Podcasts about Ironweed

Meryl Streep is widely regarded as the finest living actor, so we go through her movies and rate her performances. She has the most Oscar nominations of all time (23). We go through each nominated performance and rate her films. We also go through her lesser known works, discussing her more underrated roles that perhaps deserve more attention. In particular, we go through her 70s and 80s films. Tune in for some high-fivin' fun!

Tim Kennelty returns with Part 3 of his Good Plant/Bad Plant Retrospective. In this episode he continues with a wealth of information about native plants that are beneficial to the environment, as well as others that tend to be invasive or noxious. Today, Ironweed, Japanese Barberry, Asters, Tree of Heaven and Viburnums are featured. Ironweed, is a great native, pollinator plant known for its purple flowers and impressive height that will add ‘presence' to any garden. Ironweed prefers rich moist acidic soils but will grow in average moist to wet soils in full sun. Use in a rain garden, cottage garden, meadow, along streams or ponds or the back of the border. By contrast, invasive Japanese Barberry is not such a good choice for a garden as it creates a great habitat for the white-footed mouse which is known to be a carrier for tick-borne diseases Asters, once known as New World asters, are now classified under a different genera, particularly Symphyotrichum. These native plants offer vibrant colors in purple, pink and white while also supporting late-season pollinators, making them an excellent addition to your garden. On the flip side, the invasive Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), is a non-native plant that has wreaked havoc in many ecosystems, including New York's. As Tim describes, it's critical to manage this troublesome plant, which also serves as the primary host for the destructive spotted lanternfly. Listen and learn how to identify, control, and support your local ecosystem. Viburnums are a very admired and fast-growing flowering landscape shrubs or small trees with a large number of cultivars available. Bloom times span from early spring through June, followed by attractive fruit and great fall foliage. However, not all viburnums are created equal. Learn about the differences between the native and non-native species Host: Jean Thomas Guest: Tim Kennelty Photo by: Tim Kennelty Production Support: Linda Aydlett, Deven Connelly, Teresa Golden, Xandra Powers, Annie Scibienski

More discussions of Waits's unreleased recordings brings us to the 1980s, featuring several demos, a bunch of covers, and significant collaborations with other musicians, both big and small. Highlights this week include his contribution to a poetry documentary, a live Ewan MacColl cover, and his evening of collaborations with The Replacements. website: songbysongpodcast.com twitter: @songbysongpod e-mail: songbysongpodcast@gmail.com Music extracts used for illustrative/review purposes include: Purple Avenue / Empty Pockets, live recording, Expo Theatre, Montreal Canada (3 July 1981) Smuggler's Waltz / Bronx Lullaby, from Poetry In Motion, dir. Ron Mann (1982) Carnivalins, unreleased recording, Frank's Wild Demos (1986?) Vegas Theme, unreleased recording, Frank's Wild Demos (1986?) Downtown Train (alt take), NME's Big Four 7" EP, Tom Waits (1986) Harlem Shuffle, Dirty Work, The Rolling Stones (1986) I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Knew (About Her), live recording, Beverly Theatre, Los Angeles CA, Tom Waits with Elvis Costello and Lou Reed, w. Cecil Null (4 October 1986) Papa's Got A Brand New Bag, live recording, Massey Hall, Toronto Canada, w. James brown (7 October 1987) Mack The Knife, live recording, Freie Volksbuhne, Berlin Germany, w. Bertolt Brecht / Kurt Weill (8 December 1987) Big Rock Candy Mountain, from the film Ironweed, dir. Hector Babenco (1987) Once More Before I Go, from the film Candy Mountain, dir. Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer (1988) Date To Church, single b-side, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989) Lowdown Monkey Blues, Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989/2019) If Only You Were Lonely, Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989/2019) I Can Help, studio outtake / Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits, w. Billy Swan (1989/2019) We Know The Night - Rehearsal Version, Dead Man's Pop, The Replacements / Tom Waits (1989/2019) Take It As It Comes, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. The Doors (31 December 1988) Pennies From Heaven, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke (31 December 1988) Dirty Old Town, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. Ewan MacColl (31 December 1988) Hound Dog, live recording, Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles CA, w. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (31 December 1988) Dirty Old Town, Rum Sodomy and The Lash, The Pogues (1985) We think your Song by Song experience will be enhanced by hearing, in full, the songs featured in the show, which you can get hold of from your favourite record shop or online platform. Please support artists by buying their music, or using services which guarantee artists a revenue - listen responsibly.

This week on And the Runner-Up Is, Kevin welcomes back his boyfriend/partner/best supporting actor Sebastian Gronback to discuss the 1987 Oscar race for Best Actress, where Cher won for her performance in "Moonstruck," beating Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction," Holly Hunter in "Broadcast News," Sally Kirkland in "Anna," and Meryl Streep in "Ironweed." We discuss all of these nominated performances and determine who we think was the runner-up to Cher.  0:00 - 8:56 - Introduction 8:57 - 40:23 - Glenn Close 40:24 - 1:08:16 - Holly Hunter 1:08:17 - 1:27:53 - Sally Kirkland 1:27:54 - 1:44:25 - Meryl Streep 1:44:26 - 2:07:39 - Cher 2:07:40 - 3:03:07 - Why Cher won / Twitter questions 3:03:08- 3:10:41 - Who was the runner-up? Buy And the Runner-Up Is merch at https://www.teepublic.com/stores/and-the-runner-up-is?ref_id=24261! Support And the Runner-Up Is on Patreon at patreon.com/andtherunnerupis! Follow Kevin Jacobsen on Twitter Follow Sebastian Gronback on Twitter Follow And the Runner-Up Is on Twitter and Instagram Theme/End Music: "Diamonds" by Iouri Sazonov Additional Music: "Storming Cinema Ident" by Edward Blakeley Artwork: Brian O'Meara

