Podcast appearances and mentions of mary godwin

FOR ACTUAL TEXT of Mary Wollstonecraft's *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* USE CLOSED CAPTIONS—Links to discussed topics can be found below the timecodes. Please add QUESTIONS and CLARIFICATIONS in the comments. FULL SERIES: 00:00 Intro notes 01:56 Understanding MW's Annotations 05:02 Note 1 on Islam - PBS LINK:  05:44 Sura Ghafir 40:40 06:17 Note on Islam 2  07:03 Define: Providence 08:00 Notes on Genesis and Creation 10:07 Definition: Sensual 11:01 Virtue and Moratily in MWs View 12:22 Deifine: Positive  14:23 CHAPTER TWO TEXT: A Vindication on the Rights of Woman 14:30 The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed 16:07 Women's Education and Virtue 18:09 Critique of Rousseau and Other Authors 28:16 The Superficial Knowledge of Women and Soldiers 31:51 The Impact of Standing Armies 34:57 The Tyranny of Sensualists 35:32 Rousseau's Unnatural Sophia 42:28 Post-chapter Footnotes *Links for you* Not Discussed Today, But Useful Now & In Future Episodes , written within a year after her death from Placental Sepsis after giving birth to her second daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Shelley) Mary Wollstonecraft's death: Link below Full-Text Links Full-text of Vindication: Full-text of Paradise Lost: Full-text of Èmile: More links and info on MW's death can be found at the end of this post. Not Wollstonecraft, but also good to know... Bot Army—Irksome Humans May Not Be Human My response: Ages ago, there was a Twitter bot that you could forward a tweet to and get a reading of a % chance whether or not the tweet came from a bot. I used it all the time—and calmed down A LOT. Then it disappeared. Does anyone else remember using something like that?     CraftLit's Socials Find everything here: Join the newsletter: Podcast site: Facebook: Facebook group: Pinterest: TikTok podcast: Spooky Narration: Email: heather@craftlit.com Call and share your thoughts! 1-206-350-1642 SUPPORT THE SHOW! CraftLit App Premium feed  (only one tier available) PATREON:  (all tiers, below) ——Walter Harright - $5/mo for the same audio as on App ——Jane Eyre - $10/mo for even-month Book Parties ——Mina Harker - $15/mo for odd-month Watch Parties All tiers and benefits are also available as YouTube Channel Memberships Ko-Fi NEW at CraftLit.com — Premium SITE Membership  (identical to Patreon except more of your support goes to the CraftLit Team) If you want to join us for a particular Book or Watch Party but you don't want to subscribe, please use or CraftLit @ Venmo and include what you want to attend in the message field. Please give us at least 24 hours to get your message and add you to the attendee list. Download the FREE CraftLit App for iOS or Android (you can call or email feedback straight from within the app) Call 1-206-350-1642 __________ MW's Death Trigger Warning: Women's Healthcare—Placental sepsis Placental sepsis led to the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 after she gave birth to her daughter Mary Godwin. It is now more commonly known as puerperal sepsis or postpartum sepsis. This condition is an infection that occurs after childbirth. In the past, it was a major cause of maternal deaths related to childbirth, especially before modern hygiene practices and antibiotics became available. Global Situation Today: - Maternal sepsis remains a serious issue and is still a significant cause of maternal deaths around the world. - The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that maternal sepsis accounts for about 10% of all maternal deaths globally. It tends to be more common in areas where many births happen at home, there are not enough skilled healthcare workers, and healthcare systems are weak. Historical Background: During Wollstonecraft's time, doctors often worked in unhygienic environments and did not yet understand germs. Consequently, infections after childbirth were sadly common and often turned deadly. - Peer Reviewed Journal Articles on Placental Sepsis: Cambridge: ; AIMDR: ; Incidences of: -Trigger Warning: Details on MW's death:

Im Sommer 1816 treffen in einer Villa am Genfer See fünf junge Briten aufeinander: Mary Godwin (spätere Shelley), ihr späterer Ehemann Percy Shelley, ihre Stiefschwester Claire Clairmont sowie Lord George Byron und dessen Leibarzt John Polidori. Sie verleben hier nicht nur angenehme Tage mit Ausflügen und Zestreuungen jeglicher Art, sondern betätigen sich auch literarisch. Unter dem Eindruck eines Unwetters stellen sie sich eines Abends die Aufgabe, Gruselgeschichten zu schreiben... Was daraus wird und wie es mit dieser illustren Gesellschaft weitergeht, das erfahrt ihr in dieser Episode! ▶ ACHTUNG: Registriere dich jetzt KOSTENLOS auf https://lesedusche.de/registrieren und erhalte ab sofort einmal monatlich exklusive BUCHTIPPS zu den jeweiligen Podcast-Episoden Und besuche die Lesedusche auch, um Frankenstein und seiner Schöpferin zu lauschen: https://lesedusche.de/sendungen/weltliteratur/frankensteins-erwachen.html

We're doing things a little differently this episode. There are still spoilers ahead! Frankenstein is considered by many people to be a solid first choice for the first science fiction novel. (Before you start jumping up and down in disgust, yes, there are many stories from the 1600s and even ancient tales which are considered to be strong contenders for the first written sci-fi story. That does not take away from the influence of Mary Shelley.) In 1816 the teenager* went on holiday to Switzerland and came up with the character of Frankenstein and his monster which would then develop into a novel titled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Over 200 years later there are still films being made based on the characters from the book. In this episode, we touch upon James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein film but look at the origins of the story, examine why its monster has such a long lasting legacy, and why these stories resonate with us still.For full detailed shownotes please click the episode at www.everyscififilm.com/watch and scroll down.The expertsRoger Luckhurst is a Professor at Birkbeck, University of London. He specialises in literature, film and cultural history from the 19th century to the present. He has written many books and numerous articles on science fiction, horror and the Gothic.Sarah Artt is a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University. She has taught courses on Frankenstein in film and literature and co-led a 3 year project titled The Age of Frankenstein which examined the origins and legacy of the story. Her book Quiet Pictures comes out in May 2024. Chapters00:00 Introduction, thank you and guests02:08 The origin of the monster04:51 Mary Godwin: not your average 19th century girl06:22 The monster is still with us10:16 Mary Shelley as the monster: my hackneyed take14:23 The ultimate goth princess15:02 Knowledge and punishment16:37 The horror film genre20:12 Frankenstein's monster: a child of revolution!23:16 Why we love monsters29:58 James Whale and the Bride of Frankenstein31:38 Godzilla, B movies and pod people35:50 The Stepford Wives39:18 The slave becomes the master40:08 Burning cross, lynching and the mob42:59 Conclusions: class, prejudice and eugenics46:06 RecommendationsNext episodeThe next film we will be covering is Just Imagine (1930). Is is a musical, rom-com sci-fi set in 1980. You can watch it here: https://archive.org/details/JustImagine_201701*Correction: I wrongly say at 02:37 that Mary Shelley is 16 or 17 years old when they arrive at Villa Diodati but she is 18.Send me a text message.

