Podcasts about festival theatre

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Listen to our audio guide for The Court of Public Opinion - a free interactive exhibition in the Festival Theatre foyer exploring the famous Redlands drugs bust of the Rolling Stones. The exhibition runs alongside our world premiere production of Redlands by Charlotte Jones, until 18 October.

Open Seas is a Scottish charity that focusses on protecting our marine environment and the things that live in it. A few weeks ago, Mark joined them in Skye where they were carrying out seabed surveys. While the weather didn't play ball and they didn't get out on their planned boat trip, the team did manage to show him the kind of footage they record and why it's important in influencing the kinds of protection marine areas can get.Rachel is in Pitlochry where the Firebrand Theatre Company along with the Festival Theatre are staging a play all about naturalist and poet Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed. She hears about how the play came together and the extraordinary legacy of Nan.Wigtown is now well known across Scotland and the wider literary world as Scotland's Book Town. It's a title it has held since 1998 and since the first festival in 1999, the town has seen its prospects transformed. Mark met up with Anne Barclay from the festival company to hear about the positive changes in the town over the past 25 years.Rachel heads out on a coastal foraging walk as part of the 2024 Moray Walking and Outdoor Festival which kicks off this weekend. Forager Daniel shows her some of the things that can be found along the coastline from plants to seaweeds, foods and medicine.By the time Out of Doors is broadcast, Scotland will have played Germany in the opening match of Euro 2024. For the past few days Scotland fans have been arriving in Munich and the town is covered in tartan and saltires. But what is the origin of the white cross on a blue background? Mark visits the Scottish Flag Trust at Athelstaneford in East Lothian to find out more.The story of modern whaling in the Southern Hemisphere is a controversial one. Many British companies played a key role in the industry, and they had a largely Scottish workforce. A project is underway to collect the memories of those who worked in the industry and their families before it's too late. We chat live to Helen Balfour from the Whalers' Memory Bank to find out more about the project.A couple of weeks ago the last seagoing paddle steamer in the world, The Waverley, made its first ever visit to Ullapool. Our news colleague in Inverness Stephen Macleod went along to experience the excitement.In this week's Scotland Outdoors podcast, Rachel speaks to Artist in Residence at the Rahoy Nature Reserve, Liz Myhill. Her role is to raise awareness of the huge reserve and encourage people to visit and explore. We hear an excerpt.More than 130 years ago two men began a years' long adventure to discover, climb and map Skye's famous Black Cuillin. Professor Norman Collie was a scientist and John Mackenzie was a local mountain guide. The unlikely pair are considered among the greatest pioneering mountaineers of their time and in 2020 after several years of fundraising, a statue was erected in their memory. Mark went to visit it in Sligachan and hear Collie and Mackenzie's story.

Neil Armfield AO is a leading Australian director of theatre, opera and film. Alongside Rachel Healy, Neil was Artistic Director of Adelaide Festival between 2017 and 2022. Prior to that, Neil was the inaugural Artistic Director of Belvoir St Theatre, which he also co-founded, for 17 years.   As Artistic Director of Belvoir, and for other companies, Neil has directed well over 100 productions, with a focus on new and Indigenous writing, Shakespeare, David Hare and Patrick White.  Some highlights include; The Tempest, Hamlet, Up the Road, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Keating!, Toy Symphony, Dallas Winmar's Aliwa, Angels in America, A Cheery Soul, Signal Driver, The Blind Giant is Dancing and Things I KnowTo Be True. Neil's production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman opened in late 2023 to glowing reviews. Produced by GWB Entertainment and Red Line Productions at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne, it starred Anthony LaPaglia and Alison Whyte. After the success of the Melbourne season, the play will be presented at the Theatre Royal Sydney in May/June 2024.   In 2022, Neil directed the world premiere of the oratorio Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan by Joseph Twist at the Adelaide Festival, and Glyndebourne Festival's production of Brett Dean's Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Neil directed the same production of Hamlet at Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper in July 2023. For the 2021 Adelaide Festival, Neil directed the Australian premiere of A German Life by Christopher Hampton, starring Robyn Nevin, as well as Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Festival Theatre. Later that year he directed an acclaimed production of Rameau's comic masterpiece Platée for Pinchgut Opera. In addition to his extensive work in Australia, many of Neil's productions have played internationally. These include Cloudstreet (toured to London, Dublin, Zurich, New York), The Diary of a Madman (with Geoffrey Rush, toured to Moscow, St Petersburg, New York), Exit The King (Broadway), The Book of Everything (toured to New York), The Judas Kiss (toured Australia with Bille Brown, London, New York and Toronto with Rupert Everett), The Secret River (adapted by Andrew Bovell, toured to Edinburgh Festival and London) and the world premiere of David Hare's I'm Not Running for National Theatre in London. Neil frequently collaborates with major opera companies, having directed productions at The Metropolitan Opera, English National Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Chicago Lyric Opera, Zurich Opera, Bregenz Festival, Washington National Opera, Opera Australia, Pinchgut, Canadian Opera, Welsh National Opera, and Houston Grand Opera. In addition to classics by Mozart, Britten and Wagner, Neil directed the premieres of Frankie and The Eighth Wonder by Alan John, Whitsunday by Brian Howard, Love Burns by Graeme Koehne and Bliss and Hamlet by Brett Dean. For screen, Neil directed and co-wrote the feature film Candy, starring Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, which screened at over twenty international films festivals including In Competition at the Berlinale. Neil was awarded Best Adapted Screenplay at the AFI Awards and an AWGIE for Best Screenplay. Neil's second feature film Holding the Man premiered at Sydney Film Festival in 2015. For television, Neil directed miniseries Edens Lost for ABC (AFI Award Best Director and Best Mini-Series), The Fisherman's Wake (by Andrew Bovell), which won an ATOM Award for Best Original TV Production, and Coral Island (by Nick Enright). Over his distinguished career, Neil has received 2 AFI Awards, 12 Helpmann Awards and several Sydney Theatre, Victorian Green Room and Sydney Theatre Critics Circle Awards. He holds Honorary Doctorates from Adelaide, Sydney and NSW Universities, and in 2007 was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia. The STAGES podcast is available to access and subscribe from Spotify and Apple podcasts.

