Podcast appearances and mentions of Meg Tilly

American-Canadian actress and novelist

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Meg Tilly

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Best podcasts about Meg Tilly

Latest podcast episodes about Meg Tilly

13 O'Clock Podcast
Movie Time: One Dark Night (1982)

13 O'Clock Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2025


Tom and Jenny discuss a somewhat obscure, minor cult flick, a supernatural horror film from the early 80s that stars Meg Tilly as a young woman forced to stay overnight in a mausoleum where a powerful psychic has recently been entombed. Audio version: Video version: Please support us on Patreon! Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube … Continue reading Movie Time: One Dark Night (1982)

Still Any Good?
135. Psycho II

Still Any Good?

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2025 97:56


The terrifying story of a middle aged man going into a scary, dank house full off terror and fear. But enough about Chris' garage, we're here to have a nice old chat about the sequel to one of the most famous 'terror films' of all time.  No, not Leprechaun.  It's 1983's PSYCHO II.END CREDITS- Presented by Robert Johnson and Christopher Webb- Produced/edited by Christopher Webb- "Still Any Good?" logo designed by Graham Wood & Robert Johnson- Crap poster mock-up by Christopher Webb- Theme music ("The Slide Of Time") by The Sonic Jewels, used with kind permission(c) 2025 Tiger Feet ProductionsFind us:Twitter @stillanygoodpodInstagram @stillanygoodpodBluesky @stillanygood.bsky.socialEmail stillanygood@gmail.comSupport the show

Vox Vomitus
Vince A. Liaguno, author of "Demo Reels" and "Arthouse Madness"

Vox Vomitus

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2025 57:08


https://www.vinceliaguno.comVince Liaguno is an award-winning writer, anthologist and editor, and an occasional poet.Vince won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET (Dark Scribe Press 2008), an anthology of queer horror fiction, which he co-edited with Chad Helder. His debut novel, 2006's THE LITERARY SIX, was a tribute to the slasher films of the 80s and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) for Horror and was named a finalist in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category.Vince began writing professionally in 2005 for AUTOGRAPH, a national print magazine for enthusiasts of the titular hobby, where he remained an active contributor through 2009. In 2007, he launched DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE, where he has remained Editor-in-Chief since the virtual magazine's inception. His many profiles, interviews, and non-fiction pieces have included bestselling authors (Christopher Rice, Bentley Little, Tess Gerritsen, Chelsea Cain), award-winning actors (Julianne Moore, Kathy Bates, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meg Tilly), music artists (Cyndi Lauper, Terri Nunn of Berlin, the late Laura Branigan), and pop culture retrospectives on TV series such as MELROSE PLACE and WILL & GRACE. A complete list of Vince's published work can be found here.Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, raised in the Princeton area of New Jersey, he now calls the snowy mitten-shaped state of Michigan his home. He is a member — and former Secretary — of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC).VOX VOMITUS: Sometimes, it's not what goes right in the writing process, it's what goes horribly wrong. Host Jennifer Anne Gordon, award-winning gothic horror novelist and Co-Host Allison Martine, award-winning contemporary romance and speculative fiction novelist have taken on the top and emerging new authors of the day, including Josh Malerman (BIRDBOX, PEARL), Paul Tremblay (THE PALLBEARERS CLUB, SURVIVOR SONG), May Cobb (MY SUMMER DARLINGS, THE HUNTING WIVES), Amanda Jayatissa (MY SWEET GIRL), Carol Goodman (THE STRANGER BEHIND YOU), Meghan Collins (THE FAMILY PLOT), and dozens more in the last year alone. Pantsers, plotters, and those in between have talked everything from the “vomit draft” to the publishing process, dream-cast movies that are already getting made, and celebrated wins as the author-guests continue to shine all over the globe.www.jenniferannegordon.comwww.afictionalhubbard.comhttps://www.facebook.com/VoxVomituspodcast https://twitter.com/VoxVomitus#voxvomitus #voxvomituspodcast #authorswhopodcast #authors #authorlife #authorsoninstagram #authorsinterviewingauthors #livevideopodcast #livepodcast #bookstagram #liveauthorinterview #voxvomituslivevideopodcast #Jennifergordon

History & Factoids about today
Feb 14th-Valentines Day, Arizona & Oregon Birthdays, Matchbox 20, Penn & Teller, Mrs. Brady, Miss Moneypenny, Tommy Enlow

History & Factoids about today

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2025 16:17


Valentines day. Entertainment from 2015. $1,000,000 bountry placed on writer Salman Rushdie, Oregan and Arizona became states, St. Valentines day massacre took place in Chicago. Todays birthdays - Lois Maxwell, Vic Murrow, Florence Henderson, Razzy Bailey, Gregory Hines, Teller, Meg Tilly, D'wayne Wiggins, Rob Thomas. James Cook died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard   ttp://defleppard.com/Valentine - Martina McBrideUptown funk - Mark Ronson  Bruno MarsI see you - Luke BryanBirthday - The BeatlesBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent    http://50cent.com/Brady Bund TV themeTonight she's going to love me - Razzy BaileyThe girl wants to dance with me - Gregory HinesFeels good - Tony! Toni! Tone!Lonely no more - Rob ThomasThe Tommy Son - The guy who sings your name over and overAll the beer in Alabama - Shane Owenscountryundergroundradio.com

Plug It Up
Psycho 2: The Original Legacy Sequel

Plug It Up

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 11, 2024 76:17


Mathula joins Caitlin to cover Psycho 2, a sequel that came out 23 years after its predecessor. We look at monstrous motherhood, revenge, friendship, and deception as we discuss this underrated gem. Tangents include: Blockbuster, swear word rankings, preferred alcoholic spirits, favorite ice, stylish villains, brand loyalty, Christmas lists, Christmas lights, and an unhinged question from Mary. Be sure to check out Hallelujah Dystopia!

Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast
We Hate Venom The Last Dance

Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2024 61:44


In this episode, we dive into Venom: The Last Dance, directed by Kelly Marcel and starring Tom Hardy. Eddie Brock and Venom are back with a choice that could change everything as they're pursued by a relentless military figure and alien monsters from Venom's home planet. Will the duo survive, and what sacrifices must they make along the way? We also review Conclave, a taut thriller directed by Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, and Stanley Tucci. This film brings audiences into the Vatican's hidden corridors as Cardinal Lawrence unearths secrets that threaten the very core of the Catholic Church during a papal election. Next up is Your Monster, directed by Caroline Lindy and starring Melissa Barrera and Tommy Dewey. This unique horror-comedy follows Laura Franco, an actress rediscovering her strength after meeting a strange, charismatic monster living in her closet. For our classic pick, we revisit Agnes of God (1985). Directed by Norman Jewison and starring Jane Fonda, Meg Tilly, and Anne Bancroft, this tense drama pits science and faith against each other in a mystery involving a young nun's shocking secrets. Follow Us: Website: I Hate Critics Facebook: Everyone is a Critic Podcast Twitter: @criticspod Instagram: @criticspod Patreon: Support Us Merch: TeePublic Store YouTube: Watch Us Check out Jeff's art at Jeff Lassiter Art and read Sean's reviews at Sean at the Movies. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe!

Remainders
Episode 62: Psycho 2

Remainders

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2024 80:43


Send us a textOn this episode of Remainders we dive into Psycho 2. Picking up 22 years after Hitchcock's classic, it's a true continuation of the character of Norman Bates. Perkins' give an all time great performance in what is more of psychological thriller than a straight up horror movie - although the classic 80s gore is not abandoned completely. A first time watch, Psycho 2 has become an all time favorite. Other topics includes the role of legacy sequels in film, Darren's recent trip to Chicago and the return of The Scissors, new horror movies we're watching for October, Joel Potrykus introducing his new film at the Chicago International Film Festival, Vertigo and the Music Box of Horrors, thoughts on Joker 2, and the Terrifier movies creating a franchise that may rival the all time great 80s killers. Songs of the WeekLong Dark Night by Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsI Don't Know How to Say Goodbye by The MopesRemainders Podcast JukeboxWebsiteFacebookInstagramYouTubeTwitter

The Raven Effect
Giving you ALL of the useless information that's very useful

The Raven Effect

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2024 65:06


What are all of Elon's rockets and cars up to?  Feeney has been looking for Cybertrucks, and he's finally been seeing them in his area; In a shocking plot twist, Raven brings up wrestling this week; Tony Schiavone, not dead; What Feeney has planned for the show at Wrestlecon is the most Raven Effect thing in the world; The shocking revelation about the Ghostbusters song that you may not know; Feeney shares a pet update; The anniversaries you should really be celebrating; Are Jennifer Tilly and Meg Tilly the same person? The problematic lyrics of Dire Straits and Guns N' Roses, and of course, all the usual perversions. Follow the guys on X!Raven - @theRavenEffectRich - @RichBocchiniFeeney - @jffeeney3rdRaven has some action figures available for purchase at https://www.majorbendies.com/ so go buy them.Buy some of Raven's old comics and other goods. Check out the store by Ask Danna at https://www.ebay.com/str/askdannaHave Raven say things that you want him to say, either for yourself or for someone you want to talk big-game shit to by going to http://www.cameo.com/ravenprime1If you want all the uncensored goodness AND watch The Raven Effect, sign up for Patreon by going to http://www.patreon.com/TheRavenEffect it's only $5 a month!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-raven-effect--5166640/support.

School of Movies
Psycho II

School of Movies

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2024 82:42


[School of Movies 2024] This was a commissioned episode for Dean R who was very keen for us to examine this 1983 follow-up to the 1960 classic. This film brings back Anthony Perkins after Norman has served his time and behaved well in crazy-jail, with the 'Mother' persona seemingly dormant. But now we, as the audience may find ourselves strangely onside with the mild-mannered, respectful man, seemingly genuinely trying to go straight, and surrounded by people who want to give this multiple-murderer a piece of their mind (knock it off, idiots, it's crowded enough in there!). Meg Tilly (sister of Chucky's bride, Jennifer) plays Mary, a down-on-her-luck waitress whom Norman really seems to want to help back onto her feet, as this torrid story circles into an operatic and tragic conclusion. We close out with a synopsis of the entirely unrelated book "Psycho 2" by Robert Bloch; a novel so hated by the studio that they made their own sequel here.

Back To The Blockbuster
Episode 194 - BTTB Presents: Tales of Horror - “Psycho II”

Back To The Blockbuster

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2024 89:21


Join us in this chilling episode of Back To The Blockbuster as we delve deep into the chilling world of "Psycho II," the haunting sequel that dared to reintroduce the infamous Norman Bates, portrayed masterfully by Anthony Perkins. Directed by Richard Franklin, this film reignited the horror franchise with fresh tension, bringing back beloved characters like Vera Miles and introducing new faces like Meg Tilly. We'll explore the creative journey of screenwriter Tom Holland as he crafts a narrative that blurs the lines between sanity and madness, all while examining the film's legacy in the horror genre. Tune in for a spine-tingling discussion filled with behind-the-scenes stories, character analysis, and the psychological implications of one man's struggle with his dark past. Joining BTTB for this discussion is Wes of wespresso_films on Instagram, who made this their pick to kick off the spooky season on the podcast with this very first episode of Tales of Horror. Where To Watch Psycho II Links For Guest: Wespresso_Films

Spider-Dan & The Secret Bores
Body Snatchers (1993) V.S. The Puppet Masters (1994) W/ Ria Carrogan & Tony Farina

Spider-Dan & The Secret Bores

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2024 109:00


*Slight issue with Ria's audio on this one it periodically cuts out briefly not sure why, it sounded all right live. I've done my best to cut round it but it is still noticeable. The infiltration has begun and its time to embrace change! As I unite our collective for the first time on #PrattleWorld by bringing together two of my favourite #PodPeople Tony Farina & Ria Carrogan to compare one parasitic alien film against its duplicate. As #JackFinney's #BodySnatchers1993 takes on #RobertHeinlein's #ThePuppetMasters1994! Join us as we discuss social commentary, hammy acting & the unfortunate sexualisation of teenagers... #PrepareForPrattle Follow Ria at https://www.femmeon.show/ Follow Tony at https://www.arfarina.com/ The first time Ria was on the show we talked James Gunn's parasitic alien creature feature #Slither listen here https://rb.gy/ae2k14 Check out both Ria & Tony talk The Thing on 20th Century Geek here https://rb.gy/puz4xm & here https://rb.gy/lcx4mw Here's the video from Meg Tilly that Ria mentioned https://youtu.be/3yNE23Z3EGE?si=dHGuOI3Y5B1v0A_K Check out Tonya's Banned Books podcast here! Banned Books 2023 - Charlotte's Web By E.B. White Ria and I discussed Lost Boys in comparison with Near Dark here! ​Femme On - Near Dark (1987)​ Where to find the Spider-Dan & The Secret Bores Podcast… Follow this link to find your preferred podcast catcher of choice ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠pod.link/danbores⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/secretbores⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/dan_bores?lang=en ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Tiktok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://www.tiktok.com/@dan_bores⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/spiderdansecretbores/?hl=en⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Discord: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.com/invite/CeVrdqdpjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ IMDB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22023774/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Letterboxd: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://letterboxd.com/spiderdan_2006/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Like, share, comment, subscribe etc. and don't forget to use the #PrepareForPrattle when you interact with us. Please subscribe to The Pop Culture Collective newsletter to find out what myself, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Comics In Motion⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and all the other related podcasts are up to week by week ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://pccnewsletter.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ I'd like to thank my patrons on #Patreon for their continuing donations it is very much appreciated and helps PrattleWorld keep turning and if you ever find yourself in a position to help the podcast please consider it. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/spiderdanandthesecretbores⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you would like to make a one off donation head over to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ko-fi.com/spiderdanandthesecretbores⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you want to #JoinThePrattalion and to be briefed in full on the #SecretBores head over to #PrattleWorld ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.spiderdanandthesecretbores.com/

Thor's Hour of Thunder
Episode 1017: Psycho II

Thor's Hour of Thunder

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2024 43:34


Mr. Monopoly and Old Tomato Face pitched a new theme, "April showers". Join us all month long as we cover all the Psycho sequels. Check out the various projects of our pantheon members: Old Tomato Face - Bad For Me, examining movies that supposedly make people cry. Chibi - The BRAND NEW Unidentified Flying Obsession. Lebbi - Gamelink is about video game movies and the games behind them. Next week's episode is Psycho III.

Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast
Bring Me the Head of Harriet the Spy

Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 28, 2024 62:06


Welcome back to another exciting episode of the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast! Join us as we dissect the nominees across various categories and share our thoughts on who might take home the coveted awards. Movie Reviews: 1. "Ordinary Angels" (2024) Directed by: Jon Gunn Written by: Meg Tilly, Kelly Fremon Craig Starring: Hilary Swank, Alan Ritchson, Nancy Travis Release Date: February 23rd, 2024 Synopsis: A heartwarming tale of resilience and community, as a struggling hairdresser finds purpose in rallying her town to help a widowed father and his two daughters during a time of crisis. 2. "DriveAway Dolls" (2024) Directed by: Ethan Coen Written by: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Matt Damon Synopsis: Follow two women on an unexpected road trip to Tallahassee, Florida, as they encounter a series of misadventures involving inept criminals. 3. Classic Feature: Title: "9 to 5" (1980) Directed by: Colin Higgins Written by: Colin Higgins Starring: Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Dabney Coleman Synopsis: An iconic office satire where three female secretaries take matters into their own hands after dealing with a tyrannical, sexist boss. Social Media Links: Website: www.ihatecritics.com Facebook: Everyone is a Critic Podcast Twitter: @criticspod Instagram: criticspod Patreon: patreon.com/criticspod Tee Public: CriticsPod Tee Public YouTube: CriticsPod YouTube Channel Featured Creators: Jeff's Art: Jeff Lassiter Art Sean's Reviews: Sean at the Movies Blog Tune in, subscribe, and join the conversation as we dissect the 2023 Oscar Nominations and explore the dynamic world of cinema on the Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast! Thank you for being part of our film-loving community!

History & Factoids about today
Feb 14th-Valentines Day, Arizona & Oregon Birthdays, Matchbox 20, Penn & Teller, Mrs. Brady

History & Factoids about today

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2024 15:44


Valentines day. Entertainment from 1973. $1,000,000 bountry placed on writer Salman Rushdie, Oregan and Arizona became states, St. Valentines day massacre took place in Chicago. Todays birthdays - Lois Maxwell, Vic Murrow, Florence Henderson, Razzy Bailey, Gregory Hines, Teller, Meg Tilly, D'wayne Wiggins, Rob Thomas. James Cook died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Valentine - Martina McBrideCrocadile Rock - Elton JohnI wonder if they ever think of me - Merle HaggardBirthday - The BeatlesBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/Brady Bund TV themeTonight she's going to love me - Razzy BaileyThe girl wants to dance with me - Gregory HinesFeels good - Tony! Toni! Tone!Lonely no more - Rob ThomasThe Tommy Son - The guy who sings your name over and overExit - its not love - Dokken

The Recommendation Game
Episode 205: Psycho 2

The Recommendation Game

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 4, 2023 57:56


Psycho 2 (1983) directed by Richard Franklin. Two decades after the original murders at the Bates Motel, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) completes his treatment at a mental institution and returns home to find his hotel run down under the management of Warren Toomey (Dennis Franz). Despite a new friendship with a waitress (Meg Tilly) and a job busing tables at a diner, Norman begins to hear voices once again. No matter how hard he tries, Norman cannot keep "Mother" from returning and coaxing him to unleash the homicidal maniac within. This is The Recommendation Game, a bi-weekly podcast where two film lovers take turns to recommend a film the other has not seen, they watch and then skype to discuss it. Spoilers are a given. We are Ricardo Deakin and Orla McNelis, two filmy types who love waffling. Catch us on Dublin Digital Radio every second Monday: listen.dublindigitalradio.com/home Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/therecgame Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/therecommendationgame/

Mary Versus the Movies
Episode 123 - The Big Chill (1983)

Mary Versus the Movies

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2023 75:15


Two hours of upper-middle-class naval-gazing? A poison pill of nostaliga? An exericize in self-loathing? A critique of ex-hippies who sold out? Or an attempt at excusing "going straight" and embracing being a yuppie? Maybe it's all those things. Or maybe that's putting too much weight to put on a movie that's mostly a small drama about people coming together after a friend's suicide.  Starring Kevin Cline, Glenn Close, William Hurt, Tom Berenger, Jeff Goldblum, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly,  JoBeth Williams, and Kevin Costner's body. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

Literary Escapes with Becki
Ep 89: Meg Tilly: From Fame to Fiction - Embracing the Power of Storytelling

Literary Escapes with Becki

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2023 63:26


In this episode, Meg Tilly joins host Becki to share her remarkable journey from ballet dancer to award-winning actress to successful author. From her experiences in Hollywood to her love of travel and writing, Meg Tilly offers a candid and inspiring glimpse into her life and creative process.   Join us as Meg opens up about her life, writing, and finding solace in the written word.   CLICK HERE to check out the SHOW NOTES for this episode!   Are you an author who would like to join me for a conversation on the podcast? CLICK HERE to get more information and fill out the form.   Thanks so much for listening to my podcast! If you'd like to support me, there are a few ways that would be helpful: 1. Leave a review on iTunes 2. Share this episode on social media 3.  Buy me a coffee!

Castle of Horror Podcast
Psycho II (Podcast/Discussion)

Castle of Horror Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2023 100:47


This week we have a look at the 1983 film PSYCHO II. This is Episode #420! Psycho II is a 1983 American psychological slasher film directed by Richard Franklin, written by Tom Holland, and starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Robert Loggia, and Meg Tilly. It is the first sequel to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho and the second film in the Psycho franchise. Set 22 years after the first film, it follows Norman Bates after he is released from the mental institution and returns to the house and Bates Motel to continue a normal life. However, his troubled past continues to haunt him as someone begins to murder the people around him. Psycho II was released on June 3, 1983, and grossed $34.7 million at the box office on a budget of $5 million– so a huge hit. The film is unrelated to the 1982 novel Psycho II by Robert Bloch, which he wrote as a sequel to his original 1959 novel Psycho.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4268760/advertisement

Talk Classic To Me
The Big Chill (1983)

Talk Classic To Me

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2023 76:01


Do you love stellar ensemble casts, autumnally 80's production design, and perfect motion picture soundtracks? Then The Big Chill (1983) is the movie for you! Check out this Lawrence Kasdan directed classic (that pays homage to his alma mater the University of Michigan -- Go Blue!) and features an all star cast including Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, JoBeth Williams, Tom Berenger, Mary Kay Place, and Meg Tilly. Host, Sara Greenfield and her guest Daniel Strauss chat about all this and more on this week's episode of Talk Classic To Me. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sara-greenfield/support

