British actor, producer, director, and singer
POPULARITY
2 episodes with David Hemmings
2 episodes with David Hemmings
2 episodes with David Hemmings
2 episodes with David Hemmings
2 episodes with David Hemmings
2 episodes with David Hemmings
2 episodes with David Hemmings
Nesse episódio vamos celebrar os 50 anos de lançamento de um Giallo absolutamente genial e influente, Profondo Rosso aka Deep Red, Prelúdio Para Matar de 1975, dirigido por Dario Argento. Com uma trama bem arquitetada, sequências antológicas e sangrentas, uma trilha sonoraimpressionante do grupo Goblin e a presença em cena do cultuado ator David Hemmings, o filme até hoje surpreende novas gerações de cinéfilos e críticos.https://www.instagram.com/avingancadosfilmesb/https://www.instagram.com/cinematecacapitolio/https://www.instagram.com/mondogiallopodcast/
Boldly pursuing tariff-free trade in rock and roll news, nostalgia, gossip and old hokum since 2007 and, this week, featuring … … the romantic allure of life as a critic. … Sting's part in the success of ‘Adolescence'. … Mick Jagger's long engagement to Melanie Hamrick (born when Steel Wheels came out!) … "Contained within these grooves are twelve convincing arguments against the capitalist system" and other vicious reviews revisited. … when Bob Marley recorded ‘Sugar Sugar' by the Archies. … Al Bowlly's menacing ‘Midnight, The Stars And You' and how film soundtracks change your relationship with music. … what Mike Chapman had to tell Blondie to make ‘Parallel Lines' a hit. … little-known pop fact no 97: Dave Pegg was at the same school as the man who invented the internet! … "I can lose weight but you will always be the director of Brown Bunny” – cracking film review one-liners from Roger Ebert. … the Jaws film and the Jeeves musical: both came out 50 years ago, both riddled with catastrophe. One broke box office records, the other died like a louse in a Russian's beard. … Gabrielle Drake - “If you're going to be in a flop, best it be a huge one.” … why Elvis Costello and Al Stewart should hit the lecture circuit. … and David Hemmings, inconsolable, in a shower. Plus birthday guest Chuck Loncon stages a quiz.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Boldly pursuing tariff-free trade in rock and roll news, nostalgia, gossip and old hokum since 2007 and, this week, featuring … … the romantic allure of life as a critic. … Sting's part in the success of ‘Adolescence'. … Mick Jagger's long engagement to Melanie Hamrick (born when Steel Wheels came out!) … "Contained within these grooves are twelve convincing arguments against the capitalist system" and other vicious reviews revisited. … when Bob Marley recorded ‘Sugar Sugar' by the Archies. … Al Bowlly's menacing ‘Midnight, The Stars And You' and how film soundtracks change your relationship with music. … what Mike Chapman had to tell Blondie to make ‘Parallel Lines' a hit. … little-known pop fact no 97: Dave Pegg was at the same school as the man who invented the internet! … "I can lose weight but you will always be the director of Brown Bunny” – cracking film review one-liners from Roger Ebert. … the Jaws film and the Jeeves musical: both came out 50 years ago, both riddled with catastrophe. One broke box office records, the other died like a louse in a Russian's beard. … Gabrielle Drake - “If you're going to be in a flop, best it be a huge one.” … why Elvis Costello and Al Stewart should hit the lecture circuit. … and David Hemmings, inconsolable, in a shower. Plus birthday guest Chuck Loncon stages a quiz.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Boldly pursuing tariff-free trade in rock and roll news, nostalgia, gossip and old hokum since 2007 and, this week, featuring … … the romantic allure of life as a critic. … Sting's part in the success of ‘Adolescence'. … Mick Jagger's long engagement to Melanie Hamrick (born when Steel Wheels came out!) … "Contained within these grooves are twelve convincing arguments against the capitalist system" and other vicious reviews revisited. … when Bob Marley recorded ‘Sugar Sugar' by the Archies. … Al Bowlly's menacing ‘Midnight, The Stars And You' and how film soundtracks change your relationship with music. … what Mike Chapman had to tell Blondie to make ‘Parallel Lines' a hit. … little-known pop fact no 97: Dave Pegg was at the same school as the man who invented the internet! … "I can lose weight but you will always be the director of Brown Bunny” – cracking film review one-liners from Roger Ebert. … the Jaws film and the Jeeves musical: both came out 50 years ago, both riddled with catastrophe. One broke box office records, the other died like a louse in a Russian's beard. … Gabrielle Drake - “If you're going to be in a flop, best it be a huge one.” … why Elvis Costello and Al Stewart should hit the lecture circuit. … and David Hemmings, inconsolable, in a shower. Plus birthday guest Chuck Loncon stages a quiz.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Nelson G from “Average Home Theater Reviews” & I are joining forces to discuss our favorite episodes from each season & both movies. In our third episode, we'll discuss 6 episodes from Season 3.Ep1 "Loved to Death" from Tales from the Crypt #25. Directed by Tom Mankiewicz. Written by Joe Minion and John Mankiewicz. Originally aired on June 15, 1991.Aspiring screenwriter Edward Foster (Andrew McCarthy) has a crush on his neighbor, aspiring actress Miranda Singer (Mariel Hemingway). After failing to get Miranda to notice him, Edward finally gains her affection with a potion given to him by his woman-hating landlord (David Hemmings). Eventually, Edward begins to regret his choice after Miranda's newfound obsession with him becomes too much for him to handle. Also starring Kathleen Freeman as the next-door neighbor.Ep2 "Carrion Death" from Shock Suspense Stories #9. Written & directed by Steven E. de Souza. Originally aired on June 15, 1991.Earl Raymond Diggs (Kyle MacLachlan), a murderer who has recently escaped prison, is running for the Mexican border. He is pursued by a state trooper (George DelHoyo) who ends up slapping handcuffs on him. Diggs manages to kill the trooper, but the trooper manages to swallow the key before dying. With no other options to remove the cuffs, Diggs is forced to drag the trooper'sEp3 "The Trap" from Shock Suspense Stories #18. Directed by Michael J. Fox. Written by Scott Alexander. Originally aired on June 15, 1991.Lou Paloma (Bruce McGill), an obnoxious, egotistical, mean-spirited deadbeat who cannot hold down a job, is horribly in debt, and is both unfaithful and abusive (verbally and physically) to his wife, Irene (Teri Garr) ropes her and his brother, Billy (Bruno Kirby), into a plan to fake his own death, collect his life insurance money, and escape to a new life in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, Lou is unaware that both his long-suffering wife and brother, who have developed an attraction to one another, are planning to double-cross him.Ep4 "Abra Cadaver" from Tales from the Crypt #37 (as "Dead Right!"). Directed by Stephen Hopkins. Written by Jim Birge. Originally aired on June 19, 1991.Years ago, Carl Fairbanks (Tony Goldwyn) and his brother Martin (Beau Bridges) were medical students. Carl played a prank on Martin which unexpectedly gave him a stroke and paralyzed one of his hands. In the present day, Carl becomes a successful surgeon whereas Martin's paralysis limits him to a medical research job. Martin gets his revenge by injecting Carl with an experimental serum that stops Carl's heart but keeps his brain alive, essentially trapping Carl in his own body. Note: Based on the story "Dead Right!" renamed for television.Ep7 "The Reluctant Vampire" from The Vault of Horror #20. Directed by Elliot Silverstein. Written by Terry Black. Originally aired on July 10, 1991.Ep13 "Spoiled" from The Haunt of Fear #26. Directed by Andy Wolk. Written by Connie Johnson & Doug Ronning. Originally aired on August 21, 1991.In a meta-layered spoof of daytime soap operas, Janet (Faye Grant), a housewife who is obsessed with the soap opera There's Always Tomorrow and watches the program religiously, is annoyed that her doctor husband, Leon (Alan Rachins), is more obsessed with experimenting on a rabbit than spending time with her. When her TV loses picture at a crucial moment in the show, Janet calls in a cable man named Abel (Anthony LaPaglia), to have cable installed. Inspired by There's Always Tomorrow's no-nonsense main character, Fuschia Monroe (Anita Morris), Janet begins a steamy affair with Abel while Leon is distracted with his work. When Leon catches the two of them in the act, he soon wonders if he could try his experiment on human subjects. Check out Nelson's YouTube Channel at https://youtu.be/gyd0D5sCPYU?si=_jRO4WpXDUC8i01DSupport this podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fave-five-from-fans/support
The sixth episode of our special retrospective 20th season looks back to the awesome movie year of 1975 with the second of Josh's three picks, Dario Argento's Deep Red. Directed and co-written by Dario Argento and starring David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia and Macha Méril, Deep Red is considered a landmark of the giallo subgenre.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Linda Gross in The Los Angeles Times, Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/10/archives/the-screendeep-red-is-a-bucket-of-axmurder-cliches.html), and Ann Guarino in the New York Daily News.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to...
Like what you're hearing? Let us know!Discover the enigmatic world of Australian cinema with us as Super Marcy from the Super Network joins the conversation about the 1980 thriller "Harlequin." Imagine the intrigue of a political family meeting a mysterious healer—this is just the tip of the iceberg as we unravel the film's captivating narrative surrounding the Rast family and the elusive Gregory Wolf. Spearheaded by talents like Robert Powell and David Hemmings, and guided by director Simon Wincer and screenwriter Everett DeRoche, we explore how "Harlequin" stands as a unique gem within the Ozploitation genre. Reflect on how this film fits into the broader tapestry of Australian cinema, and why it's a must-watch on platforms like Australia's Broly.From political thrillers to historical mysteries, the episode takes a fascinating detour into the real-life enigma of former Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. Vanished without a trace, his disappearance sparked wild theories, from CIA abduction to submarine escapes, and we ponder the irony of a swimming pool bearing his name. We even draw unexpected parallels between this national mystery and the triumphant moment in rugby league history when the Cronulla Sharks finally claimed victory, "turning off the porch lights" and ending decades of anticipation for their loyal fans.Peel back the layers of "Harlequin" as we dissect its themes of illusion versus reality, and liken Gregory Wolf's character to historical figures like Rasputin. From practical effects to Brian May's haunting score, we appreciate the artistry that sets this film apart from typical Ozploitation offerings. With lively discussions on its ambiguous scenes and the performances that bring tension and depth to the screen, this episode is an invitation to rediscover a film that challenges perceptions and captivates the imagination. Join us for a journey through political intrigue, cinematic mysteries, and the fascinating landscape of Australian storytelling.Support the showA Dingo Ate My Movie Socials:WebsiteBlueskyFacebookInstagramLetterboxdEmailMusic from the movies featured on the podcast: SpotifyApple MusicSupport Me At BuyMeACoffee Please note that this podcast often explores topics and uses language from past eras. This means that some of the discussions may include attitudes, expressions, and viewpoints that were common in those times but may not align with the standards and expectations of our society today. We'd like to ask for your understanding as we navigate these historical contexts, which are important to appreciate the era we're discussing fully.
In anticipation of the upcoming release of “Gladiator II”, I'm retro-reviewing the Best Picture Oscar-winning original “Gladiator” this episode. You will not have to ask if you're entertained with this review because “Gladiator” is one of the most beloved movies of all time. It's the movie that made even your Grandma aware of who Russell Crowe was. It launched a whole era of swords and sandals movies and TV series afterwards. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe playing General Maximus Decimus Meridius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife who would have his vengeance in this life, or the next. Many motivational and meme-worthy quotes were introduced into the zeitgeist by this movie: “Are you not entertained?”, “What we do in life, echoes in eternity.” I could go on, and I will, in this episode all about this Ridley Scott classic about a Roman general, made a slave, who became a gladiator then later, the savior of Rome. You could consider this part of your “homework” for brushing up on what happened in “Gladiator” before you rush out to see “Gladiator II.” “Gladiator” also stars Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Djiman Hounsou, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi, David Schofield, John Schrapnel, Tomas Arana, Ralf Moeller, Spencer Treat Clark, David Hemmings, Tommy Flanagan and Sven-Ole Thorsen. Support the showFeel free to reach out to me via:@MoviesMerica on Twitter @moviesmerica on InstagramMovies Merica on Facebook
This week, Richard Kirkham from The LAMBcast returns to the show, as we discuss the tense 1974 thriller Juggernaut. The film features an all-star cast including Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, David Hemmings, Ian Holm, and more.
“This will be a particularly ignorant episode… from an historical standpoint” - Steve, on WHM's lack of history education On this week's special We ❤️ Movies episode, we're chatting about Royal Rid's 2000-era action epic, Gladiator! How great of a run did this film set off for Russell Crowe? How easily eerie is Joaquin here? Did Jesse Ventura try to snag an audition along with Sven-Ole? How intense is that tiger sequence? Is the CGI'd Oliver Reed the first cinematic instance of Hollywood going to Tarkin Town and should we be calling it Oliver Reed-ville instead? And how funny is that “They Say No” decapitation? PLUS: How is this movie only one of THREE times Royal Rid was nominated for Best Director? Gladiator stars Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou, David Schofield, John Shrapnel, Ralf Moeller, Spencer Treat Clark, David Hemmings, Tommy Flanagan, Sven-Ole Thorsen, and Oliver Reed as Proximo; directed by Ridley Scott. This episode is brought to you in part by Uncommon Goods. To get 15% off your next gift, go to UNCOMMON GOODS dot com slash WHM. That's UNCOMMON GOODS dot com slash WHM, for 15% off! Don't miss out on this limited time offer! Uncommon Goods. We're all out of the ordinary. Be sure to catch us in Boston for our final show of the year! We'll be talking about the film Pretty Woman at Laugh Boston on December 4! It's our last stop on the road before we hibernate until next year, so we wanna see you out there! Click through here to get your tickets! Make the WHM Merch Store your one-stop shop for all your We Hate Movies merch-related needs! Including new Bus Movie, Night Vision & Too Old For This Shit designs! Original cover art by Felipe Sobreiro.
Gladiator 2 is coming to cinemas.. and not the proposed Nick Cave version, (some would say fortunately). Join co-hosts Tommy and DL as we journey back to the year 2000 yo talk about how we got here.***********************Time Codes:Intro - 0:25How are you doing? - 4:42What have you been up to? - 11:07MAIN TOPIC: Gladiator (2000) - 21:29Stupid Plot Summary - 23:48Cast & Crew - 24:42Djimon Honsou Cinematic Universe - 28:27Plot - 29:47Red Rising Bk3 Spoilers - 35:05History and Accuracy - 43:49Action - 46:51World-Building - 48:37Performances - 52:04Original Script - 54:06Tones & Themes - 57:363 Best & 3 Worst - 57:50Critical Reception - 1:01:49Better or Worse than Aquaman (2018)? - 1:02:53Trivia True or False - 1:04:02Main Topic:This week we're discussing Ridley Scott's 'swords and sandals' epic, starring Russel Crowe and a Hanz Zimmer score as epic as the acting. But we really want to talk about, is David Hemmings's eyebrows! This one is an absolute favourite. Make sure you rewatch it before the sequel hits screens!Are you excited for Gladiator 2? Let us know by contacting us at thepodcastassemble@gmail.com or hitting us up on socials, and we'll give you a shout-out on the pod!Website || Instagram || Twitter || YouTube || EmailAnd while we've got you, we'd love it if you gave us a 5 star review ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and let us know what you think of the show.#Gladiator #Gladiator2 #RidleyScott #RusselCrowe #JoaquinPhoenix Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Are you ready to be entertained?! In this month's episode, Austin and Big T discuss the 2000 film, Gladiator, and all its pros and cons. Grab a good seat in the arena and tune in as Austin discusses how this film has changed for him since he last watched it and Big T gives us his first impression. We share our opinions about the soundtrack and discuss what we think makes Commodus such a great villain. So pour yourself some wine then join us for next month when we discuss the new horror film, Strange Darling.Write into us at layersoffilmpod@gmail.comFollow us on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok: @layersoffilmpod
Halloween season draws to a close with one last pairing of horror films (for now): 1966's Eye of the Devil, starring David Niven, Deborah Kerr, David Hemmings, the beautiful and talented Sharon Tate, and horror icon Donald Pleasence and 1968's Witchfinder General, starring the dashing, debonair, and diabolical Vincent Price! Friend Dan J. joins to discuss both obscure films that deserve more recognition than they get. Happy Halloween!
Spooky season is upon us, which means SPOOKY MOVIES! We kick off this season with a legendary giallo: Dario Argento's 1975 film Deep Red, starring David Hemmings and the remarkable Daria Nicolodi. Murder has never been so weird.
We cover the altered perceptions given to us by directors Mike Nichols (in his film directorial debut) and Michaelangelo Antonioni. Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis, David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jane Birkin have us questioning what is real. Connect with us: Never Did It on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neverdiditpod Never Did It on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/bradgaroon/list/never-did-it-podcast/ Brad on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/bradgaroon/ Jake on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jake_ziegler/ Never Did It on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neverdiditpodcast Hosted by Brad Garoon & Jake Ziegler
I think the reason David Hemmings never leaves his room is because he's still scared of that puppet from Deep Red. S03E01
We continue Sci-HIGH-ence Theater Month. The Month where we ask "What the hell were they on?" ✨ In Episode 151 of "Hey, Did You See This One?" we're diving into the psychedelic world of 'Barbarella' (1968)! Join us and special guest Marianna Miniotis as we explore the bold visuals, campy fun, and iconic style of this 60s sci-fi cult favorite. From Jane Fonda's unforgettable performance to the film's lasting influence, you won't want to miss this colorful conversation!
Intro music from:Arthemis - Survivor (Destiny's Child Cover)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjYCOtYjCY4The Survivor is a 1981 supernatural horror Australian-British co-production directed by David Hemmings and starring Robert Powell, Jenny Agutter, and Joseph Cotten.In Adelaide, Australia (not Eton in the UK as in the original novel written by James Herbert), airline pilot David Keller (played by Powell) survives the crash of his Boeing 747-200, unhurt despite all 300 passengers dying in the accident. With no memories of the accident, he starts to suffer strange supernatural visions.Director David Hemmings is most famous for his acting roles, including Dildano in Barbarella, Marcus Daly in Dario Argento's Deep Red, and Thomas, the fashion photographer in the hugely successful avant-garde mystery film Blowup – a role turned down by Sean Connery because director Michelangelo Antonioni would not show him the full script but only a seven-page treatment stored in a cigarette packet. Hemmings would later feature in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Connery 37 years later.Robert Powell, best known for his portrayal of a charismatic cult leader/son of a carpenter in the 1977 epic television drama series Jesus of Nazareth, also played secret agent Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, appeared in Ken Russell's Tommy as Captain Walker and, at the request of his friend and golf partner, comedian Jasper Carrott, co-starred in the BBC sitcom The Detectives (which ran for five series!). He also lent his voice to the 2002 rock opera The Hound of the Baskervilles by Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman, playing John Watson. Powell was considered for several roles in Lifeforce (featured in episode 39 of this podcast). A founder member of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, he campaigned alongside Barry Norman on behalf of the party's first leader, Roy Jenkins.Jenny Agutter (OBE), who plays the role of Hobbs the clairvoyant (a male character in the novel), is best known for her ongoing role in the inexplicably popular Call the Midwife. She also starred in two adaptations of The Railway Children, the critically acclaimed film Walkabout, and, relevant to this podcast, An American Werewolf in London (listen to episode 26 for more info). The film also features Joseph Cotten, (best man at Orson Welles's wedding to Rita Hayworth) appeared in five films selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant. In addition to these classics, he appeared in many films and TV programs, including, pertinent to this podcast, one episode of Tales of the Unexpected. He later admitted, "I was in a lot of junk. I get nervous when I don't work." This was his final motion picture, suffering a stroke shortly after working on it.James Herbert, author of the source novel, sent a note to David Hemmings offering his assistance. He never received a reply, and in 1988 dismissed this film and the later Deadly Eyes (the film adaptation of The Rats) as "They're terrible...absolute rubbish. I can only say - don't blame me." The Survivor was Herbert's third novel, published in 1976, coming after The Rats and The Fog.The music for this film is by Brian May! …but not the one you're thinking of... This is the Australian Brian May, who has an impressive musical CV, including: The Blue Lagoon, Gallipoli, Mad Max, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Missing in Action 2 and Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.This was the first Australian movie to cost more than $1 million (Australian) to make. The location was shifted to OZ as a complex tax dodge, allowing English investors to completely write-off on the whole film. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We return to Camelot with a look at the 1967 film production of the Lerner & Loewe musical, again starring Richard Harris as King Arthur. At three hours, it's an overly-long production that loses steam in its third hour, but the first two are lush and often inspired, and possibly the best-looking movie we've covered for the show. Starring Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, David Hemmings, and Lionel Jeffries. Written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Directed by Joshua Logan. This is a preview of our Patreon-only series Hollywood Avalon: An Arthurian Film Podcast. To hear the entire episode, join the Mary Versus the Movies patreon for $3/month to hear this and the entire series Hollywood Avalon: https://www.patreon.com/maryvsmovies.
Today on Bloodhaus, the ghouls discuss one of the most iconic giallo films of all time, Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975). From wiki: “Deep Red (Italian: Profondo rosso), also known as The Hatchet Murders, is a 1975 Italian giallo film directed by Dario Argento and co-written by Argento and Bernardino Zapponi. It stars David Hemmings as a musician who investigates a series of murders performed by a mysterious figure wearing black leather gloves. The cast also stars Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril, and Clara Calamai. The film's score was composed and performed by Goblin, the first in a long-running collaboration with Argento.[1]”But also: phrogging, haunted houses, Lake Mungo, mail bag, correction for Knife + Heart, and an email about The Shape, Interview with the Vampire, Mona Lisa, The Company of Wolves, and then all about Eli Roth's Thanksgiving, 2000s remakes of 80s horror, and more!NEXT WEEK: Def by Temptation (1990) with a special guestWebsite: http://www.bloodhauspod.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/BloodhausPodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/Email: bloodhauspod@gmail.comDrusilla's art: https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/Drusilla's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydesister/Drusilla's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/drew_phillips/Joshua's website: https://www.joshuaconkel.com/Joshua's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/joshuaconkel.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/Joshua's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/joshuaconkel
It's THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR! At least that's what they tell me. We've coasted out of COMFORT FOOD and now we're full blown into the Christmas season and why not get it started with…MURDER! It's a bloody scene one Christmas Day. We see a Christmas tree. A decorated table. We hear screams. We see stabbing in the shadows. A knife falls to the floor. Children's feet step into frame. What the hell happened here? Are all Italian Christmases like this? It's time to solve some serial murders and who better than a pianist to get the job done. We're discussing Dario Argento's classic Italian slasher film “DEEP RED” from 1975 starring David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi with proggy jams by Giorgio Gaslini & Goblin. The streets are running a very bright red. A killer is on the loose and they're very good at making mechanical dolls. Also they're playing children's music when they kill. They like to stick to a theme. It's like a Batman villain from the 40s. How does it all connect with that terrifying Christmas Day? Sit through it and then hear us tell the tale shock by shock. They're trying to kill me, yeah? Subscribe to us on YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuJf3lkRI-BLUTsLI_ehOsg Contact us here: MOVIEHUMPERS@gmail.com Hear us on podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6o6PSNJFGXJeENgqtPY4h7 Our OG podcast “Documenteers”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/documenteers-the-documentary-podcast/id1321652249 Soundcloud feed: https://soundcloud.com/documenteers Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/culturewrought
Horror Hangout | Two Bearded Film Fans Watch The 50 Best Horror Movies Ever!