Tuto Tul, argentino, dice que ha viajado por todo el mundo, pero lo que pasa en Puebla de la Calzada con el teatro es algo que cuenta donde quiera que vaya. Inaugura el Festival Theatre Ves? este domingo.

Qantas is being taken to court by the consumer watchdog for allegedly selling tickets for thousands of cancelled “ghost” flights and hoarding takeoff and landing slots to drive up airfares.  Transport for NSW has for the first time confirmed that WestConnex will be sped up to 90km/h but the plans will require the motorway to be completely closed for safety checks.  A Gold Coast city councillor allegedly googled “If you kill someone in self-defence will you go to jail?” two days before he choked and killed his abusive and controlling stepdad.  A key member of the Victorian Liberal Party's leadership team has resigned.  Nutbush will come to Adelaide's city limits when smash stage production TINA – The Tina Turner Musical opens at the Festival Theatre in April next year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Qantas is being taken to court by the consumer watchdog for allegedly selling tickets for thousands of cancelled “ghost” flights and hoarding takeoff and landing slots to drive up airfares.  Transport for NSW has for the first time confirmed that WestConnex will be sped up to 90km/h but the plans will require the motorway to be completely closed for safety checks.  A Gold Coast city councillor allegedly googled “If you kill someone in self-defence will you go to jail?” two days before he choked and killed his abusive and controlling stepdad.  A key member of the Victorian Liberal Party's leadership team has resigned.  Nutbush will come to Adelaide's city limits when smash stage production TINA – The Tina Turner Musical opens at the Festival Theatre in April next year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Qantas is being taken to court by the consumer watchdog for allegedly selling tickets for thousands of cancelled “ghost” flights and hoarding takeoff and landing slots to drive up airfares.  Transport for NSW has for the first time confirmed that WestConnex will be sped up to 90km/h but the plans will require the motorway to be completely closed for safety checks.  A Gold Coast city councillor allegedly googled “If you kill someone in self-defence will you go to jail?” two days before he choked and killed his abusive and controlling stepdad.  A key member of the Victorian Liberal Party's leadership team has resigned.  Nutbush will come to Adelaide's city limits when smash stage production TINA – The Tina Turner Musical opens at the Festival Theatre in April next year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Qantas is being taken to court by the consumer watchdog for allegedly selling tickets for thousands of cancelled “ghost” flights and hoarding takeoff and landing slots to drive up airfares.  Transport for NSW has for the first time confirmed that WestConnex will be sped up to 90km/h but the plans will require the motorway to be completely closed for safety checks.  A Gold Coast city councillor allegedly googled “If you kill someone in self-defence will you go to jail?” two days before he choked and killed his abusive and controlling stepdad.  A key member of the Victorian Liberal Party's leadership team has resigned.  Nutbush will come to Adelaide's city limits when smash stage production TINA – The Tina Turner Musical opens at the Festival Theatre in April next year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Bonus Episode: The Makings of a MurdererIn this special bonus episode, Murder She Spoke go behind the scenes of The Makings of a Murderer, the one-man stage show hosted by former Detective Superintendent David Swindle, currently touring the UK. David Swindle served in the Police for 34 years and was involved in some of the most high profile criminal investigations in UK history, most notably Operation Anagram, which led to the discovery of further victims of notorious serial killer Peter Tobin.In this episode, Emma And Joannagh go on stage at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh for a preview of the production. They also have an interview with host David Swindle, who gives some insight into his philosophy on dealing with the aftermath of murder, as well as some previews of the content of his one-man show.The Makings of a Murderer show will be touring until April 2024. To book tickets, visit themakingsofamurderer.co.uk Produced by Emma Taylor & Joannagh ShanksEditing by Shaun O'NeillMusic by Tribe of NoiseSources:https://www.davidswindle.com/about-david-swindle/https://themakingsofamurderer.co.uk/https://www.crimecon.co.uk/david-swindlehttps://kirstymaxwell.com/https://craigmallon.com/https://www.scotsman.com/news/crime/who-did-peter-tobin-kill-and-was-he-bible-john-former-lead-detective-david-swindle-on-why-the-serial-killer-case-is-not-cold-yet-1403956https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-13717063https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-51114483https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-61962924https://www.gov.uk/government/news/helen-s-law-receives-royal-assentThis 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/4533442/advertisement

