Podcasts about larry gordon

Today is the Yahrzeit of my grandfather, R' Nison Gordon, and I'd like to share with you a conversation I had my father, R' Larry Gordon, about R' Nisson. R' Nison traveled from Poland when he was 18-years-old to report on life in New York City as the American correspondent for a Polish newspaper. Later he would became a well know Yiddish writer, writing for “The Day,” “The Day Morning Journal,” and “The Algemeiner Journal,” during a career that spanned over 45 years.

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Join us on Sales Lead Dog where we're joined by Larry Gordon, Managing Director of Emtec Inc., for an enlightening conversation on what it takes to be successful in the world of sales and leadership. Listen in as Larry breaks down his three essential drivers for success: capitalizing on technology inflection points, collaborating with exceptional CEOs, and prioritizing leadership actions over titles. His unique insights on fostering relationships with top-tier CEOs, alongside reflections on his own journey through sales and business development, offer a wealth of knowledge for anyone looking to thrive in the tech industry.     In our chat with Larry, we unpack the transition into sales leadership and the invaluable lessons that come with it. Discover the traits Larry values in potential leaders, including integrity and a deep understanding of the intricacies of relationship-driven business. He shares his strategies for assembling a balanced team, with a mix of personalities to lead effectively. This episode is brimming with Larry's advice on keeping the focus on customer engagement and sales results, offering listeners a blueprint for fostering strong, accountable leadership within their own teams.     We also tackle the sometimes challenging world of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Larry and I explore the delicate balance between the advantages of centralized customer information and the potential drawbacks of CRMs becoming overly complex or disconnected from sales team needs. Learn about the philosophy of "walking the Gemba" to truly understand front-line requirements, and the pursuit of a streamlined CRM that empowers rather than encumbers sales professionals. If you've ever felt weighed down by your CRM, this episode will guide you towards reassessing and reinvigorating your approach to drive your business forward.  Larry Gordon is Managing Director at Emtec and has been co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer and CEO of several successful start-ups in the IT services and digital engineering and AI spaces. Larry has held senior leadership positions at Cognizant and Capgemini.  He has had successful exits and built enduring customer relationships in the AI, security, devops and digital transformation segments. He has also been a successful angel investor in the energy and cloud spaces.    Quotes:  "I love identifying good opportunities at an inflection point in the technology industry. It makes things a lot easier to market, easier to recruit salespeople, and it's exciting."  "Leadership comes down to doing leadership things as opposed to being a leader. That's one of my themes."   "Offering [CEOs] things that are really useful, in my case, it's about driving revenue... I say I can do this and be accountable for it and spend the money the right way."     Links:  Larry Gordon's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurencemgordon/   Emtec, Inc. - https://www.emtecinc.com   Get this episode and all other episodes of Sales Lead Dog at https://empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog/     

In this episode of "Don't Kill the Messenger," host Kevin Goetz sits down with veteran producer Carol Baum, whose impressive career includes working with Hollywood icons such as Dolly Parton, Barbara Streisand, Robert De Niro, Zendaya, and Steve Martin. Carol shares stories and insights from her decades in the film industry, discussing her work on memorable films like "Father of the Bride," "The Good Girl," "Dead Ringers," and "Flyaway Home." She also shares candid experiences as a studio executive at Fox and Lorimar, where she developed classic films like "Officer and a Gentleman" and "The Dead Zone." With the recent release of her book, "Creative Producing," Carol provides a wealth of knowledge for aspiring filmmakers and industry professionals.Carol's Early Career and Education (07:42)Carol discusses her early career, how a girl from South Orange, New Jersey with no Hollywood connections landed a job in publishing at Bantam Books, where she discovered "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and how she went on to produce classic movies.Studio Executive Roles (24:28)As a studio executive, Carol worked with Jon Peters' company, where she learned the importance of a positive work environment. She then moved on to Fox, working under Joe Wizan, and experienced a culture shift when Larry Gordon and Scott Rudin joined the studio. At Lorimar, Carol developed classic films such as "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "The Dead Zone."Father of the Bride, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sandollar Productions (30:17)Carol shares stories of working with Sandy Gallin and Dolly Parton at Sandollar Productions where she produced successful films like "Father of the Bride" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" while collaborating with Howard Rosenman.Creative Producing (38:10)Carol discusses her book, Creative Producing, where she emphasizes the importance of the development process and working closely with writers to refine scripts and make them better.Working with Stars Like Barbara Streisand, Steve Martin, and a Young Zendaya (42:53)Carol shares her love for actors and their role in getting projects made. She considers Anthony Hopkins one of the greatest living actors and recounts her experiences working with Barbara Streisand, Steve Martin, and a young Zendaya.Carol Baum's love for movies shines through and shows why she is so valuable to the film industry. Her willingness to share her experiences and lessons in this episode as well as in her book, Creative Producing, are sure to inspire and guide countless filmmakers If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review or connect on social media. We look forward to bringing you more revelations from behind the scenes next time on Don't Kill the Messenger!Host: Kevin GoetzGuest: Carol BaumProducer: Kari CampanoWriters: Kevin Goetz, Darlene Hayman, and Kari CampanoFor more information about Carol Baum:IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0062071/Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_BaumWebsite: https://www.carolfriedlandbaum.com/For more information about Kevin Goetz:Website: www.KevinGoetz360.comAudienceology Book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Audience-ology/Kevin-Goetz/9781982186678Facebook, Twitter, Instagram: @KevinGoetz360Linked In @Kevin GoetzScreen Engine/ASI Website: www.ScreenEngineASI.com

Larry Gordon was born and raised in Brooklyn, and has six children; including Nachi Gordon, co-host of Meaningful People Podcast. He is a veteran journalist, writing stories on Jewish life and related issues for thirty years. He is also the acknowledged creator of modern Jewish radio. This distinction is due, for Larry, in 1977, pioneered the first weekday morning Jewish music and news program on FM radio—91.1 WFMU at New Jersey's Upsala College. Larry's program, the “Hebrew and Jewish program,” and the format he created, is the direct, originating predecessor of the world famous JM in the AM radio show hosted by Nachum Segal. Larry's interest in journalism is inspired by his father, Nison Gordon, a”h, who traveled from Poland when he was 18-years-old to report on life in New York City as the American correspondent for a Polish newspaper. Larry's father's became a well know Yiddish writer, writing for “The Day,” “The Day Morning Journal,” and “The Algemeiner Journal,” during a career that spanned over 45 years.  ____________________________________    ►Ceremian (Alpert and Associates) Call Moshe Alpert!  Email: Moshe.alpert@nm.com for a free consultation, or head to https://bit.ly/moshealpert Or call 718-644-1594  _________________________________________ ►Collars and Co For the best-looking and most comfortable dress shirts in the world.. www.Collarsandco.com  Use promo code: Winter15 for 15% off all order $100+ _______________________________________________________  ►Town Appliance Visit https://www.townappliance.com Message Town Appliance on WhatsApp: https://bit.ly/Townappliance_whatsapp  ________________________________________________ ►Mosaica Press Book of The Week "Inside-Outside Parenting" by Dr. Shalom Augenbaum, published by Mosaica Press, delves into the intricacies and challenges of parenting. It emphasizes understanding children's needs, personalities, and behaviors from both an inside (emotional and psychological) and outside (observable behavior) perspective. The book is structured to guide parents in nurturing and comprehending their children's unique characteristics, offering insights from both professional and personal parenting experiences. It's a comprehensive resource for parents seeking to deepen their understanding and improve their parenting skills.Pick up your copy today! To enter the Mosaica Book Give away of the week visit  https://mosaicapress.com/?sld=meaning... and enter your email to be entered into this weeks Book Giveaway! The book is available for purchase at https://mosaicapress.com/?sld=meaning... Use code Meaningful15 for 15% off any purchase! ___________________________________________________________ ► Dream Raffle Enter the raffle now to win the prize of your dreams! https://thedreamraffle.com ___________________________________ Request to join Meaningful Minute Plus + https://chat.whatsapp.com/HzpRKhv88F38T1mUsFf99h ----------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to our Podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2WALuE2   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/39bNGnO   Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/MPPGooglePodcasts   Or wherever Podcasts are available! Editor: Sruly Saftlas Podcast created by: Meaningful Minute   For more info and upcoming news, check out: https://Meaningfulminute.org

Coach Larry Gordon is a wrestling coach that found the Martial Art of Kajukenbo later in his life. In this episode, he shares his martial arts journey.

