Podcasts about Little Dorrit

In this episode we chat with the man who gave us the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice—for many, the definitive Austen adaptation. A prolific author and screenwriter, Andrew Davies is also responsible for the 1996 ITV adaptation of Emma, Northanger Abbey (2007), Sense and Sensibility (2008), and the recent dramatization of Sanditon—not to mention adaptations of a host of other classic novels. Join us as we discuss Andrew's thoughts on adapting Austen's novels to film and, of course, Mr. Darcy in a wet shirt. Andrew Davies, prominent author and screenwriter, began his career writing radio plays and eventually moved into writing for television, film, and theater. He is also the author of several novels and children's books. In addition to the screen adaptations of Austen's novels mentioned above, he has dramatized television series such as Bleak House, House of Cards (ITV), Mr. Selfridge, Little Dorrit, To Serve Them All My Days, Vanity Fair, and War & Peace, in addition to films such as Bridget Jones's Diary, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Andrew's work has garnered dozens of nominations and awards, and in 2002, he received the highest honor bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a BAFTA Fellowship, in recognition of his “outstanding achievement in the art forms of the moving image.” For a transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep18.Visit our website: www.jasna.orgFollow us on Instagram and FacebookSubscribe to the podcast on our YouTube channelEmail: podcast@jasna.org

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 17, 2024 is: circumlocution • ser-kum-loh-KYOO-shun • noun Circumlocution refers to the use of many words to say something that could be said more clearly and directly with fewer words. Usually encountered in formal speech and writing, circumlocution can also refer to speech that is intentionally evasive. // The judge coughed and pointed to her watch, clearly impatient with the attorney's tiresome circumlocutions in defense of his client. See the entry > Examples: “The slight stiltedness of her … English merges with the circumlocution of business-school lingo to produce phrases like ‘the most important aspect is to embrace a learning mind-set' and ‘I believe we're going to move forward in a positive way.'” — Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, 1 Oct. 2023 Did you know? In The King's English (1906), lexicographers H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler advised, “Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.” It's good advice: using more words than necessary to convey a point can confuse and annoy one's audience. Circumlocution itself combines two Latin elements: the prefix circum-, meaning “around,” and locutio, meaning “speech.” In essence, circumlocution may be thought of as “roundabout speech.” Since at least the early 16th century, English writers have used circumlocution with disdain, naming a thing to stop, or better yet, to avoid altogether. Charles Dickens used the word to satirize political runarounds in the 1857 novel Little Dorrit with the creation of the fictional Circumlocution Office, a government department that delayed the dissemination of information and just about everything else.

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Little Dorrit, one of the three great novels of Charles Dickens' last period, was produced in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and is considered one of his most profound. Dickens' father spent three months in Marshalsea Prison for debt, which made a lasting impact on his life. This story centers around life in Marshalsea Prison and, as always, society in general.Book One begins in the infamous Marseilles Prison in France, where two prisoners, Rigaud the French rogue and the ever cheerful Italian Cavaletto, share a cell. We meet them again later, but the scene shifts quickly to the English debtor's prison, The Marshalsea, where Mr. Dorrit is confined. His daughter Amy is born there, the only baby ever born in that prison. Tiny as a baby, she grows into a sweet-natured tiny adult, better known as “Little Dorrit.” The other inmates love and respect the child and the caring woman she becomes. Mr. Dorrit is also revered by them, and as the inmate with the longest term of imprisonment, he becomes “Father of the Marshalsea.”Enter Arthur Clennam, who meets Mr. Dorrit and Amy. He notes that she takes care of her father's every need, and also cooks, cleans, and mends the clothes of her older siblings. Arthur suspects that Dorrit was wrongly imprisoned, and begins investigating the case, which may involve his own family as well.In Book Two, Mr. Dorrit has been freed, and his family begins a new life. Arthur Clennam, now a dear friend of Little Dorrit, becomes partner with an engineer and inventor named Daniel Doyce, but a surprising event occurs which puts Arthur into prison. The twists and turns of fortune for himself, the Dorrit family and many others are changed forever. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dominic is joined by the award-winning author and food historian Pen Vogler who offers insightful reflections on how Charles Dickens used food as complex metaphors in his novels, that reflect the psychological and societal shifts during the Victorian era. The richly detailed food descriptions in works like A Christmas Carol and Little Dorrit reflect not just the era's celebrated dining etiquettes but sometimes Dickens' own discomfort in these settings.From Pen's new book Stuffed  there's also a hearty discussion on the role of food in society, particularly concerning feeding children, an issue highlighted more than ever during the pandemic. With a nod to the inspiring campaign by footballer Marcus Rashford, Pen finds parallels in Dickens' advocacy for children's rights and a nation's duty to nourish its future generations. We take a bite into history with the contentious debates in Parliament over this responsibility and the impact of land Enclosures on the food system.  Get ready also to rediscover the culinary history of forgotten ingredients like caraway seeds and dried broad beans.  Pen also promises a future Christmas episode. So sit back, savour the flavour of history, and let's dig in! Support the showIf you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrardHost: Dominic GerrardSeries Artwork: Léna GibertOriginal Music: Dominic GerrardThank you for listening!

Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, with disastrous consequences in adulthood. Two associates, wishing to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from fungous wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean—across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine and the faithful company servant.The story contains crafted descriptions, well-drawn and diverse characters, eerie and exotic backgrounds, mystery, semi-concealed identities, brinkmanship with death, romance, the eventual triumph of Good over Evil, and many other elements expected in classic Dickens.First published in 1867 there are thematic parallels with other books from Dickens' mature writings, including Little Dorrit (1857) and especially Our Mutual Friend (1865). The Listener will decide if this story yields insights into The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished 1870).Wilkie Collins collaborated with Charles Dickens to produce this ‘Christmas' book and the stage play of the same name. In the book Collins assisted in Act 1 and Act 4; Collins scripted most of the stage play with Dickens' assistance. If this book were released today it would be splashed "THE BOOK OF THE FILM".Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, with disastrous consequences in adulthood. Two associates, wishing to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from fungous wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean—across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine and the faithful company servant.The story contains crafted descriptions, well-drawn and diverse characters, eerie and exotic backgrounds, mystery, semi-concealed identities, brinkmanship with death, romance, the eventual triumph of Good over Evil, and many other elements expected in classic Dickens.First published in 1867 there are thematic parallels with other books from Dickens' mature writings, including Little Dorrit (1857) and especially Our Mutual Friend (1865). The Listener will decide if this story yields insights into The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished 1870).Wilkie Collins collaborated with Charles Dickens to produce this ‘Christmas' book and the stage play of the same name. In the book Collins assisted in Act 1 and Act 4; Collins scripted most of the stage play with Dickens' assistance. If this book were released today it would be splashed "THE BOOK OF THE FILM".Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, with disastrous consequences in adulthood. Two associates, wishing to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from fungous wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean—across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine and the faithful company servant.The story contains crafted descriptions, well-drawn and diverse characters, eerie and exotic backgrounds, mystery, semi-concealed identities, brinkmanship with death, romance, the eventual triumph of Good over Evil, and many other elements expected in classic Dickens.First published in 1867 there are thematic parallels with other books from Dickens' mature writings, including Little Dorrit (1857) and especially Our Mutual Friend (1865). The Listener will decide if this story yields insights into The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished 1870).Wilkie Collins collaborated with Charles Dickens to produce this ‘Christmas' book and the stage play of the same name. In the book Collins assisted in Act 1 and Act 4; Collins scripted most of the stage play with Dickens' assistance. If this book were released today it would be splashed "THE BOOK OF THE FILM".Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Two boys from the Foundling Hospital are given the same name, with disastrous consequences in adulthood. Two associates, wishing to right the wrong, are commissioned to find a missing heir. Their quest takes them from fungous wine cellars in the City of London to the sunshine of the Mediterranean—across the Alps in winter. Danger and treachery would prevail were it not for the courage of the heroine and the faithful company servant.The story contains crafted descriptions, well-drawn and diverse characters, eerie and exotic backgrounds, mystery, semi-concealed identities, brinkmanship with death, romance, the eventual triumph of Good over Evil, and many other elements expected in classic Dickens.First published in 1867 there are thematic parallels with other books from Dickens' mature writings, including Little Dorrit (1857) and especially Our Mutual Friend (1865). The Listener will decide if this story yields insights into The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished 1870).Wilkie Collins collaborated with Charles Dickens to produce this ‘Christmas' book and the stage play of the same name. In the book Collins assisted in Act 1 and Act 4; Collins scripted most of the stage play with Dickens' assistance. If this book were released today it would be splashed "THE BOOK OF THE FILM".Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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

