am Games in Chile. We'll hear more about that experience.

Welcome to another episode of The comedians paradise, an interview podcast focused on giving an inside scoop of being a comedian from mavericks across the comedy world, todays guest is the magnificent Colin Higgins. Colin Higgins is a rising star from the Glasgow comedy scene and has performed UK wide. He delights audience's with his cutting observations, brutal honesty and self deprecating style. He has also featured on the Billy Connolly docuseries 'Billy and Us' BBC Scotland. Recently he has had his Will Smith moment, where he was punched by an audience member at the Edinburgh fringe, here is an overview of what we discussed:[[02:37]] Being a comedy whore [[03:13]][[07:46]] Are all comics going to need another job on the side? [[09:54]][[09:54]] Catching paedos to [[28:31]][[28:46]] How he got started in comedy [[32:33]][[33:06]] When I got punched in the mouth by a woman to [[46:27]][[47:09]] Playing pianos [[50:35]][[50:47]] Why the intent and the manner in which things are done is important [[57:51]][[63:47]] Comedy being very cutthroat [[64:31]]If you would like to know more on Marvin, you can follow him through his Linktree at https://linktr.ee/theflopmaster. #comedypodcast #standupcomedy #podcastvideo #standupcomedian You can follow this podcast on Youtube at https://bit.ly/41LWDAq, Spotify at https://spoti.fi/3oLrmyU and Apple podcasts at https://apple.co/3LEkr3E.

In this episode of Drive-In Double Feature Podcast, hosts Nathan and Ryan take a journey into the delightful blend of comedy and mystery in "Foul Play" (1978). Directed by Colin Higgins, this classic film stars Goldie Hawn as a librarian who becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue, assassination plots, and romantic escapades. Join us as we explore the film's witty humor, memorable characters, and the on-screen chemistry between Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. Discover how "Foul Play" brought laughter and suspense to the big screen and continues to be a beloved classic. Get ready for a discussion that's equal parts fun and mystery as we unravel the charm of "Foul Play."

Today, we cover the love letter to Alfred Hitchcock, Foul Play, written and directed by Colin Higgins, starring Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase, Burgess Meredith, Rachel Roberts, Eugene Roche, and many, many more. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thegenxfiles/support

With her reality comedy I Have Nothing now streaming on Crave, Baroness Von Sketch Show's Carolyn Taylor is here to tackle Colin Higgins' 9 to 5, the 1980 workplace comedy smash that pitted office workers Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton against Dabney Coleman's swaggering jerk of a boss. Your genial host Norm Wilner really wanted to sing the song.

9 to 5 is a film starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. It is the tale of three oppressed female employees of a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot and how they find a way to turn the tables on him. The film is directed by Colin Higgins and is quite interesting to watch today.   Timecodes: 00:00 - Introduction :18 - The Film stats 6:12 - Gender dynamics and workplace toxicity 15:55 - Gender roles and power dynamics 20:35 Film analysis & writing 29:07 - Head Trauma 29:41 - Smoochie, Smoochie, Smoochie 29:47 - Driving Review 33:11 - To the Numbers References from the episode: Lily driving Behind the Scenes clip Jane Fonda Documentary Dolly Parton Documentary Lily Tomlin Documentary To guess the theme of this month's films you can email christi@dodgemediaproductions.com You can guess as many times as you would like. Guess the Monthly Theme for 2023 Contest - More Info Here Next week's film will be October Sky (1999) Subscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes! Thanks for tuning into today's episode of Dodge Movie Podcast with your host, Mike and Christi Dodge. If you enjoyed this episode, please head over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe and leave a rating and review. Special thanks to Melissa Villagrana our social media posts. Don't forget to visit our website, connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. Email at christi@dodgemediaproductions.com   To get 2 months free on Libsyn click here: https://signup.libsyn.com/?promo_code=SMOOCHIE

Take a hit of that Maui Wowie, and pour yourself a cup on ambition, because we made it to 200! We invited over author Helen Ellis (American Housewife, Kiss Me In the Coral Lounge) to celebrate the occasion, and watched 9-5! Staring the dynmatic trio Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton it's one of the most beloved feminst texts of cinema history. Delivering major laughs, and biting social commentary, these three ladies are our Avengers of the 1980s. We talk about the pussy bow situation on Jane, Lily's pitch perfect comedic timing, and how Dolly knocks this debut performance out of the park. Seriously, some of Dolly's lines still have us cackling. Dolly saying,  "Could you come back her for a second?", or her hog tying Dabney Coleman, are chef's kiss perfection. We talk about the incredibly satisfying set ups and pay offs of Patrica Resnick and Colin Higgins's script, and what has and hasn't changed about this tale of workplace revenge. Are your work bestie really your true besties unless they co-conspire with you to hide the body?  Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! www.patreon.com/moviesthatmadeusgay Facebook/Instagram: @moviesthatmadeusgay Twitter: @MTMUGPod Scott Youngbauer: Twitter @oscarscott / Instagram @scottyoungballer Peter Lozano: Twitter/Instagram @peterlasagna