It was the greatest evil of all. And the child was made to bear it. The child suffered and became the man. Now it will be avenged.Deep Red (Italian: Profondo rosso), also known as The Hatchet Murders, is a 1975 Italian giallo film directed by Dario Argento and co-written by Argento and Bernardino Zapponi.It stars David Hemmings as a musician who investigates a series of murders performed by a mysterious figure wearing black leather gloves. The cast also stars Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril, and Clara Calamai. The film's score was composed and performed by Goblin, the first in a long-running collaboration with Argento.00:00 Intro2:40 Horror News 19:05 What We've Been Watching / Women Make Horror33:12 Film Review1:34:03 Name Game1:39:03 Film Rating1:42:33 OutroPodcast - https://podlink.to/horrorhangoutPatreon - https://www.patreon.com/horrorhangoutFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/horrorhangoutpodcastTwitter - https://twitter.com/horror_hangout_TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@horrorhangoutpodcastInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/horrorhangoutpodcast/Website - http://www.hawkandcleaver.comBen - https://twitter.com/ben_erringtonAndy - https://twitter.com/andyctwritesSarah - https://www.instagram.com/sarahofhorrorhttps://linktr.ee/sarahofhorrorAudio credit - Taj Eastonhttp://tajeaston.comSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thehorrorhangout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As a special treat, this episode features four tasty albums from the golden age of Rock Music. Rick Wakeman's “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, accused of hastening the arrival of punk, and of justifying the need for it, ultimately sold over 14 million copies. Go figure! “Not Fragile” by Bachman Turner Overdrive, topped the charts in USA and Australia proclaiming that “you ain't seen nothin' yet”! The pick of the crop, the self-titled “Bad Company” was hailed as “swing and swagger with power chords”. Arising from the ashes of Free and Humble Pie, Bad Company was one of the first bands to be dubbed a “supergroup” Our album that “You Must Hear before you Die” is Bowie's "Young Americans" (1975), the album that first got America's attention and laid the groundwork for “Heroes”, 2 years later. Jeff also has plenty to say about fake American “influencers”, especially at events like Coachella! Enjoy!! References: “Young Americans”, David Bowie, One Damn Sing, John Lennon, “Fame”, “Across the Universe”, “A Day in the Life”, Carlos Alomar, King Arthur on Ice, Jules Verne, orchestral concerts, The Who, “Tommy”, A&M Records, David Hemmings, “Grumpy Old Men”, “Not Fragile”, Randy Bachman, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet", “Roll on down the Highway”, “Paul Rodgers, Simon Kirke, Free, Mick Ralphs, Mott the Hoople, Boz Burrell, King Crimson, Peter Grant, Swan Song Records, "Straight Shooter”, “Shooting Star”, Led Zeppelin, “Houses of the Holy”, Hipgnosis, "Can't Get Enough", “Movin' On”, “Bad Company”, “Rock Steady”, “Ready for Love” Cochella Fashion 2023Episode Playlist
Giallo July, our month-long celebration of Italian horror films, begins with Dario Argento’s chilling masterpiece Deep Red, starring David Hemmings and the creepiest damn puppet… The post Deep Red (1975) appeared first on Too Many Thoughts.
Giallo July, our month-long celebration of Italian horror films, begins with Dario Argento's chilling masterpiece Deep Red, starring David Hemmings and the creepiest damn puppet of all time. Chat with the TMT Community on Discord! For More TMT Shenanigans: toomanythoughtsmedia.com Twitter: @TMT_Media, @tackyslacks, @NicoDeGregorio, @someadamhall E-mail: toomanythoughtsmedia@gmail.com Subscribe and Rate on Apple Podcasts!
Book Vs. Movie: Blow-UpThe Julio Cortazar Short Story Vs. the Michelangelo Antonio Movie The Margos are feeling very mod today with this particular episode. We talk about Michelangelo Antonini, one of the most revered directors of the 1960s & 1970s, with a Palm d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bread, and the Golden Leopard among his film accomplishments. 1966's Blow-Up is his biggest English language hit, and it captured the New Wave movement in modern filmmaking. The original story is from Julio Cortazar in a short story titled “Las Babas del Diablo,” written in 1959. The symbolism-heavy story is told with several unreliable narrators and the artist's relationship to their medium. Our protagonist is Roberto, a French-Chilean translator who loves photography and may or may not be connected to reality. He remembers watching a middle-aged woman in a park with a teenage boy. Is she procuring him for an older man? Roberto takes photographs and obsesses over the crime about to happen. The 1966 film (Antonioni's first English-speaking production) follows Thomas (David Hemmings,) a fashion photographer in demand who obsesses over antiques and modernism. The movie also stars Vanessa Redgrave as a woman being photographed by Thomas in a clinch with an older man. She tries to seduce the roll of film from him after following him home. But he keeps the original and discovers, after blowing up the negatives) that he might have uncovered a murder. Thomas travels through underground London (via The Yardbirds) and the pastoral field, seeking the truth. So between the short story and movie--which did the Margos like better? In this ep, the Margos discuss:The bios of Antonioni & CortazarThe mod movement of the 1960s London.The cast of the 1966 film: David Hemmings (Thomas,) Vanessa Redgrave (Jane,) Sarah Miles (Patricia,) John Castle (Bill,) Jane Birkin (the Blonde,) Gillian Hillis (the Brunette,) Peter Bowles (Ron,) Veruschka von Lehndorff (herself,) Jimmy Page (The Yardbirds,) Jeff Beck (The Yardbirds) and Keith Relf vocalist for The YardbirdsClips used:Vanessa Redgrave and David HemmingsBlow-Up (1966 trailer) Thomas directs modelsThomas instructs Jane to move against the beatThe Yardbirds in Blow-UpJane Birkin modelsMusic: Blow-Up soundtrack, Herbert HancockBook Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page “Book Vs. Movie podcast”You can find us on Facebook at Book Vs. Movie Podcast GroupFollow us on Twitter @bookversusmovieInstagram: Book Versus Movie https://www.instagram.com/bookversusmovie/Email us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. Twitter @BrooklynMargo Margo D's Blog www.brooklynfitchick.com Margo D's Instagram “Brooklyn Fit Chick”Margo D's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@margodonohuebrooklynfitchick@gmail.comYou can buy your copy of Filmed in Brooklyn here! Margo P. Twitter @ShesNachoMamaMargo P's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shesnachomama/Margo P's Blog https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5406542/advertisement
Book Vs. Movie: Blow-UpThe Julio Cortazar Short Story Vs. the Michelangelo Antonio Movie The Margos are feeling very mod today with this particular episode. We talk about Michelangelo Antonini, one of the most revered directors of the 1960s & 1970s, with a Palm d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bread, and the Golden Leopard among his film accomplishments. 1966's Blow-Up is his biggest English language hit, and it captured the New Wave movement in modern filmmaking. The original story is from Julio Cortazar in a short story titled “Las Babas del Diablo,” written in 1959. The symbolism-heavy story is told with several unreliable narrators and the artist's relationship to their medium. Our protagonist is Roberto, a French-Chilean translator who loves photography and may or may not be connected to reality. He remembers watching a middle-aged woman in a park with a teenage boy. Is she procuring him for an older man? Roberto takes photographs and obsesses over the crime about to happen. The 1966 film (Antonioni's first English-speaking production) follows Thomas (David Hemmings,) a fashion photographer in demand who obsesses over antiques and modernism. The movie also stars Vanessa Redgrave as a woman being photographed by Thomas in a clinch with an older man. She tries to seduce the roll of film from him after following him home. But he keeps the original and discovers, after blowing up the negatives) that he might have uncovered a murder. Thomas travels through underground London (via The Yardbirds) and the pastoral field, seeking the truth. So between the short story and movie--which did the Margos like better? In this ep, the Margos discuss:The bios of Antonioni & CortazarThe mod movement of the 1960s London.The cast of the 1966 film: David Hemmings (Thomas,) Vanessa Redgrave (Jane,) Sarah Miles (Patricia,) John Castle (Bill,) Jane Birkin (the Blonde,) Gillian Hillis (the Brunette,) Peter Bowles (Ron,) Veruschka von Lehndorff (herself,) Jimmy Page (The Yardbirds,) Jeff Beck (The Yardbirds) and Keith Relf vocalist for The YardbirdsClips used:Vanessa Redgrave and David HemmingsBlow-Up (1966 trailer) Thomas directs modelsThomas instructs Jane to move against the beatThe Yardbirds in Blow-UpJane Birkin modelsMusic: Blow-Up soundtrack, Herbert HancockBook Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page “Book Vs. Movie podcast”You can find us on Facebook at Book Vs. Movie Podcast GroupFollow us on Twitter @bookversusmovieInstagram: Book Versus Movie https://www.instagram.com/bookversusmovie/Email us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. Twitter @BrooklynMargo Margo D's Blog www.brooklynfitchick.com Margo D's Instagram “Brooklyn Fit Chick”Margo D's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@margodonohuebrooklynfitchick@gmail.comYou can buy your copy of Filmed in Brooklyn here! Margo P. Twitter @ShesNachoMamaMargo P's Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shesnachomama/Margo P's Blog https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine
“IN SHORT THERE'S SIMPLY NOT, A MORE CONGENIAL SPOT.“On this episode, we return to the 1960's to catch the beginning of the end of the big budget musical era. We watch the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, Camelot, starring Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Franco Nero, and David Hemmings. Although this was the 10th highest grossing movie of the year, neither Austin or Jorge have ever heard about it, and had a listener not requested it for their birthday, we may have never seen this 3 hour long musical of the Arthurian legend. Why was this film not a huge success despite the musical being so popular? Why did this drive Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, out of the company he worked hard to swindle from his surviving brothers? Will this break the streak of being the first musical Jorge doesn't like? Sometimes describing a film as “interesting,” can be interpreted as a nice way of saying “I don't like it.“ However, in the case of Camelot, interesting is actually a very fitting description of the film. Even though it has its flaws, it is very entertaining to watch. It has a G rating, but it is one of the most sexually charged G ratings we have ever seen. Despite this film winning some Academy Awards, it was not very well received critically, possibly due to the aforementioned flaws, but perhaps also due to its content vastly differing from the rest of the films of this era. Perhaps one of the most interesting things about the film, is what part of the King Arthur story it chooses to focus on: his wife and his best friend falling in love.We have different opinions on the quality of the music in this film, but the one thing we do agree on is how it deals with the love triangle trope. Sometimes we like to have sides to root for in the triangle, we want to see our character(s) make the correct choice and celebrate with them. Sometimes you need one or two sides of the triangle to hate, or at least sit back and watch them hate each other. Camelot takes the path less traveled, and presents the love triangle where there is no villain. Only three sides getting hurt, and feeling bad for hurting each other.We talk about the shortcomings and personal gripes with the film. This is a three hour film with a pacing problem, some of the songs don't hit as hard as songs from previous musicals we've covered, and there is a question of what the film meant to say in the first place. Musicals can afford to be very direct and throw subtlety out the window, but something about the riddles the mysterious Merlin leaves Arthur leave us thinking about what we just saw, and what we were supposed to make of it. It's not a bad thing to think about a film's message was, but this is also the same genre of film where we get direct insight on a characters internal thought process, so why be coy about the take away? Regardless, this was an incredibly fun film to watch and talk about, and a piece of cinema history. They literally don't make them like this anymore.Music is from Triune Digital and audio clips pulled from movies we will be reviewing in other episodes.Artwork by @jannelle_o
Que Luis Manuel Ferri se convirtiera en Nino Bravo era cuestión de tiempo. Había militado en grupos como Los Hispánicos y Los Superson , y aquel inmenso chorro de voz hacía saltar por los aires todos los cánones sobre los típicos registros del típico vocalista de conjunto beat.Nino Bravo tenía alma de rockero, que interpretaba aquellas baladas con la misma rabia y pasión con las que se lucen las más carismáticas voces internacionales.Los sesenta londinenses fueron tiempos de minifaldas firmadas por Mary Quant, y de juventud, colorido y libertad arriba y abajo de Carnaby Street, King's Road y Kengsinton; de beatles, whos, kinks y stones; de Michael Caine y David Hemmings con pantalones blancos y cámara en mano; de protestas, drogas, ideas y,Y suenan también: Micky, Los Mitos, Mireille Mathieu, Los Ángeles, Small Faces, Los Sirex, Billy Fury, Paul McCartney y Modulos
On this episode, we talk about the great American filmmaker Robert Altman, and what is arguably the worst movie of his six decade, thirty-five film career: his 1987 atrocity O.C. and Stiggs. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we're going to talk about one of the strangest movies to come out of the decade, not only for its material, but for who directed it. Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs. As always, before we get to the O.C. and Stiggs, we will be going a little further back in time. Although he is not every cineaste's cup of tea, it is generally acknowledged that Robert Altman was one of the best filmmakers to ever work in cinema. But he wasn't an immediate success when he broke into the industry. Born in Kansas City in February 1925, Robert Altman would join the US Army Air Force after graduating high school, as many a young man would do in the days of World War II. He would train to be a pilot, and he would fly more than 50 missions during the war as part of the 307th Bomb Group, operating in the Pacific Theatre. They would help liberate prisoners of war held in Japanese POW Camps from Okinawa to Manila after the victory over Japan lead to the end of World War II in that part of the world. After the war, Altman would move to Los Angeles to break into the movies, and he would even succeed in selling a screenplay to RKO Pictures called Bodyguard, a film noir story shot in 1948 starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane, but on the final film, he would only share a “Story by” credit with his then-writing partner, George W. George. But by 1950, he'd be back in Kansas City, where he would direct more than 65 industrial films over the course of three years, before heading back to Los Angeles with the experience he would need to take another shot. Altman would spend a few years directing episodes of a drama series called Pulse of the City on the DuMont television network and a syndicated police drama called The Sheriff of Cochise, but he wouldn't get his first feature directing gig until 1957, when a businessman in Kansas City would hire the thirty-two year old to write and direct a movie locally. That film, The Delinquents, cost only $60k to make, and would be purchased for release by United Artists for $150k. The first film to star future Billy Jack writer/director/star Tom Laughlin, The Delinquents would gross more than a million dollars in theatres, a very good sum back in those days, but despite the success of the film, the only work Altman could get outside of television was co-directing The James Dean Story, a documentary set up at Warner Brothers to capitalize on the interest in the actor after dying in a car accident two years earlier. Throughout the 1960s, Altman would continue to work in television, until he was finally given another chance to direct a feature film. 1967's Countdown was a lower budgeted feature at Warner Brothers featuring James Caan in an early leading role, about the space race between the Americans and Soviets, a good two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The shoot itself was easy, but Altman would be fired from the film shortly after filming was completed, as Jack Warner, the 75 year old head of the studio, was not very happy about the overlapping dialogue, a motif that would become a part of Altman's way of making movies. Although his name appears in the credits as the director of the film, he had no input in its assembly. His ambiguous ending was changed, and the film would be edited to be more family friendly than the director intended. Altman would follow Countdown with 1969's That Cold Day in the Park, a psychological drama that would be both a critical and financial disappointment. But his next film would change everything. Before Altman was hired by Twentieth-Century Fox to direct MASH, more than a dozen major filmmakers would pass on the project. An adaptation of a little known novel by a Korean War veteran who worked as a surgeon at one of the Mobile Auxiliary Surgical Hospitals that give the story its acronymic title, MASH would literally fly under the radar from the executives at the studio, as most of the $3m film would be shot at the studio's ranch lot in Malibu, while the executives were more concerned about their bigger movies of the year in production, like their $12.5m biographical film on World War II general George S. Patton and their $25m World War II drama Tora! Tora! Tora!, one of the first movies to be a Japanese and American co-production since the end of the war. Altman was going to make MASH his way, no matter what. When the studio refused to allow him to hire a fair amount of extras to populate the MASH camp, Altman would steal individual lines from other characters to give to background actors, in order to get the bustling atmosphere he wanted. In order to give the camp a properly dirty look, he would shoot most of the outdoor scenes with a zoom lens and a fog filter with the camera a reasonably far distance from the actors, so they could act to one another instead of the camera, giving the film a sort of documentary feel. And he would find flexibility when the moment called for it. Sally Kellerman, who was hired to play Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, would work with Altman to expand and improve her character to be more than just eye candy, in large part because Altman liked what she was doing in her scenes. This kind of flexibility infuriated the two major stars of the film, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, who at one point during the shoot tried to get Altman fired for treating everyone in the cast and crew with the same level of respect and decorum regardless of their position. But unlike at Warners a couple years earlier, the success of movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider bamboozled Hollywood studio executives, who did not understand exactly what the new generation of filmgoers wanted, and would often give filmmakers more leeway than before, in the hopes that lightning could be captured once again. And Altman would give them exactly that. MASH, which would also be the first major studio film to be released with The F Word spoken on screen, would not only become a critical hit, but become the third highest grossing movie released in 1970, grossing more than $80m. The movie would win the Palme D'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and it would be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Ms. Kellerman, winning only for Best Adapted Screenplay. An ironic win, since most of the dialogue was improvised on set, but the victory for screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. would effectively destroy the once powerful Hollywood Blacklist that had been in place since the Red Scare of the 1950s. After MASH, Altman went on one of the greatest runs any filmmaker would ever enjoy. MASH would be released in January 1970, and Altman's follow up, Brewster McCloud, would be released in December 1970. Bud Cort, the future star of Harold and Maude, plays a recluse who lives in the fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome, who is building a pair of wings in order to achieve his dream of flying. The film would feature a number of actors who already were featured in MASH and would continue to be featured in a number of future Altman movies, including Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, John Schuck and Bert Remson, but another reason to watch Brewster McCloud if you've never seen it is because it is the film debut of Shelley Duvall, one of our greatest and least appreciated actresses, who would go on to appear in six other Altman movies over the ensuing decade. 1971's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for me, is his second best film. A Western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, was a minor hit when it was first released but has seen a reevaluation over the years that found it to be named the 8th Best Western of all time by the American Film Institute, which frankly is too low for me. The film would also bring a little-known Canadian poet and musician to the world, Leonard Cohen, who wrote and performed three songs for the soundtrack. Yeah, you have Robert Altman to thank for Leonard Cohen. 1972's Images was another psychological horror film, this time co-written with English actress Susannah York, who also stars in the film as an author of children's books who starts to have wild hallucinations at her remote vacation home, after learning her husband might be cheating on her. The $800k film was one of the first to be produced by Hemdale Films, a British production company co-founded by Blow Up actor David Hemmings, but the film would be a critical and financial disappointment when it was released Christmas week. But it would get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score. It would be one of two nominations in the category for John Williams, the other being The Poseidon Adventure. Whatever resentment Elliott Gould may have had with Altman during the shooting of MASH was gone by late 1972, when the actor agreed to star in the director's new movie, a modern adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel The Long Goodbye. Gould would be the eighth actor to play the lead character, Phillip Marlowe, in a movie. The screenplay would be written by Leigh Brackett, who Star Wars nerds know as the first writer on The Empire Strikes Back but had also adapted Chandler's novel The Big Sleep, another Phillip Marlowe story, to the big screen back in 1946. Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich had both been approached to make the film, and it would be Bogdanovich who would recommend Altman to the President of United Artists. The final film would anger Chandler fans, who did not like Altman's approach to the material, and the $1.7m film would gross less than $1m when it was released in March 1973. But like many of Altman's movies, it was a big hit with critics, and would find favor with film fans in the years to come. 1974 would be another year where Altman would make and release two movies in the same calendar year. The first, Thieves Like Us, was a crime drama most noted as one of the few movies to not have any kind of traditional musical score. What music there is in the film is usually heard off radios seen in individual scenes. Once again, we have a number of Altman regulars in the film, including Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, John Schuck and Tom Skerritt, and would feature Keith Carradine, who had a small co-starring role in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in his first major leading role. And, once again, the film would be a hit with critics but a dud with audiences. Unlike most of Altman's movies of the 1970s, Thieves Like Us has not enjoyed the same kind of reappraisal. The second film, California Split, was released in August, just six months after Thieves Like Us. Elliott Gould once again stars in a Robert Altman movie, this time alongside George Segal. They play a pair of gamblers who ride what they think is a lucky streak from Los Angeles to Reno, Nevada, would be the only time Gould and Segal would work closely together in a movie, and watching California Split, one wishes there could have been more. The movie would be an innovator seemingly purpose-build for a Robert Altman movie, for it would be the first non-Cinerama movie to be recorded using an eight track stereo sound system. More than any movie before, Altman could control how his overlapping dialogue was placed in a theatre. But while most theatres that played the movie would only play it in mono sound, the film would still be a minor success, bringing in more than $5m in ticket sales. 