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

Television star Katey Sagal (Married with Children, Futurama, Sons of Anarchy) & writer Paul Gordon (2001 Tony Nominated Composer for Jane Eyre) pull back the curtain to talk about the new Off-Broadway Musical, The Gospel According to Heather.In this interview, they reveal:What they relate to most about the showTheir creative processesStage/Theatrical mishapsBest Advice they receivedOne rule they each live byIn The Gospel According to Heather, Heather Krebs just wants a boyfriend. But how can she even navigate her way through high school if she might be the New Messiah? A small town in Ohio grapples with politics, religion and teenage romance in this eclectic pop musical.The Gospel According to Heather plays at Theater 555 in NYC through the newly extended date of July 16, 2023.*This interview took place live at The Gospel According to Heather press event, where members of the media were given a sneak peak of this new Off-Broadway Musical. More on Katey Sagal:TV: The Connors, Rebel, Sons of Anarchy (Golden Globe Award), Superior Donuts, 8 Simple Rules, Futurama and Married with Children.FILM: Bleed For This, Pitch Perfect 2 and The Good Mother.Music: CDs Well..., Room, Covered and performs with her band The Reluctant Apostles.Books: Her first book, Grace Notes: My Recollections, was published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster.More on Paul Gordon:2001 Tony Award nominated composer for his musical Jane Eyre. Other works include Sense and Sensibility (winner of the 2015 Jeff Award for Best New Work), Daddy Long Legs (2009 Ovation Award, 2 Drama Desk Award nominations, Off-Broadway Alliance Award nomination and 3 Outer Critic Circle award nominations). He is the co-founder of StreamingMusicals.com, where his musicals Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Estella Scrooge, Being Earnest and No One Called Ahead can currently be streamed. Knight's Tale, written with John Caird, has had multiple productions in Japan. His other shows include: Stellar Atmospheres, Little Dorrit, Schwab's, Analog and Vinyl, The Front, Juliet and Romeo, Sleepy Hollow, First Night, The Circle, Ribbit, Greetings From Venice Beach and The Sportswriter. In his former life, Paul was a pop songwriter, writing several number one hits.Special Thanks:Richard Hillman PRTheme Song by Bobby CroninPodcast Logo by Liam O'DonnellEdited by Adam RothenbergMore Call Me Adam:Website: www.callmeadam.comFacebook: @CallMeAdamNYCInstagram: @CallMeAdamNYC