Fred talks about Ironweed as an ornamental plant

Au sommaire de cette spéciale classiques : -Évocation de titres parus chez Carlotta Films, à savoir, THE GREY FOX de Phillip Borsos & IRONWEED d'Hector Babenco ;-Retour sur MILLIARDAIRE POUR UN JOUR, le dernier film de Frank Capra, disponible chez Rimini Éditions ;-Chronique de quelques sorties estampillées Elephant Films, à savoir, SENTIMENTALEMENT VÔTRE de Carol Reed, MILLIE de George Roy Hill, MARIE STUART REINE D'ECOSSE de Charles Jarrott, LA ROUTE SEMÉE D'ÉTOILES de Leo McCarey, GOUVERNEUR MALGRÉ LUI de Preston Sturges & MA VACHE ET MOI de Buster Keaton ;-Recension de LA VILLE DORÉE de Veit Harlan & LA FILLE AU VAUTOUR de Hans Steinhoff, édités par Artus Films. Bonne écoute à toutes et tous !

The guest for this episode of rootbound is Ryan Rimmele. First we talk genera and a bunch of dudes. Then Ryan talks about his sibling with a twist. Steve shares about a weed, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.Genus SirdavidiaSyngonium podophyllumSyngonium: The Feng Shui, Air Purifying and Hard to Kill PlantOut My Backdoor: Ironweed, a Native BeautyNew York Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis)Ironweed (novel)Ironweed trailerTeal House on the Hill - Ryan's project along with Audrey (from episode 73)The Please Be Prompt PodcastSupport rootbound

Podcast for a deep examination into the career and life choices of Jack Nicholson. Patrick falls asleep during the recording and dreams he is in Hungary. Joe stands up for the Academy in spite of Lev's barbs. But a long dormant segment returns to reunite the two despite this strife. What major US historical event saves the day? Find out on this week's episode of 'What the Hell Happened to Them?' Email the cast at whathappenedtothem@gmail.com Disclaimer: This episode was recorded in May 2023. References may feel confusing and/or dated unusually quickly. 'Ironweed' is available on Blu-ray (really? this but not Heartburn?), DVD, and VHS: https://www.amazon.com/Ironweed-Blu-ray-Jack-Nicholson/dp/B00B27WT1I/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=238247123925&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9031599&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=13135325041665561034&hvtargid=kwd-311114381203&hydadcr=17043_9871065&keywords=ironweed+blu+ray&qid=1683409892&s=movies-tv&sr=1-1 Music from 'Run On' by Moby  and 'Ghost Train' by Gorillaz Artwork from BJ West   quixotic, united, skeyhill, vekeman, jack, nicholson, syzygy, streep, ironweed, iron, weed, crusaders maulers,  renegades, sharks, football, 80s, frasier, ebert

It's part two of our exploration of sad romances. This time, we look at the Tony award-winning Broadway musical Hadestown, which is--like Moulin Rouge--based on the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I look at another ill-fated Depression-era love story, Ironweed, and another tragic art vs. romantic love story, The Red Shoes. And Oz, The Relationship Coach, stops by to give us some tips on handling heartbreak. All I can say is: have tissues nearby.https://www.confessionsofaclosetromantic.comGuestsFollow Mariah Cotnoir on Twitter and Instagram @marcootsOscar Adrian is a relationship coach specializing in relationship break ups.  Follow him on Twitter and get his post break up roadmap here.ShowThe incredible original Broadway cast recording of HadestownClips from the Broadway show Hadestown.The Hadestown cast performs a lo-fi NPR Tiny Desk Concert.A wonderful animatic on the song "Any Way the Wind Blows" from HadestownMoviesGet your Kleenex out: the Ironweed trailer.The entire  "He's Me Pal" scene from Ironweed, complete with heartbreaking twist.The famous British filmmaking partnership The Archers made The Red Shoes, among many influential movies, and it set the bar for ballets choreographed for the screen, including Gene Kelly's An American in Paris. The 1948 Technicolor is glorious. Watch the full movie here.Support the showPlease share this episode, tell your friends and connect with me on Twitter @poppy_confesses Thanks for listening!

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.

Tim Kennelty returns with another Good Plant/Bad Plant segment. This time he talks about Ironweed, a great native, pollinator plant known for its purple flowers and impressive height that will add ‘presence' to any garden. Then, he explains why the invasive Japanese Barberry is not such a good choice for your garden as it creates a great habitat for the white-footed mouse which is known to be a carrier for tick-borne diseases. Then Jackie Hayden and Dede Terns-Thorpe are back with another segment of Pests and Pathogens. Thís time they discuss a category of blisters, galls, and spots on leaves and trees that are caused by a rust fungus. Learn all about them here! Finally, we have a new recurring segment called Patch to Plate. Annie Scibienski, a new Master Gardener volunteer, highlights ingredients from the home garden and how they can be used in the home kitchen. In this segment, she features root vegetables and uses them to create Maple-Glazed Carrots and a Hidden Beet pound cake. Yum! Hosts: Tim Kennelty, and Jean Thomas Guests: Tim Kennelty, Dede Terns-Thorpe, Jackie Hayden and Annie Scibienski Production Support: Linda Aydlett, Teresa Golden and Annie Scibiencki Resources

Walking back to the show only to walk away again, Jo Neary takes on another trio of Orphans with Martin and Sam. Beginning with the 90s religious material, heading back to theatre of the 80s, and then the street poetry of William Kennedy's childhood, we also consider how Waits's writing functions as a dusting soundtrack. website: songbysongpodcast.com twitter: @songbysongpod e-mail: songbysongpodcast@gmail.com Music extracts used for illustrative/review purposes include: Walk Away, Orphans: Brawlers Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits (2006) If I Have To Go, Orphans: Brawlers Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits (2006) Poor Little Lamb, Orphans: Brawlers Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits (2006) Clip from Ironweed, dir. Hector Babenco (1987) We think your Song by Song experience will be enhanced by hearing, in full, the songs featured in the show, which you can get hold of from your favourite record shop or online platform. Please support artists by buying their music, or using services which guarantee artists a revenue - listen responsibly.