Puccini's El Trittico - three one act operas in one performance by Scottish opera in a co-production with Welsh National Opera of ‘El Trittico' directed by Sir David McVicar in Glasgow and Edinburgh with audio description. Puccini's El Trittico a trio of one-act operas of love and loss, El Trittico runs the gamut from high drama and heart-breaking tragedy to devilish black comedy and farce. Il Tabarro (The Cloak) sees a wife trapped in a marriage she yearns to escape, Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) an outsider forced into a life for which she has no vocation, and Gianni Schicchi a dysfunctional family caught in the snare of a shameless conman. RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey was joined by Helen Lambert one of Scottish Opera's Audio Describers to find out a bit more about the two up-coming described performances of El Trittico.  Hellen began by giving Toby a bit of background to the story of each of the three operas, an idea of how the set and costumes will look and what the whole Scottish opera audio described experience would be like for blind and partially sighted people coming to the two up-coming described performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Puccini's El Trittico will be audio described at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow on Saturday 18 March and also at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on Saturday 25 March with both performances at 6pm with Touch Tours starting at 4.30pm. More details about these and other Scottish Opera audio described performances can be found by visiting- https://www.scottishopera.org.uk/access Image: Scottish Opera logo

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs panto opens at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh on 17th Dec.

Welcome to the Festival Theatre foyer. Time for your next clue - there's some helpful hint in this is you're needing some assistance.

Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 The Musical plays the Festival Theatre until early November. Adelaide born performer Lily Baulderstone talks about the show and her career with Matthew.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Deborah Moggach joins Nikki Bedi and Richard Coles. The novelist and screenwriter talks about relationships, why it's never too late to have adventures and the forthcoming play based on her novel These Foolish Things. The first adaptation resulted in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel film. Listener Nick Bunker was listening to Saturday Live a few weeks ago when the writer Lesley Pearse told us how she'd been reunited with the son she'd given up for adoption. He was moved to write to us – as he was adopted as a baby in 1963. Fast forward 54 years later, he received an email and discovered he had a whole family in Australia where they'd emigrated as Ten Pound Poms! From a working class upbringing in post-war Sheffield to creating some of the most famous songs and bands of all time – The Human League and Heaven 17 – Martyn Ware has been at the forefront of music for decades. Jules Buckley shares his Inheritance Tracks: Sweet Soul Music by Arthur Conley and Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. Samantha Renke is an actress, broadcaster and disability campaigner. She was born with brittle bone condition and uses her own experiences to advise and empower people, to overcome difficulties in their own lives. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opens at Richmond Theatre on Monday 5th September 2022, and is then touring until Sat 3 June, ending in Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. Electronically Yours: Vol 1 by Martyn Ware is out now. You Are the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread by Samantha Renke is out now. Producer: Claire Bartleet