Poet, novelist, translator, journalist, crime fiction writer, children's book author, teacher, math tutor: now here is a man who contains multitudes. Jerry Pinto joins Amit Varma in episode 314 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life and learnings. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Jerry Pinto on Instagram, Amazon and his own website. 2. Em and the Big Hoom -- Jerry Pinto. 3. The Education of Yuri -- Jerry Pinto. 4. Murder in Mahim -- Jerry Pinto. 5. A Book of Light -- Edited by Jerry Pinto. 6. Baluta -- Daya Pawar (translated by Jerry Pinto). 7. I Have Not Seen Mandu -- Swadesh Deepak (translated by Jerry Pinto). 8. Cobalt Blue -- Sachin Kundalkar (translated by Jerry Pinto). 9. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale -- Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. ‘Sometimes I feel I have to be completely invisible as a poet' -- Jerry Pinto's interview of Adil Jussawalla. 11. A Godless Congregation — Amit Varma. 12. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 13. The Big Questions — Steven E Landsburg. 14. Unlikely is Inevitable — Amit Varma. 15. The Law of Truly Large Numbers. 16. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 17. Young India — Episode 83 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Snigdha Poonam). 18. Dreamers — Snigdha Poonam. 19. The Loneliness of the Indian Man — Episode 303 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nikhil Taneja). 20. The History Boys -- Alan Bennett. 21. The Connell Guide to How to Write Well -- Tim de Lisle. 22. Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut -- Marcus Du Sautoy. 23. Dead Poet's Society -- Peter Weir. 24. A Mathematician's Apology -- GH Hardy. 25. The Man Who Knew Infinity -- Robert Kanigel. 26. David Berlinski and Martin Gardner on Amazon, and Mukul Sharma on Wikipedia.. 27. Range Rover -- The archives of Amit Varma's column on poker for The Economic Times. 28. Luck is All Around -- Amit Varma. 29. Stoicism on Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Britannica. 30. House of the Dead —  Fyodor Dostoevsky. 31. Black Beauty -- Anna Sewell. 32. Lady Chatterley's Lover -- DH Lawrence. 33. Mr Norris Changes Trains -- Chistopher Isherwood. 34. Sigrid Undset on Amazon and Wikipedia. 35. Some Prefer Nettles -- Junichiro Tanizaki. 36. Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe. 37. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy on Amazon. 38. Orientalism -- Edward Said. 39. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Kurt Vonnegut on Amazon. 40. Johnny Got His Gun -- Dalton Trumbo. 41. Selected Poems -- Kamala Das. 42. Collected Poems -- Kamala Das. 43. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones — Pradip Krishen. 44. Dance Dance For the Halva Waala — Episode 294 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jai Arjun Singh and Subrat Mohanty). 45. Tosca -- Giacomo Puccini. 46. Civilisation by Kenneth Clark on YouTube and Wikipedia. 47. Archives of The World This Week. 48. Dardi Rab Rab Kardi -- Daler Mehndi. 49. Is Old Music Killing New Music? — Ted Gioia. 50. Mother India (Mehboob Khan) and Mughal-E-Azam (K Asif). 51. A Meditation on Form — Amit Varma. 52. Sara Rai Inhales Literature — Episode 255 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. Collected Poems — Mark Strand. 54. Forgive Me, Mother -- Eunice de Souza. 55. Porphyria's Lover -- Robert Browning. 56. Island -- Nissim Ezekiel. 57. Paper Menagerie — Ken Liu. 58. Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures — Episode 17 of Conversations With Tyler. 59. The Notebook Trilogy — Agota Kristof. 60. Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life — Episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen. 61. The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal — Amitava Kumar. 62. Nissim Ezekiel on Amazon, Wikipedia and All Poetry. 63. Adil Jussawalla on Amazon, Wikipedia and Poetry International. 64. Eunice de Souza on Amazon, Wikipedia and Poetry International. 65. Dom Moraes on Amazon, Wikipedia and Poem Hunter. 66. WH Auden and Stephen Spender on Amazon. 67. Pilloo Pochkhanawala on Wikipedia and JNAF. 68. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on Amazon, Wikipedia and Poetry Foundation. 69. Amar Akbar Anthony -- Manmohan Desai. 67. Ranjit Hoskote on Amazon, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia and Poetry International. 71. Arundhathi Subramaniam on Amazon, Instagram, Wikipedia, Poetry International and her own website. 72. The Red Wheelbarrow -- William Carlos Williams. 73. Mary Oliver's analysis of The Red Wheelbarrow. 74. A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver. 75. The War Against Cliche -- Martin Amis. 76. Seamus Heaney on Amazon, Wikipedia and Poetry Foundation. 77. The world behind 'Em and the Big Hoom' -- Jerry Pinto interviewed by Swetha Amit. 78. Jerry Pinto interviewed for the New York Times by Max Bearak. 79. Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and GV Desani on Amazon. 80. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal, Nishant Jain, Deepak Shenoy and Abhijit Bhaduri. 81. Graham Greene, W Somerset Maugham and Aldous Huxley on Amazon. 82. Surviving Men -- Shobhaa De. 83. Surviving Men -- Jerry Pinto. 84. The Essays of GK Chesterton. 85. The Life and Times of Nilanjana Roy — Episode 284 of The Seen and the Unseen. 86. City Improbable: Writings on Delhi -- Edited by Khushwant Singh. 87. Bombay, Meri Jaan -- Edited by Jerry Pinto and Naresh Fernandes. 88. The Life and Times of Urvashi Butalia — Episode 287 of The Seen and the Unseen. 89. Films, Feminism, Paromita — Episode 155 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Paromita Vohra). 90. Wanting -- Luke Burgis. 91. Kalpish Ratna and Sjowall & Wahloo on Amazon. 92. Memories and Things — Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 93. Ashad ka Ek Din -- Mohan Rakesh. 94. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy (translated by Constance Garnett). 95. Gordon Lish: ‘Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!' -- Christian Lorentzen.. 96. Sooraj Barjatya and Yash Chopra. 97. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 98. Don't think too much of yourself. You're an accident — Amit Varma. 99. Phineas Gage. 100. Georges Simenon on Amazon and Wikipedia.. 101. The Interpreter -- Amit Varma on Michael Gazzaniga's iconic neuroscience experiment. 102. The Life and Times of Abhinandan Sekhri — Episode 254 of The Seen and the Unseen.. 103. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert. 104. Self-Portrait — AK Ramanujan. 105. Ivan Turgenev, Ryu Murakami and Patricia Highsmith on Amazon. 106. A Clockwork Orange -- Anthony Burgess. 107. On Exactitude in Science — Jorge Luis Borges. 110. Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present — Shanta Gokhale. 111. Kubla Khan -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 112. Girish Shahane, Naresh Fernandes, Suketu Mehta, David Godwin and Kiran Desai. 113. The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas. 114. Pedro Almodóvar and Yasujirō Ozu. 115. The Art of Translation — Episode 168 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arunava Sinha). 116. The Lives of the Poets -- Samuel Johnson. 117. Lives of the Women -- Various authors, edited by Jerry Pinto. 118. Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister — Amit Varma. 119. On Bullshit — Harry Frankfurt. 120. The Facts Do Not Matter — Amit Varma. 121. Beware of the Useful Idiots — Amit Varma. 122. Modi's Lost Opportunity — Episode 119 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Salman Soz). 123. Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala. 124. The Importance of Data Journalism — Episode 196 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 125. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 126. Pramit Bhattacharya Believes in Just One Ism — Episode 256 of The Seen and the Unseen. 127. Listen, The Internet Has SPACE -- Amit Varma.. 128. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 129. The Reflections of Samarth Bansal — Episode 299 of The Seen and the Unseen. 130. The Saturdays -- Elizabeth Enwright. 131. Summer of My German Soldier -- Bette Greene. 132. I am David -- Anne Holm. 133. Tove Jannson and Beatrix Potter on Amazon. 134. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings -- JRR Tolkien. 135. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness -- William Styron. 136. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness -- Kay Redfield Jamison. 137. Searching for Swadesh -- Nirupama Dutt.. 138. Parsai Rachanawali -- Harishankar Parsai. 139. Not Dark Yet (official) (newly released outtake) -- Bob Dylan.. 140. How This Nobel Has Redefined Literature -- Amit Varma on Dylan winning the Nobel Prize.. 141. The New World Upon Us — Amit Varma. 142. PG Wodehouse on Amazon and Wikipedia. 143. I Heard the Owl Call My Name -- Margaret Craven. 144. 84, Charing Cross Road -- Helen Hanff. 145. Great Expectations, Little Dorrit and Bleak House -- Charles Dickens. 146. Middlemarch -- George Eliot. 147. The Pillow Book -- Sei Shonagon. 148. The Diary of Lady Murasaki -- Murasaki Shikibu. 149. My Experiments With Truth -- Mohandas Gandhi. 150. Ariel -- Sylvia Plath. 151. Jejuri -- Arun Kolatkar. 152. Missing Person -- Adil Jussawalla. 153. All About H Hatterr -- GV Desani. 154. The Ground Beneath Her Feet -- Salman Rushdie. 155. A Fine Balance -- Rohinton Mistry. 156. Tales from Firozsha Baag -- Rohinton Mistry. 157. Amores Perros -- Alejandro G Iñárritu. 158. Samira Makhmalbaf on Wikipedia and IMDb. 159. Ingmar Bergman on Wikipedia and IMDb. 160. The Silence, Autumn Sonata and Wild Strawberries - Ingmar Bergman. 161. The Mahabharata. 162. Yuganta — Irawati Karve. 163. Kalyug -- Shyam Benegal. 164. The Hungry Tide -- Amitav Ghosh. 165. On Hinduism and The Hindus -- Wendy Doniger. 166. I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd — Lal Dĕd (translated by Ranjit Hoskote). 167. The Essential Kabir -- Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. 168. The Absent Traveller -- Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. 169. These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry -- Edited by Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘He is Reading' by Simahina.

