1970 US drama film by Bob Rafelson
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23 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
2 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
3 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
4 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
5 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
2 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
2 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
2 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
2 episodes with Five Easy Pieces
Brian and Ryan dive into the delicious mess of The Valley Season 2, Episodes 7 and 8, including why Janet is the absolute worst and the emotional chaos of Five Easy Pieces. You gotta wonder how Jack Nicholson might've handled Jax...
Welcome to the first official episode of the What Are You Watching New Hollywood Film Project, where we examine films of the New Hollywood era, with a primary focus on 1970s classics. In this episode, Alex and Nick break down Bob Rafelson's “Five Easy Pieces.” The guys discuss Rafelson's career, BBS Productions, a struggling B-movie actor/writer/director named Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, The Monkees, chicken salad sandwiches, and one of the best endings in all of cinema.Follow @WAYW_Podcast on Twitter and Instagram and Letterboxd.Send mailbag questions to whatareyouwatchingpodcast@gmail.com
This week we're exploring Isolated Pianists with two loners looking for their place within society. One in rural America with the Jack Nicholson classic, Five Easy Pieces and one in luxurious Italy with Anthony Minghella's 1999 film, The Talented Mr Ripley. Timings for this week are: Five Easy Pieces: (03:33) The Talented Mr Ripley: (33:03) Next episode our theme will be Alienated Pianist Films. Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Threads Bluesky Letterboxd Facebook Email: frame.to.frame250@gmail.com Join our Discord: Frame to Framers or that of the wider Film Stories Podcast Network Support Film Stories Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/simonbrew Twitter: @filmstories Facebook/Instagram/Threads: Film Stories Website: https://filmstories.co.uk/ Gothamlicious by Kevin MacLeod Link License Leave us a review on Podchaser or Apple Podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
GGACP continues the celebration of Women's History Month with this ENCORE of the first part of a two-part interview with Emmy-winning actress Sally Struthers. In this episode, Sally joins Gilbert and Frank for a laugh-filled conversation about the aloofness of Rudy Vallee, the eccentricities of Sam Peckinpah, the versatility of Bill Dana, the unexplainable existence of “The Phynx” and the recent 50th anniversary of “All in the Family.” Also, Jack Nicholson shops at Tiffany's, Steve McQueen romances Ali MacGraw, Rod Steiger gives Sally the heebie-jeebies and Bob Hope visits the “Planet of the Shapes.” PLUS: Jack Benny! Ned Glass! “Five Easy Pieces”! “The Tim Conway Comedy Hour”! The many faces of Sammy Davis Jr! And Sally remembers friends and co-stars Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jack Nicholson in 1970's… FIVE EASY PIECES.. and a lot of other good stuff. SUPPORT US ON AMAZON – CLICK HERE
Jack Nicholson in 1970's… FIVE EASY PIECES.. and a lot of other good stuff. SUPPORT US ON AMAZON – CLICK HERE
The final bonus for s10 sees Clara Hill return with Matt and Daryl to discuss Paul Dano's fourth and final Letterboxd favourite film, Five Easy Pieces (1970). You can find all season artwork designs (from the ridiculously talented Stephen Trumble) on our Teepublic store. We also have our intro themes and interludes over on Bandcamp. The intro theme was performed by Daryl Bär and produced by Mike Hall. Please drop us a Five Star Review us at Apple Podcasts, or a Five Star Rating on Spotify. Find us on Twitter and Instagram (@ispauldanook), and drop us an email at ispauldanook@gmail.com
Director: Bob Rafelson Producers: Bob Rafelson, Richard Wechsler Screenplay: Carole Eastman Photography: Laszlo Kovacs Music: N/A Cast: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Billy Green Bush, Fannie Flagg, Sally Struthers Rotten Tomatoes: Critics: 89%/Audience: 84%
INTRO - Is that guest host Nick Nolte or does Mike have a cold? Plus, we qualify the “everything and nothing” maxim. GOTHAM AWARDS + NYFCC OVERREACTIONS: Sing Sing wins Lead & Supporting - 2:00 Nickel Boys wins 2 Best Director Awards + Breakthrough Performer - 7:17 A Different Man wins Best Film at Gotham & The Brutalist wins NYFCC - 9:26 International Feature goes twice to All We Imagine As Light - 14:13 Documentary goes twice to No Other Land - 17:22 Breakthrough Director goes to Vera Drew of the People's Joker - 19:39 Gotham Screenplay to Azazel Jacobs, NYFCC to Anora - 21:34 Thoughts on the Gothams Livestream / Broadcast - 24:03 Gotham Tribute commentary featuring Sing Sing's big moment - 30:02 A Few More NYFCC Awards to Cover - 37:50 BOX OFFICE REPORT: Further breakdowns of the Record Setting Weekend for Moana 2 & Wicked - 41:32 WHAT WE'RE WATCHING: Juror No 2 - 47:16 Nutcrackers - 49:44 Beatles ‘64, Yacht Rock, The Last of the Sea Women - 50:43 Five Easy Pieces - 52:53 Rio Bravo, The Searchers, Unforgiven - 53:57 Network - 58:21 Through A Glass Darkly, Superman, Madden Docuseries - 1:00:17 OUTRO - How to contact and follow us, more Oscar Race Checkpoints to come, and some words of wisdom to live by this (and every) awards season.
Austin picks a 70's road movie this week! FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) Directed by Bob Rafelson
Recorded on Sunday, September 29, 2024 we continue talking about South Park, DR Phil, luxury home tours, Colombo, dinner, the movies Five Easy Pieces, and Shampoo, plus more.
We aimed the airgun of enquiry at this week's rock and roll side-stall and dislodged the following coconuts … … sports star, Rhodes scholar, bohemian: why Kris Kristofferson was a whole new breed of American hero. … the letter his parents wrote disowning him. … how he invented the crossover hit. … echoes of his life in Five Easy Pieces. … Fellini's La Strada and the story of ‘Me And Bobby McGee'. …. ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' and other songs written to order. … why the past is the age before mobile phones. … Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Carly Simon: the kiss and tell school of songwriting. … why Tracey Thorn misses the age of the autograph. … who'd be famous in the 21st Century? … “What do you think about when you're playing the drums?” Cameron Crowe's lost 1983 time capsule. … in a lift with Ken Barlow. Plus birthday guest Paul Cook and the furthest you've ever travelled for a gig.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We aimed the airgun of enquiry at this week's rock and roll side-stall and dislodged the following coconuts … … sports star, Rhodes scholar, bohemian: why Kris Kristofferson was a whole new breed of American hero. … the letter his parents wrote disowning him. … how he invented the crossover hit. … echoes of his life in Five Easy Pieces. … Fellini's La Strada and the story of ‘Me And Bobby McGee'. …. ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' and other songs written to order. … why the past is the age before mobile phones. … Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Carly Simon: the kiss and tell school of songwriting. … why Tracey Thorn misses the age of the autograph. … who'd be famous in the 21st Century? … “What do you think about when you're playing the drums?” Cameron Crowe's lost 1983 time capsule. … in a lift with Ken Barlow. Plus birthday guest Paul Cook and the furthest you've ever travelled for a gig.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We aimed the airgun of enquiry at this week's rock and roll side-stall and dislodged the following coconuts … … sports star, Rhodes scholar, bohemian: why Kris Kristofferson was a whole new breed of American hero. … the letter his parents wrote disowning him. … how he invented the crossover hit. … echoes of his life in Five Easy Pieces. … Fellini's La Strada and the story of ‘Me And Bobby McGee'. …. ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' and other songs written to order. … why the past is the age before mobile phones. … Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Carly Simon: the kiss and tell school of songwriting. … why Tracey Thorn misses the age of the autograph. … who'd be famous in the 21st Century? … “What do you think about when you're playing the drums?” Cameron Crowe's lost 1983 time capsule. … in a lift with Ken Barlow. Plus birthday guest Paul Cook and the furthest you've ever travelled for a gig.Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Rerun: NBC premiered ‘Royal Flush' - the pilot episode of iconic Sixties pop-comedy show The Monkees - on 12th September, 1966. And the Daydream Believers quickly found their way into America's heart… The Beatles-a-like actors had never met or worked with each other ever before answering an ad seeking ‘four insane boys, aged 18-21', placed by‘Five Easy Pieces' producer Bob Rafelson. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why each episode of the sitcom ended with a fourth wall-breaking discussion between the boys; explore how credible songwriters like Carole King and Neil Diamond ended up working on their singles; and discover why, despite the boyband's enormous success, the series was cancelled in its second season… Further Reading: • ‘The Untold Truth Of The Monkees' (Grunge, 2019): https://www.grunge.com/146172/the-untold-truth-of-the-monkees/ • ‘Why 'The Monkees' Was a Perfect Meld of Television and Music (That Will Never Happen Again)' (Huffington Post, 2016): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-the-monkees-was-a-per_b_10368468 • ‘The Monkees: Royal Flush' (NBC, 1966): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JESo3dcRuo ‘Why am I hearing a rerun?' Each Thursday and Friday we repeat stories from our archive of 800+ episodes, so we can maintain the quality of our independent podcast and bring you fresh, free content every Monday-Wednesday… … But
Join us for a look at the movie that put Jack Nicholson on the map, and a comparison of 1970's "La Piscine" ("The Swimming Pool") and 2015's "A Bigger Splash", a loose remake by . Connect with us: Never Did It on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neverdiditpod Never Did It on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/bradgaroon/list/never-did-it-podcast/ Brad on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/bradgaroon/ Jake on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jake_ziegler/ Never Did It on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neverdiditpodcast Hosted by Brad Garoon & Jake Ziegler
In the tertian episode of FFS, Ciara and Conor discuss the life and films of Jack Nicholson, and Showcase one film in particular. Spoiler: It's The Fortune (1975). But they also talk a lot about Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, About Schmidt, the Shooting (and the Roger Corman days), Head (and the Monkees), Something's Gotta Give, Tommy and Broadcast News. How do you know? Because you listened to the podcast.