1975 would bring what many consider to be the quintessential Robert Altman movie to screens. The two hour and forty minute Nashville would feature no less than 24 different major characters, as a group of people come to Music City to be involved in a gala concert for a political outsider who is running for President on the Replacement Party ticket. The cast is one of the best ever assembled for a movie ever, including Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakely, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, Cristina Raines, Lily Tomlin and Keenan Wynn. Altman would be nominated for two Academy Awards for the film, Best Picture, as its producer, and Best Director, while both Ronee Blakely and Lily Tomlin would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Keith Carradine would also be nominated for an Oscar, but not as an actor. He would, at the urging of Altman during the production of the film, write and perform a song called I'm Easy, which would win for Best Original Song. The $2.2m film would earn $10m in ticket sales, and would eventually become part of the fourth class of movies to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1991, the first of four Robert Altman films to be given that honor. MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye would also be selected for preservation over the years. And we're going to stop here for a second and take a look at that list of films again. MASH Brewster McCloud McCabe and Mrs. Miller Images The Long Goodbye Thieves Like Us California Split Nashville Eight movies, made over a five year period, that between them earned twelve Academy Award nominations, four of which would be deemed so culturally important that they should be preserved for future generations. And we're still only in the middle of the 1970s. But the problem with a director like Robert Altman, like many of our greatest directors, their next film after one of their greatest successes feels like a major disappointment. And his 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, and that is the complete title of the film by the way, did not meet the lofty expectations of film fans not only its director, but of its main stars. Altman would cast two legendary actors he had not yet worked with, Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster, and the combination of those two actors with this director should have been fantastic, but the results were merely okay. In fact, Altman would, for the first time in his career, re-edit a film after its theatrical release, removing some of the Wild West show acts that he felt were maybe redundant. His 1977 film 3 Women would bring Altman back to the limelight. The film was based on a dream he had one night while his wife was in the hospital. In the dream, he was directing his regular co-star Shelley Duvall alongside Sissy Spacek, who he had never worked with before, in a story about identity theft that took place in the deserts outside Los Angeles. He woke up in the middle of the dream, jotted down what he could remember, and went back to sleep. In the morning, he didn't have a full movie planned out, but enough of one to get Alan Ladd, Jr., the President of Twentieth-Century Fox, to put up $1.7m for a not fully formed idea. That's how much Robert Altman was trusted at the time. That, and Altman was known for never going over budget. As long as he stayed within his budget, Ladd would let Altman make whatever movie he wanted to make. That, plus Ladd was more concerned about a $10m movie he approved that was going over budget over in England, a science fiction movie directed by the guy who did American Graffiti that had no stars outside of Sir Alec Guinness. That movie, of course, was Star Wars, which would be released four weeks after 3 Women had its premiere in New York City. While the film didn't make 1/100th the money Star Wars made, it was one of the best reviewed movies of the year. But, strangely, the film would not be seen again outside of sporadic screenings on cable until it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection 27 years later. I'm not going to try and explain the movie to you. Just trust me that 3 Women is from a master craftsman at the top of his game. While on the press tour to publicize 3 Women, a reporter asked Altman what was going to be next for him. He jokingly said he was going to shoot a wedding. But then he went home, thought about it some more, and in a few weeks, had a basic idea sketched out for a movie titled A Wedding that would take place over the course of one day, as the daughter of a Southern nouveau riche family marries the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman who may or may not a major figure in The Outfit. And while the film is quite entertaining, what's most interesting about watching this 1978 movie in 2023 is not only how many great established actors Altman got for the film, including Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Howard Duff, Mia Farrow, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton, and, in her 100th movie, Lillian Gish, but the number of notable actors he was able to get because he shot the film just outside Chicago. Not only will you see Dennis Christopher just before his breakthrough in Breaking Away, and not only will you see Pam Dawber just before she was cast alongside Robin Williams in Mark and Mindy, but you'll also see Dennis Franz, Laurie Metcalfe, Gary Sinese, Tim Thomerson, and George Wendt. And because Altman was able to keep the budget at a reasonable level, less than $1.75m, the film would be slightly profitable for Twentieth Century-Fox after grossing $3.6m at the box office. Altman's next film for Fox, 1979's Quintet, would not be as fortunate. Altman had come up with the story for this post-apocalyptic drama as a vehicle for Walter Hill to write and direct. But Hill would instead make The Warriors, and Altman decided to make the film himself. While developing the screenplay with his co-writers Frank Barhydt and Patricia Resnick, Altman would create a board game, complete with token pieces and a full set of rules, to flesh out the storyline. Altman would once again work with Paul Newman, who stars as a seal hunter in the early days of a new ice age who finds himself in elaborate game with a group of gamblers where losing in the game means losing your life in the process. Altman would deliberately hire an international cast to star alongside Newman, not only to help improve the film's ability to do well in foreign territories but to not have the storyline tied to any specific country. So we would have Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, Spaniard Fernando Rey, Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, French actress Brigitte Fossey, and Danish actress Nina van Pallandt. In order to maintain the mystery of the movie, Altman would ask Fox to withhold all pre-release publicity for the film, in order to avoid any conditioning of the audience. Imagine trying to put together a compelling trailer for a movie featuring one of the most beloved actors of all time, but you're not allowed to show potential audiences what they're getting themselves into? Altman would let the studio use five shots from the film, totaling about seven seconds, for the trailer, which mostly comprised of slo-mo shots of a pair of dice bouncing around, while the names of the stars pop up from moment to moment and a narrator tries to create some sense of mystery on the soundtrack. But audiences would not be intrigued by the mystery, and critics would tear the $6.4m budget film apart. To be fair, the shoot for the film, in the winter of 1977 outside Montreal was a tough time for all, and Altman would lose final cut on the film for going severely over-budget during production, although there seems to be very little documentation about how much the final film might have differed from what Altman would have been working on had he been able to complete the film his way. But despite all the problems with Quintet, Fox would still back Altman's next movie, A Perfect Couple, which would be shot after Fox pulled Altman off Quintet. Can you imagine that happening today? A director working with the studio that just pulled them off their project. But that's how little ego Altman had. He just wanted to make movies. Tell stories. This simple romantic comedy starred his regular collaborator Paul Dooley as Alex, a man who follows a band of traveling bohemian musicians because he's falling for one of the singers in the band. Altman kept the film on its $1.9m budget, but the response from critics was mostly concern that Altman had lost his touch. Maybe it was because this was his 13th film of the decade, but there was a serious concern about the director's ability to tell a story had evaporated. That worry would continue with his next film, Health. A satire of the political scene in the United States at the end of the 1970s, Health would follow a health food organization holding a convention at a luxury hotel in St. Petersburg FL. As one would expect from a Robert Altman movie, there's one hell of a cast. Along with Henry Gibson, and Paul Dooley, who co-write the script with Altman and Frank Barhydt, the cast would include Lauren Bacall, Carol Burnett, James Garner and, in one of her earliest screen appearances, Alfre Woodard, as well as Dick Cavett and Dinah Shore as themselves. But between the shooting of the film in the late winter and early spring of 1979 and the planned Christmas 1979 release, there was a change of management at Fox. Alan Ladd Jr. was out, and after Altman turned in his final cut, new studio head Norman Levy decided to pull the film off the 1979 release calendar. Altman fought to get the film released sometime during the 1980 Presidential Campaign, and was able to get Levy to give the film a platform release starting in Los Angeles and New York City in March 1980, but that date would get cancelled as well. Levy then suggested an April 1980 test run in St. Louis, which Altman was not happy with. Altman countered with test runs in Boston, Houston, Sacramento and San Francisco. The best Altman, who was in Malta shooting his next movie, could get were sneak previews of the film in those four markets, and the response cards from the audience were so bad, the studio decided to effectively put the film on the proverbial shelf. Back from the Mediterranean Sea, Altman would get permission to take the film to the Montreal World Film Festival in August, and the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals in September. After good responses from film goers at those festivals, Fox would relent, and give the film a “preview” screening at the United Artists Theatre in Westwood, starting on September 12th, 1980. But the studio would give the film the most boring ad campaign possible, a very crude line drawing of an older woman's pearl bracelet-covered arm thrusted upward while holding a carrot. With no trailers in circulation at any theatre, and no television commercials on air, it would be little surprise the film didn't do a whole lot of business. You really had to know the film had been released. But its $14k opening weekend gross wasn't really all that bad. And it's second week gross of $10,500 with even less ad support was decent if unspectacular. But it would be good enough to get the film a four week playdate at the UA Westwood. And then, nothing, until early March 1981, when a film society at Northwestern University in Evanston IL was able to screen a 16mm print for one show, while a theatre in Baltimore was able to show the film one time at the end of March. But then, nothing again for more than another year, when the film would finally get a belated official release at the Film Forum in New York City on April 7th, 1982. It would only play for a week, and as a non-profit, the Film Forum does not report film grosses, so we have no idea how well the film actually did. Since then, the movie showed once on CBS in August 1983, and has occasionally played on the Fox Movie Channel, but has never been released on VHS or DVD or Blu-Ray. I mentioned a few moments ago that while he was dealing with all this drama concerning Health, Altman was in the Mediterranean filming a movie. I'm not going to go too much into that movie here, since I already have an episode for the future planned for it, suffice to say that a Robert Altman-directed live-action musical version of the Popeye the Sailor Man cartoon featuring songs by the incomparable Harry Nilsson should have been a smash hit, but it wasn't. It was profitable, to be certain, but not the hit everyone was expecting. We'll talk about the film in much more detail soon. After the disappointing results for Popeye, Altman decided to stop working in Hollywood for a while and hit the Broadway stages, to direct a show called Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. While the show's run was not very long and the reviews not very good, Altman would fund a movie version himself, thanks in part to the sale of his production company, Lion's Gate, not to be confused with the current studio called Lionsgate, and would cast Karen Black, Cher and Sandy Dennis alongside newcomers Sudie Bond and Kathy Bates, as five female members of The Disciples of James Dean come together on the 20th anniversary of the actor's death to honor his life and times. As the first film released by a new independent distributor called Cinecom, I'll spend more time talking about this movie on our show about that distributor, also coming soon, suffice it to say that Altman was back. Critics were behind the film, and arthouse audiences loved it. This would be the first time Altman adapted a stage play to the screen, and it would set the tone for a number of his works throughout the rest of the decade. Streamers was Altman's 17th film in thirteen years, and another adaptation of a stage play. One of several works by noted Broadway playwright David Rabe's time in the Army during the Vietnam War, the film followed four young soldiers waiting to be shipped to Vietnam who deal with racial tensions and their own intolerances when one soldier reveals he is gay. The film featured Matthew Modine as the Rabe stand-in, and features a rare dramatic role for comedy legend David Alan Grier. Many critics would note how much more intense the film version was compared to the stage version, as Altman's camera was able to effortlessly breeze around the set, and get up close and personal with the performers in ways that simply cannot happen on the stage. But in 1983, audiences were still not quite ready to deal with the trauma of Vietnam on film, and the film would be fairly ignored by audiences, grossing just $378k. Which, finally, after half an hour, brings us to our featured movie. O.C. and Stiggs. Now, you might be asking yourself why I went into such detail about Robert Altman's career, most of it during the 1970s. Well, I wanted to establish what types of material Altman would chose for his projects, and just how different O.C. and Stiggs was from any other project he had made to date. O.C. and Stiggs began their lives in the July 1981 issue of National Lampoon, as written by two of the editors of the magazine, Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. The characters were fun-loving and occasionally destructive teenage pranksters, and their first appearance in the magazine would prove to be so popular with readers, the pair would appear a few more times until Matty Simmons, the publisher and owner of National Lampoon, gave over the entire October 1982 issue to Mann and Carroll for a story called “The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” It's easy to find PDFs of the issues online if you look for it. So the issue becomes one of the biggest selling issues in the history of National Lampoon, and Matty Simmons has been building the National Lampoon brand name by sponsoring a series of movies, including Animal House, co-written by Lampoon writers Doug Kenney and Chris Miller, and the soon to be released movies Class Reunion, written by Lampoon writer John Hughes… yes, that John Hughes… and Movie Madness, written by five Lampoon writers including Tod Carroll. But for some reason, Simmons was not behind the idea of turning the utterly monstrous mind-roasting adventures of O.C. and Stiggs into a movie. He would, however, allow Mann and Carroll to shop the idea around Hollywood, and wished them the best of luck. As luck would have it, Mann and Carroll would meet Peter Newman, who had worked as Altman's production executive on Jimmy Dean, and was looking to set up his first film as a producer. And while Newman might not have had the credits, he had the connections. The first person he would take the script to his Oscar-winning director Mike Nichols, whose credits by this time included Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge. Surprisingly, Nichols was not just interested in making the movie, but really wanted to have Eddie Murphy, who was a breakout star on Saturday Night Live but was still a month away from becoming a movie star when 48 Hours was released, play one of the leading characters. But Murphy couldn't get out of his SNL commitments, and Nichols had too many other projects, both on Broadway and in movies, to be able to commit to the film. A few weeks later, Newman and Altman both attended a party where they would catch up after several months. Newman started to tell Altman about this new project he was setting up, and to Newman's surprise, Altman, drawn to the characters' anti-establishment outlook, expressed interest in making it. And because Altman's name still commanded respect in Hollywood, several studios would start to show their interest in making the movie with them. MGM, who was enjoying a number of successes in 1982 thanks to movies like Shoot the Moon, Diner, Victor/Victoria, Rocky III, Poltergeist, Pink Floyd - The Wall, and My Favorite Year, made a preemptive bid on the film, hoping to beat Paramount Pictures to the deal. Unknown to Altman, what interested MGM was that Sylvester Stallone of all people went nuts for the script when he read it, and mentioned to his buddies at the studio that he might be interested in making it himself. Despite hating studio executives for doing stuff like buying a script he's attached to then kicking him off so some Italian Stallion not known for comedy could make it himself, Altman agree to make the movie with MGM once Stallone lost interest, as the studio promised there would be no further notes about the script, that Altman could have final cut on the film, that he could shoot the film in Phoenix without studio interference, and that he could have a budget of $7m. Since this was a Robert Altman film, the cast would be big and eclectic, filled with a number of his regular cast members, known actors who he had never worked with before, and newcomers who would go on to have success a few years down the road. Because, seriously, outside of a Robert Altman movie, where are you going to find a cast that included Jon Cryer, Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Dennis Hopper, Tina Louise, Martin Mull, Cynthia Nixon, Bob Uecker, Melvin van Peebles, and King Sunny Adé and His African Beats? And then imagine that movie also featuring Matthew Broderick, Jim Carrey, Robert Downey, Jr. and Laura Dern? The story for the film would both follow the stories that appeared in the pages of National Lampoon fairly closely while also making some major changes. In the film, Oliver Cromwell “O.C.” Oglivie and Mark Stiggs are two ne'er-do-well, middle-class Phoenix, Arizona high school students who are disgusted with what they see as an omnipresent culture of vulgar and vapid suburban consumerism. They spend their days slacking off and committing pranks or outright crimes against their sworn enemies, the Schwab family, especially family head Randall Schwab, a wealthy insurance salesman who was responsible for the involuntary commitment of O.C.'s grandfather into a group home. During the film, O.C. and Stiggs will ruin the wedding of Randall Schwab's daughter Lenore, raft their way down to a Mexican fiesta, ruin a horrible dinner theatre performance directed by their high school's drama teacher being attended by the Schwabs, and turn the Schwab mansion into a homeless shelter while the family is on vacation. The film ends with O.C. and Stiggs getting into a gun fight with Randall Schwab before being rescued by Dennis Hopper and a helicopter, before discovering one of their adventures that summer has made them very wealthy themselves. The film would begin production in Phoenix on August 22nd, 1983, with two newcomers, Daniel H. Jenkins and Neill Barry, as the titular stars of the film. And almost immediately, Altman's chaotic ways of making a movie would become a problem. Altman would make sure the entire cast and crew were all staying at the same hotel in town, across the street from a greyhound racetrack, so Altman could take off to bet on a few of the races during production downtime, and made sure the bar at the hotel was an open bar for his team while they were shooting. When shooting was done every day, the director and his cast would head to a makeshift screening room at the hotel, where they'd watch the previous day's footage, a process called “dailies” in production parlance. On most films, dailies are only attended by the director and his immediate production crew, but in Phoenix, everyone was encouraged to attend. And according to producer Peter Newman and Dan Jenkins, everyone loved the footage, although both would note that it might have been a combination of the alcohol, the pot, the cocaine and the dehydration caused by shooting all day in the excessive Arizona heat during the middle of summer that helped people enjoy the footage. But here's the funny thing about dailies. Unless a film is being shot in sequence, you're only seeing small fragments of scenes, often the same actors doing the same things over and over again, before the camera switches places to catch reactions or have other characters continue the scene. Sometimes, they're long takes of scenes that might be interrupted by an actor flubbing a line or an unexpected camera jitter or some other interruption that requires a restart. But everyone seemed to be having fun, especially when dailies ended and Altman would show one of his other movies like MASH or The Long Goodbye or 3 Women. After two months of shooting, the film would wrap production, and Altman would get to work on his edit of the film. He would have it done before the end of 1983, and he would turn it in to the studio. Shortly after the new year, there would be a private screening of the film in New York City at the offices of the talent agency William Morris, one of the larger private screening rooms in the city. Altman was there, the New York-based executives at MGM were there, Peter Newman was there, several of the actors were there. And within five minutes of the start of the film, Altman realized what he was watching was not his cut of the film. As he was about to lose his stuff and start yelling at the studio executives, the projector broke. The lights would go up, and Altman would dig into the the executives. “This is your effing cut of the film and not mine!” Altman stormed out of the screening and into the cold New York winter night. A few weeks later, that same print from New York would be screened for the big executives at the MGM lot in Los Angeles. Newman was there, and, surprisingly, Altman was there too. The film would screen for the entire running length, and Altman would sit there, watching someone else's version of the footage he had shot, scenes put in different places than they were supposed to be, music cues not of his design or consent. At the end of the screening, the room was silent. Not one person in the room had laughed once during the entire screening. Newman and Altman left after the screening, and hit one of Altman's favorite local watering holes. As they said their goodbyes the next morning, Altman apologized to Newman. “I hope I didn't eff up your movie.” Maybe the movie wasn't completely effed up, but MGM certainly neither knew what to do with the film or how to sell it, so it would just sit there, just like Health a few years earlier, on that proverbial shelf. More than a year later, in an issue of Spin Magazine, a review of the latest album by King Sunny Adé would mention the film he performed in, O.C. and Stiggs, would, quote unquote, “finally” be released into theatres later that year. That didn't happen, in large part because after WarGames in the early summer of 1983, almost every MGM release had been either an outright bomb or an unexpected financial disappointment. The cash flow problem was so bad that the studio effectively had to sell itself to Atlanta cable mogul Ted Turner in order to save itself. Turner didn't actually want all of MGM. He only wanted the valuable MGM film library, but the owner of MGM at the time was either going to sell it all or nothing at all. Barely two months after Ted Turner bought MGM, he had sold the famed studio lot in Culver City to Lorimar, a television production company that was looking to become a producer and distributor of motion pictures, and sold rest of the company he never wanted in the first place to the guy he bought it all from, who had a kind of seller's remorse. But that repurchase would saddle the company with massive bills, and movies like O.C. and Stiggs would have to sit and collect dust while everything was sorted out. How long would O.C. and Stiggs be left in a void? It would be so long that Robert Altman would have time to make not one, not two, but three other movies that would all be released before O.C. and Stiggs ever saw the light of day. The first, Secret Honor, released in 1984, featured the great Philip Baker Hall as former President Richard Nixon. It's probably Hall's single best work as an actor, and the film would be amongst the best reviewed films of Altman's career. In 1985, Altman would film Fool For Love, an adaptation of a play by Sam Shepard. This would be the only time in Shepard's film career where he would star as one of the characters himself had written. The film would also prove once and for all that Kim Basinger was more than just a pretty face but a real actor. And in February 1987, Altman's film version of Beyond Therapy, a play by absurdist playwright Christopher Durant, would open in theatres. The all-star cast would include Tom Conti, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Guest, Julie Hagerty and Glenda Jackson. On March 5th, 1987, an article in Daily Variety would note that the “long shelved” film would have a limited theatrical release in May, despite the fact that Frank Yablans, the vice chairman of MGM, being quoted in the article that the film was unreleasable. It would further be noted that despite the film being available to international distributors for three years, not one company was willing to acquire the film for any market. The plan was to release the movie for one or two weeks in three major US markets, depending on its popularity, and then decide a future course of action from there. But May would come and go, without a hint of the film. Finally, on Friday, July 10th, the film would open on 18 screens, but none in any major market like Chicago, Los Angeles or New York City. I can't find a single theatre the film played in that weekend, but that week's box office figures would show an abysmal $6,273 worth of tickets were sold during that first weekend. There would not be a second weekend of reported grosses. But to MGM's credit, they didn't totally give up on the film. On Thursday, August 27th, O.C. and Stiggs would open in at least one theatre. And, lucky for me, that theatre happened to be the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz. But despite the fact that the new Robert Altman was opening in town, I could not get a single friend to see it with me. So on a Tuesday night at 8:40pm, I was the only person in all of the region to watch what I would soon discover was the worst Robert Altman movie of all time. Now, I should note that even a bad Robert Altman movie is better than many filmmakers' best movies, but O.C. and Stiggs would have ignobility of feeling very much like a Robert Altman movie, with its wandering camera and overlapping dialogue that weaves in and out of conversations while in progress and not quite over yet, yet not feeling anything like a Robert Altman movie at the same time. It didn't have that magical whimsy-ness that was the hallmark of his movies. The satire didn't have its normal bite. It had a number of Altman's regular troop of actors, but in smaller roles than they'd usually occupy, and not giving the performances one would expect of them in an Altman movie. I don't know how well the film did at the Nick, suffice it to say the film was gone after a week. But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film. On October 9th, the film would open at the AMC Century City 14, one of a handful of movies that would open the newest multiplex in Los Angeles. MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone from the new multiplex after a week. But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film. The studio would give the film one more chance, opening it at the Film Forum in New York City on March 18th, 1988. MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone after a week. But whether that was because MGM didn't support the film with any kind of newspaper advertising in the largest market in America, or because the movie had been released on home video back in November, remains to be seen. O.C. and Stiggs would never become anything resembling a cult film. It's been released on DVD, and if one was programming a Robert Altman retrospect at a local arthouse movie theatre, one could actually book a 35mm print of the film from the repertory cinema company Park Circus. But don't feel bad for Altman, as he would return to cinemas with a vengeance in the 1990s, first with the 1990 biographical drama Vincent and Theo, featuring Tim Roth as the tortured genius 19th century painter that would put the actor on the map for good. Then, in 1992, he became a sensation again with his Hollywood satire The Player, featuring Tim Robbins as a murderous studio executive trying to keep the police off his trail while he navigates the pitfalls of the industry. Altman would receive his first Oscar nomination for Best Director since 1975 with The Player, his third overall, a feat he would repeat the following year with Short Cuts, based on a series of short stories by Raymond Carver. In fact, Altman would be nominated for an Academy Award seven times during his career, five times as a director and twice as a producer, although he would never win a competitive Oscar. In March 2006, while editing his 35th film, a screen adaptation of the then-popular NPR series A Prairie Home Companion, the Academy would bestow an Honorary Oscar upon Altman. During his acceptance speech, Altman would wonder if perhaps the Academy acted prematurely in honoring him in this fashion. He revealed he had received a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, and felt that, even though he had turned 81 the month before, he could continue for another forty years. Robert Altman would pass away from leukemia on November 20th, 2006, only eight months after receiving the biggest prize of his career. Robert Altman had a style so unique onto himself, there's an adjective that exists to describe it. Altmanesque. Displaying traits typical of a film made by Robert Altman, typically highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective and often a subversive twist. He truly was a one of a kind filmmaker, and there will likely never be anyone like him, no matter how hard Paul Thomas Anderson tries. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 106, Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