"the children dancing to the music of the band"

This week, we're joined by actor Claire Foy! We discuss her compelling performance in Sarah Polley's Women Talking (5:10), the painful journey of her character, Salome (7:50), and a pivotal scene from the film (11:50). [To skip ahead, the conversation around Women Talking ends at 15:10.] Then, Foy describes growing up in England (16:08), her path to drama school in Liverpool (21:49), and her on-screen debut in the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit (26:24). On the back-half, she describes working with Nicolas Cage (31:00), balancing motherhood and her starring role in The Crown (33:57), the evolution she's witnessed in the film industry (39:12), and her lifelong appreciation of ordinary lives (44:47).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens audiobook. Born in the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors, Amy—Little Dorrit—the daughter of the ruined, but self-respectful William Dorrit, has put her entire heart in caring for her dear father, until one day her humble path is crossed by Arthur Clennam. Their meeting proves providential not only for Amy's life, but for the whole Dorrit family, whose new rise will, in many ways, be also their fall. As in all his novels, in Little Dorrit Dickens ushers us into a fascinating and startlingly rich world of human characters and destinies, where virtue and nobility cross swords with vice and villainy, where strength and weakness intertwine with prejudice and magnanimity and where the author's inspired pen wields a compelling and unforgettable power over the readers.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

Originally published as a serial from 1855 to 1857, Little Dorrit tells the story of Amy Dorrit who was born and raised in a debtors prison. Amy's life is changed when she meets Arthur Clennam, returning home from a 20-year period abroad. The GSMC Audiobook Series presents some of the greatest classic novels, Audiobooks, and theatrical presentations from a bygone era. The GSMC Audiobook Series collection is the embodiment of the best of the golden age of Audio Book. Let Golden State Media Concepts take you on a ride through classic Audiobooks read by some of the top Audiobook performers of all time. This compiled collection of classic Audiobooks from a wide variety of classic Novels. ***PLEASE NOTE*** GSMC Podcast Network presents these shows and Audiobook as historical content and have brought them to you unedited. Remember that times have changed, and some Audiobooks might not reflect the standards of today's politically correct society. The shows do not necessarily reflect the views, standards, or beliefs of Golden State Media Concepts or the GSMC Podcast Network. Our goal is to entertain, educate and give you a glimpse into the past.