In the tertian episode of FFS, Ciara and Conor discuss the life and films of Jack Nicholson, and Showcase one film in particular. Spoiler: It's The Fortune (1975). But they also talk a lot about Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, About Schmidt, the Shooting (and the Roger Corman days), Head (and the Monkees), Something's Gotta Give, Tommy and Broadcast News. How do you know? Because you listened to the podcast.
Happy Sidewalk Season! Listen to the podcast our new A.I. overlords don't want you to hear! Featuring... What Is It? - How many movies can Corey correctly identify from a sound clip? What We're Watching - Snack Shack, Hacks season 3, IF, I Saw the TV Glow, Stress Positions, The Beast, Five Easy Pieces and Dressed to Kill Hosted by your own personal cinematic Liquid Cocaine and Meat Cube! Music by Splash '96 Recorded & Edited by Boutwell Studios Write us about how great I Saw the TV Glow is at podcast@sidewalkfest.com Sidewalk is on Threads! Follow us! Join us at the 26th annual Sidewalk Film Festival Aug. 19-25! Get tickets and passes now at www.sidewalkfest.com!
Exploring "Running on Empty" with Filmmaker Daniel Andre In this episode of The Neil Haley Show, Neil welcomes filmmaker Daniel Andre to discuss his intriguing new film, "Running on Empty," set to release in August. Daniel shares the inspiration behind his debut film, drawing from classics like "Five Easy Pieces" and "Punch Drunk Love," and crafting a story that's as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. Neil and Daniel delve into the film's unique premise—a futuristic world where people know their death dates and the implications this has on society and individual choices. They explore the film's balance of humor and poignancy, the creative process, and the stellar cast, including talents like Kira Gilchrist, Jay Pharoah, and Jim Gaffigan. Tune in to hear more about the film's narrative, its upcoming release, and how it encourages viewers to live life to the fullest. Don't miss this engaging conversation!
In this episode, I talk with author and novelist about his recent hybrid memoir and cultural exploration, Always Crashing in the Same Car. We discuss his fascination with figures who faced creative crises in Hollywood, from F. Scott Fitzgerald, filmmaker Hal Ashby or musician Warren Zevon to more overlooked but similarly brilliant figures like Carole Eastman, the screenwriter of the 1970s classic Five Easy Pieces.We also explore the realities of growing up in LA, including being “celebrity-adjacent.” That's perhaps best illustrated by the time Marlon Brando left an incredible monologue in the form of a voicemail. We do a deep dive into the attraction of hybrid memoir for fiction writer, Matthew's approach to research, and whether it's possible any longer to be a middle-class creative in Hollywood.--------------------------“All of those kind of impulses fused in me, and eventually, and I sort of realized, like, oh, this is what I want to write. I want to write a book that's a memoir that isn't about me, or a memoir that's only kind of, you know, partly about me.”--------------------------Key Takeaways* Always Crashing In the Same Car pays homage to figures who've faced both genius and marginalization in Hollywood, including Thomas McGuane, Renata Adler, Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Warren Zevon & more. The book is about “those who failed, faltered, and whose triumphs are punctuated by flops...”* Matthew shares his fascination with Carol Eastman, best known for Five Easy Pieces. He was deeply touched by her prose writings, comparing her to poets like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.* The book and the interview also delves more deeply into women's contributions to Hollywood, focusing on other overlooked talents like Eleanor Perry and Elaine May. Matthew reflects on his mother, a one-time screenwriter, and how her generation had less opportunity to develop their skills.* Why a hybrid memoir? Matthew was reading, and inspired by, writers like Hilton Als, Heidi Julavits, and Olivia Laing. He wanted to create a narrative that wasn't limited to—or rather moved beyond—the self, weaving together cultural criticism about Hollywood and creative crises.* We talk a lot about voice, which Matthew says is crucial for him to discover early on. “Once I can locate the voice for any piece of writing... I have it in the pocket,” he says. The narrator of this book blends personal reflections with a noir quality, he says.* Matthew sees himself as a novelist at heart. He considers the narrative tools of a novelist indispensable, even when writing memoirs and cultural critiques: “I am fundamentally a novelist….I think that's part of being a fiction writer or novelist is, you know, anything that you write is a kind of criticism in code. You're always responding to other texts.”* Matthew begins by explaining his unique research style: "I'm kind of ravenous and a little deranged about it…” His research process involves intuitive dives, like a two-day blitz through Carol Eastman's archives.* The discussion also touched on Matthew's upbringing with a mom who was a one-time screenwriter and who crossed the picket line during one writer's strike, and his father, who had modest beginnings but went on to become a famous Hollywood “superagent” representing Marlon Brando, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren & many others.* At the same time, Matthew explores misconceptions around Hollywood glitz, addressing the middle-class reality of many involved in the film industry. For a long-time, Hollywood could support such middle-class creatives, Matthew contends, something that is no longer really possible.* Addressing the evolution of the entertainment industry, Matthew notes the shift towards debt servicing, influenced by corporate acquisitions. This financial pragmatism often overrides the creative impulse, squeezing the middle class out.* Another takeaway? The creative world, especially in Hollywood, is fraught with periods of drift and struggle. In one sense, Always Crashing In the Same Car is a love letter to that state of things.--------------------------"I still kind of think of [Always Crashing…] as being secretly a novel. Not because it's full of made up s**t…but because I think sometimes our idea of what a novel is is pretty limited. You know, there's no reason why a novel can't be, like, 98% fact."--------------------------About Matthew SpecktorMatthew Specktor's books include the novels That Summertime Sound and American Dream Machine, which was long-listed for the Folio Prize; the memoir-in-criticism Always Crashing in The Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, and The Golden Hour, forthcoming from Ecco Press. Born in Los Angeles, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2009. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Paris Review, Tin House, Black Clock, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angles Review of Books.Resources:Books by Matthew Specktor:* Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California* American Dream Machine* That Summertime Sound* Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, introduction by Matthew SpecktorReferenced on this episode:* The Women, by Hilton Als* Low, by David Bowie* The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon, The Pat Hobby Stories, and The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald* F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips* The Folded Clock: A Diary, by Heidi Julavits* The Lonely City, by Olivia Laing* 300 Arguments, by Sarah Manguso* “Bombast: Carole Eastman,” by Nick Pinkerton* “The Life and Death of Hollywood,” by Daniel Bessner, Harper's, May 2024.CreditsThis episode was produced by Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions. Get full access to The Book I Want to Write at bookiwanttowrite.substack.com/subscribe