We continue our look back at the movies released by independent distributor Vestron Pictures, focusing on their 1988 releases. ----more---- The movies discussed on this episode, all released by Vestron Pictures in 1988 unless otherwise noted, include: Amsterdamned (Dick Maas) And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim) The Beat (Paul Mones) Burning Secret (Andrew Birkin) Call Me (Sollace Mitchell) The Family (Ettore Scola) Gothic (Ken Russell, 1987) The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell) Midnight Crossing (Roger Holzberg) Paramedics (Stuart Margolin) The Pointsman (Jos Stelling) Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell) Promised Land (Michael Hoffman) The Unholy (Camilo Vila) Waxwork (Anthony Hickox)   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.   At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was celebrating the best year of its two year history. Dirty Dancing had become one of the most beloved movies of the year, and Anna was becoming a major awards contender, thanks to a powerhouse performance by veteran actress Sally Kirkland. And at the 60th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the films of 1987, Dirty Dancing would win the Oscar for Best Original Song, while Anna would be nominated for Best Actress, and The Dead for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costumes.   Surely, things could only go up from there, right?   Welcome to Part Two of our miniseries.   But before we get started, I'm issuing a rare mea culpa. I need to add another Vestron movie which I completely missed on the previous episode, because it factors in to today's episode. Which, of course, starts before our story begins.   In the 1970s, there were very few filmmakers like the flamboyant Ken Russell. So unique a visual storyteller was Russell, it's nigh impossible to accurately describe him in a verbal or textual manner. Those who have seen The Devils, Tommy or Altered States know just how special Russell was as a filmmaker. By the late 1980s, the hits had dried up, and Russell was in a different kind of artistic stage, wanting to make somewhat faithful adaptations of late 19th and early 20th century UK authors. Vestron was looking to work with some prestigious filmmakers, to help build their cache in the filmmaking community, and Russell saw the opportunity to hopefully find a new home with this new distributor not unlike the one he had with Warner Brothers in the early 70s that brought forth several of his strongest movies.   In June 1986, Russell began production on a gothic horror film entitled, appropriately enough, Gothic, which depicted a fictionalized version of a real life meeting between Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairemont at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, hosted by Lord Byron, from which historians believe both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John William Polidori's The Vampyre were inspired.   And you want to talk about a movie with a great cast. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, Natasha Richardson, in her first ever movie, as Mary Shelley, Timothy Spall as John William Polidori, and Dexter Fletcher.   Although the film was produced through MGM, and distributed by the company in Europe, they would not release the film in America, fearing American audiences wouldn't get it. So Vestron would swoop in and acquire the American theatrical rights.   Incidentally, the film did not do very well in American theatres. Opening at the Cinema 1 in midtown Manhattan on April 10th, 1987, the film would sell $45,000 worth of tickets in its first three days, one of the best grosses of any single screen in the city. But the film would end up grossing only $916k after three months in theatres.   BUT…   The movie would do quite well for Vestron on home video, enough so that Vestron would sign on to produce Russell's next three movies. The first of those will be coming up very soon.   Vestron's 1988 release schedule began on January 22nd with the release of two films.   The first was Michael Hoffman's Promised Land. In 1982, Hoffman's first film, Privileged, was the first film to made through the Oxford Film Foundation, and was notable for being the first screen appearances for Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs, the first film scored by future Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman, and was shepherded into production by none other than John Schlesinger, the Oscar winning director of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman's second film, the Scottish comedy Restless Natives, was part of the 1980s Scottish New Wave film movement that also included Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, and was the only film to be scored by the Scottish rock band Big Country.   Promised Land was one of the first films to be developed by the Sundance Institute, in 1984, and when it was finally produced in 1986, would include Robert Redford as one of its executive producers. The film would follow two recent local high school graduates, Hancock and Danny, whose lives would intersect again with disastrous results several years after graduation. The cast features two young actors destined to become stars, in Keifer Sutherland and Meg Ryan, as well as Jason Gedrick, Tracy Pollan, and Jay Underwood. Shot in Reno and around the Sundance Institute outside Park City, Utah during the early winter months of 1987, Promised Land would make its world premiere at the prestigious Deauville Film Festival in September 1987, but would lose its original distributor, New World Pictures around the same time. Vestron would swoop in to grab the distribution rights, and set it for a January 22nd, 1988 release, just after its American debut at the then U.S. Film Festival, which is now known as the Sundance Film Festival.    Convenient, eh?   Opening on six screens in , the film would gross $31k in its first three days. The film would continue to slowly roll out into more major markets, but with a lack of stellar reviews, and a cast that wouldn't be more famous for at least another year and a half, Vestron would never push the film out to more than 67 theaters, and it would quickly disappear with only $316k worth of tickets sold.   The other movie Vestron opened on January 22nd was Ettore Scale's The Family, which was Italy's submission to that year's Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. The great Vittorio Gassman stars as a retired college professor who reminisces about his life and his family over the course of the twentieth century. Featuring a cast of great international actors including Fanny Ardant, Philip Noiret, Stefania Sandrelli and Ricky Tognazzi, The Family would win every major film award in Italy, and it would indeed be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, but in America, it would only play in a handful of theatres for about two months, unable to gross even $350k.   When is a remake not a remake? When French filmmaker Roger Vadim, who shot to international fame in 1956 with his movie And God Created Woman, decided to give a generational and international spin on his most famous work. And a completely different story, as to not resemble his original work in any form outside of the general brushstrokes of both being about a young, pretty, sexually liberated young woman.   Instead of Bridget Bardot, we get Rebecca De Mornay, who was never able to parlay her starring role in Risky Business to any kind of stardom the way one-time boyfriend Tom Cruise had. And if there was any American woman in the United States in 1988 who could bring in a certain demographic to see her traipse around New Mexico au natural, it would be Rebecca De Mornay. But as we saw with Kathleen Turner in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion in 1984 and Ellen Barkin in Mary Lambert's Siesta in 1987, American audiences were still rather prudish when it came to seeing a certain kind of female empowered sexuality on screen, and when the film opened at 385 theatres on March 4th, it would open to barely a $1,000 per screen average. And God Created Woman would be gone from theatres after only three weeks and $717k in ticket sales.   Vestron would next release a Dutch film called The Pointsman, about a French woman who accidentally gets off at the wrong train station in a remote Dutch village, and a local railwayman who, unable to speak the other person's language, develop a strange relationship while she waits for another train that never arrives.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on New York's Upper West Side on April 8th, the film would gross $7,000 in its first week, which in and of itself isn't all that bad for a mostly silent Dutch film. Except there was another Dutch film in the marketplace already, one that was getting much better reviews, and was the official Dutch entry into that year's Best Foreign Language Film race. That film, Babette's Feast, was becoming something more than just a movie. Restaurants across the country were creating menus based on the meals served in the film, and in its sixth week of release in New York City that weekend, had grossed four times as much as The Pointsman, despite the fact that the theatre playing Babette's Feast, the Cinema Studio 1, sat only 65 more people than the Lincoln Plaza 1. The following week, The Pointsman would drop to $6k in ticket sales, while Babette's Feast's audience grew another $6k over the previous week. After a third lackluster week, The Pointsman was gone from the Lincoln Plaza, and would never play in another theatre in America.   In the mid-80s, British actor Ben Cross was still trying to capitalize on his having been one of the leads in the 1981 Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire, and was sharing a home with his wife and children, as well as Camilo Vila, a filmmaker looking for his first big break in features after two well-received short films made in his native Cuba before he defected in the early 1980s. When Vila was offered the chance to direct The Unholy, about a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans who finds himself battling a demonic force after being appointed to a new parish, he would walk down the hall of his shared home and offered his roomie the lead role.   Along with Ned Beatty, William Russ, Hal Holbrook and British actor Trevor Howard in his final film, The Unholy would begin two weeks of exterior filming in New Orleans on October 27th, 1986, before moving to a studio in Miami for seven more weeks. The film would open in 1189 theatres, Vestron's widest opening to date, on April 22nd, and would open in seventh place with $2.35m in ticket sales. By its second week in theatres, it would fall to eleventh place with a $1.24m gross. But with the Summer Movie Season quickly creeping up on the calendar, The Unholy would suffer the same fate as most horror films, making the drop to dollar houses after two weeks, as to make room for such dreck as Sunset, Blake Edwards' lamentable Bruce Willis/James Garner riff on Hollywood and cowboys in the late 1920s, and the pointless sequel to Critters before screens got gobbled up by Rambo III on Memorial Day weekend. It would earn a bit more than $6m at the box office.   When Gothic didn't perform well in American theatres, Ken Russell thought his career was over. As we mentioned earlier, the American home video store saved his career, as least for the time being.    The first film Russell would make for Vestron proper was Salome's Last Dance, based on an 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, which itself was based on a story from the New Testament. Russell's script would add a framing device as a way for movie audiences to get into this most theatrical of stories.   On Guy Fawkes Day in London in 1892, Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, arrive late at a friend's brothel, where the author is treated to a surprise performance of his play Salome, which has recently been banned from being performed at all in England by Lord Chamberlain. All of the actors in his special performance are played by the prostitutes of the brothel and their clients, and the scenes of the play are intertwined with Wilde's escapades at the brothel that night.   We didn't know it at the time, but Salome's Last Dance would be the penultimate film performance for Academy Award winning actress Glenda Jackson, who would retire to go into politics in England a couple years later, after working with Russell on another film, which we'll get to in a moment. About the only other actor you might recognize in the film is David Doyle, of all people, the American actor best known for playing Bosley on Charlie's Angels.   Like Gothic, Salome's Last Dance would not do very well in theatres, grossing less than half a million dollars after three months, but would find an appreciative audience on home video.   The most interesting thing about Roger Holzberg's Midnight Crossing is the writer and director himself. Holzberg started in the entertainment industry as a playwright, then designed the props and weapons for Albert Pyun's 1982 film The Sword and the Sorcerer, before moving on to direct the second unit team on Pyun's 1985 film Radioactive Dreams. After making this film, Holzberg would have a cancer scare, and pivot to health care, creating a number of technological advancements to help evolve patient treatment, including the Infusionarium, a media setup which helps children with cancer cope with treatment by asking them questions designed to determine what setting would be most comforting to them, and then using virtual reality technology and live events to immerse them in such an environment during treatment.   That's pretty darn cool, actually.   Midnight Crossing stars Faye Dunaway and Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti in his first major movie role as a couple who team with another couple, played by Kim Cattrall and John Laughlin, who go hunting for treasure supposedly buried between Florida and Cuba.   The film would open in 419 theaters on May 11th, 1988, and gross a paltry $673k in its first three days, putting it 15th on the list of box office grosses for the week, $23k more than Three Men and a Baby, which was playing on 538 screens in its 25th week of release. In its second week, Midnight Crossing would lose more than a third of its theatres, and the weekend gross would fall to just $232k. The third week would be even worse, dropping to just 67 theatres and $43k in ticket sales. After a few weeks at a handful of dollar houses, the film would be history with just $1.3m in the bank. Leonard Klady, then writing for the Los Angeles Times, would note in a January 1989 article about the 1988 box office that Midnight Crossing's box office to budget ratio of 0.26 was the tenth worst ratio for any major or mini-major studio, ahead of And God Created Woman's 8th worst ratio of .155 but behind other stinkers like Caddyshack II.   The forgotten erotic thriller Call Me sounds like a twist on the 1984 Alan Rudolph romantic comedy Choose Me, but instead of Genevieve Bujold we get Patricia Charbonneau, and instead of a meet cute involving singles at a bar in Los Angeles, we get a murder mystery involving a New York City journalist who gets involved with a mysterious caller after she witnesses a murder at a bar due to a case of mistaken identity.   The film's not very good, but the supporting cast is great, including Steve Buscemi, Patti D'Arbanville, Stephen McHattie and David Straithairn.   Opening on 24 screens in major markets on May 20th, Call Me would open to horrible reviews, lead by Siskel and Ebert's thumbs facing downward, and only $58,348 worth of tickets sold in its first three days. After five weeks in theatres, Vestron hung up on Call Me with just $252k in the kitty.   Vestron would open two movies on June 3rd, one in a very limited release, and one in a moderate national release.   There are a lot of obscure titles in these two episodes, and probably the most obscure is Paul Mones' The Beat. The film followed a young man named Billy Kane, played by William McNamara in his film debut, who moves into a rough neighborhood controlled by several gangs, who tries to help make his new area a better place by teaching them about poetry. John Savage from The Deer Hunter plays a teacher, and future writer and director Reggie Rock Bythewood plays one of the troubled youths whose life is turned around through the written and spoken word.   The production team was top notch. Producer Julia Phillips was one of the few women to ever win a Best Picture Oscar when she and her then husband Michael Phillips produced The Sting in 1973. Phillips was assisted on the film by two young men who were making their first movie. Jon Kilik would go on to produce or co-produce every Spike Lee movie from Do the Right Thing to Da 5 Bloods, except for BlackkKlansman, while Nick Weschler would produce sex, lies and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, The Player and Requiem for a Dream, amongst dozens of major films. And the film's cinematographer, Tom DiCillo, would move into the director's chair in 1991 with Johnny Suede, which gave Brad Pitt his first lead role.   The Beat would be shot on location in New York City in the summer of 1986, and it would make its world premiere at the Cannes Film Market in May 1987. But it would be another thirteen months before the film arrived in theatres.   Opening on seven screens in Los Angeles and New York City on June 3rd, The Beat would gross just $7,168 in its first three days.  There would not be a second week for The Beat. It would make its way onto home video in early 1989, and that's the last time the film was seen for nearly thirty years, until the film was picked up by a number of streaming services.   Vestron's streak of bad luck continued with the comedy Paramedics starring George Newbern and Christopher McDonald. The only feature film directed by Stuart Margolin, best known as Angel on the 1970s TV series The Rockford Files, Newbern and McDonald play two… well, paramedics… who are sent by boss, as punishment, from their cushy uptown gig to a troubled district at the edge of the city, where they discover two other paramedics are running a cadavers for dollars scheme, harvesting organs from dead bodies to the black market.   Here again we have a great supporting cast who deserve to be in a better movie, including character actor John P. Ryan, James Noble from Benson, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs from Welcome Back Kotter, the great Ray Walston, and one-time Playboy Playmate Karen Witter, who plays a sort of angel of death.   Opening on 301 screens nationwide, Paramedics would only gross $149,577 in its first three days, the worst per screen average of any movie playing in at least 100 theatres that weekend. Vestron stopped tracking the film after just three days.   Two weeks later, on June 17th, Vestron released a comedy horror film that should have done better. Waxwork was an interesting idea, a group of college students who have some strange encounters with the wax figures at a local museum, but that's not exactly why it should have been more popular. It was the cast that should have brought audiences in. On one side, you had a group of well-known younger actors like Deborah Foreman from Valley Girl, Zack Gailligan from Gremlins, Michelle Johnson from Blame It on Rio, and Miles O'Keeffe from Sword of the Valiant. On the other hand, you had a group of seasoned veterans from popular television shows and movies, such as Patrick Macnee from the popular 1960s British TV show The Avengers, John Rhys-Davies from the Indiana Jones movies, and David Warner, from The Omen and Time after Time and Time Bandits and Tron.   But if I want to be completely honest, this was not a movie to release in the early part of summer. While I'm a firm believer that the right movie can find an audience no matter when it's released, Waxwork was absolutely a prime candidate for an early October release. Throughout the 1980s, we saw a number of horror movies, and especially horror comedies, released in the summer season that just did not hit with audiences. So it would be of little surprise when Waxwork grossed less than a million dollars during its theatrical run. And it should be of little surprise that the film would become popular enough on home video to warrant a sequel, which would add more popular sci-fi and horror actors like Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation, David Carradine and even Bruce Campbell. But by 1992, when Waxwork 2 was released, Vestron was long since closed.   The second Ken Russell movie made for Vestron was The Lair of the White Worm, based on a 1911 novel by Bram Stoker, the author's final published book before his death the following year. The story follows the residents in and around a rural English manor that are tormented by an ancient priestess after the skull of a serpent she worships is unearthed by an archaeologist.   Russell would offer the role of Sylvia Marsh, the enigmatic Lady who is actually an immortal priestess to an ancient snake god, to Tilda Swinton, who at this point of her career had already racked up a substantial resume in film after only two years, but she would decline. Instead, the role would go to Amanda Donohoe, the British actress best known at the time for her appearances in a pair of Adam Ant videos earlier in the decade. And the supporting cast would include Peter Capaldi, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, and the under-appreciated Sammi Davis, who was simply amazing in Mona Lisa, A Prayer for the Dying and John Boorman's Hope and Glory.   The $2m would come together fairly quickly. Vestron and Russell would agree on the film in late 1987, the script would be approved by January 1988, filming would begin in England in February, and the completed film would have its world premiere at the Montreal Film Festival before the end of August.   When the film arrived in American theatres starting on October 21st, many critics would embrace the director's deliberate camp qualities and anachronisms. But audiences, who maybe weren't used to Russell's style of filmmaking, did not embrace the film quite so much. New Yorkers would buy $31k worth of tickets in its opening weekend at the D. W. Griffith and 8th Street Playhouse, and the film would perform well in its opening weeks in major markets, but the film would never quite break out, earning just $1.2m after ten weeks in theatres. But, again, home video would save the day, as the film would become one of the bigger rental titles in 1989.   If you were a teenager in the early 80s, as I was, you may remember a Dutch horror film called The Lift. Or, at the very least, you remember the key art on the VHS box, of a man who has his head stuck in between the doors of an elevator, while the potential viewer is warned to take the stairs, take the stairs, for God's sake, take the stairs. It was an impressive debut film for Dick Maas, but it was one that would place an albatross around the neck of his career.   One of his follow ups to The Lift, called Amsterdamned, would follow a police detective who is searching for a serial killer in his home town, who uses the canals of the Dutch capital to keep himself hidden. When the detective gets too close to solving the identity of the murderer, the killer sends a message by killing the detective's girlfriend, which, if the killer had ever seen a movie before, he should have known you never do. You never make it personal for the cop, because he's gonna take you down even worse.   When the film's producers brought the film to the American Film Market in early 1988, it would become one of the most talked about films, and Vestron would pick up the American distribution rights for a cool half a million dollars. The film would open on six screens in the US on November 25th, including the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills but not in New York City, but a $15k first weekend gross would seal its fate almost immediately. The film would play for another four weeks in theatres, playing on 18 screens at its widest, but it would end its run shortly after the start of of the year with only $62,044 in tickets sold.   The final Vestron Pictures release of 1988 was Andrew Birkin's Burning Secret. Birkin, the brother of French singer and actress Jane Birkin, would co-write the screenplay for this adaptation of a 1913 short story by Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, about a about an American diplomat's son who befriends a mysterious baron while staying at an Austrian spa during the 1920s. According to Birkin in a 2021 interview, making the movie was somewhat of a nightmare, as his leading actors, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway, did not like each other, and their lack of comfort with each other would bleed into their performances, which is fatal for a film about two people who are supposed to passionately burn for each other.   Opening on 16 screens in major markets on Thursday, December 22nd, Burning Secret would only gross $27k in its first four days. The film would actually see a post-Christmas bump, as it would lose a screen but see its gross jump to $40k. But after the first of the year, as it was obvious reviews were not going to save the film and awards consideration was non-existent, the film would close after three weeks with only $104k worth of tickets sold.   By the end of 1988, Vestron was facing bankruptcy. The major distributors had learned the lessons independents like Vestron had taught them about selling more volumes of tapes by lowering the price, to make movies collectables and have people curate their own video library. Top titles were harder to come by, and studios were no longer giving up home video rights to the movies they acquired from third-party producers.   Like many of the distributors we've spoken about before, and will undoubtedly speak of again, Vestron had too much success with one movie too quickly, and learned the wrong lessons about growth. If you look at the independent distribution world of 2023, you'll see companies like A24 that have learned that lesson. Stay lean and mean, don't go too wide too quickly, try not to spend too much money on a movie, no matter who the filmmaker is and how good of a relationship you have with them. A24 worked with Robert Eggers on The Witch and The Lighthouse, but when he wanted to spend $70-90m to make The Northman, A24 tapped out early, and Focus Features ended up losing millions on the film. Focus, the “indie” label for Universal Studios, can weather a huge loss like The Northman because they are a part of a multinational, multimedia conglomerate.   This didn't mean Vestron was going to quit quite yet, but, spoiler alert, they'll be gone soon enough.   In fact, and in case you are newer to the podcast and haven't listen to many of the previous episodes, none of the independent distribution companies that began and/or saw their best years in the 1980s that we've covered so far or will be covering in the future, exist in the same form they existed in back then.    New Line still exists, but it's now a label within Warner Brothers instead of being an independent distributor. Ditto Orion, which is now just a specialty label within MGM/UA. The Samuel Goldwyn Company is still around and still distributes movies, but it was bought by Orion Pictures the year before Orion was bought by MGM/UA, so it too is now just a specialty label, within another specialty label. Miramax today is just a holding company for the movies the company made before they were sold off to Disney, before Disney sold them off to a hedge fund, who sold Miramax off to another hedge fund.    Atlantic is gone. New World is gone. Cannon is gone. Hemdale is gone. Cinecom is gone. Island Films is gone. Alive Films is gone. Concorde Films is gone. MCEG is gone. CineTel is gone. Crown International is gone. Lorimar is gone. New Century/Vista is gone. Skouras Films is gone. Cineplex Odeon Films is gone.   Not one of them survived.   The same can pretty much be said for the independent distributors created in the 1990s, save Lionsgate, but I'll leave that for another podcast to tackle.   As for the Vestron story, we'll continue that one next week, because there are still a dozen more movies to talk about, as well as the end of the line for the once high flying company.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon.   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 look back at the movies released by independent distributor Vestron Pictures, focusing on their 1988 releases. ----more---- The movies discussed on this episode, all released by Vestron Pictures in 1988 unless otherwise noted, include: Amsterdamned (Dick Maas) And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim) The Beat (Paul Mones) Burning Secret (Andrew Birkin) Call Me (Sollace Mitchell) The Family (Ettore Scola) Gothic (Ken Russell, 1987) The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell) Midnight Crossing (Roger Holzberg) Paramedics (Stuart Margolin) The Pointsman (Jos Stelling) Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell) Promised Land (Michael Hoffman) The Unholy (Camilo Vila) Waxwork (Anthony Hickox)   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.   