After a first instalment packed with Snowdrops, Primulas and Cardamine, get ready for even more early-Spring inspiration from Organic Gardener Val Bourne, including Narcissi, Hamamelis, Hellebores and Hepaticas! In this episode we mention our https://www.getgardeningnow.co.uk/newsletter (new Newsletter). To sign up to it and read the first instlament which went out a few weeks ago, head here: https://www.getgardeningnow.co.uk/newsletter (https://www.getgardeningnow.co.uk/newsletter) PLANT LIST Narcissus 'Rijnveld's Early Sensation' Narcissus 'Candlepower' Narcissus 'Navarre' Narcissus 'Jumblie' Narcissus cyclamineus Chimonanthus praecox Hamamelis × intermedia 'Aurora' Hamamelis × intermedia 'Pallida' Prunus 'Kursar' Ribes laurifolium Galanthus 'South Hayes' Helleborus 'Penny's Pink' Helleborus 'Anna's Red' Polypodium cambricum Polypodium cambricum 'Richard Kayse' Hepatica 'Kilmeston Pink' Hepatica transsilvanica 'Elison Spence' Hepatica nobilis Hepatica x media 'Harvington Beauty' Hepatica transsilvanica Leucojum vernum var. vernum 'Green Lantern' Leucojum vernum var. vagneri 'Janus' Miersia chilensis Galanthus 'Bumblebee' Galanthus plicatus 'Diggory' Galanthus plicatus 'Golden Fleece' Galanthus 'Treasure Island' Galanthus gracilis Galanthus 'Little Dorrit' Galanthus 'Chantry Poppet' Galanthus 'Bambino' Galanthus 'Cherub' Galanthus nivalis 'Lady Putman' Cyclamen coum 'Tilebarn Elizabeth' Crocus heuffelianus Crocus rujanensis 'Belphoebe' Galanthus elwesii 'Broadwell'

It's a surprise drop, and it's jam-packed, y'all! Join Nana and Misan this week as we take on the greeting card-industrial complex, review a couple of recent romcoms*, and, for some reason, give our Super Bowl predictions (spoiler alert: we were wrong). Also, Hyun Bin and Son Ye-jin are getting married!!!! *Stream Marry Me on Peacock and I Want You Back on Amazon Prime --- Nana's HEA: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Dorrit/dp/B07C88V4J8 Misan's HEAs: https://www.jennyholiday.com/book/duke-actually/ https://www.viki.com/1tv/36677c-1-of-something --- Check out our website: https://www.heallyeah.com/ Find us on IG: @h.e.a.llyeah Email us at: heallyeah.podcast@gmail.com

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 1 Title: Little Dorrit Overview: Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, the youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison, in this case, is the Marshalsea, where Dickens' own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Published: 1857 Author: Charles Dickens Genre: Novel, Serial Novel, Social Criticism Novel, Novella, Bildungsroman, Fiction Novel Episode: Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 1 Part: 1 of 6 Length Part: 6:04:00 Book: 13 Length Book: 36:31:40 Episodes: 1 - 12 of 71 Narrator: Mil Nicholson Language: English Edition: Unabridged Audiobook Keywords: determination, persistence, kindness, human spirit, morality play, perception, discovery, hope, betrayal, deceit, social classes, reconciliation, growth, change, social ascent, class structure, exploitation, satire, debt, debtor prison, banks, financial collapse, bleakness Credits: All LibriVox Recordings are in the Public Domain. Wikipedia (c) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WOMBO Dream. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/support

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 2 Title: Little Dorrit Overview: Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, the youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison, in this case, is the Marshalsea, where Dickens' own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Published: 1857 Author: Charles Dickens Genre: Novel, Serial Novel, Social Criticism Novel, Novella, Bildungsroman, Fiction Novel Episode: Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 2 Part: 2 of 6 Length Part: 6:31:31 Book: 13 Length Book: 36:31:40 Episodes: 13 - 24 of 71 Narrator: Mil Nicholson Language: English Edition: Unabridged Audiobook Keywords: determination, persistence, kindness, human spirit, morality play, perception, discovery, hope, betrayal, deceit, social classes, reconciliation, growth, change, social ascent, class structure, exploitation, satire, debt, debtor prison, banks, financial collapse, bleakness Credits: All LibriVox Recordings are in the Public Domain. Wikipedia (c) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WOMBO Dream. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/support