This episode looks at the 1984 debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and its 1987 film adaptation. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we're going to talk about 80s author Bret Easton Ellis and his 1985 novel Less Than Zero, the literal polar opposite of last week's subjects, Jay McInerney and his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. As I mentioned last week, McInerney was twenty-nine when he published Bright Lights, Big City. What I forgot to mention was that he was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, halfway between Boston and New York City, and he would a part of that elite East Coast community that befits the upper class child of a corporate executive. Bret Easton Ellis was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father was a property developer, and his parents would divorce when he was 18. He would attend high school at The Buckley School, a college prep school in nearby Sherman Oaks, whose other famous alumni include a who's who of modern pop culture history, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Tucker Carlson, Laura Dern, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, Matthew Perry, and Nicole Richie. So they both grew up fairly well off. And they both would attend tony colleges in New England.  Ellis would attend Bennington College in Vermont, a private liberal arts college whose alumni include fellow writers Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt, who would both graduate from Bennington the same year as Ellis, 1986. While still attending The Buckley School, the then sixteen year old Ellis would start writing the book he would call Less Than Zero, after the Elvis Costello song. The story would follow a protagonist not unlike Bret Easton Ellis and his adventures through a high school not unlike Buckley. Unlike the final product, Ellis's first draft of Less Than Zero wore its heart on its sleeve, and was written in the third person.  Ellis would do a couple of rewrites of the novel during his final years at Buckley and his first years at Bennington, until his creative writing professor, true crime novelist Joe McGinness, suggested to the young writer that he revert his story back to the first person, which Ellis was at first hesitant to do. But once he did start to rewrite the story as a traditional novel, everything seemed to click. Ellis would have his book finished by the end of the year, and McGinniss was so impressed with the final product that he would submit it to his own agent to send out to publishers. Bret Easton Ellis was only a second year student at the time. And because timing is everything in life, Less Than Zero was being submitted to publishers just as Bright Lights, Big City was tearing up the best seller charts, and the publisher Simon and Schuster would purchase the rights to the book for $5,000. When the book was published in June 1985, Ellis just finished his third year at Bennington.  He was only twenty-one years and three months old. Oh… also… before the book was published, the film producer Marvin Worth, whose credits included Bob Fosse's 1974 doc-drama about Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman, 1979's musical drama The Rose, Bette Midler's breakthrough film as an actress, and the 1983 Dudley Moore comedy Unfaithfully Yours, would purchase the rights to make the novel into a movie, for $7,500. The film would be produced at Twentieth Century-Fox, under the supervision of the studio's then vice president of production, Scott Rudin. The book would become a success upon its release, with young readers gravitating towards Clay and his aimless, meandering tour of the rich and decadent young adults in Los Angeles circa Christmas 1984, bouncing through parties and conversations and sex and drugs and shopping malls. One of those readers who became obsessed with the book was a then-seventeen year old Los Angeles native who had just returned to the city after three years of high school in Northern California. Me. I read Less Than Zero easily three times that summer, enraptured not only with Ellis's minimalist prose but with Clay specifically. Although I was neither bisexual nor a user of drugs, Clay was the closest thing I had ever seen to myself in a book before. I had kept in touch with my school friends from junior high while I lived in Santa Cruz, and I found myself to have drifted far away from them during my time away from them. And then when I went back to Santa Cruz shortly after Christmas in 1985, I had a similar feeling of isolation from a number of my friends there, not six months after leaving high school. I also loved how Ellis threw in a number of then-current Los Angeles-specific references, including two mentions of KROQ DJ Richard Blade, who was the coolest guy in radio on the planet. And thanks to Sirius XM and its First Wave channel, I can still listen to Richard Blade almost daily, but now from wherever I might be in the world. But I digress. My bond with Less Than Zero only deepened the next time I read it in early 1986. One of the things I used to do as a young would-be screenwriter living in Los Angeles was to try and write adaptation of novels when I wasn't going to school, going to movies, or working as a file clerk at a law firm. But one book I couldn't adapt for the life of me was Less Than Zero. Sure, there was a story there, but its episodic nature made it difficult to create a coherent storyline. Fox felt the same way, so they would hire Michael Cristofer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, to do the first draft of the script. Cristofer had just finished writing the adaptation of John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick that Mad Max director George Miller was about to direct, and he would do a literal adaptation of Ellis's book, with all the drugs and sex and violence, except for a slight rehabilitation of the lead character's sexuality. Although it was still the 1980s, with one part of the nation dramatically shifting its perspective on many types of sexuality, it was still Ronald Reagan's 1980s America, and maybe it wasn't a good idea to have the lead character be openly bisexual in a major studio motion picture. Cristofer would complete his first draft of the script in just one month, and producer Marvin Worth really loved it. Problem was, the Fox executives hated it. In a November 18th, 1987, New York Times article about the adaptation, Worth would tell writer Allen Harmetz that he thought Cristofer's script was highly commercial, because “it had something gripping to say about the dilemma of a generation to whom nothing matters.” Which, as someone who had just turned twenty years old eight days after the movie's release and four days before this article came out, I absolutely disagree with. My generation cared about a great many things. We cared about human rights. We cared about ending apartheid. We cared about ending AIDS and what was happening politically and economically. Yeah, we also cared about puffy jean jackets and neon colored clothes and other non-sensical things to take our minds off all the other junk we were dealing with, but it would be typical of a forty something screenwriter and a fiftysomething producer to thing we didn't give a damn about anything. But again, I digress. Worth and the studio would agree on one thing. It wasn't really a drug film, but about young people being destroyed by the privilege of having everything you ever wanted available to you. But the studio would want the movie version of the book to be a bit more sanitized for mainstream consumption. Goodbye, Marvin Worth. Hello, Jon Avnet. In 1986, Jon Avnet was mostly a producer of low-budget films for television, with titles like Between Two Women and Calendar Girl Murders, but he had struck gold in 1983 with a lower-budgeted studio movie with a first-time director and a little known lead actor. That movie was Risky Business, and it made that little known lead actor, Tom Cruise, a bona-fide star. Avnet, wanting to make the move out of television and onto the big screen, would hire Harley Peyton, a former script reader for former Columbia Pictures and MGM/UA head David Begelman, who you might remember from several of our previous episodes, and six-time Oscar nominated producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Peyton would spend weeks in Avnet's office, pouring over every page of the book, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and what to change. Two of the first things to go were the screening of a “snuff” film on the beach, and a scene where a twelve year old girl is tied to a bedpost and raped by one of the main characters. Julian would still hustle himself out to men for money to buy drugs, but Clay would a committed heterosexual. Casting on the film would see many of Hollywood's leading younger male actors looked at for Clay, including a twenty-three year old recent transplant from Oklahoma looking not only for his first leading role, but his first speaking role on screen. Brad Pitt. The producers would instead go with twenty-four year old Andrew McCarthy, an amiable-enough actor who had already made a name for himself with such films as St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink, and who would have another hit film in Mannequin between being cast as Clay and the start of production. For Blair, they would cast Jami Gertz, who had spent years on the cusp of stardom, between her co-starring role as Muffy Tepperman on the iconic 1982 CBS series Square Pegs, to movies such as Quicksilver and Crossroads that were expected to be bigger than they ended up being. The ace up her sleeve was the upcoming vampire horror/comedy film The Lost Boys, which Warner Brothers was so certain was going to be a huge hit, they would actually move it away from its original Spring 1987 release date to a prime mid-July release. The third point in the triangle, Julian, would see Robert Downey Jr. get cast. Today, it's hard to understand just how not famous Downey was at the time. He had been featured in movies like Weird Science and Tuff Turf, and spent a year as a Not Ready For Prime Time Player on what most people agree was the single worst season of Saturday Night Live, but his star was starting to rise.  What the producers did not know, and Downey did not elaborate on, was that, like Julian, Downey was falling down a spiral of drug use, which would make his performance more method-like than anyone could have guessed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were hot in the Los Angeles music scene but were still a couple years from the release of their breakout album, 1989's Mothers Milk, were cast to play a band in one of the party scenes, and additional cast members would include James Spader and Lisanne Falk, who would become semi-famous two years later as one of the Heathers. Impressed with a 1984 British historical drama called Another Country featuring Colin Firth, Cary Elwes and Rupert Everett, Avnet would hire that film's 35 year old director, Marek Kanievska, to make his American directing debut. But Kanievska would be in for a major culture shock when he learned just how different the American studio system was to the British production system. Shooting on the film was set to begin in Los Angeles on May 6th, 1987, and the film was already scheduled to open in theatres barely six months later. One major element that would help keep the movie moving along was cinematographer Ed Lachman. Lachman had been working as a cinematographer for nearly 15 years, and had shot movies like Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace, Susan Sideman's Desperately Seeking Susan, and David Byrne's True Stories.  Lachman knew how to keep things on track for lower budgeted movies, and at only $8m, Less Than Zero was the second lowest budgeted film for Twentieth Century-Fox for the entire year. Not that having a lower budget was going to stop Kanievska and Lachman from trying make the best film they could. They would stage the film in the garish neon lighting the 80s would be best known for, with cool flairs like lighting a poolside discussion between Clay and Julian where the ripples of the water and the underwater lights create an effect on the characters' faces that highlight Julian's literal drowning in his problems. There's also one very awesome shot where Clay's convertible, parked in the middle of a street with its top down, as we see Clay and Blair making out while scores of motorcycles loudly pass by them on either side. And there's a Steadicam shot during the party scene featuring the Chili Peppers which is supposed to be out of this world, but it's likely we'll never see it. Once the film was finished shooting and Kanievska turned in his assembly cut, the studio was not happy with the film. It was edgier than they wanted, and they had a problem with the party scene with the Peppers. Specifically, that the band was jumping around on screen, extremely sweaty, without their shirts on. It also didn't help that Larry Gordon, the President of Fox who had approved the purchase of the book, had been let go before production on the film began, and his replacement, Alan Horn, who did give the final go-ahead on the film, had also been summarily dismissed. His replacement, Leonard Goldberg, really hated the material, thought it was distasteful, but Barry Diller, the chairman of the studio, was still a supporter of the project. During all this infighting, the director, Kanievska, had been released from the film.  Before any test screenings. Test screenings had really become a part of the studio modus operandi in the 1980s, and Fox would often hold their test screenings on the Fox Studio Lot in Century City. There are several screenings rooms on the Fox lot, from the 53 seat William Fox Theatre, to the 476 seat Darryl Zanuck Theatre. Most of the Less Than Zero test screenings would be held in the 120 seat Little Theatre, so that audience reactions would be easier to gauge, and should they want to keep some of the audience over for a post-screening Q&A, it would be easier to recruit eight or ten audience members. That first test screening did not go over well. Even though the screening room was filled with young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and many of them were recruited from nearby malls like the Century City Mall and the Beverly Center based off a stated liking of Andrew McCarthy, they really didn't like Jami Hertz's character, and they really hated Robert Downey Jr's. Several of the harder scenes of drug use with their characters would be toned down, either through judicious editing, or new scenes were shot, such as when Blair is seen dumping her cocaine into a bathroom sink, which was filmed without a director by the cinematographer, Ed Lachman. They'd also shoot a flashback scene to the trio's high school graduation, meant to show them in happier times. The film would be completed three weeks before its November 6th release date, and Fox would book the film into 871 theatres., going up against no less than seven other new movies, including a Shelley Long comedy, Hello Again, the fourth entry in the Death Wish series, yet another Jon Cryer high school movie, Hiding Out, a weird Patrick Swayze sci-fi movie called Steel Dawn, a relatively tame fantasy romance film from Alan Rudolph called Made in Heaven, and a movie called Ruskies which starred a very young Joaquin Phoenix when he was still known as Leaf Phoenix, while also contending with movies like Fatal Attraction, Baby Boom and Dirty Dancing, which were all still doing very well two to four months in theatres. The reviews for the film were mostly bad. If there was any saving grace critically, it would be the praise heaped upon Downey for his raw performance as a drug addict, but of course, no one knew he actually was a drug addict at that time. The film would open in fourth place with $3.01m in ticket sales, less than half of what Fatal Attraction grossed that weekend, in its eighth week of release. And the following weeks' drops would be swift and merciless. Down 36% in its second week, another 41% in its third, and had one of the worst drops in its fourth week, the four day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when many movies were up in ticket sales. By early December, the film was mostly playing in dollar houses, and by the first of the year, Fox had already stopped tracking it, with slightly less than $12.4m in tickets sold. As of the writing of this episode, at the end of November 2022, you cannot find Less Than Zero streaming anywhere, although if you do want to see it online, it's not that hard to find. But it has been available for streaming in the past on sites like Amazon Prime and The Roku Channel, so hopefully it will find its way back to streaming in the future. Or you can find a copy of the 21 year old DVD on Amazon. Thank you for listening. We'll talk again real soon, when our final episode of 2022, Episode 96, on Michael Jackson's Thriller, is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Less Than Zero the movie and the novel, and its author, Bret Easton Ellis. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.