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with filmmaker Amy Scott, discussing her terrific documentary, “Hal,” which takes a deep dive into the life and films of director Hal Ashby (“Harold and Maude,” “Being There,” Coming Home,” “Shampoo”). LINKS A Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6 Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/ Amy Scott Website: https://www.amyelizabethscott.com/ “Hal” Documentary website: https://hal.oscilloscope.net/ “Hal” Trailer: https://youtu.be/GBGfKan2qAg “Harold and Maude Two-Year Anniversary” Documentary: https://youtu.be/unRuCOECvZM Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/ Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastAmy Scott Transcript First, I want to say thank you for making the movie and thank you for making such a great movie because he totally deserved it. I would always wonder why of all the directors of the 70s and 80s, he was never really heralded the way he should have been. I think part of it has to do with that he had no discernible style. So, you couldn't really pick him for something. But before we dive into that, tell me a little bit about your background before you made Hal?Amy Scott: Well, I'm from Oklahoma. I moved to Chicago, out of college and in college, we studied a lot of, I had a great professor at ODU at the University of Oklahoma. I don't think he's there anymore. But he really hipped us to the coolest documentaries. I had no idea that you could be a documentary filmmaker, like from Chris Marker to the 7-Up series to Hands on a Hard Body. It was just a really great, great, well-rounded Film and Media Program. Anyway, I moved to Chicago. I wanted to be a director and a DP, but I fell down, I had gotten a job at the University of Chicago. I think I faked my way into it. I was supposed to start on a Monday, and I fell on the ice and broke my arm on a Friday. So I was like, “I can't shoot. I can't film. I can't use my arm to film and hold the camera. I need to learn how to edit. So I learned how to edit with my right hand, and I loved it. And then I just did that for like 10 years. Well, I mean, I still do it. But it was like this accidental career path.You're an accidental editor.Amy Scott: An accidental editor. That became something that later, I just valued as such an important skill set. I use it now. I have wonderful editors that I work with. But we speak the same language. And I think with the story structure, that you have an eye for things in the edit bay and now it really, really helps my ability to break down a three-act structure or figure out where the narrative arc is, and things like that. I think would have taken me a lot longer, had I not fallen and broken my arm.It was sort of a similar path for Hal Ashby, starting in editing.Amy Scott: Totally. I loved his films and then when I read Nick Dawson's book, and I started to learn more about him, I really, really connected with him. Because of things that he would say about filmmaking and editing and being in the edit bay and being obsessed with every frame. I felt like, being seen and heard. Like, “Oh, this is how I feel about it, too. I don't feel like such a freak of nature, and lots of people feel this way.” I really connected with Hal and he didn't make The Landlord I believe until he was 40 years old. He was up there. Amy Scott: Yeah, up there. For a first-time filmmaker, that's a late start.Amy Scott: And that was about the same age that I made the Hal movie. What was your first experience with a Hal Ashby movie?Amy Scott: The first film that I saw that I can remember was with my friend Jason in college. I was watching Truffaut and Cassavetes and so I thought that I had a very well-rounded understanding of the new Hollywood. And my friend Jason said, “Have you ever seen Harold and Maude?” I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a couple years older, and he was like, “Oh, honey, you're gonna skip school today. We're gonna watch it.” And I swear to God, we watched it. I couldn't believe what it was. I couldn't believe I'd never seen it. It somehow gone past me. As soon as it was over, I was like, “Stop. Start it again.” We have to rewatch it. We where there for like eight hours, watching it on a loop. David Russell compares it to The Catcher in the Rye as a sort of like rite of passage for people at that age. It hit me right straight through the heart. And then from there, I think I saw The Landlord, someone had screen of The Landlord in Oklahoma City. And I was like, oh my god, this is incredible.I live in Minneapolis, where Harold and Maude ran at The Westgate theater for two and a half years. I saw the movie quite a bit there. And then, because I was in a film program, and knew someone who knew the film critic for the local paper, when Ruth and Bud came to town for the two-year anniversary, he sorts of dragged me along with him. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort and hung out a little bit with Ruth Gordon. I made a little documentary on Super 8mm of my perspective on their experiences. I was 15 years old or something and although I knew their itinerary, I couldn't drive. And so I would go to the TV station and shoot some stuff there with them and then they were on to something else. I had to hop on a bus to keep up with them.Amy Scott: That's incredible.Yes, my only regret was on that when I had dinner with Bud that I didn't ask better questions. I was sort of starstruck and there's a lot of question. I would ask him now—that I've tried to ask him—but you know, he's not too communicative.Amy Scott: Yeah. That's incredible that you that you have that footage and I would love to see it.It was really, really fun and interesting. Ruth Gordon was very much Ruth Gordon, very much Maude. She didn't suffer fools. So, you've seen Harold and Maude, seen The Landlord. At what point did you decide that a documentary had to be made?Amy Scott: Well, okay, I was pregnant with my first child, and was finishing up Nick Dawson's book on Hal, you know, on Hal's life. And I thought, I just couldn't believe there was a documentary. But this is before the market became oversaturated with a story about everyone's life. At the time, I just thought, oh my gosh, there's so much here. This guy, his films should be really celebrated. And he should be more known and revered in the canon of American 70s New Hollywood, because he's so influential.And that's why it was important that we include David O Russell and Adam McKay, and Allison Anders, Judd Apatow. They could draw a direct connections, like the film family tree. When you see the wide shots in Harold and Maude, you think of Wes Anderson. Or, you know, the music, you think of David O Russell. I mean, his influence was everywhere. I started to connect the dots and I thought, oh, my gosh, we've got to, we've got to make a film here. But I'd never done anything like that. I had directed smaller documentaries. I tried to make a film about this band called The Red Crayola and that was a hilarious attempt on my part. To try to chase them around the globe and on no money. That was my only experience outside of editing. So, fortunately, I had hooked up with my producing partners that I still work with now. I just met them at the time and they hired me to edit some cat food commercials. So it was editing Friskies or Purina, I don't know what it was. It was just looking at cats all day.And I was about to give birth but I was working trying to lock down the rights And the rights came through one afternoon and I just pulled them (the producers) in and I was like, let's do this together. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but it was so great and so fun. We approached it, like, all hands-on deck, and we were a little family making this thing. So, that spirit has continued, thank goodness, because of what we put into the Ashby movie.What do you think were his unique qualities as a director?Amy Scott: Gosh, so much. I just think he really had an eye. He could see stories. You said something earlier, that all of his films are not the same and therefore it's hard to go, oh, he's this style of filmmaker. But the thing that they all have in common is that he has a very real and raw approach at looking at humanity. Sort of holding the mirror up and showing us who we are, with all of our faults and complexities and layers of contradictions and failures. So he's able to see that and find the stories of humanity. And that's the connective tissue for me. He also had a sick musical taste; I mean, he sort of found Cat Stevens. The soundtrack to Shampoo—I think that's why it's not in wide release right now, as I can't imagine having to license Hendrix and Janis and the Beach Boys, you know?That's true. But I'll also say he had the wisdom to let Paul Simon do the small musical things he did in Shampoo, which are just as powerful or if not more powerful.Amy Scott: So, powerful. So much restraint. Incredibly powerful. I feel like Hal, because he was not—from all of our research and talking to everyone and girlfriends and collaborators—he wasn't a dictatorial director. He didn't lay down mandates. He was really open to hearing from everybody and making it feel like it was a democratic scene and everyone has an equal voice. If you had an idea, speak up.But at the end of the day, he was like, okay, here's the vision. And once he had that vision, I think that's where he really got into problems with the studio system. Because that was such a different time. The studio guys thought that they were also the director, that they were also the auteur. I cannot imagine a world where you throw your entire life into making a film and then a studio head comes along and tries to seize it from you. I mean, that would give me cancer, you know, from the stress. I can't imagine.It certainly didn't match with his personality at all.Amy Scott: No, not at all. What I thought was so fascinating was how open he was to ideas. I love that about him and it resonates in my microscopic ways of connecting to that now. Man, every time it pops up, I'm like, I feel this little Hal Ashby devil angel on my shoulders. Yes, but it's odd. Because it's not like they didn't know what they were getting. It's not like he hid that part of his personality. You would know, immediately from meeting him that...Amy Scott: Yeah.With Harold and Maude, it was just a weird perfect storm of a crazy executive like Robert Evans saying yes to all these weird things. And then the marketing team at Gulf and Western/Paramount going, “we have no idea what to do.” You know, I had the Harold and Maude poster hanging for years. And it's the most obvious example of a studio that cannot figure out how to market a movie. The Harold and Maude different color name thing. It's just so obviously they didn't know what do.Amy Scott: I know I love when Judd Apatow was talking about that. That's really funny.So, what was the biggest thing that surprised you as you learned more about Hal?Amy Scott: What surprised me was that side of his temperament. He did look like this peace love guy. He was an attractive man but, you know, this long hair and long beard and so cool and I had a really myopic like view of what I thought his personality was. I thought he was a super mellow guy. And then I got in and started reading the letters. My producer, Brian would read the letters in his voice as a temp track that we would use that to edit to cut the film. And we were rolling, dying, laughing, like falling down, like, oh, my God, I cannot believe that Hal would write some of this shit to the head of Paramount or whoever. It was like, wow, this guy is not at all who I thought. These were fiery missives that he was shooting off into space.It wasn't like just getting mad and writing an email. I mean, he had to sit on a typewriter.Amy Scott: Typewriter and they were very, very long. I mean, the sections that we used in the film, were obviously heavily cut. We couldn't show like six pages of vitriol. The best part about the vitriol though, he wasn't just vomiting, anger. It was a very poetic. He had a very poetic way of weaving together his frustration and expletives in a way that I just loved.And then we turned the papers over to Ben Foster. That's why we wanted him to narrate—be the voice of Hal—because he's always struck me as an artist that totally gets it. Not a studio guy and he was all over it. He was right. You can really identify with this sort of, you're either with us or against us artists versus, the David and Goliath. So, that was most fascinating to me. I knew—because of the book, because Nick did such a great job—I knew Hal's story. Leaving his child, leaving Leigh. It's one thing to read about it in a book and it's a completely different thing to go meet that person, to sit with her. She's since become a dear friend to me. I feel like she'd never really spoken about that, about her dad and that time of her of her life. I think revisiting trauma on that level, and working through a lot of those emotions with her, was really heavy and not what I intended. When I set out to make the film, I was thinking about the films of Hal Ashby. I didn't think it would get as heavy as it did. I'm glad that we went there and that she took us with her. I feel really, really thankful. I think she got a lot out of it. We certainly did.It really did show you just how complicated he was, the reality of his life, when you see the child. And she was so eloquent on screen. Amy Scott: So great. He had some generational trauma too and then you put it all together, and you're like, okay, well, this is somebody that's really adept at looking deep into the human condition. He'd been through a lot. He'd made a lot of mistakes and he's been through a lot. So, of course, this checks out. And he's just so talented and creative, that he can make these films that are this really accurate, fun and funny and sad and tragic and beautiful portrayals of humanity.Well, let's just if we can't dive into a couple of my favorites just to see if anything you walked away with.Obviously, Harold and Maude hold a special place in my heart. I've just loved reading Nick's book and reading and hearing in your film and in listening to commentaries about what Hal did to wrestle Harold and Maude into the movie that it is. I forget who it was on one of the commentaries who said there were so many long speeches by Maude that you just ended up hating her. And Hal's editor's ability to go and just trim it and trim it and trim it. I compare what he did there to what Colin Higgins went on to do when he directed and he simply didn't have it. He had the writing skill, obviously, and the directing skills. He didn't have that editor's eye. I don't think there's a Colin Higgins movie made that couldn't be 20 minutes shorter. If Hal had gone into Foul Play and edited it down, it would have been a much stronger comedy. 