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Alexei Sayle is an actor, author, stand-up comedian, television presenter and former recording artist. He was one of the leading figures in the British alternative comedy movement in the 1980s, becoming the leading performer at The Comic Strip, in Soho. In 1981, he wrote and performed the radio series, Alexei Sayle and the Fish People, for which he won a Pye Radio Award. This was followed by Alexei Sayle and the Dutch Lieutenant's Trousers, and two series of Lenin of the Rovers, a 1988 comedy about Britain's first communist football team. He returned to Radio 4 in 2016 with Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar, which has run for five critically acclaimed series so far. His first high-profile television appearances were on Central Independent Television's late-night alternative cabaret show O.T.T. and several appearance in The Young Ones. He's had his own shows, three series of Alexei Sayle's Stuff for which he won an International Emmy, two series of The All New Alexei Sayle Show (1994–1995) and one series of Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round On film he's appeared in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, Gorky Park, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Supergrass, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Carry On Columbus, The Legend of the Tamworth Two, and How to Build a Girl, among others. He's also been in Dr Who, The Comic Strip Presents, Selling Hitler, Tipping the Velvet, Bremner, Bird and Fortune, Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive, Miss Marple, Horrible Histories, New Tricks, Toby City, Casualty, and lots more. He's written two short story collections, five novels, including a graphic novel and a radio series spin-off book, as well as columns for various publications. He can be heard on Alexei Sayle's Strangers on a Train on BBC Sounds Where he breaks the golden rule of travelling by train in the UK - by actually talking to his fellow passengers and his own podcast is available now, and it's called the Alexei Sayle Podacst .Alexei Sayle is our guest in episode 493 of My Time Capsule and chats to Michael Fenton Stevens about the five things he'd like to put in a time capsule; four he'd like to preserve and one he'd like to bury and never have to think about again .Listen to The Alexei Sayle's Podcast here - https://podfollow.com/1540500007/links .Follow The Alexei Sayle's Podcast on Twitter/X & Instagram @alexeisaylepod .Follow My Time Capsule on Instagram: @mytimecapsulepodcast & Twitter/X & Facebook: @MyTCpod .Follow Michael Fenton Stevens on Twitter/X: @fentonstevens & Instagram @mikefentonstevens .Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .Music by Pass The Peas Music .Artwork by matthewboxall.com .This podcast is proud to be associated with the charity Viva! Providing theatrical opportunities for hundreds of young people . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In November, I made my fourth volunteering trip to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. I went despite - or maybe because of - uncertainty about how the war will end. As with previous trips, which I wrote about in The Current, I helped make packaged meals for soldiers and led drama therapy workshops for university students, mental health workers and actors in various cities. In the sessions, which involved 200 participants, we focused not on the war but on fantasy: sunbathing on the beach in Crimea, swimming in the river of youth, growing the tree of life and digging for wishes. Unlike in April, in nearly every session, people cried, even tough military doctors. This trip was different for another reason. My last stop was Kharkiv, the country's most-bombed major city, 19 miles from the Russian border in the northeast. Residents live each moment knowing that a missile, drone or glide bomb may hit the spot on which they are standing, without warning. I went to Kharkiv because I wanted to learn how human beings can live in such extreme conditions. And I wanted to give folks an emotional outlet or a bit of stress relief. Most of all, it was personal. I recently learned that my grandfather was born not far away. My pilgrimage began in baroque Lviv (occasionally bombed), proceeded to majestic Kyiv (bombed during my arrival) and then to Irpin (bombed at the beginning of the war). On the 1,001st day of the war, I took a six-hour train to the end of the line. That was Kharkiv. Kharkiv reminded me of New York City when I was growing up there in the 1980s, with boarded-up and burned-out buildings abutting sparkling cafes and boutiques, Beamers and bangers tooling down potholed roads and Irish bars next to rubble. Everyone I met, from sociologist Olena, to clinic director Alexander, to university administrator Yulia, was exhausted by the war. Because we were close to the front and a military hospital lies in the city center, I saw countless soldiers who had a 1,000-meter stare. After we sipped infused-fruit tea in a place called Some Like it Hot, Olena showed me Freedom Square (one of the largest in Europe), historic skyscraper Derzhprom (bombed a few weeks earlier) and the rebuilt Gorky Park (now known as Central Park). She said she doesn't worry about the risk of death in Kharkiv because there's no point. We passed a Ferris wheel, haunted house and roller coaster (all closed). A few brave souls strolled and jogged in a soft rain. Olena told me which way was north (i.e., Russia), and I glanced nervously in that direction. After hearing a rumbling in the distance, I asked if it was thunder or an explosion. She indicated the latter. I tried to rest in my hotel room before the workshop at the National Arts University. But I heard the rat-tat-tat of what sounded like missile defense fire. Was it the Russians? Should I hide in the shelter? I checked the air alert app, but for most of my 48 hours in Kharkiv it buzzed away, useless. I texted my friend Corey Watson, who spends much time in Kharkiv with his non-governmental organization (NGO), Pizza for Ukraine. From Oregon, where it was the middle of the night, he gave me real-time updates from Telegram. No, the Russians were not attacking. It was the piping, the elevator or just my mind. I speed-walked to the House with Chimeras, an art nouveau relic that has survived at least three wars and is adorned with foreboding creatures and a dash of English Gothic. When I entered the room, yet another air alert had begun but everyone was focused on putting plastic baggies on their shoes. The attendees - acting students and teachers from their early 20s to 70s - were the most energetic of the 10 groups I saw in Ukraine. I had them do spectrograms, asking them to rate how they felt physically, emotionally and spiritually by standing on a line ranging from zero to 100. No words, some tears, but improbably most were close to 100 for each question. They created a breathtaking series of silent emotional s...
Today's West Coast Cookbook & Speakeasy Podcast for our especially special Daily Special, Metro Shrimp & Grits Thursdays is now available on the Spreaker Player!Starting off in the Bistro Cafe, a town in ‘Murder' Taylor Greene's Georgia district that voted overwhelming for Trump, is freaking out after realizing he will destroy their economy.Then, on the rest of the menu, Wells Fargo announced it will lay off seven hundred of its Oregon employees in 2025; Jeff Bezos said he really wants to help cut regulations from a made-up cabinet position, too; and, a federal judge in Texas blocked the nationwide enforcement of the federal anti-money laundering law.After the break, we move to the Chef's Table where Belgian authorities opened a money laundering investigation into the just-departed former European Union chief justice; and, the United Kingdom dismantled a series of massive money laundering operations tied to Russian oligarchs, Gorky Park organized crime groups, FSB cybercriminals and Moscow drug dealers.All that and more, on West Coast Cookbook & Speakeasy with Chef de Cuisine Justice Putnam.Bon Appétit!The Netroots Radio Live PlayerKeep Your Resistance Radio Beaming 24/7/365!“Everyone in this good city enjoys the full right to pursue his own inclinations in all reasonable and, unreasonable ways.” - The Daily Picayune, New Orleans, March 5, 1851Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/west-coast-cookbook-speakeasy--2802999/support.
553 w/ Chris Jericho - Gorky Park - Moscow Calling: Chris Jericho joins Chris, Nick, and Andy to break down the title track from Gorky Park's 1993 album Moscow Calling.
Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with Scott Page, Renowned Musician with Supertramp, Toto and Pink Floyd About Harvey's guest: Today's guest, Scott Page, is a renowned musician who's toured and recorded with the legendary bands Supertramp, Toto and Pink Floyd. He's also worked with a wide variety of music artists including David Cassidy, Gorky Park, David Lee Roth, and Hang Dynasty. But what makes him even more fascinating, are his innovative business ventures in the world of technology, post-production, interactive multi-media, software development, distribution services, and cyberspace management enhancement for content creators. For over 30 years he's been at the leading edge of technology entrepreneurship in the entertainment industry. In 1987 he founded an audio and video post-production company called Walt Tucker Productions, that produced projects for The Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi, Janet Jackson, Garth Brooks, and many other music stars. Then, in 1993, he co-founded a company called 7th Level, which created educational entertainment software called “Tuneland” featuring Howie Mandel, and its flagship product, the interactive musical CD/ROM, “Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time”. In 2004, he co-founded the New Media Broadcasting Company, which developed interactive distribution services for content creators and consumers, and created a communications platform connecting diverse audiences, artists and content owners through a collaborative online network. In 2011, he created a company called Direct To Care, which provided an online social business and presence management network for healthcare professionals. And in 2014, he launched GetYourOPI, an online presence management company, focusing on improving cyberspace presence for individuals and entities through analysis of their existing results on internet search engines. He served as CEO of Ignited Network, a start up music accelerator based in Los Angeles. And currently, he's the CEO of THINK-EXP, a company which is revolutionizing the entertainment industry with technological innovations creating one-of-a-kind, live immersive concert experiences. Our guest is also a philanthropist, and he's used his music to raise millions of dollars for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ To see more about Scott Page, go to:https://www.instagram.com/iamscottpage/ #ScottPage #harveybrownstoneinterviews
This week we have NEW Rock and Roll music that DESERVES to be heard from Aaron Leigh, Venrez, Paul Rodgers, Novakain, Leatherwolf, Mammoth WVH, Kurt Deimer, KK's Priest, Hurricane, Jackson Colt and Escape The Hive, plus music from Platinum Overdose, Krokus, Ted Nugent, and Gorky Park!
Всем привет! Новый ремикс на супер трек - Moscow Calling! Ровно в 100 BPM и в любимом стиле moombahton. Насыщенная аранжировка. Приятного прослушивания!
Programa 335 del 03 de mayo, trasmitiendo en España en Sol y Rabia, Revi Radio, TNT Radio Rock y Asalto Mata Radio Rock, en Argentina en Lado Salvaje Radio y en Puerto Rico en Heavy Metal Mansion. Programa especial dedicado al productor Bruce Fairbairn quien grabara discos para Loverboy, Blue Oyster Cult, Krokus, Black n' Blue, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Cinderella, Gorky Park, AC/DC, Scorpions, Poison, Jackyl, Van Halen, Chicago, Kiss, Yes y muchos otros. Canciones que escucharemos hoy: 1.Loverboy - Lucky One 2.Blue Oyster Cult - Take me Away 3.Krokus - Midnite Maniac 4.Black n' Blue - Stop the Lightning 5.Bon Jovi - The Boys are Back in Town 6.Aerosmith - Dude (Looks Like a Lady) 7.Ozzy Osbourne - Purple Haze 8.Cinderella - Move Over 9.Gorky Park - Bang 10.AC/DC - Thunderstruck 11.Scorpions - Don´t Believe Her 12.Poison - Ride the Wind 13.Jackyl - I am the I am 14.Van Halen - Amsterdam 15.Chicago - Night and Day 16.Kiss - Psycho Circus 17.Yes - Finally
Den 12. og 13. august 1989 blev der skrevet rockhistorie, da Bon Jovis manager, Doc McGhee, slæbte hele cirkusset til det der i dag er kendt som Luzhniki Stadion i Moskva. Og med hele cirkusset mener vi Cinderella, Scorpions, Skid Row, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi - og nykommerne, russiske Gorky Park. Det blev kaldt det russiske Woodstock - og når du hører dagens episode vil du forstå hvorfor - for der var lige dele kærlighed, kaos og rockmusik. Vært: Mike Tramp
The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro) TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago? For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt. That was the logo of the disc's distributor. Vestron Video. A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it. But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time. The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company. But what to call the company? It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point. At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future. Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling. The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet. Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great. Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night. For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron. They were doing pretty good. And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever. When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video. It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars. Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with. In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made. Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies. Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build. But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company. Lots of money. Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day. It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution. Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure. Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000. Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside. And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year. Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2. The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner. The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again. In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco. Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross. Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week. It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for. Dirty Dancing. Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname. Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle. But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it. They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise. To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special. Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget. For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials. Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny. Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role. Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming. Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released. After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th. Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance. But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set. The music. Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film. Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording. The writer nailed all ten. But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle. The closing song. While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.” Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version. The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there. While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals. With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably. RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts. When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts. The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds. But then a funny thing happened… Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack. Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place. In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales. Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better. When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago. On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong. The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988. Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets. Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then. Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola. The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role. New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.” Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck. But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales. Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves. Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo. The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales. And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting. Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot. One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either. John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6. The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres. Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label. The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film. The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them. After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run. While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school. People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years. Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was. Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right? We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro) TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago? For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt. That was the logo of the disc's distributor. Vestron Video. A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it. But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time. The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company. But what to call the company? It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point. At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future. Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling. The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet. Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great. Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night. For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron. They were doing pretty good. And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever. When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video. It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars. Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with. In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made. Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies. Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build. But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company. Lots of money. Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day. It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution. Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure. Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000. Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside. And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year. Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2. The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner. The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again. In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco. Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross. Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week. It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for. Dirty Dancing. Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname. Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle. But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it. They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise. To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special. Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget. For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials. Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny. Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role. Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming. Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released. After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th. Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance. But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set. The music. Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film. Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording. The writer nailed all ten. But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle. The closing song. While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.” Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version. The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there. While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals. With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably. RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts. When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts. The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds. But then a funny thing happened… Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack. Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place. In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales. Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better. When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago. On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong. The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988. Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets. Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then. Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola. The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role. New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.” Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck. But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales. Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves. Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo. The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales. And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting. Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot. One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either. John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6. The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres. Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label. The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film. The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them. After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run. While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school. People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years. Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was. Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right? We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
What's the least crazy set of sport parents? What's your top three favorite snack cakes? Gorky Park? It's a classic ToGH episode where the guys solve all the world's problems. Enjoy! Lens Plus: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/channel/lens/id6443351349 Subscribe on Spotify: https://anchor.fm/lensmedia/subscribe Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@talkorgohome Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ToGHPodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalkorGo YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEEnQWQLqsOI6p3L7ptQqQQ Created by Nick Wilson and Brandon Farmer Produced by Nick Wilson Hosted by Nick Wilson, Clint Thompson, & David Murphree Associate Producers - Aaron Garvich, Jake Morton Production Assistants - Coby Caswell, Nic Hansen --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lensmedia/message
Different cities have different things they buy into. In Paris there's style—you never want to look sloppy in Paris. In New York it's the energy of movement—try walking slowly on the sidewalk and you'll have Fran Leibowitz come up and say "Hey! Pretend it's a city."In Bangalore, there is a buy-in to preserve trees.You can ride a motorcycle on a crowded sidewalk, drive up the wrong way on a one-way street and only mildly annoy others. But try cutting a tree and the passing Bangalorean will give you a sharp look and probably make a quick call to the authorities. Indeed most homes have trees and apartment buildings are sometimes built around an existing tree. So Bangaloreans would not be surprised to see a new apartment building with a tree growing right through its floors.This isn't new though. Something about trees has found its way into the DNA of the city and indeed in all of us—after all in our DNA, we are part human, part city.And the sense of greenery has expressed itself in the city having two major, botanically rich parks—Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh—each as large and as old as some of the greatest city parks in the world. Hyde Park in London, Gorky Park in Moscow, Central Park, New York, and there are others.My guest Roopa Pai is author of the book, Cubbon Park—The Green Heart Of Bangalore.When Roopa was researching she called and asked to interview me. I said yes of course, immediately. More than anything, this appealed to my sense of duty. Indeed, I was personally involved in an investigative story about Cubbon Park titled, The Conspiracy To Kill Cubbon Park. The story was based on some builders and politicians who were spoiling to parcel off this historic lung space to developers.I grew up in Bangalore. The Park has been a part of my life. Roopa made me realize that I share a connection with people I will probably never meet.Because each of us has been alone with our deepest introspection when we experience the solitude of Cubbon Park. A bliss of birds and dogs—and oddly, the company of a hundred other humans who exist and at the same time, don't.Roopa Pai is a widely published author having written several children's book ranging from Indian mythology to Economics.She is an engineer—of computer science—a restaurant reviewer and a sometimes travel writer. Her ability to deal with such diverse subjects comes from Roopa being a fascinating subject for an urban petri dish. And beneath a charming and unassuming front, an incisive and perceptive mind.Let's find out all about her and about Cubbon Park.ABOUT ROOPA PAIRoopa Pai is one of India's best-known writers for children. She is Bangalore-based and has written over 25 books, ranging from picture books to chapter books and fiction to non-fiction, on themes as varied as sci-fi fantasy, popular science, math, history, economics, Indian philosophy, life skills, and medicine. When she is not writing, Roopa leads groups of children and young people on history and heritage walks across Bangalore and Karnataka, as part of her job as director of a company she co-founded, BangaloreWalks.Buy Cubbon Park: The Green Heart Of Bengaluru: https://amzn.to/3V0cJ6oWHAT'S THAT WORD?!Co-host Pranati "Pea" Madhav joins Ramjee Chandran in "What's That Word?!", where they discuss the phrase "UP STICKS (AND MOVE)".WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW?Reach us by mail: theliterarycity@explocity.com or simply, tlc@explocity.com.Or here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theliterarycityOr here: https://www.instagram.com/explocityblr/
Mick Herron chats about some of his favourite books and authors which include Francis Spufford, John Steinbeck, Gorky Park and The Wind In The Willows See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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Join Greg and me as we talk about Russia. Many people are fascinated with Russia (me included). It's the land where “everything is difficult, but nothing is impossible.” As we recorded this show, we acknowledge now is not the time to visit. We share information for when it is the time. St. Petersburg and Moscow are full of UNESCO sites, Michelin star restaurants, and cultural experiences like the Bolshoi Theater. There are also opportunities to enjoy the outdoors in Gorky Park, biking through St Petersburg, dining on a terrace or strolling the streets lined with fashionable boutiques. Russia is a place where exclusive experiences are quite unique – whether talking with Gorbachev's former interpreter, seeing behind the scenes of the Russian ballet, or having your child enjoy a ballet lesson with a professional dancer. And of course, we talk about favorite luxury hotels like the Four Seasons and Ararat Park Hyatt. Visit truvaytravel.com/40 for a video of today's show and additional resources.
For decades it was illegal to teach the Bible in the Soviet Union. Violators risked being subjected to “re-education.” If Soviet children were taught to revere anything, it was the Soviet State and its leaders. But things have changed, as you know, in the former “Evil Empire.” Thousands of Bibles have been distributed in Moscow's Gorky Park, in prisons, and in schools. School children were given Bibles in St. Petersburg. “I remember we had the Bibles in the classroom for only one month,” expressed the mayor, “and saw a profound change among the children.” The children given the Bible to...Article Link
Lee und Guess enttäuschen mit vollmundigen Versprechungen und Gästen, die nicht kommen, kündigen niveauvolle Rezensionen an und bewerben nur feinsten Stoff aus Filmen und Serien. Sorry, mit Erwartungen kommen die Banausen nicht klar - und trauen dürft ihr den beiden sowieso nicht.
This week, we look at the case of the art dealer Inigo Philbrick, who pleaded guilty to fraud in a New York court last week: is the art world, as his attorney claimed, “corrupt from top to bottom”? Georgina Adam, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper gives her response. For this epsiode's Work of the Week, we talk to Carmen Hermo, the curator of the exhibition Andy Warhol: Revelation at the Brooklyn Museum, about a painting in the show, New York Post (Judge Blasts Lynch) (1983), and what it tells us about Warhol's Catholicism. And as GES-2 House of Culture, the V-A-C Foundation's huge cultural centre in a former power station transformed by architect Renzo Piano, opens in Moscow next week, and the Garage Museum in the Russian capital announces its expansion into a landmark Modernist building in Gorky Park, we talk to Anna Bronovitsksya, architectural historian and professor at the Moscow Architecture School about these museums and the wider political situation in which they are being constructed. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week on a bumper Episode 114 of The Aid Station, presented by njuko, we travel to the USA for a far-reaching conversation with Ian Adamson, former competitive adventure racer, television professional and president of World Obstacle. It's an episode so packed with insights and inspiration that it stretches way beyond our usual limits to 30minutes. A few of the highlights include: The vital role of sleep and its impact on memory. These insights alone are worth investing the time to listen to the conversation The story behind how Obstacle Racing was one of only two sports since 2018 to achieve Global Association of International Sports Federation observer status - a key stepping stone to becoming an Olympic Sport Behind the scenes insights into delivering the World Ninja Championships in 2019 in Gorky Park, Moscow with 100,000 spectators Delivering the highest ever OCR World Championships in the crater of Mount Kilimanjaro and directly impacting the lives of over 10,000 local People and it's relevance to every mass participation event Understanding that everyone's point of view is 100% correct - even if you don't agree with it #MassParticipationWorld #TheAidStation #IanAdamson #MassParticipationEvents #MassEvents #MassSports #WorldObstacle #OCR #Spartan #JoedeSeana #MPW #Spartan #Ninja
Ideas & Insights Thoughts out loud. A way to think ideas into solutions. Dream Pilot Movie Overviewed: https://boxd.it/e3wOU Be kind - Stay in control Read more books, stay amazing Be Thankful - Be Grateful podcastjebuth.com #podcast #VLOG #thoughts
“Wind Of Change” by Scorpions has the rare distinction of being a history lesson within a huge rock ballad, released after the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989 in the band's native Germany. In the years since, it has become a unifying theme song for the circumstances around that event, and singer Klaus Meine has surprisingly had to debunk conspiracy theories that the song was actually written by the C.I.A. as propaganda to end the Cold War. The fascination people around the world have with this song - and its iconic whistle - is a testament to the power of music. Watch the video episode on the Behind The Song Youtube channel: https://bit.ly/2DBF4wJ
Freiwillige Filmkontrolle widmet sich in Teil 1 der 1983er-Retrospektive folgenden Werken: 1. „Return of the Jedi“ 2. „Krull“ 3. „Das Osterman Weekend“ 4. „The Day After“ + „Testament“ 5. „Scarface“ 6. „Under Fire“ 7. „The King of Comedy“ 8. „The Big Chill“ 9. „Flashdance“ 10 „Gorky Park“
FFK bespricht die wichtigsten Filme des Kinojahres 1983 Freiwillige Filmkontrolle widmet sich in Teil 1 der 1983er-Retrospektive folgenden Werken: 1. „Return of the Jedi“ 2. „Krull“ 3. „Das Osterman Weekend“ 4. „The Day After“ + „Testament“ 5. „Scarface“ 6. „Under Fire“ 7. „The King of Comedy“ 8. „The Big Chill“ 9. „Flashdance“ 10 „Gorky Park“ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After a forensic examination of the work of Max Norman in Episode 22, the second visit to the control desk by the Enter Sadmen podcast headed for America and the man behind some of the biggest selling rock albums of the 80s - the late Bruce Fairbairn. Mention Fairbairn in a game of word association and the chances are the words that immediately spring to mind are Bon and Jovi. closely followed by Slippery, When and Wet. In fact, record a show about Fairbairn's work and it would be an act of near criminality to omit New Jersey's finest (with apologies to Springsteen fans) from consideration. Joining Jon and the boys were veteran rockers Aerosmith and their renaissance album from 1987, Permanent Vacation. And Steve deals up the joker in the pack with Gorky Park, the band mentored and championed by JBJ back in the day, and their self-titled debut.