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 3 Title: Little Dorrit Overview: Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, the youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison, in this case, is the Marshalsea, where Dickens' own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Published: 1857 Author: Charles Dickens Genre: Novel, Serial Novel, Social Criticism Novel, Novella, Bildungsroman, Fiction Novel Episode: Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 3 Part: 3 of 6 Length Part: 6:18:08 Book: 13 Length Book: 36:31:40 Episodes: 25 - 36 of 71 Narrator: Mil Nicholson Language: English Edition: Unabridged Audiobook Keywords: determination, persistence, kindness, human spirit, morality play, perception, discovery, hope, betrayal, deceit, social classes, reconciliation, growth, change, social ascent, class structure, exploitation, satire, debt, debtor prison, banks, financial collapse, bleakness Credits: All LibriVox Recordings are in the Public Domain. Wikipedia (c) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WOMBO Dream. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/support

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 4 Title: Little Dorrit Overview: Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, the youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison, in this case, is the Marshalsea, where Dickens' own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Published: 1857 Author: Charles Dickens Genre: Novel, Serial Novel, Social Criticism Novel, Novella, Bildungsroman, Fiction Novel Episode: Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 4 Part: 4 of 6 Length Part: 5:46:40 Book: 13 Length Book: 36:31:40 Episodes: 37 - 48 of 71 Narrator: Mil Nicholson Language: English Edition: Unabridged Audiobook Keywords: determination, persistence, kindness, human spirit, morality play, perception, discovery, hope, betrayal, deceit, social classes, reconciliation, growth, change, social ascent, class structure, exploitation, satire, debt, debtor prison, banks, financial collapse, bleakness Credits: All LibriVox Recordings are in the Public Domain. Wikipedia (c) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WOMBO Dream. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/support

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 5 Title: Little Dorrit Overview: Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, the youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison, in this case, is the Marshalsea, where Dickens' own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Published: 1857 Author: Charles Dickens Genre: Novel, Serial Novel, Social Criticism Novel, Novella, Bildungsroman, Fiction Novel Episode: Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 5 Part: 5 of 6 Length Part: 5:56:53 Book: 13 Length Book: 36:31:40 Episodes: 49 of 60 of 71 Narrator: Mil Nicholson Language: English Edition: Unabridged Audiobook Keywords: determination, persistence, kindness, human spirit, morality play, perception, discovery, hope, betrayal, deceit, social classes, reconciliation, growth, change, social ascent, class structure, exploitation, satire, debt, debtor prison, banks, financial collapse, bleakness Credits: All LibriVox Recordings are in the Public Domain. Wikipedia (c) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WOMBO Dream. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/support

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 6 Title: Little Dorrit Overview: Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, the youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison, in this case, is the Marshalsea, where Dickens' own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional "Circumlocution Office". Dickens also satirizes the stratification of society that results from the British class system. Published: 1857 Author: Charles Dickens Genre: Novel, Serial Novel, Social Criticism Novel, Novella, Bildungsroman, Fiction Novel Episode: Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens - Book 13, Part 6 Part: 6 of 6 Length Part: 5:54:26 Book: 13 Length Book: 36:31:40 Episodes: 61 - 71 of 71 Narrator: Mil Nicholson Language: English Edition: Unabridged Audiobook Keywords: determination, persistence, kindness, human spirit, morality play, perception, discovery, hope, betrayal, deceit, social classes, reconciliation, growth, change, social ascent, class structure, exploitation, satire, debt, debtor prison, banks, financial collapse, bleakness Credits: All LibriVox Recordings are in the Public Domain. Wikipedia (c) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. WOMBO Dream. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/free-audiobooks/support

On Tuesday 23rd June 2020, WFT Vice-Chair Vanessa Gildea was in conversation with award-winning director Dearbhla Walsh about her directing career to date. The pair of filmmakers spoke about filming techniques, working in the industry and personal experiences - as well as taking questions from our WFT members and supporters. About Dearbhla Walsh: Dearbhla Walsh is from Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo. She is an award-winning director who has worked on drama series including most recently Tales from the Loop, The Handmaid's Tale, EastEnders, Shameless, Penny Dreadful, The Tudors and much to her nephew's delight the Netflix Marvel series The Punisher. She won the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special for Little Dorrit. She directed Roald Dahl's Esio Trot, starring Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench, a television film adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel of the same name. She has also directed several art/dance films, funded by the Arts Council, in collaboration with Fearghus Ó Conchúir including Match and I'm Roger Casement. Walsh has been nominated for the Irish Film and Television Awards eight times and won twice for directing in 2011 and 2018 respectively. This event was supported by the BAI. https://wft.ie/