This episode looks at the 1984 debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and its 1987 film adaptation. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we're going to talk about 80s author Bret Easton Ellis and his 1985 novel Less Than Zero, the literal polar opposite of last week's subjects, Jay McInerney and his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. As I mentioned last week, McInerney was twenty-nine when he published Bright Lights, Big City. What I forgot to mention was that he was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, halfway between Boston and New York City, and he would a part of that elite East Coast community that befits the upper class child of a corporate executive. Bret Easton Ellis was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father was a property developer, and his parents would divorce when he was 18. He would attend high school at The Buckley School, a college prep school in nearby Sherman Oaks, whose other famous alumni include a who's who of modern pop culture history, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Tucker Carlson, Laura Dern, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, Matthew Perry, and Nicole Richie. So they both grew up fairly well off. And they both would attend tony colleges in New England.  Ellis would attend Bennington College in Vermont, a private liberal arts college whose alumni include fellow writers Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt, who would both graduate from Bennington the same year as Ellis, 1986. While still attending The Buckley School, the then sixteen year old Ellis would start writing the book he would call Less Than Zero, after the Elvis Costello song. The story would follow a protagonist not unlike Bret Easton Ellis and his adventures through a high school not unlike Buckley. Unlike the final product, Ellis's first draft of Less Than Zero wore its heart on its sleeve, and was written in the third person.  Ellis would do a couple of rewrites of the novel during his final years at Buckley and his first years at Bennington, until his creative writing professor, true crime novelist Joe McGinness, suggested to the young writer that he revert his story back to the first person, which Ellis was at first hesitant to do. But once he did start to rewrite the story as a traditional novel, everything seemed to click. Ellis would have his book finished by the end of the year, and McGinniss was so impressed with the final product that he would submit it to his own agent to send out to publishers. Bret Easton Ellis was only a second year student at the time. And because timing is everything in life, Less Than Zero was being submitted to publishers just as Bright Lights, Big City was tearing up the best seller charts, and the publisher Simon and Schuster would purchase the rights to the book for $5,000. When the book was published in June 1985, Ellis just finished his third year at Bennington.  He was only twenty-one years and three months old. Oh… also… before the book was published, the film producer Marvin Worth, whose credits included Bob Fosse's 1974 doc-drama about Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman, 1979's musical drama The Rose, Bette Midler's breakthrough film as an actress, and the 1983 Dudley Moore comedy Unfaithfully Yours, would purchase the rights to make the novel into a movie, for $7,500. The film would be produced at Twentieth Century-Fox, under the supervision of the studio's then vice president of production, Scott Rudin. The book would become a success upon its release, with young readers gravitating towards Clay and his aimless, meandering tour of the rich and decadent young adults in Los Angeles circa Christmas 1984, bouncing through parties and conversations and sex and drugs and shopping malls. One of those readers who became obsessed with the book was a then-seventeen year old Los Angeles native who had just returned to the city after three years of high school in Northern California. Me. I read Less Than Zero easily three times that summer, enraptured not only with Ellis's minimalist prose but with Clay specifically. Although I was neither bisexual nor a user of drugs, Clay was the closest thing I had ever seen to myself in a book before. I had kept in touch with my school friends from junior high while I lived in Santa Cruz, and I found myself to have drifted far away from them during my time away from them. And then when I went back to Santa Cruz shortly after Christmas in 1985, I had a similar feeling of isolation from a number of my friends there, not six months after leaving high school. I also loved how Ellis threw in a number of then-current Los Angeles-specific references, including two mentions of KROQ DJ Richard Blade, who was the coolest guy in radio on the planet. And thanks to Sirius XM and its First Wave channel, I can still listen to Richard Blade almost daily, but now from wherever I might be in the world. But I digress. My bond with Less Than Zero only deepened the next time I read it in early 1986. One of the things I used to do as a young would-be screenwriter living in Los Angeles was to try and write adaptation of novels when I wasn't going to school, going to movies, or working as a file clerk at a law firm. But one book I couldn't adapt for the life of me was Less Than Zero. Sure, there was a story there, but its episodic nature made it difficult to create a coherent storyline. Fox felt the same way, so they would hire Michael Cristofer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, to do the first draft of the script. Cristofer had just finished writing the adaptation of John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick that Mad Max director George Miller was about to direct, and he would do a literal adaptation of Ellis's book, with all the drugs and sex and violence, except for a slight rehabilitation of the lead character's sexuality. Although it was still the 1980s, with one part of the nation dramatically shifting its perspective on many types of sexuality, it was still Ronald Reagan's 1980s America, and maybe it wasn't a good idea to have the lead character be openly bisexual in a major studio motion picture. Cristofer would complete his first draft of the script in just one month, and producer Marvin Worth really loved it. Problem was, the Fox executives hated it. In a November 18th, 1987, New York Times article about the adaptation, Worth would tell writer Allen Harmetz that he thought Cristofer's script was highly commercial, because “it had something gripping to say about the dilemma of a generation to whom nothing matters.” Which, as someone who had just turned twenty years old eight days after the movie's release and four days before this article came out, I absolutely disagree with. My generation cared about a great many things. We cared about human rights. We cared about ending apartheid. We cared about ending AIDS and what was happening politically and economically. Yeah, we also cared about puffy jean jackets and neon colored clothes and other non-sensical things to take our minds off all the other junk we were dealing with, but it would be typical of a forty something screenwriter and a fiftysomething producer to thing we didn't give a damn about anything. But again, I digress. Worth and the studio would agree on one thing. It wasn't really a drug film, but about young people being destroyed by the privilege of having everything you ever wanted available to you. But the studio would want the movie version of the book to be a bit more sanitized for mainstream consumption. Goodbye, Marvin Worth. Hello, Jon Avnet. In 1986, Jon Avnet was mostly a producer of low-budget films for television, with titles like Between Two Women and Calendar Girl Murders, but he had struck gold in 1983 with a lower-budgeted studio movie with a first-time director and a little known lead actor. That movie was Risky Business, and it made that little known lead actor, Tom Cruise, a bona-fide star. Avnet, wanting to make the move out of television and onto the big screen, would hire Harley Peyton, a former script reader for former Columbia Pictures and MGM/UA head David Begelman, who you might remember from several of our previous episodes, and six-time Oscar nominated producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Peyton would spend weeks in Avnet's office, pouring over every page of the book, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and what to change. Two of the first things to go were the screening of a “snuff” film on the beach, and a scene where a twelve year old girl is tied to a bedpost and raped by one of the main characters. Julian would still hustle himself out to men for money to buy drugs, but Clay would a committed heterosexual. Casting on the film would see many of Hollywood's leading younger male actors looked at for Clay, including a twenty-three year old recent transplant from Oklahoma looking not only for his first leading role, but his first speaking role on screen. Brad Pitt. The producers would instead go with twenty-four year old Andrew McCarthy, an amiable-enough actor who had already made a name for himself with such films as St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink, and who would have another hit film in Mannequin between being cast as Clay and the start of production. For Blair, they would cast Jami Gertz, who had spent years on the cusp of stardom, between her co-starring role as Muffy Tepperman on the iconic 1982 CBS series Square Pegs, to movies such as Quicksilver and Crossroads that were expected to be bigger than they ended up being. The ace up her sleeve was the upcoming vampire horror/comedy film The Lost Boys, which Warner Brothers was so certain was going to be a huge hit, they would actually move it away from its original Spring 1987 release date to a prime mid-July release. The third point in the triangle, Julian, would see Robert Downey Jr. get cast. Today, it's hard to understand just how not famous Downey was at the time. He had been featured in movies like Weird Science and Tuff Turf, and spent a year as a Not Ready For Prime Time Player on what most people agree was the single worst season of Saturday Night Live, but his star was starting to rise.  What the producers did not know, and Downey did not elaborate on, was that, like Julian, Downey was falling down a spiral of drug use, which would make his performance more method-like than anyone could have guessed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were hot in the Los Angeles music scene but were still a couple years from the release of their breakout album, 1989's Mothers Milk, were cast to play a band in one of the party scenes, and additional cast members would include James Spader and Lisanne Falk, who would become semi-famous two years later as one of the Heathers. Impressed with a 1984 British historical drama called Another Country featuring Colin Firth, Cary Elwes and Rupert Everett, Avnet would hire that film's 35 year old director, Marek Kanievska, to make his American directing debut. But Kanievska would be in for a major culture shock when he learned just how different the American studio system was to the British production system. Shooting on the film was set to begin in Los Angeles on May 6th, 1987, and the film was already scheduled to open in theatres barely six months later. One major element that would help keep the movie moving along was cinematographer Ed Lachman. Lachman had been working as a cinematographer for nearly 15 years, and had shot movies like Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace, Susan Sideman's Desperately Seeking Susan, and David Byrne's True Stories.  Lachman knew how to keep things on track for lower budgeted movies, and at only $8m, Less Than Zero was the second lowest budgeted film for Twentieth Century-Fox for the entire year. Not that having a lower budget was going to stop Kanievska and Lachman from trying make the best film they could. They would stage the film in the garish neon lighting the 80s would be best known for, with cool flairs like lighting a poolside discussion between Clay and Julian where the ripples of the water and the underwater lights create an effect on the characters' faces that highlight Julian's literal drowning in his problems. There's also one very awesome shot where Clay's convertible, parked in the middle of a street with its top down, as we see Clay and Blair making out while scores of motorcycles loudly pass by them on either side. And there's a Steadicam shot during the party scene featuring the Chili Peppers which is supposed to be out of this world, but it's likely we'll never see it. Once the film was finished shooting and Kanievska turned in his assembly cut, the studio was not happy with the film. It was edgier than they wanted, and they had a problem with the party scene with the Peppers. Specifically, that the band was jumping around on screen, extremely sweaty, without their shirts on. It also didn't help that Larry Gordon, the President of Fox who had approved the purchase of the book, had been let go before production on the film began, and his replacement, Alan Horn, who did give the final go-ahead on the film, had also been summarily dismissed. His replacement, Leonard Goldberg, really hated the material, thought it was distasteful, but Barry Diller, the chairman of the studio, was still a supporter of the project. During all this infighting, the director, Kanievska, had been released from the film.  Before any test screenings. Test screenings had really become a part of the studio modus operandi in the 1980s, and Fox would often hold their test screenings on the Fox Studio Lot in Century City. There are several screenings rooms on the Fox lot, from the 53 seat William Fox Theatre, to the 476 seat Darryl Zanuck Theatre. Most of the Less Than Zero test screenings would be held in the 120 seat Little Theatre, so that audience reactions would be easier to gauge, and should they want to keep some of the audience over for a post-screening Q&A, it would be easier to recruit eight or ten audience members. That first test screening did not go over well. Even though the screening room was filled with young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and many of them were recruited from nearby malls like the Century City Mall and the Beverly Center based off a stated liking of Andrew McCarthy, they really didn't like Jami Hertz's character, and they really hated Robert Downey Jr's. Several of the harder scenes of drug use with their characters would be toned down, either through judicious editing, or new scenes were shot, such as when Blair is seen dumping her cocaine into a bathroom sink, which was filmed without a director by the cinematographer, Ed Lachman. They'd also shoot a flashback scene to the trio's high school graduation, meant to show them in happier times. The film would be completed three weeks before its November 6th release date, and Fox would book the film into 871 theatres., going up against no less than seven other new movies, including a Shelley Long comedy, Hello Again, the fourth entry in the Death Wish series, yet another Jon Cryer high school movie, Hiding Out, a weird Patrick Swayze sci-fi movie called Steel Dawn, a relatively tame fantasy romance film from Alan Rudolph called Made in Heaven, and a movie called Ruskies which starred a very young Joaquin Phoenix when he was still known as Leaf Phoenix, while also contending with movies like Fatal Attraction, Baby Boom and Dirty Dancing, which were all still doing very well two to four months in theatres. The reviews for the film were mostly bad. If there was any saving grace critically, it would be the praise heaped upon Downey for his raw performance as a drug addict, but of course, no one knew he actually was a drug addict at that time. The film would open in fourth place with $3.01m in ticket sales, less than half of what Fatal Attraction grossed that weekend, in its eighth week of release. And the following weeks' drops would be swift and merciless. Down 36% in its second week, another 41% in its third, and had one of the worst drops in its fourth week, the four day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when many movies were up in ticket sales. By early December, the film was mostly playing in dollar houses, and by the first of the year, Fox had already stopped tracking it, with slightly less than $12.4m in tickets sold. As of the writing of this episode, at the end of November 2022, you cannot find Less Than Zero streaming anywhere, although if you do want to see it online, it's not that hard to find. But it has been available for streaming in the past on sites like Amazon Prime and The Roku Channel, so hopefully it will find its way back to streaming in the future. Or you can find a copy of the 21 year old DVD on Amazon. Thank you for listening. We'll talk again real soon, when our final episode of 2022, Episode 96, on Michael Jackson's Thriller, is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Less Than Zero the movie and the novel, and its author, Bret Easton Ellis. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.