On this episode, we talk about the great American filmmaker Robert Altman, and what is arguably the worst movie of his six decade, thirty-five film career: his 1987 atrocity O.C. and Stiggs. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we're going to talk about one of the strangest movies to come out of the decade, not only for its material, but for who directed it. Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs. As always, before we get to the O.C. and Stiggs, we will be going a little further back in time. Although he is not every cineaste's cup of tea, it is generally acknowledged that Robert Altman was one of the best filmmakers to ever work in cinema. But he wasn't an immediate success when he broke into the industry. Born in Kansas City in February 1925, Robert Altman would join the US Army Air Force after graduating high school, as many a young man would do in the days of World War II. He would train to be a pilot, and he would fly more than 50 missions during the war as part of the 307th Bomb Group, operating in the Pacific Theatre. They would help liberate prisoners of war held in Japanese POW Camps from Okinawa to Manila after the victory over Japan lead to the end of World War II in that part of the world. After the war, Altman would move to Los Angeles to break into the movies, and he would even succeed in selling a screenplay to RKO Pictures called Bodyguard, a film noir story shot in 1948 starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane, but on the final film, he would only share a “Story by” credit with his then-writing partner, George W. George. But by 1950, he'd be back in Kansas City, where he would direct more than 65 industrial films over the course of three years, before heading back to Los Angeles with the experience he would need to take another shot. Altman would spend a few years directing episodes of a drama series called Pulse of the City on the DuMont television network and a syndicated police drama called The Sheriff of Cochise, but he wouldn't get his first feature directing gig until 1957, when a businessman in Kansas City would hire the thirty-two year old to write and direct a movie locally. That film, The Delinquents, cost only $60k to make, and would be purchased for release by United Artists for $150k. The first film to star future Billy Jack writer/director/star Tom Laughlin, The Delinquents would gross more than a million dollars in theatres, a very good sum back in those days, but despite the success of the film, the only work Altman could get outside of television was co-directing The James Dean Story, a documentary set up at Warner Brothers to capitalize on the interest in the actor after dying in a car accident two years earlier. Throughout the 1960s, Altman would continue to work in television, until he was finally given another chance to direct a feature film. 1967's Countdown was a lower budgeted feature at Warner Brothers featuring James Caan in an early leading role, about the space race between the Americans and Soviets, a good two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The shoot itself was easy, but Altman would be fired from the film shortly after filming was completed, as Jack Warner, the 75 year old head of the studio, was not very happy about the overlapping dialogue, a motif that would become a part of Altman's way of making movies. Although his name appears in the credits as the director of the film, he had no input in its assembly. His ambiguous ending was changed, and the film would be edited to be more family friendly than the director intended. Altman would follow Countdown with 1969's That Cold Day in the Park, a psychological drama that would be both a critical and financial disappointment. But his next film would change everything. Before Altman was hired by Twentieth-Century Fox to direct MASH, more than a dozen major filmmakers would pass on the project. An adaptation of a little known novel by a Korean War veteran who worked as a surgeon at one of the Mobile Auxiliary Surgical Hospitals that give the story its acronymic title, MASH would literally fly under the radar from the executives at the studio, as most of the $3m film would be shot at the studio's ranch lot in Malibu, while the executives were more concerned about their bigger movies of the year in production, like their $12.5m biographical film on World War II general George S. Patton and their $25m World War II drama Tora! Tora! Tora!, one of the first movies to be a Japanese and American co-production since the end of the war. Altman was going to make MASH his way, no matter what. When the studio refused to allow him to hire a fair amount of extras to populate the MASH camp, Altman would steal individual lines from other characters to give to background actors, in order to get the bustling atmosphere he wanted. In order to give the camp a properly dirty look, he would shoot most of the outdoor scenes with a zoom lens and a fog filter with the camera a reasonably far distance from the actors, so they could act to one another instead of the camera, giving the film a sort of documentary feel. And he would find flexibility when the moment called for it. Sally Kellerman, who was hired to play Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, would work with Altman to expand and improve her character to be more than just eye candy, in large part because Altman liked what she was doing in her scenes. This kind of flexibility infuriated the two major stars of the film, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, who at one point during the shoot tried to get Altman fired for treating everyone in the cast and crew with the same level of respect and decorum regardless of their position. But unlike at Warners a couple years earlier, the success of movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider bamboozled Hollywood studio executives, who did not understand exactly what the new generation of filmgoers wanted, and would often give filmmakers more leeway than before, in the hopes that lightning could be captured once again. And Altman would give them exactly that. MASH, which would also be the first major studio film to be released with The F Word spoken on screen, would not only become a critical hit, but become the third highest grossing movie released in 1970, grossing more than $80m. The movie would win the Palme D'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and it would be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Ms. Kellerman, winning only for Best Adapted Screenplay. An ironic win, since most of the dialogue was improvised on set, but the victory for screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. would effectively destroy the once powerful Hollywood Blacklist that had been in place since the Red Scare of the 1950s. After MASH, Altman went on one of the greatest runs any filmmaker would ever enjoy. MASH would be released in January 1970, and Altman's follow up, Brewster McCloud, would be released in December 1970. Bud Cort, the future star of Harold and Maude, plays a recluse who lives in the fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome, who is building a pair of wings in order to achieve his dream of flying. The film would feature a number of actors who already were featured in MASH and would continue to be featured in a number of future Altman movies, including Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, John Schuck and Bert Remson, but another reason to watch Brewster McCloud if you've never seen it is because it is the film debut of Shelley Duvall, one of our greatest and least appreciated actresses, who would go on to appear in six other Altman movies over the ensuing decade. 1971's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for me, is his second best film. A Western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, was a minor hit when it was first released but has seen a reevaluation over the years that found it to be named the 8th Best Western of all time by the American Film Institute, which frankly is too low for me. The film would also bring a little-known Canadian poet and musician to the world, Leonard Cohen, who wrote and performed three songs for the soundtrack. Yeah, you have Robert Altman to thank for Leonard Cohen. 1972's Images was another psychological horror film, this time co-written with English actress Susannah York, who also stars in the film as an author of children's books who starts to have wild hallucinations at her remote vacation home, after learning her husband might be cheating on her. The $800k film was one of the first to be produced by Hemdale Films, a British production company co-founded by Blow Up actor David Hemmings, but the film would be a critical and financial disappointment when it was released Christmas week. But it would get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score. It would be one of two nominations in the category for John Williams, the other being The Poseidon Adventure. Whatever resentment Elliott Gould may have had with Altman during the shooting of MASH was gone by late 1972, when the actor agreed to star in the director's new movie, a modern adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel The Long Goodbye. Gould would be the eighth actor to play the lead character, Phillip Marlowe, in a movie. The screenplay would be written by Leigh Brackett, who Star Wars nerds know as the first writer on The Empire Strikes Back but had also adapted Chandler's novel The Big Sleep, another Phillip Marlowe story, to the big screen back in 1946. Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich had both been approached to make the film, and it would be Bogdanovich who would recommend Altman to the President of United Artists. The final film would anger Chandler fans, who did not like Altman's approach to the material, and the $1.7m film would gross less than $1m when it was released in March 1973. But like many of Altman's movies, it was a big hit with critics, and would find favor with film fans in the years to come. 1974 would be another year where Altman would make and release two movies in the same calendar year. The first, Thieves Like Us, was a crime drama most noted as one of the few movies to not have any kind of traditional musical score. What music there is in the film is usually heard off radios seen in individual scenes. Once again, we have a number of Altman regulars in the film, including Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, John Schuck and Tom Skerritt, and would feature Keith Carradine, who had a small co-starring role in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in his first major leading role. And, once again, the film would be a hit with critics but a dud with audiences. Unlike most of Altman's movies of the 1970s, Thieves Like Us has not enjoyed the same kind of reappraisal. The second film, California Split, was released in August, just six months after Thieves Like Us. Elliott Gould once again stars in a Robert Altman movie, this time alongside George Segal. They play a pair of gamblers who ride what they think is a lucky streak from Los Angeles to Reno, Nevada, would be the only time Gould and Segal would work closely together in a movie, and watching California Split, one wishes there could have been more. The movie would be an innovator seemingly purpose-build for a Robert Altman movie, for it would be the first non-Cinerama movie to be recorded using an eight track stereo sound system. More than any movie before, Altman could control how his overlapping dialogue was placed in a theatre. But while most theatres that played the movie would only play it in mono sound, the film would still be a minor success, bringing in more than $5m in ticket sales. 1975 would bring what many consider to be the quintessential Robert Altman movie to screens. The two hour and forty minute Nashville would feature no less than 24 different major characters, as a group of people come to Music City to be involved in a gala concert for a political outsider who is running for President on the Replacement Party ticket. The cast is one of the best ever assembled for a movie ever, including Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakely, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, Cristina Raines, Lily Tomlin and Keenan Wynn. Altman would be nominated for two Academy Awards for the film, Best Picture, as its producer, and Best Director, while both Ronee Blakely and Lily Tomlin would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Keith Carradine would also be nominated for an Oscar, but not as an actor. He would, at the urging of Altman during the production of the film, write and perform a song called I'm Easy, which would win for Best Original Song. The $2.2m film would earn $10m in ticket sales, and would eventually become part of the fourth class of movies to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1991, the first of four Robert Altman films to be given that honor. MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye would also be selected for preservation over the years. And we're going to stop here for a second and take a look at that list of films again. MASH Brewster McCloud McCabe and Mrs. Miller Images The Long Goodbye Thieves Like Us California Split Nashville Eight movies, made over a five year period, that between them earned twelve Academy Award nominations, four of which would be deemed so culturally important that they should be preserved for future generations. And we're still only in the middle of the 1970s. But the problem with a director like Robert Altman, like many of our greatest directors, their next film after one of their greatest successes feels like a major disappointment. And his 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, and that is the complete title of the film by the way, did not meet the lofty expectations of film fans not only its director, but of its main stars. Altman would cast two legendary actors he had not yet worked with, Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster, and the combination of those two actors with this director should have been fantastic, but the results were merely okay. In fact, Altman would, for the first time in his career, re-edit a film after its theatrical release, removing some of the Wild West show acts that he felt were maybe redundant. His 1977 film 3 Women would bring Altman back to the limelight. The film was based on a dream he had one night while his wife was in the hospital. In the dream, he was directing his regular co-star Shelley Duvall alongside Sissy Spacek, who he had never worked with before, in a story about identity theft that took place in the deserts outside Los Angeles. He woke up in the middle of the dream, jotted down what he could remember, and went back to sleep. In the morning, he didn't have a full movie planned out, but enough of one to get Alan Ladd, Jr., the President of Twentieth-Century Fox, to put up $1.7m for a not fully formed idea. That's how much Robert Altman was trusted at the time. That, and Altman was known for never going over budget. As long as he stayed within his budget, Ladd would let Altman make whatever movie he wanted to make. That, plus Ladd was more concerned about a $10m movie he approved that was going over budget over in England, a science fiction movie directed by the guy who did American Graffiti that had no stars outside of Sir Alec Guinness. That movie, of course, was Star Wars, which would be released four weeks after 3 Women had its premiere in New York City. While the film didn't make 1/100th the money Star Wars made, it was one of the best reviewed movies of the year. But, strangely, the film would not be seen again outside of sporadic screenings on cable until it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection 27 years later. I'm not going to try and explain the movie to you. Just trust me that 3 Women is from a master craftsman at the top of his game. While on the press tour to publicize 3 Women, a reporter asked Altman what was going to be next for him. He jokingly said he was going to shoot a wedding. But then he went home, thought about it some more, and in a few weeks, had a basic idea sketched out for a movie titled A Wedding that would take place over the course of one day, as the daughter of a Southern nouveau riche family marries the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman who may or may not a major figure in The Outfit. And while the film is quite entertaining, what's most interesting about watching this 1978 movie in 2023 is not only how many great established actors Altman got for the film, including Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Howard Duff, Mia Farrow, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton, and, in her 100th movie, Lillian Gish, but the number of notable actors he was able to get because he shot the film just outside Chicago. Not only will you see Dennis Christopher just before his breakthrough in Breaking Away, and not only will you see Pam Dawber just before she was cast alongside Robin Williams in Mark and Mindy, but you'll also see Dennis Franz, Laurie Metcalfe, Gary Sinese, Tim Thomerson, and George Wendt. And because Altman was able to keep the budget at a reasonable level, less than $1.75m, the film would be slightly profitable for Twentieth Century-Fox after grossing $3.6m at the box office. Altman's next film for Fox, 1979's Quintet, would not be as fortunate. Altman had come up with the story for this post-apocalyptic drama as a vehicle for Walter Hill to write and direct. But Hill would instead make The Warriors, and Altman decided to make the film himself. While developing the screenplay with his co-writers Frank Barhydt and Patricia Resnick, Altman would create a board game, complete with token pieces and a full set of rules, to flesh out the storyline. Altman would once again work with Paul Newman, who stars as a seal hunter in the early days of a new ice age who finds himself in elaborate game with a group of gamblers where losing in the game means losing your life in the process. Altman would deliberately hire an international cast to star alongside Newman, not only to help improve the film's ability to do well in foreign territories but to not have the storyline tied to any specific country. So we would have Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, Spaniard Fernando Rey, Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, French actress Brigitte Fossey, and Danish actress Nina van Pallandt. In order to maintain the mystery of the movie, Altman would ask Fox to withhold all pre-release publicity for the film, in order to avoid any conditioning of the audience. Imagine trying to put together a compelling trailer for a movie featuring one of the most beloved actors of all time, but you're not allowed to show potential audiences what they're getting themselves into? Altman would let the studio use five shots from the film, totaling about seven seconds, for the trailer, which mostly comprised of slo-mo shots of a pair of dice bouncing around, while the names of the stars pop up from moment to moment and a narrator tries to create some sense of mystery on the soundtrack. But audiences would not be intrigued by the mystery, and critics would tear the $6.4m budget film apart. To be fair, the shoot for the film, in the winter of 1977 outside Montreal was a tough time for all, and Altman would lose final cut on the film for going severely over-budget during production, although there seems to be very little documentation about how much the final film might have differed from what Altman would have been working on had he been able to complete the film his way. But despite all the problems with Quintet, Fox would still back Altman's next movie, A Perfect Couple, which would be shot after Fox pulled Altman off Quintet. Can you imagine that happening today? A director working with the studio that just pulled them off their project. But that's how little ego Altman had. He just wanted to make movies. Tell stories. This simple romantic comedy starred his regular collaborator Paul Dooley as Alex, a man who follows a band of traveling bohemian musicians because he's falling for one of the singers in the band. Altman kept the film on its $1.9m budget, but the response from critics was mostly concern that Altman had lost his touch. Maybe it was because this was his 13th film of the decade, but there was a serious concern about the director's ability to tell a story had evaporated. That worry would continue with his next film, Health. A satire of the political scene in the United States at the end of the 1970s, Health would follow a health food organization holding a convention at a luxury hotel in St. Petersburg FL. As one would expect from a Robert Altman movie, there's one hell of a cast. Along with Henry Gibson, and Paul Dooley, who co-write the script with Altman and Frank Barhydt, the cast would include Lauren Bacall, Carol Burnett, James Garner and, in one of her earliest screen appearances, Alfre Woodard, as well as Dick Cavett and Dinah Shore as themselves. But between the shooting of the film in the late winter and early spring of 1979 and the planned Christmas 1979 release, there was a change of management at Fox. Alan Ladd Jr. was out, and after Altman turned in his final cut, new studio head Norman Levy decided to pull the film off the 1979 release calendar. Altman fought to get the film released sometime during the 1980 Presidential Campaign, and was able to get Levy to give the film a platform release starting in Los Angeles and New York City in March 1980, but that date would get cancelled as well. Levy then suggested an April 1980 test run in St. Louis, which Altman was not happy with. Altman countered with test runs in Boston, Houston, Sacramento and San Francisco. The best Altman, who was in Malta shooting his next movie, could get were sneak previews of the film in those four markets, and the response cards from the audience were so bad, the studio decided to effectively put the film on the proverbial shelf. Back from the Mediterranean Sea, Altman would get permission to take the film to the Montreal World Film Festival in August, and the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals in September. After good responses from film goers at those festivals, Fox would relent, and give the film a “preview” screening at the United Artists Theatre in Westwood, starting on September 12th, 1980. But the studio would give the film the most boring ad campaign possible, a very crude line drawing of an older woman's pearl bracelet-covered arm thrusted upward while holding a carrot. With no trailers in circulation at any theatre, and no television commercials on air, it would be little surprise the film didn't do a whole lot of business. You really had to know the film had been released. But its $14k opening weekend gross wasn't really all that bad. And it's second week gross of $10,500 with even less ad support was decent if unspectacular. But it would be good enough to get the film a four week playdate at the UA Westwood. And then, nothing, until early March 1981, when a film society at Northwestern University in Evanston IL was able to screen a 16mm print for one show, while a theatre in Baltimore was able to show the film one time at the end of March. But then, nothing again for more than another year, when the film would finally get a belated official release at the Film Forum in New York City on April 7th, 1982. It would only play for a week, and as a non-profit, the Film Forum does not report film grosses, so we have no idea how well the film actually did. Since then, the movie showed once on CBS in August 1983, and has occasionally played on the Fox Movie Channel, but has never been released on VHS or DVD or Blu-Ray. I mentioned a few moments ago that while he was dealing with all this drama concerning Health, Altman was in the Mediterranean filming a movie. I'm not going to go too much into that movie here, since I already have an episode for the future planned for it, suffice to say that a Robert Altman-directed live-action musical version of the Popeye the Sailor Man cartoon featuring songs by the incomparable Harry Nilsson should have been a smash hit, but it wasn't. It was profitable, to be certain, but not the hit everyone was expecting. We'll talk about the film in much more detail soon. After the disappointing results for Popeye, Altman decided to stop working in Hollywood for a while and hit the Broadway stages, to direct a show called Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. While the show's run was not very long and the reviews not very good, Altman would fund a movie version himself, thanks in part to the sale of his production company, Lion's Gate, not to be confused with the current studio called Lionsgate, and would cast Karen Black, Cher and Sandy Dennis alongside newcomers Sudie Bond and Kathy Bates, as five female members of The Disciples of James Dean come together on the 20th anniversary of the actor's death to honor his life and times. As the first film released by a new independent distributor called Cinecom, I'll spend more time talking about this movie on our show about that distributor, also coming soon, suffice it to say that Altman was back. Critics were behind the film, and arthouse audiences loved it. This would be the first time Altman adapted a stage play to the screen, and it would set the tone for a number of his works throughout the rest of the decade. Streamers was Altman's 17th film in thirteen years, and another adaptation of a stage play. One of several works by noted Broadway playwright David Rabe's time in the Army during the Vietnam War, the film followed four young soldiers waiting to be shipped to Vietnam who deal with racial tensions and their own intolerances when one soldier reveals he is gay. The film featured Matthew Modine as the Rabe stand-in, and features a rare dramatic role for comedy legend David Alan Grier. Many critics would note how much more intense the film version was compared to the stage version, as Altman's camera was able to effortlessly breeze around the set, and get up close and personal with the performers in ways that simply cannot happen on the stage. But in 1983, audiences were still not quite ready to deal with the trauma of Vietnam on film, and the film would be fairly ignored by audiences, grossing just $378k. Which, finally, after half an hour, brings us to our featured movie. O.C. and Stiggs. Now, you might be asking yourself why I went into such detail about Robert Altman's career, most of it during the 1970s. Well, I wanted to establish what types of material Altman would chose for his projects, and just how different O.C. and Stiggs was from any other project he had made to date. O.C. and Stiggs began their lives in the July 1981 issue of National Lampoon, as written by two of the editors of the magazine, Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. The characters were fun-loving and occasionally destructive teenage pranksters, and their first appearance in the magazine would prove to be so popular with readers, the pair would appear a few more times until Matty Simmons, the publisher and owner of National Lampoon, gave over the entire October 1982 issue to Mann and Carroll for a story called “The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” It's easy to find PDFs of the issues online if you look for it. So the issue becomes one of the biggest selling issues in the history of National Lampoon, and Matty Simmons has been building the National Lampoon brand name by sponsoring a series of movies, including Animal House, co-written by Lampoon writers Doug Kenney and Chris Miller, and the soon to be released movies Class Reunion, written by Lampoon writer John Hughes… yes, that John Hughes… and Movie Madness, written by five Lampoon writers including Tod Carroll. But for some reason, Simmons was not behind the idea of turning the utterly monstrous mind-roasting adventures of O.C. and Stiggs into a movie. He would, however, allow Mann and Carroll to shop the idea around Hollywood, and wished them the best of luck. As luck would have it, Mann and Carroll would meet Peter Newman, who had worked as Altman's production executive on Jimmy Dean, and was looking to set up his first film as a producer. And while Newman might not have had the credits, he had the connections. The first person he would take the script to his Oscar-winning director Mike Nichols, whose credits by this time included Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge. Surprisingly, Nichols was not just interested in making the movie, but really wanted to have Eddie Murphy, who was a breakout star on Saturday Night Live but was still a month away from becoming a movie star when 48 Hours was released, play one of the leading characters. But Murphy couldn't get out of his SNL commitments, and Nichols had too many other projects, both on Broadway and in movies, to be able to commit to the film. A few weeks later, Newman and Altman both attended a party where they would catch up after several months. Newman started to tell Altman about this new project he was setting up, and to Newman's surprise, Altman, drawn to the characters' anti-establishment outlook, expressed interest in making it. And because Altman's name still commanded respect in Hollywood, several studios would start to show their interest in making the movie with them. MGM, who was