Phil Manchester, former Moscow resident and pub quizmaster extraordinaire, joins Ally Pitts to discuss this adaptation of the first of Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko detective novels, set in early 1980s Moscow. CONTENT WARNING: The film includes violence and gore, including violence against women. SPOILERS for both the book and the film (and indeed subsequent Renko books) from about 23 minutes in until the end. Support the show/fund Ally's caffeine habit at: ko-fi.com/russophilesunite Listeners in the UK can help the show by picking up a book from our uk.bookshop.org affiliate store. The selection includes Gorky Park and the rest of Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko novels. There's also our www.rusandsov.com affiliate store where you can get t-shirts, wall posters, coffee mugs, and more with a Russian and or Soviet theme. If you use the promo code RUSSOPHILESUNITE at check out, you'll get 10% off, and they ship locally in the US, the EU, and Australia. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow and rate us on Podchaser: www.podchaser.com/russophilesunitemoviepodcast The show's intro music is Cold by Sasha Ilyukevich and the Highly Skilled Migrants. You can find more of their music at: https://thehighlyskilledmigrants.bandcamp.com/ or on Spotify. If you'd like to get in touch and tell us what you thought of the film and/or the podcast episode, it would be great to hear from you! Here are some ways you can do that: Twitter: @RussophilesU Email: russophilesunite@gmail.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/russophilesunite Instagram: www.instagram.com/russophiles_unite/ Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/Ally_ Find Ally's other podcast appearances at: https://www.podchaser.com/creators/alistair-pitts-107ZzmUqmI
Episode 16 of season 4 started a bit differently as I was testing out the auto DJ function and instead of starting up the theme song for TSORR, it played Whitesnake. Normality was resumed quickly and we sped through some Black Sabbath and ACDC. I pointed out that 'Neon Knights' off Sabbath's Heaven and Hell is the song responsible for the world's greatest ever collective sigh. I am still deeply under the spell of the book Nothin' But a Good Time, the story of 80's hair metal so we checked out Girl and L.A. Guns. We took a listen to Bob Dylan's live version of 'All Along The Watchtower' as promised last week. The new stuff included more Smith / Kotzen and Greta Van Fleet off their brand new album The Battle at Garden's Gate. I am raving about the tracks I have heard off the soon-to-be-released Myles Kennedy album, the track we played, 'Get Aong' is superb. Other than that it was pretty much par for the course, The Burning and L.A. Cobra for South Africa, James Reyne, ACDC, and Jet for Aussie, Kreator and In Flames for metal and The Distillers and Stiff Little Fingers for punk. A highlight for me was listening to 'Dreamer Deceiver', Judas Priests' masterpiece off Sad Wings of Destiny, it is a reminder once again of just how good Rob Halford is. Artists featured: Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, ACDC, Ministry, Scorpions, Girl, L.A. Guns, Greta Van Fleet, The Dead Daisies, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Bob Dylan, Kreator, Gorky Park, Ozzy Osbourne, Stiff Little Fingers, The Distillers, Pink Floyd, Smith / Kotzen, Jet, James Reyne, Myles Kennedy, Twisted Sister, Probot, Dokken, The Burning, L.A. Cobra, Iron Maiden, Guns 'n' Roses, Accept, Jetboy, Great White, Hinder, Judas Priest, Todd La Torre, In Flames, Kiss.
Today I go over this fun track by the Russian metal band Gorky Park from their “Moscow Calling” album. As promised, here is a link to this track: https://youtu.be/mWW6NFGtVM4
It's time to discuss serious issues like medical abuse, Native American rights and the Soviet critter industry, as we take a look at some of the varied output of compassionate journeyman Michael Apted. GORKY PARK (1983) 16:30 THUNDERHEART (1992) 1:00:00 EXTREME MEASURES (1996) 1:47:10
Oh, those Russians. Always up to no good. Director Michael Apted helms this thriller with a stellar cast including William Hurt, Lee Marvin, Joanna Pacula, Brian Dennehy, Ian McDiarmid, Ian Bannen, and Richard Griffiths.