Paul Farren talks to Wayne Byrne about his latest book Walter Hill: The Cinema of a Hollywood Maverick. Walter Hill: The Cinema of a Hollywood Maverick is a comprehensive journey through the long career of auteur Hollywood filmmaker Walter Hill, director of The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire and many more. The book covers every motion picture that Hill directed, with historical detail and critical commentary on each, and discusses Hill's overall cultural relevance and industrial impact. It includes candid conversations with Hill; producer Larry Gordon; actors Nicholas Guest, William Sadler and Michael Pare; cinematographers Lloyd Ahern and Matthew Leonetti; composers Van Dyke Parks and David Mansfield; screenwriter Larry Gross, and others who worked with Hill throughout his prolific career. Walter Hill: The Cinema of a Hollywood Maverick is out now. Wayne will be celebrating the release of Walter Hill: The Cinema of a Hollywood Maverick in Naas Library on November 18th from 7pm to 9pm. Wayne will be joined at the event by Film Ireland's Paul Farren for a discussion about the making of the book and all things Walter Hill. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which Wayne will answer any questions about Walter and writing on Cinema. All are welcome, but booking is essential. You can reserve a seat by contacting Naas Library on 045-879111 or email them at naaslib@kildarecoco.ie

Today on Vermont Viewpoint, Pat McDonald hosts! First up, she'll have Karen Kevra. Karen is the Artistic Director for Capital City Concerts and they'll talk about The Legacy of Larry Gordon. After that, she'll speak with Tony Camps, the President of New England Cooks and Producer/ Director of CVTV in Barre. They'll talk about New England Cooks!. And for the last half of the show, she'll talk with Matt Musgrave, who's the Deputy Ex. VP for Associated General Contractors. They'll talk about Construction in Vermont.

Today on Vermont Viewpoint, Pat McDonald hosts! First up, she'll speak with Sonny Provetto. Sonny is a LSW and Director of Vermont Center for Responder Wellness. They'll talk about the Legacy of Larry Gordon. Next up, Erica Scott joins the conversation and talks about Wheels for Warmth. During the second hour of the show, Jeffrey and Eric Tuper-Giles will be on to talk about the History and Restoration of the Reynolds House. Jeffrey and Eric are co-owners of the Reynolds House Bed and Breakfast in Barre.

On the evening of July 7, 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters marched in downtown Dallas and other cities nationwide. They peacefully gathered in response to the police shootings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few blocks from the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an African American man who had left the U.S. Army following disgraceful conduct got out of his SUV, ready for combat. The mass murderer arrived with a calculated plan to kill police officers, preferably white officers.  Wearing tactical gear, a bullet-resistant vest, and armed with a high-powered assault rifle, he, in effect, executed five officers and wounded eleven others.  A cell phone video by a witness in a nearby building recorded Johnson shooting an officer for the city's transit system, DART,  in the back and then standing over the officer to pump eleven more rounds into him at point-blank range. The ambush marked the deadliest and bloodiest day for American law enforcement since 9/11. In a fierce gun battle, officers cornered the shooter inside the downtown campus building of the El Centro Community College. Larry Gordon, a crisis hostage negotiator for the DALLAS SWAT team, spent four hours talking with the gunman who pledged to take his life and the lives of more officers. Gordon and Retired Dallas Police Lt. Bob Owens, a 40-year veteran of DPD who served 20 years on SWAT, join Robert to reveal the inside story of what happened. FOLLOW the True Crime Reporter® Podcast  SIGN UP FOR my True Crime Newsletter THANK YOU FOR THE FIVE-STAR REVIEWS ON APPLE Please leave one – it really helps. TELL ME about a STORY OR SUBJECT  that you want to hear more about

On the evening of July 7, 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters marched in downtown Dallas and other cities across the nation. They peacefully gathered in response to the police shootings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few blocks from the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an African American man who had left the U.S. Army following disgraceful conduct got out of his SUV ready for combat. The mass murderer arrived with a calculated plan to kill police officers, preferably white officers.  Wearing tactical gear, a bullet-resistant vest, and armed with a high-powered assault rifle he in effect executed five officers and wounded eleven others.  A cell phone video by a witness in a nearby building recorded Johnson shooting an officer for the city's transit system, DART,  in the back and then standing over the officer to pump eleven more rounds into him at point-blank range. The ambush marked the deadliest and bloodiest day for American law enforcement since 9/11. In a fierce gun battle, officers cornered the shooter inside the downtown campus building of the El Centro Community College. Larry Gordon, a crisis hostage negotiator for the DALLAS SWAT team, spent four hours talking with the gunman who pledged to take his life and the lives of more officers. Gordon and Retired Dallas Police Lt. Bob Owens, a 40-year veteran of DPD who served 20 of those years on SWAT join Robert to reveal the inside story of what happened.

On the evening of July 7, 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters marched in downtown Dallas and other cities across the nation. They peacefully gathered in response to the police shootings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few blocks from the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an African American man who had left the U.S. Army following disgraceful conduct got out of his SUV ready for combat. The mass murderer arrived with a calculated plan to kill police officers, preferably white officers.  Wearing tactical gear, a bullet-resistant vest, and armed with a high-powered assault rifle he in effect executed five officers and wounded eleven others.  A cell phone video by a witness in a nearby building recorded Johnson shooting an officer for the city's transit system, DART,  in the back and then standing over the officer to pump eleven more rounds into him at point-blank range. The ambush marked the deadliest and bloodiest day for American law enforcement since 9/11. In a fierce gun battle, officers cornered the shooter inside the downtown campus building of the El Centro Community College. Larry Gordon, a crisis hostage negotiator for the DALLAS SWAT team, spent four hours talking with the gunman who pledged to take his life and the lives of more officers. Gordon and Retired Dallas Police Lt. Bob Owens, a 40-year veteran of DPD who served 20 of those years on SWAT join Robert to reveal the inside story of what happened. We want to become your favorite true crime podcast. Please leave a review wherever you listen. Join our true crime community and follow us here.  The True Crime Reporter® podcast features stories about serial killers, mass murderers, murder mysteries, homicides, cold cases, prisons, violent criminals, serial rapists, child abductors, child molesters, kidnappers, bank robbers, cyber criminals, and assorted violent criminals. True Crime Reporter® is a @2022 copyrighted and trade-marked production by True Crime Reporter®, LLC, in Dallas, Texas.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Owning The Customer Experience with Larry Gordon Larry Gordon and Joe Lynch discuss owning the customer experience. Larry is the Managing Director, GTM, Emtec Digital, a global technology services company that provides digital software engineering and transformation solutions to clients across multiple industries. About Larry Gordon  Larry Gordon is the Managing Director, GTM, Emtec Digital. Prior to joining Emtec, Larry has held senior leadership positions at Cognizant and Capgemini and has founded and led IT services and software companies in the security, devops and digital transformation segments. He has also been a successful angel investor in the energy and cloud spaces. About Emtec Emtec is a global IT consultancy dedicated to helping world class organizations in the enterprise, education, and government markets drive transformation and growth by employing the latest enterprise technologies and innovative business processes. We empower our clients to accelerate innovation and deliver amazing client experiences to better compete and ultimately lead in their industry. Our “Client for Life” approach is built upon over 20 years of delivering rapid, meaningful, and lasting business value. Our offerings span the IT spectrum from Advisory, Applications (Enterprise, Custom, Mobile and Cloud) as well as Intelligent Automation, Analytic, Cyber Security and Infrastructure Services. Key Takeaways: Owning The Customer Experience Larry Gordon is the Managing Director, GTM, Emtec Digital, a firm that empowers their transportation and logistics clients to accelerate innovation and deliver amazing client experiences. In the podcast interview, Larry explains how the customer experience is increasingly enabled by technology. Consumer technology companies like Amazon have raised the bar on customer experience. Leading transportation, logistics, and warehousing companies are investing to deliver the best customer experience. The 3PL market is separating between the “haves” who have game-changing technology and the “have-nots” who are unable or unwilling to invest in technology. In the past, IT service companies developed systems that were focused on operational and financial functions that were not seen or use by the firm's customers. Today, IT service companies are not just not just developing systems that streamline the process – they are delivering customer experiences. When the customer is regularly interacting with the technology, the bar is very high. IT services companies who are developing customer experiences, work closely with customers (end customers) to understand their unique preferences. Emtec develops digital products or platforms that are customer facing – products that have the ability to delight customers and give your company a competitive advantage. Emtec is a global technology services company providing digital software engineering and transformation solutions to clients in logistics, transportation, and warehousing. Emtec also works some of the leading technology companies in the freight tech space. Learn More About Owning The Customer Experience Larry Gordon LinkedIn Emtec Emtec Digital The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Screenwriter and Producer, Gary L. Goldman, sits down with Poxy and Ragan to revisit his work on films such as Big Trouble in Little China, Total Recall, and Minority Report. Gary discusses his early days working with Director, Louis Malle, and Producer, Larry Gordon, at Paramount Studios. He also goes into depth about his ongoing lawsuit with Disney concerning the 2016 animated film, Zootopia. Support the show

This episode with Larry Gordon is all about his trip to South America. Larry is a digital nomad who recently launched Work in Progress Coffee. Listen to hear his tips on how to learn Spanish fast and how to make the most of three months in Colombia. ----more---- Mentions:  Selena - Medellín (hotel / co-working) Work in Progress Coffee - Sustainable Small Batch Colombian Coffee  The Way of the Superior Man  by David Deida Your Money or Your Life by Joseph R. Dominguez and Vicki Robin From the Ground Up - with Alana Trapp ----more---- THEME MUSIC: You're Listening to Lotrería by Bardo You can find more Music from Bardo on Spotify, TiDAL, Apple music and Soundcloud Bardo is an acclaimed “student of music with a global perspective”. By drawing on international inspiration, Bardo has a stand out multilingual sound, in part, provided by his four-piece band, Allied Forces To get more Bardo Music, merch, and updates visit.  whereisbardo.com

A breakdown of some of the controversies surrounding GlobalFoundries push to become its own utility. Plus, record-breaking COVID cases, and remembering Larry Gordon.