Ironweed. We came for the Tom Waits, we stayed for the bleakness and depression. Well, we actually stayed to do a podcast, but would we have if that wasn’t the case with this well made but clearly oscar-baiting movie about tramps? Come and find out in our discussion which includes: imagining Jack Nicholson’s breath, emotional … Continue reading "361: Ironweed [1987] Movie Discussion"

After last episode's delightful diversion, we have arrived at the season seven playoffs. This week, Matthew, Dan, and Tim are all keen to become the winner of the Chronic Town division, but only ONE can do so, and advance to the season finale. In round one, we'll look at famous non-fiction books that have been adapted into scripted Hollywood movies, before going in the television wayback machine to mashup famous shows' pilot episodes that aired on the same day. And of course, it all comes down to the lightning round. NOTES ⚠️ Inline notes below may be truncated due to podcast feed character limits. Full notes are always on the episode page.

Vernonia noveboracensis (New York ironweed or vein-leaf hawkweed) is a plant in the daisy family, Asteraceae. It is native to the eastern United States, from Florida to Massachusetts and west to Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia and to southern Ontario.

While a student studying for his BFA at NYU, David was cast in the original Broadcast production of Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along", directed by Harold Prince, then appeared as Peter Van Daan in the Off-Broadway chamber musical, "Yours, Anne", followed by touring as Motel the Tailor in "Fiddler On The Roof" opposite Herschel Bernardi, after which he returned to gain his degree. David later interned at the Playwrights Horizons where he became interested in casting. After a brief stint in a theatrical agency, he joined the casting department at Grey Advertising, where he began learning the commercial industry and subsequently worked for casting director, Bonnie Timmerman on "Dirty Dancing", Roman Polanski's "Frantic" starring Harrison Ford, "Ironweed", Disney's "Enchanted" starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson and the third season of "Miami Vice", the world premieres of Michael John La Chuisa's "The Petrified Prince" for the Public Theater and Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Whistle Down the Wind", both directed by Mr. Prince. This led to 30 years as a casting director at Donna DeSeta Casting, one of New York's busiest offices, personally casting over 2000 TV commercials, and developed techniques for teaching commercial acting, which he brings to his classes at Manhattan School of Music, NYU, Pace University, Actors Connection, other private studios around the city, as well as to his musical theater performance and auditioning classes at AMDA (American Musical and Dramatic Academy) Testimonials about David include statements such as: "Your class to this day has been one of the most valuable classes I've ever taken"; "This truly is an undergraduate degree in commercial acting! The added benefit is how incredibly kind you are and that you want every actor in your class to succeed". Check David out as one who helps to make the most of your auditions, and – more importantly – grow as artists, in both skills and confidence at: https://www.davidcady.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ozzie-stewart/support

When Pulitzer prize-winning author William Kennedy put his five-year-old son Brendan to bed one night many years ago, he made up a story about a boy whose belly button was stolen. The improvised bedtime story went on to become a published children's book in 1986, co-written with his then-teenaged son. Almost 40 years later, the pair is hoping their story and others will inspire a love of literature among kids in the Capital Region and beyond.  On this episode of The Eagle, the "Ironweed" author and his son talk to Times Union Editor-in-Chief Casey Seiler about writing together, and about their favorite childhood books.  Also on this episode, social justice activists are asking the city of Saratoga Springs to drop charges against a dozen Black Lives Matter demonstrators involved in an incident during a protest in July. They say the arrests – which included the use of shackles for low-level offenses – are racially motivated intimidation tactics by police. Police say they are merely trying to balance civil rights with public safety. Reporter Wendy Libertore discusses the latest developments in this ongoing story. 