At the time I went from Warsaw to Belarus, they issued a 5-day visa on arrival. So, I decided to spend 4 days in the country, since my flight out would have been a few hours too late. This five-day visa on arrival was changed one day after my visit to 30 days. It must have been because I made such a good impression on the government that they changed it. Belarus It has borders with Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia – and is a fairly unexplored corner of Eastern Europe. The population of Belarus is about 9.5 million people, which puts them on the 93rd place in the world. So somewhere in the middle when it comes to population. But the land mass is quite big so it's not that densely populated. Minsk, the capital of Belarus, is about 2 million, so Minsk is the 11th most populous city in Europe. After an hour bus ride from the Airport to the city, I met my Airbnb host, Svetlana. She let me in to a wonderful apartment with a huge bathtub. TOURING MINSK WITH A COUNTRYMAN I have a Danish friend of a friend who lives here permanently. I've been in contact with him for a while. And it was actually my plan to go to Belarus in the very start of my journey in 2016… but only because he wasn't in the country at the time, I decided to go there later. As we both are Danish, we obviously speak Danish, so you probably won't be able to understand much. If you – on the other hand do speak the language head over to the Danish version of this podcast. While we're walking, we pass the building where the president is working. It's not the White House of Belarus. He doesn't live here. LIVING IN A DICTATORSHIP Belarus is a dictatorship, and a few days before my visit, I shared a YouTube clip with President Lukashenko where he said these words… and I kid you not… “I think it's better to be a dictator – than being gay”. Yes, he actually said that. Lukashenko has run Belarus with an iron fist since 1994, and Belarus is often referred to as the last dictatorship in Europe. It's a country where gay rights are almost non-existent, a country where there's no free press. But according to Carsten, it's not as bad as people think. Yes, there's no freedom of speech, and the elections might not be totally fair. But it's not North Korea, he says. There's still a nice quality of life here, and it's not something he feels in his daily life. When I posted the video on Facebook and was appalled by the statement about it being better to be a dictator than being gay, someone commented: ” Oh .. how judgmental and prejudiced you are Palle Bo. When you are so biased and negative, I don't understand at all that you choose to travel to Belarus.” This was something I also heard when I went to North Korea. But I don't see it that way. Going to a country doesn't mean that I support the leadership and the way things are run. I've also been to the USA during the Trump presidency – even though I'm not a big fan of him. I know, you can't compare USA to a dictatorship. Not at all, but when I go to a country, it's to learn things and hopefully make some local friends along the way. I try to educate myself before, during and after my visit to a country, and I do feel that I also try to keep an open mind. I speak up about the things that I feel is wrong and also talk about the things that are good about my visit. I also did that in my North Korea episode, where I spoke highly of the people. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this… Is it wrong for me to travel to a country like this? Make a comment on Facebook.com/theradiovagabond, drop me a line on listener@theradiovagabond.com or record a voice message by clicking on the “talk to me-banner” on theradiovagabond.com. CARSTEN'S VIEWS ON LIVING HERE They do have elections here, but according to Carsten the result is more or less decided before. And they do have a parliament but all the people in it are in Lukashenko's pocket. When I ask him if he's afraid to speak out loud about this he says. “No, as long as I'm not protesting with a megaphone and a sign in the city, nothing will happen. Sometimes I'm a bit tired of the way western media are describing the country. Yes, it is a dictatorship, but many of the countries that we (quote-unquote) are “friendly with” … like Saudi Arabia, The Emirates and China… are also dictatorships.” Some things are good in Belarus. Compared to many of the other former Soviet countries, he's cracking down on corruption – maybe except for himself. Other good things, Carsten mentions are that it's quite clean here in the city and then it's safe. There's no need to be afraid of walking around even at night here. And in the 90's he came down hard on the Belarusian Mafia. Carsten actually says: “So, there are good thing about having a dictator”, which makes me laugh – and we decide that this quote will be the title of this episode. FACTS ABOUT WHERE WE ARE: Here are some facts about Belarus that you might not know: Around 40% of Belarus is covered by forest – and sometimes referred to as the ‘Lungs of Europe'. Belarus is the last country in Europe that still has the death penalty. It's the Las Vegas of Eastern European. When gambling was banned in Russia, a lot of casinos were opened in Belarus, which is one the reasons so many Russians come here. Belarus is one of the few countries that does not switch to daylight saving time. The country has an extremely low unemployment rate, less than 1%. Beggars and homeless people are also very few here. Minsk is a very green and clean city. Not only do they have many parks, but here is also the third largest botanical garden in the world. Stretching over 15 kilometres across the capital, Independence Avenue is the country's longest street. Throughout history, it has not only grown in length and width but has also had 14 name changes. one of the longest streets in Europe, a candidate for inclusion in the UNESCO World Heritage List. MINSK METRO, GORKY PARK, AND VICTORIA SQUARE We're heading down underground to The Minsk Metro. It opened in 1984, and it's not that big – presently it only consists of 3 lines and 33 stations. Unlike the Moscow metro, here the signs are also in letters that we can read, which makes riding it a bit easier. Not only is it a fast way to move around Minsk, it's also cheap: A ticket you can use all days is only around 30 cents. Victory Square in the historic center of Minsk and it's the key landmark of Minsk. It's close to Gorky Park – yes, like Moscow they also have a Gorky Park here, which holds an amusement park. In the middle of the square there's a monument that was built in 1954 in honour of the soldiers of the Soviet Army and partisans of Belarus, during the Second World War. Being between Europe and Russia they were really stuck in the middle when Hitler and Stalin were fighting. So, Minsk and a lot of the country has been more or less totally rebuilt after the war. THE COMMUNIST PARTY STARTED HERE Carsten then takes me to a tiny green house and tells me a story that I didn't know. In this little house they founded the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party that was the forefather of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was all the way back in 1898 – so before the revolution in 1917, for those of you than know your history. And it all started right here in Minsk. Not in Moscow. NO BOWLING = KENNEDY ASSASINATION And then another thing that I didn't know. A few meters away in number 4 of the same street lived a guy called … Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin accused of shooting President John F. Kennedy. He defected to the USSR in the early '60s, after he was discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps and ended up living right here in Minsk. But he didn't like it here. In his diary he wrote, “I am starting to reconsider my desire about staying. The work is drab, the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have had enough.” Shortly after that, he wrote to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow requesting to get his American passport back, since he never formally renounced his U.S. citizenship. So, in other words: If there were bowling alleys and nightclubs here at the time… he might have stayed, and Kennedy might never have assassinated. That is if you don't believe in the conspiracy theories that he didn't do it. KHATYN MEMORIAL SITE We're heading 50 km north to Khatyn to visit the Memorial site where a tragic even took place in the Second World War. Khatyn was a village of 26 houses. On March 22, 1943, almost the entire population of the village was massacred by a Nazi Battalion in retaliation for an attack on German troops by Soviet partisans. The people here had nothing to do with the attack and were completely innocent. 149 people, including 75 children under 16 years of age, were killed – burned, shot or suffocated in fire. The youngest baby was only 7 weeks old. The village was then looted and burned to the ground. This massacre was not an unusual incident in Belarus during World War II. At least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were burned and destroyed by the Nazis, and often all their inhabitants were killed – some amounting up to 1,500 victims. Many of the villages were burned down many times. Altogether, over 2,000,000 people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, almost a quarter of the region's population. MEET VALERIE FROM MINSK Back in Minsk we meet one of Carstens friends. Valerie, who is born and raised here in Minsk. She tells me that she really likes living here, and a few of the things she mentions is that it's a city that never sleeps – you can always find a cozy bar and a buzzling nightclub any night of the week. Apparently a lot different than when Lee Harvey was here. That was all from Belarus, that turned out to be a great experience. Like Albania this wasn't a country I had high expectations from. But if I look back on all the countries in the eastern part of Europe, I've visited in this season, Albania and Belarus are my favourites. Maybe because I didn't expect much. My next stop will be the last in this season… I'm going to the Czech Republic and I'm so looking forward to that. My name is Palle Bo and I gotta keep moving. See ya. LETTER FROM A LISTENER I've got a letter from a listener… from Dublin, Ireland. Hi Palle I discovered your podcast when a friend recommended it to me, and since then I've been totally hooked on it. I started by binching your current episodes from Europe, and after that I went back in the archives and listened to your episodes from Asia. I love following your journey, and it inspires me to travel more myself – when the Pandemic lets us. Normally I listen while I cook, and I'm always looking forward to hearing what happens next. Keep up the good work, Ian from Dublin. I would love to hear from you and now there's a simple way for you to send me a voice message. It's a cool little web-based app called Tellbee and all you have to do is click on the banner called TALK TO ME on TheRadioVagabond.com and talk. Tell me where you are and what you're doing when you listen to this. It's super simple and one of the cool things is that you can listen to it and redo it if you're not happy with it – before you click send. I get a small soundbite I can play on the show and it's always wonderful to hear from you guys. You can off course also just fill out the form under contact on the website. SPONSOR This episode is supported in part by Hotels25.com where you always can find the best prices on hotels, guesthouses and hostels.