enjoying a number of successes in 1982 thanks to movies like Shoot the Moon, Diner, Victor/Victoria, Rocky III, Poltergeist, Pink Floyd - The Wall, and My Favorite Year, made a preemptive bid on the film, hoping to beat Paramount Pictures to the deal. Unknown to Altman, what interested MGM was that Sylvester Stallone of all people went nuts for the script when he read it, and mentioned to his buddies at the studio that he might be interested in making it himself. Despite hating studio executives for doing stuff like buying a script he's attached to then kicking him off so some Italian Stallion not known for comedy could make it himself, Altman agree to make the movie with MGM once Stallone lost interest, as the studio promised there would be no further notes about the script, that Altman could have final cut on the film, that he could shoot the film in Phoenix without studio interference, and that he could have a budget of $7m. Since this was a Robert Altman film, the cast would be big and eclectic, filled with a number of his regular cast members, known actors who he had never worked with before, and newcomers who would go on to have success a few years down the road. Because, seriously, outside of a Robert Altman movie, where are you going to find a cast that included Jon Cryer, Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Dennis Hopper, Tina Louise, Martin Mull, Cynthia Nixon, Bob Uecker, Melvin van Peebles, and King Sunny Adé and His African Beats? And then imagine that movie also featuring Matthew Broderick, Jim Carrey, Robert Downey, Jr. and Laura Dern? The story for the film would both follow the stories that appeared in the pages of National Lampoon fairly closely while also making some major changes. In the film, Oliver Cromwell “O.C.” Oglivie and Mark Stiggs are two ne'er-do-well, middle-class Phoenix, Arizona high school students who are disgusted with what they see as an omnipresent culture of vulgar and vapid suburban consumerism. They spend their days slacking off and committing pranks or outright crimes against their sworn enemies, the Schwab family, especially family head Randall Schwab, a wealthy insurance salesman who was responsible for the involuntary commitment of O.C.'s grandfather into a group home. During the film, O.C. and Stiggs will ruin the wedding of Randall Schwab's daughter Lenore, raft their way down to a Mexican fiesta, ruin a horrible dinner theatre performance directed by their high school's drama teacher being attended by the Schwabs, and turn the Schwab mansion into a homeless shelter while the family is on vacation. The film ends with O.C. and Stiggs getting into a gun fight with Randall Schwab before being rescued by Dennis Hopper and a helicopter, before discovering one of their adventures that summer has made them very wealthy themselves. The film would begin production in Phoenix on August 22nd, 1983, with two newcomers, Daniel H. Jenkins and Neill Barry, as the titular stars of the film. And almost immediately, Altman's chaotic ways of making a movie would become a problem. Altman would make sure the entire cast and crew were all staying at the same hotel in town, across the street from a greyhound racetrack, so Altman could take off to bet on a few of the races during production downtime, and made sure the bar at the hotel was an open bar for his team while they were shooting. When shooting was done every day, the director and his cast would head to a makeshift screening room at the hotel, where they'd watch the previous day's footage, a process called “dailies” in production parlance. On most films, dailies are only attended by the director and his immediate production crew, but in Phoenix, everyone was encouraged to attend. And according to producer Peter Newman and Dan Jenkins, everyone loved the footage, although both would note that it might have been a combination of the alcohol, the pot, the cocaine and the dehydration caused by shooting all day in the excessive Arizona heat during the middle of summer that helped people enjoy the footage. But here's the funny thing about dailies. Unless a film is being shot in sequence, you're only seeing small fragments of scenes, often the same actors doing the same things over and over again, before the camera switches places to catch reactions or have other characters continue the scene. Sometimes, they're long takes of scenes that might be interrupted by an actor flubbing a line or an unexpected camera jitter or some other interruption that requires a restart. But everyone seemed to be having fun, especially when dailies ended and Altman would show one of his other movies like MASH or The Long Goodbye or 3 Women. After two months of shooting, the film would wrap production, and Altman would get to work on his edit of the film. He would have it done before the end of 1983, and he would turn it in to the studio. Shortly after the new year, there would be a private screening of the film in New York City at the offices of the talent agency William Morris, one of the larger private screening rooms in the city. Altman was there, the New York-based executives at MGM were there, Peter Newman was there, several of the actors were there. And within five minutes of the start of the film, Altman realized what he was watching was not his cut of the film. As he was about to lose his stuff and start yelling at the studio executives, the projector broke. The lights would go up, and Altman would dig into the the executives. “This is your effing cut of the film and not mine!” Altman stormed out of the screening and into the cold New York winter night. A few weeks later, that same print from New York would be screened for the big executives at the MGM lot in Los Angeles. Newman was there, and, surprisingly, Altman was there too. The film would screen for the entire running length, and Altman would sit there, watching someone else's version of the footage he had shot, scenes put in different places than they were supposed to be, music cues not of his design or consent. At the end of the screening, the room was silent. Not one person in the room had laughed once during the entire screening. Newman and Altman left after the screening, and hit one of Altman's favorite local watering holes. As they said their goodbyes the next morning, Altman apologized to Newman. “I hope I didn't eff up your movie.” Maybe the movie wasn't completely effed up, but MGM certainly neither knew what to do with the film or how to sell it, so it would just sit there, just like Health a few years earlier, on that proverbial shelf. More than a year later, in an issue of Spin Magazine, a review of the latest album by King Sunny Adé would mention the film he performed in, O.C. and Stiggs, would, quote unquote, “finally” be released into theatres later that year. That didn't happen, in large part because after WarGames in the early summer of 1983, almost every MGM release had been either an outright bomb or an unexpected financial disappointment. The cash flow problem was so bad that the studio effectively had to sell itself to Atlanta cable mogul Ted Turner in order to save itself. Turner didn't actually want all of MGM. He only wanted the valuable MGM film library, but the owner of MGM at the time was either going to sell it all or nothing at all. Barely two months after Ted Turner bought MGM, he had sold the famed studio lot in Culver City to Lorimar, a television production company that was looking to become a producer and distributor of motion pictures, and sold rest of the company he never wanted in the first place to the guy he bought it all from, who had a kind of seller's remorse. But that repurchase would saddle the company with massive bills, and movies like O.C. and Stiggs would have to sit and collect dust while everything was sorted out. How long would O.C. and Stiggs be left in a void? It would be so long that Robert Altman would have time to make not one, not two, but three other movies that would all be released before O.C. and Stiggs ever saw the light of day. The first, Secret Honor, released in 1984, featured the great Philip Baker Hall as former President Richard Nixon. It's probably Hall's single best work as an actor, and the film would be amongst the best reviewed films of Altman's career. In 1985, Altman would film Fool For Love, an adaptation of a play by Sam Shepard. This would be the only time in Shepard's film career where he would star as one of the characters himself had written. The film would also prove once and for all that Kim Basinger was more than just a pretty face but a real actor. And in February 1987, Altman's film version of Beyond Therapy, a play by absurdist playwright Christopher Durant, would open in theatres. The all-star cast would include Tom Conti, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Guest, Julie Hagerty and Glenda Jackson. On March 5th, 1987, an article in Daily Variety would note that the “long shelved” film would have a limited theatrical release in May, despite the fact that Frank Yablans, the vice chairman of MGM, being quoted in the article that the film was unreleasable. It would further be noted that despite the film being available to international distributors for three years, not one company was willing to acquire the film for any market. The plan was to release the movie for one or two weeks in three major US markets, depending on its popularity, and then decide a future course of action from there. But May would come and go, without a hint of the film. Finally, on Friday, July 10th, the film would open on 18 screens, but none in any major market like Chicago, Los Angeles or New York City. I can't find a single theatre the film played in that weekend, but that week's box office figures would show an abysmal $6,273 worth of tickets were sold during that first weekend. There would not be a second weekend of reported grosses. But to MGM's credit, they didn't totally give up on the film. On Thursday, August 27th, O.C. and Stiggs would open in at least one theatre. And, lucky for me, that theatre happened to be the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz. But despite the fact that the new Robert Altman was opening in town, I could not get a single friend to see it with me. So on a Tuesday night at 8:40pm, I was the only person in all of the region to watch what I would soon discover was the worst Robert Altman movie of all time. Now, I should note that even a bad Robert Altman movie is better than many filmmakers' best movies, but O.C. and Stiggs would have ignobility of feeling very much like a Robert Altman movie, with its wandering camera and overlapping dialogue that weaves in and out of conversations while in progress and not quite over yet, yet not feeling anything like a Robert Altman movie at the same time. It didn't have that magical whimsy-ness that was the hallmark of his movies. The satire didn't have its normal bite. It had a number of Altman's regular troop of actors, but in smaller roles than they'd usually occupy, and not giving the performances one would expect of them in an Altman movie. I don't know how well the film did at the Nick, suffice it to say the film was gone after a week. But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film. On October 9th, the film would open at the AMC Century City 14, one of a handful of movies that would open the newest multiplex in Los Angeles. MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone from the new multiplex after a week. But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film. The studio would give the film one more chance, opening it at the Film Forum in New York City on March 18th, 1988. MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone after a week. But whether that was because MGM didn't support the film with any kind of newspaper advertising in the largest market in America, or because the movie had been released on home video back in November, remains to be seen. O.C. and Stiggs would never become anything resembling a cult film. It's been released on DVD, and if one was programming a Robert Altman retrospect at a local arthouse movie theatre, one could actually book a 35mm print of the film from the repertory cinema company Park Circus. But don't feel bad for Altman, as he would return to cinemas with a vengeance in the 1990s, first with the 1990 biographical drama Vincent and Theo, featuring Tim Roth as the tortured genius 19th century painter that would put the actor on the map for good. Then, in 1992, he became a sensation again with his Hollywood satire The Player, featuring Tim Robbins as a murderous studio executive trying to keep the police off his trail while he navigates the pitfalls of the industry. Altman would receive his first Oscar nomination for Best Director since 1975 with The Player, his third overall, a feat he would repeat the following year with Short Cuts, based on a series of short stories by Raymond Carver. In fact, Altman would be nominated for an Academy Award seven times during his career, five times as a director and twice as a producer, although he would never win a competitive Oscar. In March 2006, while editing his 35th film, a screen adaptation of the then-popular NPR series A Prairie Home Companion, the Academy would bestow an Honorary Oscar upon Altman. During his acceptance speech, Altman would wonder if perhaps the Academy acted prematurely in honoring him in this fashion. He revealed he had received a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, and felt that, even though he had turned 81 the month before, he could continue for another forty years. Robert Altman would pass away from leukemia on November 20th, 2006, only eight months after receiving the biggest prize of his career. Robert Altman had a style so unique onto himself, there's an adjective that exists to describe it. Altmanesque. Displaying traits typical of a film made by Robert Altman, typically highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective and often a subversive twist. He truly was a one of a kind filmmaker, and there will likely never be anyone like him, no matter how hard Paul Thomas Anderson tries. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 106, Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
This week, we finish our three part episode on the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures. ----more---- The movies discussed on this week's episode are: The Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm (1990, Stan Winston) Big Man on Campus (1989, Jeremy Paul Kagan) Dream a Little Dream (1989, Marc Rocco) Earth Girls Are Easy (1989, Julien Temple) Far From Home (1989, Meiert Avis) Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose) Parents (1989, Bob Balaban) The Rainbow (1989, Ken Russell) Wonderland (1989, Philip Saville) 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. At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was starting to experience the turbulence a number of independent distributors faced when they had a successful film too soon out of the gate, and the direction of the company seemingly changes to go chasing more waterfalls instead of sticking to the rivers and the lakes they were used to. Welcome to Part Three of our miniseries. As we enter 1989, Vestron is seriously in trouble. More money has gone out then has come back in. It seems that they needed one more hit to keep going for a while longer. But if you were to look at their release schedule for the year, which included a pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, there wasn't really anything that felt like it could be a Dirty Dancing-like break out, except for maybe the pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group. But we'll get there in a moment. Their first film from 1989 is a certifiable cult film if there ever was one, but the problem with this label is that the film tagged as so was not a success upon its initial theatrical release. Bob Balaban, the beloved character actor who had been regularly seen on screen since his memorable debut in Midnight Cowboy twenty years earlier, would make his directorial debut with the black comedy horror film Parents. Bryan Madorsky stars as Michael Laemle, a ten year old boy living in the California suburbs in the 1950s, who starts to suspect mom and dad, played by Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid, might be cannibals. It's a strange but fun little movie, and even Ken Russell would compare it favorably over David Lynch's Blue Velvet during one contemporary interview, but sadly, it would take far more time for the film to find its audience than Vestron could afford. Opening in 94 theatres on January 27th, the $3m Parents could not overcome a series of negative reviews from critics, and it would only gross $278k in its first three days. Vestron would not strike any additional prints of the film, and would cycle the ones they did have around the country for several months, but after four months, the film could only attract $870k in box office receipts. But it would become something of a cult hit on video later in the year. In 1992, British filmmaker Bernard Rose would make his American directing debut with an all-time banger, Candyman. But he wouldn't gotten Candyman if it wasn't for his 1989 film Paperhouse, an inventive story about a young girl whose drawings seem to manifest into reality. British actor Ben Cross from Chariots of Fire and American actress Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels plays the young girl's parents. Outside of Gene Siskel, who would give the film a thumbs down on his movie review show with Roger Ebert despite acknowledging Rose's talent as a filmmaker and being fascinated by the first two-thirds of the movie, the critical consensus was extraordinary. But it appears Siskel may have never actually written a review of the film for the Chicago Tribune, as the film still has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the film would only earn $6,700 from its single screen playdate at the Carnegie Hall Cinemas when it opened on February 17th, and the film would get little support from Vestron after that. More single playdates in major cities that added up to a $241k box office tally after fourteen weeks in release. Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream would be the third film in The Two Coreys Cinematic Universe. Corey Feldman plays a high school student who, through one of the strangest plot twists in the whole body switching genre, finds himself switching places with two time Academy Award-winner Jason Robards, playing a professor who is looking for immortality through entering a meditative alpha state. Meredith Salinger and Piper Laurie also find themselves switching bodies as well, while Corey Haim plays the goofball best friend with not a whole lot to do. The supporting cast also includes veteran character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Alex Rocco, the latter who agreed to do the film because it was directed by his son. When the film opened on March 3rd, it would be Vestron's second widest release, opening on more than 1,000 theatres. But just like the previous year's License to Drive, the pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman did not set the box office on fire, opening in fifth place with $2.57m in ticket sales, compared to the #1 film of the week, the Morgan Freeman drama Lean on Me, which would gross twice as much as Dream a Little Dream while playing in 125 fewer theatres. In its second week, the film would lose 56 theatres and 52% of its opening weekend audience, falling all the way to 13th place with a gross of only $1.25m. By week three, the movie would move to dollar houses, and trudge along for several more months, until it closed in the middle of summer with only $5.55m in the till. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer/director Jeremy Paul Kagan had directed and occasionally written several big ticket movies, including the 1977 Henry Winkler drama Heroes, which also starred Sally Field and, in his first post-Star Wars movie, Harrison Ford, and the 1985 Meredith Salinger/John Cusack adventure film The Journey of Natty Gann. Which makes his Natty Gann follow up, Big Man on Campus, such a head scratcher. A modern adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Big Man on Campus was written by Allan Katz, who had been working in television for nearly twenty years writing for and producing shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and MASH. Katz would also star in the movie as the titular hunchback, even though he had never once acted on any of his shows. But at least he had a good cast supporting him, including Gerrit Graham, Melora Hardin, Jessica Harper, Tom Skerritt, and Cindy Williams. I can only find one playdate for the film ever, in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in March 1989, so while this mostly qualifies as a direct to video release, I feel compelled to at least give it a token mention here. Have you ever heard of a movie called The Fruit Machine? Of course you haven't, because that's a horrible name for a movie, no matter what it's about. When Vestron acquired this British drama about young gay men who go on the run after they witness a murder, the first thing they did was change the title to Wonderland. Not that Wonderland gives you any more of an idea of what the movie is about than The Fruit Machine. But, whatever. Today, the movie has two things going for it. One, an early role for Robbie Coltrane, playing a transvestite who operates a nightclub for gay men and transvestites called, you guessed it, The Fruit Machine. Second, the musical score was written by Hans Zimmer, in one of his earliest film jobs. Ironically, Wonderland would be the the third movie scored by Hans Zimmer to be released by Vestron in a four month period, after Burning Secret and Paperhouse. Wonderland would open at the Quad Cinemas in New York City on April 28th, to poor reviews but a decent $11,500 opening weekend. But the film would not be able to maintain much of an audience, and after five weeks, Wonderland was out of the Quad Cinemas, never to play another theatre in America, with just $50k in the till. Ken Russell's third and final film in his contract with Vestron was The Rainbow, an adaptation of a 1915 novel by D.H. Lawrence, whose 1920 novel Women in Love had been adapted by Russell in 1969. Glenda Jackson, who had won the Academy Award for her role in Women in Love, here plays the mother of the character she played in the other film. Here, she co-stars with Sammi Davis as Ursala, the younger sister of Jackson's Women in Love character, who finds herself attracted to Anton, a young man in town, as well as her gym teacher Winifred. As one would expect from Ken Russell, the supporting cast is top notch, including future Eighth Doctor Paul McGann, regular Russell collaborator Christopher Gable, and Blowup star David Hemmings. The film would open at the Paris Theatre in New York City on May 5th, where it would gross a very good $22k, spurred on by great reviews from most of the city's major critics, several of which noted the film to be Russell's best in a number of years. So it would be sad that the film would end up being the lowest grossing of the three films he'd make with Vestron, only earning a total of $444k after three months in mostly single playdates in major markets. In 1985, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum would work together on a forgettable horror comedy film called Transylvania 6-5000, whose name was a pun on a popular 1940 song recorded by Glenn Miller. In 1986, the pair would work together again in David Cronenberg's amazing remake of the cheesy 1950s horror film The Fly. In late 1987, shortly after the pair married, they would work together for a third time, on another comedy, and on a movie that was this time based on an actual song. Earth Girls Are Easy was the name of a song that appeared on comedian Julie Brown's 1984 EP Goddess in Progress, and was originally developed as a movie at Warner Brothers Studio. The studio would get cold feet when Absolute Beginners, the big British musical directed by music video director Julien Temple, failed big time everywhere in the world except for the UK. Temple was slated to direct Earth Girls Are Easy, and Brown, as the co-writer and co-star of the film, was committed to the filmmaker, even if it meant Warners putting the film into turnaround. Which they did, in 1986. It would take nearly a year to get the project back on track, after being rejected by every other major studio and production company in Hollywood, until the French banking giant Credit Lyonnais agree to finance the film, provided they could cut the budget from $14m to $10m, and if the filmmakers could make a distribution deal with the bank's preferred distributor, the then newly-formed DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group. The film, about a manicurist in Los Angeles who helps three aliens blend into human culture after they accidentally crash land their spaceship into her pool, would begin production in Los Angeles in October 1987. Davis played the manicurist, and Goldblum one of the aliens, alongside Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey, while the remaining cast would include a number of great comedic actors like MASH's Larry Linville, Michael McKean, Rick Overton, and Charles Rocket, as well as Los Angeles media personality Angelyne as basically herself. While the film was nearing completion in early 1988, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group would go out of business, leaving Credit Lyonnais in need of a new distributor for their investment. But after Temple turned in his first cut of the film, Credit Lyonnais would send Temple back into his editing bay, where he and his team would spend nearly another five months winnowing out various scenes and completely excising a big and expensive musical number based on one of the other songs on Brown's 1984 EP, I Like ‘Em Big and Stupid, because it just didn't work for the film. Additional scenes would be shot, and the budget would end up being $11m. The film would have its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1988, and attract attention from a number of distributors including MGM/UA, New World Pictures and Twentieth Century-Fox, but Vestron would end up putting in the winning bid. The film would originally be set for a February 1989 release, but would get delayed until May 12th. When it finally opened on 317 screens in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philly, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington DC, the film would gross $893k, putting in twelfth place for the weekend, but its per screen average would be the fourth best amongst the films in the top twenty. The film would fall one place in its second week, losing 35% of its opening weekend audience, grossing $577k. The film would slowly hemorrhage theatres and box office until the plug was pulled in mid-July with only $3.9m in tickets sold. The sole lasting legacy of the film is that Damon Wayans enjoyed working so much with Jim Carrey that when Damon's brother Kenan Ivory Wayans was putting together a new comedy television show together thanks to the success of his movie I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, Damon would get his brother to give Carrey a chance. In Living Color would make Carrey and the Wayans Brothers stars, and would change the course of comedy. So there's that… In late June, the Lightning Pictures imprint would release their first movie in nearly two years, Far From Home. The film starred the then-fourteen year old Drew Barrymore as a young girl traveling cross country with her father, who get stuck in a small desert town in Nevada on their way to back to Los Angeles, who must deal with some very strange characters in the trailer park they're staying in, as they slowly discover nothing is as it's supposed to be. Matt Frewer, Max Headroom himself, plays the dad, who must protect his daughter while he figures out how to get the hell out of town alive. Truth be told, the movie sucks, and it's really creepy in how it sexualizes Barrymore, but there's one hell of a great supporting cast doing their best to keep the joint from totally stinking the place up. Richard Masur, Academy Award nominee Susan Tyrell, Anthony Rapp from Adventures in Babysitting, Jennifer Tilly, and beloved character actor Dick Miller. When Vestron opened the film in four theatres in third-tier regions on June 30th, it was little surprise the film got some very bad notices, although one unnamed reviewer for Variety felt the need to note that Barrymore, who again was only fourteen at the time, had “a baby face, dreamy eyes and a playboy model's body.” The film would gross just $3,763 in its first and only weekend in theatres. But that wasn't even the worst news of the week for Vestron. On the same day as they opened Far From Home, Vestron had been informed by Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles that the $100 million line of credit the company had with them was being terminated. 