Today in botanical history, we celebrate a British Spy/American Farmer, a social reformer and poet, and an American writer. We'll hear an excerpt from a book written by the beloved Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery. We Grow That Garden Library™ with a book about homestead life - from growing great produce to canning and preserving. And then we'll wrap things up with a look back at Minnie Hite Moody's garden column from this day in 1980. She made a bouquet of weeds and then wrote about it.   Curated News The Complete Fall Garden Checklist | Garden Therapy | Stephanie Rose   Important Events September 24, 1789 Death of Metcalf Bowler, British-American merchant, and politician. As a young man, Metcalf came to America with his father. He successfully marketed a local apple known as the Rhode Island Greening Apple as part of his business. The apple later became the official state fruit of Rhode Island. A gentleman farmer, Metcalf himself was an avid horticulturist, and he was purported to have the most beautiful garden in the state. Metcalf was a successful merchant until the revolutionary war, which ruined him financially. In the 1920s, after stumbling on letters and examining handwriting, historians accidentally learned Metcalf had spied for the British. His love of nature may have inspired his code name: Rusticus. After the war, Metcalf wrote a book called A Treatise on Agriculture and Practical Husbandry(1786). Metcalf, the spy, sent a copy to George Washington, who wrote him back and tucked the copy away in his library.   September 24, 1825  Birth of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, African-American suffragist, social reformer, abolitionist, writer, and poet. Her famous quote is, “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.” Her writing was mostly dedicated to her work for justice, but occasionally she would write about nature. Here's an excerpt from her poem The Crocuses: Soon a host of lovely flowers  From vales and woodland burst;  But in all that fair procession  The crocuses were first.    September 24, 1913  Birth of Wilson Rawls, American writer. His embarrassment caused him to burn his manuscripts so his fiancee, Sophie, wouldn't see them. Later she implored him to re-write one of the five stories from memory, which resulted in Where the Red Fern Grows (1961). The red fern was not an actual plant, but it served as the centerpiece of the novel. In the book, Wilson wrote, I had heard the old Indian legend about the red fern. How a little Indian boy and girl were lost in a blizzard and had frozen to death. In the spring, when they were found, a beautiful red fern had grown up between their two bodies. The story went on to say that only an angel could plant the seeds of a red fern and that they never died; where one grew, that spot was sacred.   Unearthed Words There were several things concerning which Miss Cornelia wished to unburden her soul. The funeral had to be all talked over, of course. Susan and Miss Cornelia thrashed this out between them; Anne took no part or delight in such ghoulish conversations. She sat a little apart and watched the autumnal flame of dahlias in the garden and the dreaming, glamorous harbor of the September sunset. Mary Vance sat beside her, knitting meekly. Mary's heart was down in the Rainbow Valley, whence came sweet, distance-softened sounds of children's laughter, but her fingers were under Miss Cornelia's eye. She had to knit so many rounds of her stocking before she might go to the valley. Mary knit and held her tongue but used her ears. “I never saw a nicer-looking corpse,” said Miss Cornelia judicially. “Myra Murray was always a pretty woman—she was a Corey.” ― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rainbow Valley   Grow That Garden Library Welcome to the Farm by Shaye Elliott This book came out in 2017, and the subtitle is How-to Wisdom from The Elliott Homestead. Shaye lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest. She's the founder of the blog, The Elliott Homestead. She is a beekeeper, gardener and enjoys preserving a variety of foods for the winter larder. This book is truly a welcome to the Elliott Farm, and Shaye shares everything she's gleaned about growing the good food right in her own backyard. Shaye teaches a ton in this book - how to harvest organic produce, plant an orchard, build a greenhouse, winter sowing and growing, make cider and wine, can jams and jellies, raise chickens and bees, and even milk a dairy cow (and make butter). , This book is 336 pages of jam-packed goodness from a mini-farm to help homesteaders and urban farmers alike. You can get a copy of Welcome to the Farm by Shaye Elliott and support the show using the Amazon Link in today's Show Notes for around $10.   Today's Botanic Spark Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart September 24, 1980 On this day, Minnie Hite Moody wrote in her garden column about her bouquet made of weeds: Somehow or other I failed to get any flower seeds planted this past summer. June brought its plague of groundhogs, and what with replanting my beans and other necessities. July was here before I had caught up with myself, and then came the storms and rain. It was even too wet for me to go seeking Queen Anne's lace and daisies in the fringes of the golf course, though what with mechanical mowers and weed sprays, I would have had to search far and wide for the simple weed-blossoms once so familiar. So all through July and August I had to skrimish for enough blooms to enliven what in the Deep South is spoken of as the "eating table." I am used to flowers on the table, and while I receive more than my share of elegant hothouse flowers, they do not suit Grandma's plain white ash table with which she went to housekeeping in 1872. September, however, kindly improved my situation. Along my property frontage where the Ohio Electric railroad tracks predated the WPA sidewalk, the pale lavender blooms of soap-wort, commonly called Pretty Betty, began to peep out. Now soapwort, which the books call Saponaria, a genus of hardy annual and perennial Old-World herbs of the Pink Family, is regarded as just an old weed and not very special. Believe me, it was special in our great-grandmothers' day, for bar soap and detergents were far in the future, unless she made her own soap with grease and lye.l tried washing with soapwort myself one time, just to see how it worked, and was pleasantly sur prised. But I'm careful to call it Pretty Betty when I have it in a table bouquet. My friends seem to react to that name better than they do to soapwort. In some sections of the country, the name seems to be Bouncing Bet, which I mention as an alternate. The books say that soapwort (alias Pretty Betty or Bouncing Bet) comes in clusters of pink, white or red flowers. The only ones I ever have seen are pale lavender-blues, white, or pinkish. By themselves they don't make an especially stunning bouquet, so it is fortunate that ironweed blooms at the same time of year. Ironweed blossoms are purple, and I know Garden Club ladies who would swoon at the sight of the bouquet right now gracing my eating table, for it has purple ironweed, Pretty Betty of a questionable shade, maybe blue, maybe lavender, along with some bright yellow Rudbeckia blossoms and a spray or two of Eupatorim per-foliatum, which is acceptable by that name, but not as plain old good-for-nothing boneset. As a matter of fact, boneset used to ease aches and pains fully as well as some of the costly arthritis and rheumatism pills of the present. All the "old wife" of bygone days had to do was gather the herb when the bloom was brightest, tie it into a bunch and hang it from the ceiling beams. The late Euell Gibbons in his books claimed that he simply laid boneset for drying on newspapers placed on his attic floor. When the boneset is thoroughly dry. stalks and stems are discarded, and the dried leaves crumbled into airtight jars. If you don't need boneset tea for rheumatic ailments, it is said to be good for fevers, colds, catarrh, dropsy, general debility, dyspepsia, and "trouble arising from intemperance." In other words, hangover. Rudbeckia is that golden September bloom named in honor, of Swedish botanist Olaus Rud-beck (1830-1702).   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember: “For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.”