This is one of those podcasts that I can't really begin to comprehend, understand, other than to allow that the over four decades I knew Robert Towne, it was like I was put in his path so I could do this interview. Robert was a prolific writer, some consider to be the greatest screenwriter who put pen to paper (or pages in a Selectric.) Robert asked me to do this interview before he passed, made me promise. I have sent the unedited version to his friends and family (without some pauses and spaces) and this version is slightly shorter - but not by much. Where to begin? I spent three years walking his dog Hira - and when I told him I wanted to direct, he said "I think that would be a good idea, but you'll make mild comedies." He was right. I've written and or directed 8 of them that most haven't seen or are aware of. But while working for him, I got to know many of his closest pals - some who are offstage, some who are onstage - and in this interview I asked for his opinion about some of them. I introduced him to Jennifer about five years ago - he was a skeptic until we did a session and he was able to learn new information from people offstage. He learned new information from his dog Hira. He learned new information from people I didn't know, never met - nor could Jennifer. I use first names in this interview, because that's all Jennifer needs. She doesn't recall the contents of our sessions - and she did a couple with Robert, but has done sessions with me weekly for 8 years. She does sessions with law enforcement daily - and like an "Etch a Sketch" wipes her awareness clear each time. But for whatever reason, we can bypass the filters, talk to people offstage together. We do this podcast to demonstrated that anyone can. I recommend watching this on the HACKING THE AFTERLIFE podcast because in the video version I put up subtitles as to who was being referenced. Not hard to figure out - but Fred Roos, Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn are mentioned. John Shaner. These folks were friends of his. In some cases I didn't mention their names - and referred to them in Italian, because I know that Robert knows who I'm referring to, even if Jennifer does not. In the case of Eddie Taylor, we put to bed the idea he was the person who wrote Chinatown. It's a live demonstration of how people can speak to their loved ones offstage. Learn new information. You don't need Jennifer (but it helps.) We've been doing this weekly for 8 years. Jennifer did a number of sessions with Robert, and I filmed at least two. Love is all there is. We come to the planet to have an experience with our loved ones, friends, animals. "It's over in the blink of an eye." If one takes away anything from this session it's to realize that it's possible they still exist, that it's possible that we can communicate with them, it's possible that our pets, animals, loved ones still exist, are able to help us, reach out to us - keep an eye on us. Two things: the reference to the "monkey scene" in the film "Five Easy Pieces" (written by Robert's friend Carol Eastman (listed as Adrien Joyce) and directed by his pal Bob Rafelson. It's possible he's referring to favorite dialogue, instead of "favorite lines he wrote" - because I have no awareness of his writing scenes for this movie (even though he did it for so many others, sometimes without credit like Bonnie and Clyde, Godfather and others). But here's the dialog that he's referencing: Excerpt from “Five Easy Pieces” : Helena Kallianiotes is an over talkative hitchhiker: Jack Nicholson is driving. (Just after the infamous table clearing scene) Helena: (Palm) “Fantastic! .. I would have just punched her out... People... oof (shakes her head) Animals are not like that... always cleaning themselves. Pigeons! Always picking bugs out of their hair. Monkeys too. Except monkeys do things out in the open that I don't go for.” Bobby's eyes glazed over as he stares out through the windshield. Helena: “I was in this place once, store with snakes, monkeys, everything you could imagine. I walked in, had to run out. It stunk! They didn't even have incense.. Filth you wouldn't believe! I don't even want to talk about it!” (From “Five Easy Pieces” written by Robert's pal, Luana's roommate, Carole Eastman, directed by Robert's pal Bob Rafelson, starring their pal Jack Nicholson. 1970) (Interesting to note; this dialog is in the script, but doesn't appear in the filmed version, some of the lines do, but the monkey part does not. Robert like to say writing was "monkeys at a typewriter" until they get it right. When he left his deal at Warner Bros over the editing of "Personal Best" we took everything out of his bungalow except a giant stuffed toy ape that Warners had given him, and set him behind a studio typewriter with the page quoting Robert about monkeys at a typewriter. (Not his idea, mine and Richard Prince's) With his daughter's permission, here is the poem that Robert references in the podcast that Kate wrote about him: "I met the love of my life the day I was born. My father put stars in my eyes and words in my heart. When reading a poem to me when I was 10, the word god appeared. I asked him if he believed in god and pointing to the words he said,” I believe in this.” When I was about 6 it was my dad's 50th birthday. I looked up at him and with a shiver in my heart I said, “you're half of a hundred.” It drove me to distraction the rest of my life knowing the inevitability. I have endlessly bargained with this grief, chased and run from shadows and dreaded this painful thing until it shaped every part of me. He knew I could be morose and in his later years could gently point that out and boy, did it feel like home to be known by him. I don't know how to say I love you I love you I love you I will never let you go I will always be dreaming of you and I will always look for you in poems and magic hour and cats. Thank you for the apologies and the tenderness and the time. It wasn't perfect. It was better. “The wages of dying is love.”- GK In the podcast Robert refers to the last line being funny - "It was better." I gasped when I read it, because it was a surprise to see. Maybe me weep with the memory of my pal. I did this interview at his request, and am sharing it as per his request. Not only for his loved ones and friends, but for those on the planet who are suffering because their loved ones have "left the stage." Know that they are not gone. They just aren't here. And we can access them if we need to or want to.
Jason Sinay, a Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and guitarist, has a storied career performing with legends like Keith Richards, Neil Young, and Mike Campbell's Dirty Knobs. Now, he's venturing into his solo career with the release of "The Mountain," a double album produced and co-written with Martin Pradler.In our latest episode of The Travel Wins, Jason shares insights on his musical journey, the challenges of leaving the Dirty Knobs, and the making of "The Mountain." He reflects on the resilience required to perfect the album, highlighting songs like "It Was You" and "History," which span decades, and more contemporary tracks like "Every Day Every Night" that delve into his personal life.Starting his guitar journey at nine after a life-changing Led Zeppelin concert, Jason's path was shaped by influences from Queen to Neil Young and mentorship from jazz guitarist Buddy Matlock. His early career included a significant record deal with Five Easy Pieces and extensive touring, which honed his craft and led to his pivotal role in the Dirty Knobs.Leaving the Dirty Knobs was a tough decision, driven by a desire to explore his potential as a solo artist. This period of transformation resulted in "The Mountain," an album Jason considers his most important work to date. He's passionate about using the album's proceeds for charity and is eager to return to touring, sharing his music live with fans.Tune in to hear Jason Sinay's full story and his thoughts on The Travel Wins podcast.
The end of 1974 saw the implosion of the Director's Company, founded just a year earlier by three of Hollywood's hottest directors: Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin. Funded by Paramount, the idea was that within a certain budget, these directors would make whatever they wanted, have final cut on their work, and split the profits on each other's films. Its rapid collapse, amid artistic failure and hubris and egged on by corporate intrigue, signaled the beginning of the end of what later came to be known as the Hollywood New Wave. A year later, the phenomenon that was "Jaws" recentered the narrative so that blockbuster weekend box office was everyone's sole and explicit goal. This in turn led to the return of the money people to power, and they have barely relinquished any of that power in the ensuing half-century. It's not a coincidence that 1974 also saw "Hearts and Minds", one of the great antiwar films ever made in this country, win the Oscar for Best Feature-Length Documentary. The film was also a milestone in that it was the last film ever released by BBS, the renegade company founded by Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson and Steve Blauner in 1969. Buoyed by the money they had made from the success of the Monkees, BBS disrupted an already-crumbling industry by releasing "Easy Rider", which grossed $60 million on a budget of $400K. The next few years saw releases from BBS like Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces" and "The King of Marvin Gardens", Jack Nicholson's directorial debut in "Drive, He Said", Jaglom's "A Safe Place" and Bogdanovich's mainstream breakthrough, "The Last Picture Show". By the middle of the decade, however, BBS had been swallowed up by Columbia, and the writing was on the wall for the days of the creative freedom that came with this iteration of American independent film. So while few realized it at the time, 1974 would mark the end of something unique and the beginning of something else. Come, then, and join our intrepid Team Vintage Sand as we step into the Way-Back Machine to say goodbye to Tricky Dick Nixon, spend weekend days waiting on line for gasoline, and explore that sui generis year in film. It was, of course, the year of young Vito Corleone, Jake Gittes and Harry Caul, but also a time when even many low-budget genre films ended up as classics. In the end, you very well might end up agreeing with our own John Meyer, who back in Episode 5 called 1974 the greatest year in film history.