At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was celebrating the best year of its two year history. Dirty Dancing had become one of the most beloved movies of the year, and Anna was becoming a major awards contender, thanks to a powerhouse performance by veteran actress Sally Kirkland. And at the 60th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the films of 1987, Dirty Dancing would win the Oscar for Best Original Song, while Anna would be nominated for Best Actress, and The Dead for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costumes.   Surely, things could only go up from there, right?   Welcome to Part Two of our miniseries.   But before we get started, I'm issuing a rare mea culpa. I need to add another Vestron movie which I completely missed on the previous episode, because it factors in to today's episode. Which, of course, starts before our story begins.   In the 1970s, there were very few filmmakers like the flamboyant Ken Russell. So unique a visual storyteller was Russell, it's nigh impossible to accurately describe him in a verbal or textual manner. Those who have seen The Devils, Tommy or Altered States know just how special Russell was as a filmmaker. By the late 1980s, the hits had dried up, and Russell was in a different kind of artistic stage, wanting to make somewhat faithful adaptations of late 19th and early 20th century UK authors. Vestron was looking to work with some prestigious filmmakers, to help build their cache in the filmmaking community, and Russell saw the opportunity to hopefully find a new home with this new distributor not unlike the one he had with Warner Brothers in the early 70s that brought forth several of his strongest movies.   In June 1986, Russell began production on a gothic horror film entitled, appropriately enough, Gothic, which depicted a fictionalized version of a real life meeting between Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairemont at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, hosted by Lord Byron, from which historians believe both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John William Polidori's The Vampyre were inspired.   And you want to talk about a movie with a great cast. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, Natasha Richardson, in her first ever movie, as Mary Shelley, Timothy Spall as John William Polidori, and Dexter Fletcher.   Although the film was produced through MGM, and distributed by the company in Europe, they would not release the film in America, fearing American audiences wouldn't get it. So Vestron would swoop in and acquire the American theatrical rights.   Incidentally, the film did not do very well in American theatres. Opening at the Cinema 1 in midtown Manhattan on April 10th, 1987, the film would sell $45,000 worth of tickets in its first three days, one of the best grosses of any single screen in the city. But the film would end up grossing only $916k after three months in theatres.   BUT…   The movie would do quite well for Vestron on home video, enough so that Vestron would sign on to produce Russell's next three movies. The first of those will be coming up very soon.   Vestron's 1988 release schedule began on January 22nd with the release of two films.   The first was Michael Hoffman's Promised Land. In 1982, Hoffman's first film, Privileged, was the first film to made through the Oxford Film Foundation, and was notable for being the first screen appearances for Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs, the first film scored by future Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman, and was shepherded into production by none other than John Schlesinger, the Oscar winning director of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman's second film, the Scottish comedy Restless Natives, was part of the 1980s Scottish New Wave film movement that also included Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, and was the only film to be scored by the Scottish rock band Big Country.   Promised Land was one of the first films to be developed by the Sundance Institute, in 1984, and when it was finally produced in 1986, would include Robert Redford as one of its executive producers. The film would follow two recent local high school graduates, Hancock and Danny, whose lives would intersect again with disastrous results several years after graduation. The cast features two young actors destined to become stars, in Keifer Sutherland and Meg Ryan, as well as Jason Gedrick, Tracy Pollan, and Jay Underwood. Shot in Reno and around the Sundance Institute outside Park City, Utah during the early winter months of 1987, Promised Land would make its world premiere at the prestigious Deauville Film Festival in September 1987, but would lose its original distributor, New World Pictures around the same time. Vestron would swoop in to grab the distribution rights, and set it for a January 22nd, 1988 release, just after its American debut at the then U.S. Film Festival, which is now known as the Sundance Film Festival.    Convenient, eh?   Opening on six screens in , the film would gross $31k in its first three days. The film would continue to slowly roll out into more major markets, but with a lack of stellar reviews, and a cast that wouldn't be more famous for at least another year and a half, Vestron would never push the film out to more than 67 theaters, and it would quickly disappear with only $316k worth of tickets sold.   The other movie Vestron opened on January 22nd was Ettore Scale's The Family, which was Italy's submission to that year's Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. The great Vittorio Gassman stars as a retired college professor who reminisces about his life and his family over the course of the twentieth century. Featuring a cast of great international actors including Fanny Ardant, Philip Noiret, Stefania Sandrelli and Ricky Tognazzi, The Family would win every major film award in Italy, and it would indeed be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, but in America, it would only play in a handful of theatres for about two months, unable to gross even $350k.   When is a remake not a remake? When French filmmaker Roger Vadim, who shot to international fame in 1956 with his movie And God Created Woman, decided to give a generational and international spin on his most famous work. And a completely different story, as to not resemble his original work in any form outside of the general brushstrokes of both being about a young, pretty, sexually liberated young woman.   Instead of Bridget Bardot, we get Rebecca De Mornay, who was never able to parlay her starring role in Risky Business to any kind of stardom the way one-time boyfriend Tom Cruise had. And if there was any American woman in the United States in 1988 who could bring in a certain demographic to see her traipse around New Mexico au natural, it would be Rebecca De Mornay. But as we saw with Kathleen Turner in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion in 1984 and Ellen Barkin in Mary Lambert's Siesta in 1987, American audiences were still rather prudish when it came to seeing a certain kind of female empowered sexuality on screen, and when the film opened at 385 theatres on March 4th, it would open to barely a $1,000 per screen average. And God Created Woman would be gone from theatres after only three weeks and $717k in ticket sales.   Vestron would next release a Dutch film called The Pointsman, about a French woman who accidentally gets off at the wrong train station in a remote Dutch village, and a local railwayman who, unable to speak the other person's language, develop a strange relationship while she waits for another train that never arrives.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on New York's Upper West Side on April 8th, the film would gross $7,000 in its first week, which in and of itself isn't all that bad for a mostly silent Dutch film. Except there was another Dutch film in the marketplace already, one that was getting much better reviews, and was the official Dutch entry into that year's Best Foreign Language Film race. That film, Babette's Feast, was becoming something more than just a movie. Restaurants across the country were creating menus based on the meals served in the film, and in its sixth week of release in New York City that weekend, had grossed four times as much as The Pointsman, despite the fact that the theatre playing Babette's Feast, the Cinema Studio 1, sat only 65 more people than the Lincoln Plaza 1. The following week, The Pointsman would drop to $6k in ticket sales, while Babette's Feast's audience grew another $6k over the previous week. After a third lackluster week, The Pointsman was gone from the Lincoln Plaza, and would never play in another theatre in America.   In the mid-80s, British actor Ben Cross was still trying to capitalize on his having been one of the leads in the 1981 Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire, and was sharing a home with his wife and children, as well as Camilo Vila, a filmmaker looking for his first big break in features after two well-received short films made in his native Cuba before he defected in the early 1980s. When Vila was offered the chance to direct The Unholy, about a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans who finds himself battling a demonic force after being appointed to a new parish, he would walk down the hall of his shared home and offered his roomie the lead role.   Along with Ned Beatty, William Russ, Hal Holbrook and British actor Trevor Howard in his final film, The Unholy would begin two weeks of exterior filming in New Orleans on October 27th, 1986, before moving to a studio in Miami for seven more weeks. The film would open in 1189 theatres, Vestron's widest opening to date, on April 22nd, and would open in seventh place with $2.35m in ticket sales. By its second week in theatres, it would fall to eleventh place with a $1.24m gross. But with the Summer Movie Season quickly creeping up on the calendar, The Unholy would suffer the same fate as most horror films, making the drop to dollar houses after two weeks, as to make room for such dreck as Sunset, Blake Edwards' lamentable Bruce Willis/James Garner riff on Hollywood and cowboys in the late 1920s, and the pointless sequel to Critters before screens got gobbled up by Rambo III on Memorial Day weekend. It would earn a bit more than $6m at the box office.   When Gothic didn't perform well in American theatres, Ken Russell thought his career was over. As we mentioned earlier, the American home video store saved his career, as least for the time being.    The first film Russell would make for Vestron proper was Salome's Last Dance, based on an 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, which itself was based on a story from the New Testament. Russell's script would add a framing device as a way for movie audiences to get into this most theatrical of stories.   On Guy Fawkes Day in London in 1892, Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, arrive late at a friend's brothel, where the author is treated to a surprise performance of his play Salome, which has recently been banned from being performed at all in England by Lord Chamberlain. All of the actors in his special performance are played by the prostitutes of the brothel and their clients, and the scenes of the play are intertwined with Wilde's escapades at the brothel that night.   We didn't know it at the time, but Salome's Last Dance would be the penultimate film performance for Academy Award winning actress Glenda Jackson, who would retire to go into politics in England a couple years later, after working with Russell on another film, which we'll get to in a moment. About the only other actor you might recognize in the film is David Doyle, of all people, the American actor best known for playing Bosley on Charlie's Angels.   Like Gothic, Salome's Last Dance would not do very well in theatres, grossing less than half a million dollars after three months, but would find an appreciative audience on home video.   The most interesting thing about Roger Holzberg's Midnight Crossing is the writer and director himself. Holzberg started in the entertainment industry as a playwright, then designed the props and weapons for Albert Pyun's 1982 film The Sword and the Sorcerer, before moving on to direct the second unit team on Pyun's 1985 film Radioactive Dreams. After making this film, Holzberg would have a cancer scare, and pivot to health care, creating a number of technological advancements to help evolve patient treatment, including the Infusionarium, a media setup which helps children with cancer cope with treatment by asking them questions designed to determine what setting would be most comforting to them, and then using virtual reality technology and live events to immerse them in such an environment during treatment.   That's pretty darn cool, actually.   Midnight Crossing stars Faye Dunaway and Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti in his first major movie role as a couple who team with another couple, played by Kim Cattrall and John Laughlin, who go hunting for treasure supposedly buried between Florida and Cuba.   The film would open in 419 theaters on May 11th, 1988, and gross a paltry $673k in its first three days, putting it 15th on the list of box office grosses for the week, $23k more than Three Men and a Baby, which was playing on 538 screens in its 25th week of release. In its second week, Midnight Crossing would lose more than a third of its theatres, and the weekend gross would fall to just $232k. The third week would be even worse, dropping to just 67 theatres and $43k in ticket sales. After a few weeks at a handful of dollar houses, the film would be history with just $1.3m in the bank. Leonard Klady, then writing for the Los Angeles Times, would note in a January 1989 article about the 1988 box office that Midnight Crossing's box office to budget ratio of 0.26 was the tenth worst ratio for any major or mini-major studio, ahead of And God Created Woman's 8th worst ratio of .155 but behind other stinkers like Caddyshack II.   The forgotten erotic thriller Call Me sounds like a twist on the 1984 Alan Rudolph romantic comedy Choose Me, but instead of Genevieve Bujold we get Patricia Charbonneau, and instead of a meet cute involving singles at a bar in Los Angeles, we get a murder mystery involving a New York City journalist who gets involved with a mysterious caller after she witnesses a murder at a bar due to a case of mistaken identity.   The film's not very good, but the supporting cast is great, including Steve Buscemi, Patti D'Arbanville, Stephen McHattie and David Straithairn.   Opening on 24 screens in major markets on May 20th, Call Me would open to horrible reviews, lead by Siskel and Ebert's thumbs facing downward, and only $58,348 worth of tickets sold in its first three days. After five weeks in theatres, Vestron hung up on Call Me with just $252k in the kitty.   Vestron would open two movies on June 3rd, one in a very limited release, and one in a moderate national release.   There are a lot of obscure titles in these two episodes, and probably the most obscure is Paul Mones' The Beat. The film followed a young man named Billy Kane, played by William McNamara in his film debut, who moves into a rough neighborhood controlled by several gangs, who tries to help make his new area a better place by teaching them about poetry. John Savage from The Deer Hunter plays a teacher, and future writer and director Reggie Rock Bythewood plays one of the troubled youths whose life is turned around through the written and spoken word.   The production team was top notch. Producer Julia Phillips was one of the few women to ever win a Best Picture Oscar when she and her then husband Michael Phillips produced The Sting in 1973. Phillips was assisted on the film by two young men who were making their first movie. Jon Kilik would go on to produce or co-produce every Spike Lee movie from Do the Right Thing to Da 5 Bloods, except for BlackkKlansman, while Nick Weschler would produce sex, lies and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, The Player and Requiem for a Dream, amongst dozens of major films. And the film's cinematographer, Tom DiCillo, would move into the director's chair in 1991 with Johnny Suede, which gave Brad Pitt his first lead role.   The Beat would be shot on location in New York City in the summer of 1986, and it would make its world premiere at the Cannes Film Market in May 1987. But it would be another thirteen months before the film arrived in theatres.   Opening on seven screens in Los Angeles and New York City on June 3rd, The Beat would gross just $7,168 in its first three days.  There would not be a second week for The Beat. It would make its way onto home video in early 1989, and that's the last time the film was seen for nearly thirty years, until the film was picked up by a number of streaming services.   Vestron's streak of bad luck continued with the comedy Paramedics starring George Newbern and Christopher McDonald. The only feature film directed by Stuart Margolin, best known as Angel on the 1970s TV series The Rockford Files, Newbern and McDonald play two… well, paramedics… who are sent by boss, as punishment, from their cushy uptown gig to a troubled district at the edge of the city, where they discover two other paramedics are running a cadavers for dollars scheme, harvesting organs from dead bodies to the black market.   Here again we have a great supporting cast who deserve to be in a better movie, including character actor John P. Ryan, James Noble from Benson, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs from Welcome Back Kotter, the great Ray Walston, and one-time Playboy Playmate Karen Witter, who plays a sort of angel of death.   Opening on 301 screens nationwide, Paramedics would only gross $149,577 in its first three days, the worst per screen average of any movie playing in at least 100 theatres that weekend. Vestron stopped tracking the film after just three days.   Two weeks later, on June 17th, Vestron released a comedy horror film that should have done better. Waxwork was an interesting idea, a group of college students who have some strange encounters with the wax figures at a local museum, but that's not exactly why it should have been more popular. It was the cast that should have brought audiences in. On one side, you had a group of well-known younger actors like Deborah Foreman from Valley Girl, Zack Gailligan from Gremlins, Michelle Johnson from Blame It on Rio, and Miles O'Keeffe from Sword of the Valiant. On the other hand, you had a group of seasoned veterans from popular television shows and movies, such as Patrick Macnee from the popular 1960s British TV show The Avengers, John Rhys-Davies from the Indiana Jones movies, and David Warner, from The Omen and Time after Time and Time Bandits and Tron.   But if I want to be completely honest, this was not a movie to release in the early part of summer. While I'm a firm believer that the right movie can find an audience no matter when it's released, Waxwork was absolutely a prime candidate for an early October release. Throughout the 1980s, we saw a number of horror movies, and especially horror comedies, released in the summer season that just did not hit with audiences. So it would be of little surprise when Waxwork grossed less than a million dollars during its theatrical run. And it should be of little surprise that the film would become popular enough on home video to warrant a sequel, which would add more popular sci-fi and horror actors like Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation, David Carradine and even Bruce Campbell. But by 1992, when Waxwork 2 was released, Vestron was long since closed.   The second Ken Russell movie made for Vestron was The Lair of the White Worm, based on a 1911 novel by Bram Stoker, the author's final published book before his death the following year. The story follows the residents in and around a rural English manor that are tormented by an ancient priestess after the skull of a serpent she worships is unearthed by an archaeologist.   Russell would offer the role of Sylvia Marsh, the enigmatic Lady who is actually an immortal priestess to an ancient snake god, to Tilda Swinton, who at this point of her career had already racked up a substantial resume in film after only two years, but she would decline. Instead, the role would go to Amanda Donohoe, the British actress best known at the time for her appearances in a pair of Adam Ant videos earlier in the decade. And the supporting cast would include Peter Capaldi, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, and the under-appreciated Sammi Davis, who was simply amazing in Mona Lisa, A Prayer for the Dying and John Boorman's Hope and Glory.   The $2m would come together fairly quickly. Vestron and Russell would agree on the film in late 1987, the script would be approved by January 1988, filming would begin in England in February, and the completed film would have its world premiere at the Montreal Film Festival before the end of August.   When the film arrived in American theatres starting on October 21st, many critics would embrace the director's deliberate camp qualities and anachronisms. But audiences, who maybe weren't used to Russell's style of filmmaking, did not embrace the film quite so much. New Yorkers would buy $31k worth of tickets in its opening weekend at the D. W. Griffith and 8th Street Playhouse, and the film would perform well in its opening weeks in major markets, but the film would never quite break out, earning just $1.2m after ten weeks in theatres. But, again, home video would save the day, as the film would become one of the bigger rental titles in 1989.   If you were a teenager in the early 80s, as I was, you may remember a Dutch horror film called The Lift. Or, at the very least, you remember the key art on the VHS box, of a man who has his head stuck in between the doors of an elevator, while the potential viewer is warned to take the stairs, take the stairs, for God's sake, take the stairs. It was an impressive debut film for Dick Maas, but it was one that would place an albatross around the neck of his career.   One of his follow ups to The Lift, called Amsterdamned, would follow a police detective who is searching for a serial killer in his home town, who uses the canals of the Dutch capital to keep himself hidden. When the detective gets too close to solving the identity of the murderer, the killer sends a message by killing the detective's girlfriend, which, if the killer had ever seen a movie before, he should have known you never do. You never make it personal for the cop, because he's gonna take you down even worse.   When the film's producers brought the film to the American Film Market in early 1988, it would become one of the most talked about films, and Vestron would pick up the American distribution rights for a cool half a million dollars. The film would open on six screens in the US on November 25th, including the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills but not in New York City, but a $15k first weekend gross would seal its fate almost immediately. The film would play for another four weeks in theatres, playing on 18 screens at its widest, but it would end its run shortly after the start of of the year with only $62,044 in tickets sold.   The final Vestron Pictures release of 1988 was Andrew Birkin's Burning Secret. Birkin, the brother of French singer and actress Jane Birkin, would co-write the screenplay for this adaptation of a 1913 short story by Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, about a about an American diplomat's son who befriends a mysterious baron while staying at an Austrian spa during the 1920s. According to Birkin in a 2021 interview, making the movie was somewhat of a nightmare, as his leading actors, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Faye Dunaway, did not like each other, and their lack of comfort with each other would bleed into their performances, which is fatal for a film about two people who are supposed to passionately burn for each other.   Opening on 16 screens in major markets on Thursday, December 22nd, Burning Secret would only gross $27k in its first four days. The film would actually see a post-Christmas bump, as it would lose a screen but see its gross jump to $40k. But after the first of the year, as it was obvious reviews were not going to save the film and awards consideration was non-existent, the film would close after three weeks with only $104k worth of tickets sold.   By the end of 1988, Vestron was facing bankruptcy. The major distributors had learned the lessons independents like Vestron had taught them about selling more volumes of tapes by lowering the price, to make movies collectables and have people curate their own video library. Top titles were harder to come by, and studios were no longer giving up home video rights to the movies they acquired from third-party producers.   Like many of the distributors we've spoken about before, and will undoubtedly speak of again, Vestron had too much success with one movie too quickly, and learned the wrong lessons about growth. If you look at the independent distribution world of 2023, you'll see companies like A24 that have learned that lesson. Stay lean and mean, don't go too wide too quickly, try not to spend too much money on a movie, no matter who the filmmaker is and how good of a relationship you have with them. A24 worked with Robert Eggers on The Witch and The Lighthouse, but when he wanted to spend $70-90m to make The Northman, A24 tapped out early, and Focus Features ended up losing millions on the film. Focus, the “indie” label for Universal Studios, can weather a huge loss like The Northman because they are a part of a multinational, multimedia conglomerate.   This didn't mean Vestron was going to quit quite yet, but, spoiler alert, they'll be gone soon enough.   In fact, and in case you are newer to the podcast and haven't listen to many of the previous episodes, none of the independent distribution companies that began and/or saw their best years in the 1980s that we've covered so far or will be covering in the future, exist in the same form they existed in back then.    New Line still exists, but it's now a label within Warner Brothers instead of being an independent distributor. Ditto Orion, which is now just a specialty label within MGM/UA. The Samuel Goldwyn Company is still around and still distributes movies, but it was bought by Orion Pictures the year before Orion was bought by MGM/UA, so it too is now just a specialty label, within another specialty label. Miramax today is just a holding company for the movies the company made before they were sold off to Disney, before Disney sold them off to a hedge fund, who sold Miramax off to another hedge fund.    Atlantic is gone. New World is gone. Cannon is gone. Hemdale is gone. Cinecom is gone. Island Films is gone. Alive Films is gone. Concorde Films is gone. MCEG is gone. CineTel is gone. Crown International is gone. Lorimar is gone. New Century/Vista is gone. Skouras Films is gone. Cineplex Odeon Films is gone.   Not one of them survived.   The same can pretty much be said for the independent distributors created in the 1990s, save Lionsgate, but I'll leave that for another podcast to tackle.   As for the Vestron story, we'll continue that one next week, because there are still a dozen more movies to talk about, as well as the end of the line for the once high flying company.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon.   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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4th , 1792. At the time he was considered a radical both politically and poetically. He is most well known for the pieces "Ozymandias," "To a Skylark," and "Prometheus Unbound." While he faced considerable family strife over his atheism, he eventually made good friends of Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Lord Byron. Mary Godwin, his second wife, is the author of Frankenstein. Shelley passed in a boating accident on July 8th , 1822 at the age of 29.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4th , 1792. At the time he was considered a radical both politically and poetically. He is most well known for the pieces "Ozymandias," "To a Skylark," and "Prometheus Unbound." While he faced considerable family strife over his atheism, he eventually made good friends of Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Lord Byron. Mary Godwin, his second wife, is the author of Frankenstein. Shelley passed in a boating accident on July 8th , 1822 at the age of 29.