Owning The Customer Experience with Larry Gordon Larry Gordon and Joe Lynch discuss owning the customer experience. Larry is is the Managing Director, GTM, Emtec Digital, a global technology services company that provides digital software engineering and transformation solutions to clients across multiple industries. About Larry Gordon  Larry Gordon is the Managing Director, GTM, Emtec Digital. Prior to joining Emtec, Larry has held senior leadership positions at Cognizant and Capgemini and has founded and led IT services and software companies in the security, devops and digital transformation segments. He has also been a successful angel investor in the energy and cloud spaces. About Emtec Emtec is a global IT consultancy dedicated to helping world class organizations in the enterprise, education, and government markets drive transformation and growth by employing the latest enterprise technologies and innovative business processes. We empower our clients to accelerate innovation and deliver amazing client experiences to better compete and ultimately lead in their industry. Our “Client for Life” approach is built upon over 20 years of delivering rapid, meaningful, and lasting business value. Our offerings span the IT spectrum from Advisory, Applications (Enterprise, Custom, Mobile and Cloud) as well as Intelligent Automation, Analytic, Cyber Security and Infrastructure Services. Key Takeaways: Owning The Customer Experience Larry Gordon is the Managing Director, GTM, Emtec Digital, a firm that empowers their transportation and logistics clients to accelerate innovation and deliver amazing client experiences. In the podcast interview, Larry explains how the customer experience is increasingly enabled by technology. Consumer technology companies like Amazon have raised the bar on customer experience. Leading transportation, logistics, and warehousing companies are investing to deliver the best customer experience. The 3PL market is separating between the “haves” who have game-changing technology and the “have-nots” who are unable or unwilling to invest in technology. In the past, IT service companies developed systems that were focused on operational and financial functions that were not seen or use by the firm's customers. Today, IT service companies are not just not just developing systems that streamline the process – they are delivering customer experiences. When the customer is regularly interacting with the technology, the bar is very high. IT services companies who are developing customer experiences, work closely with customers (end customers) to understand their unique preferences. Emtec develops digital products or platforms that are customer facing – products that have the ability to delight customers and give your company a competitive advantage. Emtec is a global technology services company providing digital software engineering and transformation solutions to clients in logistics, transportation, and warehousing. Emtec also works some of the leading technology companies in the freight tech space. Learn More About Owning The Customer Experience Larry Gordon LinkedIn Emtec Emtec Digital The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

The ambush of Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in July of 2016 marked the deadliest and bloodiest day for American law enforcement since 9/11. BLM protesters had peacefully gathered in downtown Dallas and other cities across the nation in response to the police shootings of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few blocks from the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an African American man who had been discharged from the U.S. Army for disgraceful conduct got out of his SUV ready for combat. Micah Johnson arrived with a calculated plan to kill police officers, preferably white officers.  Wearing tactical gear, a bullet-resistant vest, and armed with a high-powered assault rifle as well as handguns Johnson executed five officers and wounded eleven others.  A cell phone video by a witness on the balcony of a nearby hotel recorded Johnson shooting an officer for the city’s transit system, DART, in the back and then standing over the officer as he pumped eleven more rounds into the officer at point-blank range. Following a fierce running gun battle, officers cornered the shooter inside the downtown campus building of the El Centro Community College. Larry Gordon, a crisis hostage negotiator for the DALLAS SWAT team, spent four hours talking with the gunman who pledged to take his life and the lives of more officers. A robot armed with a bomb ended the standoff.  Larry Gordon shares the story of what happened on that tragic night in Dallas in this exclusive episode of SWAT Brothers.  Follow SWATBrothers Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SWATpodcast/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/swat_brothers_podcast/ SWAT Brothers is a trademarked and copyrighted news show produced by the True Crime Reporter™ podcast. It is hosted and written by Peabody Award-Winning Investigative Reporter Robert Riggs and Retired 40-year Dallas Police Lieutenant Bob Owens who served twenty years in Dallas SWAT. It is produced by Grace Woodward. Send SWAT Brothers your questions about firearms, equipment, training, or any other subjects to FastDrawFriday@gmail.com. We answer questions on the 3rd Friday of each month. Contact us there if you want to be a guest or recommend a guest or subject for an episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Larry talks about involvement with Baseball in Tidewater, his involvement with Norview and Maury Baseball Prgms. This year Maury is currently 6-0 and the #1 ranked team in the Va Pilot/Daily Press Top 15 Poll

Aloha Everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Temple of Surf - The Podcast. We will give you full access to the best surfers, skaters, shapers, surfboards collectors, shop owners in the world! Discover with me their stories, their greatest successes, amazing behind the scenes and much more! Today with us, from San Diego, California Eric Gordon, son of the legendary Larry Gordon co-founder of Gordon & Smith. Let's discover more about G&S stories, surf, art of shaping, and much more!

On the evening of July 7, 2016, protesters gathered in cities across the nation after police shot two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. As officers patrolled a march in Dallas, a young man stepped out of an SUV wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a high-powered rifle. He killed five officers and wounded eleven others. It fell to a small group of cops to corner the shooter inside a community college, where a fierce gun battle was followed by a stalemate. Crisis negotiator Larry Gordon, a 21-year department veteran, spent hours bonding with the gunman—over childhood ghosts and death and shared experiences of racial injustice in America—while his colleagues devised an unprecedented plan to bring the night to its dramatic end.

How to embrace your humble beginnings without limiting your potential. Finding purpose through Midwest roots, Larry is a self taught technologist fixated on leveraging systems thinking to bring about positive change. Highly in tune to politics, he brings a passion for democracy and being highly informed. Twitter/IG: @_lg3

First Segment: xOps.IT, Larry Gordon, CEO/Co-Founder.xOps is a global company with headquarters in New York City and resources around the world. Our global presence allows us to offer highly engineered infrastructure solutions fast, at a low cost, and with high quality. It also allows us to offer services such as 24 x 7 deployment and operations support as part of our offering. In addition we offer operations consulting services In the US through our DevOps and Cloud consulting practice. xOps is unique because we are changing the nature of the IT services value chain. Topics:Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm | Quanta MagazineVerizon's 5G network is tiny—Verizon ads “falsely implied” it's nationwide | Ars TechnicaWestern Digital releases new 18TB, 20TB EAMR drives | Ars TechnicaYou can buy ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator' on 10 DVDs if you want | EngadgetFor full show notes, check out ComputerAmerica.com!

The #1 sports podcast in the Hampton Roads area is back! We’re kicking off a new season of the I-64 Sports Podcast with Maury baseball coach Larry Gordon from the inaugural 757 High School Baseball Media Day! Coach Gordon discusses the current state of baseball in the 757 with the regular season less than two weeks away. Also, will the Commodores finally get over the hump in Region 5A? Check it out!

This week: EdSource reporter Larry Gordon summarizes a new UC faculty task force report that recommends requiring the SAT or ACT for freshmen admissions; and Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, shares why the organization opposes the use of the tests.

Todd meets one of his heroes as film legend WALTER HILL shares incredible insights and stories from his work as writer/director/producer on ALIEN - THE WARRIORS - 48 HOURS - THE LONG RIDERS - and his recent spoken word album - THE COWBOY ILIAD.

Oakland Unified could be the second district in California this year to go through the wrenching experience of a teachers' strike. In this week’s podcast, Louis talks with EdSource reporter Theresa Harrington about the overwhelming vote by teachers to authorize a strike — and when it could happen. We also talk with EdSource’s Larry Gordon about the big push at the California State University to improve graduation rates and how far many campuses have to go to reach their goals.

This week, EdSource higher ed reporter Larry Gordon discusses financial pressures that are forcing many Cal State students to work multiple jobs and the toll it takes on their grades. A Fresno State senior describes life juggling college and work.