On this episode of I Am The Wiz, Wiz reviews the 1970 drama Five Easy Pieces starring Jack Nicholson and Karen Black, directed by Bob Rafelson.
Our Aussie invasion continues with this week's guest, film critic and podcaster extraordinaire, Blake Howard, the mastermind of One Heat Minute Productions. Blake joins us to talk about unhealthy relationships with movies and his love for the films of 1970, from the gallows humor of “M*A*S*H” to the working class heroism of “Five Easy Pieces” to the unequalled cool (and Frenchness) of “Le Cercle Rouge.” Become a member for Bonus Episodes, personal stories of working in the industry, and yes - EVEN MORE MOVIES. https://plus.acast.com/s/a-very-good-year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Five Easy Pieces: on Magnificent 7 stocks, open source large language models, the No Labels movement, the Armageddonists and bottom-fishing in Chinese equities. View video here
This week, we talked to film director Jack Perez (Some Guy Who Kills People, La Cucaracha), who picked Ralph Bakshi's intense animated music-stuffed drama ‘American Pop' to discuss. Jack also discusses working with cult icons Barry Boswich (Rocky Horror Picture Show) & Karen Black (Nashville, Five Easy Pieces), how this film affected him as a 15-year-old moviegoer, how this might be the most ambitious music film of all time & what songs just…well…suck in it.So take a druggy trip through the cornfields of your mind with this week's episode of Revolutions Per Movie.JACK PEREZ:https://www.jackperezdirector.com/Theme by Eyelids 'My Caved In Mind'www.musicofeyelids.bandcamp.comArtwork by Jeff T. Owenshttps://linktr.ee/mymetalhandNew episodes of Revolutions Per Movies are released every Thursday, and if you like the show, please rank and review it on your favorite podcast app. ALSO, CHECK OUT OUR PATREON LINK BELOW FOR WEEKLY BONUS EPISODES, ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING AND MORE!!!Thanks! Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hold the chicken between your knees and listen to the siblings' discussion of the movie that kicked off the New Hollywood of the 70's, FIVE EASY PIECES. How does Iris do at defending this so-called “betrayal movie” against Wesley's new wave malaise? Let us kno at OrWhateverMovies.com. Contains spoilers. Thank you for listening! Wes and Iris want to hear from you! Hit them at: 818-835-0473 orwhatevermovies@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Old Spice by Shulton (1938) + Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972) + Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970) with John 8/29/23 S5E61 To hear the complete continuing story of The Perfume Nationalist please subscribe on Patreon.
Five Easy Pieces / Bob Rafelson / 1970 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cinexpress/support
We start off CinemAddicts Episode 196 saying goodbye to show co-creator Anderson Cowan. He couldn't make the episode due to a dental appointment, but he will be popping up now and again on the show. So we basically give some love to Anderson before starting this week's reviews.Anderson did join me the following day to say his goodbyes, and it's a really great show. We cover the year 1970 (movies picked are Bloody Mama and Five Easy Pieces) on our CinemAddicts Patreon.For the July's Bonus Patreon episode, I will cover the year 1999 with Bruce Purkey and Eric Holmes. To join our Patreon or get more info: https://www.patreon.com/cinemaddictsTimestamp(0:00) - Intro and thoughts on Anderson Cowan(15:04) - Review of Confidential Informant**. Now on Digital and On Demand. Hits theaters June 30. Stars Mel Gibson, Dominic Purcell and Nick Stahl.(24:20) - CinemAddicts Facebook Group Members Have Movie Recommendations! Thanks Joseph Bridges, Pete Abeyta, Ryan Smith, Alec Vasquez, and Matt Stillman! (29:29) - Nimona - streaming on Netflix June 30(36:44) - Love Gets A Room review. Movie stars Clara Rugaard and Ferdia Walsh-Peelo.(51:49) - Red Lights - Eric Holmes watched this movie since it is also directed by Love Gets A Room director Rodrigo Cortés.(56:30) - To Be Or Not To Be* - starring Carole Lombard and Robert Stack. Bruce saw this since like Love Gets A Room it is set in Warsaw Poland. (63:20) - La Cabina - a short recommended by our pal Joseph Bridges.(66:50) - Wake Up Sleeping Beauty directed by Shila Ommi. Reviewed by Eric Holmes. **Shop on Amazon by using our links. We receive a commission as Associates members. 1. Subscribe to our CinemAddicts YouTube Channel 2. Like Our CinemAddicts Facebook Page3. Join our CinemAddicts Facebook Group for daily movie recommendations!4. Questions/comments email us at editor@deepestdream.com 5. Our website for entertainment news, reviews, and podcast coverage is Find Your Film: https://findyourfilms.com/6. Contact Bruce Purkey for some What's in the Box? recommendations: brucepurkey@gmail.com8. Eric Holmes can be reached at hamslime@gmail.com9. Anderson Cowan's latest project is Loaded for Bear: The Documentary. For info and support: https://loadedforbeardoc.com/10. Atty's Antiques is on Facebook MarketplaceSupport the show
These days, Jack Nicholson seems to have settled happily into the role of world's-most-casually-dressed-Lakers-fan, but in the 1970's he was arguably the greatest new actor since Brando. Even before he perfected his explosive rage act for Kubrick's The Shining, he had come to symbolize America's collective frustration, betrayal, and anger at the collapse of the Hippie dream - and no films capture that sadness more accurately than Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail!
Hola Gerardo aquí en otro episodio de Simplemente Yo; La selección de esta semana es Five Easy Pieces, es una película dramática de 1970 dirigida por Bob Rafelson, escrita por Carole Eastman y Rafelson Plot: Un desertor de la clase alta encuentra un trabajo en plataformas petroleras cuando su rutina se ve interumpida por su padre grabemente enfermo y con esto decide volver a su casa. Espero que lo disfruten ;) Información adicional del podcast: Enlace del website official de Filmic Notion Podcast: https://filmicnotionpod.com/ Enlace a nuestra página de Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fnpod
Hollipop and Robi are headed back to 1970 to jive talk Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, starring Jack Nicholson. Classically trained pianists hanging out on oil rigs, traffic jams, neck braces, Cindy Crawford, and disillusionment abound. Check it out!