9 to 5 would have been 20 minutes shorter. Probably a little stronger. Anyway, you don't recognize that. It's all hidden. It's the edit. You don't know what he threw away and that's the beauty of Harold and Maude: within this larger piece he found that movie and found the right way to express it. So, what did you learn about that movie that might have surprised you?Amy Scott: Everything surprise me about it. You know, we were never able to get Bud Cort. You know Bud Curt, he's so special and so elusive and we thought we thought we were gonna get him a couple times and then it was just a real difficult thing. But you have him from the memorial service, and that's a great thing.Amy Scott: Oh, yeah. Anytime he's on camera, he's bewitching. He's incredible. So we went again with the letters. I just didn't realize that Bud and Hal we're so close. I mean, obviously, they were close. But they were very tight. They had a real father son, sort of bond.Charles Mulvehill, the producer, also talked about how difficult it was to make the film. I didn't know that Charles ended up marrying one of the women that is on the dating service that Harold's mom tries to set up. That was interesting, too. It's hard for me, to tell you the truth. We did so much research on all the films, so there's little bits and pieces of all.Jumping away from Harold and Maude—just because my brain is disorganized—Diane Schroeder was with Hal for a number of years and she's in the film. She was sort of a researcher archivists, she wore many hats. I did not realize that on Being There, she really needed to nail down what was on the television Chauncey Gardiner learned everything from TV, so it was really important what was on it. When he's flipping, it's not random. She and Hal would take VHS tapes in or I guess it would have been Beta at the time, whatever the fidelity was, but they would record hundreds of hours of TV and watch it. She got all these TV Guides from that year, 1981. But what was a three year's span, she had all the TV Guides. She had everything figured out. It was like creating the character of Chauncey Gardiner, with Hal and then Peter Sellars got involved, and he had certain thoughts about it, too. I was just so blown away by the fact that that much care and effort and painstaking detail would go into it. When you see it on screen, it's definitely a masterpiece because of those things. Just the defness of editing, of leaving things out, is what makes it good. That is such a such a really hyper detailed behind the scenes thing to know that. When we were going through his storage space. I remember asking Diane, why are there boxes and boxes and boxes of TV. She said, “oh, yeah, that's Chancy Gardener's.” I said, I cannot believe you guys saved this. Really funny. It's interesting because they would have done all that in post now. And they had to get that all figured out, before they were shooting it. That's a lot of pre-production.Amy Scott: Oh, an immense amount of pre-production. Hal set up an edit bay in his bedroom. It's the definition of insanity. I had that going on at one point in my life and it's not good. It's not good thing to roll over and it's like right there like right next to pillows staring at you. You need some distance.When I saw Being There for the first time for some reason I was in Los Angeles/ I saw it and of course loved it. And then came back to Minneapolis and someone had seen it and said, “don't you love the outtakes?” And I said, “What outtakes?” They said, “over the end credits, all those outtakes with Peter Sellars.” And I said, “there were no outtakes.” In the version in LA, they didn't do that.Amy Scott: I wanted to add this, but we just ran out of time. We found all these Western Union telegrams that Peter Sellars wrote to Hal, just pissed, just livid, furious about that. He said, “You broke the spell. You broke the spell. God dammit, you broke the spell.” He was so pissed that they included those outtakes and I agree with them.It's not a real normal Hal move, is it?Amy Scott: No, it's honestly the first time that I'd ever seen blooper outtakes in a film like that. That's such an interesting 80s style, shenanigans and whatnot. But, yeah, no, you want them to walk out on the water after watching him dip umbrella in the water and think about that for the rest of your life. Exactly. I think they left it out of the LA version for Academy purposes, thinking that would help with the awards. But then years later to look at the DVD and see the alternate ending and go, well, that's terrible. I'm glad you guys figured that out. And then apparently, was it on the third take that somebody said, he should put his umbrella down into the water? Amy Scott: That's so smart.It's so smart. Alright. Shampoo is another favorite. I'm curious what you learned about that one, because you had three very strong personalities making that movie with Robert Towne on one side and Warren Beatty on the other and Hal in the middle. It's amazing that it came out as well as it did. Somehow Hal wrangled it and did what he did. What did you learn there that sort of surprised you?Amy Scott: Well, that aspect is what we wanted to really investigate. Because Hal had a pretty singular vision. Hal as a director—at that stage—was becoming a very important filmmaker. So, then how do you balance the styles of Robert Towne and Warren Beatty? These guys are colossal figures in Hollywood, Alpha dogs. I wish that we could have sat with Warren. It was not for lack of trying. I think a lot of these guys that we couldn't get, it's like, yeah, that's what makes him so cool. Bruce Dern. I was trying to chase down Bruce Dern at the Chase Bank, and he got up one day and I was just like, I knew, let it go. But Shampoo, everything we learned, we put in the film. Robert Towne talked to us. And then there was the audio commentary that Hal had from his AFI seminars. Caleb Deschanel spoke pretty eloquently about it being like watching a ping pong match going back and forth between Robert and Warren about what the direction should be. And then the director sitting in a chair probably smoking a joint, waiting for them to finish. It seems like they might have needed a sort of mediator type presence to guide the ship, like have a soft hand with it, you know? You can't have three alphas in the room at the same time. Nothing would get done. You need a neutralizing force and it seems like that's what Hal was it. He just had a really great taste, you know? My favorite element of that movie—besides Julie Christie's backless dress—would be Jack Warden. Anytime Jack Warden comes on screen, I'm like, just want to hang with him for another half hour. I can just watch that man piddle around and be funny.I remember reading an interview with Richard Dreyfus after Duddy Kravitz came out, in which he was blasting the director, saying that they ruined Jack Warden's performance in post-production. And Jack Warden is amazing in Duddy Kravitz. I don't know what they he thinks they did to it, because he's just fantastic.Amy Scott: He must have just been astronomically amazing and funny, which is what I imagined he's was like.I took away two things from Shampoo. One was—having seen Harold and Maude as often as I did—recognizing that the sound effects of the policeman's motorcycle as being the same one as George's motorcycle as he's going up the Hollywood Hills. Exact same ones.But the last shot as he's looking down on Julie Christie's house and the use of high-angle shot, it is one of the saddest things I've ever seen. It's just a guy standing on an empty lot looking down onto the houses below, but it's … I don't know. Given the guys he was dealing with, I don't know how he made that into a Hal Ashby movie, but he did.Amy Scott: He did. Well, it seems like it's moments like that yeah, there's so much melancholy loaded into that moment. Because George is such an interesting character. Now, I'm realizing that you and I have just blown, we've just spoiled the ending shots of both Being There and Shampoo.Anybody listening to this who hasn't seen those movies deserves to be spoiled.Amy Scott: Get on the boat. But yeah, that always got me. I think it's all of those really like, foggy misty Mulholland Drive shot of George on his motorcycle, anytime he's alone. Because he crams his life so full of women to try to fill the hole or the void or whatever he's got going on that's missing in his life. And he's just trying to shove it full of women. So, when he's alone, and he has nothing and no one you're like, oh, my God, this is the saddest thing I've ever seen.It really is. I don't know. Maybe you can fill me in on this. I remember reading somewhere that the scene—his last scene with Goldie Hawn—they went back and they reshot it because somebody said he's standing. He should be sitting. And I'm always interested in directors who hear that and are willing to go back and do it. The other example is Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People in his last scene. Telling Redford, “I did it wrong. I should be done crying. I was crying when I should have been done crying.” and they went back and reshot. His portion of it is no longer crying because the director went, you're right. And that simple notion of Warren Beatty should be sitting down, and she should be standing over him. Amy Scott: She's got the power. Yes. But I'm not sure a lot of directors would have said yes to that. Like, “We don't need to go back and do that. We're overscheduled we got other stuff to do …”Amy Scott: Oh, I don't think Hal cared about the schedule at all. Everything that I read or, you know, even Jeff Bridges talked about, like them being over budget and he's like, “you know, all right, let's figure out a creative solution to this. It's going to take as long as it's going to take.” He never seemed to really get riled onset or let those sorts of parameters hold all the power and guide the filmmaking. He was in complete control of that. Having that sort of attitude about things, that just spreads to the whole set. That spreads everywhere and makes it easier for everybody to work.Amy Scott: It does.Let's do one last one. Coming Home is interesting for me because I had friends who ran a movie theater here in town. It was just a couple of running it and I would come by from time to time if they were busy. I'd go up and run the projector for them. They had one of those flat plate systems, so you only had to turn the projector on. It wasn't that big a deal. But you know, I was young and it's like okay, now I'm going to turn the house lights down … I got to see the first five minutes of Coming Home a lot. Probably more than I saw the rest of the movie. Was there anything you learned about the making of that film that surprised you?Amy Scott: Yeah, I didn't realize how hard it was to get that film made. Jane Fonda is the one that's really responsible for Coming Home even existing. Nancy Dowd had a book and Jane really fought hard to get it made. By the time it got to Hal, it was different, there was a number of rewrites. And it obviously had to be cut down significantly. I never think—it's never my go-to—to think that one of the actors is the one responsible. Usually it comes to you in a different way, and especially if he's working with Robert Towne and the like. But I thought that was really cool and really interesting that