The 80s Movies Podcast
Miramax Films - Part Five

The 80s Movies Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2023 54:39


We finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we complete our look back at the 1980s theatrical releases for Miramax Films. And, for the final time, a reminder that we are not celebrating Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but reminiscing about the movies they had no involvement in making. We cannot talk about cinema in the 1980s without talking about Miramax, and I really wanted to get it out of the way, once and for all.   As we left Part 4, Miramax was on its way to winning its first Academy Award, Billie August's Pelle the Conquerer, the Scandinavian film that would be second film in a row from Denmark that would win for Best Foreign Language Film.   In fact, the first two films Miramax would release in 1989, the Australian film Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train and the Anthony Perkins slasher film Edge of Sanity, would not arrive in theatres until the Friday after the Academy Awards ceremony that year, which was being held on the last Wednesday in March.   Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train stars Wendy Hughes, the talented Australian actress who, sadly, is best remembered today as Lt. Commander Nella Daren, one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's few love interests, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Jenny, a prostitute working a weekend train to Sydney, who is seduced by a man on the train, unaware that he plans on tricking her to kill someone for him. Colin Friels, another great Aussie actor who unfortunately is best known for playing the corrupt head of Strack Industries in Sam Raimi's Darkman, plays the unnamed man who will do anything to get what he wants.   Director Bob Ellis and his co-screenwriter Denny Lawrence came up with the idea for the film while they themselves were traveling on a weekend train to Sydney, with the idea that each client the call girl met on the train would represent some part of the Australian male.   Funding the $2.5m film was really simple… provided they cast Hughes in the lead role. Ellis and Lawrence weren't against Hughes as an actress. Any film would be lucky to have her in the lead. They just felt she she didn't have the right kind of sex appeal for this specific character.   Miramax would open the film in six theatres, including the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles and the Fashion Village 8 in Orlando, on March 31st. There were two versions of the movie prepared, one that ran 130 minutes and the other just 91. Miramax would go with the 91 minute version of the film for the American release, and most of the critics would note how clunky and confusing the film felt, although one critic for the Village Voice would have some kind words for Ms. Hughes' performance.   Whether it was because moviegoers were too busy seeing the winners of the just announced Academy Awards, including Best Picture winner Rain Man, or because this weekend was also the opening weekend of the new Major League Baseball season, or just turned off by the reviews, attendance at the theatres playing Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train was as empty as a train dining car at three in the morning. The Beverly Center alone would account for a third of the movie's opening weekend gross of $19,268. After a second weekend at the same six theatres pocketing just $14,382, this train stalled out, never to arrive at another station.   Their other March 31st release, Edge of Sanity, is notable for two things and only two things: it would be the first film Miramax would release under their genre specialty label, Millimeter Films, which would eventually evolve into Dimension Films in the next decade, and it would be the final feature film to star Anthony Perkins before his passing in 1992.   The film is yet another retelling of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, with the bonus story twist that Hyde was actually Jack the Ripper. As Jekyll, Perkins looks exactly as you'd expect a mid-fifties Norman Bates to look. As Hyde, Perkins is made to look like he's a backup keyboardist for the first Nine Inch Nails tour. Head Like a Hole would have been an appropriate song for the end credits, had the song or Pretty Hate Machine been released by that time, with its lyrics about bowing down before the one you serve and getting what you deserve.   Edge of Sanity would open in Atlanta and Indianapolis on March 31st. And like so many other Miramax releases in the 1980s, they did not initially announce any grosses for the film. That is, until its fourth weekend of release, when the film's theatre count had fallen to just six, down from the previous week's previously unannounced 35, grossing just $9,832. Miramax would not release grosses for the film again, with a final total of just $102,219.   Now when I started this series, I said that none of the films Miramax released in the 1980s were made by Miramax, but this next film would become the closest they would get during the decade.   In July 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when the married Profumo began a sexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was very short-lived, either ending, depending on the source, in August 1961 or December 1961. Unbeknownst to Profumo, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy at the same time.   No one was the wiser on any of this until December 1962, when a shooting incident involving two other men Keeler had been involved with led the press to start looking into Keeler's life. While it was never proven that his affair with Keeler was responsible for any breaches of national security, John Profumo was forced to resign from his position in June 1963, and the scandal would take down most of the Torie government with him. Prime Minister Macmillan would resign due to “health reasons” in October 1963, and the Labour Party would take control of the British government when the next elections were held in October 1964.   Scandal was originally planned in the mid-1980s as a three-part, five-hour miniseries by Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas and American music producer turned movie producer Joe Boyd. The BBC would commit to finance a two-part, three-hour miniseries,  until someone at the network found an old memo from the time of the Profumo scandal that forbade them from making any productions about it. Channel 4, which had been producing quality shows and movies for several years since their start in 1982, was approached, but rejected the series on the grounds of taste.   Palace Pictures, a British production company who had already produced three films for Neil Jordan including Mona Lisa, was willing to finance the script, provided it could be whittled down to a two hour movie. Originally budgeted at 3.2m British pounds, the costs would rise as they started the casting process.  John Hurt, twice Oscar-nominated for his roles in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, would sign on to play Stephen Ward, a British osteopath who acted as Christine Keeler's… well… pimp, for lack of a better word. Ian McKellen, a respected actor on British stages and screens but still years away from finding mainstream global success in the X-Men movies, would sign on to play John Profumo. Joanne Whaley, who had filmed the yet to be released at that time Willow with her soon to be husband Val Kilmer, would get her first starring role as Keeler, and Bridget Fonda, who was quickly making a name for herself in the film world after being featured in Aria, would play Mandy Rice-Davies, the best friend and co-worker of Keeler's.   To save money, Palace Pictures would sign thirty-year-old Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones to direct, after seeing a short film he had made called The Riveter. But even with the neophyte feature filmmaker, Palace still needed about $2.35m to be able to fully finance the film. And they knew exactly who to go to.   Stephen Woolley, the co-founder of Palace Pictures and the main producer on the film, would fly from London to New York City to personally pitch Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Woolley felt that of all the independent distributors in America, they would be the ones most attracted to the sexual and controversial nature of the story. A day later, Woolley was back on a plane to London. The Weinsteins had agreed to purchase the American distribution rights to Scandal for $2.35m.   The film would spend two months shooting in the London area through the summer of 1988. Christine Keeler had no interest in the film, and refused to meet the now Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to talk about the affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies was more than happy to Bridget Fonda about her life, although the meetings between the two women were so secret, they would not come out until Woolley eulogized Rice-Davies after her 2014 death.   Although Harvey and Bob would be given co-executive producers on the film, Miramax was not a production company on the film. This, however, did not stop Harvey from flying to London multiple times, usually when he was made aware of some sexy scene that was going to shoot the following day, and try to insinuate himself into the film's making. At one point, Woolley decided to take a weekend off from the production, and actually did put Harvey in charge. That weekend's shoot would include a skinny-dipping scene featuring the Christine Keeler character, but when Whaley-Kilmer learned Harvey was going to be there, she told the director that she could not do the nudity in the scene. Her new husband was objecting to it, she told them. Harvey, not skipping a beat, found a lookalike for the actress who would be willing to bare all as a body double, and the scene would begin shooting a few hours later. Whaley-Kilmer watched the shoot from just behind the camera, and stopped the shoot a few minutes later. She was not happy that the body double's posterior was notably larger than her own, and didn't want audiences to think she had that much junk in her trunk. The body double was paid for her day, and Whaley-Kilmer finished the rest of the scene herself.   Caton-Jones and his editing team worked on shaping the film through the fall, and would screen his first edit of the film for Palace Pictures and the Weinsteins in November 1988. And while Harvey was very happy with the cut, he still asked the production team for a different edit for American audiences, noting that most Americans had no idea who Profumo or Keeler or Rice-Davies were, and that Americans would need to understand the story more right out of the first frame. Caton-Jones didn't want to cut a single frame, but he would work with Harvey to build an American-friendly cut.   While he was in London in November 1988, he would meet with the producers of another British film that was in pre-production at the time that would become another important film to the growth of the company, but we're not quite at that part of the story yet. We'll circle around to that film soon.   One of the things Harvey was most looking forward to going in to 1989 was the expected battle with the MPAA ratings board over Scandal. Ever since he had seen the brouhaha over Angel Heart's X rating two years earlier, he had been looking for a similar battle. He thought he had it with Aria in 1988, but he knew he definitely had it now.   And he'd be right.   In early March, just a few weeks before the film's planned April 21st opening day, the MPAA slapped an X rating on Scandal. The MPAA usually does not tell filmmakers or distributors what needs to be cut, in order to avoid accusations of actual censorship, but according to Harvey, they told him exactly what needed to be cut to get an R: a two second shot during an orgy scene, where it appears two background characters are having unsimulated sex.   So what did Harvey do?   He spent weeks complaining to the press about MPAA censorship, generating millions in free publicity for the film, all the while already having a close-up shot of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer's Christine Keeler watching the orgy but not participating in it, ready to replace the objectionable shot.   A few weeks later, Miramax screened the “edited” film to the MPAA and secured the R rating, and the film would open on 94 screens, including 28 each in the New York City and Los Angeles metro regions, on April 28th.   And while the reviews for the film were mostly great, audiences were drawn to the film for the Miramax-manufactured controversy as well as the key art for the film, a picture of a potentially naked Joanne Whaley-Kilmer sitting backwards in a chair, a mimic of a very famous photo Christine Keeler herself took to promote a movie about the Profumo affair she appeared in a few years after the events. I'll have a picture of both the Scandal poster and the Christine Keeler photo on this episode's page at The80sMoviePodcast.com   Five other movies would open that weekend, including the James Belushi comedy K-9 and the Kevin Bacon drama Criminal Law, and Scandal, with $658k worth of ticket sales, would have the second best per screen average of the five new openers, just a few hundred dollars below the new Holly Hunter movie Miss Firecracker, which only opened on six screens.   In its second weekend, Scandal would expand its run to 214 playdates, and make its debut in the national top ten, coming in tenth place with $981k. That would be more than the second week of the Patrick Dempsey rom-com Loverboy, even though Loverboy was playing on 5x as many screens.   In weekend number three, Scandal would have its best overall gross and top ten placement, coming in seventh with $1.22m from 346 screens. Scandal would start to slowly fade after that, falling back out of the top ten in its sixth week, but Miramax would wisely keep the screen count under 375, because Scandal wasn't going to play well in all areas of the country. After nearly five months in theatres, Miramax would have its biggest film to date. Scandal would gross $8.8m.   The second release from Millimeter Films was The Return of the Swamp Thing. And if you needed a reason why the 1980s was not a good time for comic book movies, here you are. The Return of the Swamp Thing took most of what made the character interesting in his comic series, and most of what was good from the 1982 Wes Craven adaptation, and decided “Hey, you know what would bring the kids in? Camp! Camp unseen in a comic book adaptation since the 1960s Batman series. They loved it then, they'll love it now!”   They did not love it now.   Heather Locklear, between her stints on T.J. Hooker and Melrose Place, plays the step-daughter of Louis Jourdan's evil Dr. Arcane from the first film, who heads down to the Florida swaps to confront dear old once presumed dead stepdad. He in turns kidnaps his stepdaughter and decides to do some of his genetic experiments on her, until she is rescued by Swamp Thing, one of Dr. Arcane's former co-workers who got turned into the gooey anti-hero in the first movie.   The film co-stars Sarah Douglas from Superman 1 and 2 as Dr. Arcane's assistant, Dick Durock reprising his role as Swamp Thing from the first film, and 1980s B-movie goddess Monique Gabrielle as Miss Poinsettia.   For director Jim Wynorski, this was his sixth movie as a director, and at $3m, one of the highest budgeted movies he would ever make. He's directed 107 movies since 1984, most of them low budget direct to video movies with titles like The Bare Wench Project and Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, although he does have one genuine horror classic under his belt, the 1986 sci-fi tinged Chopping Maul with Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton.   Wynorski suggested in a late 1990s DVD commentary for the film that he didn't particularly enjoy making the film, and had a difficult time directing Louis Jourdan, to the point that outside of calling “action” and “cut,” the two didn't speak to each other by the end of the shoot.   The Return of Swamp Thing would open in 123 theatres in the United States on May 12th, including 28 in the New York City metro region, 26 in the Los Angeles area, 15 in Detroit, and a handful of theatres in Phoenix, San Francisco. And, strangely, the newspaper ads would include an actual positive quote from none other than Roger Ebert, who said on Siskel & Ebert that he enjoyed himself, and that it was good to have Swamp Thing back. Siskel would not reciprocate his balcony partner's thumb up. But Siskel was about the only person who was positive on the return of Swamp Thing, and that box office would suffer. In its first three days, the film would gross just $119,200. After a couple more dismal weeks in theatres, The Return of Swamp Thing would be pulled from distribution, with a final gross of just $275k.   Fun fact: The Return of Swamp Thing was produced by Michael E. Uslan, whose next production, another adaptation of a DC Comics character, would arrive in theatres not six weeks later and become the biggest film of the summer. In fact, Uslan has been a producer or executive producer on every Batman-related movie and television show since 1989, from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan to Zack Snyder to Matt Reeves, and from LEGO movies to Joker. He also, because of his ownership of the movie rights to Swamp Thing, got the movie screen rights, but not the television screen rights, to John Constantine.   Miramax didn't have too much time to worry about The Return of Swamp Thing's release, as it was happening while the Brothers Weinstein were at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. They had two primary goals at Cannes that year:   To buy American distribution rights to any movie that would increase their standing in the cinematic worldview, which they would achieve by picking up an Italian dramedy called, at the time, New Paradise Cinema, which was competing for the Palme D'Or with a Miramax pickup from Sundance back in January. Promote that very film, which did end up winning the Palme D'Or.   Ever since he was a kid, Steven Soderbergh wanted to be a filmmaker. Growing up in Baton Rouge, LA in the late 1970s, he would enroll in the LSU film animation class, even though he was only 15 and not yet a high school graduate. After graduating high school, he decided to move to Hollywood to break into the film industry, renting an above-garage room from Stephen Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker best known as the father of Jake and Maggie, but after a few freelance editing jobs, Soderbergh packed up his things and headed home to Baton Rouge.   Someone at Atco Records saw one of Soderbergh's short films, and hired him to direct a concert movie for one of their biggest bands at the time, Yes, who was enjoying a major comeback thanks to their 1983 triple platinum selling album, 90125. The concert film, called 9012Live, would premiere on MTV in late 1985, and it would be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.   Soderbergh would use the money he earned from that project, $7,500, to make Winston, a 12 minute black and white short about sexual deception that he would, over the course of an eight day driving trip from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles, expand to a full length screen that he would call sex, lies and videotape. In later years, Soderbergh would admit that part of the story is autobiographical, but not the part you might think. Instead of the lead, Graham, an impotent but still sexually perverse late twentysomething who likes to tape women talking about their sexual fantasies for his own pleasure later, Soderbergh based the husband John, the unsophisticated lawyer who cheats on his wife with her sister, on himself, although there would be a bit of Graham that borrows from the filmmaker. Like his lead character, Soderbergh did sell off most of his possessions and hit the road to live a different life.   When he finished the script, he sent it out into the wilds of Hollywood. Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and husband of Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle, would read it and sign on as an executive producer. Soderbergh had wanted to shoot the film in black and white, like he had with the Winston short that lead to the creation of this screenplay, but he and Mason had trouble getting anyone to commit to the project, even with only a projected budget of $200,000. For a hot moment, it looked like Universal might sign on to make the film, but they would eventually pass.   Robert Newmyer, who had left his job as a vice president of production and acquisitions at Columbia Pictures to start his own production company, signed on as a producer, and helped to convince Soderbergh to shoot the film in color, and cast some name actors in the leading roles. Once he acquiesced, Richard Branson's Virgin Vision agreed to put up $540k of the newly budgeted $1.2m film, while RCA/Columbia Home Video would put up the remaining $660k.   Soderbergh and his casting director, Deborah Aquila, would begin their casting search in New York, where they would meet with, amongst others, Andie MacDowell, who had already starred in two major Hollywood pictures, 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and 1985's St. Elmo's Fire, but was still considered more of a top model than an actress, and Laura San Giacomo, who had recently graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh and would be making her feature debut. Moving on to Los Angeles, Soderbergh and Aquila would cast James Spader, who had made a name for himself as a mostly bad guy in 80s teen movies like Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero, but had never been the lead in a drama like this. At Spader's suggestion, the pair met with Peter Gallagher, who was supposed to become a star nearly a decade earlier from his starring role in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker, but had mostly been playing supporting roles in television shows and movies for most of the decade.   In order to keep the budget down, Soderbergh, the producers, cinematographer Walt Lloyd and the four main cast members agreed to get paid their guild minimums in exchange for a 50/50 profit participation split with RCA/Columbia once the film recouped its costs.   The production would spend a week in rehearsals in Baton Rouge, before the thirty day shoot began on August 1st, 1988. On most days, the shoot was unbearable for many, as temperatures would reach as high as 110 degrees outside, but there were a couple days lost to what cinematographer Lloyd said was “biblical rains.” But the shoot completed as scheduled, and Soderbergh got to the task of editing right away. He knew he only had about eight weeks to get a cut ready if the film was going to be submitted to the 1989 U.S. Film Festival, now better known as Sundance. He did get a temporary cut of the film ready for submission, with a not quite final sound mix, and the film was accepted to the festival. It would make its world premiere on January 25th, 1989, in Park City UT, and as soon as the first screening was completed, the bids from distributors came rolling in. Larry Estes, the head of RCA/Columbia Home Video, would field more than a dozen submissions before the end of the night, but only one distributor was ready to make a deal right then and there.   Bob Weinstein wasn't totally sold on the film, but he loved the ending, and he loved that the word “sex” not only was in the title but lead the title. He knew that title alone would sell the movie. Harvey, who was still in New York the next morning, called Estes to make an appointment to meet in 24 hours. When he and Estes met, he brought with him three poster mockups the marketing department had prepared, and told Estes he wasn't going to go back to New York until he had a contract signed, and vowed to beat any other deal offered by $100,000. Island Pictures, who had made their name releasing movies like Stop Making Sense, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, The Trip to Bountiful and She's Gotta Have It, offered $1m for the distribution rights, plus a 30% distribution fee and a guaranteed $1m prints and advertising budget. Estes called Harvey up and told him what it would take to make the deal. $1.1m for the distribution rights, which needed to paid up front, a $1m P&A budget, to be put in escrow upon the signing of the contract until the film was released, a 30% distribution fee, no cutting of the film whatsoever once Soderbergh turns in his final cut, they would need to provide financial information for the films costs and returns once a month because of the profit participation contracts, and the Weinsteins would have to hire Ira Deutchman, who had spent nearly 15 years in the independent film world, doing marketing for Cinema 5, co-founding United Artists Classics, and co-founding Cinecom Pictures before opening his own company to act as a producers rep and marketer. And the Weinsteins would not only have to do exactly what Deutchman wanted, they'd have to pay for his services too.   The contract was signed a few weeks later.   The first move Miramax would make was to get Soderbergh's final cut of the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, where it would be accepted to compete in the main competition. Which you kind of already know what happened, because that's what I lead with. The film would win the Palme D'Or, and Spader would be awarded the festival's award for Best Actor. It was very rare at the time, and really still is, for any film to be awarded more than one prize, so winning two was really a coup for the film and for Miramax, especially when many critics attending the festival felt Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was the better film.   In March, Miramax expected the film to make around $5-10m, which would net the company a small profit on the film. After Cannes, they were hopeful for a $15m gross.   They never expected what would happen next.   On August 4th, sex, lies, and videotape would open on four screens, at the Cinema Studio in New York City, and at the AMC Century 14, the Cineplex Beverly Center 13 and the Mann Westwood 4 in Los Angeles. Three prime theatres and the best they could do in one of the then most competitive zones in all America. Remember, it's still the Summer 1989 movie season, filled with hits like Batman, Dead Poets Society, Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Lethal Weapon 2, Parenthood, Turner & Hooch, and When Harry Met Sally. An independent distributor even getting one screen at the least attractive theatre in Westwood was a major get. And despite the fact that this movie wasn't really a summertime movie per se, the film would gross an incredible $156k in its first weekend from just these four theatres. Its nearly $40k per screen average would be 5x higher than the next closest film, Parenthood.   In its second weekend, the film would expand to 28 theatres, and would bring in over $600k in ticket sales, its per screen average of $21,527 nearly triple its closest competitor, Parenthood again. The company would keep spending small, as it slowly expanded the film each successive week. Forty theatres in its third week, and 101 in its fourth. The numbers held strong, and in its fifth week, Labor Day weekend, the film would have its first big expansion, playing in 347 theatres. The film would enter the top ten for the first time, despite playing in 500 to 1500 fewer theatres than the other films in the top ten. In its ninth weekend, the film would expand to its biggest screen count, 534, before slowly drawing down as the other major Oscar contenders started their theatrical runs. The film would continue to play through the Oscar season of 1989, and when it finally left theatres in May 1989, its final gross would be an astounding $24.7m.   Now, remember a few moments ago when I said that Miramax needed to provide financial statements every month for the profit participation contracts of Soderbergh, the producers, the cinematographer and the four lead actors? The film was so profitable for everyone so quickly that RCA/Columbia made its first profit participation payouts on October 17th, barely ten weeks after the film's opening.   That same week, Soderbergh also made what was at the time the largest deal with a book publisher for the writer/director's annotated version of the screenplay, which would also include his notes created during the creation of the film. That $75,000 deal would be more than he got paid to make the movie as the writer and the director and the editor, not counting the profit participation checks.   During the awards season, sex, lies, and videotape was considered to be one of the Oscars front runners for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and at least two acting nominations. The film would be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress by the Golden Globes, and it would win the Spirit Awards for Best Picture, Soderbergh for Best Director, McDowell for Best Actress, and San Giacomo for Best Supporting Actress. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, the film would only receive one nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. The same total and category as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which many people also felt had a chance for a Best Picture and Best Director nomination. Both films would lose out to Tom Shulman's screenplay for Dead Poet's Society.   The success of sex, lies, and videotape would launch Steven Soderbergh into one of the quirkiest Hollywood careers ever seen, including becoming the first and only director ever to be nominated twice for Best Director in the same year by the Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America, in 2001 for directing Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He would win the Oscar for directing Traffic.   Lost in the excitement of sex, lies, and videotape was The Little Thief, a French movie that had an unfortunate start as the screenplay François Truffaut was working on when he passed away in 1984 at the age of just 52.   Directed by Claude Miller, whose principal mentor was Truffaut, The Little Thief starred seventeen year old Charlotte Gainsbourg as Janine, a young woman in post-World War II France who commits a series of larcenies to support her dreams of becoming wealthy.   The film was a modest success in France when it opened in December 1988, but its American release date of August 25th, 1989, was set months in advance. So when it was obvious sex, lies, and videotape was going to be a bigger hit than they originally anticipated, it was too late for Miramax to pause the release of The Little Thief.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City, and buoyed by favorable reviews from every major critic in town, The Little Thief would see $39,931 worth of ticket sales in its first seven days, setting a new house record at the theatre for the year. In its second week, the gross would only drop $47. For the entire week. And when it opened at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles, its opening week gross of $30,654 would also set a new house record for the year.   The film would expand slowly but surely over the next several weeks, often in single screen playdates in major markets, but it would never play on more than twenty-four screens in any given week. And after four months in theatres, The Little Thief, the last movie created one of the greatest film writers the world had ever seen, would only gross $1.056m in the United States.   The next three releases from Miramax were all sent out under the Millimeter Films banner.   The first, a supernatural erotic drama called The Girl in a Swing, was about an English antiques dealer who travels to Copenhagen where he meets and falls in love with a mysterious German-born secretary, whom he marries, only to discover a darker side to his new bride. Rupert Frazer, who played Christian Bale's dad in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, plays the antique dealer, while Meg Tilly the mysterious new bride.   Filmed over a five week schedule in London and Copenhagen during May and June 1988, some online sources say the film first opened somewhere in California in December 1988, but I cannot find a single theatre not only in California but anywhere in the United States that played the film before its September 29th, 1989 opening date.   Roger Ebert didn't like the film, and wished Meg Tilly's “genuinely original performance” was in a better movie. Opening in 26 theatres, including six theatres each in New York City and Los Angeles, and spurred on by an intriguing key art for the film that featured a presumed naked Tilly on a swing looking seductively at the camera while a notice underneath her warns that No One Under 18 Will Be Admitted To The Theatre, The Girl in a Swing would gross $102k, good enough for 35th place nationally that week. And that's about the best it would do. The film would limp along, moving from market to market over the course of the next three months, and when its theatrical run was complete, it could only manage about $747k in ticket sales.   We'll quickly burn through the next two Millimeter Films releases, which came out a week apart from each other and didn't amount to much.   Animal Behavior was a rather unfunny comedy featuring some very good actors who probably signed on for a very different movie than the one that came to be. Karen Allen, Miss Marion Ravenwood herself, stars as Alex, a biologist who, like Dr. Jane Goodall, develops a “new” way to communicate with chimpanzees via sign language. Armand Assante plays a cellist who pursues the good doctor, and Holly Hunter plays the cellist's neighbor, who Alex mistakes for his wife.   Animal Behavior was filmed in 1984, and 1985, and 1987, and 1988. The initial production was directed by Jenny Bowen with the assistance of Robert Redford and The Sundance Institute, thanks to her debut film, 1981's Street Music featuring Elizabeth Daily. It's unknown why Bowen and her cinematographer husband Richard Bowen left the project, but when filming resumed again and again and again, those scenes were directed by the film's producer, Kjehl Rasmussen.   Because Bowen was not a member of the DGA at the time, she was not able to petition the guild for the use of the Alan Smithee pseudonym, a process that is automatically triggered whenever a director is let go of a project and filming continues with its producer taking the reigns as director. But she was able to get the production to use a pseudonym anyway for the director's credit, H. Anne Riley, while also giving Richard Bowen a pseudonym of his own for his work on the film, David Spellvin.   Opening on 24 screens on October 27th, Animal Behavior would come in 50th place in its opening weekend, grossing just $20,361. The New York film critics ripped the film apart, and there wouldn't be a second weekend for the film.   The following Friday, November 3rd, saw the release of The Stepfather II, a rushed together sequel to 1987's The Stepfather, which itself wasn't a big hit in theatres but found a very quick and receptive audience on cable.   Despite dying at the end of the first film, Terry O'Quinn's Jerry is somehow still alive, and institutionalized in Northern Washington state. He escapes and heads down to Los Angeles, where he assumes the identity of a recently deceased publisher, Gene Clifford, but instead passes himself off as a psychiatrist. Jerry, now Gene, begins to court his neighbor Carol, and the whole crazy story plays out again. Meg Foster plays the neighbor Carol, and Jonathan Brandis is her son.    Director Jeff Burr had made a name for himself with his 1987 horror anthology film From a Whisper to a Scream, featuring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager and Terry Kiser, and from all accounts, had a very smooth shooting process with this film. The trouble began when he turned in his cut to the producers. The producers were happy with the film, but when they sent it to Miramax, the American distributors, they were rather unhappy with the almost bloodless slasher film. They demanded reshoots, which Burr and O'Quinn refused to participate in. They brought in a new director, Doug Campbell, to handle the reshoots, which are easy to spot in the final film because they look and feel completely different from the scenes they're spliced into.   When it opened, The Stepfather II actually grossed slightly more than the first film did, earning $279k from 100 screens, compared to $260k for The Stepfather from 105 screens. But unlike the first film, which had some decent reviews when it opened, the sequel was a complete mess. To this day, it's still one of the few films to have a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Stepfather II would limp its way through theatres during the Christmas holiday season, ending its run with a $1.5m gross.   But it would be their final film of the decade that would dictate their course for at least the first part of the 1990s.   Remember when I said earlier in the episode that Harvey Weinstein meant with the producers of another British film while in London for Scandal? We're at that film now, a film you probably know.   My Left Foot.   By November 1988, actor Daniel Day-Lewis had starred in several movies including James Ivory's A Room With a View and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He had even been the lead in a major Hollywood studio film, Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars, a very good film that unfortunately got caught up in the brouhaha over the exit of the studio head who greenlit the film, David Puttnam.   The film's director, Jim Sheridan, had never directed a movie before. He had become involved in stage production during his time at the University College in Dublin in the late 1960s, where he worked with future filmmaker Neil Jordan, and had spent nearly a decade after graduation doing stage work in Ireland and Canada, before settling in New York City in the early 1980s. Sheridan would go to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where one of his classmates was Spike Lee, and return to Ireland after graduating. He was nearly forty, married with two pre-teen daughters, and he needed to make a statement with his first film.   He would find that story in the autobiography of Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, whose spirit and creativity could not be contained by his severe cerebral palsy. Along with Irish actor and writer Shane Connaughton, Sheridan wrote a screenplay that could be a powerhouse film made on a very tight budget of less than a million dollars.   Daniel Day-Lewis was sent a copy of the script, in the hopes he would be intrigued enough to take almost no money to play a physically demanding role. He read the opening pages, which had the adult Christy Brown putting a record on a record player and dropping the needle on to the record with his left foot, and thought to himself it would be impossible to film. That intrigued him, and he signed on. But during filming in January and February of 1989, most of the scenes were shot using mirrors, as Day-Lewis couldn't do the scenes with his left foot. He could do them with his right foot, hence the mirrors.   As a method actor, Day-Lewis remained in character as Christy Brown for the entire two month shoot. From costume fittings and makeup in the morning, to getting the actor on set, to moving him around between shots, there were crew members assigned to assist the actor as if they were Christy Brown's caretakers themselves, including feeding him during breaks in shooting. A rumor debunked by the actor years later said Day-Lewis had broken two ribs during production because of how hunched down he needed to be in his crude prop wheelchair to properly play the character.   The actor had done a lot of prep work to play the role, including spending time at the Sandymount School Clinic where the young Christy Brown got his education, and much of his performance was molded on those young people.   While Miramax had acquired the American distribution rights to the film before it went into production, and those funds went into the production of the film, the film was not produced by Miramax, nor were the Weinsteins given any kind of executive producer credit, as they were able to get themselves on Scandal.   My Left Foot would make its world premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival on September 4th, 1989, followed soon thereafter by screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th and the New York Film Festival on September 23rd. Across the board, critics and audiences were in love with the movie, and with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. Jim Sheridan would receive a special prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for his direction, and Day-Lewis would win the festival's award for Best Actor. However, as the film played the festival circuit, another name would start to pop up. Brenda Fricker, a little known Irish actress who played Christy Brown's supportive but long-suffering mother Bridget, would pile up as many positive notices and awards as Day-Lewis. Although there was no Best Supporting Actress Award at the Montreal Film Festival, the judges felt her performance was deserving of some kind of attention, so they would create a Special Mention of the Jury Award to honor her.   Now, some sources online will tell you the film made its world premiere in Dublin on February 24th, 1989, based on a passage in a biography about Daniel Day-Lewis, but that would be impossible as the film would still be in production for two more days, and wasn't fully edited or scored by then.   I'm not sure when it first opened in the United Kingdom other than sometime in early 1990, but My Left Foot would have its commercial theatre debut in America on November 10th, when opened at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City and the Century City 14 in Los Angeles. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would, in the very opening paragraph of her review, note that one shouldn't see My Left Foot for some kind of moral uplift or spiritual merit badge, but because of your pure love of great moviemaking. Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times spends most of his words praising Day-Lewis and Sheridan for making a film that is polite and non-judgmental.    Interestingly, Miramax went with an ad campaign that completely excluded any explanation of who Christy Brown was or why the film is titled the way it is. 70% of the ad space is taken from pull quotes from many of the top critics of the day, 20% with the title of the film, and 10% with a picture of Daniel Day-Lewis, clean shaven and full tooth smile, which I don't recall happening once in the movie, next to an obviously added-in picture of one of his co-stars that is more camera-friendly than Brenda Fricker or Fiona Shaw.   Whatever reasons people went to see the film, they flocked to the two theatres playing the film that weekend. It's $20,582 per screen average would be second only to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, which had opened two days earlier, earning slightly more than $1,000 per screen than My Left Foot.   In week two, My Left Foot would gross another $35,133 from those two theatres, and it would overtake Henry V for the highest per screen average. In week three, Thanksgiving weekend, both Henry V and My Left Foot saw a a double digit increase in grosses despite not adding any theatres, and the latter film would hold on to the highest per screen average again, although the difference would only be $302. And this would continue for weeks. In the film's sixth week of release, it would get a boost in attention by being awarded Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle. Daniel Day-Lewis would be named Best Actor that week by both the New York critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while Fricker would win the Best Supporting Actress award from the latter group.   But even then, Miramax refused to budge on expanding the film until its seventh week of release, Christmas weekend, when My Left Foot finally moved into cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Its $135k gross that weekend was good, but it was starting to lose ground to other Oscar hopefuls like Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, Enemies: A Love Story, and Glory.   And even though the film continued to rack up award win after award win, nomination after nomination, from the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild and the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, Miramax still held firm on not expanding the film into more than 100 theatres nationwide until its 16th week in theatres, February 16th, 1990, two days after the announcement of the nominees for the 62nd Annual Academy Awards. While Daniel Day-Lewis's nomination for Best Actor was virtually assured and Brenda Fricker was practically a given, the film would pick up three other nominations, including surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Jim Sheridan and co-writer Shane Connaughton would also get picked for Best Adapted Screenplay.   Miramax also picked up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape, and a Best Foreign Language Film nod for the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso, which, thanks to the specific rules for that category, a film could get a nomination before actually opening in theatres in America, which Miramax would rush to do with Paradiso the week after its nomination was announced.   The 62nd Academy Awards ceremony would be best remembered today as being the first Oscar show to be hosted by Billy Crystal, and for being considerably better than the previous year's ceremony, a mess of a show best remembered as being the one with a 12 minute opening musical segment that included Rob Lowe singing Proud Mary to an actress playing Snow White and another nine minute musical segment featuring a slew of expected future Oscar winners that, to date, feature exact zero Oscar nominees, both which rank as amongst the worst things to ever happen to the Oscars awards show.   The ceremony, held on March 26th, would see My Left Foot win two awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, as well as Cinema Paradiso for Best Foreign Film. The following weekend, March 30th, would see Miramax expand My Left Foot to 510 theatres, its widest point of release, and see the film made the national top ten and earn more than a million dollars for its one and only time during its eight month run.   The film would lose steam pretty quickly after its post-win bump, but it would eek out a modest run that ended with $14.75m in ticket sales just in the United States. Not bad for a little Irish movie with no major stars that cost less than a million dollars to make.   Of course, the early 90s would see Miramax fly to unimagined heights. In all of the 80s, Miramax would release 39 movies. They would release 30 films alone in 1991. They would release the first movies from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. They'd release some of the best films from some of the best filmmakers in the world, including Woody Allen, Pedro Almadovar, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Atom Egoyan, Steven Frears, Peter Greenaway, Peter Jackson, Neil Jordan, Chen Kaige, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von Trier, and Zhang Yimou. In 1993, the Mexican dramedy Like Water for Chocolate would become the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America, and it would play in some theatres, including my theatre, the NuWilshire in Santa Monica, continuously for more than a year.   If you've listened to the whole series on the 1980s movies of Miramax Films, there are two things I hope you take away. First, I hope you discovered at least one film you hadn't heard of before and you might be interested in searching out. The second is the reminder that neither Bob nor Harvey Weinstein will profit in any way if you give any of the movies talked about in this series a chance. They sold Miramax to Disney in June 1993. They left Miramax in September 2005. Many of the contracts for the movies the company released in the 80s and 90s expired decades ago, with the rights reverting back to their original producers, none of whom made any deals with the Weinsteins once they got their rights back.   Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence in upstate New York after being found guilty in 2020 of two sexual assaults. Once he completes that sentence, he'll be spending another 16 years in prison in California, after he was convicted of three sexual assaults that happened in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013. And if the 71 year old makes it to 107 years old, he may have to serve time in England for two sexual assaults that happened in August 1996. That case is still working its way through the British legal system.   Bob Weinstein has kept a low profile since his brother's proclivities first became public knowledge in October 2017, although he would also be accused of sexual harassment by a show runner for the brothers' Spike TV-aired adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Mist, several days after the bombshell articles came out about his brother. However, Bob's lawyer, the powerful attorney to the stars Bert Fields, deny the allegations, and it appears nothing has occurred legally since the accusations were made.   A few weeks after the start of the MeToo movement that sparked up in the aftermath of the accusations of his brother's actions, Bob Weinstein denied having any knowledge of the nearly thirty years of documented sexual abuse at the hands of his brother, but did allow to an interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter that he had barely spoken to Harvey over the previous five years, saying he could no longer take Harvey's cheating, lying and general attitude towards everyone.   And with that, we conclude our journey with Miramax Films. While I am sure Bob and Harvey will likely pop up again in future episodes, they'll be minor characters at best, and we'll never have to focus on anything they did ever again.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 119 is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