The author of the multi-million-selling Languedoc trilogy, set amidst religious wars in south-west France and beginning with the bestselling Labyrinth, Kate Mosse has written nine novels and short story collections, and four plays. She is also one of the co-founders of the Women's Prize For Fiction. Kate Mosse tells John Wilson about first visiting the Festival Theatre in her hometown of Chichester at the age of six and seeing the 19th-century French farce The Italian Straw Hat, an experience that opened her mind to the power of drama. She remembers being among the million and a half visitors to the blockbuster Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum in 1972, and explains how her interest in historical narratives can be traced back to the treasures of the boy king. Kate Mosse also chooses two literary influences for This Cultural Life. Having read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as a teenager, she says the way that Bronte describes the Yorkshire moors as like a character in their own right influenced her own novels in which the Languedoc landscape plays a similar narrative role. Her last big cultural moment is the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction when an all-male shortlist prompted Kate and other literary figures to create the Women's Prize for Fiction as a way of shining the spotlight on novels written by women anywhere in the world. Producer: Edwina Pitman

When you consider the fact that John Zak has had a career as a professional musician for over 45 years, despite being born with a chronic lung condition that at one time had his parents believe that he would be on an iron lung by the time he was 16, and that by the time he was in high school his first music teacher failed him and said that he would never make it, it is truly remarkable what he has managed to achieve during his musical journey! John was born in South Australia and grew up living in the Norwood area. He always loved music and at first thought that he would be a singer, that was until he took a liking for the drums after being inspired by The Sweet, so in 1976 his dad enrolled him to have lessons at 'John Reynolds Music City' with Robert Lloyd. His father then wanted to see if he could go further so he arranged for him to go and have lessons with another of my previous guests Jim Bailey, John accredits Jim as being the reason why he made it in the music industry. Being a student with Jim Bailey meant that John was gigging well before he left school, playing with various ensembles at the Dom Polski Centre and at the Festival Theatre. His first professional gig was with The Hot Boys, he then joined The Pits who eventually became F.A.B who had quite a bit of success in the mid 80's, they released a single called ''Happy People/The Fastest Song In All The World '' in 1985 on the RCA label, Produced by Eddie Rayner of Split Enz. This led to them playing their first big event "The Big Swing" which was held at Football Park, appearing on the same line-up as The Models and INXS. Thanks to former F.A.B singer/songwriter/guitarist Stuart Day for putting me in contact with John so that I could interview him. When F.A.B disbanded they became a popular cover band called Division 4. It was around this time that his fellow band mate bassist Warwick Cheatle had been to see the Zep Boys play, he told John that the Zep Boys were looking for a new drummer and bass player, so they joined the band and went on to play and tour with the band for 11 years, this includes the first time that the Zep Boys teamed up with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra to perform the music of Led Zeppelin. John has also performed with the ASO performing the music of Pink Floyd and Queen. In 1996 Frank Corniola went to see John play with the Zep Boys and invited him to come to Melbourne to play at the Ultimate drummers Weekend Festival, Frank was impressed with his playing and suggested that John move to Melbourne and come and teach at Drumtek which he did, John has lived in Melbourne ever since. In Melbourne John has worked with a variety of artists, he was the touring drummer for Graham Bonnet and Glen Hughes, was a member of another band that almost made it big called 'Subsonic Symphonee', they were about to be signed by LA socialite and philanthropist, Daphna Ziman, but unfortunately their Australian Manager disagreed with Daphna's request for the band to change their image and refused to sign the contract, when he heard what had happened John and the guitarist left the band. John has continued to play with a variety of Melbourne bands including Flame Trees, SCAT, and Earthling777 just to name a few, he currently plays with Damon Stone in the bands 'STONE' and 'The Internationals'. John works as a production assistant/stage manager on corporate events with Kojo and The City of Stonnington. Music intro "Band It About" theme song, written and recorded by Catherine Lambert and Michael Bryant. Outro "To be a Man" by Earthling777. Links: https://instinctmusic.com.au/live-entertainment/damon-stone-melbourne-acoustic-performer/ All of the BAND IT ABOUT - Podcast Series links can be found here: https://linktr.ee/banditaboutpodcastseries --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dianne-spillane/message

Listen to Isaac Bont from St. Croix Festival Theatre talk about their hopes for the hopes and dreams for their future location, upcoming shows, and even a little bit about his experience in theatre. CLICK HERE to learn more about St. Croix Festival Theatre. Want to see upcoming events in the St. Croix Valley? Visit Getoutandtry.com often to stay up-to-date on all of the events and happenings in the St. Croix Valley. Are you a St. Croix Valley business that is offering events? Let's get them listed on our calendar - there is always a free option! CLICK HERE to get started. Short on time & need help? Just send an email to info@getoutandtry.com and we'll get you set up! Still have questions? Check out our FAQ section. Follow us on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Youtube | Pinterest | LinkedIN Click your preferred platform below and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode of the Get Out And Try Podcast. Spotify | Anchor | Breaker | Google Podcasts | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Radio Public --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/getoutandtry/support