The complete audiobook is available for purchased at Audible.com: voicesoftoday.net/vamp The Vampyre A Tale By John William Polidori Narrated by Gregory Sheridan John William Polidori (1795 – 1821) was an English physician and an associate of Byron and Shelley. On a tour with the two poets and Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Polidori participated in a competition to write a short ghost story. Polidori's contribution was the Vampyre, which is considered to be the first modern work of vampire fiction. The central figures in the plot are the mysterious and sinister Lord Ruthven, and a naive and wealthy young man named Aubrey. The latter forms a friendship with Ruthven, and the two set off on a European tour together. However, Aubrey soon becomes disgusted with Ruthven's manipulative and vicious behavior, and leaves him to explore antiquities in Greece, where he falls in love with Ianthe, the daughter of an innkeeper. Shortly afterwards, Ianthe is found dead, with her throat torn open, and the locals claim that her death is the work of a vampire. Aubrey falls dangerously ill, and discovers, to his dismay, that Ruthven has joined him and is nursing him back to health. On resuming their travels the pair are attacked by bandits and Ruthven is killed. Aubrey returns to London, and later finds, to his amazement, that Ruthven has been restored to life. Eventually, Ruthven marries Aubrey's sister, who is later found dead, with her body drained of blood. Polidori's tale proved very influential. Prominent authors like Gogol, Dumas and Tolstoy produced vampire stories, and later in the century, Bram Stoker wrote the most famous vampire story of all, Dracula.