Jane spoke about showing what our veterans were going through. This wasn't new, because you had like The Deer Hunter would have been the comparable. And that's a wildly different take on what coming home from the Vietnam War was like. But also, the woman's journey in that film, and the sexuality of all of that was just like, wow. Only Jane Fonda can speak about it eloquently as Jane Fonda does. I also didn't realize— when we were sitting with John Voigt—that he was really method in the way that he didn't get out of his chair, I mean, for days on end. Going into crafty in the chair, learning how to do go up ramps and play basketball and all the things that you see was because he wouldn't get out of the chair, which was wonderful. I really enjoyed talking with Jeff Wexler, and Haskell. That interview that we did with Haskell, I'm so thankful for because, you know, Haskell passed away, not that long after we film. That was one of his last interviews. So, it was really special. He came to the set and Haskell is like, a film God to me and my team. For me, I lived in Chicago so Medium Cool, was one of the coolest things ever. Meeting him and talking with him was so interesting. I loved hearing about the opening. You can just tell it's Haskell Wexler. You know it's a Hal Ashby film, but the way it starts and having seen Medium Cool, and going into that opening scene, where the all the vets are non-professional actors. They were actual vets that had come home and those were their true real stories. Now we would say it's sort of hybrid documentary and scripted, but it was like a really early use of that kind of style. And that's what made it feel so real and then you start in with the Rolling Stones, it's just such a masterly, powerful film.I'm always curious about that sort of thing where he has a lot of footage and he's creating the movie out of it and what would Hal Ashby be like today? How different would his life be if he had everything at his fingertips and it's not hanging out a pin over in a bin and he had to remember where everything was? I don't know if that would have been any made any difference at all?Amy Scott: He was an early pioneer of digital editing. He was building his giant rigs and was convincing everyone that digital is the way to go. Which is so cool and so mind blowing. But I think it was born out of a place of independent film, of democratizing the access and taking the power away from the studios. And knowing that you could do this cheaply in your home. It was so actually tragic to learn that. What could he have done? Because his output was just, he put out so much so many great movies. So, what could he have done if the infrastructure was even more accessible and sped up technologically?Imagine an 8-part streaming series directed by Hal Ashby, what would that be?Amy Scott: Just be incredible. Well, I know that he was wanting to work. He had so many films that we found. And we found script after script. One of them, I was so, “damn, that would have been cool,” was The Hawkline Monster. A Richard Brautigan science fiction Western novel. It's so trippy and so cool. I feel like every couple of years, I hear about some directors says, “we got the rights, we're gonna make it.” And I'm like, when are they gonna make it? It's so long.And imagine what his version of Tootsie would have been.Amy Scott: Oh, I know. Yeah. No joke.Just seeing those test shots. Wow. Amy Scott: I know, it would have been a different film.I read a quote somewhere that one of the producers or maybe it was Sydney Pollack, who said, they took the script to Elaine May. And she said, “yeah, it just needs…” And then she listed like five things: He needs a roommate that he can talk to … the girl on the TV show, she needs a father, so he can become involved with him … there also has to be a co-worker who is interested in him as a woman … the director needs to be an ass, he should probably be dating the woman. It was like five different things. She said the script is fine, but you need these five things. So, what did they have? She just listed the whole movie.Amy Scott: Right. Well, we're talking about Elaine May. She's someone that needs a film. She does. And why aren't you doing that?Amy Scott: Listen, I'm telling you. I've tried. This is another one that I've tried for years. You know, here's a real shocker: It's hard to get a film about a female filmmaker funded. It's a hard sell.She probably wouldn't want to do it anywayAmy Scott: She's so cool. My approach has always been that she has so much to teach us still. So, I would love to get her hot takes on all those films. A New Leaf. I mean, the stories behind that thing getting made.Like the uncut version of A New Leaf.Amy Scott: Exactly. I want to hear it from her. So, yeah, that's high up on my list. I really, really want to make one with Elaine.Was there anyone else you really wanted to get to? You mentioned Warren didn't want to talk to you. Anybody else?Amy Scott: I would have loved Julie Christie or, you know, more women would have been great. Bruce Dern was so great and so funny and I'd seen him a number of times. I saw he was at a screening of one of his movies. He talked for like, an hour and a half before they even screened the film. He was whip smart in his memories. I was so upset that we couldn't work it out because I knew that he would be incredible.Just his knowledge of movie industry, having been in it so long.Amy Scott: My gosh, yeah.He even worked with Bette Davis.Amy Scott: Yeah, he's national treasure. Exactly. I was just staring at a poster. I have framed poster of Family Plot in my kitchen. That's the movie that was going to make him a star, according to Hitchcock. It still has one of the greatest closing shots of all time. I think I read that Barbara Harris improvised the wink, and that's another person who you should make a documentary about.Amy Scott: Oh my gosh. Barbara Harris is something. Do you remember what was the film that she was in with? Dustin Hoffman and Dr. Hook scored it. It's a really long title. Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?Amy Scott: That is such a phenomenal Barbara Harris performance. I mean, Dustin Hoffman is incredible. He's always great. But Barbara Harris really shines and I guess I'm like, that's who she was. Yeah, I think she was difficult. Well, I don't know, difficult. She had stuff she was dealing with.Amy Scott: She had issues and Hal had to deal with those on Second Hand Hearts too.From a production standpoint, people are interested in hearing what your Indiegogo process was Any tips you'd have for someone who wants to fund their film via Indiegogo?Amy Scott: Oh, boy. Well, that was a different time, because I really don't know how films are funded at the moment. This came out five years ago, but it took us like six years to make. So, during in that time, you could at least raise enough capital to get through production.The Indiegogo campaign enabled it so that we could even make the movie, because everything past that point, nobody ever got paid at all. But at least that way, we could buy film stock and pay the camera operators and our DPs and stuff. So, that was hugely important.At the time, I remember thinking like, oh, no, how are we ever going to get anybody to because you had to make these—I don't know if this is still the case—but you had to make these commercials for your project or like a trailer to get people's attention. And you had to be all over Facebook and crap like that. So, I was like, oh, no, how am I going to make a thing that shows that Hal Ashby's important to people that want to give money?A friend somehow knew John C. Reilly and mentioned it to him. It was like, we just need a celebrity to come in for like, you know, half a day or one hour. And he said, I'll come on down and do that. And he came. I couldn't believe it. The generosity of this man. He didn't know us at all. But he knew and loved the films of Hal Ashby and wanted to give back and pay it forward. So, he came down and because of him, we have a really funny, awesome little commercial trailer. I have no idea where that thing even is. I'd love to see it because I had to do it with him, which was terrifying, because I am not a front of camera person. I didn't know what to say. And he said, All you have to do is ask for money. I'll all do the rest of the talking.I remember seeing it. Amy Scott: It's been stripped from Indiegogo which probably means that we used a song that we weren't able to. That was back in the early days of crowdfunding, where you could just take images or songs and I'm sure I used the music of Cat Stevens, and then, loaded up with a bunch of photos that we never paid for.Well, that brings up a question of how did you get all the rights to the stuff you got for the finished movie? Was that a huge part of your budget?Amy Scott: No. The most expensive thing always to this day is music. Music is going to get you. Outside of that, thank goodness, there's this little thing called fair use now, which wasn't the case in documentary filmmaking for a very long time. But now you can fair use certain elements, photographs, or news clips, video clips, anything that sort of supports your thesis that you're making about your subject and supports your storyline falls under the category of fair use. So, I think what our money did pay for is the fair use attorneys that that really go over your product. They went over out fine cut, because we couldn't afford to pay for multiple lawyers to look at it. So you give them a fine cut, you hold your breath and hope that they say, oh, you know, you only have to take out a couple things. And you're like, oh, thank God. Okay, and then you change it.I believe, because we never had any money, that we submitted to Sundance and got in on a wing and a prayer. And then had, you know, two weeks to turn the film around and get it, finished. I remember we were like, you know, pulling all these all nighters, trying to change the notes that the legal said XY and Z was not fair use and trying to swap out music with our composer. It was a wild, wild run.Isn't that always the way? You work on it for six years and then suddenly you have two weeks to finish it.Amy Scott: That's how it shook out for us. It was like really, really pretty funny, because you're going on a leisurely pace until you're not. And then it's like, alright, it's real now. I thought for years, I think my friends and casual acquaintances thought that I've lost my mind. Because every year, I'd see people that I would see occasionally and they're like, hey, how's it going? What are you working on? I'm like, I'm just working on this Ashby's movie. And they were like, year after year, like damn. She's like, we need to reel her in and we need to throw her a lifeline. No, really, I really, really am. So, it was pretty funny. We were. We did it.People have no idea how long these things take. Amy Scott: It's unfunded. But you know, then we got lucky after that, because we nearly killed ourselves on Hal. Then we kind of fell into the era of streaming deals and streamers. And then people were like, oh, we want to make biopics and we want to give you money to make a biopic. And that was truly our first rodeo. We're like, oh, my gosh, what? This is incredible. We can get paid for this. Now that's falling away. This streaming industry is, you know, collapsing in on itself as it should, because there's no curation anymore. And it's like, let's return to form a little bit here, guys. So, we're just riding the wave. I say it's like we're riding trying to learn how to ride a mechanical bull this industry. I'm a tomboy. So, every local Oklahomans is up for the ride.Let me ask you one last question. I'll let you go then. So, as a filmmaker, what did you learn doing a deep dive into the work of this director and editor and you are a director and editor? So, that's sort of a scary thing to do anyway, to be the person who's going to edit Hal Ashby. What did you learn in the process that you can still take away today?Amy Scott: Well, listen, we joke about it all the time. My producer, Brian Morrow and I are constantly going, oh, what would Hal do? Everything that he stood for, as a filmmaker. The film will tell you what to do. Get in there, be obsessed be the film, all of those things.I get this man because I feel the same way. So, when we like took a real bath in Hal Ashby's words for years, that sort of that shapes the rest of your life as a filmmaker. You're not like a casual filmmaker after going through like the Ashby's carwash. That stuff's sticks.But I'm proud. I'm proud that that we pulled it off. I'm proud that we were able to make the movie. Somebody would have done it, because Hal is too great and too good, and he just has deserved it for so long.The only thing that we've ever wanted was that we wanted people to go back and watch his films, or to watch him for the first time if they had never seen him. And then to take his creative spirit forward. Be in love with the thing that you make. It's your lifeforce. So, otherwise, what is it all for, you know? So, yeah, that's what I got from him.