RICK KENT joins me in The Engine Room to discuss his musical journey which began in Adelaide during the 60s Rock 'N' Roll days with The Firebirds who became The Vibrants. The Vibrants moved to Melbourne in 1966, and had several charting hits, "Something About You, Baby", "My Prayer", "Don't Let Your Left Hand Know", and "How Sweet It Is". After leaving the band Rick went on to run his own music schools in Perth, The Perth Jingle Workshop. He then lived in England for two years, and joined popular London band "The Basic Truth". The highlight of his time in England was a world tour with The Osmond Bros, which culminated in a concert at Madison Square Gardens in New York. Rick returned to Australia in the mid seventies and became involved in the recording side of music, setting up a studio in Adelaide with mobile recording facilities, while playing in a band six nights a week. Some of the artists he recorded during this period were Christie Allen and Men at Work. Rick also did ads for radio and TV, and film scores for the South Australian Film Corp. Rick worked with Lisa Edwards in a band called "Night Shift", the support band for the great Roy Orbison at the Festival Theatre. Rick moved back to Melbourne with singer Lisa Edwards under his management, Lisa later went on to join the Farnham Band. He then spent 2 years with the Channel 9 Band, Brisbane, on the popular "Conway Country" in the early 80's. During this time he also worked major Leagues Clubs and RSL's on the Gold Coast with various other bands. By the middle of the eighties and through most of the nineties, Rick was located in the Byron Bay area, where he taught drums, both privately and in local schools, played with various bands from the area, and worked on several recording projects in different studios, including Big Toe, Music Farm, Star Sound, Ch9, and Suite 16. Rick has played rock, jazz, country, showroom cabaret, backing many famous Australian and International acts including: Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Osmond Bros, Del Shannon, Andy Stewart, and Danny La Rue. Rick keeps his hand in playing with country rock band "Deep Creek", and showband "Forever Everly", as well as freelancing with various other acts. Music: Into "Band It About" written and and recorded by Catherine Lambert and Michael Bryant. Outro: "Big Man" by Alex Tomlin. Links: To purchase a copy of "A Vibrant Life" :https://www.facebook.com/AVibrantLifeBook Rick Kent Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rickstix If you have enjoyed listening to this episode please share the link with your friends! Band It About can be heard on all of the major podcast listening platforms including: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Anchor and Spotify. https://ratethispodcast.com/banditabout Email: banditabout17@gmail.com #rickkent #thevibrants #banditabout #drummers #Adelaide #musicinterviews #realstories #realpeople #Australianmusicindustry #60s #rockandroll #thebasictruth #springfieldrevival #maddisonsquaregardens #theosmonds #nightshift #SouthAustralia #conwaycountry --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dianne-spillane/message

Dr Owen Emmerson and Claire Ridgway are excited to announce the release date of their forthcoming book, "The Boleyns of Hever Castle".   It will be released as a coffee-table style book and ebook on 1st August 2021 and Owen and Claire are launching it with a special talk and book signing at the Festival Theatre, Hever Castle, on that date. Book your ticket at https://heverfestival.co.uk/index.php/the-boleyns-of-hever-castle/   --------------------- Hever Castle is a picture-postcard fortified manor house nestled in the Kent countryside. It is, of course, famous for its links with the Boleyns, an East Anglian gentry family who rose and fell dramatically at the court of King Henry VIII.   In The Boleyns of Hever Castle, historians Dr Owen Emmerson and Claire Ridgway invite you into the home of this notorious family.    Travel back in time to those 77 years of Boleyn ownership. Tour each room just as it was when Anne Boleyn retreated from court to escape the advances of Henry VIII or when she fought off the dreaded ‘sweat’. See the 16th century Hever Castle come to life with room reconstructions and read the story of the Boleyns, who, in just five generations, rose from petty crime to a castle, from Hever to the throne of England...