But with, first, film noir in the 40s and 50s, then the end of the American century beginning with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the scandal of Watergate, plus the rise of the counter-culture, heroes became more and more difficult to identify, or identify with. The 60s and 70s gave rise to the idea of the anti-hero, still the protagonist of the film, but someone who had a more ambivalent moral or legal code --- Dirty Harry, Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson again with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. You weren't rooting for them perhaps, but the fascination with their character, flaws and all, as well as the ambiguities of the storyline, focused your attention. But what if you determined to make a film about someone who was almost completely unlikable, who inspired fear rather than fascination, someone who seemed almost irredeemable? How do you situate such an individual in a story that doesn't cause the audience to turn away or walk out? Moreover, why even make such a film? What would drive a filmmaker to these lengths?email: David@thosewonderfulpeople.comWebsite and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.comIG: @thosewonderfulpeopleTwitter: @FilmsInTheDark
Warning: Listening may result in an overwhelming compulsion to read! First, Diane Bay finally received her birth mom's name from the state of Illinois. She nervously typed it into Google… Her birth mom is New Hollywood darling and cult movie queen, Karen Black, who starred in Easy Rider, The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces and so much more!Diane's journey to self discovery pulls her from elation to despair when she learns that her mom is dying. Their heart wrenching year together is chronicled beautifully in Diane's book, Finding Karen Black. Joining us for the episode is Karen's best friend, actor Lee Purcell who is uniquely positioned to provide us with Karen's emotionally wrenching perspective.Then we welcome finance insider Richard E. Farley who is winning our favorite book title of the year award with: Gonzo Wall Street: Riots, Radicals, Racism and Revolution - How the Go-Go Bankers of the 1960s Crashed the Financial System and Bamboozled Washington. Richard takes a long look at Wall Street in the 1960s, and finding that the precident for the 2008 bailouts was set when the corrupt Wall Street investment banks of the 1960s held Congress over a barrel and got an outrageous taxpayer-funded bailout of what THEY owed their customers.Plus, Fritz and Weezy are recommending Jon Meacham's And Then There Was Light - Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.Path Points of Interest:Finding Karen Black by Diane BayDiane BayFinding Karen Black WebsiteDiane Bay on Social Mediainstagram.com/dianebaydesign/facebook.com/dianebayartistwww.FindingKarenBlack.comfacebook.com/findingkarenblackKaren Black WikipediaKaren Black on IMDBLee PurcellLee Purcell on IMDBLee Purcell on Social Mediahttps://www.facebook.com/leepurcellfanpage/https://www.instagram.com/theleepurcell/Carol of the Bell's TrailerLee Purcell & Andrea F. Friedman in Office Scene From "Carol of the Bells” Donna Mills & Lee Purcell in scene from Joey Travolta's "Carol of the Bells” The Making Of "Carol of the Bells" PromoHollywood Radio PlayersHollywood Radio Players on YoutubeMake a tax deductible donation to Hollywood Radio PlayersRichard E. FarleyRichard E. Farley on AmazonGonzo Wall Street: Riots, Radicals, Racism and Revolution How the Go-Go Bankers of the 1960s Crashed the Financial System and Bamboozled Washington by Richard E. FarleyGonzo Wall Street ArticleLessons in Chemistry by Bonnie GarumsBonnie Garmus's Amazon Author PageAnd Then There Was Light - Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham
Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q. But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t
The second of out Stanley Kubrick retrospective episodes has us examine the second feature film, and first Noir, made by Kubrick; Killer's Kiss from 1955. We look at the progression from Fear and Desire (1953) and dissect the film together. We talk about New York City, Noir films, and signs of a genius. In our Trailers features we also talk about: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), Aftersun (2022), the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996 - ), Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths (2022)We hope that you enjoy the show and return in future to the congregation!Show Website: https://film-church-radio.captivate.fm/listenLewis' Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/walkerlewis3007/Past Episodes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/film-church-radio/id1603164927Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/filmchurchradio/
Welcome to our first episode of the new year, which is also our first episode of Season 5. Thank you for continuing to join us on this amazing journey. On today's episode, we head back to Christmas of 1980, when pop music superstar Neil Diamond would be making his feature acting debut in a new version of The Jazz Singer. ----more---- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, this is The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. It's 2023, which means we are starting our fifth season. And for our first episode of this new season, we're going back to the end of 1980, to take a look back at what was supposed to be the launch of a new phase in the career of one of music's biggest stars. That musical star was Neil Diamond, and this would end up becoming his one and only attempt to act in a motion picture. We're talking about The Jazz Singer. As I have said time and time again, I don't really have a plan for this show. I talk about the movies and subjects I talk about often on a whim. I'll hear about something and I'll be reminded of something, and a few days later, I've got an episode researched, written, recorded, edited and out there in the world. As I was working on the previous episode, about The War of the Roses just before my trip to Thailand, I saw a video of Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline on opening night of A Beautiful Noise, a new Broadway musical about the life and music of Mr. Diamond. I hadn't noticed Diamond had stopped performing live five years earlier due to a diagnosis of Parkinson's, and it was very touching to watch a thousand people joyously singing along with the man. But as I was watching that video, I was reminded of The Jazz Singer, a movie we previously covered very lightly three years ago as part of our episode on the distribution company Associated Film Distribution. I was reminded that I haven't seen the movie in over forty years, even though I remember rather enjoying it when it opened in theatres in December 1980. I think I saw it four or five times over the course of a month, and I even went out and bought the soundtrack album, which I easily listened to a hundred times before the start of summer. But we're getting ahead of ourselves yet again. The Jazz Singer began its life in 1917, when Samson Raphaelson, a twenty-three year old undergraduate at the University of Illinois, attended a performance of Robinson Crusoe, Jr., in Champaign, IL. The star of that show was thirty-year-old Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew who had been a popular performer on Broadway stages for fifteen years by this point, regularly performing in blackface. After graduation, Raphaelson would become an advertising executive in New York City, but on the side, he would write stories. One short story, called “The Day of Atonement,” would be a thinly fictionalized account of Al Jolson's life. It would be published in Everybody's Magazine in January 1922. At the encouragement of his secretary at the advertising firm, Raphaelson would adapted his story into a play, which would be produced on Broadway in September 1925 with a new title… The Jazz Singer. Ironically, for a Broadway show based on the early life of Al Jolson, Jolson was not a part of the production. The part of Jake Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who finds success on Broadway with the Anglicized named Jack Robin, would be played by George Jessel. The play would be a minor hit, running for 303 performances on Broadway before closing in June 1926, and Warner Brothers would buy the movie rights the same week the show closed. George Jessel would be signed to play his stage role in the movie version. The film was scheduled to go into production in May 1927. There are a number of reasons why Jessel would not end up making the movie. After the success of two Warner movies in 1926 using Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc system that could play music synchronized to a motion picture, Warner Brothers reconcieved The Jazz Singer as a sound movie, but not just a movie with music synchronized to the images on screen, but a “talkie,” where, for the first time for a motion picture, actual dialogue and vocal songs would be synchronized to the pictures on screen. When he learned about this development, Jessel demanded more money. The Warner Brothers refused. Then Jessel had some concerns about the solvency of the studio. These would be valid concerns, as Harry Warner, the eldest of the four eponymous brothers who ran the studio, had sold nearly $4m worth of his personal stock to keep the company afloat just a few months earlier. But what ended up driving Jessel away was a major change screenwriter Alfred A. Cohen made when adapting the original story and the play into the screenplay. Instead of leaving the theatre and becoming a cantor like his father, as it was written for the stage, the movie would end with Jack Robin performing on Broadway in blackface while his mom cheers him on from one of the box seats. With Jessel off the project, Warner would naturally turn to… Eddie Cantor. Like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor was a Jew of Russian descent, although, unlike Jolson, he had been born in New York City. Like Jolson, he had been a star on Broadway for years, regularly performing in and writing songs for Florenz Ziegfeld' annual Follies shows. And like Jolson, Cantor would regularly appear on stage in blackface. But Cantor, a friend of Jessel's, instead offered to help the studio get Jessel back on the movie. The studio instead went to their third choice… Al Jolson. You know. The guy whose life inspired the darn story to begin with. Many years later, film historian Robert Carringer would note that, in 1927, George Jessel was a vaudeville comedian with one successful play and one modestly successful movie to his credit, while Jolson was one of the biggest stars in America. In fact, when The Vitaphone Company was trying to convince American studios to try their sound-on-disc system for movies, they would hire Jolson in the fall of 1926 for a ten minute test film. It would be the success of the short film, titled A Plantation Act and featuring Jolson in blackface singing three songs, that would convince Warners to take a chance with The Jazz Singer as the first quote unquote talkie film. I'll have a link to A Plantation Act on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, if you're interested in seeing it. Al Jolson signed on to play the character inspired by himself for $75,000 in May 1927, the equivalent to $1.28m today. Filming would be pushed back to June 1927, in part due to Jolson still being on tour with another show until the end of the month. Warners would begin production on the film in New York City in late June, starting with second unit shots of the Lower East Side and The Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, shooting as much as they could until Jolson arrived on set on July 11th. Now, while