Welcome back to Musical May! We are taking a break right now, but we have some extra special episodes coming your way from the Rebel Rewind!  I may be sus of just a Lil' Ole Bitty Pissant Country Place, but if Dolly says there's nothing Dirty going on, Who am I to say otherwise! Carlotta, Chad and I watched The Best Little Whore House in Texas (1982) and for a movie about a WhoreHouse in Texas, there's a lot for the Gays to enjoy too!Best Little Whorehouse In Texas (1982)  Directed by Colin Higgins, starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, and Dom DeLuise. A town's Sheriff and regular patron of a historical whorehouse fights to keep it running when a television reporter targets it as the Devil's Playhouse.Support the showSubscribe to hear our entire library now!Follow the Rebels: Stefan: @sjmaroni Bear SailorMoon: @bearsailormooon Carlotta Carlisle: @carlottacarlisle Chad: @cski01 / @dressedasaChad (IG/Tiktok) Julia: @julialynched PJ: @xndra_design Stu: @janikon_ Facebook: /groups/rwacpod Instagram @RWACpodFind us at linktr.ee/RWAC

On this episode, we do our first deep dive into the John Landis filmography, to talk about one of his lesser celebrated film, the 1985 Jeff Goldblum/Michelle Pfeiffer morbid comedy Into the Night. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   Long time listeners to this show know that I am not the biggest fan of John Landis, the person. I've spoken about Landis, and especially about his irresponsibility and seeming callousness when it comes to the helicopter accident on the set of his segment for the 1983 film The Twilight Zone which took the lives of actors Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, enough where I don't wish to rehash it once again.   But when one does a podcast that celebrates the movies of the 1980s, every once in a while, one is going to have to talk about John Landis and his movies. He did direct eight movies, one documentary and a segment in an anthology film during the decade, and several of them, both before and after the 1982 helicopter accident, are actually pretty good films.   For this episode, we're going to talk about one of his lesser known and celebrated films from the decade, despite its stacked cast.   We're talking about 1985's Into the Night.   But, as always, before we get to Into the Night, some backstory.   John David Landis was born in Chicago in 1950, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was four months old. While he grew up in the City of Angels, he still considers himself a Chicagoan, which is an important factoid to point out a little later in his life.   After graduating from high school in 1968, Landis got his first job in the film industry the way many a young man and woman did in those days: through the mail room at a major studio, his being Twentieth Century-Fox. He wasn't all that fond of the mail room. Even since he had seen The  7th Voyage of Sinbad at the age of eight, he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker, and you're not going to become a filmmaker in the mail room. By chance, he would get a job as a production assistant on the Clint Eastwood/Telly Savalas World War II comedy/drama Kelly's Heroes, despite the fact that the film would be shooting in Yugoslavia. During the shoot, he would become friendly with the film's co-stars Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland. When the assistant director on the film got sick and had to go back to the United States, Landis positioned himself to be the logical, and readily available, replacement. Once Kelly's Heroes finished shooting, Landis would spend his time working on other films that were shooting in Italy and the United Kingdom. It is said he was a stuntman on Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but I'm going to call shenanigans on that one, as the film was made in 1966, when Landis was only sixteen years old and not yet working in the film industry. I'm also going to call shenanigans on his working as a stunt performer on Leone's 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, and Tony Richardson's 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Peter Collinson's 1969 film The Italian Job, which also were all filmed and released into theatres before Landis made his way to Europe the first time around.   In 1971, Landis would write and direct his first film, a low-budget horror comedy called Schlock, which would star Landis as the title character, in an ape suit designed by master makeup creator Rick Baker. The $60k film was Landis's homage to the monster movies he grew up watching, and his crew would spend 12 days in production, stealing shots wherever they could  because they could not afford filming permits. For more than a year, Landis would show the completed film to any distributor that would give him the time of day, but no one was interested in a very quirky comedy featuring a guy in a gorilla suit playing it very very straight.   Somehow, Johnny Carson was able to screen a print of the film sometime in the fall of 1972, and the powerful talk show host loved it. On November 2nd, 1972, Carson would have Landis on The Tonight Show to talk about his movie. Landis was only 22 at the time, and the exposure on Carson would drive great interest in the film from a number of smaller independent distributors would wouldn't take his calls even a week earlier. Jack H. Harris Enterprises would be the victor, and they would first release Schlock on twenty screens in Los Angeles on December 12th, 1973, the top of a double bill alongside the truly schlocky Son of The Blob. The film would get a very good reception from the local press, including positive reviews from the notoriously prickly Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas, and an unnamed critic in the pages of the industry trade publication Daily Variety. The film would move from market to market every few weeks, and the film would make a tidy little profit for everyone involved. But it would be four more years until Landis would make his follow-up film.   The Kentucky Fried Movie originated not with Landis but with three guys from Madison, Wisconsin who started their own theatre troop while attending the University of Wisconsin before moving it to West Los Angeles in 1971. Those guys, brothers David and Jerry Zucker, and their high school friend Jim Abrahams, had written a number of sketches for their stage shows over a four year period, and felt a number of them could translate well to film, as long as they could come up with a way to link them all together. Although they would be aware of Ken Shapiro's 1974 comedy anthology movie The Groove Tube, a series of sketches shot on videotape shown in movie theatres on the East Coast at midnight on Saturday nights, it would finally hit them in 1976, when Neal Israel's anthology sketch comedy movie TunnelVision became a small hit in theatres. That movie featured Chevy Chase and Laraine Newman, two of the stars of NBC's hit show Saturday Night Live, which was the real reason the film was a hit, but that didn't matter to Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker.   The Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team decided they needed to not just tell potential backers about the film but show them what they would be getting. They would raise $35,000 to film a ten minute segment, but none of them had ever directed anything for film before, so they would start looking for an experienced director who would be willing to work on a movie like theirs for little to no money.   Through mutual friend Bob Weiss, the trio would meet and get to know John Landis, who would come aboard to direct the presentation reel, if not the entire film should it get funded. That segment, if you've seen Kentucky Fried Movie, included the fake trailer for Cleopatra Schwartz, a parody of blaxploitation movies. The guys would screen the presentation reel first to Kim Jorgensen, the owner of the famed arthouse theatre the Nuart here in Los Angeles, and Jorgensen loved it. He would put up part of the $650k budget himself, and he would show the reel to his friends who also ran theatres, not just in Los Angeles, whenever they were in town, and it would be through a consortium of independent movie theatre owners that Kentucky Fried Movie would get financed.   The movie would be released on August 10th, 1977, ironically the same day as another independent sketch comedy movie, Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses?, was released. But Kentucky Fried Movie would have the powerful United Artists Theatres behind them, as they would make the movie the very first release through their own distribution company, United Film Distribution. I did a three part series on UFDC back in 2021, if you'd like to learn more about them. Featuring such name actors as Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland, Kentucky Fried Movie would earn more than $7m in theatres, and would not only give John Landis the hit he needed to move up the ranks, but it would give Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker the opportunity to make their own movie. But we'll talk about Airplane! sometime in the future.   Shortly after the release of Kentuck Fried Movie, Landis would get hired to direct Animal House, which would become the surprise success of 1978 and lead Landis into directing The Blues Brothers, which is probably the most John Landis movie that will ever be made. Big, loud, schizophrenic, a little too long for its own good, and filled with a load of in-jokes and cameos that are built only for film fanatics and/or John Landis fanatics. The success of The Blues Brothers would give Landis the chance to make his dream project, a horror comedy he had written more than a decade before.   An American Werewolf in London was the right mix of comedy and horror, in-jokes and great needle drops, with some of the best practical makeup effects ever created for a movie. Makeup effects so good that, in fact, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would make the occasionally given Best Makeup Effects Oscar a permanent category, and Werewolf would win that category's first competitive Oscar.   In 1982, Landis would direct Coming Soon, one of the first direct-to-home video movies ever released. Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, Coming Soon was, essentially, edited clips from 34 old horror and thriller trailers for movies owned by Universal, from Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and The Birds. It's only 55 minutes long, but the video did help younger burgeoning cineasts learn more about the history of Universal's monster movies.   And then, as previously mentioned, there was the accident during the filming of The Twilight Zone.   Landis was able to recover enough emotionally from the tragedy to direct Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in the winter of 1982/83, another hit that maybe showed Hollywood the public wasn't as concerned about the Twilight Zone accident as they worried it would. The Twilight Zone movie would be released three weeks after Trading Places, and while it was not that big a hit, it wasn't quite the bomb it was expected to be because of the accident.   Which brings us to Into the Night.   While Landis was working on the final edit of Trading Places, the President of Universal Pictures, Sean Daniels, contacted Landis about what his next project might be. Universal was where Landis had made Animal House, The Blues Brothers and American Werewolf, so it would not be unusual for a studio head to check up on a filmmaker who had made three recent successful films for them. Specifically, Daniels wanted to pitch Landis on a screenplay the studio had in development called Into the Night. Ron Koslow, the writer of the 1976 Sam Elliott drama Lifeguard, had written the script on spec which the studio had picked up, about an average, ordinary guy who, upon discovering his wife is having an affair, who finds himself in the middle of an international incident involving jewel smuggling out of Iran. Maybe this might be something he would be interested in working on, as it would be both right up his alley, a comedy, and something he'd never done before, a romantic action thriller.   Landis would agree to make the film, if he were allowed some leeway in casting.   For the role of Ed Okin, an aerospace engineer whose insomnia leads him to the Los Angeles International Airport in search of some rest, Landis wanted Jeff Goldblum, who had made more than 15 films over the past decade, including Annie Hall, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Big Chill and The Right Stuff, but had never been the lead in a movie to this point. For Diana, the jewel smuggler who enlists the unwitting Ed into her strange world, Landis wanted Michelle Pfeiffer, the gorgeous star of Grease 2 and Scarface. But mostly, Landis wanted to fill as many of supporting roles with either actors he had worked with before, like Dan Aykroyd and Bruce McGill, or filmmakers who were either contemporaries of Landis and/or were filmmakers he had admired. Amongst those he would get would be Jack Arnold, Paul Bartel, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, Richard Franklin, Amy Heckerling, Colin Higgins, Jim Henson, Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Mazursky, Don Siegel, and Roger Vadim, as well as Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, Midnight Cowboy writer Waldo Salt, personal trainer to the stars Jake Steinfeld, music legends David Bowie and Carl Perkins, and several recent Playboy Playmates. Landis himself would be featured as one of the four Iranian agents chasing Pfeiffer's character.   While neither Perkins nor Bowie would appear on the soundtrack to the film, Landis was able to get blues legend B.B. King to perform three songs, two brand new songs as well as a cover of the Wilson Pickett classic In the Midnight Hour.   Originally scheduled to be produced by Joel Douglas, brother of Michael and son of Kirk, Into the Night would go into production on April 2nd, 1984, under the leadership of first-time producer Ron Koslow and Landis's producing partner George Folsey, Jr.   The movie would make great use of dozens of iconic Los Angeles locations, including the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Shubert Theatre in Century City, the Ships Coffee Shot on La Cienega, the flagship Tiffanys and Company in Beverly Hills, Randy's Donuts, and the aforementioned airport. But on Monday, April 23rd, the start of the fourth week of shooting, the director was ordered to stand trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter due to the accident on the Twilight Zone set. But the trial would not start until months after Into the Night was scheduled to complete its shoot. In an article about the indictment printed in the Los Angeles Times two days later, Universal Studios head Sean Daniels was insistent the studio had made no special plans in the event of Landis' possible conviction. Had he been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, Landis was looking at up to six years in prison.   The film would wrap production in early June, and Landis would spend the rest of the year in an editing bay on the Universal lot with his editor, Malcolm Campbell, who had also cut An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, the Michael Jackson Thriller short film, and Landis's segment and the Landis-shot prologue to The Twilight Zone.   During this time, Universal would set a February 22nd, 1985 release date for the film, an unusual move, as every movie Landis had made since Kentucky Fried Movie had been released during the summer movie season, and there was nothing about Into the Night that screamed late Winter.   I've long been a proponent of certain movies having a right time to be released, and late February never felt like the right time to release a morbid comedy, especially one that takes place in sunny Los Angeles. When Into the Night opened in New York City, at the Loews New York Twin at Second Avenue and 66th Street, the high in the city was 43 degrees, after an overnight low of 25 degrees. What New Yorker wants to freeze his or her butt off to see Jeff Goldblum run around Los Angeles with Michelle Pfeiffer in a light red leather jacket and a thin white t-shirt, if she's wearing anything at all? Well, actually, that last part wasn't so bad. But still, a $40,000 opening weekend gross at the 525 seat New York Twin would be one of the better grosses for all of the city. In Los Angeles, where the weather was in the 60s all weekend, the film would gross $65,500 between the 424 seat Avco Cinema 2 in Westwood and the 915 seat Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.   The reviews, like with many of Landis's films, were mixed.   Richard Corliss of Time Magazine would find the film irresistible and a sparkling thriller, calling Goldblum and Pfeiffer two of the most engaging young actors working. Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine at the time, would anoint the film with a rarely used noun in film criticism, calling it a “pip.” Travers would also call Pfeiffer a knockout of the first order, with a newly uncovered flair for comedy. Guess he hadn't seen her in the 1979 ABC spin-off of Animal House, called Delta House, in which she played The Bombshell, or in Floyd Mutrix's 1980 comedy The Hollywood Knights.    But the majority of critics would find plenty to fault with the film. The general critical feeling for the film was that it was too inside baseball for most people, as typified by Vincent Canby in his review for the New York Times. Canby would dismiss the film as having an insidey, which is not a word, manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for the moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening room.   After two weeks of exclusive engagements in New York and Los Angeles, Universal would expand the film to 1096 screens on March 8th, where the film would gross $2.57m, putting it in fifth place for the weekend, nearly a million dollars less than fellow Universal Pictures film The Breakfast Club, which was in its fourth week of release and in ninety fewer theatres. After a fourth weekend of release, where the film would come in fifth place again with $1.95m, now nearly a million and a half behind The Breakfast Club, Universal would start to migrate the film out of first run theatres and into dollar houses, in order to make room for another film of theirs, Peter Bogdanovich's comeback film Mask, which would be itself expanding from limited release to wide release on March 22nd. Into the Night would continue to play at the second-run theatres for months, but its final gross of $7.56m wouldn't even cover the film's $8m production budget.   Despite the fact that it has both Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer as its leads, Into the Night would not become a cult film on home video the way that many films neglected by audiences in theatres would find a second life.   I thought the film was good when I saw it opening night at the Aptos Twin. I enjoyed the obvious chemistry between the two leads, and I enjoyed the insidey manner in which there were so many famous filmmakers doing cameos in the film. I remember wishing there was more of David Bowie, since there were very few people, actors or musicians, who would fill the screen with so much charm and charisma, even when playing a bad guy. And I enjoyed listening to B.B. King on the soundtrack, as I had just started to get into the blues during my senior year of high school.   I revisited the film, which you can rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon and several other major streaming services, for the podcast, and although I didn't enjoy the film as much as I remember doing so in 1985, it was clear that these two actors were going to become big stars somewhere down the road. Goldblum, of course, would become a star the following year, thanks to his incredible work in David Cronenberg's The Fly. Incidentally, Goldblum and Cronenberg would meet for the first time on the set of Into the Night. And, of course, Michelle Pfeiffer would explode in 1987, thanks to her work with Susan Sarandon, Cher and Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick, which she would follow up with not one, not two but three powerhouse performances of completely different natures in 1988, in Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise, and her Oscar-nominated work in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons. Incidentally, Pfeiffer and Jonathan Demme would also meet for the first time on the set of Into the Night, so maybe it was kismet that all these things happened in part because of the unusual casting desires of John Landis.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 108, on Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl, is released.     Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Into the Night.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