Gary's first West End role was that of Bill Snibson in the award winning Musical ‘Me And My Girl' in 1989 (Adelphi Theatre).  A successful No.1 theatre tour of a new comedy, ‘Teething Troubles' followed, both productions to critical acclaim. With direction by Simon Callow, Gary's next role was that of Joe in the award winning ‘Carmen Jones' (Old Vic). Gary then starred in the first sell out national tour of ‘Me And My Girl' which earned him a best actor nomination.He then went on to star in the world premier of the Barry Manilow musical ‘Copacabana' at London's Prince of Wales Theatre after which, he received a special invitation to recreate his role in ‘Me And My Girl' for the final tour of this great show.That same year he recorded a one-hour TV special for the BBC – ‘Showstoppers' and was invited to record a further series of six TV spectaculars with the BBC Concert Orchestra and many national and international guest stars. He also starred in and directed a 160 date tour of ‘Showstoppers'.In 1997 he created the role of Elliot Garfield in ‘The Goodbye Girl' and in 1998 another successful characterisation of Fagin in the Cameron Mackintosh production of ‘Oliver', touring through spring and summer 1999.Gary spent a highly successful period at the Bristol Old Vic (and touring) in Willy Russell's play ‘One For The Road' and starred in the concert tour of ‘Music To Watch Girls By' singing, in his own inimitable style. A No 1 tour of Alan Ayckbourn's ‘Confusions', Bottom in The New Shakespeare Company to play  ‘A_Midsummer_Night's_Dream' (Open Air Theatre Regent's Park) and the Pirate King in ‘Pirates of Penzance' and a performance in the national tour of Giles Havergal's brilliant adaptation of the Graham Greene novel ‘Travels With My Aunt'.Gary spent most of 2003/4 at The London Palladium, starring in the record breaking ‘Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang' and ending the year with his own national concert tour ‘My-Kind_Of_Music'. In the summer, he was invited back to The Open Air Theatre to play Dauntless Dick Deadeye in ‘H.M.S_Pinafore' and then starring in ‘Santa Claus the Musical' at The Mayflower, Southampton in 2005. He was invited back to ‘Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang' and the 2006 Christmas season saw him starring in ‘Peter Pan' as Captain Hook.A successful national tour of ‘Half_a Sixpence' and the 2007 Christmas as the Scarecrow in ‘The Wizard of Oz' and then the Lion in The Festival Theatre's The Wizard of Oz in 2008, finally ending the year in Manchester as Smee in Peter Pan.In 2009 Gary starred in the national tour of ‘Chicago' in the role of Billy Flynn, the lawyer, ‘The Invisible Man', at Chocolate Factory, the national tour of Lord Arthur Saville's Crime as Septimus Podgers and as the lead comic role in the national tour of  ‘Radio Times'. In 2013, he played Dame for the first time at the Birmingham Hippodrome and then a run of westend shows including, The Pajama Game, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Wind in the Willows followed by another panto at the Palladium and a run of M

In this episode Laura chats to printmaker and textile artist Sophie Fields about collaging in lockdown, life as an Artist in Residence and creating an installation using 150m of fabric to fill the windows of the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. Find Sophie's work on her website here: https://www.sophielfields.co.uk/Featured in the Episode: Capital Theatres, Hanging by a Million Threads by Sophie Fields https://www.capitaltheatres.com/about/stories/art-installation-at-the-festival-theatreTanya Kovats, Rivers at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh https://www.jupiterartland.org/art/tania-kovats-rivers/#:~:text=Jupiter%20Artland%20%2D%20Rivers%20Tania%20Kovats&text=Born%20in%20London%20in%201966,the%20Serpentine%20Gallery%20in%201991.Drawing Water by Tanya Kovats. https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/shop/the-fruitmarket-gallery-books/tania-kovats-drawing-water/The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/vincent-van-gogh-the-starry-night-1889/Grayson's Art Club Exhibition Book https://shop.manchesterartgallery.org/products/graysons-art-club-the-exhibitionMUSIC BY KYE PERRY https://kyeperry.myportfolio.com/production See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tim and Brady talk about sofa jingles, partner conversion, spoons, and siblings - plus other nonsense. Don't you do a thing until you check out Storyblocks for stock video, pictures and audio at storyblocks.com/unmade - https://www.storyblocks.com/unmade Support us on Patreon to be in the running for a souvenir spoon - and other bonuses - https://www.patreon.com/unmadeFM Join the discussion of this episode on our subreddit - https://redd.it/idah3e USEFUL LINKS Alan Stewart - The Maestro - on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO2TxBy8 The Sofa Shop sheet music - via Zach and for Patrons - https://www.patreon.com/posts/38069233 Moulin Rouge Soundtrack - https://amzn.to/2YjfVOP Listening to Music at 'The Third Level' - https://www.unmade.fm/press-play The Aguuuueeerrrrro Goal - https://www.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football/11987352/aguero-wins-title-for-man-city-as-united-miss-out Tim's Spoon of the Week - https://www.unmade.fm/spoon-of-the-week Adelaide's iconic Festival Theatre - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Festival_Centre The former Pope's older brother - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ratzinger