the film has been regularly touted for nearly a century now as the first talking motion picture, the truth is, there's very little verbal dialogue in the film. The vast majority of dialogue in the movie was still handled with the traditional silent movie use of caption cards, and the very few scenes featuring what would be synchronized dialogue were saved for the end of production, due to the complexity of how those scenes would be captured. But the film would finish shooting in mid-September. The $422k movie would have its world premiere at the Warner Brothers theatre in New York City not three weeks later, on October 6th, 1927, where the film would become a sensation. Sadly, none of the Warner Brothers would attend the premiere, as Sam Warner, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone at the studio, had died of pneumonia the night before the premiere, and his remaining brothers stayed in Los Angeles for the funeral. The reviews were outstanding, and the film would bring more than $2.5m in rental fees back to the studio. At the first Academy Awards, held in May 1929 to honor the films released between August 1927 and July 1928, The Jazz Singer was deemed ineligible for the two highest awards, Outstanding Production, now known as Best Picture, and Unique and Artistic Production, which would only be awarded this one time, on the grounds that it would have been unfair to a sound picture compete against all the other silent films. Ironically, by the time the second Academy Awards were handed out, in April 1930, silent films would practically be a thing of the past. The success of The Jazz Singer had been that much a tectonic shift in the industry. The film would receive one Oscar nomination, for Alfred Cohn's screenplay adaptation, while the Warner Brothers would be given a special award for producing The Jazz Singer, the “pioneer outstanding talking picture which has revolutionized the industry,” as the inscription on the award read. There would be a remake of The Jazz Singer produced in 1952, starring Danny Thomas as Korean War veteran who, thankfully, leaves the blackface in the past, and a one-hour television adaptation of the story in 1959, starring Jerry Lewis. And if that sounds strange to you, Jerry Lewis, at the height of his post-Lewis and Martin success, playing a man torn between his desire to be a successful performer and his shattered relationship with his cantor father… well, you can see it for yourself, if you desire, on the page for this episode on our website. It is as strange as it sounds. At this point, we're going to fast forward a number of years in our story. In the 1970s, Neil Diamond became one of the biggest musical stars in America. While he wanted to be a singer, Diamond would get his first big success in music in the 1960s as a songwriter, including writing two songs that would become big hits for The Monkees: I'm a Believer and A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You. And really quickly, let me throw out a weird coincidence here… Bob Rafelson, the creator of The Monkees who would go on to produce and/or direct such films as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, was the nephew of Samson Raphaelson, the man who wrote the original story on which The Jazz Singer is based. Anyway, after finding success as a songwriter, Diamond would become a major singing star with hits like Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon, Sweet Caroline, and Song Sung Blue. And in another weird coincidence, by 1972, Neil Diamond would become the first performer since Al Jolson to stage a one-man show at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. By 1976, Neil Diamond is hosting specials on television, and one person who would see one of Diamond's television specials was a guy named Jerry Leider, an executive at Warner Brothers in charge of foreign feature production. Leider sees something in Diamond that just night be suited for the movies, not unlike Elvis Presley or Barbra Streisand, who in 1976 just happens to be the star of a remake of A Star Is Born for Warner Brothers that is cleaning up at the box office and at records stores nationwide. Leider is so convinced Neil Diamond has that X Factor, that unquantifiable thing that turns mere mortals into superstars, that Leider quits his job at Warners to start his own movie production company, wrestling the story rights to The Jazz Singer from Warner Brothers and United Artists, both of whom claimed ownership of the story, so he can make his own version with Diamond as the star. So, naturally, a former Warners Brothers executive wanting to remake one of the most iconic movies in the Warner Brothers library is going to set it up at Warner Brothers, right? Nope! In the fall of 1977, Leider makes a deal with MGM to make the movie. Diamond signs on to play the lead, even before a script is written, and screenwriter Stephen H. Foreman is brought in to update the vaudeville-based original story into the modern day while incorporating Diamond's strengths as a songwriter to inform the story. But just before the film was set to shoot in September 1978, MGM would drop the movie, as some executives were worried the film would be perceived as being, and I am quoting Mr. Foreman here, “too Jewish.” American Film Distribution, the American distribution arm of British production companies ITC and EMI, would pick the film up in turnaround, and set a May 1979 production start date. Sidney J. Furie, the Canadian filmmaker who had directed Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, would be hired to direct, and Jacqueline Bisset was pursued to play the lead female role, but her agent priced their client out of the running. Deborah Raffin would be cast instead. And to help bring the kids in, the producers would sign Sir Laurence Olivier to play Diamond's father, Cantor Rabinovitch. Sir Larry would get a cool million dollars for ten weeks of work. There would, as always is with the case of making movies, be setbacks that would further delay the start of production. First, Diamond would hurt his back at the end of 1978, and needed to go in for surgery in early January 1979. Although Diamond had already written and recorded all the music that was going to be used in the movie, AFD considered replacing Diamond with Barry Manilow, who had also never starred in a movie before, but they would stick with their original star. After nearly a year of rest, Diamond was ready to begin, and cameras would roll on the $10m production on January 7th, 1980. And, as always is with the case of making movies, there would be more setbacks as soon as production began. Diamond, uniquely aware of just how little training he had as an actor, struggled to find his place on set, especially when working with an actor of Sir Laurence Olivier's stature. Director Furie, who was never satisfied with the screenplay, ordered writer Foreman to come up with new scenes that would help lessen the burden Diamond was placing on himself and the production. The writer would balk at almost every single suggestion, and eventually walked off the film. Herbert Baker, an old school screenwriter who had worked on several of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies, was brought in to punch up the script, but he would end up completely rewriting the film, even though the movie had been in production for a few weeks. Baker and Furie would spend every moment the director wasn't actively working on set reworking the story, changing the Deborah Raffin character so much she would leave the production. Her friend Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, would take over the role, after Cher, Liza Minnelli and Donna Summer were considered. Sensing an out of control production, Sir Lew Grade, the British media titan owner of AFD, decided a change was needed. He would shut the production down on March 3rd, 1980, and fire director Furie. While Baker continued to work on the script, Sir Grade would find a new director in Richard Fleischer, the journeyman filmmaker whose credits in the 1950s and 1960s included such films as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Compulsion, Fantastic Voyage and Doctor Doolittle, but had fallen out of favor with most studios after a string of flops. In fact, this would be the second film in a year where Fleischer was hired to replace another director during the middle of production, having replaced Richard C. Sarafian on the action-adventure film Ashanti in 1979. With Fleischer aboard, production on The Jazz Singer would resume in late March, and there was an immediate noticeable difference on set. Where Furie and many members of the crew would regularly defer to Diamond due to his stature as an entertainer, letting the singer spiral out of control if things weren't working right, Fleischer would calm the actor down and help work him back into the scene. Except for one scene, set in a recording studio, where Diamond's character needed to explode into anger. After a few takes that didn't go as well as he hoped, Diamond went into the recording booth where his movie band was stationed while Fleischer was resetting the shot, when the director noticed Diamond working himself into a rage. The director called “action,” and Diamond nailed the take as needed. When the director asked Diamond how he got to that moment, the singer said he was frustrated with himself that he wasn't hitting the scene right, and asked the band to play something that would make him angry. The band obliged. What did they play? A Barry Manilow song. Despite the recasting of the leading female role, a change of director and a number of rewrites by two different writers during the production, the film was able to finish shooting at the end of April with only $3m added to the budget. Associated Film would set a December 19th, 1980 release date for the film, while Capitol Records, owned at the time by EMI, would release the first single from the soundtrack, a soft-rock ballad called Love on the Rocks, in October, with the full soundtrack album arriving in stores a month later. As expected for a new Neil Diamond song, Love on the Rocks was an immediate hit, climbing the charts all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Several days before the film opened in 241 theatres on December 19th, there was a huge, star-studded premiere at the Plitt Century Plaza Cinemas in Los Angeles. Peter Falk, Harvey Korman, Ed McMahon, Gregory Peck, Cesar Romero and Jon Voight were just a handful of the Hollywood community who came out to attend what was one of the biggest Hollywood premieres in years. That would seem to project a confidence in the movie from the distributor's standpoint. Or so you'd think. But as it turned out, The Jazz Singer was one of three movies Associated Film would release that day. Along with The Jazz Singer, they would release the British mystery film The Mirror Crack'd starring Angela Lansbury and Elizabeth Taylor, and the Richard Donner drama Inside Moves. Of the three movies, The Jazz Singer would gross the most that weekend, pulling in a modest $1.167m, versus The Mirror Crack'd's $608k from 340 screens, and Inside Moves's $201k from 67 screens. But compared to Clint Eastwood's Any Which Way You Can, the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy, and Dolly Parton/Lily Tomlin/Jane Fonda comedy 9 to 5, it wasn't the best opening they could hope for. But the film would continue to play… well, if not exceptional, at least it would hold on to its intended audience for a while. Sensing the film needed some help, Capitol Records released a second single from the soundtrack, another power ballad called Hello Again, in January 1981, which would become yet another top ten hit for Diamond. A third single, the pro-immigration