On this episode, we do our first deep dive into the John Landis filmography, to talk about one of his lesser celebrated film, the 1985 Jeff Goldblum/Michelle Pfeiffer morbid comedy Into the Night. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   Long time listeners to this show know that I am not the biggest fan of John Landis, the person. I've spoken about Landis, and especially about his irresponsibility and seeming callousness when it comes to the helicopter accident on the set of his segment for the 1983 film The Twilight Zone which took the lives of actors Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, enough where I don't wish to rehash it once again.   But when one does a podcast that celebrates the movies of the 1980s, every once in a while, one is going to have to talk about John Landis and his movies. He did direct eight movies, one documentary and a segment in an anthology film during the decade, and several of them, both before and after the 1982 helicopter accident, are actually pretty good films.   For this episode, we're going to talk about one of his lesser known and celebrated films from the decade, despite its stacked cast.   We're talking about 1985's Into the Night.   But, as always, before we get to Into the Night, some backstory.   John David Landis was born in Chicago in 1950, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was four months old. While he grew up in the City of Angels, he still considers himself a Chicagoan, which is an important factoid to point out a little later in his life.   After graduating from high school in 1968, Landis got his first job in the film industry the way many a young man and woman did in those days: through the mail room at a major studio, his being Twentieth Century-Fox. He wasn't all that fond of the mail room. Even since he had seen The  7th Voyage of Sinbad at the age of eight, he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker, and you're not going to become a filmmaker in the mail room. By chance, he would get a job as a production assistant on the Clint Eastwood/Telly Savalas World War II comedy/drama Kelly's Heroes, despite the fact that the film would be shooting in Yugoslavia. During the shoot, he would become friendly with the film's co-stars Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland. When the assistant director on the film got sick and had to go back to the United States, Landis positioned himself to be the logical, and readily available, replacement. Once Kelly's Heroes finished shooting, Landis would spend his time working on other films that were shooting in Italy and the United Kingdom. It is said he was a stuntman on Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but I'm going to call shenanigans on that one, as the film was made in 1966, when Landis was only sixteen years old and not yet working in the film industry. I'm also going to call shenanigans on his working as a stunt performer on Leone's 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, and Tony Richardson's 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Peter Collinson's 1969 film The Italian Job, which also were all filmed and released into theatres before Landis made his way to Europe the first time around.   In 1971, Landis would write and direct his first film, a low-budget horror comedy called Schlock, which would star Landis as the title character, in an ape suit designed by master makeup creator Rick Baker. The $60k film was Landis's homage to the monster movies he grew up watching, and his crew would spend 12 days in production, stealing shots wherever they could  because they could not afford filming permits. For more than a year, Landis would show the completed film to any distributor that would give him the time of day, but no one was interested in a very quirky comedy featuring a guy in a gorilla suit playing it very very straight.   Somehow, Johnny Carson was able to screen a print of the film sometime in the fall of 1972, and the powerful talk show host loved it. On November 2nd, 1972, Carson would have Landis on The Tonight Show to talk about his movie. Landis was only 22 at the time, and the exposure on Carson would drive great interest in the film from a number of smaller independent distributors would wouldn't take his calls even a week earlier. Jack H. Harris Enterprises would be the victor, and they would first release Schlock on twenty screens in Los Angeles on December 12th, 1973, the top of a double bill alongside the truly schlocky Son of The Blob. The film would get a very good reception from the local press, including positive reviews from the notoriously prickly Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas, and an unnamed critic in the pages of the industry trade publication Daily Variety. The film would move from market to market every few weeks, and the film would make a tidy little profit for everyone involved. But it would be four more years until Landis would make his follow-up film.   The Kentucky Fried Movie originated not with Landis but with three guys from Madison, Wisconsin who started their own theatre troop while attending the University of Wisconsin before moving it to West Los Angeles in 1971. Those guys, brothers David and Jerry Zucker, and their high school friend Jim Abrahams, had written a number of sketches for their stage shows over a four year period, and felt a number of them could translate well to film, as long as they could come up with a way to link them all together. Although they would be aware of Ken Shapiro's 1974 comedy anthology movie The Groove Tube, a series of sketches shot on videotape shown in movie theatres on the East Coast at midnight on Saturday nights, it would finally hit them in 1976, when Neal Israel's anthology sketch comedy movie TunnelVision became a small hit in theatres. That movie featured Chevy Chase and Laraine Newman, two of the stars of NBC's hit show Saturday Night Live, which was the real reason the film was a hit, but that didn't matter to Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker.   The Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team decided they needed to not just tell potential backers about the film but show them what they would be getting. They would raise $35,000 to film a ten minute segment, but none of them had ever directed anything for film before, so they would start looking for an experienced director who would be willing to work on a movie like theirs for little to no money.   Through mutual friend Bob Weiss, the trio would meet and get to know John Landis, who would come aboard to direct the presentation reel, if not the entire film should it get funded. That segment, if you've seen Kentucky Fried Movie, included the fake trailer for Cleopatra Schwartz, a parody of blaxploitation movies. The guys would screen the presentation reel first to Kim Jorgensen, the owner of the famed arthouse theatre the Nuart here in Los Angeles, and Jorgensen loved it. He would put up part of the $650k budget himself, and he would show the reel to his friends who also ran theatres, not just in Los Angeles, whenever they were in town, and it would be through a consortium of independent movie theatre owners that Kentucky Fried Movie would get financed.   The movie would be released on August 10th, 1977, ironically the same day as another independent sketch comedy movie, Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses?, was released. But Kentucky Fried Movie would have the powerful United Artists Theatres behind them, as they would make the movie the very first release through their own distribution company, United Film Distribution. I did a three part series on UFDC back in 2021, if you'd like to learn more about them. Featuring such name actors as Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland, Kentucky Fried Movie would earn more than $7m in theatres, and would not only give John Landis the hit he needed to move up the ranks, but it would give Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker the opportunity to make their own movie. But we'll talk about Airplane! sometime in the future.   Shortly after the release of Kentuck Fried Movie, Landis would get hired to direct Animal House, which would become the surprise success of 1978 and lead Landis into directing The Blues Brothers, which is probably the most John Landis movie that will ever be made. Big, loud, schizophrenic, a little too long for its own good, and filled with a load of in-jokes and cameos that are built only for film fanatics and/or John Landis fanatics. The success of The Blues Brothers would give Landis the chance to make his dream project, a horror comedy he had written more than a decade before.   An American Werewolf in London was the right mix of comedy and horror, in-jokes and great needle drops, with some of the best practical makeup effects ever created for a movie. Makeup effects so good that, in fact, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would make the occasionally given Best Makeup Effects Oscar a permanent category, and Werewolf would win that category's first competitive Oscar.   In 1982, Landis would direct Coming Soon, one of the first direct-to-home video movies ever released. Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, Coming Soon was, essentially, edited clips from 34 old horror and thriller trailers for movies owned by Universal, from Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and The Birds. It's only 55 minutes long, but the video did help younger burgeoning cineasts learn more about the history of Universal's monster movies.   And then, as previously mentioned, there was the accident during the filming of The Twilight Zone.   Landis was able to recover enough emotionally from the tragedy to direct Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in the winter of 1982/83, another hit that maybe showed Hollywood the public wasn't as concerned about the Twilight Zone accident as they worried it would. The Twilight Zone movie would be released three weeks after Trading Places, and while it was not that big a hit, it wasn't quite the bomb it was expected to be because of the accident.   Which brings us to Into the Night.   While Landis was working on the final edit of Trading Places, the President of Universal Pictures, Sean Daniels, contacted Landis about what his next project might be. Universal was where Landis had made Animal House, The Blues Brothers and American Werewolf, so it would not be unusual for a studio head to check up on a filmmaker who had made three recent successful films for them. Specifically, Daniels wanted to pitch Landis on a screenplay the studio had in development called Into the Night. Ron Koslow, the writer of the 1976 Sam Elliott drama Lifeguard, had written the script on spec which the studio had picked up, about an average, ordinary guy who, upon discovering his wife is having an affair, who finds himself in the middle of an international incident involving jewel smuggling out of Iran. Maybe this might be something he would be interested in working on, as it would be both right up his alley, a comedy, and something he'd never done before, a romantic action thriller.   Landis would agree to make the film, if he were allowed some leeway in casting.   For the role of Ed Okin, an aerospace engineer whose insomnia leads him to the Los Angeles International Airport in search of some rest, Landis wanted Jeff Goldblum, who had made more than 15 films over the past decade, including Annie Hall, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Big Chill and The Right Stuff, but had never been the lead in a movie to this point. For Diana, the jewel smuggler who enlists the unwitting Ed into her strange world, Landis wanted Michelle Pfeiffer, the gorgeous star of Grease 2 and Scarface. But mostly, Landis wanted to fill as many of supporting roles with either actors he had worked with before, like Dan Aykroyd and Bruce McGill, or filmmakers who were either contemporaries of Landis and/or were filmmakers he had admired. Amongst those he would get would be Jack Arnold, Paul Bartel, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, Richard Franklin, Amy Heckerling, Colin Higgins, Jim Henson, Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Mazursky, Don Siegel, and Roger Vadim, as well as Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, Midnight Cowboy writer Waldo Salt, personal trainer to the stars Jake Steinfeld, music legends David Bowie and Carl Perkins, and several recent Playboy Playmates. Landis himself would be featured as one of the four Iranian agents chasing Pfeiffer's character.   While neither Perkins nor Bowie would appear on the soundtrack to the film, Landis was able to get blues legend B.B. King to perform three songs, two brand new songs as well as a cover of the Wilson Pickett classic In the Midnight Hour.   Originally scheduled to be produced by Joel Douglas, brother of Michael and son of Kirk, Into the Night would go into production on April 2nd, 1984, under the leadership of first-time producer Ron Koslow and Landis's producing partner George Folsey, Jr.   The movie would make great use of dozens of iconic Los Angeles locations, including the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Shubert Theatre in Century City, the Ships Coffee Shot on La Cienega, the flagship Tiffanys and Company in Beverly Hills, Randy's Donuts, and the aforementioned airport. But on Monday, April 23rd, the start of the fourth week of shooting, the director was ordered to stand trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter due to the accident on the Twilight Zone set. But the trial would not start until months after Into the Night was scheduled to complete its shoot. In an article about the indictment printed in the Los Angeles Times two days later, Universal Studios head Sean Daniels was insistent the studio had made no special plans in the event of Landis' possible conviction. Had he been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, Landis was looking at up to six years in prison.   The film would wrap production in early June, and Landis would spend the rest of the year in an editing bay on the Universal lot with his editor, Malcolm Campbell, who had also cut An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, the Michael Jackson Thriller short film, and Landis's segment and the Landis-shot prologue to The Twilight Zone.   During this time, Universal would set a February 22nd, 1985 release date for the film, an unusual move, as every movie Landis had made since Kentucky Fried Movie had been released during the summer movie season, and there was nothing about Into the Night that screamed late Winter.   I've long been a proponent of certain movies having a right time to be released, and late February never felt like the right time to release a morbid comedy, especially one that takes place in sunny Los Angeles. When Into the Night opened in New York City, at the Loews New York Twin at Second Avenue and 66th Street, the high in the city was 43 degrees, after an overnight low of 25 degrees. What New Yorker wants to freeze his or her butt off to see Jeff Goldblum run around Los Angeles with Michelle Pfeiffer in a light red leather jacket and a thin white t-shirt, if she's wearing anything at all? Well, actually, that last part wasn't so bad. But still, a $40,000 opening weekend gross at the 525 seat New York Twin would be one of the better grosses for all of the city. In Los Angeles, where the weather was in the 60s all weekend, the film would gross $65,500 between the 424 seat Avco Cinema 2 in Westwood and the 915 seat Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.   The reviews, like with many of Landis's films, were mixed.   Richard Corliss of Time Magazine would find the film irresistible and a sparkling thriller, calling Goldblum and Pfeiffer two of the most engaging young actors working. Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine at the time, would anoint the film with a rarely used noun in film criticism, calling it a “pip.” Travers would also call Pfeiffer a knockout of the first order, with a newly uncovered flair for comedy. Guess he hadn't seen her in the 1979 ABC spin-off of Animal House, called Delta House, in which she played The Bombshell, or in Floyd Mutrix's 1980 comedy The Hollywood Knights.    But the majority of critics would find plenty to fault with the film. The general critical feeling for the film was that it was too inside baseball for most people, as typified by Vincent Canby in his review for the New York Times. Canby would dismiss the film as having an insidey, which is not a word, manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for the moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening room.   After two weeks of exclusive engagements in New York and Los Angeles, Universal would expand the film to 1096 screens on March 8th, where the film would gross $2.57m, putting it in fifth place for the weekend, nearly a million dollars less than fellow Universal Pictures film The Breakfast Club, which was in its fourth week of release and in ninety fewer theatres. After a fourth weekend of release, where the film would come in fifth place again with $1.95m, now nearly a million and a half behind The Breakfast Club, Universal would start to migrate the film out of first run theatres and into dollar houses, in order to make room for another film of theirs, Peter Bogdanovich's comeback film Mask, which would be itself expanding from limited release to wide release on March 22nd. Into the Night would continue to play at the second-run theatres for months, but its final gross of $7.56m wouldn't even cover the film's $8m production budget.   Despite the fact that it has both Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer as its leads, Into the Night would not become a cult film on home video the way that many films neglected by audiences in theatres would find a second life.   I thought the film was good when I saw it opening night at the Aptos Twin. I enjoyed the obvious chemistry between the two leads, and I enjoyed the insidey manner in which there were so many famous filmmakers doing cameos in the film. I remember wishing there was more of David Bowie, since there were very few people, actors or musicians, who would fill the screen with so much charm and charisma, even when playing a bad guy. And I enjoyed listening to B.B. King on the soundtrack, as I had just started to get into the blues during my senior year of high school.   I revisited the film, which you can rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon and several other major streaming services, for the podcast, and although I didn't enjoy the film as much as I remember doing so in 1985, it was clear that these two actors were going to become big stars somewhere down the road. Goldblum, of course, would become a star the following year, thanks to his incredible work in David Cronenberg's The Fly. Incidentally, Goldblum and Cronenberg would meet for the first time on the set of Into the Night. And, of course, Michelle Pfeiffer would explode in 1987, thanks to her work with Susan Sarandon, Cher and Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick, which she would follow up with not one, not two but three powerhouse performances of completely different natures in 1988, in Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise, and her Oscar-nominated work in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons. Incidentally, Pfeiffer and Jonathan Demme would also meet for the first time on the set of Into the Night, so maybe it was kismet that all these things happened in part because of the unusual casting desires of John Landis.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 108, on Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl, is released.     Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Into the Night.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