christmas united states america american new york california canada world thanksgiving new york city chicago lord english hollywood kids disney los angeles france england moving state americans british french san francisco new york times war society ms girl fire australian drama german stars batman ireland italian arts united kingdom detroit trip oscars irish bbc empire mexican sun camp superman pittsburgh joker kiss universal scandals lego cinema dvd mtv chocolate hole scottish academy awards metoo denmark secretary indiana jones indianapolis scream stephen king dublin xmen quentin tarantino labor day traffic golden globes aussie ghostbusters palace steven spielberg swing bars whispers lt major league baseball hughes promote lsu grammy awards christopher nolan new york university mist parenthood zack snyder cannes dc comics tim burton forty copenhagen richard branson right thing kevin smith los angeles times harvey weinstein spike lee hyde sanity best picture snow white santa monica sundance perkins film festival rotten tomatoes go go woody allen scandinavian peter jackson sam raimi apes ripper baton rouge christian bale mona lisa kevin bacon wes craven tarzan jekyll val kilmer elmo arcane estes hooker sheridan hollywood reporter matt reeves lethal weapon swamp thing cannes film festival star trek the next generation robert redford best actor labour party nine inch nails mcdowell steven soderbergh vincent price aquila michael thomas best actress burr kenneth branagh best director jane goodall roger ebert trier rob lowe unbeknownst best films ebert writers guild billy crystal daniel day lewis last crusade national board westwood pelle when harry met sally paradiso loverboy rain man strange cases robert louis stevenson village voice university college spider woman toronto international film festival robert altman pretty in pink elephant man film critics bountiful honey i shrunk the kids criminal law hooch like water darkman erin brockovich dead poets society john hurt stepfathers ian mckellen spike tv best supporting actress james spader tisch school truffaut national society norman bates melrose place patrick dempsey dga holly hunter henry v columbia pictures miramax mpaa woolley siskel soderbergh midnight express john constantine anthony perkins stop making sense riveter andie macdowell keeler karen allen cinema paradiso neil jordan james mason best original screenplay best screenplay barbara crampton charlotte gainsbourg best adapted screenplay directors guild proud mary animal behavior annual academy awards belinda carlisle jean pierre jeunet driving miss daisy gotta have it new york film festival sundance institute spirit award angel heart bernardo bertolucci profumo conquerer west los angeles bridget fonda peter gallagher movies podcast less than zero fiona shaw jim wynorski best foreign language film unbearable lightness philip kaufman century city fricker zhang yimou park city utah alan smithee captain jean luc picard peter greenaway meg foster atom egoyan dead poet spader kelli maroney james ivory armand assante special mentions best foreign film taylor hackford weinsteins jim sheridan jonathan brandis krzysztof kie jury award joe boyd meg tilly pretty hate machine day lewis motion picture academy clu gulager street music dimension films sarah douglas miramax films stephen ward my left foot doug campbell james belushi terry kiser new york film critics circle head like brenda fricker san giacomo entertainment capital laura san giacomo beverly center mister hyde bob weinstein david puttnam los angeles film critics association uslan louis jourdan atco records christy brown royal theatre chen kaige elizabeth daily world war ii france stephen gyllenhaal richard bowen wendy hughes michael e uslan greystoke the legend colin friels carnegie mellon school dick durock morgan mason monique gabrielle vincent canby
ScreenPeople Podcast
The Big Chill