power-pop song America, would arrive in April 1981 and go to number eight on the charts, but by then, the film was out of theatres with a respectable $27.12m in tickets sold. Contemporary reviews of the film were rather negative, especially towards Diamond as an actor. Roger Ebert noted in his review that there were so many things wrong in the film that the review was threatening to become a list of cinematic atrocities. His review buddy Gene Siskel did praise Lucie Arnaz's performance, while pointing out how out of touch the new story was with the immigrant story told by the original film. Many critics would also point out the cringe-worthy homage to the original film, where Diamond unnecessarily performs in blackface, as well as Olivier's overacting. I recently watched the film for the first time since 1981, and it's not a great movie by any measurable metric. Diamond isn't as bad an actor as the reviews make him out to be, especially considering he's essentially playing an altered version of himself, a successful pop singer, and Lucie Arnaz is fairly good. The single best performance in the film comes from Caitlin Adams, playing Jess's wife Rivka, who, for me, is the emotional center of the film. And yes, Olivier really goes all-in on the scenery chewing. At times, it's truly painful to watch this great actor spin out of control. There would be a few awards nominations for the film, including acting nominations for Diamond and Arnaz at the 1981 Golden Globes, and a Grammy nomination for Best Soundtrack Album, but most of its quote unquote awards would come from the atrocious Golden Raspberry organization, which would name Diamond the Worst Actor of the year and Olivier the Worst Supporting Actor during its first quote unquote ceremony, which was held in some guy's living room. Ironically but not so surprisingly, while the film would be vaguely profitable for its producers, it would be the soundtrack to the movie that would bring in the lion's share of the profits. On top of three hit singles, the soundtrack album would sell more than five million copies just in the United States in 1980 and 1981, and would also go platinum in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. While he would earn less than half a million dollars from the film, Diamond's cut of the soundtrack would net him a dollar per unit sold, earning him more than ten times his salary as an actor. And although I fancied myself a punk and new wave kid at the end of 1980, I bought the soundtrack to The Jazz Singer, ostensibly as a gift for my mom, who loved Neil Diamond, but I easily wore out the grooves of the album listening to it over and over again. Of the ten new songs he wrote for the soundtrack, there's a good two or three additional tracks that weren't released as singles, including a short little ragtime-inspired ditty called On the Robert E. Lee, but America is the one song from the soundtrack I am still drawn to today. It's a weirdly uplifting song with its rhythmic “today” chants that end the song that just makes me feel good despite its inherent cheesiness. After The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond would only appear as himself in a film. Lucie Arnaz would never quite have much of a career after the film, although she would work quote regularly in television during the 80s and 90s, including a short stint as the star of The Lucie Arnaz Show, which lasted six episodes in 1985 before being cancelled. Laurence Olivier would continue to play supporting roles in a series of not so great motion pictures and television movies and miniseries for several more years, until his passing in 1989. And director Richard Fleischer would make several bad movies, including Red Sonja and Million Dollar Mystery, until he retired from filmmaking in 1987. As we noted in our February 2020 episode about AFD, the act of releasing three movies on the same day was a last, desperate move in order to pump some much needed capital into the company. And while The Jazz Singer would bring some money in, that wasn't enough to cover the losses from the other two movies released the same day, or several other underperforming films released earlier in the year such as the infamous Village People movie Can't Stop the Music and Raise the Titanic. Sir Lew Grade would close AFD down in early 1981, and sell several movies that were completed, in production or in pre-production to Universal Studios. Ironically, those movies might have saved the company had they been able to hang on a little longer, as they included such films as The Dark Crystal, Frances, On Golden Pond, Sophie's Choice and Tender Mercies. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 99 is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Neil Diamond and The Jazz Singer. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
NBC premiered ‘Royal Flush' - the pilot episode of iconic Sixties pop-comedy show The Monkees - on 12th September, 1966. And the Daydream Believers quickly found their way into America's heart… The Beatles-a-like actors had never met or worked with each other ever before answering an ad seeking ‘four insane boys, aged 18-21', placed by‘Five Easy Pieces' producer Bob Rafelson. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why each episode of the sitcom ended with a fourth wall-breaking discussion between the boys; explore how credible songwriters like Carole King and Neil Diamond ended up working on their singles; and discover why, despite the boyband's enormous success, the series was cancelled in its second season… Further Reading: • ‘The Untold Truth Of The Monkees' (Grunge, 2019): https://www.grunge.com/146172/the-untold-truth-of-the-monkees/ • ‘Why 'The Monkees' Was a Perfect Meld of Television and Music (That Will Never Happen Again)' (Huffington Post, 2016): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-the-monkees-was-a-per_b_10368468 • ‘The Monkees: Royal Flush' (NBC, 1966): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JESo3dcRuo For bonus material and to support the show, visit Patreon.com/Retrospectors We'll be back tomorrow! Follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/Retrospectors The Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina & Arion McNicoll, with Matt Hill. Theme Music: Pass The Peas. Announcer: Bob Ravelli. Graphic Design: Terry Saunders. Edit Producer: Sophie King. Copyright: Rethink Audio / Olly Mann 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In his last appearance, film writer Sean Burns joined me to take a look at Michael Douglas in lothario mode in one of the pod's most hilarious and popular adults-only episodes. And this week, he's back to dissect five films starring one of the podcast's most beloved and covered character actors in the form of Jack Nicholson's turns in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Shining, Terms of Endearment, and The Crossing Guard. In addition to astute insights and Nicholson storytelling, you'll hear the hilarious Burns bring out my feistier side the deeper we get into the episode. So sit back as we curse like sailors, critique strip club numbers, lovingly poke fun at filmmaking pretensions, and compare the pretty, dull young actors of today to salad dressing. It's another fun conversation indeed!A film critic for WBUR's Arts & Culture and a contributing writer at North Shore Movies and Crooked Marquee, he was Philadelphia Weekly's lead film critic from 1999-2013 and worked as contributing editor at the Improper Bostonian from 2006-2014. His reviews, interviews, and essays have also appeared in Metro, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Boston Herald, Nashville Scene, Time Out New York, Philadelphia City Paper, and RogerEbert.com.A graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Burns was a recurring guest on the late David Brudnoy's WBZ 1030 AM radio show, and in 2002, received an award for Excellence in Criticism from the Greater Philadephia Society of Professional Journalists. His writing has been called "jocular but serious, more like a 1940's daily reporter pounding out columns on a manual typewriter than a typical twenty-first-century navel-gazing film critic." Meanwhile, his sisters still tell him that he "swears too much and drive like an old lady."Logo: KateGabrielle.comTheme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music ArchiveOriginally Posted on Patreon (9/9/22) here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/71745247
Adnan talks to Kal Penn about Harold and Kumar, working for Obama, Van Wilder, breaking into the film industry as a minority, and Kal tells a fantastic story about an Indian stripper (11:43). The Captain (39:33). Were Alex Rodriguez's criticisms of Derek Jeter fair? Adnan has two run-ins with the law. Adnan rips White Castle burgers. Adnan binges a bunch of Jack Nicholson movies including The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (57:31). Adnan's advice for Keith Olbermann. Do doctors tell all patients their cholesterol is a little high? Most awkward sex scene in film history? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adnan talks to Kal Penn about Harold and Kumar, working for Obama, Van Wilder, breaking into the film industry as a minority, and Kal tells a fantastic story about an Indian stripper (11:43). The Captain (39:33). Were Alex Rodriguez's criticisms of Derek Jeter fair? Adnan has two run-ins with the law. Adnan rips White Castle burgers. Adnan binges a bunch of Jack Nicholson movies including The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (57:31). Adnan's advice for Keith Olbermann. Do doctors tell all patients their cholesterol is a little high? Most awkward sex scene in film history? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello! It's hot, hot, hot. It's the dog days of August, which means that here in Southern California there's only three months left of summer. But we have a great show today. Now, I have spoken frequently of my affection for ME-TV. For me, it's television comfort food. Star Trek, Voyage To the Bottom Of the Sea. Perry Mason. Now, these were not the shows on in prime time when I was a kid. But they were the re-runs that were on when I was a kid. They were the shows on in syndication, five days a week, in Boston on good ol' Channel 56 or Channel 38. So these were the shows that I grew up watching every day after school. I'm sure that's true for many of you as well. Well, as it turns out, most, not all, but most of these shows all came from the same TV season. Star Trek, Batman, The Monkees, Lost In Space… The network television season that began in the fall of 1966 was the first all-color television season in American. It was really the dawn of modern television and, of course, all the stuff we see today was already going on back then. And there's a new book about it called PrimeTime '66 – 67 by Tom Shubilla and here's here. And THEN, one of the giants of that era of television was Irwin Allen. Allen gave us Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Lost In Space, Land Of The Giants, The Time Tunnel and then turned around gave us The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. A true giant of 60's TV and 70's film, and my good friend Bond, Jeff Bond has a new, massive book, It's not even a book, it's a tome, called The Fantasy Worlds Of Irwin Allen and he's here to talk about THAT. True Tales From Weirdsville is taking a deep dive into the mind of Bob Rafelson who not only created that gem of the 1966 TV season The Monkees, but also made the Monkees movie, HEAD, which is really about what a jerk you were if you liked the Monkees. Starring The Monkees. And then he made Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. You know, just ‘cause. And episode image by the great Drew Friedman, by the way!