140 of the approximately 300 Vestron staff members, mostly from the Los Angeles office, were let go, including the President of Production, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Distribution, and the Vice President of Publicity and Promotion. While Vestron Video would continue for a while, in large part thanks to a $15.7m payoff during a dispute over home video ownership rights to the 1986 Best Picture winner Platoon, the theatrical distribution unit was effectively dead. Some movies, including the Fred Savage/Howie Mandel comedy Little Monsters, the Harry Dean Stanton-led comedy Twister, and the Kathryn Bigelow-directed action thriller Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, would be sold off to other companies, but the titles left behind would see their planned theatrical releases cancelled and eventually be released direct to video. Thanks to some of the legacy titles in their video catalog, including Dirty Dancing, Vestron would be able to stave off the inevitable, but in January 1991, the company would file for bankruptcy, their final film being the Stan Winston-directed fantasy buddy comedy The Adventures of a Gnome named Gnorm. Filmed in 1988 as Upward, the film featured Anthony Michael Hall as an Los Angeles Police Detective who has to team up with a gnome, a puppet created by Winston, the effects wizard who also directed the film, to solve a murder. For Winston, it was deja vu all over again, as his previous directorial effort, Pumpkinhead, found itself in limbo for a while when its distributor, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, filed for bankruptcy in 1987 before they could release that film. In bankruptcy court, Live Entertainment, partially owned by 1990s mega movie production company Carolco Pictures, would purchase all of Vestron's assets for $24m. Live used the assets as collateral to secure a line of credit from industry friendly banks, so they could start their own production and distribution company, of which their only moment of note was helping to finance Reservoir Dogs when no one else would. Eventually, Live Entertainment would be sold off to Bain Capital, a private investment firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, in 1997, and they would rebrand Live as Artisan Entertainment. Artisan today is best known as the little independent distributor of The Blair Witch Project, but they also would enter into an agreement with Marvel Comics to make movies for 15 of their characters, including Ant-Man, Black Panther, Deadpool, Iron Fist, Longshot, Morbius, Mort the Dead Teenager, and the Power Pack. Artisan would produce two movies based on Marvel characters, Man-Thing and The Punisher, although neither of those films would be released by Artisan. Artisan would declare bankruptcy in 2003, and Marvel would be one of the companies to place a bid for them. Lionsgate would end up becoming the winning bidder for Artisan's assets, which is how the vast majority of Vestron titles are now owned by a company that didn't even exist when Vestron closed shop. Today, Lionsgate is the owner of the assets of a number of the companies we've spoken about on this podcast in the past, and will be talking about in the future, including Crown International, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, Embassy Pictures, and New World Pictures. And it's also a major reason why so many of the movies we discuss in these episodes looking back at past companies are completely unknown today. As big as Lionsgate is, with nearly $3.6 billion in revenue in 2022, they aren't going to be able to keep up with the chain of ownership for every movies from every company they've purchased, and they're not going to put the money in to the movies that are barely remembered today. The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization co-founded by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, which is dedicated to film preservation, estimates the average cost to do a photochemical restoration of a color feature with sound to between $80,000 to $450,000 dollars, not including the cost of a 2k or 4k digital scan. I'm going to have a link in the show notes on our website at The80sMoviePodcast.com to a November 2018 article from the Science History Institute about the process of restoring films. It's not a long read, but it's a fascinating read. I hope you'll check it out. So there you have it, the end of the line for Vestron Pictures, and many of the movies they helped to make and distribute, most of which you cannot find today in any form. Thank you for listening. We'll talk again next week when Episode 105, on the 1985 teen comedy O.C. and Stiggs, directed by Robert Altman, will be discussed. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
This week, we finish our three part episode on the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures. ----more---- The movies discussed on this week's episode are: The Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm (1990, Stan Winston) Big Man on Campus (1989, Jeremy Paul Kagan) Dream a Little Dream (1989, Marc Rocco) Earth Girls Are Easy (1989, Julien Temple) Far From Home (1989, Meiert Avis) Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose) Parents (1989, Bob Balaban) The Rainbow (1989, Ken Russell) Wonderland (1989, Philip Saville) 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. At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was starting to experience the turbulence a number of independent distributors faced when they had a successful film too soon out of the gate, and the direction of the company seemingly changes to go chasing more waterfalls instead of sticking to the rivers and the lakes they were used to. Welcome to Part Three of our miniseries. As we enter 1989, Vestron is seriously in trouble. More money has gone out then has come back in. It seems that they needed one more hit to keep going for a while longer. But if you were to look at their release schedule for the year, which included a pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, there wasn't really anything that felt like it could be a Dirty Dancing-like break out, except for maybe the pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group. But we'll get there in a moment. Their first film from 1989 is a certifiable cult film if there ever was one, but the problem with this label is that the film tagged as so was not a success upon its initial theatrical release. Bob Balaban, the beloved character actor who had been regularly seen on screen since his memorable debut in Midnight Cowboy twenty years earlier, would make his directorial debut with the black comedy horror film Parents. Bryan Madorsky stars as Michael Laemle, a ten year old boy living in the California suburbs in the 1950s, who starts to suspect mom and dad, played by Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid, might be cannibals. It's a strange but fun little movie, and even Ken Russell would compare it favorably over David Lynch's Blue Velvet during one contemporary interview, but sadly, it would take far more time for the film to find its audience than Vestron could afford. Opening in 94 theatres on January 27th, the $3m Parents could not overcome a series of negative reviews from critics, and it would only gross $278k in its first three days. Vestron would not strike any additional prints of the film, and would cycle the ones they did have around the country for several months, but after four months, the film could only attract $870k in box office receipts. But it would become something of a cult hit on video later in the year. In 1992, British filmmaker Bernard Rose would make his American directing debut with an all-time banger, Candyman. But he wouldn't gotten Candyman if it wasn't for his 1989 film Paperhouse, an inventive story about a young girl whose drawings seem to manifest into reality. British actor Ben Cross from Chariots of Fire and American actress Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels plays the young girl's parents. Outside of Gene Siskel, who would give the film a thumbs down on his movie review show with Roger Ebert despite acknowledging Rose's talent as a filmmaker and being fascinated by the first two-thirds of the movie, the critical consensus was extraordinary. But it appears Siskel may have never actually written a review of the film for the Chicago Tribune, as the film still has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the film would only earn $6,700 from its single screen playdate at the Carnegie Hall Cinemas when it opened on February 17th, and the film would get little support from Vestron after that. More single playdates in major cities that added up to a $241k box office tally after fourteen weeks in release. Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream would be the third film in The Two Coreys Cinematic Universe. Corey Feldman plays a high school student who, through one of the strangest plot twists in the whole body switching genre, finds himself switching places with two time Academy Award-winner Jason Robards, playing a professor who is looking for immortality through entering a meditative alpha state. Meredith Salinger and Piper Laurie also find themselves switching bodies as well, while Corey Haim plays the goofball best friend with not a whole lot to do. The supporting cast also includes veteran character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Alex Rocco, the latter who agreed to do the film because it was directed by his son. When the film opened on March 3rd, it would be Vestron's second widest release, opening on more than 1,000 theatres. But just like the previous year's License to Drive, the pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman did not set the box office on fire, opening in fifth place with $2.57m in ticket sales, compared to the #1 film of the week, the Morgan Freeman drama Lean on Me, which would gross twice as much as Dream a Little Dream while playing in 125 fewer theatres. In its second week, the film would lose 56 theatres and 52% of its opening weekend audience, falling all the way to 13th place with a gross of only $1.25m. By week three, the movie would move to dollar houses, and trudge along for several more months, until it closed in the middle of summer with only $5.55m in the till. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer/director Jeremy Paul Kagan had directed and occasionally written several big ticket movies, including the 1977 Henry Winkler drama Heroes, which also starred Sally Field and, in his first post-Star Wars movie, Harrison Ford, and the 1985 Meredith Salinger/John Cusack adventure film The Journey of Natty Gann. Which makes his Natty Gann follow up, Big Man on Campus, such a head scratcher. A modern adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Big Man on Campus was written by Allan Katz, who had been working in television for nearly twenty years writing for and producing shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and MASH. Katz would also star in the movie as the titular hunchback, even though he had never once acted on any of his shows. But at least he had a good cast supporting him, including Gerrit Graham, Melora Hardin, Jessica Harper, Tom Skerritt, and Cindy Williams. I can only find one playdate for the film ever, in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in March 1989, so while this mostly qualifies as a direct to video release, I feel compelled to at least give it a token mention here. Have you ever heard of a movie called The Fruit Machine? Of course you haven't, because that's a horrible name for a movie, no matter what it's about. When Vestron acquired this British drama about young gay men who go on the run after they witness a murder, the first thing they did was change the title to Wonderland. Not that Wonderland gives you any more of an idea of what the movie is about than The Fruit Machine. But, whatever. Today, the movie has two things going for it. One, an early role for Robbie Coltrane, playing a transvestite who operates a nightclub for gay men and transvestites called, you guessed it, The Fruit Machine. Second, the musical score was written by Hans Zimmer, in one of his earliest film jobs. Ironically, Wonderland would be the the third movie scored by Hans Zimmer to be released by Vestron in a four month period, after Burning Secret and Paperhouse. Wonderland would open at the Quad Cinemas in New York City on April 28th, to poor reviews but a decent $11,500 opening weekend. But the film would not be able to maintain much of an audience, and after five weeks, Wonderland was out of the Quad Cinemas, never to play another theatre in America, with just $50k in the till. Ken Russell's third and final film in his contract with Vestron was The Rainbow, an adaptation of a 1915 novel by D.H. Lawrence, whose 1920 novel Women in Love had been adapted by Russell in 1969. Glenda Jackson, who had won the Academy Award for her role in Women in Love, here plays the mother of the character she played in the other film. Here, she co-stars with Sammi Davis as Ursala, the younger sister of Jackson's Women in Love character, who finds herself attracted to Anton, a young man in town, as well as her gym teacher Winifred. As one would expect from Ken Russell, the supporting cast is top notch, including future Eighth Doctor Paul McGann, regular Russell collaborator Christopher Gable, and Blowup star David Hemmings. The film would open at the Paris Theatre in New York City on May 5th, where it would gross a very good $22k, spurred on by great reviews from most of the city's major critics, several of which noted the film to be Russell's best in a number of years. So it would be sad that the film would end up being the lowest grossing of the three films he'd make with Vestron, only earning a total of $444k after three months in mostly single playdates in major markets. In 1985, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum would work together on a forgettable horror comedy film called Transylvania 6-5000, whose name was a pun on a popular 1940 song recorded by Glenn Miller. In 1986, the pair would work together again in David Cronenberg's amazing remake of the cheesy 1950s horror film The Fly. In late 1987, shortly after the pair married, they would work together for a third time, on another comedy, and on a movie that was this time based on an actual song. Earth Girls Are Easy was the name of a song that appeared on comedian Julie Brown's 1984 EP Goddess in Progress, and was originally developed as a movie at Warner Brothers Studio. The studio would get cold feet when Absolute Beginners, the big British musical directed by music video director Julien Temple, failed big time everywhere in the world except for the UK. Temple was slated to direct Earth Girls Are Easy, and Brown, as the co-writer and co-star of the film, was committed to the filmmaker, even if it meant Warners putting the film into turnaround. Which they did, in 1986. It would take nearly a year to get the project back on track, after being rejected by every other major studio and production company in Hollywood, until the French banking giant Credit Lyonnais agree to finance the film, provided they could cut the budget from $14m to $10m, and if the filmmakers could make a distribution deal with the bank's preferred distributor, the then newly-formed DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group. The film, about a manicurist in Los Angeles who helps three aliens blend into human culture after they accidentally crash land their spaceship into her pool, would begin production in Los Angeles in October 1987. Davis played the manicurist, and Goldblum one of the aliens, alongside Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey, while the remaining cast would include a number of great comedic actors like MASH's Larry Linville, Michael McKean, Rick Overton, and Charles Rocket, as well as Los Angeles media personality Angelyne as basically herself. While the film was nearing completion in early 1988, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group would go out of business, leaving Credit Lyonnais in need of a new distributor for their investment. But after Temple turned in his first cut of the film, Credit Lyonnais would send Temple back into his editing bay, where he and his team would spend nearly another five months winnowing out various scenes and completely excising a big and expensive musical number based on one of the other songs on Brown's 1984 EP, I Like ‘Em Big and Stupid, because it just didn't work for the film. Additional scenes would be shot, and the budget would end up being $11m. The film would have its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1988, and attract attention from a number of distributors including MGM/UA, New World Pictures and Twentieth Century-Fox, but Vestron would end up putting in the winning bid. The film would originally be set for a February 1989 release, but would get delayed until May 12th. When it finally opened on 317 screens in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philly, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington DC, the film would gross $893k, putting in twelfth place for the weekend, but its per screen average would be the fourth best amongst the films in the top twenty. The film would fall one place in its second week, losing 35% of its opening weekend audience, grossing $577k. The film would slowly hemorrhage theatres and box office until the plug was pulled in mid-July with only $3.9m in tickets sold. The sole lasting legacy of the film is that Damon Wayans enjoyed working so much with Jim Carrey that when Damon's brother Kenan Ivory Wayans was putting together a new comedy television show together thanks to the success of his movie I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, Damon would get his brother to give Carrey a chance. In Living Color would make Carrey and the Wayans Brothers stars, and would change the course of comedy. So there's that… In late June, the Lightning Pictures imprint would release their first movie in nearly two years, Far From Home. The film starred the then-fourteen year old Drew Barrymore as a young girl traveling cross country with her father, who get stuck in a small desert town in Nevada on their way to back to Los Angeles, who must deal with some very strange characters in the trailer park they're staying in, as they slowly discover nothing is as it's supposed to be. Matt Frewer, Max Headroom himself, plays the dad, who must protect his daughter while he figures out how to get the hell out of town alive. Truth be told, the movie sucks, and it's really creepy in how it sexualizes Barrymore, but there's one hell of a great supporting cast doing their best to keep the joint from totally stinking the place up. Richard Masur, Academy Award nominee Susan Tyrell, Anthony Rapp from Adventures in Babysitting, Jennifer Tilly, and beloved character actor Dick Miller. When Vestron opened the film in four theatres in third-tier regions on June 30th, it was little surprise the film got some very bad notices, although one unnamed reviewer for Variety felt the need to note that Barrymore, who again was only fourteen at the time, had “a baby face, dreamy eyes and a playboy model's body.” The film would gross just $3,763 in its first and only weekend in theatres. But that wasn't even the worst news of the week for Vestron. On the same day as they opened Far From Home, Vestron had been informed by Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles that the $100 million line of credit the company had with them was being terminated. 140 of the approximately 300 Vestron staff members, mostly from the Los Angeles office, were let go, including the President of Production, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Distribution, and the Vice President of Publicity and Promotion. While Vestron Video would continue for a while, in large part thanks to a $15.7m payoff during a dispute over home video ownership rights to the 1986 Best Picture winner Platoon, the theatrical distribution unit was effectively dead. Some movies, including the Fred Savage/Howie Mandel comedy Little Monsters, the Harry Dean Stanton-led comedy Twister, and the Kathryn Bigelow-directed action thriller Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, would be sold off to other companies, but the titles left behind would see their planned theatrical releases cancelled and eventually be released direct to video. Thanks to some of the legacy titles in their video catalog, including Dirty Dancing, Vestron would be able to stave off the inevitable, but in January 1991, the company would file for bankruptcy, their final film being the Stan Winston-directed fantasy buddy comedy The Adventures of a Gnome named Gnorm. Filmed in 1988 as Upward, the film featured Anthony Michael Hall as an Los Angeles Police Detective who has to team up with a gnome, a puppet created by Winston, the effects wizard who also directed the film, to solve a murder. For Winston, it was deja vu all over again, as his previous directorial effort, Pumpkinhead, found itself in limbo for a while when its distributor, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, filed for bankruptcy in 1987 before they could release that film. In bankruptcy court, Live Entertainment, partially owned by 1990s mega movie production company Carolco Pictures, would purchase all of Vestron's assets for $24m. Live used the assets as collateral to secure a line of credit from industry friendly banks, so they could start their own production and distribution company, of which their only moment of note was helping to finance Reservoir Dogs when no one else would. Eventually, Live Entertainment would be sold off to Bain Capital, a private investment firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, in 1997, and they would rebrand Live as Artisan Entertainment. Artisan today is best known as the little independent distributor of The Blair Witch Project, but they also would enter into an agreement with Marvel Comics to make movies for 15 of their characters, including Ant-Man, Black Panther, Deadpool, Iron Fist, Longshot, Morbius, Mort the Dead Teenager, and the Power Pack. Artisan would produce two movies based on Marvel characters, Man-Thing and The Punisher, although neither of those films would be released by Artisan. Artisan would declare bankruptcy in 2003, and Marvel would be one of the companies to place a bid for them. Lionsgate would end up becoming the winning bidder for Artisan's assets, which is how the vast majority of Vestron titles are now owned by a company that didn't even exist when Vestron closed shop. Today, Lionsgate is the owner of the assets of a number of the companies we've spoken about on this podcast in the past, and will be talking about in the future, including Crown International, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, Embassy Pictures, and New World Pictures. And it's also a major reason why so many of the movies we discuss in these episodes looking back at past companies are completely unknown today. As big as Lionsgate is, with nearly $3.6 billion in revenue in 2022, they aren't going to be able to keep up with the chain of ownership for every movies from every company they've purchased, and they're not going to put the money in to the movies that are barely remembered today. The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization co-founded by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, which is dedicated to film preservation, estimates the average cost to do a photochemical restoration of a color feature with sound to between $80,000 to $450,000 dollars, not including the cost of a 2k or 4k digital scan. I'm going to have a link in the show notes on our website at The80sMoviePodcast.com to a November 2018 article from the Science History Institute about the process of restoring films. It's not a long read, but it's a fascinating read. I hope you'll check it out. So there you have it, the end of the line for Vestron Pictures, and many of the movies they helped to make and distribute, most of which you cannot find today in any form. Thank you for listening. We'll talk again next week when Episode 105, on the 1985 teen comedy O.C. and Stiggs, directed by Robert Altman, will be discussed. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
Ian is joined by Nathan Greenaway to pop his 41st century space cherry and review bonkers comic book adaptation Barbarella!Barbarella (1968) Directed by Roger Vadim. Adapted from Jean Claude Forest's comic book. starring Jane Fonda, David Hemmings, John Philip Law and Anita Pallenberg
Prison, drugs and gang war touch three friends from the east coast. A guest co-host joins them and learns that the previous co-host was killed by these friends, and he fears the same will happen to him. On Episode 548 of Trick or Treat Radio we are joined by EF Contentment for another Patreon Takeover! This time EF has selected the films Blood In, Blood Out from director Taylor Hackford and Unman, Wittering and Zigo from director John Mackenzie for us to discuss! We spend a large portion of this oversized show talking about the highly quotable crime epic Blood In, Blood Out close to the film's 30th anniversary! Orale, grab your copy of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, expect nothing and get everything, and strap on for the world's most dangerous podcast!Stuff we talk about: Patreon Takeover, MZ's glossy-eyed stare, The Offering, watching the wrong movie, EF Contentment, Cruise Gooseman, going to the theater, Watch/Skip+, Nasty Boys, Blood In Blood Out, Teddy Wilson, Delroy Lindo, Damian Chapa, Jesse Borrego, Michael Pare, Nemesis, Albert Pyun, Taylor Hackford, Benjamin Bratt, Tom Towles, Billy Bob Thornton, descrambled ppv, David Ayer, Harsh Times, Christian Bale, Peace Corps, American Me, Tom Cruz, Heroes, Fame, drug-addicted artist stereotype, Vatos Locos Forever, how you recover from tragedy, Richard Masur, Risky Business, License to Drive, Ving Rhames, The Thing, Thomas F. Wilson, doing the vengeance, John Woo, Bullet in the Head, RRR, Dashcam, Lanny Flaherty, Stuart Gordon, William H. Macy, Edmond, scared straight, Inglourious Basterds, Schindler's List, Helen Mirren is the bridge between worlds, Fast and Furious, True Lies, Unman Wittering and Zigo, John Mackenzie, David Hemmings, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, Carolyn Seymour, Droogs, A Clockwork Orange, 70s film stock, boarding school kids are dicks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Serpico, spin-offs 50 years later, Hobo with a Shotgun, Kids vs. Aliens, Jason Eisener, Tales from the Territories, Dark Side of the Ring, San Quentin, East LA, racism in the lunch line, Menace 2 Society, Boyz in the Hood, Hollywood Pictures, White Knights, Miklo Ravenshadow, 20/23 Vision, and Hooked on Buttcrack.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trickortreatradioJoin our Discord Community: discord.trickortreatradio.comSend Email/Voicemail: mailto:podcast@trickortreatradio.comVisit our website: http://trickortreatradio.comStart your own podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=386Use our Amazon link: http://amzn.to/2CTdZzKFB Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/trickortreatradioTwitter: http://twitter.com/TrickTreatRadioFacebook: http://facebook.com/TrickOrTreatRadioYouTube: http://youtube.com/TrickOrTreatRadioInstagram: http://instagram.com/TrickorTreatRadioSupport the show
There's still time to celebrate Giallo January! And what better way to spend it than with master of horror, Dario Argento. And we can't talk about Suspiria or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage again, can we? No, no. We covered those in our Top 10 Horror Films of the 1970s episodes. So here are three more titles, just dripping with blood red Italian horror!After witnessing the murder of a psychic, a pianist cannot shake his obsession to unravel the mystery of who was responsible, despite becoming a target himself. Get ready for arm wrestling, fiendish child artwork, a creepy animatronic doll, and a brutal, gruesome finale, in Deep Red, aka Profondo Rosso (1975)!To promote the release of his latest novel, an American author travels to Italy on a book tour, where a killer is using his work as a template in a series of ghastly murders. We hope that you don't mind a few twists along the way, because this ending is well worth the wait! Things get more than a little messy in Tenebrae (1982).And then from there, Jennifer Connelly teams up with Donald Pleasence, in the role of an entomologist, as they use Jennifer's ability to communicate with insects to uncover the identity of a mad killer in scenic Switzerland. If you thought the first two movies had enough false finishes, you have to see this ending to believe it! Time for maggot, mad ape, and monster child mayhem in Phenomena (1985)!