In which the Mister and Monsters join me in reviewing 9 to 5 (1980) which is currently available on HBO Max or to buy/rent on Prime. With a screenplay by Patricia Resnick and Colin Higgins, from a story by Patricia Resnick, the film is directed by Colin Higgins. In this story, three secretaries: Violet (Lily Tomlin), Doralee (Dolly Parton) and Judy (Jane Fonda) have had enough of their lying, lazy, egotistical, hypocritical and horribly sexit boss, Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) and somehow find the tables turned to their advantage to teach Mr. Hart a lesson.  A strong script, deliciously humorous performances by the entire cast make this a MUST WATCH during women's history month.  The film is rated PG and clocks in at 1 h 49 m. Please note there are SPOILERS in this review.This episode of the podcast is dedicated to all the secretaries, AAs, EAs, office assistants and office support staff I've met along the journey.  A special shout out to my current tribe - Joann D, Rashema, Che, Veli, Valencia, Yvette, Monica, Melissa, Naz, Anna and Jelahn - I am nothing without you! Opening intro music: GOAT by Wayne Jones, courtesy of YouTube Audio Library --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jokagoge/support

"Getting even is a full-time job." In this week's episode, we discuss the work place comedy '9 to 5' starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Dabney Coleman. Directed by Colin Higgins.9 to 5 - IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080319/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_99 to 5 - Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/9_to_5Bill's Letterboxd Ratings: https://letterboxd.com/bill_b/list/bills-all-80s-movies-podcast-ratings/Jason's Letterboxd Ratings: https://letterboxd.com/jasonmasek/list/jasons-all-80s-movies-podcast-ratings/Website: http://www.all80smoviespodcast.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/podcastAll80sFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100030791216864TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@all80smoviespodcast

An eight hour livestream in honor of Brett's 40th birthday. Part 2. With special guests Jaida Essence Hall, Heidi N Closet, magician El Ropo, 9 to 5 writer Patricia Resnick, Joe and Jenah Silver, working actor Andrew Block, and Andy Warhol (Brett Davis). Representing the arthouse, it's Andy Warhol's eight hour continuous shot of the Empire State Building, Empire (1965). Except that it's impossible to get a copy of Empire because the Warhol Museum keeps it under lock and key. So instead we watch Andy Warhol's Minion (2022), an eight hour continuous shot of the Universal Studios Minion. And representing the mainstream, it's 1980's all-time great workplace comedy 9 to 5, directed by Colin Higgins, written by Patricia Resnick, and starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Dabney Coleman. Which will win and enter the canon? Which will lose and enter the trash canon and Brett and Joe can never watch it again for the rest of their lives? Listen to find out! JOIN US EVERY MONDAY NIGHT ON TWITCH 8PM ET: https://www.twitch.tv/foreverdogteam   VIDEO & AD FREE EPISODES ON FOREVER DOG PLUS https://foreverdog.plus   THE COMPLETE CANON & TRASH CANON ON LETTERBOXD: https://letterboxd.com/weekendbergman/lists   FOLLOW JOE ON LETTERBOXD: https://letterboxd.com/joecilio   FOLLOW WEEKEND AT BERGMAN'S https://twitter.com/weekendbergman https://www.instagram.com/weekendbergman https://www.tiktok.com/@weekendbergman   BUY MERCH https://www.teepublic.com/user/weekend-at-bergmans   WEEKEND AT BERGMAN'S IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/weekend-at-bergmans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An eight hour livestream in honor of Brett's 40th birthday. Part 1. With special guests Julie Klausner, Tom Scharpling, Forever Dog's Alex Ramsey, working actor Andrew Block, and Andy Warhol (Brett Davis). Representing the arthouse, it's Andy Warhol's eight hour continuous shot of the Empire State Building, Empire (1965). Except that it's impossible to get a copy of Empire because the Warhol Museum keeps it under lock and key. So instead we watch Andy Warhol's Minion (2022), an eight hour continuous shot of the Universal Studios Minion. And representing the mainstream, it's 1980's all-time great workplace comedy 9 to 5, directed by Colin Higgins, written by Patricia Resnick, and starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Dabney Coleman. Which will win and enter the canon? Which will lose and enter the trash canon and Brett and Joe can never watch it again for the rest of their lives? Listen to find out! JOIN US EVERY MONDAY NIGHT ON TWITCH 8PM ET: https://www.twitch.tv/foreverdogteam   VIDEO & AD FREE EPISODES ON FOREVER DOG PLUS https://foreverdog.plus   THE COMPLETE CANON & TRASH CANON ON LETTERBOXD: https://letterboxd.com/weekendbergman/lists   FOLLOW JOE ON LETTERBOXD: https://letterboxd.com/joecilio   FOLLOW WEEKEND AT BERGMAN'S https://twitter.com/weekendbergman https://www.instagram.com/weekendbergman https://www.tiktok.com/@weekendbergman   BUY MERCH https://www.teepublic.com/user/weekend-at-bergmans   WEEKEND AT BERGMAN'S IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/weekend-at-bergmans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Analisamos o filme "Como Eliminar Seu Chefe", clássica comédia feminista dos anos 80 estrelada por Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin e Dolly Parton. - Visite a página do podcast no site e confira material extra sobre o tema do episódio - Junte-se ao Cineclube Cinematório e tenha acesso a conteúdo exclusivo de cinema Nesta edição do podcast Escolha da Audiência, o tema é o filme "Como Eliminar Seu Chefe" (Nine to Five, 1980), de Colin Higgins. Estrelada por Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin e Dolly Parton, a comédia discute os direitos trabalhistas das mulheres e critica o machismo no mundo corporativo. Pedido do nosso apoiador Hélcio da Silva Jr. Escrito por Colin Higgins e Patricia Resnick, "Como Eliminar Seu Chefe" se inspira nas clássicas screwballs comedies (ou "comédias malucas") para mostrar as situações absurdas em que três funcionárias de uma grande empresa se envolvem quando tentam se livrar do chefe machista e sexista delas (interpretado por Dabney Coleman). O filme "Como Eliminar Seu Chefe" foi indicado ao Oscar de Melhor Canção Original: a clássica "Nine to Five", de Dolly Parton. No podcast Escolha da Audiência, Renato Silveira e Kel Gomes analisam filmes ou séries pedidos por apoiadores do cinematório e que ainda não haviam sido pauta dos nossos podcasts. Quer mandar um e-mail? Escreva para contato@cinematorio.com.br. A sua mensagem pode ser lida no podcast!