This week's Nose poured gasoline on the tapes and lit them on fire. Armageddon and Deep Impact and Antz and A Bug's Life in 1998. The Illusionist and The Prestige in 2006. Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down in 2013. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madnessand Everything Everywhere All at Once this year. What is the deal with Hollywood sometimes putting out multiple movies about the same thing at the same time? And: How do you organize your bookshelves? By subject? Author? Title? Color? Size? …Not at all? And finally: The Last Movie Stars is a six-part HBO docuseries directed by Ethan Hawke. It “chronicles Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward's iconic careers and decades-long partnership” and features the voices of Laura Linney as Joanne Woodward, George Clooney as Paul Newman, Karen Allen as Frances Woodward, Brooks Ashmanskas as Gore Vidal, Bobby Cannavale as Elia Kazan, Vincent D'Onofrio as John Huston and Karl Malden, Oscar Isaac as Sydney Pollack, Tom McCarthy as Sidney Lumet, Sam Rockwell as Stuart Rosenberg, Mark Ruffalo as Meade Roberts, and many more. Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: ‘Goodfellas,' ‘Law & Order' actor Paul Sorvino dies at 83 David Warner, British Actor Known for ‘The Omen' and ‘Tron,' Dies at 80 Bob Rafelson, Director of ‘Five Easy Pieces' and Co-Creator of ‘The Monkees,' Dies at 89 The maverick filmmaker worked with Jack Nicholson on seven features, and his company produced ‘The Last Picture Show.' Tony Dow, Big Brother Wally on ‘Leave It to Beaver,' Dies at 77 He went on to a varied career as an actor, director, producer and sculptor, but he could never shake his association with the sitcom that brought him stardom. His death came a day after it was announced erroneously. Claes Oldenburg Dies at 93; Pop Artist Made the Everyday Monumental Taking ordinary objects like hamburgers and household items, he sculpted them in unfamiliar, often imposing dimensions — what he called his “Colossal Monuments.” Shonka Dukureh, Who Played Big Mama Thornton in ‘Elvis,' Dies at 44 Janeane Garofalo Never Sold Out. What a Relief. That concept might be the reason her trailblazing stand-up career has been overshadowed; it may also be the reason she's still so sharp, our critic argues. How fake accounts and a powder-keg fandom helped Zack Snyder restore his Justice League It might be hard to believe, but the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement was even weirder than we thought Jennifer Lopez Becomes Jennifer Affleck, Now Please Sign Up for Her Newsletter And other reflections on her recent wedding. Raving for Shrek, the Swamp Comes to Brooklyn A party in East Williamsburg invited fans of the 2001 film to translate into reality their online obsessions with the titular ogre. Can't Talk, I'm Busy Being Hot A social media movement inspired by the rapper Megan Thee Stallion strikes back at the gatekeepers of beauty. The 50 Greatest Fictional Deaths of All Time The most tearjerking, hilarious, satisfying, and shocking death scenes in 2,500 years of culture. Amazon Is Giving Prime Video Its Biggest Redesign In Years New navigation, a top 10 list, and a very familiar look and feel How Did Yellowstone, America's Most Popular Show, Get Totally Ignored by the Emmys? Taylor Sheridan's universe of shows is a juggernaut, but awards still go to “stuff that appeals to the coastal elite.” Quidditch rebrands as quadball and further distances itself from Harry Potter author ‘The Bear' Is Why We Must End The Reign Of TV's Vibes Cartel Celebrities Continue to Be Richer Than You TVs Are Too Good Now Why does Home Alone look better than the latest Marvel fare on the most advanced displays? America's Most Misunderstood Marsupial The opossum might be snarly and a little bit scraggly, but she deserves our admiration. Velveeta Releases Cheese-Infused Martini That's Garnished with Pasta Shells The brand teamed up with BLT Restaurant Group for the unconventional creation Five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen says he will not defend his title This goat is all ears. REALLY! They may be the longest in goat history Tom Cruise Really Could Finally Win an Oscar for Top Gun: Maverick It's a long shot, sure. But with the legacy sequel the undeniable success story of the summer, it's likely the best opportunity the Academy will ever have to give Cruise the gold. YouTube hit Channel 5 News is “reporting for people who don't watch the news” “People who don't watch the news watch me. People who watch the news don't watch me.” A Minneapolis venue canceled a Dave Chappelle set hours before showtime Dave Chappelle Opens for Kevin Hart and Chris Rock at Madison Square Garden People Are Saying The TikTok Pink Sauce Is "Disgusting,” But The Way People Are Treating Its Creator Is Also Leaving A Bad Taste In My Mouth “I feel like Madonna or Beyoncé just tripped onstage and I woke up with their phone in my hand.” Ken Jennings Makes Circumcision Joke On ‘Jeopardy!' And Fans Say It's A Cut Above The host put some skin in the game in his return. The Choco Taco is gone for good ‘Full Frontal with Samantha Bee' is canceled by TBS after 7 seasons The series was one of the few late-night shows hosted by a woman The Case of the $5,000 Springsteen Tickets Triumphant fans showed up in Ticketmaster's queue with special codes, only to encounter its “dynamic pricing” system. Was the Boss OK with that? What's the Deal With Water Bottles? GUESTS: Rebecca Castellani: Co-founder of Quiet Corner Communications and a freelance writer Illeana Douglas: Movie and television star Taneisha Duggan: Director, producer, and arts consultant The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Minds will be blown by this latest episode, with Toni Basil, a true show business Zelig. Sure, we all remember Basil's 1981 hit, “Mickey.” But it turns out this might be the least interesting part of her long career as a dancer, singer, and choreographer. Hear Toni's tales of: dancing with Frank Sinatra in 1964's Rat Pack vehicle Robin and the Seven Hoods, boogying in and helping choreograph Elvis' movie, Viva Las Vegas, that time she watched Mick Jagger nearly faint when he realized he had to follow James Brown on stage. She played a hooker in Easy Rider and sat across the diner booth from Jack Nicholson for his famous toast ordering scene in Five Easy Pieces. Oh, and did we mention that she taught Leonardo DiCaprio how to do the twist for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood? Plus, she basically introduced hip hop dance to America back in the Seventies when she founded the street dance troupe The Lockers. You'll never use the term "one hit wonder" again. Stuff to check out: Toni Basil's House, on youtube, home to the mother lode of clips. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLDiLz79uHGkK4KyIMl7Ljg Toni, Sinatra, and Bing Crosby on set of Robin and The Seven Hoods, 1964 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUZXOdsEPJo Toni does "the dog" for Elvis in Viva Las Vegas, 1964 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLi5PNasbvA Toni in Bruce Conner's "Breakaway" short https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CHtEASlzG8 Peter Fonda (and Toni) in Easy Rider, 1969 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iamsdf-VSQI Jack Nicholson (and Toni) in Five Easy Pieces, 1970 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdIXrF34Bz0 Toni and The Lockers on Soul Train, 1975 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwAZoce7QHY Toni dancing a few years ago (at 74) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcpjta4q7lc
Sally Struthers is thinking a lot about the passage of time these days. For one, this year is the 50th anniversary of All In The Family premiering on CBS. She's also thinking that so many people she worked with in movies like Five Easy Pieces and The Getaway are no longer with us. And she's thinking about how all this downtime from the pandemic is keeping her from doing what she loves: touring the country in stage productions. Sally talks with Marc about how time catches up with all of us, but also how she can look back fondly and with gratitude on what has passed. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast.
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