Fred suggests giving Ironweed a try and attract more butterflies to your garden.

Fred's Plant of the Week: Ironweed!

A Safe Place is Henry Jaglom's directorial debut. As a BBS Production, and with Jack Nicholson a key player in the BBS world, this little known indie feature would naturally offer Jack a supporting role. This week, Sarah is back with our "lost" episode!

Episode 077: Interview with author Willy Vlautin The Motel Life Northline Lean on Pete The Free Don't Skip Out On Me *** The Night Always Comes *** (Latest)       Episode 077: Interview with Willy Vlautin Amie Newberry & Tami Ruf   We'd like to thank Willy Vlautin for taking time to talk to us. It's VERY exciting for these Reno High Grads to talk with such an amazing author and musician! All of the links for Willy's books go to his website to purchase (and have them personally signed by the author too) directly from him - music too! Check his website out at WillyVlautin.com for more merchandise too! We were all so excited to speak with Willy that we all picked books to read, not just his newest title. The rundown of what we individually read looked like this: Tami Read - Don't Skip Out on Me (Tami has The Night Always Comes, The Motel Life, and Lean On Pete on her TBR line up!) Rob Read - The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, and The Night Always Comes (5 of the 6). Don't Skip Out On Me is now on Rob's TBR! Jamie Read - The Motel Life & Lean on Pete (Next up for Jamie is Don't Skip Out On Me) Amie Read - The Motel Life & Lean on Pete (Next up for Amie is Don't Skip Out On Me) Willy's Favorite Authors John Steinbeck Raymond Carver Robert Laxalt Walter Van Tilburg Clark William Kennedy Books Mentioned The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt Ironweed by William Kennedy Sites Mentioned Sundance Books and Music Willy's Music Richmond Fontaine The Delines   Music Influences Punk Rock  The Replacements Hüskür Do X Country Music   What did you Read during the Pandemic? Shoshone Mike by Frank Burgon Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain The Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin   What are you currently reading and writing? He's blurbing books currently! Jess Walters Books There are two books in the works - stay tuned! One is about a painter in St John's, Oregon and the second is about a musician, set in Reno, that ends up in Tonopah. Movie Mentioned Paris, Texas 1984 movie - available to rent on Amazon Prime Video     Show Notes for the Extra Interview on Patreon (Free) Click here to go to Patreon   All time Favorite Authors and Their Books John Steinbeck Ironweed by William Kennedy Fat City by Leonard Gardner Flannery O'Connor Barry Gifford Lucia Berlin Noir Authors Jim Thompson David Goodis Charles Willaford Western Author James Welch Willy's Favorite Steinbeck Novels Canary Row Grapes of Wrath Of Mice and Men The Long Valley The Wayward Bus Tortilla Flat Other Books Mentioned Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas The Kestral for a Knave by Barry Hines University of Nevada Press  Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage by Susan Shillinglaw   Willy is a book purchaser over visiting the library but uses the Libby app and listens to numerous audiobooks If the world is ending Willy would take his first edition, signed, edition of Ironweed by William Kennedy

Jack Nicholson's third feature of 1975 would take a light-hearted turn with The Fortune, co-starring Warren Beatty and Stockard Channing.

Jack Nicholson's next feature of 1975 would be a departure for him, as he takes on a starring role in Michelangelo Antonioni's neo-noir art film, The Passenger.

We're joined by Helen O'Hara (host of the Empire Film Podcast and author of 'Women vs Hollywood') to discuss the down-and-out misadventures of Streep, Nicholson, Waits & co in this 1987 box-office flop. Song by Song is Martin Zaltz Austwick and Sam Pay; two musicians listening to and discussing every single Tom Waits track in chronological order. website: songbysongpodcast.com twitter: @songbysongpod e-mail: songbysongpodcast@gmail.com Music extracts used for illustrative/review purposes include: Clips from Ironweed, dir. Hector Babenco (1987) We think your Song by Song experience will be enhanced by hearing, in full, the songs featured in the show, which you can get hold of from your favourite record shop or online platform. Please support artists by buying their music, or using services which guarantee artists a revenue - listen responsibly.

My friend Jim Finnegan (who was my guest on episode #3 of our podcast) discusses Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart; a tough book but a great read. An unfortunate tale of growing up gay in working class poor Glascow with an alcoholic mother; anger, sadness, lack of hope, despair and dependence. Jim and I also discuss Milkman, Ironweed, The Vanishing Half, The Shadow King, Deacon King Kong, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Interior Chinatown, Lolita, Caro’s LBJ biographies, The Power Broker, Motherless Brooklyn (film), Angela’s Ashes, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World. A Swim In a Pond in the Rain - In Which Four Russians Give A Master - Class on Writing, Reading and Life, Passing, The Tenant and The Natural. Another whirlwind of a discussion with Jim. Reviews of each of these books are linked in my website www.bookwormsinthewild.com

Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we usually talk about movie stars and not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones they made in between. Today, however, we talk about Oscar movies (!) that time has relegated to B-Side status. To tackle such a task, Dan and Conor welcome the incredible Chris Feil of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. In their discussions, our guest and his co-host Joe Reid dive into myriad films that were released to significant awards buzz, only to earn zero Academy Award nominations. In today's episode, we each choose one film to focus on. Conor's pick is the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic Bound For Glory. The film earned six Oscar nominations, including wins for Cinematography and Best Music, Adapted. Chris' pick is Ironweed from 1987, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, adapted from William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Both stars earned lead acting nominations at the 1988 Oscars, though neither won. As for Dan, he chose 1994's The Madness of King George, directed by theater legend Nicholas Hytner and starring Nigel Hawthorne. This adaptation of the Alan Bennett earned four Academy Award nominations, including a win for Art Direction. For those keeping score, this was the “infamous” Oscar ceremony that David Letterman hosted. Spoiler alert: it's pretty funny! UMA...OPRAH! There's also a bit of chatter about Chariots of Fire, a Best Picture winner that we argue now sadly lives in B-Side seclusion. Most reading will know the film for its score alone. As Chris beautifully puts it: “It's the first score to win Best Picture.” Much is made of each Oscar year, from the surprises to the snubs. Oh, and also, we talk about Center Stage, also directed by Hytner! Be sure to give us a follow on Twitter at @TFSBSide. Also enter our giveaways, get access to our private Slack channel, and support new episodes by becoming a Patreon contributor. We are also now on Spotify and Stitcher. Enjoy!