Continuing his weekly live performances as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performs live from the empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik. Tonight Víkingur will play The Arts and the Hours by Rameau, an interlude from the 18th Century French composer’s final opera, Les Boreades. George The Poet is a London-born spoken word performer of Ugandan heritage. His podcast 'Have You Heard George’s Podcast?' has won armfuls of awards and his work as a recording artist and a social commentator has now been recognised at the Visionary Honours Awards for championing diversity and inclusion in the arts, entertainment and showbiz. Elizabeth Newman, director of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, is directing David Greig's new play Adventures of the Painted People remotely, the actors all separately isolated. Towards the end of the first week she tells John Wilson how the work is going. She explains too the unique situation of her theatre, in a small community in the Scottish Highlands, its financial predicament and how through imaginative creative initiatives it is continuing its role. Professor John Mullan is celebrating the merits of reading, or re-reading, the novels of Jane Austen during lockdown. Today, the title that’s many people’s favourite, thanks not least to countless adaptations: Pride and Prejudice. Presenter John Wilson Producer Jerome Weatherald Studio Manager Tim Heffer

In this episode, we speak to Bronté Barbé, Isaac Gryn and Emmanuel Kojo, who are all in the summer centrepiece of Festival 2019, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, which runs in the Festival Theatre until 7 September 2019. Recorded at Chichester Festival Theatre Music: Chichester Festival Theatre Production of Oklahoma! 2019

durée : 00:03:44 - Ca vaut le détour avec FB Provence -

In this episode, we speak to Hugh Bonneville and Liz White, who are both appearing in Shadowlands by William Nicholson, which runs in the Festival Theatre until 25 May 2019 and is part of the Festival 2019 season. Recorded at Chichester Festival Theatre. Music by Ted Hayes

In this episode, we're discussing Chichester Festival Youth Theatre's Christmas production of Sleeping Beauty, which runs in the Festival Theatre from 15 - 30 December 2018. Hear Rufus Norris, the writer and now director of the National Theatre speak about his adaptation of the original story, along with the director of our production Lucy Betts who is an ex-member of CFYT, followed by an interview with some of the cast. Recorded at Chichester Festival Theatre. Music by Ted Hayes

Stream podcast episodes on demand from www.bitesz.com (mobile friendly). Melbourne Cabaret Festival The ninth annual Melbourne Cabaret Festival bursts onto the stage with some of the most fabulous and seductive cabaret from across Australia. Returning to Chapel Off Chapel with an even bigger program, up to 10 performances daily, from Tuesday 19 June to Sunday 1 July 2018. Featuring 20 brand new cabaret shows, the festival again provides an opportunity to see new works from established and emerging artists before they tour to take on the national and world festival stages. For more details, visit: http://www.melbournecabaret.com/ Theatre First RSS feed: https://audioboom.com/channels/4839371.rss Subscribe, rate and review Theatre First at all good podcatcher apps, including Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes), Stitcher, Pocket Casts, audioBoom, CastBox.FM, Podbean etc. If you're enjoying Theatre First podcast, please share and tell your friends. Your support would be appreciated...thank you. #theatre #stage #reviews #melbourne #australia #cabaret #melbournecabaretfestival #festival #alexfirst #theatrefirst #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Each week, Milo gives us a rundown of can’t-miss shows in and around the Detroit area.

During a week where many of my friends were rocking out at the Guns n Roses concerts around Australia, I chose instead to sit in an audience of thousands of adoring fans in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre to listen to the Rock God of the Natural World, Sir David Attenborough, on his “Quest for Life” tour. For two and a half hours my husband and I were mesmerized listening to Sir David share stories from his lifetime of amazing adventures bringing images of the some of the most exotic species in the most remote locations on Earth to our loungerooms. And if that experience wasn’t amazing enough, I was plucked from the audience to ask him a direct question in Q+A time (and yes my legs were shaking!). In this episode I share the experience of my evening with Sir David Attenborough, one of my personal Eco Heroes, and tell you exactly what I asked him in front of that massive live audience.