This week we break out our old cameras and go shooting with David Hemmings. But, what will the shutter see? Join us for Blow Up. We've launched a Patreon, so fans can now support the show and help keep the lights on at ISTYA towers. There are various benefits on offer, and we can assure you that Joe wearing his rubber dungarees isn't one of them. To sign up please visit https://www.patreon.com/istya If you want to contact the show, or simply have a chinwag with the chaps, then follow us on Twitter, join in the conversation on our Reddit page, or you can even contact us on good old email by sending your missives to - show@isawthatyearsago.com
Blow-Up, Barbarella, Les Frissons de l'angoisse… Vous avez peut-être déjà vu ou entendu parler de ces films qui ont marqué les années 60 et 70. Tous ont un dénominateur commun : David Hemmings. Cet acteur anglais dont la popularité à explosé au milieu des années 60 a enchaîné les gros projets en cette fin de décennie hippie avant de s'éloigner progressivement des plateaux de cinéma pour revenir à un quasi-anonymat. Signe de sa popularité alors à son paroxysme, il sort en 1967 un album sous son nom, Happens. Passé quasiment inaperçu, l'album finira par être oublié pendant de nombreuses années, mais s'agit-il seulement d'un essai discographique mis sur le marché pour capitaliser sur la célébrité d'un acteur ou renferme-t-il des trésors insoupçonnés ? C'est ce que je vous propose de découvrir dans cet épisode. Titres diffusés durant l'émission : After The Rain - David Hemmings Temptation Baby - Gene Vincent Mr. Tambourine Man - The Byrds Anathea - David Hemmings Reason To Believe - David Hemmings War's Mystery - David Hemmings Bell Birds - David Hemmings The Soldier Wind - David Hemmings Back Street Mirror - David Hemmings Le Twitter de l'émissionLe Twitter de Fox
Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it. I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane
Nja, voor de vorm houdt onze host zijn duim omlaag op de foto, maar ter compensatie mag podgast Andy zijn beide duimen hemelwaarts richten. Want het ergst denkbare is gebeurd: Ruud zag, hij herbekeek, en hij veranderde van mening. Barbarella (1968) is niet de troep waar hij het jarenlang voor hield, integendeel zelfs. Sekspositieve Jane Fonda op ruimteavontuur is een van de plezierigste dingen die hij in tijden op het scherm zag! Zijn gast, Andy Leenen (Tekstbureau Tien Anderen), is behalve communicatieheld en echte filmkenner. De Amazing Discoveries-editie van het InScience Filmfestival (4-5 nov.) is een uitstekende aanleiding om het te hebben over een film die héél erg scifi, maar niet heel erg wetenschapsfilm is. Barbarella kijken is voor hem "als een goede, oude vriend tegenkomen, met wie je een vriendschap hebt die je niet hoeft te onderhouden." Overigens, Duimpjeworstelen is er LIVE! bij op deze mini-editie van InScience. De Ruud neemt daar met livepubliek een speciale aflevering op met NRC-wetenschapsjournalist Laura Bergshoef, over de activistische (get it?) documentaire Seaspiracy. Za 5 november, om 15.30u in Café LUX Nijmegen. In deze aflevering over Barbarella gaat het trouwens ook nog over waarom rapper Snoop Dogg in de film The Beach Bum de naam Ray heeft, over het Ruuds bijna-acoholprobleem in 2009 en over de vraag of deze film een goede double feature is met 2001: A Space Odyssey. Steun Duimpjeworstelen op Patreon! En ontvang leuke extraatjes ^_^ Links: Tekstbureau Tien Anderen: https://tienanderen.nl/ Duimpjeworstelen LIVE! op InScience Amazing Discoveries: https://www.insciencefestival.nl/nl/vertoning/duimpjeworstelen-live-laura-bergshoef-nrc-vs-seaspiracy/ Extra links: Geeky Dingen over Barbarella: https://geekydingen.nl/2022/06/24/99-barbarella-feministisch-icoon-of-andermans-stoeipoes/ Celluloid Gurus: http://www.celluloidgurus.eu/ Ranking Krystow Kieslowski in Inglorious Rankers deel 1: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7vJaPN4youQkeFpaw3sXSg Rule of Three over The Rutles: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kevin-eldon-on-the-rutles/ Miriam Margolyes in Harry Potter: https://consequence.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Professor-Sprout.jpg Miriam Margolyes te gast in Grounded met Louis Theroux: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/7-miriam-margolyes/ Miriam Margolyes bij Graham Norton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZZv9ryzjj8
On this spooky season edition of Parallax Views, film historian Troy Howarth, author of such books as So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films, Assault on the System: The Nonconformist Cinema of John Carpenter, Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films, Murder by Design: The Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento, The Haunted World of Mario Bava, and the new Make Them Die Slowly: The Kinetic Cinema of Umberto Lenzi, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about horror movies. Among the topics covered: - How Troy got into horror through the Hammer Studios' horor movies of the late 1950s through to the 1970s. These films starred such actors as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and centered around classic monsters like The Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, and Count Dracula - Why Troy doesn't like the "cheesy" description when it comes to older movies; especially when said movies are deliberately infused with comical elements - John Carpenter's Halloween and the dark side of suburbia; Carpenter's films in the context of the Vietnam War and Watergate; the rebellious nature of Carpenter's filmography - Similarities between horror and comedy as genres; the art of the jump scare; the label "elevated horror" and the problems with it - Explaining the term "Euro-Horor" and why Troy doesn't like the term "Euro-Trash" to describe such movies; the history of the Italian murder mystery aka giallo and it's relationship to film noir, whodunits, and the German krimis written by Edgar Wallace; psycho-sexual themes in the giallo; the pulp vibe in Italian gialli; the effect of WWII and fascism on Italian filmmakers like Dario Argento; the politics of Italian horror movies (are they left-wing or right-wing?); Dario Argento's latest movie Occhiali Neri (Dark Glasses) and it relevant social themes in the post-COVID era - Violence and women in the Italian giallo; the complex portrayal of women in the Italian gialli; Argento's collaborator Daria Nicolodi and her importance to films like Suspiria; accusations that Lucio Fulci's films are misogynistic; the decadence of the upper class or bourgeoisie in Italian horror movies -The jazz stylings of the controversial Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco and how living under the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco influenced his films; sympathy and perversion in regards to women in Jess Franco's films - Analyzing the political subtext of Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso aka Deep Red starring David Hemmings and (slightly) futuristic Tenebrae - The ecological sentiment of Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve and Bay of Blood; the importance of Mario Bava's horror films and his giallo Blood and Black Lace; Mario Bava's Boris Karloff-starring Black Sabbath and the difference between the more subversive European cut (with sexual subtext) and the American International Pictures cut of the film; continental horror films of the mid-20th century were aimed at adults whereas many American horror films were aimed at youth and teenagers - Ruggero Deodato, the director of Cannibal Holocaust - Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the explosion of the giallo on the silver screen And much, much more!
Barbarella is a 1968 science fiction film directed by Roger Vadim, based on the French comic series of the same name by Jean-Claude Forest. The film stars Jane Fonda as the title character, a space traveler, and representative of the United Earth government sent to find scientist Durand Durand, who has created a weapon that could destroy humanity. The supporting cast includes John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O'Shea, Marcel Marceau, David Hemmings, Ugo Tognazzi, and Claude Dauphin.Purchase the music (without talk) at:Barbarella (classicalsavings.com)Your purchase helps to support our show! Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by La Musica International Chamber Music Festival and Uber. @CMDHedgecock#ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive#LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans#CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain#ClassicalMusicLivesOn#Uber Please consider supporting our show, thank you!http://www.classicalsavings.com/donate.html staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com
Succès indémodable du réalisateur italien Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow Up, sorti en 1966, traque un photographe, joué par David Hemmings, dans les rues de Londres et nous offre un panorama exceptionnel de la ville à ce moment charnière de son histoire. Un film fascinant qui montre les différentes facettes que peut prendre la vérité.
This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we're featuring a Q&A with Dario Argento on Deep Red following the world premiere of the new restoration at our retrospective, underway through June 29. The conversation was moderated by Maddie Whittle with interpretation by Michael Moore. Get tickets for our retrospective at www.filmlinc.org/argento Blow–Up's David Hemmings takes the lead in Argento's most sophisticated giallo, playing a jazz pianist who struggles to remember a vital piece of evidence after witnessing the murder of Macha Méril's German psychic. Joined by Argento's real-life partner Daria Nicolodi in the role of a plucky journalist, Hemmings embarks on a dizzying tour of Rome (with shooting locations in Turin standing in for the capital city) which, through Argento's roving, suprahuman lens, appears just as haunted and hyper-compartmentalized as the movie's tortured human protagonists. Ranked among the director's masterworks, Deep Red is supplemented by Argento's first score with Italian prog-rock band Goblin and astonishing production design by Giuseppe Bassan.
Prelúdio Para Matar (1975), de Dario Argento, é uma das maiores referências do subgênero italiano de terror giallo, e um dos grandes suspenses da história do cinema. Na sua trama, acompanhamos o pianista Marcus Daly, vivido por David Hemmings, que estava no lugar errado na hora errada e acaba se envolvendo em uma investigação de assassinatos misteriosa, sangrenta e com uma trilha sonora que dificilmente vai sair da sua cabeça. Vem ouvir o que achamos sobre ele! Não se esquece de nos seguir nas redes sociais: @vissebr no Twitter e no Instagram, e de entrar no nosso grupo de discussões no Telegram (também @vissebr)! A equipe: Aninha: Instagram e Twitter Leo: Instagram e Twitter Matheus: Instagram e Twitter Lembrando que é recomendado assistir ao filme antes de ouvir o podcast, pois ele está cheio de SPOILERS. Mas no início falamos sem spoilers e avisamos quando eles começam! Obras citadas no podcast: - Maligno - Noite Passada em Soho - Suspiria (1977 e 2018) - O Pássaro das Plumas de Cristal - Halloween - Três Homens em Conflito - O Iluminado - Dark Glasses - Blow-Up: Depois Daquele Beijo - The Office (série) - The Blacklist (série) - Crash: Estranhos Prazeres - Crash: No Limite - Mães Paralelas - Turma da Mônica: Laços/Lições - Bingo: O Rei das Manhãs - Seis Mulheres Para o Assassino - Insônia - A Pantera Cor de Rosa - Mr. Bean - Matrix - Annabelle - O Bebê de Rosemary - O Gato das Nove Caudas - Quatro Moscas Sobre Veludo Cinza
Zach & Zo are spectators in ancient Rome. The city is absolutely congested. The streets literally smell like dung, but that doesn't bother them as their excitement cannot be deterred! They are here to witness one of the greatest gladiators ever known. Finally, they get to see the undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champion of the known world of gladiatorial combat. They will see a man that had been rumored to have once have been a celebrated and renowned Roman general: a man they only know as "The Spaniard".Episode Segment Time StampsOpening Credits . . . . . . 00:03:11Favorite Parts . . . . . . . . 00:11:00Trivia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .00:46:53Critics' Thoughts . . . . . .00:57:20Back Look Cinema: The Podcast Links:www.backlookcinema.comEmail: fanmail@backlookcinema.comTwitter: @backlookcinemaFacebook: The Back Look Cinema Podcast Instagram: backlookcinemapodcastTicTok: @backlookcinemaBack Look Cinema Merch at Teespring.comBack Look Cinema Merch at Teepublic.com
Rule-flouting cop Fabio is deep undercover, chasing a globe-trotting ring of drug smugglers suspected to be operating out of Rome. Working with Mike Hamilton an Interpol agent with a hair-trigger temper, he sets out to worm his way into the group's confidence. But can these two rule-bending risk-takers stay one step ahead of the criminals long enough to bring them down from the inside?Starring Fabio Testi, David Hemmings, Sherry Buchanan, Wolfango Soldati, Massimo Vanni, Angelo Ragusa, Romano Puppo, Sergio Ruggeri, Johnny Loffredo, Leon Lenoir, and Gianni OrlandoMusic by GoblinDirector of Photography Giovanni BergaminiScreenplay by Massimo De Rita and Enzo G. CastellariDirected by Enzo G. Castellari
THIRSTKacey is better at pronouncing things than I amBest way to shower is with eyes closed, facing the shower-head ignoring all disturbing soundsIf you're a descendant of Elizabeth Bathory you're fucked (and probably a vampire)Thirst is a 1979 Australian horror film directed by Rod Hardy and starring Chantal Contouri and Max Phipps and British actor David Hemmings. It has been described as a blend of vampire and science fiction genres, influenced by the 1973 film Soylent Green[2] as well as drawing on the vampire folklore of Elizabeth Báthory – one of several vampire films in the 1970s to do so.[3][4]Support the show
The Wicker Man is a 1973 British folk horror film directed by Robin Hardy and starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt, and Big Chris Lee. In his 7th appearance on The General Witchfinders. The screenplay by Anthony (frenzy) Shaffer, inspired by David Pinner's 1967 novel Ritual, centres on the visit of Police Sergeant Neil Howie to the isolated island of Summerisle in search of a missing girl. Howie, a devout Christian, is appalled to find that the inhabitants of the island have abandoned Christianity and now practice a form of Celtic paganism.The movie is well-regarded by critics. Film magazine Cinefantastique described it as "The Citizen Kane of horror movies", and in 2004, Total Film magazine named The Wicker Man the sixth greatest British film of all time, and during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony the film was included as part of a sequence that celebrated British cinema.In 1989, Shaffer wrote a script treatment for The Loathsome Lambton Worm, a direct sequel with fantasy elements. Hardy had no interest in the project, and it was never produced. In 2006, an ill-received American remake was released, from which Hardy and others involved with the original have dissociated themselves. In 2011, a spiritual sequel directed by Hardy entitled The Wicker Tree, was released and featured Lee in a cameo appearance.Television actor Edward Woodward was cast in the role of Sergeant Neil Howie after the part was declined by both Michael York and David Hemmings. In Britain, Woodward was best known for the role of Callan, which he played from 1967 to 1972. After The Wicker Man, Woodward went on to receive international attention for his roles in the 1980 film Breaker Morant and the 1980s TV series The Equalizer.The film was produced at a time of crisis for the British film industry. The studio in charge of production, British Lion Films, was in financial trouble and was bought by wealthy businessman John Bentley. To convince the unions that he was not about to asset-strip the company, Bentley needed to get a film into production quickly. This meant that The Wicker Man, a film set during spring, actually began filming in October 1972: artificial leaves and blossoms had to be glued to trees in many scenes. The production was kept on a small budget. Christopher Lee was extremely keen to get the film made; he and others worked on the production without pay,(Something he seems very keen to mention at every opportunity). While filming took place, British Lion was bought by EMI Films.Iron Maiden released a single called The Wicker Man from their Brave New World album in tribute to the classic film.$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$ Just in case anyone has too much money and wants to give a bit to us to help with our hosting n stuff. It would be amazing if you fancied sending us some pennies - thank you.https://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders $£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Genre Fans Joe and Katie discuss whether Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975) is "Definitely," "Kinda," or "Not Really" a giallo. YouTubeIG: @genre.fansTwitter: genre_fansMusic: "Mojo Flag (Sting Version)" by Tayler Watts (Epidemic Sound)
¡Vuelve el sr. Deans a Ben & Deans! Eso sí, el sr. Ben seguirá reservando su regreso para realizar una entrada triunfal. Junto al Coronel Dutch y el Sr. Dalton se marcan una doble sesión en la que analizan la última película de Edgar Wright "LAST NIGHT IN SOHO", con Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Diana Rigg y Terence Stamp; así como "BLOW UP, DESEO DE UNA MAÑANA DE VERANO", todo un clásico y referente cultural de la estética mod, dirigida por Michelangelo Antonioni y protagonizada por: Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle, Jane Birkin y Gillian Hills. ¡Qué ustedes lo disfruten! ________________________________ Playlist del programa: · "Bailando Boogaloo" | Juanitos (Tema CABECERA del programa) · "Opinión de mierda" | Los Punsetes · "Strange Movies" | Half Cocked (Tema CIERE del programa) · Corte de audio de trailer "Last Night in Soho" (2021) ________________________________________ · Para quejas y comentarios de haters: bdcinepodcast@gmail.com · Web: https://benanddeans.com/ · Twitter: @BenandDeans · Facebook: @BenandDeans https://www.facebook.com/BenandDeans/
Pravidelná týdenní rubrika proudového vysílání, ve které si připomínáme výročí spojená se zajímavými osobnostmi. Připravil Ivan Mls.
In the thirty-first episode of Season 4 (The Horror, The Horror) Kyle is joined by screenwriter David Gutierrez and fellow podcaster Gio Maldonado (of the Nos Tiramos de Pecho podcast) to discuss a seminal work in the maestro of Giallo Dario Argento's oeuvre, the noir-ish and bizarre serial killer film Deep Red.
The coats are going deep...and deeper...into Dario Argento's 1975 giallo: "Deep Red". If you know anything about giallo, then you know the significance of Argento's fourth giallo film to the history of the sub-genre. If you don't, then you should stop reading this and watch this film NOW.Looking back, one can say that "Deep Red" was the turning point for Argento, when he shed his skin and embraced the more supernatural elements that he'd been toying with in the creative process leading up to 1975. After a respite from his animal trilogy, and a brief. sojourn into the italian comedy scene with "The Five Days", Argento returned with a renewed taste for horror and a new music collaborator in the prog rock band Goblin (their first--but not last collaboration), that took the world by storm. Director - Dario ArgentoStarring - David Hemmings - Dario Nicolodi - Gabriele LaviaIf you like the show, stab the follow button on your podcast app and write a nice 5-star review to help us grow the show!And if you want some more conspicuous content, support the show on Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ConspicuousTrenchcoatsCatch the Coats on:instagram https://www.instagram.com/con.coats/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ConCoatsconcoats.buzzsprout.comGet your tickets to see your conspicuous host in the new Army of the Dead VR game at: https://armyofthedeadvr.comSpecial Thanks to:Lucas Brahme for our music https://www.lucasbrahme.comUptownStyleStudio for designing our artwork https://www.instagram.com/uptownstylestudio/Veronica Maccarihttps://www.instagram.com/iamveronicamaccari/?hl=enMichael Mackenzie (http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4730/1/2013Mackenziephd.pdf)Troy HowarthArrow VideoJ&B WhiskeyIMDBSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/ConspicuousTrenchcoats)
The fourth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1967 features the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up. Directed and co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle and Peter Bowles, Blowup won the top prize at Cannes and was nominated for two Oscars. The post Blow-Up (1967 Cannes Palme d'Or Winner) appeared first on Awesome Movie Year.
The “Cinephile Cuties” are ready to investigate a murder. That’s because they’re chatting about Dario Argento’s Deep Red. And they are joined by a (kind of) Giallo expert, writer, and host of Full Court Chat with Dave Schilling - Dave Schilling! Patrick also tries to impress everybody with his knowledge of Italian prog-rockers, Goblin. And Casey may have prematurely asserted that former San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy is dead. In addition to that, they put Deep Red through their proprietary “Fartsy Test.” Patrick recommends a drink pairing. And they give each other notes to improve the show. Listen in to see if it’s working! If you like this show, tell a friend!If you’d like to sponsor the show, Venmo Patrick at Patrick-Mallon$10 for episode sponsorship$25 for sponsorship AND the boys will imbibe a drink of your choosing.Follow Farthouse on Twitter and InstagramFollow Patrick and Casey and Dave on TwitterAnd follow Patrick and Casey and on Letterboxd
Episode 31 Electronic Literature The Marriage of Electronic Music, Poetry, and Literature Playlist Luciano Berio, "Thema (Omaggio A Joyce)," from Orient-Occident/Momenti-Omaggio A Joyce/Continuo/Transition 1 (1967 Philips). Composed by Luciano Berio at the RAI studio in Milan. Vocals, Cathy Berberian. The piece dates from 1958-59. An exploration of editing and tape composition with the voice as a key source of audio material. This is an interpretative reading of the poem "Sirens" from chapter 11 of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce. This release on the Philips Prospective 21e Siècle is shorter than the one released around the same time on the Turnabout label in America. It omits the spoken sequence at the beginning where Berberian recites the words prior to them being manipulated on tape. John Cage/David Tudor, "Side 3" excerpt from Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental And Electronic Music (1959 Folkways). John Cage reads previously prepared stories and anecdotes, David Tudor performs electronic music at the same time with no Earthly connection between the two. This was a long-standing performance practice of theirs and I saw them do this several times. John Cage, "Part One (To Line 220)" from Roaratorio: An Irish Circus On Finnegans Wake (1992 Mode), excerpt, for speaker, Irish musicians and 62-track tape. Speaker, John Cage. Production: WDR, Köln; Süddeutscher Rundfunk, Stuttgart; Katholieke Radio Omroep, Hilversum; Technical cooperation: IRCAM, Paris. First transmission: 22 October 1979, WDR3-Hörspielstudio. This score is a means for translating any book into a performance without actors, a performance which is both literary and musical or one or the other. In this case, the book was Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The text of Roaratorio was published separately as Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake. This was part of the evolution of Cage's interest in creating works of text for performance with music and other activities. It further evolved into his use of texts by Henry David Thoreau for which he used chance processes to derive a text for solo vocal performance. Shakespeare, excerpt, (1962 Odhams Books Ltd.). BBC radioplay production with musique concrète by Desmond Leslie. King Henry is played by Richard Burton. Electronic music provided on tape for a set of Shakespeare play productions. This short. 2 and a half-minute segment is from Act IV, Scene 3 and gives you an idea of how the sound effects was joined with the dialog. This was a common outlet for electronic music in the UK. Shackleton, “Music For The Quiet Hour, Part 2,” excerpt, from Music For The Quiet Hour (2012 Woe To The Septic Heart!). Vocals, words (poetry), Vengeance Tenfold; Composer, producer, A. Gerth, K. Biswas, Sam Shackleton. A collaboration between producer Shackleton and vocalist Vengeance Tenfold. Beats, bass and rhythm patterns provide a backdrop for some stark poetry. This is a portion of a longer work that whose overall length is about an hour. Lily Greenham, “Traffic” from Lingual Music (2007 Paradigm Discs). Reissue of text-sound works made by Danish concrete poet Lily Greenham, probably between 1972-75. Hugh Davies is credited with assisting on the electronics for this work. Voice: Lily Greenham. Anne Clark, "Swimming" and "An Ordinary Life" from The Sitting Room (1982 Red Flame). Clark is a foremost British poet who fuses her texts with electronic music. This was the first of her albums. Words, Keyboards, Electronic Percussion, Water Percussion, Anne Clark; Guitar, Effects, Voice, Gary Mundy; Keyboards, Domonic Appleton, Patrik Fitzgerald; Keyboards, Electronic Percussion, Andrea Laschetti. Rick Wakeman, “The Journey,” excerpt, from Journey to the Center of the Earth (1974 A&M). Recorded in concert at The Royal Festival Hall London on Friday January 18th 1974. Synthesizers and other keyboards, Rick Wakeman; Narrator, David Hemmings; drums, Barney James; guitar, Mike Egan; accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Measham. Alan Parsons Project, "The Raven" from Tales of Mystery and Imagination - Edgar Allan Poe (1976 Charisma). Words from the tale of the same name by Poe. The Harmony Vocoder heard on "The Raven" was invented and built by EMI Central Research Laboratories.Keyboards, Alan Parsons, Andrew Powell, Billy Lyall, Christopher North, Eric Woolfson, Francis Monkman; Composed by Alan Parsons, Andrew Powell, and Eric Woolfson. Silver Apples, "Dust" from Silver Apples (1968 Kapp). "INSTRUCTIONS: Play Twice Before Listening." Composed and Arranged by Dan Taylor and Simeon; Percussion, Dan Taylor; Oscillators, mixers, electronic gear (The Simeon), Simeon; Vocals, Dan Taylor, Simeon. Alice Shields, " Study For Voice And Tape" from Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961-1973 (1998 New World Records). Recorded Voice, Buchla synthesizer, poem by Alice Shields. Ronald Perera, "Three Poems of Gunter Grass," part 1, “Gleisdreieck" from Music And Words (1980 CRI. Ronald Perera, electronic music on tape created in the Smith College Electronic Music Studio; soprano, Elsa Charlston; Conductor, Richard Pittman. John Hill, "Europa" from Six Moons Of Jupiter (2009 Finders Keepers). Recorded at Sigma Sound, Philadelphia, January-August 1970, but I don't think it was ever released. Uses a Moog Modular synthesizer programmed by Walter Sear. Composed, arranged produced, Moog Modular Synthesizer, Guitar, Bass, Flute, Recorder, Hammond organ, John Hill; Drums, Percussion, Jimmy Valerio; Performer (Poetry), Susan Christie; poetry, Ian Michaels. Ruth White, "The Clock," "Evening Harmony," "Lover's Wine," Owls," from Flowers of Evil (1969, Limelight). Composer, vocals, electronics (Moog Synthesizer), Ruth White; based on poetry by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Ruth White. Fantastic music from this singular composer who owned a Moog Modular Synthesizer. Her other music was often composed for media, television, and children's records. Archive Mix In which I play two records at the same time to see what happens. The recordings were: Lily Greenham, “ABC in Sound” from Lingual Music (1968/2007 Paradigm Discs). Recording from 1968 and includes the words of poet Bob Cobbing. Arif Mardin, “The Prophet,” excerpt from side 1, from The Prophet (1974 Atlantic). Narrator Richard Harris; keyboards, Bob James, Pat Rebillot, and Ken Bichel (ARP 2600). Poetry by Kahlil Gibran. The opening montage consists of excerpts from Milt Gabler and a reading of “The People Yes (Excerpt)” by Carl Sandburg and some saxophone music from Avant Slant (1968 Decca); James Joyce reading “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (1929 The Orthographic Institute); John Cage and David Tudor, Indeterminacy (1959 Folkways); Alice Shields, Dance Piece No. 3 from Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961-1973 (1998 New World Records); Luciano Berio, "Thema (Omaggio A Joyce)," from Electronic Music III (1967 Turnabout); Anne Clark, "The Sitting Room " from The Sitting Room (1982 Red Flame); Arif Mardin, “The Prophet,” excerpt from The Prophet (1974 Atlantic); Ruth White, "Owls" from Flowers of Evil (1969, Limelight). Background music is excerpted from Shackleton, “Music For The Quiet Hour, Part 2,” from Music For The Quiet Hour (2012 Woe To The Septic Heart!). Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz.