There's no better place to start than at the beginning – so, for the first episode of Die Hard With a Podcast, we're taking a look at the making of Die Hard. For a film with so many incredible stunts and huge explosions, it's hard to believe it's based on a book – or is technically a sequel to a 1960s Frank Sinatra flick. On this show, we go from acquiring the rights to the story, crewing up the film, writing the script, casting its stars, and rolling at the Fox Plaza building in Los Angeles. Learn why Die Hard was fully expected to flop, why Bruce Willis's salary was so controversial, and how exactly they pulled off Hans's fall from the 30th floor. As we kick off this limited series, let us know what you think! Drop us a line at diehardwithapodcast@gmail.com, or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com.   Source Links A/V Club, Die Hard humanized (and perfected) the action movie ABC News, 'Die Hard' turns 30: All about the film and who could have played John McClane Creative Screenwriting, “There is no such thing as an action movie.” Steven E. de Souza on Screenwriting Deep Focus Review, The Definitives: Die Hard Empire, Empire Essay: Die Hard Review Entertainment Weekly, Bruce Willis: "If I hadn't done 'Die Hard,' I'd rip it off" Eric Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie Film School Rejects, 31 Things We Learned From the ‘Die Hard’ Commentary Track Film School Through Commentaries, John McTiernan on filmmaking philosophy I Choose to Stand, Retrospective: Die Hard (1988) IMDb, Die Hard IndieWire, Cruel Summer: Die Hard (1988) Mental Floss, 19 Things to Look for the Next Time You Watch Die Hard Mental Floss, 30 Cold, Hard Facts About Die Hard Overthinking It, The Best of All Possible Die Hards Rolling Stone, Why the OG ‘Die Hard’ Still Rules Screen Rant, 15 Crazy Things You Didn’t Know About Die Hard Shmoop, Die Hard Shortlist, Die Hard: 25 Years On The Daily Beast, ‘Die Hard’: How Bruce Willis Changed the Movies The New York Times, If Willis Gets $5 Million, How Much for Redford? The Star Democrat, Five days of ‘Die Hard’ part one: ‘Die Hard’ (1988) Thrillist, A (Mini) Oral History of the Most Memorable 'Die Hard' Moments Viddy Well, 10 Fun Facts About Die Hard Vulture, How Die Hard Changed the Action Game Wikipedia, Die Hard Zimbio, 20 Things You Never Knew About 'Die Hard'    Get In Touch Email Website Twitter Facebook Instagram Patreon   Full Episode Transcript Welcome to the podcast, pal. My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for Die Hard. With. A! Podcast! The show that examines the best American action movie of all time: Die Hard. This is the first episode of this new podcast! It’s been a kind of crazy labor of love, putting the show together. Over a year ago, I started a podcast called Black Mass Appeal with the help of some of my friends. That show is about, shall we say... alternative religions... and it’s been a ton of fun to put together and I’ve learned so much doing it. But now, I’m starting on a new project about something else I love. I can’t recall exactly when I became a die hard Die Hard fan. I think my story is probably pretty typical; falling in love with the movie as I watched it at home on VHS, or badly censored on TV. I do remember that when I moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to take an internship on the Fox lot, I never got over my excitement at driving past the Fox Plaza building – Nakatomi Tower – every day. I got a gray sweatshirt and a red Sharpie to make my own “Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho” costume for my Christmas party. I attended the Alamo Drafthouse’s “Nakatomi ‘88”-themed screening in San Francisco. And yes, I became one of those annoying drunks who’d go on at length about why Die Hard is a Christmas movie after a couple of cocktails. After yet another friend asked me for quick notes on whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie in order to settle an office debate, I sat down with a (couple) glass(es) of whiskey, rewatched the movie, and hammered out a four-page, fully-cited essay on the matter. (Which you can read on the website.) Yes, this is how I spend my Friday nights. But the fact that I did that made something abundantly clear: I love Die Hard. I have a lot to say about it. And I want to share it. So here we are! This podcast is going to have nine episodes that each explore different aspects of the movie. We’ll look at action movies of the 80s, we’ll look at our heroes and villains, how women and minorities are portrayed, and why Die Hard is so popular again. There’ll also be a BONUS episode… You can find out more about that in just a minute. So, before we dive in, a little housekeeping. Die Hard With a Podcast will release every other Thursday, wrapping up right before Christmas. If you want to get in touch... Email Website Twitter Facebook Instagram Finally, if you like this show, kick me a buck or two on Patreon. Patreon helps to offset the cost of doing this show, so unless you have a vault with $640 million in bearer bonds you can open up for me, pledge a little bit on Patreon. Patreon There are some cool bonuses you can get, like stickers, ornaments, and the bonus episode – and you can even help decide what you want the bonus episode to be on! So check that out, and pitch in if you can. And if you can’t – the best thing you can do is just listen and tell your friends. Leave a review on iTunes – that helps put this show in front of more people, so everyone can get in on the Die Hard love. All right, on with the show. For our first episode, I thought what better place to begin than where Die Hard began? So: this is the story of how Die Hard got made. The novel Die Hard doesn’t seem like one of those movies that started out as a book – there’s a lot of explosions in the movie and all – but it did. In fact, it started out as a sequel, to both a book and another movie. In 1966, writer Roderick Thorp wrote a novel called The Detective. It was an adult take on the cop genre, with the main character, private investigator Joe Leland, taking on a gritty case of supposed suicide that leads him to uncover murder and corruption. The novel was turned into a movie of the same name in 1968 by 20th Century Fox. The film starred Frank Sinatra as Joe, and the film did decent box office while Sinatra’s performance was well reviewed. Over a decade later, in 1979, Thorp wrote a sequel to The Detective with the express intention of turning it into another movie for Sinatra. The book was called Nothing Lasts Forever (which sounds more like a James Bond movie if you ask me). In it, now-retired Joe Leland goes to visit his daughter – not his wife! – at her high-rise office in Los Angeles at Christmas. While he’s there, terrorists take over and… a lot of the rest is the same is the movie. Kinda. We’ll get into that on another episode. Anyway, it’s kind of like how author Michael Crichton wrote The Lost World expressly to be made into a sequel to the movie Jurassic Park, or Thomas Harris wrote Hannibal to be a made into a sequel for the Silence of the Lambs. (You’ll come to find out that Silence of the Lambs is another favorite movie of mine…) Buying the rights According to Thorp, future Die Hard associate producer Lloyd Levin showed the book Nothing Lasts Forever to future producer Lawrence Gordon. Gordon took one look at the cover, with a burning skyscraper and circling helicopter, and said, “I don’t need ro read it. Buy it.” So, 20th Century Fox bought the movie rights to this novel, too. Now, Die Hard was actually produced by Silver Pictures, the production company founded by mega-producer Joel Silver in 1985. 20th Century Fox ended up being more of the distributor. (At some point in the early 80s, before Silver Pictures picked it up, the rights to Nothing Lasts Forever were actually owned by Clint Eastwood, who had intended on starring in the movie himself.) Joel Silver was just coming off of a hot streak of iconic 80s action movies like Commando, Lethal Weapon, Predator, and Action Jackson, and he was able to pull from the talent behind those movies to put Die Hard into production. The crew Silver offered the gig to the director of 1987’s Predator, John McTiernan. Back in 1985, McTiernan had turned down directing Commando, and he almost turned down Die Hard, too. In fact, he tried a couple of times to turn it down. McTiernan said the material was just too dark and cynical for him. (And if you’ve read Nothing Lasts Forever, you’ll totally get it. That shit is bleak.) Eventually, he came around because he came up with a plot change that would “lighten things up.” “The original screenplay was a grim terrorist movie,” he said. “On my second week working on it, I said, 'Guys, there's no part of terrorism that's fun. Robbers are fun bad guys. Let's make this a date movie.’ And they had the courage to do it.” So instead of terrorists, McTiernan’s bad guys would be pulling off a heist. “I liked the idea of imagining what would happen when one of those Baader-Meinhof types got tired of fighting his and others’ political battles and decided to show them what a criminal is,” he said. McTiernan also changed things up with inspiration from an unlikely source: Shakespeare. The original story took place over the course of three days, which was way too long. Now, borrowing from the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the entirely of the plot would transpire over a single night. To hammer out the story, writers Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza were hired. Jeb Stuart wrote the original script, and Steven de Souza was responsible for a lot of the on-the-fly revisions that would take place during shooting. Die Hard was Jeb Stuart’s first film credit if you can believe it, and after Die Hard he later went on to write Another 48 Hours, Fire Down Below, and the really really amazing The Fugitive. De Souza had previously written 48 Hours, Commando, and The Running Man, and he would go on to write Die Hard 2, Hudson Hawk, Ricochet, Beverly Hills Cop III, Street Fighter, and Judge Dredd. Basically, these are the guys to go to for action thrillers. The cast But who to go to to be the star of this action flick? Contractually, because Die Hard is technically a sequel to The Detective, the role had to be offered back to Frank Sinatra… who was 73 years old at the time. Fortunately, Sinatra decided he was “too old and too rich” to be running around making movies anymore. By not going with an older gentleman as the lead, the filmmakers were now free to explore new options for the lead role. Jeb Stuart describes how he discovered the core of the film: "I had no idea how to make this into a movie," he said. After getting into an argument with his wife, Stuart said he got into his car and took off. "It's in the days before cell phones and literally the minute I got on the highway, I knew I was wrong and knew I had to apologize," he said. He wasn't paying attention to the road and ran into a refrigerator box. "I went through it at 65 miles per hour and, fortunately, it was empty," he explained. "I pulled over to the side of the road, my heart was pounding and I thought, 'I know what this movie is about!' It's not about a 65-year-old man... It's about a 30-year-old man, who should have said he's sorry to his wife and then bad shit happens." He went home and wrote 30 pages of the script that very night. Hopefully he apologized to his wife first. When it came to casting the role of the now-renamed John McClane, the filmmakers seemed to try every male movie star in town. The part was offered to… Sly Stallone, Don Johnson, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Clint Eastwood (as already mentioned), Burt Reynolds, Robert De Niro, Charles Bronson, Nick Nolte, Mel Gibson, James Caan, Paul Newman, and Richard Dean Anderson (yes, MacGyver!). These actors ran the gamut from musclebound he-men to more sophisticated sorts. “When I first started working on it, they were talking about Richard Gere,” said John McTiernan. “The part was very buttoned down. He’s wearing a sport jacket, and he’s very suave and sophisticated and all that stuff. It was a sort of Ian Fleming hero, the gentleman man of action.” But what all those actors had in common was they all turned the role down. Going to Bruce Willis was seen as a desperate move in the film industry. After all, he was a *sniff* television actor, not a movie star. Willis was currently on the show Moonlighting, which was a comedy-drama about two private detectives. He had been in two movies by then as well, Blind Date and Sunset, but neither had been hits. Still, Willis was a charismatic, charming actor. Demographic data from CinemaScore, an entertainment polling and research company, said that Willis was popular with audiences. And once again, producer Lawrence Gordon stepped in to take decisive action. Bruce Willis tells it himself: “I know that Larry Gordon was instrumental in me getting the job. What’s that expression? Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan? Well, a lot of people take credit for my appearance in the first Die Hard, but Larry Gordon was really the guy. He lobbied for me. And then got them to give me an outrageous sum of money for acting in the film.” It really was an outrageous sum of money. Willis was paid $5 million – more than almost any other leading man at the time. (Dustin Hoffman got $5.5 million for Tootsie, and Stallone got $12 million for Rambo III.) But multi-million dollar paychecks were usually reserved for only the biggest names in the business. Even then, the figures were only in the $2 or $3 million range. A TV actor getting this kind of payday sparked a legit panic among studios. In a New York Times article titled, “If Willis Gets $5 Million, How Much for Redford?,” writer Aljean Harmetz calls it “equivalent to an earthquake. The map of movie-star salaries must now be redrawn.” In response, Leonard Goldberg, president and chief operating officer of 20th Century Fox got a little testy. He told the New York Times for that article, ''Die Hard hinges on the lead. We had a very exciting script and a team of producers who delivered Predator and Commando. We reached out for Bruce Willis because we thought we had the potential of a major film which is a star vehicle.'' But even after all of that, the reason Willis could even take the role came down to his Moonlighting co-star, Cybill Shepherd. Shepherd announced that she was pregnant – and because the pregnancy couldn’t be written into the show, Moonlighting producer Glenn Caron put the show on hiatus and gave everyone 11 weeks off. At last, Die Hard had its star. Casting the villain to McClane’s hero was less fraught, but still a bit of a gamble. The role was originally offered to Sam Neill, but he turned it down. Then, in the spring of 1987, casting director Jackie Burch saw Alan Rickman playing the dastardly Valmont in the Broadway production of Dangerous Liaisons – a role which earned him a Tony Award nomination. Rickman was known for theater, but, at the age of 41, had never done a movie. When he was offered the role of Hans Gruber, his instinct was to turn it down. He didn’t want to be a terrorist in an action movie. Rickman said (no, I’m not even going to attempt doing Rickman’s voice here): "I didn’t know anything about L.A. I didn’t know anything about the film business… I’d never made a film before, but I was extremely cheap. I read [the script], and I said, 'What the hell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.' Agents and people said: ‘Alan, you don’t understand, this doesn’t happen. You’ve only been in L.A. two days, and you’ve been asked to do this film.'" Of course, in the end, Rickman accepted the role. Rounding out the cast were Bonnie Bedelia as John’s wife Holly, Reginald VelJohnson as Sergeant Al Powell, Paul Gleason as Deputy Police Chief Dwayne Robinson, William Atherton as reporter Richard Thornberg, James Shigeta as Joseph Takagi, De’voreaux White as limo driver Argyle, and a whole mess of big tall dudes as Hans’s gang of robbers. While Hans is supposed to be German, Alan Rickman is British, and his right hand man Karl, played by Alexander Gudunov, is Russian. The rest of the crew was portrayed as more… vaguely international. That’s because there were chosen more for their intimidating look and height – 9 of the 12 were over 6 feet tall. And they certainly didn’t speak German – most of what they said in “German” was pretty much gibberish. As a final bit of casting trivia, there are three Playboy Playmates in Die Hard. Kym Malin (May 1982) is the woman discovered having sex in the office when the terrorists arrive. Terri Lynn Doss (July 1988) is the woman who hugs someone at the airport. And Pamela Stein's November 1987 actual centerfold is the one on the wall of the under-construction building hallway. The set Speaking of the under-construction building hallway – we have to talk about the set. Now, back in 1975, Roderick Thorp saw the movie The Towering Inferno, and dreamed about a man running through a skyscraper chased by men with guns. It’s what led to the high-rise setting of Nothing Lasts Forever, and eventually Die Hard. If you’ll remember, the cover of the book, with the building on fire, was what convinced Lawrence Gordon to buy the rights, after all. Call it coincidence or good luck or a sign of things to come. But 20th Century Fox was just wrapping up construction on their new office building, a brown steel-and-glass building at 2121 Avenue of the Stars in Century City, which would be named Fox Plaza. Or, as we know it better: Nakatomi Tower. It was production designer Jackson De Govia’s idea to use the building as Die Hard’s location. Getting to use the building required extensive negotiations with Fox. They had to agree to no daytime filming, and no explosions (whoops). According to McTiernan, "We had to periodically run downstairs and apologize to the lawyer beneath us, saying 'we're about to fire machine guns; will you excuse us?'" The scene where the SWAT team’s armored vehicle knocks over a stair railing in the front of the building caused months of negotiations alone. But in the end, Die Hard got its location, and Fox not only got to showcase its shiny new headquarters – in fact, a lot of early promotional material featured only the building, and not Bruce Willis – but they charged themselves rent for the building’s use. That’s actually pretty common in the film industry. The bookkeeping in the movie business is… interesting. The interior of the building was still incomplete, so any shots you see of under-construction offices were actually shot in the unfinished parts of the building. Other sets were constructed at Stage 15 in the regular studio lot. Using the half-finished areas allowed McTiernan and cinematographer Jan De Bont to place fluorescent lights in the ground and have half-finished structures in the foreground. The maze-like feeling of the offices and hallways was deliberate. Jackson De Govia said, “When I first read the script, I saw a jungle maze. It reminded me of the book High Rise by J.G. Ballard, in which a modern building becomes a tribal battleground. I wanted to make a building where that kind of action could take place. When the building is a jungle, people revert to utter realism, which is savagery… There are entire sequences where McClane moves through the building not touching the floor, like a predator in a jungle.” Although you might think so with a quote like that, De Govia didn’t work on Predator with McTiernan. De Govia had previously worked on a variety of movies, including Red Dawn, so he did have some experience with everyday folks fighting terrorists… De Govia did carry a visual element from McTiernan’s Predator to Die Hard, though: both Schwarzenegger and Willis crawl through waterfalls during the action. You see, the lobby of the Nakatomi Corporation’s office is a dead-on copy of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house Fallingwater, complete with stone walls and, uh, falling water. De Govia was inspired by Japanese corporations buying up American institutions – something that was freaking out Americans in the late 80s. He created a backstory where Nakatomi bought the actual house and had it reassembled in their lobby on the 30th floor of the building, waterfall and all. Directing style Now, putting McClane under waterfalls, into ventilation ducts and elevator shafts, under tables, and swinging him from firehoses certainly play to that guerilla-jungle spirit of Die Hard’s set. But the problem with a maze-like set is making sure the audience knows where everyone is, and where the action is taking place relative to the other players. Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, analyzed Die Hard for Rolling Stone magazine. He said, “John McTiernan’s direction is an amazing piece of intricate craftsmanship. What a lot of filmmakers have trouble communicating is a sense of geography. For instance, one floor of a building under construction looks a lot like any other floor. But McTiernan put in little things, like a Playboy centerfold hung up by a construction worker. At first it seems like a visual joke, but it’s really there to identify that floor, so when Willis encounters it again, the audience knows exactly where he is. Many directors also shoot action very sloppily – they shoot up close and cut around a lot and put in all these big noises to distract you. But in Die Hard, you know where every character is every second of the movie. Things are going by at a fast clip, but you’re never lost.” This kind of dynamic but geographically-clear directing was McTiernan’s signature style, already on display in his previous film, Predator, as Arnold and his crew battle a literally invisible alien in the South American jungle. McTiernan is known for helping the audience understand the relative locations of people and things within a space by using as few cuts as possible; instead, he keeps rolling as he pans the camera from something on one side of the room to the other side of the room. For example, in Die Hard, when the building’s alarm goes off and the henchman in the lobby acknowledges it, the camera moves from the alarm on the right to the henchman on the left, without cutting – just like you’re there yourself, turning your head to see. You can tell he’s sitting just to the side of the blinking alarm. Similarly, McTiernan will rack focus from something in the foreground to something in the background, or vice versa. Again, this creates a feeling of depth within a single shot and allows the viewer to follow where things are with their own eyes. It avoids confusion, and is in a way more efficient as you allow the audience to track things themselves instead of having to explain things every time. Connecting these shots with a moving camera also keeps things, well, moving. The camera roams around, taking in the shot in a natural way, the way your own eye would. The objects and people within the frame are arranged to guide your eye (and therefore the camera, as it mimics the movement of your eye) from one thing to the next, leading you to discover important clues to the story. McTiernan says, “The camera isn't just moving for the sake of keeping it moving. The camera is an active narrator in a thriller. The camera has to tell you how to evaluate every piece information you get and put it into context.” McTiernan was able to achieve this kind of visual storytelling with the work of his supremely talented cinematographer, Jan De Bont. De Bont was born in the Netherlands and had quite a body of work already; McTiernan was already fascinated by what was considered “European-style” camera movement, and had particularly admired De Bont’s work with director Paul Verhoeven in The Fourth Man. McTiernan was trained in this so-called “European style” of filmmaking, and it fits right in with what we’ve already discussed about his style. You see, not only do McTiernan (with De Bont) move the camera to naturally create a sense of geography, they also enhance emotion and tension with “unmotivated moves.” By moving the camera (tilting, panning) and zooming in on someone’s face, they heighten their expression. It’s just like when you’re in an uncomfortable or tense situation, and the first thing you do is look at everyone’s faces to understand how they’re reacting, so you can know how to react, too. Production Die Hard’s principal photography began on November 2, 1987. The film had a surprisingly low budget of $28 million – it’d more than double that for the sequel. Once everything was in place, things had to move fast – 20th Century Fox wanted to release the film the very next year. That lead to a lot of making shit up as they went. A lot. The script wasn’t even entirely done when they began shooting. The heart of John McClane was still a bit of a mystery. Sure, they knew Bruce Willis was not going to be playing McClane like he would have the hardened cop Joe Leland from Nothing Lasts Forever, but there was still something missing. It wasn’t until halfway through shooting that Willis and McTiernan realized that John McClane simply doesn’t like himself all that much. You know that moment where John argues with Holly in her office at the beginning of the movie, and he bangs his head on the doorframe after she walks out? That was a reshoot done way later, once they’d clued in to what makes McClane tick. McClane’s sarcastic humor was also the result of on-the-fly rewrites. Bruce Willis said about shooting, “I remember that the script was in flux. It would change and they would rewrite scenes and we would come in and there'd be new scenes. I'll give you an example. The second biggest line in Die Hard was 'Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs…' That line was written while I was in this mock-up of a ventilator shaft, trapped in there, I couldn't come out. In those days, a cell phone looked like a shoe box, they were enormous. And someone had to hand me a phone with Steven de Souza, the writer for the rewrites on Die Hard, and he'd tell me a line, they'd turn the camera on, we'd shoot it.” There’s some debate about whether or not the biggest line in the movie was the result of improv or not. In a 2013 interview with Ryan Seacrest, Willis said that “Yippee-kay-yay, motherfucker” was “just a throwaway. I was just trying to crack up the crew and I never thought it was going to be allowed to stay in the film.” Then again, writer Steven De Souza recalled the creation of that line a little differently. “Bruce and I grew up watching the same TV shows,” he said. “Roy Rogers used to say ‘Yippee ki yay, kids.’ So it had to become ‘Yippee ki yay, motherfucker’ in the movie. That line was from me. Whenever you think you’re writing a line that’s going to catch on, it never does. A lot of people, cough, Sylvester Stallone, cough, think they can invent them. The line you think is going to catch on never catches on and the audience decides what is the takeaway line.” Damn. De Souza shading both Willis and Stallone at the same time… Aspects of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber were yet to crystalize, too. The filmmakers wanted John and Hans to have a “mano a mano” meeting somehow, before the final showdown. When De Souza learned that Rickman could do a “good” American accent (which… No disrespect, but I think good is up for debate…), he put it together with the fact that up until this face to face meeting, John had only heard Hans, and speaking with a German accent, over the radio. So, Hans, searching for his detonators, runs into John… and pretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay who has slipped away. To stay on this scene for just a minute longer: there’s a bit of a “controversy” where it’s not explicitly explained how John figures out that Hans is only pretending to be a hostage. How would John know not to give Hans a loaded gun? Well, in an earlier scene that was cut from the final film, everyone in Hans’s gang synchronizes their watches – and they’re all wearing the same watch – something McClane, as a cop, would have noticed as he searched the bodies of the bad guys he’d already snuffed. Steven De Souza says, “When Bruce offers the cigarette to Alan Rickman, Bruce sees the watch. You see his eyes look at the watch. That's how he knows that he is one of the terrorists.” So supposedly this is some big plot hole caused by the cut scene. But if I can interject for just a second – and I can, it’s my podcast – I think that’s bullshit. It’s not a plot hole. We don’t need it spelled out for us how John figures out that Hans is one of the terrorists. John’s a cop, and clearly a good one – I mean, he’d survived that far into the movie, he’s gotta be pretty skilled. The audience can fill in that he caught something we didn’t. He can be smart; he can know things the audience doesn't know. He can notice the watches, or he can have a gut feeling, or he can just have the common sense to not hand a loaded gun to a perfect stranger in a really dangerous situation. Anyway. When it comes to plot holes, there is one in Die Hard that is easy to miss, but is, in fact, logically inconsistent. Up until two weeks before the end of shooting, filmmakers still didn’t know how the gang was going to try to escape. They decided that the gang’s plan would be to drive away through the chaos of the inevitable disaster scene in an ambulance that was hidden in the back of the box truck they used to drive into the building. Not a bad plan… Except for the part where they don’t bring the ambulance with them at the start of the movie. If you look at Hans and company arriving at Nakatomi Tower in their truck, you can see the truck is way too small to contain another vehicle… and besides, it’s not there behind the men as they wait to unload. Whoops. The stunts But then, we’re not coming to Die Hard to pick apart its continuity. We’re here for some action! Die Hard employed 37 stuntmen, under stunt coordinator Charlie Picerni. Stunt doubles were used for many of the action scenes – this is Die Hard, not Mission: Impossible, after all. Things always have the potential to go disastrously wrong, and there were a few on-set accidents, but fortunately none were too grave. When McClane goes down the ventilation shaft, you can see him fall – and that wasn’t on purpose. The stunt man was supposed to grab the very first ledge within the shaft, but he missed – and editor Frank Urioste kept his fall in the final film, cutting back to McClane catching himself on a ledge way below the one he was supposed to grab. One of Die Hard’s stunt performers is actually a Technical Academy Award-winner for his Decelerator System, which is a cable system that allows stunt performers to “fall” more safely from a higher height, and to be shot from any angle. Ken Bates explains his invention: “When we did Die Hard, I started using a device called a Descender, to do controlled falls. In other words, we do a controlled fall from anywhere up to 105 stories. The fall is controlled because you’re descending on a small cable. If the film is undercranked, it looks like you’re falling.” Bates clearly knew what he was doing with his Decelerator System, since he was the one who acted as Rickman’s stunt double during his fall from Nakatomi Tower. (He also doubled Bruce Willis when he leapt off the top of the building with a firehose.) Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman did perform a couple of stunts of their own. John McTiernan recalled, “The first time we got to the point in a scene where you would insert a stuntman, I told Bruce he would only have to take it up to here, and he then could go sit down. He said, ‘No, I want to do it.’ And all of a sudden, you saw that New Jersey street kid in him come out. It’s not that he did anything dangerous, but it was a side that he had not shown us before.” Bruce Willis explained why he was so game. “I think doing my own stunts whenever possible adds a lot to the production value of the film… John can get the camera close, because he doesn’t need to disguise the stuntman. But on a personal level, it satisfies the little boy who still lives in me who gets to shoot guns, kill the bad guys and be a hero while doing jumps and falls and swinging from ropes.” McClane famously ran around Nakatomi Tower without shoes on, but Bruce Willis got a little more protection. He was given a pair of rubber feet to wear – they make him look a little hobbit-like, since they had to slip on over his own feet. You can see them in the scene when McClane jumps off the edge of the roof as the FBI shoots at him from the helicopter. McTiernan and weapons specialist Michael Papac also dialed up the intensity of the stunt weapons for added realism. As in most movies, the firearms in Die Hard are real weapons that have been modified to shoot blanks. But these blanks were specially handcrafted by Pacpac. McTiernan wanted the muzzle flash to be exaggerated and the sound to be extra-loud. He got what he wanted, but not without a price. When McClane shoots a terrorist from underneath a conference table, the gun was in such close proximity to his unprotected ears that the bangs gave Willis permanent hearing loss. Willis said, “Due to an accident on the first Die Hard, I suffer two-thirds partial hearing loss in my left ear and have a tendency to say, ‘Whaaa?’” The deafening blanks got to Rickman, too. Every time he fired his gun, Rickman would flinch. McTiernan was forced to cut away from Rickman’s reactions so his expression wouldn’t be caught on film, but you can see one of them right after Hans shoots Takagi at the beginning of the movie. The most famous stunt in the movie is Hans Gruber’s fall from the window of Nakatomi Tower. We’ve already discussed how stuntman Ken Bates was able to pull off the actual fall, but it’s the beginning of the fall, where we see Hans’s shocked face in slow motion, that makes it so heart-stopping. That, of course, is actually Alan Rickman falling, although from not quite as high a height. "John McTiernan had to talk Alan into doing that shot because even stuntmen will generally not fall backwards – they like to see where they're going," said visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund. For Hans’s fatal fall, Alan Rickman was to be dropped from 25 feet in the air, with a blue air bag below him and a camera above him to capture his expression. The camera was shooting at 270 frames per second to capture Hans’s plummeting face at a rate ten times slower than normal. Rickman was understandably apprehensive about the stunt. It didn’t help that, legendarily, the crew told him they’d give him a countdown of three, two, one, go – and drop him on “Go” – and instead… they dropped him on one. Rickman wasn’t exactly happy with the crew for that surprise bit of acting motivation, but miraculously, they convinced him to do a second take. Ultimately, the crew’s prank (?) worked – the first take is the one you see in the film. Release and reception Die Hard wrapped in March 1988, just four months before the film was set to be released. As the filmmakers got to work on post-production, the studio did not exactly demonstrate a lot of faith in the film. As mentioned earlier, the early publicity didn’t even have Bruce Willis on it; the poster featured the Fox Plaza building as the star of the show. The advertising campaign for the film was short, too – especially by today’s standards. In contrast, I think I saw the trailer for Mission Impossible: Fallout in front of every movie I saw for at least two years before it was released! Everyone seemed worried. Test audiences rated the movie poorly, and “had no interest in seeing [Bruce Willis] dart around a skyscraper shooting terrorists.” The New York Times summer movie preview doubted Willis was “enough of a movie star to carry the film,” and Newsweek’s David Ansen was even more harsh, saying Willis was “the most unpopular actor ever to get $5 million for making a movie.” Film critic Roger Ebert gave it a mere two stars, and criticized the stupidity of the deputy police chief character, claiming that "all by himself he successfully undermines the last half of the movie." 20th Century Fox was convinced it had a flop on its hands. The movie was released on July 15th, 1988, in only 21 theaters in 20 cities, where it earned only $600,000 its first weekend. But then… audiences liked it. They loved it. They kept coming back. In the second week, the movie expanded to 1,200 theaters across the country. After Die Hard opened wide, it started out in third place at the box office, taking in $7 million. From there, strong word of mouth took it to the top, where it lived in the top five for ten weeks. It only dropped into sixth place in October. Die Hard finished its theatrical run with $83 million domestic and another $57 million worldwide – completely making up for that $5 million paycheck Bruce Willis got. It was the seventh-highest grossing movie of 1988. It also enjoyed a long, successful run on home video – something we’ll talk about later in this series. Not only was Die Hard a financial triumph, it received Oscar nominations for editing, visual effects, sound and sound editing. And it turned Bruce Willis into a star. The kind of star who’d later join Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone – the very action stars he essentially replaced – in opening up a chain restaurant themed on Hollywood celebrity. And so, that’s the story of how Die Hard got made. There are certainly parts I’ve missed, or pieces of the story that have changed over time. Filmmaking stories sometimes take on the quality of oral histories, especially when the resulting film becomes a legend. Throughout the rest of this podcast series, we’ll explore why Die Hard has become so celebrated among action movies, 80s movies, movies in general. I’m excited to invite you to the party with me. Come out to the show, we’ll get together have a few laughs… Anyway, thank you for joining me. Happy trails, and yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers.