ScreenPeople Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2023 45:41


Alejandro and special guest, Rhonda Ford, will put some Smokey Robinson and The Miracles on the record player, and dive in deep into this famous 1983 movie with an all star cast including Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly, and JoBeth Williams. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rememberthatmovie/message

The 80s Movie Podcast
Miramax Films - Part Five

The 80s Movie Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2023 54:39


We finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we complete our look back at the 1980s theatrical releases for Miramax Films. And, for the final time, a reminder that we are not celebrating Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but reminiscing about the movies they had no involvement in making. We cannot talk about cinema in the 1980s without talking about Miramax, and I really wanted to get it out of the way, once and for all.   As we left Part 4, Miramax was on its way to winning its first Academy Award, Billie August's Pelle the Conquerer, the Scandinavian film that would be second film in a row from Denmark that would win for Best Foreign Language Film.   In fact, the first two films Miramax would release in 1989, the Australian film Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train and the Anthony Perkins slasher film Edge of Sanity, would not arrive in theatres until the Friday after the Academy Awards ceremony that year, which was being held on the last Wednesday in March.   Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train stars Wendy Hughes, the talented Australian actress who, sadly, is best remembered today as Lt. Commander Nella Daren, one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's few love interests, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Jenny, a prostitute working a weekend train to Sydney, who is seduced by a man on the train, unaware that he plans on tricking her to kill someone for him. Colin Friels, another great Aussie actor who unfortunately is best known for playing the corrupt head of Strack Industries in Sam Raimi's Darkman, plays the unnamed man who will do anything to get what he wants.   Director Bob Ellis and his co-screenwriter Denny Lawrence came up with the idea for the film while they themselves were traveling on a weekend train to Sydney, with the idea that each client the call girl met on the train would represent some part of the Australian male.   Funding the $2.5m film was really simple… provided they cast Hughes in the lead role. Ellis and Lawrence weren't against Hughes as an actress. Any film would be lucky to have her in the lead. They just felt she she didn't have the right kind of sex appeal for this specific character.   Miramax would open the film in six theatres, including the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles and the Fashion Village 8 in Orlando, on March 31st. There were two versions of the movie prepared, one that ran 130 minutes and the other just 91. Miramax would go with the 91 minute version of the film for the American release, and most of the critics would note how clunky and confusing the film felt, although one critic for the Village Voice would have some kind words for Ms. Hughes' performance.   Whether it was because moviegoers were too busy seeing the winners of the just announced Academy Awards, including Best Picture winner Rain Man, or because this weekend was also the opening weekend of the new Major League Baseball season, or just turned off by the reviews, attendance at the theatres playing Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train was as empty as a train dining car at three in the morning. The Beverly Center alone would account for a third of the movie's opening weekend gross of $19,268. After a second weekend at the same six theatres pocketing just $14,382, this train stalled out, never to arrive at another station.   Their other March 31st release, Edge of Sanity, is notable for two things and only two things: it would be the first film Miramax would release under their genre specialty label, Millimeter Films, which would eventually evolve into Dimension Films in the next decade, and it would be the final feature film to star Anthony Perkins before his passing in 1992.   The film is yet another retelling of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, with the bonus story twist that Hyde was actually Jack the Ripper. As Jekyll, Perkins looks exactly as you'd expect a mid-fifties Norman Bates to look. As Hyde, Perkins is made to look like he's a backup keyboardist for the first Nine Inch Nails tour. Head Like a Hole would have been an appropriate song for the end credits, had the song or Pretty Hate Machine been released by that time, with its lyrics about bowing down before the one you serve and getting what you deserve.   Edge of Sanity would open in Atlanta and Indianapolis on March 31st. And like so many other Miramax releases in the 1980s, they did not initially announce any grosses for the film. That is, until its fourth weekend of release, when the film's theatre count had fallen to just six, down from the previous week's previously unannounced 35, grossing just $9,832. Miramax would not release grosses for the film again, with a final total of just $102,219.   Now when I started this series, I said that none of the films Miramax released in the 1980s were made by Miramax, but this next film would become the closest they would get during the decade.   In July 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when the married Profumo began a sexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was very short-lived, either ending, depending on the source, in August 1961 or December 1961. Unbeknownst to Profumo, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy at the same time.   No one was the wiser on any of this until December 1962, when a shooting incident involving two other men Keeler had been involved with led the press to start looking into Keeler's life. While it was never proven that his affair with Keeler was responsible for any breaches of national security, John Profumo was forced to resign from his position in June 1963, and the scandal would take down most of the Torie government with him. Prime Minister Macmillan would resign due to “health reasons” in October 1963, and the Labour Party would take control of the British government when the next elections were held in October 1964.   Scandal was originally planned in the mid-1980s as a three-part, five-hour miniseries by Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas and American music producer turned movie producer Joe Boyd. The BBC would commit to finance a two-part, three-hour miniseries,  until someone at the network found an old memo from the time of the Profumo scandal that forbade them from making any productions about it. Channel 4, which had been producing quality shows and movies for several years since their start in 1982, was approached, but rejected the series on the grounds of taste.   Palace Pictures, a British production company who had already produced three films for Neil Jordan including Mona Lisa, was willing to finance the script, provided it could be whittled down to a two hour movie. Originally budgeted at 3.2m British pounds, the costs would rise as they started the casting process.  John Hurt, twice Oscar-nominated for his roles in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, would sign on to play Stephen Ward, a British osteopath who acted as Christine Keeler's… well… pimp, for lack of a better word. Ian McKellen, a respected actor on British stages and screens but still years away from finding mainstream global success in the X-Men movies, would sign on to play John Profumo. Joanne Whaley, who had filmed the yet to be released at that time Willow with her soon to be husband Val Kilmer, would get her first starring role as Keeler, and Bridget Fonda, who was quickly making a name for herself in the film world after being featured in Aria, would play Mandy Rice-Davies, the best friend and co-worker of Keeler's.   To save money, Palace Pictures would sign thirty-year-old Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones to direct, after seeing a short film he had made called The Riveter. But even with the neophyte feature filmmaker, Palace still needed about $2.35m to be able to fully finance the film. And they knew exactly who to go to.   Stephen Woolley, the co-founder of Palace Pictures and the main producer on the film, would fly from London to New York City to personally pitch Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Woolley felt that of all the independent distributors in America, they would be the ones most attracted to the sexual and controversial nature of the story. A day later, Woolley was back on a plane to London. The Weinsteins had agreed to purchase the American distribution rights to Scandal for $2.35m.   The film would spend two months shooting in the London area through the summer of 1988. Christine Keeler had no interest in the film, and refused to meet the now Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to talk about the affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies was more than happy to Bridget Fonda about her life, although the meetings between the two women were so secret, they would not come out until Woolley eulogized Rice-Davies after her 2014 death.   Although Harvey and Bob would be given co-executive producers on the film, Miramax was not a production company on the film. This, however, did not stop Harvey from flying to London multiple times, usually when he was made aware of some sexy scene that was going to shoot the following day, and try to insinuate himself into the film's making. At one point, Woolley decided to take a weekend off from the production, and actually did put Harvey in charge. That weekend's shoot would include a skinny-dipping scene featuring the Christine Keeler character, but when Whaley-Kilmer learned Harvey was going to be there, she told the director that she could not do the nudity in the scene. Her new husband was objecting to it, she told them. Harvey, not skipping a beat, found a lookalike for the actress who would be willing to bare all as a body double, and the scene would begin shooting a few hours later. Whaley-Kilmer watched the shoot from just behind the camera, and stopped the shoot a few minutes later. She was not happy that the body double's posterior was notably larger than her own, and didn't want audiences to think she had that much junk in her trunk. The body double was paid for her day, and Whaley-Kilmer finished the rest of the scene herself.   Caton-Jones and his editing team worked on shaping the film through the fall, and would screen his first edit of the film for Palace Pictures and the Weinsteins in November 1988. And while Harvey was very happy with the cut, he still asked the production team for a different edit for American audiences, noting that most Americans had no idea who Profumo or Keeler or Rice-Davies were, and that Americans would need to understand the story more right out of the first frame. Caton-Jones didn't want to cut a single frame, but he would work with Harvey to build an American-friendly cut.   While he was in London in November 1988, he would meet with the producers of another British film that was in pre-production at the time that would become another important film to the growth of the company, but we're not quite at that part of the story yet. We'll circle around to that film soon.   One of the things Harvey was most looking forward to going in to 1989 was the expected battle with the MPAA ratings board over Scandal. Ever since he had seen the brouhaha over Angel Heart's X rating two years earlier, he had been looking for a similar battle. He thought he had it with Aria in 1988, but he knew he definitely had it now.   And he'd be right.   In early March, just a few weeks before the film's planned April 21st opening day, the MPAA slapped an X rating on Scandal. The MPAA usually does not tell filmmakers or distributors what needs to be cut, in order to avoid accusations of actual censorship, but according to Harvey, they told him exactly what needed to be cut to get an R: a two second shot during an orgy scene, where it appears two background characters are having unsimulated sex.   So what did Harvey do?   He spent weeks complaining to the press about MPAA censorship, generating millions in free publicity for the film, all the while already having a close-up shot of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer's Christine Keeler watching the orgy but not participating in it, ready to replace the objectionable shot.   A few weeks later, Miramax screened the “edited” film to the MPAA and secured the R rating, and the film would open on 94 screens, including 28 each in the New York City and Los Angeles metro regions, on April 28th.   And while the reviews for the film were mostly great, audiences were drawn to the film for the Miramax-manufactured controversy as well as the key art for the film, a picture of a potentially naked Joanne Whaley-Kilmer sitting backwards in a chair, a mimic of a very famous photo Christine Keeler herself took to promote a movie about the Profumo affair she appeared in a few years after the events. I'll have a picture of both the Scandal poster and the Christine Keeler photo on this episode's page at The80sMoviePodcast.com   Five other movies would open that weekend, including the James Belushi comedy K-9 and the Kevin Bacon drama Criminal Law, and Scandal, with $658k worth of ticket sales, would have the second best per screen average of the five new openers, just a few hundred dollars below the new Holly Hunter movie Miss Firecracker, which only opened on six screens.   In its second weekend, Scandal would expand its run to 214 playdates, and make its debut in the national top ten, coming in tenth place with $981k. That would be more than the second week of the Patrick Dempsey rom-com Loverboy, even though Loverboy was playing on 5x as many screens.   In weekend number three, Scandal would have its best overall gross and top ten placement, coming in seventh with $1.22m from 346 screens. Scandal would start to slowly fade after that, falling back out of the top ten in its sixth week, but Miramax would wisely keep the screen count under 375, because Scandal wasn't going to play well in all areas of the country. After nearly five months in theatres, Miramax would have its biggest film to date. Scandal would gross $8.8m.   The second release from Millimeter Films was The Return of the Swamp Thing. And if you needed a reason why the 1980s was not a good time for comic book movies, here you are. The Return of the Swamp Thing took most of what made the character interesting in his comic series, and most of what was good from the 1982 Wes Craven adaptation, and decided “Hey, you know what would bring the kids in? Camp! Camp unseen in a comic book adaptation since the 1960s Batman series. They loved it then, they'll love it now!”   They did not love it now.   Heather Locklear, between her stints on T.J. Hooker and Melrose Place, plays the step-daughter of Louis Jourdan's evil Dr. Arcane from the first film, who heads down to the Florida swaps to confront dear old once presumed dead stepdad. He in turns kidnaps his stepdaughter and decides to do some of his genetic experiments on her, until she is rescued by Swamp Thing, one of Dr. Arcane's former co-workers who got turned into the gooey anti-hero in the first movie.   The film co-stars Sarah Douglas from Superman 1 and 2 as Dr. Arcane's assistant, Dick Durock reprising his role as Swamp Thing from the first film, and 1980s B-movie goddess Monique Gabrielle as Miss Poinsettia.   For director Jim Wynorski, this was his sixth movie as a director, and at $3m, one of the highest budgeted movies he would ever make. He's directed 107 movies since 1984, most of them low budget direct to video movies with titles like The Bare Wench Project and Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, although he does have one genuine horror classic under his belt, the 1986 sci-fi tinged Chopping Maul with Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton.   Wynorski suggested in a late 1990s DVD commentary for the film that he didn't particularly enjoy making the film, and had a difficult time directing Louis Jourdan, to the point that outside of calling “action” and “cut,” the two didn't speak to each other by the end of the shoot.   The Return of Swamp Thing would open in 123 theatres in the United States on May 12th, including 28 in the New York City metro region, 26 in the Los Angeles area, 15 in Detroit, and a handful of theatres in Phoenix, San Francisco. And, strangely, the newspaper ads would include an actual positive quote from none other than Roger Ebert, who said on Siskel & Ebert that he enjoyed himself, and that it was good to have Swamp Thing back. Siskel would not reciprocate his balcony partner's thumb up. But Siskel was about the only person who was positive on the return of Swamp Thing, and that box office would suffer. In its first three days, the film would gross just $119,200. After a couple more dismal weeks in theatres, The Return of Swamp Thing would be pulled from distribution, with a final gross of just $275k.   Fun fact: The Return of Swamp Thing was produced by Michael E. Uslan, whose next production, another adaptation of a DC Comics character, would arrive in theatres not six weeks later and become the biggest film of the summer. In fact, Uslan has been a producer or executive producer on every Batman-related movie and television show since 1989, from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan to Zack Snyder to Matt Reeves, and from LEGO movies to Joker. He also, because of his ownership of the movie rights to Swamp Thing, got the movie screen rights, but not the television screen rights, to John Constantine.   Miramax didn't have too much time to worry about The Return of Swamp Thing's release, as it was happening while the Brothers Weinstein were at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. They had two primary goals at Cannes that year:   To buy American distribution rights to any movie that would increase their standing in the cinematic worldview, which they would achieve by picking up an Italian dramedy called, at the time, New Paradise Cinema, which was competing for the Palme D'Or with a Miramax pickup from Sundance back in January. Promote that very film, which did end up winning the Palme D'Or.   Ever since he was a kid, Steven Soderbergh wanted to be a filmmaker. Growing up in Baton Rouge, LA in the late 1970s, he would enroll in the LSU film animation class, even though he was only 15 and not yet a high school graduate. After graduating high school, he decided to move to Hollywood to break into the film industry, renting an above-garage room from Stephen Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker best known as the father of Jake and Maggie, but after a few freelance editing jobs, Soderbergh packed up his things and headed home to Baton Rouge.   Someone at Atco Records saw one of Soderbergh's short films, and hired him to direct a concert movie for one of their biggest bands at the time, Yes, who was enjoying a major comeback thanks to their 1983 triple platinum selling album, 90125. The concert film, called 9012Live, would premiere on MTV in late 1985, and it would be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.   Soderbergh would use the money he earned from that project, $7,500, to make Winston, a 12 minute black and white short about sexual deception that he would, over the course of an eight day driving trip from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles, expand to a full length screen that he would call sex, lies and videotape. In later years, Soderbergh would admit that part of the story is autobiographical, but not the part you might think. Instead of the lead, Graham, an impotent but still sexually perverse late twentysomething who likes to tape women talking about their sexual fantasies for his own pleasure later, Soderbergh based the husband John, the unsophisticated lawyer who cheats on his wife with her sister, on himself, although there would be a bit of Graham that borrows from the filmmaker. Like his lead character, Soderbergh did sell off most of his possessions and hit the road to live a different life.   When he finished the script, he sent it out into the wilds of Hollywood. Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and husband of Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle, would read it and sign on as an executive producer. Soderbergh had wanted to shoot the film in black and white, like he had with the Winston short that lead to the creation of this screenplay, but he and Mason had trouble getting anyone to commit to the project, even with only a projected budget of $200,000. For a hot moment, it looked like Universal might sign on to make the film, but they would eventually pass.   Robert Newmyer, who had left his job as a vice president of production and acquisitions at Columbia Pictures to start his own production company, signed on as a producer, and helped to convince Soderbergh to shoot the film in color, and cast some name actors in the leading roles. Once he acquiesced, Richard Branson's Virgin Vision agreed to put up $540k of the newly budgeted $1.2m film, while RCA/Columbia Home Video would put up the remaining $660k.   Soderbergh and his casting director, Deborah Aquila, would begin their casting search in New York, where they would meet with, amongst others, Andie MacDowell, who had already starred in two major Hollywood pictures, 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and 1985's St. Elmo's Fire, but was still considered more of a top model than an actress, and Laura San Giacomo, who had recently graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh and would be making her feature debut. Moving on to Los Angeles, Soderbergh and Aquila would cast James Spader, who had made a name for himself as a mostly bad guy in 80s teen movies like Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero, but had never been the lead in a drama like this. At Spader's suggestion, the pair met with Peter Gallagher, who was supposed to become a star nearly a decade earlier from his starring role in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker, but had mostly been playing supporting roles in television shows and movies for most of the decade.   In order to keep the budget down, Soderbergh, the producers, cinematographer Walt Lloyd and the four main cast members agreed to get paid their guild minimums in exchange for a 50/50 profit participation split with RCA/Columbia once the film recouped its costs.   The production would spend a week in rehearsals in Baton Rouge, before the thirty day shoot began on August 1st, 1988. On most days, the shoot was unbearable for many, as temperatures would reach as high as 110 degrees outside, but there were a couple days lost to what cinematographer Lloyd said was “biblical rains.” But the shoot completed as scheduled, and Soderbergh got to the task of editing right away. He knew he only had about eight weeks to get a cut ready if the film was going to be submitted to the 1989 U.S. Film Festival, now better known as Sundance. He did get a temporary cut of the film ready for submission, with a not quite final sound mix, and the film was accepted to the festival. It would make its world premiere on January 25th, 1989, in Park City UT, and as soon as the first screening was completed, the bids from distributors came rolling in. Larry Estes, the head of RCA/Columbia Home Video, would field more than a dozen submissions before the end of the night, but only one distributor was ready to make a deal right then and there.   Bob Weinstein wasn't totally sold on the film, but he loved the ending, and he loved that the word “sex” not only was in the title but lead the title. He knew that title alone would sell the movie. Harvey, who was still in New York the next morning, called Estes to make an appointment to meet in 24 hours. When he and Estes met, he brought with him three poster mockups the marketing department had prepared, and told Estes he wasn't going to go back to New York until he had a contract signed, and vowed to beat any other deal offered by $100,000. Island Pictures, who had made their name releasing movies like Stop Making Sense, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, The Trip to Bountiful and She's Gotta Have It, offered $1m for the distribution rights, plus a 30% distribution fee and a guaranteed $1m prints and advertising budget. Estes called Harvey up and told him what it would take to make the deal. $1.1m for the distribution rights, which needed to paid up front, a $1m P&A budget, to be put in escrow upon the signing of the contract until the film was released, a 30% distribution fee, no cutting of the film whatsoever once Soderbergh turns in his final cut, they would need to provide financial information for the films costs and returns once a month because of the profit participation contracts, and the Weinsteins would have to hire Ira Deutchman, who had spent nearly 15 years in the independent film world, doing marketing for Cinema 5, co-founding United Artists Classics, and co-founding Cinecom Pictures before opening his own company to act as a producers rep and marketer. And the Weinsteins would not only have to do exactly what Deutchman wanted, they'd have to pay for his services too.   