Daryl picked a triple bill of films with RED in the title for his Birthday. Deep Red (Profondo Rosso). Directed by Dario Argento and starring David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi. Red Sonja. Directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Hunt For Red October (based on the Tom Clancy novel). Directed by John McTiernan and starring Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, Sam Neil, Tim Curry, Joss Ackland, Scott Glen and James Earl Jones. Please review us over on Apple Podcasts. Got comments or suggestions for new episodes? Email: sddpod@gmail.com. Seek us out via Twitter and Instagram @ sddfilmpodcast Support our Patreon for $3 a month and get access to our exclusive show, Sudden Double Deep Cuts where we talk about our favourite movie soundtracks, scores and theme songs. We also have t-shirts available via our TeePublic store!
Deep Red. Does this classic Argento giallo splatter the screen with the right amount of crimson? Check in with Morris and Rick as they put on their black gloves to discuss Deep Red.
A short review of the 1965 David Hemmings and Steve Marriott-starring pop film "Be My Guest" as recorded for the Late June 2020 edition of the Talking Pictures TV Podcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Every 4 years apparently Death By DVD feels the need to review Deep Red. It might as well be a tradition around these parts. DEEP RED discussed in all its glory.
Born on this Day: is a daily podcast hosted by Bil Antoniou, Amanda Barker & Marco Timpano. Celebrating the famous and sometimes infamous born on this day. Check out their other podcasts: Bad Gay Movies, Bitchy Gay Men Eat & Drink Every Place is the Same My Criterions The Insomnia Project Marco's book: 25 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My Podcast NOVEMBER 18 Mickey Mouse's Birthday! IChloë Sevigny , Nasim Pedrad, Elizabeth Perkins , Damon Wayans Jr. . Allison Tolman, Owen Wilson , Peta Wilson , Alan Moore , David Hemmings , Linda Evans , Delroy Lindo , Tim Guinee , Brenda Vaccaro , Kevin Nealon , Mike Epps, Nate Parker , Imogene Coca, Jocelyn Brando, Carter Burwell, Megyn Kelly --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/born-on-this-day-podcast/message
Az 1975-ös Profondo Rosso (Mélyvörös) című film a témánk Dario Argento rendezésében. Ezzel kirándulást teszünk a kontinentális Európa horrorjába is, pontosabban Olaszország őshonos alzsánerébe, a giallóba kóstolunk bele. Vendéget is hívtunk az adáshoz, Szabó Kristóf tartott velünk, hogy megismerkedjünk az olasz ponyvahorrorral és Dario Argento filmográfiájával. Az adás elején történelemleckét tartunk: honnan ered a giallo? Kik a nagy nevű alkotói? Hogy fest Dario Argento karrierje, és melyik szakaszán jelentkezett a Mélyvörössel? Miért épp erre a filmre esett a választásunk? Később belemegyünk a film részleteibe, kezdve a legparább gyilkossági jelenetektől az emelkedett realizmus eszközeinek felvonultatásáig. Mennyire működik a screwball komédia a két főszereplő közt? Mennyire hatásosak az ijesztegetések? A rendezőről ezelőtt a Suspiria kapcsán beszéltünk, így alkalmunk van összehasonlítani a két film hatásmechanizmusait és a női szereplőkkel való viszonyát is. Mennyire áll össze a film sztorija? És milyen főszereplő David Hemmings? Linkek Az Epik.hu, ahol szuperjó műfaji filmes cikkeket olvashattok Kristóf cikkei a Filmtekercsen A Vakfolt podcast Facebook oldala és a Facebook-csoportunk A Vakfolt podcast a Twitteren A Vakfolt Patreon-oldala (új!) Vakfolt címke a Letterboxdon A Vakfolt az Apple podcasts oldalán A Vakfolt a Spotify-on A Vakfolt a YouTube-on A főcímzenéért köszönet az Artur zenekarnak Kristóf a Twitteren: @duplavortex András a Twitteren: @gaines_ Péter a Twitteren: @freevo Emailen is elértek bennünket: feedback@vakfoltpodcast.hu
In the twenty-eighth episode of Season 1, Cult Ficks & Trash Picks, Kyle is joined by writer Alex Buda and musician/actor Boston Stergis to discuss the idealistic sexual innocence of the futuristic comic adaptation from director Roger Vadim, Barbarella.
Lunchtime Movie Review - Reviewing films from the 70s and 80s
United Artists Classics released Just a Gigolo on November 16, 1978. David Hemmings directed the film starring David Bowie, Sydne Rome, and Kim Novak. The post Just a Gigolo (Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo) (1978) appeared first on Movie House Memories.
United Artists Classics released Just a Gigolo on November 16, 1978. David Hemmings directed the film starring David Bowie, Sydne Rome, and Kim Novak. The post Just a Gigolo (Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo) (1978) appeared first on Movie House Memories.
As part of a two film retrospective on actor David Hemmings (along with Deep Red) - a first watch of the Michelangelo Antonioni's counter culture classic didn't let me down.
Part of a two movie David Hemmings retrospective (along with Blow Up) another classic - Dario Argento's masterpiece is superior to Suspiria.
With his sleepy eyed look and tousled blond locks, he came across as some amalgamation of Robert and Chris Mitchum...with more than a touch of Paul McCartney as a finisher. Generally strolling through films as oddly passive, even disinterested, he could flip to a crazed enervation unexpectedly, leading him to serve as the ultimate outsider figure: either failing to react or overreacting to the events onscreen, in turn. Seldom a lead but always a presence, he effortlessly shifted from star boy soprano under famed modernist composer Benjamin Britten to child actor to that rarest of transitions: a popular adult career in cinema, as both actor and eventually director of film and television. Having starred in a handful of the most celebrated films of our time (Blow Up, Deep Red, even the strangely popular Barbarella), he’d wind down his career working through increasingly obscure parts in nearly forgotten films across the UK and Italy, before making a long and successful end run in American television throughout the 80’s and 90’s, where most of his directorial work took place. Join us as we discuss the genre oddities and decidedly quirky career of David Hemmings, only here on Weird Scenes! Week 64: Disreputable: the cult cinema of David Hemmings https://weirdscenes1.wordpress.com/https://www.facebook.com/WeirdScenes1https://twitter.com/WeirdScenes1 (@weirdscenes1)https://thirdeyecinema.podbean.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/third-eye-cinema-weird-scenes-inside-the-goldmine-podcast/id553402044
Our Month of Horrors Extravaganza continues this week as week take on 1976’s DEEP RED, from giallo master Dario Argento. When pianist David Hemmings witnesses the murder of a young woman, he takes it upon himself to become an amateur sleuth and find the killer. But who could it be? The sexy journalist covering the … Continue reading Ep. #63-Deep Red →
Shelley Duvall ruled cable television in the 1980s, with her award-winning kids show FAERIE TALE THEATRE, which adapted classic faerie tales with all-star casts, and warmed the hearts of an entire generation of kids. But a lot of those kids never knew about her short-lived spin-off series NIGHTMARE CLASSICS, which adapted timeless tales of terror like THE TURN OF THE SCREW, CARMILLA and THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE into hour-long shows for teen audiences. NIGHTMARE CLASSICS stars Amy Irving, David Hemmings, Roddy McDowell, Meg Tilly, Ione Sky, Laura Dern, Rue McClanahan, C. Thomas Howell, John Stockwell and Daphne Zuniga. But was it really CANCELED TOO SOON? Film critics William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold explore this forgotten horror series in the first installment of SCARYTOBER, a whole month dedicated to short-lived scary shows! Subscribe on Patreon for exclusive content and exciting rewards, like bonus episodes, exclusive videos, Google Hangouts and much, much more! And visit our TeePublic page to buy CANCELED TOO SOON shirts, mugs and other exciting merchandise! Follow us on Twitter at @CanceledCast, "Like" us at Facebook.com/CanceledTooSoon, follow Bibbs at @WilliamBibbiani and follow Witney at @WitneySeibold, and head on over to www.criticallyacclaimed.net for all their podcasts, reviews and more! Do you have a suggestion for a TV show that was "canceled too soon" (i.e. lasted only one season or less)? You can email us at canceledtoosoon@gmail.com, or you can head over to our Amazon Wish List to send us more exciting one season wonders that we can review on the show! Theme Song: "The C2S Team" by Andy Hentz See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Learn the answers to questions like: Why are those mimes playing tennis? And how does photograph enlargement work? Listen now to find out! Scott Croco and Mike Young unhack Blow-Up (1966). When a photographer thinks he has snapped photos of a murder, he must try to unravel the mystery without getting sidetracked by swingin' 60s London. David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave star in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966)! Episode Log: Antonioni quote #1 (1:40) Summary of Blow-Up's story/plot (2:30) General thoughts on Blow-Up (4:15) Theme #1: The power of artists (6:05) Theme #2: Swingin' 60s London (9:05) Theme #3: Validation of reality by other people (10:30) Similarities to The Conversation (14:35) Antonioni quote #2 (15:50) Capturing an image, developing film, enlarging photos (16:25) Antonioni quote #3 (24:00) Box Office results (27:00) Critics' reactions and awards (28:05) Antonioni quote #4 (29:15) Episode 023 - Blow-Up (1966) unhacked! Full Shownotes: https://www.moviesunhacked.com/2018/blow-up/ Movies Unhacked compares technology in movies to technology in real life. We analyze everything from Hollywood blockbusters and television shows, to sci-fi, horror, and classic cinema. A podcast for fans of cinema and technology! Online: moviesunhacked.com Twitter: @moviesunhacked Facebook: facebook.com/moviesunhackd Music by Sean Haeberman Copyright © 2018 Movies Unhacked. All rights reserved.
Andrew and Dave return to 1975 with Dario Argento's DEEP RED, a giallo film starring David Hemmings and Daria Nicoldoi. Is the film worthy of its spot in the horror canon? Or is the film a beautiful looking misfire? Next episode: cars, casinos, and Columbo. All music by Andrew Kannegiesser
Episodio 26 de la 3ª Temporada dedicado a la figura de David Bowie en el cine. Un recorrido por su trayectoria profesional cinematográfica con parada especial por las películas de los 80 en las que participó. Volvemos a romper otra vez el formato tracidional, que no el estilo, para haceros un recorrido por el cine del conocido como Duque Blanco u hombre de las estrellas. Su influencia en la cultura, cine y música ha sido universal. Asi lo creemos nosotros y por ello le dedicamos este capítulo de Remake a los 80. David Bowie partició a lo largo de su trayectoria profesional en más de 23 películas. En este episodio hemos mencionado la mayoría como El hombre que cayó a la Tierra” (“The Man Who Fell To Earth”, Nicolas Roeg, 1976), “Gigolo” (“Just a gigolo”, David Hemmings, 1978), Cristina F” (“Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”, Uli Edel, 1981), (“Absolute beginners”, Julien Temple, 1986), Philip Jeffries en “Twin Peaks: Fuego camina conmigo” (“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”, David Lynch, 1992), “Basquiat” (Julian Schnabel, 1996), “Zoolander” (Ben Stiller, 2001) “El truco final (el prestigio)” (“The prestige”, Christopher Nolan, 2006), etc Pero hemos hecho una parada especial en las producciones de los 80 y en los siguientes títulos: -“El ansia” (“The Hunger”, 1983) - “Feliz Navidad, Mr. Lawrence” (“Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”, 1983) - “Dentro del Laberinto” (“Labyrinth”, 1986) - “La última tentación de Cristo” (“The last temptation of Christ”, 1988) Hemos contado con Miguel Dávila como invitado especial y el equipo de Remake a los 80 formado por Rafael Teruel, Javi Gacía y Juan Pablo Videoclubsero
Episodio 26 de la 3ª Temporada dedicado a la figura de David Bowie en el cine. Un recorrido por su trayectoria profesional cinematográfica con parada especial por las películas de los 80 en las que participó. Volvemos a romper otra vez el formato tracidional, que no el estilo, para haceros un recorrido por el cine del conocido como Duque Blanco u hombre de las estrellas. Su influencia en la cultura, cine y música ha sido universal. Asi lo creemos nosotros y por ello le dedicamos este capítulo de Remake a los 80. David Bowie partició a lo largo de su trayectoria profesional en más de 23 películas. En este episodio hemos mencionado la mayoría como El hombre que cayó a la Tierra” (“The Man Who Fell To Earth”, Nicolas Roeg, 1976), “Gigolo” (“Just a gigolo”, David Hemmings, 1978), Cristina F” (“Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”, Uli Edel, 1981), (“Absolute beginners”, Julien Temple, 1986), Philip Jeffries en “Twin Peaks: Fuego camina conmigo” (“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”, David Lynch, 1992), “Basquiat” (Julian Schnabel, 1996), “Zoolander” (Ben Stiller, 2001) “El truco final (el prestigio)” (“The prestige”, Christopher Nolan, 2006), etc Pero hemos hecho una parada especial en las producciones de los 80 y en los siguientes títulos: -“El ansia” (“The Hunger”, 1983) - “Feliz Navidad, Mr. Lawrence” (“Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”, 1983) - “Dentro del Laberinto” (“Labyrinth”, 1986) - “La última tentación de Cristo” (“The last temptation of Christ”, 1988) Hemos contado con Miguel Dávila como invitado especial y el equipo de Remake a los 80 formado por Rafael Teruel, Javi Gacía y Juan Pablo Videoclubsero
Toby Hadoke - comedian, actor and TV expert - enters the fifth year of his epic undertaking to talk to someone involved with each and every TV Doctor Who story... Here's the latest resulting free download and podcast:
Story: Dr. Charles Moffet hat für die Amerikaner den Hi-Tech-Kampfhubschrauber "Airwolf" entwickelt. Bei einer Vorführung bemächtigt er sich des Hubschraubers und setzt sich mit ihm nach Libyen ab. Der hochrangige Agent Michael "Archangel" Coldsmith Briggs III wendet sich an den ehemaligen Testpiloten Stringfellow "Huckleberry" Hawke, um ihn zu überreden, den Hubschrauber zurückzuholen. Hawke weigert sich zunächst, doch Archangel findet Mittel und Wege, ihn zur Mitarbeit zu überreden. In Begleitung seines Freundes Dom Santini begibt sich Hawke nach Libyen. DVD/Blu Ray-Release: 12.06.2014 (Koch Media GmbH - DVD) Action Land: USA 1984 Laufzeit: ca. 83 min. FSK: 16 Regie: Donald P. Bellisario Drehbuch: Donald P. Bellisario Mit Jan-Michael Vincent, Ernest Borgnine, Alex Cord, David Hemmings...
Story: Dr. Charles Moffet hat für die Amerikaner den Hi-Tech-Kampfhubschrauber "Airwolf" entwickelt. Bei einer Vorführung bemächtigt er sich des Hubschraubers und setzt sich mit ihm nach Libyen ab. Der hochrangige Agent Michael "Archangel" Coldsmith Briggs III wendet sich an den ehemaligen Testpiloten Stringfellow "Huckleberry" Hawke, um ihn zu überreden, den Hubschrauber zurückzuholen. Hawke weigert sich zunächst, doch Archangel findet Mittel und Wege, ihn zur Mitarbeit zu überreden. In Begleitung seines Freundes Dom Santini begibt sich Hawke nach Libyen. DVD/Blu Ray-Release: 12.06.2014 (Koch Media GmbH - DVD) Action Land: USA 1984 Laufzeit: ca. 83 min. FSK: 16 Regie: Donald P. Bellisario Drehbuch: Donald P. Bellisario Mit Jan-Michael Vincent, Ernest Borgnine, Alex Cord, David Hemmings...
A musician witnesses the murder of a famous psychic, and then teams up with a fiesty reporter to find the killer while evading attempts on their lives by the unseen killer bent on keeping a dark secret buried.Director: Dario ArgentoWriters: Dario Argento, Bernardino Zapponi (screenplay)Stars: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia - via IMDB https://archive.org/details/DeepRed1975
Episode 9! In this episode, Katie and Sarah discuss the iconic Barbarella. They discuss both the comic by Jean-Claude Forest, and the movie from 1968. 0:00 - 9:00 - Katie and Sarah catch you up on what they’ve been up to in their absence. You can buy Katie’s newest comics here and Sarah’s latest here9:00 - 36:00 In this section, the twins discuss the comic Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest. 36:00 - 1:10:00 Katie, and Sarah discuss the film Barbarella; directed by Roger Vadim, and starring Jane Fonda, Anita Pallenberg, John Phillip Law, Milo O’Shea, and David Hemmings.Intro: The Glitterhouse-“Barbarella” Outro: Jamiroquai - “Cosmic Girl”As always, thanks to our wonderful editor, Sean Witzke. You can listen to his podcast Travis Bickle on the Riviera here.
"Privat war ich nie eine 'femme fatale'" - Erika Pluhar verrät Privates Unzählige Theaterrollen, über vier Dutzend Filmrollen, zahlreiche Auftritte beim Fernsehen, Regiearbeiten, zahlreiche Schallplatten und Bücher – dies ist die bisherige Bilanz dieser unermüdlichen und vielseitigen Künstlerin. Da verwundert es nicht, wenn der „General Anzeiger“ am 1.6.13 schreibt: „Erika Pluhar ist eine österreichische Ikone“, die auch ihre Autobiografie in einer ungewöhnlichen Form „zwischen Fiktion und Realität“ geschrieben hat. In Wien geadelt Das Licht der Welt erblickte Erika Pluhar am 28.2.39 in Wien, wo sie auch ihre schulische Ausbildung absolvierte. Nach dem Abitur begann sie am Wiener Max-Reinhardt-Seminar eine Schauspielausbildung, die sie mit Auszeichnung abschloss. Noch im gleichen Jahr, 1959, erhielt die junge Schauspielerin ein Engagement am Wiener Burgtheater, auf dessen Brettern sie vier Jahrzehnte lang zu bewundern war. Ihr außergewöhnliches Talent erlaubte es Erika Pluhar, nahezu jeden Rollentypus zu spielen. So war sie unter anderem Lady Mortimer in Shakespeares "König Heinrich IV.", Ophelia in Stoppards "Rosencrantz und Guildenstern" oder auch Ruth in Pinters "Die Heimkehr", um nur einige wenige aus einer ganzen Fülle von Rollen zu nennen. Die inzwischen bekannte Schauspielerin war auch gern gesehener Gast an den Bühnen in Salzburg, Bregenz, Jagsthausen und nicht zuletzt an den Münchner Kammerspielen. Nach einigen wenigen Filmrollen sollte nun der ganz große internationale Durchbruch mit einen Film folgen: 1967 spielte sie die Hauptrolle in dem Film "Bel Ami" von Helmut Käutner, der sie auch in Übersee bekannt machte. Und zahlreiche weitere Filme sollten folgen. Die Filmschauspielerin Seit ihrem Erfolg in dem Streifen „Bel Ami“ war Erika Pluhar nun eine gefragte Filmschauspielerin und drehte mehrere Filme pro Jahr. So war sie unter anderem in dem Drama „Moos auf den Steinen“ von Georg Lhotsky, in den Krimireihen „Der Kommissar“, „Der Alte“ oder auch im „Tatort“ zu sehen. In dem Drama „Die Nacht von Lissabon“ von Zbynek Brynych spielte sie die Helen, in dem Film „Margarete in Aix“ von Helmut Käutner spielte sie die Titelrolle, so auch in dem Melodrama „Die Brüder“ von Wolf Gremm, des weiteren spielte sie an der Seite von David Bowie und Kim Nowak die Eva in dem Film „Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo“ von David Hemmings, um nur einige wenige zu nennen. Ihre schon sprichwörtliche Vielseitigkeit erlaubte es ihr auch beim Film jede Rolle zu übernehmen, und so kann sie auf eine Filmografie von über vier Dutzend Streifen zurückblicken. Doch die Schauspielerin hatte bereits Anfang der 70er-Jahre auch andere Wege beschritten. Sängerin und Autorin Im Jahr 1972 kam die erste Schallplatte von Erika Pluhar auf den Markt, die betitelt war „Erika Pluhar singt“. Es waren 11 von ihr interpretierte Lieder, die sie dort veröffentlichte und die einen Grundstein für eine weitere Karriere legten. Denn bald sollten noch mehr Schallplatten der Künstlerin folgen und in unregelmäßigen Abständen erscheinen. Zu manchen der Lieder steuerte sie auch ihre eigenen Texte bei. Und als Autorin wurde sie ebenfalls aktiv. Bereits 1981 erschien ihr erstes literarisches Werk: "Aus Tagebüchern". Im Laufe der Jahre sollte so ein Oeuvre entstehen, das sowohl Liedertexte, Lyrik, kleine Prosa sowie Romane beinhaltet. Ihr bis jetzt letzter Roman „Im Schatten der Zeit“ erschien 2012, und so urteilte etwa das Berliner Literaturportal „sf magazin“ über ihn: „Ein sensibler, wortmächtiger und bilderreicher Roman der großen österreichischen Autorin“. Schauspielerin, Regisseurin, Sängerin, Autorin: in allen diesen Berufen ein erfolreiches Multitalent, eine österreichische Ikone eben, wie schon aus dem „General Anzeiger“ zitiert. Im Februar 2004 porträtierte DW-Mitarbeiter Horst Senker Erika Pluhar in einem Gespräch. Autor: Andreas Zemke Redaktion: Diana Redlich
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