77 - Interview with author Willy Vlautin Author of *** The Night Always Comes *** (available TODAY), The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, Don’t Skip Out on Me We’d like to thank Willy Vlautin for taking time to talk to us. It’s VERY exciting for these Reno High Grads to talk with such an amazing author and musician (and former Huskie)! All of the links for Willy’s books go to his website to purchase (and have them personally signed by the author too) directly from him - music too! Check his website out at WillyVlautin.com for more merchandise too! Support our podcast by contributing to our Patreon page! Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter!! We were all so excited to speak with Willy that we all picked books to read, not just his newest title. The rundown of what we individually read looked like this: Tami Read - Don't Skip Out on Me (Tami has The Night Always Comes, The Motel Life, and Lean On Pete on her TBR line up!) Rob Read - The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, and The Night Always Comes (5 of the 6). Don't Skip Out On Me is now on Rob’s TBR! Jamie Read - The Motel Life & Lean on Pete (Next up for Jamie is Don’t Skip Out On Me) Amie Read - The Motel Life & Lean on Pete (Next up for Amie is Don’t Skip Out On Me) Willy's Favorite Authors John Steinbeck Raymond Carver Robert Laxalt Walter Van Tilburg Clark William Kennedy Books Mentioned The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt Ironweed by William Kennedy Sites Mentioned Sundance Books and Music Willy’s Music Richmond Fontaine The Delines Music Influences Punk Rock  The Replacements Hüskür Do X Country Music What did you Read during the Pandemic? Shoshone Mike by Frank Burgon Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain The Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin What are you currently reading and writing? He's blurbing books currently! Jess Walters Books There are two books in the works - stay tuned! One is about a painter in St John's, Oregon and the second is about a musician, set in Reno, that ends up in Tonopah. Movie Mentioned Paris, Texas 1984 movie - available to rent on Amazon Prime Video Show Notes for the Extra Interview on Patreon (Free) All time Favorite Authors and Their Books John Steinbeck Ironweed by William Kennedy Fat City by Leonard Gardner Flannery O'Connor Barry Gifford Lucia Berlin Noir Authors Jim Thompson David Goodis Charles Willaford Western Author James Welch Willy’s Favorite Steinbeck Novels Canary Row Grapes of Wrath Of Mice and Men The Long Valley The Wayward Bus Tortilla Flat Other Books Mentioned Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas The Kestral for a Knave by Barry Hines University of Nevada Press  Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage by Susan Shillinglaw Willy is a book purchaser over visiting the library but uses the Libby app and listens to numerous audiobooks If the world is ending Willy would take his first edition, signed, edition of Ironweed by William Kennedy

1975 brings on a huge year for Jack Nicholson! And it all starts with a cameo appearance in beloved rock opera.

Entering into 1974, Jack Nicholson would become a three-time Academy Award nominee. That would also be the year when he would star in one of his most memorable roles of all time, in one of the most highly respected films of all time.

We're back and we're entering the year 1973! It's a new world for Jack Nicholson, and it includes another lead role in another cult classic.

In 1972, Jack Nicholson would collaborate again with some old friends, director Bob Rafelson and co-star Bruce Dern, as well as his first collaboration with Scatman Crothers.

Following Jack's first feature as a director, now it's another starring role. This time, in one of the most controversial films of the decade.

After the success of Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson would work on a new project with BBS Productions - this time in the director's chair.