The contract was signed a few weeks later.   The first move Miramax would make was to get Soderbergh's final cut of the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, where it would be accepted to compete in the main competition. Which you kind of already know what happened, because that's what I lead with. The film would win the Palme D'Or, and Spader would be awarded the festival's award for Best Actor. It was very rare at the time, and really still is, for any film to be awarded more than one prize, so winning two was really a coup for the film and for Miramax, especially when many critics attending the festival felt Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was the better film.   In March, Miramax expected the film to make around $5-10m, which would net the company a small profit on the film. After Cannes, they were hopeful for a $15m gross.   They never expected what would happen next.   On August 4th, sex, lies, and videotape would open on four screens, at the Cinema Studio in New York City, and at the AMC Century 14, the Cineplex Beverly Center 13 and the Mann Westwood 4 in Los Angeles. Three prime theatres and the best they could do in one of the then most competitive zones in all America. Remember, it's still the Summer 1989 movie season, filled with hits like Batman, Dead Poets Society, Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Lethal Weapon 2, Parenthood, Turner & Hooch, and When Harry Met Sally. An independent distributor even getting one screen at the least attractive theatre in Westwood was a major get. And despite the fact that this movie wasn't really a summertime movie per se, the film would gross an incredible $156k in its first weekend from just these four theatres. Its nearly $40k per screen average would be 5x higher than the next closest film, Parenthood.   In its second weekend, the film would expand to 28 theatres, and would bring in over $600k in ticket sales, its per screen average of $21,527 nearly triple its closest competitor, Parenthood again. The company would keep spending small, as it slowly expanded the film each successive week. Forty theatres in its third week, and 101 in its fourth. The numbers held strong, and in its fifth week, Labor Day weekend, the film would have its first big expansion, playing in 347 theatres. The film would enter the top ten for the first time, despite playing in 500 to 1500 fewer theatres than the other films in the top ten. In its ninth weekend, the film would expand to its biggest screen count, 534, before slowly drawing down as the other major Oscar contenders started their theatrical runs. The film would continue to play through the Oscar season of 1989, and when it finally left theatres in May 1989, its final gross would be an astounding $24.7m.   Now, remember a few moments ago when I said that Miramax needed to provide financial statements every month for the profit participation contracts of Soderbergh, the producers, the cinematographer and the four lead actors? The film was so profitable for everyone so quickly that RCA/Columbia made its first profit participation payouts on October 17th, barely ten weeks after the film's opening.   That same week, Soderbergh also made what was at the time the largest deal with a book publisher for the writer/director's annotated version of the screenplay, which would also include his notes created during the creation of the film. That $75,000 deal would be more than he got paid to make the movie as the writer and the director and the editor, not counting the profit participation checks.   During the awards season, sex, lies, and videotape was considered to be one of the Oscars front runners for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and at least two acting nominations. The film would be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress by the Golden Globes, and it would win the Spirit Awards for Best Picture, Soderbergh for Best Director, McDowell for Best Actress, and San Giacomo for Best Supporting Actress. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, the film would only receive one nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. The same total and category as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which many people also felt had a chance for a Best Picture and Best Director nomination. Both films would lose out to Tom Shulman's screenplay for Dead Poet's Society.   The success of sex, lies, and videotape would launch Steven Soderbergh into one of the quirkiest Hollywood careers ever seen, including becoming the first and only director ever to be nominated twice for Best Director in the same year by the Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America, in 2001 for directing Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He would win the Oscar for directing Traffic.   Lost in the excitement of sex, lies, and videotape was The Little Thief, a French movie that had an unfortunate start as the screenplay François Truffaut was working on when he passed away in 1984 at the age of just 52.   Directed by Claude Miller, whose principal mentor was Truffaut, The Little Thief starred seventeen year old Charlotte Gainsbourg as Janine, a young woman in post-World War II France who commits a series of larcenies to support her dreams of becoming wealthy.   The film was a modest success in France when it opened in December 1988, but its American release date of August 25th, 1989, was set months in advance. So when it was obvious sex, lies, and videotape was going to be a bigger hit than they originally anticipated, it was too late for Miramax to pause the release of The Little Thief.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City, and buoyed by favorable reviews from every major critic in town, The Little Thief would see $39,931 worth of ticket sales in its first seven days, setting a new house record at the theatre for the year. In its second week, the gross would only drop $47. For the entire week. And when it opened at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles, its opening week gross of $30,654 would also set a new house record for the year.   The film would expand slowly but surely over the next several weeks, often in single screen playdates in major markets, but it would never play on more than twenty-four screens in any given week. And after four months in theatres, The Little Thief, the last movie created one of the greatest film writers the world had ever seen, would only gross $1.056m in the United States.   The next three releases from Miramax were all sent out under the Millimeter Films banner.   The first, a supernatural erotic drama called The Girl in a Swing, was about an English antiques dealer who travels to Copenhagen where he meets and falls in love with a mysterious German-born secretary, whom he marries, only to discover a darker side to his new bride. Rupert Frazer, who played Christian Bale's dad in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, plays the antique dealer, while Meg Tilly the mysterious new bride.   Filmed over a five week schedule in London and Copenhagen during May and June 1988, some online sources say the film first opened somewhere in California in December 1988, but I cannot find a single theatre not only in California but anywhere in the United States that played the film before its September 29th, 1989 opening date.   Roger Ebert didn't like the film, and wished Meg Tilly's “genuinely original performance” was in a better movie. Opening in 26 theatres, including six theatres each in New York City and Los Angeles, and spurred on by an intriguing key art for the film that featured a presumed naked Tilly on a swing looking seductively at the camera while a notice underneath her warns that No One Under 18 Will Be Admitted To The Theatre, The Girl in a Swing would gross $102k, good enough for 35th place nationally that week. And that's about the best it would do. The film would limp along, moving from market to market over the course of the next three months, and when its theatrical run was complete, it could only manage about $747k in ticket sales.   We'll quickly burn through the next two Millimeter Films releases, which came out a week apart from each other and didn't amount to much.   Animal Behavior was a rather unfunny comedy featuring some very good actors who probably signed on for a very different movie than the one that came to be. Karen Allen, Miss Marion Ravenwood herself, stars as Alex, a biologist who, like Dr. Jane Goodall, develops a “new” way to communicate with chimpanzees via sign language. Armand Assante plays a cellist who pursues the good doctor, and Holly Hunter plays the cellist's neighbor, who Alex mistakes for his wife.   Animal Behavior was filmed in 1984, and 1985, and 1987, and 1988. The initial production was directed by Jenny Bowen with the assistance of Robert Redford and The Sundance Institute, thanks to her debut film, 1981's Street Music featuring Elizabeth Daily. It's unknown why Bowen and her cinematographer husband Richard Bowen left the project, but when filming resumed again and again and again, those scenes were directed by the film's producer, Kjehl Rasmussen.   Because Bowen was not a member of the DGA at the time, she was not able to petition the guild for the use of the Alan Smithee pseudonym, a process that is automatically triggered whenever a director is let go of a project and filming continues with its producer taking the reigns as director. But she was able to get the production to use a pseudonym anyway for the director's credit, H. Anne Riley, while also giving Richard Bowen a pseudonym of his own for his work on the film, David Spellvin.   Opening on 24 screens on October 27th, Animal Behavior would come in 50th place in its opening weekend, grossing just $20,361. The New York film critics ripped the film apart, and there wouldn't be a second weekend for the film.   The following Friday, November 3rd, saw the release of The Stepfather II, a rushed together sequel to 1987's The Stepfather, which itself wasn't a big hit in theatres but found a very quick and receptive audience on cable.   Despite dying at the end of the first film, Terry O'Quinn's Jerry is somehow still alive, and institutionalized in Northern Washington state. He escapes and heads down to Los Angeles, where he assumes the identity of a recently deceased publisher, Gene Clifford, but instead passes himself off as a psychiatrist. Jerry, now Gene, begins to court his neighbor Carol, and the whole crazy story plays out again. Meg Foster plays the neighbor Carol, and Jonathan Brandis is her son.    Director Jeff Burr had made a name for himself with his 1987 horror anthology film From a Whisper to a Scream, featuring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager and Terry Kiser, and from all accounts, had a very smooth shooting process with this film. The trouble began when he turned in his cut to the producers. The producers were happy with the film, but when they sent it to Miramax, the American distributors, they were rather unhappy with the almost bloodless slasher film. They demanded reshoots, which Burr and O'Quinn refused to participate in. They brought in a new director, Doug Campbell, to handle the reshoots, which are easy to spot in the final film because they look and feel completely different from the scenes they're spliced into.   When it opened, The Stepfather II actually grossed slightly more than the first film did, earning $279k from 100 screens, compared to $260k for The Stepfather from 105 screens. But unlike the first film, which had some decent reviews when it opened, the sequel was a complete mess. To this day, it's still one of the few films to have a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Stepfather II would limp its way through theatres during the Christmas holiday season, ending its run with a $1.5m gross.   But it would be their final film of the decade that would dictate their course for at least the first part of the 1990s.   Remember when I said earlier in the episode that Harvey Weinstein meant with the producers of another British film while in London for Scandal? We're at that film now, a film you probably know.   My Left Foot.   By November 1988, actor Daniel Day-Lewis had starred in several movies including James Ivory's A Room With a View and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He had even been the lead in a major Hollywood studio film, Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars, a very good film that unfortunately got caught up in the brouhaha over the exit of the studio head who greenlit the film, David Puttnam.   The film's director, Jim Sheridan, had never directed a movie before. He had become involved in stage production during his time at the University College in Dublin in the late 1960s, where he worked with future filmmaker Neil Jordan, and had spent nearly a decade after graduation doing stage work in Ireland and Canada, before settling in New York City in the early 1980s. Sheridan would go to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where one of his classmates was Spike Lee, and return to Ireland after graduating. He was nearly forty, married with two pre-teen daughters, and he needed to make a statement with his first film.   He would find that story in the autobiography of Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, whose spirit and creativity could not be contained by his severe cerebral palsy. Along with Irish actor and writer Shane Connaughton, Sheridan wrote a screenplay that could be a powerhouse film made on a very tight budget of less than a million dollars.   Daniel Day-Lewis was sent a copy of the script, in the hopes he would be intrigued enough to take almost no money to play a physically demanding role. He read the opening pages, which had the adult Christy Brown putting a record on a record player and dropping the needle on to the record with his left foot, and thought to himself it would be impossible to film. That intrigued him, and he signed on. But during filming in January and February of 1989, most of the scenes were shot using mirrors, as Day-Lewis couldn't do the scenes with his left foot. He could do them with his right foot, hence the mirrors.   As a method actor, Day-Lewis remained in character as Christy Brown for the entire two month shoot. From costume fittings and makeup in the morning, to getting the actor on set, to moving him around between shots, there were crew members assigned to assist the actor as if they were Christy Brown's caretakers themselves, including feeding him during breaks in shooting. A rumor debunked by the actor years later said Day-Lewis had broken two ribs during production because of how hunched down he needed to be in his crude prop wheelchair to properly play the character.   The actor had done a lot of prep work to play the role, including spending time at the Sandymount School Clinic where the young Christy Brown got his education, and much of his performance was molded on those young people.   While Miramax had acquired the American distribution rights to the film before it went into production, and those funds went into the production of the film, the film was not produced by Miramax, nor were the Weinsteins given any kind of executive producer credit, as they were able to get themselves on Scandal.   My Left Foot would make its world premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival on September 4th, 1989, followed soon thereafter by screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th and the New York Film Festival on September 23rd. Across the board, critics and audiences were in love with the movie, and with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. Jim Sheridan would receive a special prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for his direction, and Day-Lewis would win the festival's award for Best Actor. However, as the film played the festival circuit, another name would start to pop up. Brenda Fricker, a little known Irish actress who played Christy Brown's supportive but long-suffering mother Bridget, would pile up as many positive notices and awards as Day-Lewis. Although there was no Best Supporting Actress Award at the Montreal Film Festival, the judges felt her performance was deserving of some kind of attention, so they would create a Special Mention of the Jury Award to honor her.   Now, some sources online will tell you the film made its world premiere in Dublin on February 24th, 1989, based on a passage in a biography about Daniel Day-Lewis, but that would be impossible as the film would still be in production for two more days, and wasn't fully edited or scored by then.   I'm not sure when it first opened in the United Kingdom other than sometime in early 1990, but My Left Foot would have its commercial theatre debut in America on November 10th, when opened at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City and the Century City 14 in Los Angeles. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would, in the very opening paragraph of her review, note that one shouldn't see My Left Foot for some kind of moral uplift or spiritual merit badge, but because of your pure love of great moviemaking. Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times spends most of his words praising Day-Lewis and Sheridan for making a film that is polite and non-judgmental.    Interestingly, Miramax went with an ad campaign that completely excluded any explanation of who Christy Brown was or why the film is titled the way it is. 70% of the ad space is taken from pull quotes from many of the top critics of the day, 20% with the title of the film, and 10% with a picture of Daniel Day-Lewis, clean shaven and full tooth smile, which I don't recall happening once in the movie, next to an obviously added-in picture of one of his co-stars that is more camera-friendly than Brenda Fricker or Fiona Shaw.   Whatever reasons people went to see the film, they flocked to the two theatres playing the film that weekend. It's $20,582 per screen average would be second only to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, which had opened two days earlier, earning slightly more than $1,000 per screen than My Left Foot.   In week two, My Left Foot would gross another $35,133 from those two theatres, and it would overtake Henry V for the highest per screen average. In week three, Thanksgiving weekend, both Henry V and My Left Foot saw a a double digit increase in grosses despite not adding any theatres, and the latter film would hold on to the highest per screen average again, although the difference would only be $302. And this would continue for weeks. In the film's sixth week of release, it would get a boost in attention by being awarded Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle. Daniel Day-Lewis would be named Best Actor that week by both the New York critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while Fricker would win the Best Supporting Actress award from the latter group.   But even then, Miramax refused to budge on expanding the film until its seventh week of release, Christmas weekend, when My Left Foot finally moved into cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Its $135k gross that weekend was good, but it was starting to lose ground to other Oscar hopefuls like Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, Enemies: A Love Story, and Glory.   And even though the film continued to rack up award win after award win, nomination after nomination, from the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild and the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, Miramax still held firm on not expanding the film into more than 100 theatres nationwide until its 16th week in theatres, February 16th, 1990, two days after the announcement of the nominees for the 62nd Annual Academy Awards. While Daniel Day-Lewis's nomination for Best Actor was virtually assured and Brenda Fricker was practically a given, the film would pick up three other nominations, including surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Jim Sheridan and co-writer Shane Connaughton would also get picked for Best Adapted Screenplay.   Miramax also picked up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape, and a Best Foreign Language Film nod for the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso, which, thanks to the specific rules for that category, a film could get a nomination before actually opening in theatres in America, which Miramax would rush to do with Paradiso the week after its nomination was announced.   The 62nd Academy Awards ceremony would be best remembered today as being the first Oscar show to be hosted by Billy Crystal, and for being considerably better than the previous year's ceremony, a mess of a show best remembered as being the one with a 12 minute opening musical segment that included Rob Lowe singing Proud Mary to an actress playing Snow White and another nine minute musical segment featuring a slew of expected future Oscar winners that, to date, feature exact zero Oscar nominees, both which rank as amongst the worst things to ever happen to the Oscars awards show.   The ceremony, held on March 26th, would see My Left Foot win two awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, as well as Cinema Paradiso for Best Foreign Film. The following weekend, March 30th, would see Miramax expand My Left Foot to 510 theatres, its widest point of release, and see the film made the national top ten and earn more than a million dollars for its one and only time during its eight month run.   The film would lose steam pretty quickly after its post-win bump, but it would eek out a modest run that ended with $14.75m in ticket sales just in the United States. Not bad for a little Irish movie with no major stars that cost less than a million dollars to make.   Of course, the early 90s would see Miramax fly to unimagined heights. In all of the 80s, Miramax would release 39 movies. They would release 30 films alone in 1991. They would release the first movies from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. They'd release some of the best films from some of the best filmmakers in the world, including Woody Allen, Pedro Almadovar, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Atom Egoyan, Steven Frears, Peter Greenaway, Peter Jackson, Neil Jordan, Chen Kaige, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von Trier, and Zhang Yimou. In 1993, the Mexican dramedy Like Water for Chocolate would become the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America, and it would play in some theatres, including my theatre, the NuWilshire in Santa Monica, continuously for more than a year.   If you've listened to the whole series on the 1980s movies of Miramax Films, there are two things I hope you take away. First, I hope you discovered at least one film you hadn't heard of before and you might be interested in searching out. The second is the reminder that neither Bob nor Harvey Weinstein will profit in any way if you give any of the movies talked about in this series a chance. They sold Miramax to Disney in June 1993. They left Miramax in September 2005. Many of the contracts for the movies the company released in the 80s and 90s expired decades ago, with the rights reverting back to their original producers, none of whom made any deals with the Weinsteins once they got their rights back.   Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence in upstate New York after being found guilty in 2020 of two sexual assaults. Once he completes that sentence, he'll be spending another 16 years in prison in California, after he was convicted of three sexual assaults that happened in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013. And if the 71 year old makes it to 107 years old, he may have to serve time in England for two sexual assaults that happened in August 1996. That case is still working its way through the British legal system.   Bob Weinstein has kept a low profile since his brother's proclivities first became public knowledge in October 2017, although he would also be accused of sexual harassment by a show runner for the brothers' Spike TV-aired adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Mist, several days after the bombshell articles came out about his brother. However, Bob's lawyer, the powerful attorney to the stars Bert Fields, deny the allegations, and it appears nothing has occurred legally since the accusations were made.   A few weeks after the start of the MeToo movement that sparked up in the aftermath of the accusations of his brother's actions, Bob Weinstein denied having any knowledge of the nearly thirty years of documented sexual abuse at the hands of his brother, but did allow to an interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter that he had barely spoken to Harvey over the previous five years, saying he could no longer take Harvey's cheating, lying and general attitude towards everyone.   And with that, we conclude our journey with Miramax Films. While I am sure Bob and Harvey will likely pop up again in future episodes, they'll be minor characters at best, and we'll never have to focus on anything they did ever again.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 119 is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