Da jeg rejser mod Hviderusland, kunne man få et fem-dages visum ved ankomsten. Derfor kunne jeg kun være der i fire dage – mit fly videre var fem dage og et par timer. Denne fem dages visumregel blev faktisk ændret samme dag som jeg forlod landet. Nu hedder det 30 dage. Hviderusland grænser på til Polen, Ukraine, Letland, Litauen og Rusland – og er et ret overset hjørne af Østeuropa. Der bor omkring 9,5 millioner mennesker I landet, hvilket placerer dem som nummer 93 på listen over lande inddelt efter befolkning. Men arealet er ret stort, så det er ikke særlig tæt befolket. Hovedstaden Minsk har omkring 2 millioner mennesker, hvilket placerer dem som den 11. mest befolkede hovedstad i Europa. Efter en times bustur fra lufthavnen ankommer jeg til det gadehjørne, hvor min lejlighed ligger og møder min Airbnb-værtinde Svetlana. Hun lukker mig ind i en dejlig stor lejlighed med et kæmpe badekar. GÅTUR I MINSK MED EN HERBOENDE DANSKER Jeg har en ven af en ven, der bor fast i Minsk. Jeg har været i kontakt med ham længe, og møder ham nu for første gang her i centrum af Minsk. Han har været bosat i Hviderusland siden 2011 og har før det boet og arbejdet i Estland, Letland, Litauen, Rusland og Kasakhstan… Faktisk har han boet i det tidligere USSR gennem de sidste 26 år. Da Carsten kom til Hviderusland, opstartede han et dansk logistikfirma, men har i dag et firma hvor de hjælper Danske og europæiske webshops med at sælge til Rusland. Han har 3 børn med en hviderussisk kvinde, som han nu er separeret fra. De er stadig gode venner og arbejder sammen. I dag er børnene 9, 12 og 17 år. De to yngste børn bor stadig i Minsk mens den ældste (siden jeg var der) er startet på gymnasium i Danmark. Vi går rundt i byen og kommer vi forbi den bygning, hvor præsidenten arbejder fra, men ikke hvor han bor, så det er ikke det Hviderussiske Hvide Hus. BOR I ET DIKATUR Hviderusland er et diktatur. Præsiden Lukasjenko har styret landet med en jernnæve siden 1994, og landet bliver ofte kaldt Europas sidste diktatur. Det er et land, hvor der stort set ikke er rettigheder for homoseksuelle og hvor en fri presse ikke findes. Et par dage inden mit besøg, delte jeg en video på Facebook om præsidenten, hvor han havde sagt dette: ”Jeg synes, det er bedre at være diktator – end at være bøsse”. Ja, det sagde han faktisk. Kort inden mit besøg delte jeg denne video på Facebook og fik en skarp kommentar: ”Uhhh .. hvor fordømmende og fordomsfuld, du er, Palle Bo Når du er så forudindtaget og negativ, så forstår jeg slet ikke, at du vælger at rejse til Hviderusland.” Det medførte en længere debat frem og tilbage. Og det er noget, jeg også hørte i forbindelse med mit besøg i Nordkorea. Men jeg føler ikke, at jeg støtter et styre ved at besøge landet. Jeg kommer med et åbent sind og forholder mig kritisk til, hvad jeg mener er forkert og fremhæver de positive sider. Det gjorde jeg også i min episode fra Nordkorea. Faktisk var der en amerikaner, der (på et af mine besøg i USA) spurgte mig om jeg da ikke følte at jeg støtter Kim Jong-un ved at besøge Nordkorea. Hertil svarede jeg, at jeg jo også var i USA selvom jeg nødvendigvis ikke er en stor fan af Trump. Men hvad mener du? Er det forkert af mig at besøge lande, der ikke har et styre, som vi kender fra vores del af verden. Og hvor går grænsen? Kan jeg i så fald heller ikke besøge Kina, De Forenede Arabiske Emirater og mange lande i Afrika? Lad mig høre fra dig enten på Facebook.com/theradiovagabond, eller ved at sende en mail på lytter@radiovagabond.dkeller en talebesked ved at klikke på ”Sig Noget-banneret” på radiovagabond.dk. Men ifølge Carsten er der lidt flere nuancer på udtalelsen og at det ikke er noget, han mærker meget til i hverdagen. Faktisk siger han, at han godt kan lide at der er styr på tingene. Der er meget rent, der er ingen korruption og det er meget trygt og sikkert. Han siger med et grin: ”Ja, der er faktisk gode ting ved at bo i et diktatur”. FAKTA OM HVOR VI ER: Omkring 40% af Hviderusland er dækket af skove. Og landet bliver ofte kaldt Europas lunger. Hviderusland er det sidste land i Europa, der stadig har dødsstraf. Landet er Europas Las Vegas. Da spil blev ulovligt i Rusland åbnede der mange kasinoer i Hviderusland, hvilket er en af grundene til at mange russere besøger landet. Hviderusland er et af de få lande, der ikke skifter til vintertid. Landet har en meget lav arbejdsløshed – mindre end 1%. Tiggere og hjemløse er også et meget sjældent syn her. Hovedstaden Minsk er både grøn og ren. Ikke alene har de mange parker, men de har også den tredje største botaniske have i verden. Independence Avenue strækker sig mere end 15 km gennem hovedstaden. Gennem historien er den ikke alene vokset i både længde og bredde, den har også skiftet navn hele 14 gange. Det er en af de længste gader i Europa og er kandidat til at blive optaget i UNESCOs Verdensarv liste. MINSK METRO, GORKY PARK OG SEJRSPLADSEN Fra Metroen bevæger vi os stadig under jorden hen mod Sejrspladsen i den historiske del af Minsk – tæt ved Gorky Park. Ja, som Moskva har de også en Gorky Park her i byen. I midten af pladsen, der er omringet af en rundkørsel, er der et monument, der blev rejst for at hylde de soldater der faldt i anden verdenskrig. Og så er der en evig ild, der brænder tæt ved.
It's time to review our first Blockbuster, Wonder Woman 1984! Then we review 1983's Thriller Gorky Park Starring William Hurt.
393 - Gorky Park - My Generation: Chris, Nick, and Andy break down Gorky Park's cover of the classic by The Who "My Generation" from their 1989 debut album.