Galway International Arts Festival artistic director Paul Fahy talks to Kernan Andrews about the theatre shows taking at next month's festival

From Friday April 22 John talks to MICHAEL FOX - who played Andy the footman in Downton Abbey - and ALICE ORR-EWING - who had a leading role in the movie The Scapegoat. Both are at the Festival Theatre, Chichester, in An Enemy of the People. #FestivalTheatre #AliceOrrEwing #MichaelFox

In this episode, we look at two very different non-pantomime versions of the Snow White story that can be seen this Christmas. Natasha Holmes is artistic director of Yorkshire-based Tell Tale Hearts, a company that creates highly visual participatory theatre for children and families based on ideas from the children themselves. Just before rehearsals began, Natasha talked to us about a version of the popular fairy tale that features Yorkshire miners as well as aerial performance from outdoor theatre specialists Pif-Paf. The production is at the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield from 11 to 27 December 2015. Newcastle-based balletLORENT is currently touring its new dance version of Snow White created by the same team as last year's Rapunzel. Choreographer Liv Lorent spoke to us about this collaboration with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and composer Murray Gold, better-known for his music for the TV series Doctor Who. Snow White from balletLORENT began its tour in October 2015 at Northern Stage in Newcastle. From December 2015 to April 2016, it will visit The Lowry in Salford, Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, Warwick Arts Centre, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Sadler’s Wells in London and Oxford Playhouse. (Image credits: Gavin Joynt & Bill Cooper)

Overture, light the lights, this week's podcast takes you behind the curtain of Adelaide's theatre world with publicist extraordinaire, Neil Ward. Since the 80s, Neil has been involved in publicity for theatre, opera and film, first with the Festival Theatre and then out on his own from 1994. He has worked closely with all the names in Australia's entertainment industry and shares his stories of working with them. He also gives us insight into the challenges and changes of working with our media outlets and reviewers, whom he needs to court so they share their impressions of shows with you and me. In IS IT NEWS, Nigel tests us on the theme, Entertainment. George Inglis reflects on the near death of a cylist friend in Melbourne on the weekend. Our SA Drink of the week is from Penley Estate Wines, with a bonus from DiGiorgio Wines, both from the Coonawarra and supplied by Neil Ward. In the Adelaide Visa Council, we have one defendant. And music is from last week's guest, Plan B.. NOTE: David Washington from In Daily is on leave this week. Support the show: https://theadelaideshow.com.au/listen-or-download-the-podcast/adelaide-in-crowd/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we visit with another designer from across the pond, it's Tony nominated Scenic and Costume Designer, David Farley! David was in town finally bringing 'Daddy Long Legs' to New York after playing around the globe for 6 years. He tells us about the evolution of the design and the process of modifying the set to fit different theatres. David and Cory dig into the artistic, practical and economical differences of being a designer in the US vs the UK and they chat about David's award winning work on 'Sunday in the Park...', why designing Josh Groban's tour was more difficult than you would think, designing in the Festival Theatre at Stratford and the qualities he loves in his frequent collaborators John Caird, Trevor Nunn, and John Doyle. But David isn't all work…he also shares insight into being a designer on the road with an infant back home and why he's passionate about his garden. It's a great show, but mainly because of how adorably he pronounces ‘aluminum.' Grab a seat in the stalls, raise the gauze and enjoy this week's panto!

There's a revival of Mack + Mabel, starring Michael Ball at the Festival Theatre in Chichester. By the team behind Hello Dolly, it's a tale of the silent movie era as it began to fall apart. A flop on Broadway in 1974, how does the new production fare? Inside Out is the latest Pixar film. Set inside the head of an 11 year old girl some reviewer have praised it as the best children's film ever; will our reviewers agree? Life in Squares on BBC2, is a drama about the glamorous, bohemian world of the Bloomsbury Set and their complicated intertwining love lives and careers. Jessie Greengrass's debut work is a collection of short stories "An Account of the Decline of Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It". Is it a promising start? The Wellcome Collection in London has an exhibition by Alice Anderson - winding copper wire around everyday objects; does this process imbue them with a different significance?

Matthew Sweet on Pantomime past to present with writer Jeffrey Richards and actor/director Tony Lidington. Bryony Lavery talks stage writing ahead of her double-Christmas offerings of Treasure Island at the National Theatre in London and The One Hundred and One Dalmatians at Chichester's Festival Theatre. American biologist EO Wilson on the meaning of human existence.

Mary Mack is on the line. A new feature called “Fangirl,” another song from Sophie Flynn, and Fake News. DATES: Mary Mack is at The Festival Theatre in St. Croix, WI June 17. For more dates click here. PF Wilson is at Go Bananas Wednesday June 20 to compete in the Funniest Person in Cincinnati contest, as is friend of the show “Big” Jim Leugers. Like this podcast on Facebook, follow P.F. on Twitter @PF66 PF’s Tape Recorder logo designed by Dan Koabel. Email the show here. Hey, if it’s not a bother, please give us a rating here and/or in iTunes, or both. It would be a big help as far as rankings and so on. Thanks for listening, and be sure to refer a friend.