christmas united states america american new york california canada world thanksgiving new york city chicago lord english hollywood kids disney los angeles lost france england moving state americans british french san francisco new york times war society ms girl fire australian drama german stars fun batman ireland italian arts united kingdom detroit trip oscars irish bbc empire mexican sun camp superman pittsburgh joker kiss universal scandals lego cinema dvd mtv chocolate hole scottish academy awards funding metoo denmark secretary indiana jones indianapolis scream stephen king dublin xmen quentin tarantino labor day traffic golden globes aussie ghostbusters palace steven spielberg swing bars whispers lt major league baseball directed hughes promote lsu grammy awards christopher nolan new york university mist parenthood zack snyder cannes dc comics tim burton forty copenhagen richard branson right thing kevin smith los angeles times harvey weinstein spike lee hyde sanity best picture snow white santa monica sundance perkins film festival rotten tomatoes go go woody allen scandinavian peter jackson sam raimi apes ripper baton rouge christian bale mona lisa kevin bacon wes craven tarzan jekyll val kilmer elmo filmed arcane estes hooker sheridan hollywood reporter matt reeves lethal weapon swamp thing cannes film festival star trek the next generation robert redford best actor labour party nine inch nails mcdowell steven soderbergh vincent price aquila michael thomas best actress burr kenneth branagh best director jane goodall roger ebert trier rob lowe unbeknownst best films ebert writers guild billy crystal daniel day lewis last crusade national board westwood pelle when harry met sally paradiso loverboy rain man strange cases robert louis stevenson village voice university college spider woman toronto international film festival robert altman pretty in pink elephant man film critics bountiful honey i shrunk the kids criminal law hooch like water darkman erin brockovich dead poets society john hurt stepfathers ian mckellen spike tv best supporting actress james spader tisch school truffaut national society norman bates melrose place patrick dempsey dga holly hunter henry v columbia pictures miramax mpaa woolley siskel midnight express soderbergh john constantine anthony perkins stop making sense riveter andie macdowell keeler karen allen cinema paradiso neil jordan james mason best original screenplay best screenplay barbara crampton charlotte gainsbourg best adapted screenplay directors guild proud mary animal behavior annual academy awards belinda carlisle jean pierre jeunet driving miss daisy gotta have it new york film festival sundance institute spirit award heather locklear angel heart bernardo bertolucci profumo conquerer west los angeles bridget fonda peter gallagher movies podcast less than zero fiona shaw jim wynorski best foreign language film unbearable lightness philip kaufman century city fricker zhang yimou park city utah alan smithee captain jean luc picard peter greenaway meg foster atom egoyan dead poet spader james ivory kelli maroney armand assante special mentions taylor hackford best foreign film weinsteins jim sheridan jonathan brandis krzysztof kie jury award joe boyd meg tilly pretty hate machine day lewis clu gulager motion picture academy street music dimension films sarah douglas miramax films stephen ward doug campbell my left foot james belushi terry kiser new york film critics circle head like brenda fricker san giacomo entertainment capital laura san giacomo beverly center mister hyde bob weinstein david puttnam los angeles film critics association uslan louis jourdan atco records christy brown royal theatre chen kaige elizabeth daily world war ii france stephen gyllenhaal richard bowen wendy hughes greystoke the legend michael e uslan wynorski colin friels carnegie mellon school dick durock stephen woolley morgan mason monique gabrielle vincent canby
Trick or Treat Radio
TorTR #580 - Artificial Insinuation

Trick or Treat Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2023 154:51


An exploratory dive into the deepest depths of the psyche of a daring group of podcasters spirals into chaos when a malevolent video tutorial of smoking a joint threatens their mission and forces them into a high-stakes battle for their sanity. On Episode 580 of Trick or Treat Radio we discuss Meg 2: The Trench from director Ben Wheatley! We also discuss all the Meg's we know, we find out who is on the Mount Rushmore of the Five Star Stud Club, and we somehow talk a lot about Val Kilmer! So grab your futuristic underwater super suit, attenuate your attitude, and strap on for the world's most dangerous podcast!Stuff we talk about: Thanksgiving, Eli Roth, Patrick Dempsey, attenuate, CM Punk, TonyZero, stroking out on air, defrag your brain, MEGadeth, MEG Ryan, MEG Tilly, MEGatron, MEGaforce Records, Rolling Stones, Kids in the Hall, Val Kilmer, Top Secret!, Real Genius, Top Gun, The Doors, Oliver Stone, Peter Cushing, Mel Brooks, The Salton Sea, Danny Trejo, R. Lee Ermey, Jan-Michael Vincent, Vincent Schiavelli, Better Off Dead, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jibber Johnson, the Mount Rushmore of Five Star Stud Club, Don Knots, Paul Reubens, Larry Fine, Heart of Darkness, a collapsed whoopie cushion, VOID, going Septic, Ben Wheatley, Meg 2: The Trench, Jason Statham, John Turtletaub, Cool Runnings, 3 Ninjas, A Field in England, In the Earth, Free Fire, Stephen Scarlata, getting killed by a Megalodon, Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Sky Captain, Crank, The Transporter Films, Freddy vs. Jason Statham, action sack, Jet Ski, trigger warnings, Day of the Animal, Jurassic Park, Perpetrator, shenanigans, A-Listers, the Brothers' Warner, A.I.-Lister, smelling burnt toast, Sounds of Buttstuff, MediaShame, What We Do in the Shadows, Summer School, Nation of Attenuation, These are the Megs I Know, Avoid the Void, and Jason Statham Takes Manhattan.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trickortreatradioJoin our Discord Community: discord.trickortreatradio.comSend Email/Voicemail: mailto:podcast@trickortreatradio.comVisit our website: http://trickortreatradio.comStart your own podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=386Use our Amazon link: http://amzn.to/2CTdZzKFB Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/trickortreatradioTwitter: http://twitter.com/TrickTreatRadioFacebook: http://facebook.com/TrickOrTreatRadioYouTube: http://youtube.com/TrickOrTreatRadioInstagram: http://instagram.com/TrickorTreatRadioSupport the show