Longtime friends and Meryl Streep fans Zachary Scot Johnson ( www.youtube.com/user/thesongadayproject/about ) and Maryl McNally discuss 1982's "Sophie's Choice", which co-stars Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. This film was directed and screenplay by Alan J. Pakula, based on the novel by William Styron.Email the hosts at MerylStreepPodcast@gmail.com and please remember to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast.Zach's ranking of Meryl's performances1. sophie's choice2. silkwood3. a cry in the dark4. postcards from the edge5. the post6. big little lies season 27. julie and julia8. the hours9. devil wears prada10. adaptation11. kramer vs kramer12. manchurian candidate13. into the woods14. the laundromat15. the river wild16. doubt17. music of the heart18. it's complicated19. ricki and the flash20. mamma mia 221. florence foster jenkins22. out of africa23. death becomes her24. the french lieutenant's woman25. ironweed26. deer hunter27. mamma mia 28. falling in love29. plenty30. little women31. defending your life32. heartburn33. first do no harm34. still of the night35. before and after36. she-devil37. mary poppins returns38. house of the spirits39. the homesman40. manhattan41. juliaZach's ranking of Meryl's films1. the post2. the hours3. silkwood4. little women5. a cry in the dark6. kramer vs kramer7. adaptation8. sophie's choice9. out of africa10. the deer hunter11. doubt 12. big little lies season 213. into the woods14. the laundromat15. postcards from the edge16. julie and julia17. the devil wears prada18. it's complicated19. mary poppins returns20. the river wild21. manchurian candidate22. music of the heart23. death becomes her24. the french lieutenant's woman25. falling in love26. ironweed27. ricki and the flash28. florence foster jenkins29. defending your life30. plenty31. manhattan32. mamma mia33. heartburn34. still of the night35. mamma mia 236. first do no harm37. she-devil38. julia39. the homesman40. house of the spirits41. before and afterMaryl's ranking of Meryl's performances1. the post2. julie and julia3. devil wears prada4. postcards from the edge5. adaptation6. big little lies season 27. out of africa8. kramer vs kramer9. the hours10. manchurian candidate11. river wild12. mamma mia 213. florence foster jenkins14. mamma mia15. silkwood16. music of the heart17. into the woods18. it's complicated19. little women20. heartburn21. deer hunter22. death becomes her23. ricki & the flash24. doubt25. first do no harm26. she-devil27. the laundromat28. house of the spirits29. mary poppins returns30. defending your life31. manhattan32. before and after33. still of the night34. julia35. the homesmanMaryl's ranking of Meryl's films1. the hours2. little women3. postcards from the edge4. kramer vs kramer5. the post6. adaptation7. florence foster jenkins8. doubt9. silkwood10. out of africa11. the deer hunter12. big little lies season 213. devil wears prada14. mamma mia 15. mary poppins returns16. into the woods17. julie & julia18. mamma mia 219. river wild20. manchurian candidate21. it's complicated22. death becomes her23 music of the heart24. defending your25. the laundromat26. house of the spirits27. heartburn28. first do no harm29. ricki & the flash30. julia31. she-devil32. still of the night33. before and after34. the homesman35. manhattan

Longtime friends and Meryl Streep fans Zachary Scot Johnson ( www.youtube.com/user/thesongadayproject/about ) and Maryl McNally are joined by repeat guest Erin Carlson, author of the fantastic "Queen Meryl" book ( https://www.amazon.com/Queen-Meryl-Iconic-Heroic-Legendary/dp/0316485276/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=queen+meryl&qid=1606082367&sr=8-2 ) for a discussion on 1985's "Plenty", which co-stars Sam Neill, Charles Dance, John Gielgud, Tracey Ullman, Sting, Ian McKellen and even Hugh Laurie. This film was directed by Fred Schepisi and written by David Hare, based on his own play.Email the hosts at MerylStreepPodcast@gmail.com and please remember to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast.Zach's ranking of Meryl's performances1. silkwood2. postcards from the edge3. the post4. big little lies season 25. julie and julia6. the hours7. devil wears prada8. adaptation9. a cry in the dark10. kramer vs kramer11. manchurian candidate12. into the woods13. the laundromat14. the river wild15. doubt16. music of the heart17. it's complicated18. ricki and the flash19. mamma mia 220. florence foster jenkins21. out of africa22. death becomes her23. ironweed24. deer hunter25. mamma mia 26. falling in love27. plenty28. little women29. defending your life30. heartburn31. first do no harm32. still of the night33. before and after34. she-devil35. mary poppins returns36. house of the spirits37. the homesman38. manhattan39. juliaZach's ranking of Meryl's films1. the post2. the hours3. silkwood4. little women5. kramer vs kramer6. adaptation7. out of africa8. the deer hunter9. doubt 10. big little lies season 211. into the woods12. a cry in the dark13. the laundromat14. postcards from the edge15. julie and julia16. the devil wears prada17. it's complicated18. mary poppins returns19. the river wild20. manchurian candidate21. music of the heart22. death becomes her23. falling in love24. ironweed25. ricki and the flash26. florence foster jenkins27. defending your life28. plenty29. manhattan30. mamma mia31. heartburn32. still of the night33. mamma mia 234. first do no harm35. she-devil36. julia37. the homesman38. house of the spirits39. before and afterMaryl's ranking of Meryl's performances1. the post2. julie and julia3. devil wears prada4. postcards from the edge5. adaptation6. big little lies season 27. out of africa8. kramer vs kramer9. the hours10. manchurian candidate11. river wild12. mamma mia 213. florence foster jenkins14. mamma mia15. silkwood16. music of the heart17. into the woods18. it's complicated19. little women20. heartburn21. deer hunter22. death becomes her23. ricki & the flash24. doubt25. first do no harm26. she-devil27. the laundromat28. house of the spirits29. mary poppins returns30. defending your life31. manhattan32. before and after33. still of the night34. julia35. the homesmanMaryl's ranking of Meryl's films1. the hours2. little women3. postcards from the edge4. kramer vs kramer5. the post6. adaptation7. florence foster jenkins8. doubt9. silkwood10. out of africa11. the deer hunter12. big little lies season 213. devil wears prada14. mamma mia 15. mary poppins returns16. into the woods17. julie & julia18. mamma mia 219. river wild20. manchurian candidate21. it's complicated22. death becomes her23 music of the heart24. defending your25. the laundromat26. house of the spirits27. heartburn28. first do no harm29. ricki & the flash30. julia31. she-devil32. still of the night33. before and after34. the homesman35. manhattan