Dig if you will a picture: Rita Dove, Prince, and an infidel poet.Prince released over 39 of his own albums and won seven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible (2004). In 1993, Prince announced his desire to go by "an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It's all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency," he wrote in a statement at the time. He was born June 7, 1958 and died April 21, 2016. Rita Dove was born August 28, 1952. In 1987, she won the Pulitzer in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah (becoming only the 2nd African American to win that award, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950). She was US Poet Laureate from 1999-2000. Since 1989, she has taught at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.Watch Rita Dove on the PBS News Hour here (~7 min).Watch Prince in a 1999 appearance on The Larry King Show here (~40 min)Regarding Judith Butler, here's the full quote from Claudia Rankine's Citizen: “Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers.”  You can see Prof. Dove discuss her poetry as well as her first novel in an interview here (~25 min).Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey present their work and are interviewed by Rudolph Byrd at Emory University and you can watch that conversation here (~75 min) About the Prince-Michael Jackson feud, Quincy Jones told GQ magazine that the beef  dated back to 1983, when the two attended a James Brown concert. Brown invited Jackson up on stage — and after Jackson treated the crowd to a few moments of singing and dancing, he asked Brown to bring up Prince. Jones later alleged that Prince felt like he'd been shown up — and accused him of making a half-hearted effort to run over Jackson after the show. Mary Shelley was the daughter of philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft, who died within 2 weeks of giving birth to Mary, and William Godwin. While Percy and Mary met when she was 16 (and she became pregnant by him at that time), she didn't marry him until she was 19. She died of a brain tumor at age 53. She published Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was 20. She was, like her husband, a political radical at the time.Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792 and was 21 when he met Mary Godwin. You can read more about their courtship and marriage here. Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia while sailing home from a meeting with Byron, when his boat was overtaken by a storm. During the 19th century, the average age fell for English women, but it didn't drop any lower than 22. Patterns varied depending on social and economic class, of course, with working-class women tending to marry slightly older than their aristocratic counterparts. But the prevailing modern idea that all English ladies wed before leaving their teenage years is well off the mark. While European noblewomen often married early, they were a small minority of the population, and the marriage certificates from Canterbury show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.You can listen to Beyonce's “Break My Vogue” [Queens Remix] here (~6 min).