"I really want theater to reach in and grab my heart and squeeze. I want to feel something when I'm sitting there." We love to interview playwrights! We love to hear how they discovered playwriting and how they found themselves on this journey into the world of playwriting. We had the immense pleasure to talk to Marisela Treviño Orta and we know you will enjoy this episode, listeners. Marisela is an accidental playwright. She got her MFA in poetry from the University of San Francisco. Graduate of Iowa playwrights workshop, core writer at the playwrights center, and is currently working on a commission for Audible! Her play "Somewhere", which was commissioned by Temple University, will open Feb 1st. GLISTENS: Sam's Glisten - Joy Harjo "Book of poems" Sarah's Glisten - InsideOut Writers Marisela's Glisten - sushi at Hamasaku in LA ABOUT MARISELA TREVIÑO ORTA Marisela Treviño Orta is an accidental playwright. Originally from Lockhart, Texas, she found her way to the genre while completing an MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco (USF) where she studied poetry exclusively. While a student at USF, Marisela became the Resident Poet of El Teatro Jornalero!, a social justice theatre company comprised of Latinx immigrants. Marisela's first play BRAIDED SORROW (2008 Su Teatro world premiere) won the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama and the 2009 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Drama. Her other plays include: AMERICAN TRIAGE (2012 Repertorio Español Nuestras Voces Finalist); GHOST LIMB (2017 Brava Theatre world premiere); HEART SHAPED NEBULA (2015 Shotgun Players world premiere); SHOE (2019 Kendeda Finalist); RETURN TO SENDER (2019 Nashville Children's Theatre world premiere); and WOMAN ON FIRE (2016 Camino Real Productions world premiere). In 2011, she began writing her cycle of grim Latinx fairy tales—fairy tales for adults inspired by Latinx mythology and folklore which include: THE RIVER BRIDE (2013 National Latino Playwriting Award Co-Winner, 2016 Oregon Shakespeare Festival world premiere); WOLF AT THE DOOR (2016 Kilroys List, 2018/2019 National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere); and ALCIRA. Marisela is an alum of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, the Playwrights Foundation's Resident Playwright Initiative, a founding member of the Bay Area Latino Theatre Artists Network, and a member of the Latinx Theatre Commons' national Steering Committee. Last year she was selected as a Core Writer at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Marisela is also a member of the Goodman Theatre's 2018/2019 Playwrights Unit. Currently, Marisela is working on a new cycle of worst-case scenario plays—sci-fi thriller plays which include WMB (pronounced “womb”) and NIGHTFALL which she has been commissioned by Audible to adapt for their platform. She is also adapting Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit into a five-hour epic piece of theatre. Make sure to follow Marisela to learn more about her work and stay updated: twitter.com/mariselatorta _____________________________________________ Please support Beckett's Babies by reviewing, sharing an episode to your friends, or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter: @beckettsbabies And as always, we would love to hear from you! Send us your questions or thoughts on playwriting and we might discuss it in our next episode. Email: contact@beckettsbabies.com For more info, visit our website: www.beckettsbabies.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/beckettsbabies/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/beckettsbabies/support

The Total Tutor Neil Haley wiill interview Freema Agyeman and Jocko Sims of NBC's New Amsterdam. Inspired by the oldest public hospital in America, this unique medical drama follows the brilliant and charming Dr. Max Goodwin, the institution's newest medical director, who sets out to tear up the bureaucracy and provide exceptional care. How can he help? Well, the doctors and staff have heard this before. Not taking "no" for an answer, Dr. Goodwin must disrupt the status quo and prove he will stop at nothing to breathe new life into this understaffed, underfunded and underappreciated hospital - the only one in the world capable of treating Ebola patients, prisoners from Rikers and the president of the United States under one roof - and return it to the glory that put it on the map. Freema Agyeman stars as Dr. Helen Sharpe on NBC's new drama "New Amsterdam."   Agyeman is best known for major roles on "Doctor Who," "The Carrie Diaries" and the Netflix cult hit "Sense8." A London native, she has also starred on "Law & Order: UK" and BBC1's "Survivors" and "Little Dorrit." Agyeman's other television credits include the leading role in Sky's TV movie "Rubenesque," CBBC's "Old Jack's Boat," BBC2's "Torchwood," BBC1's "Survivors," ITV's "The Bill," BBC's "Silent Witness" and "Casualty," ITV1's "The Bill" and "Crossroads," and Sky One's "Mile High."   Jocko Sims stars as Dr. Floyd Reynolds on the NBC drama "New Amsterdam."