Longtime friends and Meryl Streep fans Zachary Scot Johnson ( www.youtube.com/user/thesongadayproject/about ) and Maryl McNally discuss 1984's "Falling In Love", which co-stars Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Jane Kaczmarek, Dianne Wiest, David Clennon, George Martin and Frances Conroy. This film was directed by Ulu Grosbard and written by Michael Cristofer.Email the hosts at MerylStreepPodcast@gmail.com and please remember to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast.Zach's ranking of Meryl's performances1. silkwood2. postcards from the edge3. the post4. big little lies season 25. julie and julia6. the hours7. devil wears prada8. adaptation9. a cry in the dark10. kramer vs kramer11. manchurian candidate12. into the woods13. the laundromat14. the river wild15. doubt16. music of the heart17. it's complicated18. ricki and the flash19. mamma mia 220. florence foster jenkins21. out of africa22. death becomes her23. ironweed24. deer hunter25. mamma mia 26. falling in love27. plenty28. little women29. defending your life30. heartburn31. first do no harm32. still of the night33. before and after34. she-devil35. mary poppins returns36. house of the spirits37. the homesman38. manhattan39. juliaZach's ranking of Meryl's films1. the post2. the hours3. silkwood4. little women5. kramer vs kramer6. adaptation7. out of africa8. the deer hunter9. doubt 10. big little lies season 211. into the woods12. a cry in the dark13. the laundromat14. postcards from the edge15. julie and julia16. the devil wears prada17. it's complicated18. mary poppins returns19. the river wild20. manchurian candidate21. music of the heart22. death becomes her23. falling in love24. ironweed25. ricki and the flash26. florence foster jenkins27. defending your life28. plenty29. manhattan30. mamma mia31. heartburn32. still of the night33. mamma mia 234. first do no harm35. she-devil36. julia37. the homesman38. house of the spirits39. before and afterMaryl's ranking of Meryl's performances1. the post2. julie and julia3. devil wears prada4. postcards from the edge5. adaptation6. big little lies season 27. out of africa8. kramer vs kramer9. the hours10. manchurian candidate11. river wild12. mamma mia 213. florence foster jenkins14. mamma mia15. silkwood16. music of the heart17. into the woods18. it's complicated19. little women20. heartburn21. deer hunter22. death becomes her23. ricki & the flash24. doubt25. first do no harm26. she-devil27. the laundromat28. house of the spirits29. mary poppins returns30. defending your life31. manhattan32. before and after33. still of the night34. julia35. the homesmanMaryl's ranking of Meryl's films1. the hours2. little women3. postcards from the edge4. kramer vs kramer5. the post6. adaptation7. florence foster jenkins8. doubt9. silkwood10. out of africa11. the deer hunter12. big little lies season 213. devil wears prada14. mamma mia 15. mary poppins returns16. into the woods17. julie & julia18. mamma mia 219. river wild20. manchurian candidate21. it's complicated22. death becomes her23 music of the heart24. defending your25. the laundromat26. house of the spirits27. heartburn28. first do no harm29. ricki & the flash30. julia31. she-devil32. still of the night33. before and after34. the homesman35. manhattan

Longtime friends and Meryl Streep fans Zachary Scot Johnson ( www.youtube.com/user/thesongadayproject/about ) and Maryl McNally discuss 1981's "The French Lieutenant's Woman", which co-stars Jeremy Irons. This film was directed by Karel Reisz and written by Harold Pinter, based on the novel by John Fowles.Email the hosts at MerylStreepPodcast@gmail.com and please remember to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast.Zach's ranking of Meryl's performances1. silkwood2. postcards from the edge3. the post4. big little lies season 25. julie and julia6. the hours7. devil wears prada8. adaptation9. a cry in the dark10. kramer vs kramer11. manchurian candidate12. into the woods13. the laundromat14. the river wild15. doubt16. music of the heart17. it's complicated18. ricki and the flash19. mamma mia 220. florence foster jenkins21. out of africa22. death becomes her23. ironweed24. deer hunter25. mamma mia 26. falling in love27. plenty28. little women29. defending your life30. heartburn31. first do no harm32. still of the night33. before and after34. she-devil35. mary poppins returns36. house of the spirits37. the homesman38. manhattan39. juliaZach's ranking of Meryl's films1. the post2. the hours3. silkwood4. little women5. kramer vs kramer6. adaptation7. out of africa8. the deer hunter9. doubt 10. big little lies season 211. into the woods12. a cry in the dark13. the laundromat14. postcards from the edge15. julie and julia16. the devil wears prada17. it's complicated18. mary poppins returns19. the river wild20. manchurian candidate21. music of the heart22. death becomes her23. falling in love24. ironweed25. ricki and the flash26. florence foster jenkins27. defending your life28. plenty29. manhattan30. mamma mia31. heartburn32. still of the night33. mamma mia 234. first do no harm35. she-devil36. julia37. the homesman38. house of the spirits39. before and afterMaryl's ranking of Meryl's performances1. the post2. julie and julia3. devil wears prada4. postcards from the edge5. adaptation6. big little lies season 27. out of africa8. kramer vs kramer9. the hours10. manchurian candidate11. river wild12. mamma mia 213. florence foster jenkins14. mamma mia15. silkwood16. music of the heart17. into the woods18. it's complicated19. little women20. heartburn21. deer hunter22. death becomes her23. ricki & the flash24. doubt25. first do no harm26. she-devil27. the laundromat28. house of the spirits29. mary poppins returns30. defending your life31. manhattan32. before and after33. still of the night34. julia35. the homesmanMaryl's ranking of Meryl's films1. the hours2. little women3. postcards from the edge4. kramer vs kramer5. the post6. adaptation7. florence foster jenkins8. doubt9. silkwood10. out of africa11. the deer hunter12. big little lies season 213. devil wears prada14. mamma mia 15. mary poppins returns16. into the woods17. julie & julia18. mamma mia 219. river wild20. manchurian candidate21. it's complicated22. death becomes her23 music of the heart24. defending your25. the laundromat26. house of the spirits27. heartburn28. first do no harm29. ricki & the flash30. julia31. she-devil32. still of the night33. before and after34. the homesman35. manhattan