This week Abby and Rebecca walk through the fever dream that is 1986's Gothic. We follow Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Percy Shelley, and Claire Claremont as they arrive at Lord Byron's castle. They drink a lot of laudanum, interact with leeches, and sort of have orgies. After this haunted summer, Mary Shelley would write Frankenstein and Polidori Vampyr. Two better stories but instead we have to watch Lord Byron abuse people.

We've all heard the story of "Frankenstein's Monster." A bat shit crazy scientist wants to reanimate dead tissue and basically create a fucking zombie baby… BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU GET FUCKING ZOMBIES! Anyway, Dr. Frankenstein and his trusty assistant, Igor, set off to bring a bunch of random, dead body parts together, throw some lightning on the bugger and bring this new, puzzle piece of a quasi-human back to "life." At first, the reanimated corpse seems somewhat ordinary, but then flips his shit and starts terrorizing and doing what I can only imagine REANIMATED ZOMBIES FUCKING DO!    Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin.  So, she was brought into this world by some smart fucking people. Mary's mother died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Puerperal fever is an infectious, sometimes fatal, disease of childbirth; until the mid-19th century, this dreaded, then-mysterious illness could sweep through a hospital maternity ward and kill most new mothers. Today strict aseptic hospital techniques have made the condition uncommon in most parts of the world, except in unusual circumstances such as illegally induced abortion. Her father, William, was left to bring up Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Mary's mother's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after her mother's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, the Memoirs revealed Mary's mother's affairs and her illegitimate child. In that period, they were seen as shocking. Mary read these memoirs and her mother's books and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory. Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise Mary and Fanny himself, he looked for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children—Charles and Claire SO MANY MARY'S! Sorry folks. Most of her father's friends disliked his new wife, describing her as a straight fucking bitch. Ok, not really, but they didn't like her. However, William was devoted to her, and the marriage worked. Mary, however, came to hate that bitch. William's 19th-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later suggested that Mrs. Godwin had favored her own children over Williams. So, how awesome is it that he had a biographer? That's so badass.  Together, Mary's father and his new bride started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books and stationery, maps, and games. However, the business wasn't making any loot, and her father was forced to borrow butt loads of money to keep it going. He kept borrowing money to pay off earlier loans, just adding to his problems. By 1809, William's business was close to closing up shop, and he was "near to despair." Mary's father was saved from debtor's prison by devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him additional money. So, debtor's prison is pretty much EXACTLY what it sounds like. If you couldn't pay your debts, they threw your ass in jail. Unlike today where they just FUCK UP YOUR CREDIT! THANKS, COLUMBIA HOUSE!!!  Though Mary received little education, her father tutored her in many subjects. He often took the children on educational trips. They had access to his library and the many intelligent mofos who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. You know, that dude that shot and killed his POLITICAL opponent, Alexander Hamilton, in a fucking duel! Ah… I was born in the wrong century.   Mary's father admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary's mother's philosophy as outlined in works such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, Mary still received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess, a daily tutor, and read many of her father's children's Roman and Greek history books. For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate, England. Her father described her at age 15 as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible." My father didn't know how to spell my name until I was twelve.  In June of 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland. In a letter to Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic." Scholars have speculated that she may have been sent away for her health, remove her from the seamy side of the business, or introduce her to radical politics. However, Mary loved the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and with his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 to hang out for 10 months. In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."   Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in between her two stays in Scotland. When she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley became estranged from his wife and regularly visited Mary's father, William Godwin, whom he had agreed to bail out of debt. Percy Shelley's radicalism, particularly his economic views, alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family. They wanted him to be a high, upstanding snoot and follow traditional models of the landed aristocracy. He tried to donate large amounts of the family's money to projects meant to help the poor and disadvantaged. Percy Shelley, therefore, had a problem gaining access to capital until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice." After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed and whooped his fuckin ass! Yeah! Ok, not really. He was just super pissed. Mary and Percy began hookin' up on the down-low at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. Creepy and super fucking gross.   On 26 June 1814, Shelley and Godwin declared their love for one another as Shelley announced he could not hide his "ardent passion,." This led her in a "sublime and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; on either that day or the next, Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley, which tradition claims happened in the churchyard. So, the grown-ass 21-year-old man statutorily raped the 16-year-old daughter of the man he idolized and dicked over. In a graveyard. My god, how things have changed...GROSS! Godwin described herself as attracted to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly looks." Smart but ugly. Got it. To Mary's dismay, her father disapproved and tried to thwart the relationship and salvage his daughter's "spotless fame." No! You don't say! Dad wasn't into his TEENAGE DAUGHTER BANGING A MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD!?! Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts at about the same time. Oof. He found out after he diddled her. Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father," was confused. Um… what? She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of Political Justice but later retracted. On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped and secretly left for France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.  After convincing Mary's mother, who took off after them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio traveled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through France, recently ravaged by war, all the way to Switzerland. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley recalled in 1826. Godwin wrote about France in 1814: "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war...". As they traveled, Mary and Percy read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. Finally, at Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. Instead, they traveled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Maassluis, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814. The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was packed with bullshit, some of which she had not expected. Either before or during their journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's stupid ass surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her. The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square. They kept doing their thing, reading, and writing and entertained Percy Shelley's friends. Percy Shelley would often leave home for short periods to dodge bill collectors, and the couple's heartbroken letters would reveal their pain while he was away. Pregnant and often sick, Mary Godwin had to hear of Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 due to his constant escapades with Claire Clairmont. Supposedly, Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, which caused Mary to be rightfully jealous. And yes, Claire was Mary's cousin. Percy was a friggin' creep. Percy pissed off Mary when he suggested that they both take the plunge into a stream naked during a walk in the French countryside. This offended her due to her principles, and she was like, "Oh, hell nah, sahn!" and started taking off her earrings in a rage. Or something like that. She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whom she disliked at first but soon considered a close friend. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary and Hogg to become lovers; Mary did not dismiss the idea since she believed in free love in principle. She was a hippie before being a hippie was cool. Percy probably just wanted to not feel guilty for hooking up with her cousin. Creep. In reality, however, she loved only Percy and seemed to have gone no further than flirting with Hogg. On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-months premature baby girl, who was not expected to survive. On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg: "My dearest Hogg, my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley (Percy) is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now." The loss of her child brought about acute depression in Mary. She was haunted by visions of the baby, but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. With a revival in Percy's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-story cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Unfortunately, little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 was lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father and soon nicknamed "Willmouse." In her novel The Last Man, she later imagined Windsor as a Garden of Eden. In May 1816, Mary, Percy, and their son traveled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. Claire sounds like a bit of a trollop. No judging, just making an observation. The party arrived in Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley." Byron joined them on 25 May with his young physician, John William Polidori, and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story." Unable to think up an account, young Mary became flustered: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." Finally, one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated," Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things." Galvanism is a term invented by the late 18th-century physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to refer to the generation of electric current by chemical action. The word also came to refer to the discoveries of its namesake, Luigi Galvani, specifically the generation of electric current within biological organisms and the contraction/convulsion of natural muscle tissue upon contact with electric current. While Volta theorized and later demonstrated the phenomenon of his "Galvanism" to be replicable with otherwise inert materials, Galvani thought his discovery to confirm the existence of "animal electricity," a vital force that gave life to organic matter. We'll talk a little more about Galvani and a murderer named George Foster toward the end of the episode. It was after midnight before they retired, and she was unable to sleep, mainly because she became overwhelmed by her imagination as she kept thinking about the grim terrors of her "waking dream," her ghost story: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." She began writing what she assumed would be a short, profound story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she turned her little idea into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that time in Switzerland as "when I first stepped out from childhood into life." The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalized repeatedly, and it helped form the basis for several films. Here's a cool little side note: In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2 am and 3 am" 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write their ghost stories. Shelley and her husband collaborated on the story, but the extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics forever. There are differences in the 1818, 1823, and 1831 versions. Mary Shelley wrote, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world." She wrote that the preface to the first edition was her husband's work "as far as I can recollect." James Rieger concluded Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator." At the same time, Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." Charles E. Robinson, the editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress." So, eat one, Percy! Just kidding. In 1840 and 1842, Mary and her son traveled together all over the continent. Mary recorded these trips in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower," Mary put it. For the first time in her life, she and her son were financially independent, though the remaining estate wasn't worth as much as they had thought. In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself in the crosshairs of three separate blackmailing sons of bitches. First, in 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. Scandalous! However, a friend of her son's bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. Vaffanculo, Gatteschi! Shortly afterward, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron. Also, in 1845, Percy Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her, claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary told him to eat a big ole bag of dicks and jog on! In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary liked Jane. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and vacationed with them, as well. Mary's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing, obviously two of her favorite things. Then, on 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, Mary Shelly died at fifty-three from what her doctor suspected was a brain tumor. According to Jane Shelley, Mary had asked to be buried with her mother and father. Still, looking at the graveyard at St Pancras and calling it "dreadful," Percy and Jane chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart. Romantic or disturbing? Maybe a bit of both. Mary Shelley remained a stout political radical throughout her life. Mary's works often suggested that cooperation and sympathy, mainly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view directly challenged the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and Enlightenment political theories. She wrote seven novels / Two travel narrations / Twenty three short stories / Three books of children's literature, and many articles. Mary Shelley left her mark on the literary world, and her name will be forever etched in the catacombs of horror for generations to come. When it comes to reanimation, there's someone else we need to talk about. George Forster (or Foster) was found guilty of murdering his wife and child by drowning them in Paddington Canal, London. He was hanged at Newgate on 18 January 1803, after which his body was taken to a nearby house where it was used in an experiment by Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini. At his trial, the events were reconstructed. Forster's mother-in-law recounted that her daughter and grandchild had left her house to see Forster at 4 pm on Saturday, 4 December 1802. In whose house Forster lodged, Joseph Bradfield reported that they had stayed together that night and gone out at 10 am on Sunday morning. He also stated that Forster and his wife had not been on good terms because she wished to live with him. On Sunday, various witnesses saw Forster with his wife and child in public houses near Paddington Canal. The body of his child was found on Monday morning; after the canal was dragged for three days, his wife's body was also found. Forster claimed that upon leaving The Mitre, he set out alone for Barnet to see his other two children in the workhouse there, though he was forced to turn back at Whetstone due to the failing light. This was contradicted by a waiter at The Mitre who said the three left the inn together. Skepticism was also expressed that he could have walked to Whetstone when he claimed. Nevertheless, the jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to death and also to be dissected after that. This sentence was designed to provide medicine with corpses on which to experiment and ensure that the condemned could not rise on Judgement Day, their bodies having been cut into pieces and selectively discarded. Forster was hanged on 18 January, shortly before he made a full confession. He said he had come to hate his wife and had twice before taken his wife to the canal, but his nerve had both times failed him. A recent BBC Knowledge documentary (Real Horror: Frankenstein) questions the fairness of the trial. It notes that friends of George Forster's wife later claimed that she was highly suicidal and had often talked about killing herself and her daughter. According to this documentary, Forster attempted suicide by stabbing himself with a crudely fashioned knife. This was to avoid awakening during the dissection of his body, should he not have died when hanged. This was a real possibility owing to the crude methods of execution at the time. The same reference suggests that his 'confession' was obtained under duress. In fact, it alleges that Pass, a Beadle or an official of a church or synagogue on Aldini's payroll, fast-tracked the whole trial and legal procedure to obtain the freshest corpse possible for his benefactor. After the execution, Forster's body was given to Giovanni Aldini for experimentation. Aldini was the nephew of fellow scientist Luigi Galvani and an enthusiastic proponent of his uncle's method of stimulating muscles with electric current, known as Galvanism. The experiment he performed on Forster's body demonstrated this technique. The Newgate Calendar (a record of executions at Newgate) reports that "On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion."  Several people present believed that Forster was being brought back to life (The Newgate Calendar reports that even if this had been so, he would have been re-executed since his sentence was to "hang until he be dead"). One man, Mr. Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons' Company, was so shocked that he died shortly after leaving. The hanged man was undoubtedly dead since his blood had been drained and his spinal cord severed after the execution.   Top Ten Frankenstein Movies https://screenrant.com/best-frankenstein-movies-ranked-imdb/