La Tienda De Biblioteca Del Metal: Encontraras, Ropa, Accesorios,Decoracion, Ect... Todo Relacionado Al Podcats Biblioteca Del Metal Y Al Mundo Del Heavy Metal. Descubrela!!!!!! Ideal Para Llevarte O Regalar Productos Del Podcats De Ivoox. (Por Tiempo Limitado) https://teespring.com/es/stores/biblioteca-del-metal-1 Axxis es un grupo alemán de Power Metal, fundado en 1984, pero es en 1988 cuando realmente se consolidan como banda.Como el propio grupo cuenta en su web, todo comenzó con una "maqueta de una canción" que fue grabada en Kamen (Hermes Studios), con ayuda de Wolfgang Pentighaus en 1988. En esa maqueta tocaban el tema "Tears of the trees" que enviaron a todas las discográficas. Después de que EMI no firmara con Axxis debido a esta canción, enviaron la maqueta otra vez, fue aceptada, empezaron a delirar en la oficina central de EMI y...la historia de Axxis comenzó... En febrero de 1989 llegaba a las tiendas de todo el mundo "Kingdom of the Night", primer álbum de Axxis, que tras su salida vendió más de 100.000 copias, convirtiéndose así en el disco de debut de una banda de hard rock alemana más vendido de la historia (lo que les reportaría un Multimedia Award). Unos meses más tarde, en septiembre, Axxis estaba de gira por Europa con Black Sabbath. Casi sin tiempo para descansar, "Axxis II" fue lanzado en agosto de 1990, y obtuvo un éxito similar al de su predecesor. Dos meses después, el grupo giraba de nuevo por Alemania, Austria y Suiza. En mayo de 1991, convertidos en uno de los grupos revelación de la escena, grababan "Access All Areas", disco en directo. Dos años después, en 1993, llegaba "The Big Thrill" producido en Filadelfia y Nueva York por Joey Balin. Como curiosidad, este disco fue el último vinilo producido por la fábrica de EMI antes de su cierre, provocado por la muerte del vinilo a favor del CD. The Big Thrill llegaba acompañado de una gira, esta vez no como teloneros, sino como cabezas de cartel y con teloneros (Gorky Park). Durante ese tour pasaron por los festivales Rock Am Ring (Alemania) y Rock Auf Der Insel (Austria) Un año después, entre octubre y diciembre de 1994, "Matters Of Survival" era producido en los estudios Goodnight LA (Los Ángeles) por Keith Olsen. El álbum llegaba a las calles en febrero del año siguiente, con la consecuente gira, en la que pasaron por el Rock Am Ring y el Rock Im Park. "Voodoo Vibes", el disco más rockero del grupo, fue producido en los DierksStudios (Colonia) en octubre de 1996, y lanzado en febrero de 1997, sucedido de una gira por Alemania en mayo, y una gira acompañando a U.D.O. por Alemania y Suiza en diciembre, tras la cual el guitarrista Walter Pietsch abandonada el grupo. Los restantes miembros, Harry Oellers, Bernhard Weiß y Richtie Michalski, decidieron continuar juntos y buscar unos nuevos guitarrista y bajista. Desde mayo a diciembre de 1998 estuvieron haciendo pruebas hasta que, finalmente, Guido Wehmeyer como guitarrista y Udo(Kuno) Niemeyer como bajista pasaron a formar parte de la banda. Inmediatamente, Axxis en conjunto se puso a trabajar en "Back to the Kingdom", esta vez bajo Massacre Records, que llegaría en marzo de 2000, tras un parón de 2 años. La gira por Alemania fue un éxito, y vendría seguida de "Collection of Power", un EP concebido por la banda como un regalo a los fans. En septiembre de 2001 salió a la venta "Eyes of Darkness", CD multimedia que incluía un juego (Rockmine) y un clip en directo de la canción "Shadowman". En 2004, el grupo resurgía con "Time Machine", noveno disco. Dos años más tarde llegaría "Paradise in Flames", de gran éxito, considerado una de las obras maestras del grupo. Este álbum se caracteriza por un sonido mucho más renovado con respecto a sus trabajos anteriores, así como una fuerza y un desarrollo de las canciones más amplio, apareciendo más los teclados. Pero la característica más importante y notoria de este álbum es la intervención de la cantante "Lakonia", la cual ya había participado en su disco anterior como corista, pero que en este trabajo toma un papel protagonista, mostrando su bella y aguda voz en temas como "Take my hand" "Dance with the dead" o en la preciosa balada "Dont leave me". Es considerado como el mejor disco de Axxis por numerosos fans, y dentro del cual se encuentra una de las canciones que ya forman parte de las imprescindibles de esta banda: Tales of glory island. Tras el lanzamiento del décimo disco de la banda, no podía faltar un recopilatorio, y efectivamente "Best of Axxis" salió el mismo año 2006, aunque el lanzamiento quedó ligeramente empañado por la marcha del guitarrista, Guido, del grupo. En 2007 sale a la venta su undécimo disco: Doom of Destiny. En 2007 y 2008 hacen una gira junto a Gamma Ray y Helloween. Tras la gira el grupo anuncia la salida de su batería, André Hilgers, quien se une a los también alemanes Rage. Mientras que el grupo realizaba pruebas para encontrar sustituto, el puesto estuvo suplido por Dirk Brand. Finalmente, tras una intensa búsqueda, Axxis anuncia a Alex Landenburg (hasta ese momento batería de gira de Annihilator) como nuevo batería. En junio de 2009 vuelven a España para actuar en el Metalway Festival de Zaragoza, compartiendo cartel con bandas como Motorhead, Manowar, Heaven and Hell (Black Sabbath), Twisted Sister... y muchas otras bandas más. Después de las giras ofrecidas en 2008, Axxis comenzó a trabajar en un nuevo proyecto, que salió a la venta el 28 de agosto de 2009 y lleva como título "Utopia", del cual ya afirmaron en su web que sería un trabajo muy especial para celebrar su 20 aniversario. Este álbum se presenta mucho más veloz y potente que sus predecesores, con una especial fijación en los teclados y en los solos rápidos. La portada está de nuevo a cargo de Derek Gores, quien realizó las portadas de los álbumes anteriores. En España salió a la venta, aparte de la edición estándar, una edición especial con la "Canción del 20 Aniversario" donde colaboran, entre otros, artistas como Doro y Andi Deris (Cantante de la también alemana banda Helloween) En diciembre de 2009, realizan en Alemania un concierto llamado "20 Years Anniversary Show" para conmemorar sus 20 años de carrera. Este concierto se caracterizó por interpretar numerosos temas de la inmensa mayoría de sus álbumes y por contar con antiguos miembros de la banda que también subieron al escenario para realizar un concierto memorable. Tras el directo, se anunció en la web que en un futuro sería lanzado un DVD del concierto, con otros añadidos, cuya producción se completaría en 2011. Este Disco/DVD fue el primero que publicaron desde su propia productora, "Phonotraxx Music" desde la cual van a editar todos sus futuros trabajos. En mayo de 2012, publicarían un álbum de covers titulado "Rediscovered", el cual versionaba canciones de los años 70-80. Temas como "Stayin Alive" de los Bee Gees, "Another day in paradise" de Phil Collins o incluso la balada "My heart will go on" de James Horner fueron versionadas con un sonido impecable. El disco tuvo una acogida muy buena y vendieron muchos más álbumes de los que esperaban. En mayo de 2013, publican un video haciendo referencia al próximo trabajo, que consistirá en la segunda parte de su primer disco: Kingdom of the Night II.El estilo de esta banda germana siempre ha estado ligado al Heavy metal con influencias del rock n' roll. En los inicios, el estilo era más ochentero con un sonido clásico, que perduró en los álbumes siguientes aunque fueron algo más tranquilos. A partir de 1995, la música de esta banda optó primero por un cambio en el modo de hacer las canciones (Matter of survival) y luego por un sonido más rockero (Voodoo vibes). Poco después, volvieron a sus raíces y con el "Back to the kingdom" realizaron una de sus obras maestras sonando como en el primer álbum (de ahí su nombre) pero a su vez mostrando más calidad y experiencia. Pero fue en 2004 (Time machine) donde la evolución de Axxis comenzó. En este álbum se apreciaban nuevas técnicas como el doble pedal, una aparición mucho más notable del teclado, los coros con voces femeninas... y luego con "Paradise In flames" el sonido de Axxis llegó a lo más alto por diversas razones, así como un preludio orquestado, canciones que alternan voces masculinas y femeninas, solos de guitarra rápidos y melódicos y canciones en su totalidad que han hecho historia en este grupo como "Tales of glory Island" "Take my hand" o "Lady moon" eso si, nunca abandonando el Heavy Metal que los ha caracterizado, y los caracteriza. Se dice que el Axxis contemporáneo es Power, esto se debe a que en los últimos discos han aparecido canciones de Power Metal, como "Doom of destiny" o "Icewind" pero la mayoría siguen siendo de Heavy Metal. Uno de los rasgos más característicos de Axxis desde siempre es la aparición de una o más baladas en los álbumes. Suelen tratar temas amorosos, y sus letras son en la mayoría de los casos muy profundas. Cabrían destacar "Only God Knows", "Stay dont leave me", "Angel" o "Lost in love"
Es ist soweit: Im Sommer 1989 kehren die Scorpions zurück in die Sowjetunion, um endlich auch in Moskau zu spielen. Das von ihrem damaligen US-Manager Doc McGhee initiierte Moscow Peace Festival findet exakt 20 Jahre nach Woodstock statt, aufgrund einer ominösen juristischen Vorgeschichte McGhees allerdings als Anti-Drogen-Festival. Klaus Meine, Rudolf Schenker und Matthias Jabs erzählen Host Steve Blame, wie dafür ausgerechnet einige der wildesten Hardrock-Bands der Stunde eingeflogen werden: Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne - und natürlich die Scorpions! Im Rahmen dieser Feierlichkeiten findet Klaus schließlich die Inspiration des Moments, die ihn einige Wochen später zu "Wind Of Change" führen wird. Parallel dazu schildert Journalist und Nachrichtensprecher Peter Kloeppel die politischen Ereignisse des Jahres 1989, die bald weiter gehen als selbst Berufsoptimisten zu träumen gewagt hätten. Steve erfährt außerdem, wie es zum charakteristischen Pfeifen im Song gekommen ist und wie die Scorpions von den Ereignissen am 9. November eingeholt werden. Dass sie für ihr kommendes Album einen Song im Gepäck haben, der einmal zum Soundtrack all dieser Ereignisse werden wird, ist ihnen zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch längst nicht bewusst... Redaktion: Jens Thiele / Produktion: Aleksandra ZebischUnsere allgemeinen Datenschutzrichtlinien finden Sie unter https://art19.com/privacy. Die Datenschutzrichtlinien für Kalifornien sind unter https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info abrufbar.