. Bethune-Cookman University is excited to announce the launch of their student-run record label, HBCU Records. The new student-run record label launched by the Mike Curb Institute at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida. The institute offers students a "real world experience in real time" by providing HBCU Records as a fully functioning student-run record label. HBCU Records is the only student-run record label at an HBCU (historically black college/university   Daniel Glover, who goes by stage name DJ D Glove, is a DJ based in Florida and an Army veteran injured in Afghanistan. Larry Gordon is a singer and songwriter, who grew up singing with his family band in Dallas, Texas since he was four years old. Although these two artists come from very different backgrounds, they are connected through music. Recently, Glover and Gordon released a single together, entitled "Good Time.

Larry Gordon and Rick Rawson

Cantore welcomes his friend Ryan Berman of www.sockproblems.com to discuss Interactive Day San Diego (and Cantore's new favorite show, Cobra Kai.) Plus, it's Gordon & Smith Day in San Diego with a phone call to Larry Gordon's daughter, Debbie about her father's new bench at Tourmaline Beach.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cantore welcomes his friend Ryan Berman of www.sockproblems.com to discuss Interactive Day San Diego (and Cantore's new favorite show, Cobra Kai.) Plus, it's Gordon & Smith Day in San Diego with a phone call to Larry Gordon's daughter, Debbie about her father's new bench at Tourmaline Beach.

Executive Director Louis Freedberg, and Editor-at-Large John Fensterwald are joined by staff writers Jane Adams and Larry Gordon to discuss kindergarten vaccination rates, high school graduation rates, K-12 suspension rates and more.

Peter Dekom is a Los Angeles-based lawyer, consultant, and entrepreneur in the fields of entertainment, Internet, and telecommunications. Peter’s clients have included such Hollywood notables as George Lucas, Paul Haggis, Keenen Ivory Wayans, John Travolta, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Andy Davis, Robert Towne and Larry Gordon among many others, as well as corporate clients such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., Pacific Telesis and Japan Victor Corporation (JVC). He has been listed in Forbes among the top 100 lawyers in the United States and in Premiere Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Hollywood. He is also the author of the recent book, “Next: Reinventing Media, Marketing and Entertainment

Peter Dekom is a Los Angeles-based lawyer, consultant, and entrepreneur in the fields of entertainment, Internet, and telecommunications. Peter’s clients have included such Hollywood notables as George Lucas, Paul Haggis, Keenen Ivory Wayans, John Travolta, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Andy Davis, Robert Towne and Larry Gordon among many others, as well as corporate clients such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., Pacific Telesis and Japan Victor Corporation (JVC). He has been listed in Forbes among the top 100 lawyers in the United States and in Premiere Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Hollywood. He is also the author of the recent book, “Next: Reinventing Media, Marketing and Entertainment

George Arzdt, Public Advocate Bill deBlasio, Larry Gordon

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