Wir sprechen heute über die Zusammenkunft von Mary Godwin (spätere Shelley), Lord Byron, Percy Shelley u.a. in einer Villa am Genfer See. Was dort geschah, kann man sicherlich mit Fug und Recht als Schlüsselmoment in Mary Shelleys Leben bezeichnen. Lauscht, wie Mary Shelley diesen Schlüsselmoment beschreibt – garniert mit ausgewählten Auszügen des Werks: https://lesedusche.de/fe/frankensteins-geburt

Mary Godwin Shelley had yet to reach her nineteenth birthday when she had the dream that gave rise to the classic Gothic horror tale Frankenstein. The daughter of a dissenting English clergyman and Britain’s first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin lost her mother not long after her birth. After an unconventional upbringing by the standards of late eighteenth-century Europe, followed by the arrival of a very conventional and far from accommodating stepmother, at the age of fourteen Mary fell madly in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, they eloped to Europe, leaving behind Percy’s wife and child but bringing along Mary’s stepsister, Claire. For the next decade, the trio traveled around the continent—especially France, Switzerland, and Italy—with occasional returns to London to secure funds. Through trips over the Alps by mule, sailing expeditions on Lake Como, and wild parties thrown by Lord Byron—a misogynist who belittles Mary’s talents even as he engages in a wild affair with Claire—Mary records in her journal the events and experiences that will blossom into her first and best-known novel. In Vindicated (Cuidono Press, 2020) Kathleen Williams Renk re-creates Mary’s inner world. Her crisp, utterly compelling prose brings to life a woman whose creation, as in the novel Frankenstein itself, has taken on a life of its own, eclipsing its creator. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Godwin Shelley had yet to reach her nineteenth birthday when she had the dream that gave rise to the classic Gothic horror tale Frankenstein. The daughter of a dissenting English clergyman and Britain’s first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin lost her mother not long after her birth. After an unconventional upbringing by the standards of late eighteenth-century Europe, followed by the arrival of a very conventional and far from accommodating stepmother, at the age of fourteen Mary fell madly in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, they eloped to Europe, leaving behind Percy’s wife and child but bringing along Mary’s stepsister, Claire. For the next decade, the trio traveled around the continent—especially France, Switzerland, and Italy—with occasional returns to London to secure funds. Through trips over the Alps by mule, sailing expeditions on Lake Como, and wild parties thrown by Lord Byron—a misogynist who belittles Mary’s talents even as he engages in a wild affair with Claire—Mary records in her journal the events and experiences that will blossom into her first and best-known novel. In Vindicated (Cuidono Press, 2020) Kathleen Williams Renk re-creates Mary’s inner world. Her crisp, utterly compelling prose brings to life a woman whose creation, as in the novel Frankenstein itself, has taken on a life of its own, eclipsing its creator. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Godwin Shelley had yet to reach her nineteenth birthday when she had the dream that gave rise to the classic Gothic horror tale Frankenstein. The daughter of a dissenting English clergyman and Britain’s first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin lost her mother not long after her birth. After an unconventional upbringing by the standards of late eighteenth-century Europe, followed by the arrival of a very conventional and far from accommodating stepmother, at the age of fourteen Mary fell madly in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, they eloped to Europe, leaving behind Percy’s wife and child but bringing along Mary’s stepsister, Claire. For the next decade, the trio traveled around the continent—especially France, Switzerland, and Italy—with occasional returns to London to secure funds. Through trips over the Alps by mule, sailing expeditions on Lake Como, and wild parties thrown by Lord Byron—a misogynist who belittles Mary’s talents even as he engages in a wild affair with Claire—Mary records in her journal the events and experiences that will blossom into her first and best-known novel. In Vindicated (Cuidono Press, 2020) Kathleen Williams Renk re-creates Mary’s inner world. Her crisp, utterly compelling prose brings to life a woman whose creation, as in the novel Frankenstein itself, has taken on a life of its own, eclipsing its creator. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