Die zweite Folge von "The Iconic Song: Wind Of Change" spannt den Bogen von 1979 bis 1988: Die Scorpions feiern ihren Durchbruch als internationale Rock-Superstars und konzentrieren sich voll auf ihre Karriere in den USA, wo sie mit Alben wie "Animal Magnetism" (1980), "Blackout" (1982) und "Love At The First Sting" (1984) die Hallen und Arenen ausverkaufen. Klaus Meine, Rudolf Schenker und Matthias Jabs erzählen Host Steve Blame, wie sich dann plötzlich überraschend die Möglichkeit ergibt, hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang spielen zu können; zunächst in Budapest und über dortige Verbindungen schließlich sogar 1988 für zehn Konzerte im damaligen Leningrad (und heutigen St. Petersburg). Es sind unvergessliche Erlebnisse, die sie auch ihren Fans in der DDR ein Stück näherbringen und der Band einen prägenden Einblick in "die russische Seele" gewähren. Journalist und News-Anchorman Peter Kloeppel sowie Alexei Belov von Gorky Park, der damals russischen Supportband der Scorpions, ordnen für Steve die damaligen (musik-)historischen Ereignisse zusätzlich aus ihrer Perspektive ein. Redaktion: Jens Thiele / Produktion: Aleksandra ZebischUnsere allgemeinen Datenschutzrichtlinien finden Sie unter https://art19.com/privacy. Die Datenschutzrichtlinien für Kalifornien sind unter https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info abrufbar.
Today we lost yet another true luminary in the world of magic, Marvyn Roy, better known to many as Mr. Electric." Marvyn and Carol Roy performed the "Mr. Electric" Act for over fifty years. Mr. Electric toured the world during the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. Marvyn & Carol were featured at Radio City Music Hall, the London Palladium, the Latin Quarter, Gorky Park in Moscow, the Ed Sullivan Show and the Hollywood Palace. Whether working hotels, ice shows, floor shows, night clubs, theaters, arenas or amusement parks, Mr. & Mrs. Electric led a life that most magicians only dream of experiencing. Marvyn 95. I interviewed Marvyn in 2009 and hope that you will enjoy remembering him along with me by revisiting this interview. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Dai Vernon Foundation.
On this episode I dive into Buster Keaton's The General and Jackie Chan's Police Story. First though I talk about a lot of movies that I have been watching at home; Cul De Sac (1966), The Brood (1979), Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Invisible Man (2020), The Great Buster (2018), Mikey and Nicky (1976), Lockout (2012), Child 44 (2015), Targets (1968), Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), Lovebirds (2020), From Beyond (1986), Cornered (1945), Goke, Bodysnatcher From Hell (1968), The Wrong Missy (2020), Blind Alley (1939), Gimme Shelter (1970), My Lucky Stars (1985), Gorky Park (1983), Fearless Hyena (1979), The Young Master (1980), The General (1926), Capone (2020), Just Mercy (2019), Heathers (1989), Police Story (1985), The Greasy Strangler (2016), Haxen (1922), and Danger: Diabolik (1968). Then I talk about why I love Buster Keaton and I dive into the 1926 classic The General. Then I give some love to another actor who does great stunt work, Jackie Chan and dive into his 1985 classic Police Story. It's a fun episode. If you have never seen The General here is a link; https://youtu.be/d8ntQl055jI Please let me know what you think by calling the podcast at 602-688-2403
Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow's Gorky Park. Twenty years later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. In this interview, Ryan and Tim discuss how he learned to write, why outlining is a must for thrillers, how Tim's military experience shapes his writing, why most marketing advice is dumb, and much more. You can find Tim at: http://timtigner.com/ Mentioned on the Show: Stay updated: latest courses, podcasts, articles, and other writerly resources: https://theprolificwriter.lpages.co/vip/ Leave a rating/review/subscribe to the show: on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-prolific-writer/id1185387038?mt=2 Support the show and the Project Entertainment Network: https://www.patreon.com/ProjectEntNet
Creating Synergy at Every Level of a Company Natasha Todorovic-Cowan is known as the “Corporate Body Count Pro”. Her expertise includes unraveling people messes at all levels of an organization. Whether it is dysfunctional teams, incongruent leadership, cultures in conflict, change or strategy implementation, she gets to the marrow of what prevents leaders, teams, and organizations from connecting for results. With more than 25 years of experience applying bio-psycho-social-systems insights, Natasha confirms that nice guys rule! By age 7 Natasha had lived in 3 different countries and spoke 3 different languages. She was born in a country that no longer exists and was repeatedly caught between conflicting worlds. Her parents escaped communism in pursuit of the American dream. Natasha has worked on 5 different continents in more than 14 different countries and been caught between Russian border guards and the Russian military in Gorky Park, stuck between riot police and neo-Nazi protestors on Hitler's birthday in Vienna, and the target of wrath of a new age cult. Questions you'll hear on the podcast today What divides and what connects people? What is a Corporate Body Count Pro? Never before in the history of the world has there been a multigenerational workplace. What's going on and what did you find? You say “leaders are chosen”, what do you mean by that? I‘ve heard you say “we change in relationship” and that you work with the space in-between. What is that? In a fast changing world, how can a leader support their teams, employees, and managers to become more change resilient? One of your clients wanted to get their departments collaborating. With narrow margins, highly competitive markets, and fickle customers they were trying to follow common wisdom to get innovation. You told them it wouldn't happen unless they worked on their dog tracks, what was going on? Natasha's Website http://spiraldynamics.org/ Doug- @DJDoug Check out more episodes at www.bizwizpodcast.com Produced by www.TurnKeyPodcast.com You're the expert, let us help you prove it.
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