durée : 00:05:38 - La chronique de Juliette Arnaud - par : Juliette ARNAUD - "Harold et Maud" de Colin Higgins paru aux éditions Gallimard en 1984 et adapté d'un film américain éponyme réalisé par Hal Ashby sorti en 1971.

durée : 00:05:38 - La chronique de Juliette Arnaud - par : Juliette ARNAUD - "Harold et Maud" de Colin Higgins paru aux éditions Gallimard en 1984 et adapté d'un film américain éponyme réalisé par Hal Ashby sorti en 1971.

This month's guest is Colin Higgins. We sit in on a pitch meeting for a brand new state-of-the-art doll, learn the intricacies of schoolyard law, and follow the first Mars colony as they make a tough decision. Boston Billy written by Levi GarciaBoston Billy - Colin HigginsSandy - Mollie KirbyFlanagan - Leon ClintonKid Lawyer written by Christina MakJaxon - Colin HigginsHarper - Mollie KirbyDylan - Leon ClintonMr. Brady - Levi GarciaSurviving Mars written by Levi GarciaCraig - Colin HigginsCapt. Scott - MollieJulian - Levi GarciaAndrea - Christina MakCommander Socks - Leon ClintonEditor and Sound Design: Levi GarciaSome sound effects provided by ZapSplatEpisode Cover by Levi GarciaImage by WikiImages thru PixabayRecorded over Zoom

Few movies have such a recognizable title track as 9 to 5 from 1980! It's the pick of Patreon supporter LuckyLooLooGreen this week and it's co-written and directed by Colin Higgins with story by Patricia Resnick. Starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, Dabney Coleman, Elizabeth Wilson, and Sterling Hayden. If you enjoy the show we have a Patreon, become a supporter. www.patreon.com/thevhsstrikesback Plot Summary: Three female employees of a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot find a way to turn the tables on him. thevhsstrikesback@gmail.com https://linktr.ee/vhsstrikesback --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thevhsstrikesback/support

Due to either a calculating error or a most strongly calculated plan (you decide!), cohosts Dino and Mike are back with their Season 3 kickoff in I Eat Movies #23: Not So Noir - Foul Play (1978) / The Late Show (1977). Matching two pairs of features that combine sleuths, intrigue and sensational cities, the boys deconstruct the Hitchcockian homages found within the late Colin Higgins' directorial debut as well as the charming teaming of Chevy Chase's dry wit and Goldie Hawn's adorable naivete. With a little help from our pal Gilbert Gottfried, Dino explores in depth the unforgettable music from Charles Fox and Barry Manilow that has arguably exceeded the popularity of the film itself. Next up, Art Carney's best film in The Late Show is discussed where he plays an aging private eye tasked with finding an eccentric Lily Tomlin's cat. Not quite as simple as it sounds with things getting far more personal for the AlkaSeltzer popping detective the deeper he goes, The Late Show was universally hailed at the time of its release while, falling into obscurity in the years since. Eating movies is our racket and we couldn't be happier to resurrect this diamond in the rough for a new audience. We may be back sooner than expected but, we hope you're ready to get stuffed all over again with I Eat Movies #23: Not So Noir - Foul Play (1978) / The Late Show (1977)!     

The first episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1980 features the second-highest-grossing film at the box office, 9 to 5. Directed and co-written (with Patricia Resnick) by Colin Higgins and starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, Dabney Coleman and Elizabeth Wilson, 9 to 5 grossed $103.3 million and was nominated for an Oscar for its theme song. The post 9 to 5 (1980 Box Office Champ) appeared first on Awesome Movie Year.

As usual, we get a recap that is basically a description of the VHS tape before launching into our discussion on  The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Darcy discusses how she first saw it and why it was her pick for this episode. Joe, Katie, and MJ talk about the film's camp status.Further topics include:the odd demonization of gays as seen in the Dom DeLuise character Melvin P. Thorpethe real life drama of the Chicken Ranchhow much we love Dollyhow the gay football team helps define its camp classic statusthe Mona-Ed Earl relationshipweird racial tropes of the 80sits potential copaganda statusdepartures from the stage playcastingCharles Durning's WTF oscar nomination for his role of the governorThen we cap it off with some rapid fire trivia questions, followed by more open-ended questions. As always, we wrap the episode up with some closing thoughts. Additional Resources:Dolly Parton & Patti LabelleRoger EbertSiskel & Ebert ReviewCamp and the Gay SensibilityColin HigginsDoc HopperIG: @vhs_glowTwitter: @vhs_glowRoyalty-free music: Music Produced by Aries BeatsPromoted by CFC

On this episode, Lolo and Patrick sit down with a cup of coffee and watch a childhood favorite of Lolo's, the iconic comedy “9 to 5”! If listening to Dolly Parton sing that theme song doesn't make you want to start a revolution, we don't know what will. This episode includes a ton of trivia about how this movie came into existence, a little bit about the three incredible leads of this film (though we could do a whole episode on each so we did have to summarize) and a discussion between Lolo and Patrick about the writing of the film, and the comedy stylings of writer/director Colin Higgins. Grab your cup of ambition, put on your acrylics, and join us for a fun, silly, and very poignant ride. New episodes of First Timers Movie Club come out every other Friday so click SUBSCRIBE and rate us five stars to make sure you don't miss our next episode!Become a Patreon today for access to exclusive episodes here: www.patreon.com/ixfilmproductionsHave a favorite (or least favorite) famous movie that you think we should've seen? Reach out to IX Film Productions on Twitter, Instagram or email and we'll add it to our list!Follow IX Film Productions for podcast updates, stand up comedy, original web shorts and comedy feature films at:Facebook: www.facebook.com/ixfilmproductionsTwitter: www.twitter.com/ixproductionsInstagram: @IXProductionsYouTube: www.youtube.com/ixfp"First Timers Movie Club" is brought to you by IX Film Productions."Making the World a Funnier Place one Film at a Time"MusicThe Curtain Rises by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5007-the-curtain-risesLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

While investigating a rogue comet, the cultural archive concealed inside begins taking over both the Enterprise and Data. Today James and Lou discuss (Masks) and what we think of it.  Please note, Colin Higgins, a long time friend to the Lou Trek Show and Battle Bridge podcasts, was slated to be a part of this […]

"Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living, barely getting by, it's all taking and no giving, they just use your mind, and they never give you credit, it's enough to drive you crazy if you let it" Oh yes, there will be singing as Sailor and Kane cover the 1980 comedy 9 to 5 directed by Colin Higgins. It stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton as three working women who live out their fantasies of getting even with and overthrowing the company's autocratic, "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss, played by Dabney Coleman. During our review and recast of this movie, we try and answer why this comedy isn't talked about alongside other 80 comedy classics. We also discuss how timeless and how relevant the themes are here. Let us know what you think and if you remember the Jane Fonda workout tapes as fondly as Kane does.

This week Lindsay is joined by Fatal Femmes Host Laura Cannon as they clock in for a full shift; for a Double Features of Mike Nichols' Working Girl (1988) & Colin Higgins' 9 to 5 (1980).  This is an Double that proves that 9 to 5 is all taking and no giving. Come on sing a long you know the words!   Listen to Fatal Femmes Here   Follow Fatal Femmes on Twitter @fatal_femmes Follow Laura Cannon on Twitter @cannonlaurac   Follow Schlock and Awe on Twitter @schlockandawe1 Follow Lindsay on Twitter @readandgeek   Please Rate and Review Here   Original Music Composed and Performed by Anthony King

Continuing our celebration of Pride Month, this week we take a look at a couple of 1980's classics, each starring the one and only Dolly Parton. Brian is joined by his friend and Dolly Parton expert, Zack Hudson. In addition to sharing a star in Dolly, the films share a director, Colin Higgins. He was an out gay man, making an unapologetically feminist film with three of the early 80's biggest stars, and he followed it up with the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas! Join Brian and Zack as they revisit these two now classics, discussing Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLouise as well as share their favorite stories about Dolly Parton's legendary career. 

Who is this Colin Higgins fellow and why are we talking about him? How resonant is Harold and Maude still? Are jokes about suicide okay in a context like this? Tune in to this week's show to get these answers and more!

Who is this Colin Higgins fellow and why are we talking about him? How resonant is Harold and Maude still? Are jokes about suicide okay in a context like this? Tune in to this week's show to get these answers and more!

On the planet Fosforon, Avon and Vila sneak into Q-Base, a Federation com-station, looking for a crystal needed to decrypt new Federation pulse-codes. In space, Zen detects a 700-year-old Earth vessel on approach to the station and Cally senses something "malignant" aboard. Blake anonymously warns the station of the ship despite objections from Jenna that he is helping the enemy. On the planet, Avon blackmails Tynus, a former associate, to help Avon steal the crystal. Tynus arranges for a diversion that will allow Avon to slip past security, but it may be a ruse. Meanwhile, the base tows the derelict back to the planet whereupon Blake teleports down to warn them in person, but he is too late as the base unwittingly releases a swift-killing alien virus. Guest Stars: (as Dr. Bellfriar), (as Tynus), Colin Farrell (as Gambril), Colin Higgins (as Tak), (as Wiler), (as Bax)