At nineteen years of age, Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin since she had not yet married her poet) invented a new genre of literature. Not that anyone was aware of it at the time of course but then hindsight is a wonderful thing. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus went through several reprints during Shelley's own life time and its intense, disquieting and all too relatable themes have influenced many hundreds of subsequent writers in SciFi, Horror and the Gothic. What many may not be aware of is how Mary's own unconventional and often tragic life influenced her work. From an unusual, rather macabre childhood to a scandalous affair with a married man; from the events of the summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva to the tangled threads of her family life, Mary Shelley lived a life that ran contradictory to the socially acceptable mores of the time. Like many outsiders, this meant she saw more clearly than most. This week the dragons take a look at one of the Gothic genres heavyweight champions and how her strange and remarkable book shaped an entire genre.   Title music: Ecstasy by Smiling Cynic

In episode 72 we continue to mark the release of Dylan's new album ROUGH & ROWDY WAYS by featuring "My Own Version of You" in the context of songs about the Pygmalion myth and Frankenstein story. This week on "Who Did It Better?" we feature two versions of "Rollin' & Tumblin'," the 1950 classic from Muddy Waters and Dylan's rewrite from 2006; go to our Twitter page @RainTrains and vote for who did it better!

We are living in some very uncertain times, where an unknown virus is controlling the lives of billions of people globally. In this episode, I take time to discuss this with a good friend of mine, Mary Godwin, a business consultant and Author, focusing on the mindset and business perspective of this all. For more information, coaching and to connect click on the links below: Sh: https://shor.by/michaeltabirade In: http://instagram.com/michaeltabirade Wb: https://michaeltabirade.com/

In this week's episode, Ant and Barry follow the TARDIS to Geneva and join the Doctor in a haunted house with Lord Byron, Mary Godwin and their friends. In a creepy story that proves to be more than expected (for Ant at least), the boys find plenty to talk about. Particularly that villain...

¿Te gusta lo que hacemos? ¿Quieres ayudarnos a hacer posible El Abrazo del Oso y formar parte de nuestra comunidad exclusiva? Pásate por www.patreon.com/elabrazodeloso A principios del siglo XIX un grupo de amigos irrepetibles recala en la Villa Diodati junto al lago Leman en Suiza. Era el final de una fría primavera que ya adelantaba un estío muy especial, aquel de 1816: el año sin verano. Determinadas circunstancias climáticas y la erupción el año anterior del volcán Tambora en Indonesia provocaron que aquel año, como dicen algunos que ocurrirá en parte este 2013, el verano apenas se mostró ante los curiosos viajeros que van a protagonizar el programa de hoy. Conoceremos al genio extravagante de Lord Byron, a su médico John Polidori, al poeta Percy Shelley o a su esposa, la joven Mary Godwin, autora en aquel extraño verano de una de las obras clásicas del género de terror, Frankenstein. Bajo los techos de la famosa Villa Diodati, en aquel verano sin verano, el genio creativo de estos personajes dibujó uno de los episodios más apasionantes de la historia de la literatura, atrévete a descubrirlo junto a Eduardo Moreno en la dirección y Yolanda Barreno, Antonio Gutíerrez, Pedro José Pérez, Ángel González y Luis Illana en la redacción. Programa originalmente emitido en OMC Radio el 9 de junio de 2013. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

It's the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born Mary Godwin in London, England (1797). Her work Frankenstein (1818) is considered the first science fiction novel ever written.

In this episode, the story of how a 17-year-old named Mary Godwin came to write Frankenstein and in doing so write the first great work of science fiction.  This episode is sponsored by: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters Seeing Red by Sandra Brown Follow Annotated on Instagram!

The image and concept of Frankenstein’s monster—most notably personified by Boris Karloff in the 1931 Universal horror film—are indelible in literature, cinema and popular culture. Far more than just an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein is a philosophical journey as well as a cultural phenomenon. But how did it come about? The idea for the novel was famously hatched at a lakeside chateau in Switzerland, the Villa Diodati, in the late spring and early summer of 1816 by Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin), her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron (who was then having an affair with Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont), and his doctor John Polidori, who went on to write The Vampyr. A nightmare summer of inclement climate-changed weather, haunting visions of dead children and monstrous women, endless cycles of personal and sexual jealousy, and the toxic personality of Lord Byron all contributed to Mary’s flash of genius. The story of Frankenstein’s origin is wrapped up in the broader story of the 1810s as a whole, and is intimately connected to the environmental disaster of that decade. In this episode, historian Sean Munger presents the complicated and fascinating personal stories of Mary Shelley and the literary circle that gathered in Geneva that summer, as well as their tragic ends in the years following. You’ll learn why Lord Byron was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” why the neighbors of the Villa Diodati set up a telescope on the lawn to spy on the scandalous goings-on, and you’ll meet the horrifying midnight vision that frightened Percy Shelley so much Polidori had to give him ether. This extravaganza of Gothic terror sounds like a bad horror film (and has provided the basis for more than one), but it’s real, actual history—like you’ve never heard it before. Visit the website for this episode for show notes, pictures of the people discussed, and a trailer for the 1931 Frankenstein film!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A recording from the TLS’s 2016 London Lit Weekend at King’s Place, London: 2016 was the 200th anniversary of a dark and stormy night with an extraordinary literary legacy: Frankenstein. Frances Wilson and Benjamin Markovits recount the three days in June, 1816, at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, when a group of young writers – among them Mary Godwin – sheltered from the gloom. Find out more at www.the-tls.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Era ya la segunda visita del grupo al completo a la casa de Lord Byron en el lago Leman y todos, Mary Shelley -entonces todavía con su nombre de soltera: Mary Godwin-, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron y su médico William Polidori, disfrutaban del plácido verano cerca de Ginebra. Lord Byron tuvo la idea de que cada uno de ellos creara una historia aterradora, mejor todavía que las que solían leer en Fantasmagoria, un volumen sobre cuentos de fantasmas que leían cada noche; lo cierto es que la idea no tuvo igual seguimiento. Mientras Percy Shelley y Byron comenzaron una historia pero la dejaron a medias, sin demasiado interés por continuarla, Polidori y Mary Shelley se tomaron en serio la idea. El resultado de la joven inglesa está en la mente de todos: en Villa Diodati escribió el germen de lo que luego se convertiría en una de las novelas más famosas de todos los tiempos, Frankenstein o el moderno Prometeo. Sin embargo, el legado de Villa Diodati para Polidori viene dado por su creación más famosa: El vampiro. Aprovechando el relato que Byron había escrito para la ocasión (titulado Un fragmento aunque el autor barajaba otros nombres como Oscuridad o El entierro) Polidori da rienda suelta a una historia que sienta las bases de la narrativa moderna sobre vampiros y de paso aprovecha para hacer una semblanza de Byron en el papel de Augustus Darvell, el aristócrata sediento de sangre protagonista de la historia. Historias planteó en dos programas de larga duración (entre ambos hay tres meses de diferencia) un especial dedicado a la obra de Byron que no pudo terminar y que Polidori tomó prestada para su relato vampírico. El primero de ellos incluye la biografía del poeta inglés además de la dramatización de Un fragmento traducida por Federico Volpini. En la segunda y última parte se ofrece la adaptación radiofónica de los finales de dicha obra sugeridos por los oyentes del programa. Autor: Lord Byron Año de publicación: (A Fragment) 1816 Fecha de emisión: 28 Julio 1997

Era ya la segunda visita del grupo al completo a la casa de Lord Byron en el lago Leman y todos, Mary Shelley -entonces todavía con su nombre de soltera: Mary Godwin-, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron y su médico William Polidori, disfrutaban del plácido verano cerca de Ginebra. Lord Byron tuvo la idea de que cada uno de ellos creara una historia aterradora, mejor todavía que las que solían leer en Fantasmagoria, un volumen sobre cuentos de fantasmas que leían cada noche; lo cierto es que la idea no tuvo igual seguimiento. Mientras Percy Shelley y Byron comenzaron una historia pero la dejaron a medias, sin demasiado interés por continuarla, Polidori y Mary Shelley se tomaron en serio la idea. El resultado de la joven inglesa está en la mente de todos: en Villa Diodati escribió el germen de lo que luego se convertiría en una de las novelas más famosas de todos los tiempos, Frankenstein o el moderno Prometeo. Sin embargo, el legado de Villa Diodati para Polidori viene dado por su creación más famosa: El vampiro. Aprovechando el relato que Byron había escrito para la ocasión (titulado Un fragmento aunque el autor barajaba otros nombres como Oscuridad o El entierro) Polidori da rienda suelta a una historia que sienta las bases de la narrativa moderna sobre vampiros y de paso aprovecha para hacer una semblanza de Byron en el papel de Augustus Darvell, el aristócrata sediento de sangre protagonista de la historia. Historias planteó en dos programas de larga duración (entre ambos hay tres meses de diferencia) un especial dedicado a la obra de Byron que no pudo terminar y que Polidori tomó prestada para su relato vampírico. El primero de ellos incluye la biografía del poeta inglés además de la dramatización de Un fragmento traducida por Federico Volpini. En la segunda y última parte se ofrece la adaptación radiofónica de los finales de dicha obra sugeridos por los oyentes del programa. Autor: Lord Byron Año de publicación: (A Fragment) 1816 Fecha de emisión: 28 Abril 1997