Vox Vomitus
Vince Liaguno, editor of "Unspeakable Horror 3: Dark Rainbow Rising"

Vox Vomitus

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2023 47:50


Vince Liaguno is an award-winning writer, anthologist and editor, and an occasional poet. Vince won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET (Dark Scribe Press 2008), an anthology of queer horror fiction, which he co-edited with Chad Helder. His debut novel, 2006's THE LITERARY SIX, was a tribute to the slasher films of the 80s and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) for Horror and was named a finalist in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category. Vince began writing professionally in 2005 for AUTOGRAPH, a national print magazine for enthusiasts of the titular hobby, where he remained an active contributor through 2009. In 2007, he launched DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE, where he has remained Editor-in-Chief since the virtual magazine's inception. His many profiles, interviews, and non-fiction pieces have included bestselling authors (Christopher Rice, Bentley Little, Tess Gerritsen, Chelsea Cain), award-winning actors (Julianne Moore, Kathy Bates, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meg Tilly), music artists (Cyndi Lauper, Terri Nunn of Berlin, the late Laura Branigan), and pop culture retrospectives on TV series such as MELROSE PLACE and WILL & GRACE. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, raised in the Princeton area of New Jersey, he now calls the snowy mitten-shaped state of Michigan his home. He is a member — and former Secretary — of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). https://www.vinceliaguno.com #VinceLiaguno #UnspeakableHorror #DarkRainbowRising VOX VOMITUS: Sometimes, it's not what goes right in the writing process, it's what goes horribly wrong. And VOX VOMITUS has been going “horribly wrong” in the best way possible for the past TWO YEARS! Host Jennifer Anne Gordon, award-winning gothic horror novelist and Co-Host Allison Martine, award-winning contemporary romance novelist have taken on the top and emerging new authors of the day, including Josh Malerman (BIRDBOX, PEARL), Paul Tremblay (THE PALLBEARERS CLUB, SURVIVOR SONG), May Cobb (MY SUMMER DARLINGS, THE HUNTING WIVES), Amanda Jayatissa (MY SWEET GIRL), Carol Goodman (THE STRANGER BEHIND YOU), Meghan Collins (THE FAMILY PLOT), and dozens more in the last year alone. Pantsers, plotters, and those in between have talked everything from the “vomit draft” to the publishing process, dream-cast movies that are already getting made, and celebrated wins as the author-guests continue to shine all over the globe. www.jenniferannegordon.com www.afictionalhubbard.com https://www.facebook.com/VoxVomituspodcast https://twitter.com/VoxVomitus #voxvomitus #voxvomituspodcast #authorswhopodcast #authors #authorlife #authorsoninstagram #authorsinterviewingauthors #livevideopodcast #livepodcast #bookstagram #Jenniferannegordon #allisonmartinehubbard #allisonmartine #allisonhubbard #liveauthorinterview #livepodcast #books #voxvomituslivevideopodcast #Jennifergordon --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/voxvomitus/support

The Horror Stans Podcast
Psycho 2 (1983)

The Horror Stans Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2023 51:26


Remember we all go a little mad sometimes and listen to episode 63 of The Horror Stans Podcast! For this one we are diving into the sequel to one of the most iconic films of all time with Psycho 2! Listen as we discuss if this film's underrated status is deserved, Anthony Perkins fantastic performance as legend Norman Bates, 80's slasher inspiration and Anthony Perkins vs. Meg Tilly? We hope you enjoy! Follow us on Instagram and Twitter: @horrorstans Tiktok: @horrorstanspodcast Steve- @screamsteve/ @stesta621 Matt- @mcavo92 Please if you can take some time to give us a review or 5 star rating it helps us out so much! We appreciate all of you!

Neon Brainiacs
301 - One Dark Night (1981)

Neon Brainiacs

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2023 86:59


We're getting spooky this week, maniacs, because we're discussing the 1981 Tom McLoughlin cult flick One Dark Night! Bringing us this weird slice of horror history is Fake Ritual podcast host Lucas Sloppy. Tune in as we dissect the movie and talk about other topics such as Great Value Andy Warhol, the return of an old show favorite, and a new unique insult we haven't heard before. Drop that Caramello and check out our Patreon! We resurrected an old bonus favorite and put together a mixtape draft of songs from teen comedy movies. For as little as $2 a month you can get in on the action as well with bonus episodes, Discord privileges, livestreams, exclusive merchandise and more! For more E.G. Daily, check out our episode on Better Off Dead (episode 100), for more Meg Tilly tune in to our episode on Psycho II (episode 149) and for more Adam West pop on our episode on Zombie Nightmare (episode 165).

Saturday Night Jive Podcast
333: "Gags And Goofabouts" - Moving Violations (1985)

Saturday Night Jive Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 13, 2023


This week on Saturday Night Jive we watched a movie starring Bill Murray...'s brother, not the one you're thinking of.  No, not that one either.  It's the John Murray classic Moving Violations.  Also starring Stacy Keach's brother, Meg Tilly's sister and an Academy Award worthy performance from the 'Where's The Beef?' lady.  This movie has it all.  Car chases, montages, a puppet van crashing into a funeral home, Fred Willard inspecting a lady like an automobile, an old lady sitting on a urinal, sex in a space simulator, animated clothes getting it on, and more.  Where exactly was the beef?  And should we still be avoiding The Noid?  All this and more on this week's episode.  Enjoy!Full archive of all podcast episodes available at saturdaynightjive.blogspot.comEmail us anything at saturdaynightjivepodcast@gmail.comDownload Here

That's So Gothic
Psycho II (026)

That's So Gothic

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2023 61:53


Dracula. The Mummy. Wolfman. Creature from the Black Lagoon. And creature from the Bates Motel. We discuss the return of classic Universal movie monster Norman Bates in Psycho II (1983) Dir. Richard Franklin. Screenplay by Tom Holland. Starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Meg Tilly, and Dennis Franz. Facts about Psycho II: https://www.eightieskids.com/completely-terrifying-facts-about-psycho-ii/ That's So Gothic releases episodes on the first and third Thursday every month. Email sogothicpod@gmail.com. Follow Chance and Amanda on Letterboxd @mrchancelee and @mcavoy_amanda. Instagram @sogothicpod Closing music "Gothic Guitar" by Javolenus 2014 - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)

History & Factoids about today
Feb 14th-Valentines Day, Mrs. Brady, Miss Moneypenny, Rob Thomas, Teller, Gregory Hines, Razzy Bailey

History & Factoids about today

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2023 15:04


Valentines day. Pop Culture from 1981. Oregan and Arizona became states, telephione invented, St. Valentines day massacre. Todays birthdays - Lois Maxwell, Florence Henderson, Vic Morrow, Razzy Bailey, Teller, Meg Tilly, Gregory Hines, D'wayne Higgins, Rob Thomas. Capt. Cook died.

The World Is Wrong
...about The Two Jakes (1990)

The World Is Wrong

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 27, 2022 124:58


Jack Nicholson directs and stars in the sequel to “Chinatown”.Directed by Jack Nicholson. Written by Robert Towne. Produced by Robert Evans. Starring Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Madeline Stowe, Meg Tilly, Ruben Blades, Frederic Forrest, Richard Farnsworth & Tracy Walter How is the world wrong about “The Two Jakes”? From Andras: You'd think people would be into a Roman Polanski-less “Chinatown” sequel but they were not. Nicholson manages to give us a continuation of Robert Towne's detective story about the evolution of Los Angeles that is simultaneously sleazier AND more compassionate than the original. If the world had been a little less wrong about this film we might've got a third installment, all about pollution and the LA freeway which, as Bryan points out in the episode, is kind of the plot of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”? which may be the closest we'll get to the completion of the Chinatown series.Here's the JJ Gittes site I referenced on the podcast as a resource for the information I shared: http://j-j-gittes.blogspot.com/Find all of our episodes at www.theworldiswrongpodcast.comFollow us on Instagram @theworldiswrongpodcast Follow us on Twitter @worldiswrongpodFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKE5tmbr-I_hLe_W9pUqXagFind all things Andras Jones at https://previouslyyours.com/ The World Is Wrong theme song written, produced and performed by Andras JonesCheck out: The Director's Wall with Bryan Connolly & AJ Gonzalez&The Radio8Ball Show hosted by Andras JonesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Disturbingly Pragmatic with Dave and Paul
Groom Shows Up to Wedding in a Casket, Woman's Rag Doll Husband Cheats On Her, and "I Wish I Didn't Know" Friday Night Trivia Time!

Disturbingly Pragmatic with Dave and Paul

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 26, 2022 52:11


This Episode has EVERYTHING!It's got:Happy Black Friday!Paul's back pimple!Lots of contact lenses!Paul loves pimple popping! Dave does not!"Chucky" Season 2 was wild!Happy belated Thanksgiving, our American friends!"The Goonies" House up for sale!Potatoes with a side of white supremacy!Dave hates weddings!Groom shows up in casket! What a straight guy thing to do!What?!?! He's GAY?!?!Negatively viral!A wedding at a funeral!Rag doll cheats on his wife!Think of the CHILDREN!Marcello is horny!Chimps are sexy!The book "It" is...um...sexual!Pee is delicious!Dead senses!Dumb texts!Episode Links (In Order):Woman has multiple contact lenses removed!Devon Sawa's death scene in "Chucky" Season 2!Ronnie Vino - It's Friday Night!"The Goonies" House is up for sale!"A Christmas Story" House is up for sale!Man shows up to his wedding in a casket!Woman marries cheating rag doll!Dating a Magician!Music Credit!Opening Music Graciously Supplied By: https://audionautix.com/ Visit Our Patreon! Email Us Here: Disturbinglypragmatic@gmail.comWhere To Find Us!: Disturbingly Pragmatic Link Tree!

The Horror Script Podcast
Chucky - Season 2: Episode 4

The Horror Script Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2022 69:56


We finally get to see the new characters Glen and Glenda. The entire episode is set up as a murder mystery with 5 different acts. Love it or hate we get it. Chucky has a small special appearance which is a little out of the norm as well. A nice surprise is getting to see Joe Pantoliano, Gina Gershon, and Meg Tilly as well as a couple other few reveals. This week, my guests are Brian and Ashley from the Killer Point of View Podcast. Check out their podcast for some horror and true crime pleasures. Check out our favorite coffee by clicking on our link: Four Sigmatic Please share the podcast with your friends on social media to help us grow. Leave us a great review on whatever platform you are listening. Check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Slasher. If you would like to watch our interviews, you can check out our YouTube channel. If you would like to ask us a question or make a suggestion for the show, send us an email at horrorscriptpodcast@gmail.com You can write us or record a voice memo of yourself asking the question and we can play it on an upcoming episodeSupport the show by picking up some Horror Script Podcast merchandiseIf you do reviews and interviews virtually try Squadcast for free by using our link below. You also help support the show by using it. Special thanks to John Saccardo and Vince Lipscomb for the amazing music. Support the show

ChuckyVision - A Chucky Podcast
Chucky S2E4 - Death On Denial

ChuckyVision - A Chucky Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2022 52:57


Welcome to CHUCKYVISION, a podcast about the horror franchise Child's Play and the main character, Chucky the Good Guy Doll.The second season of the Chucky TV series is halfway over! Dev and Mark are looking at the 8 part season episode by episode for the entire run on a weekly basis. In this episode, they enjoy the midway murder mystery starring Tiffany as Jennifer Tilly trying to find her beloved Nica while Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, Sutton Stracke, and Meg Tilly get in the way!Host: Mark AdamsCo-Host: Dev ElsonEditor: Dev ElsonExecutive Producer: Tony BlackTwitter: @ChuckyVisionWe Made This on Twitter: @we_madethiswemadethisnetwork.com Title music: At the Beginning (c) Dark Fantasy Studios

We Made This
Chucky S2E4 - Death On Denial

We Made This

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2022 52:57


Welcome to CHUCKYVISION, a podcast about the horror franchise Child's Play and the main character, Chucky the Good Guy Doll. The second season of the Chucky TV series is halfway over! Dev and Mark are looking at the 8 part season episode by episode for the entire run on a weekly basis. In this episode, they enjoy the midway murder mystery starring Tiffany as Jennifer Tilly trying to find her beloved Nica while Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, Sutton Stracke, and Meg Tilly get in the way! Host: Mark Adams Co-Host: Dev Elson Editor: Dev Elson Executive Producer: Tony Black Twitter: @ChuckyVision We Made This on Twitter: @we_madethis wemadethisnetwork.com Title music: At the Beginning (c) Dark Fantasy Studios

Homos on Haunted Hill
Episode 107 – Mother Still Knows Best ("Psycho II")

Homos on Haunted Hill

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2022 70:56


Kevin & Chris check into Bates Motel to discuss the woefully underappreciated legacy-sequel Psycho II (1983). The 'mos talk a middle-aged + recovering Norman Bates, the fabulous Meg Tilly & Vera Miles, a gothic whodunit mystery with twists galore, '80s slasher influences, behind-the scenes tension, Anthony Perkins's complex queer legacy, and more. Bonus topics include thoughts on Hellraiser, Smile, Chucky, The Midnight Club, and Bros. Halloween approaches! Connect with us on Patreon and social media for updates! Patreon (on hold right now): https://www.patreon.com/homosonhauntedhill Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homosonhauntedhill Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hohhpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/hohhpodcast

The History of Literature
449 Method Acting and "Bad Hamlet" (with Isaac Butler)

The History of Literature

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2022 55:59 Very Popular


We all talk about actors who use the Method, but do we really understand what that means? And how exactly has the Method changed the way we take in drama? In this episode, Jacke talks to theater expert Isaac Butler about his book The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. And in a special bonus, Isaac also tells Jacke about the Shakespeare variant known as "Bad Hamlet." Additional listening suggestions: 338 Finding Yourself in Hollywood (with Meg Tilly) 288 The Triumph of Broadway (with Michael Riedel) 374 Ancient Plays and Contemporary Theater - A New Version of Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy (with Bryan Doerries) The Best of the Bard: Top 10 Greatest Lines in Shakespeare Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SK8ER NEZ Podcast Network
E Society Podcast -31 Days of Horror: Psycho II (1983)

SK8ER NEZ Podcast Network

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2022 31:27


Nez back with the 1983 sequel PSYCHO II.   Two decades after the original murders at the Bates Motel, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) completes his treatment at a mental institution and returns home to find his hotel run down under the management of Warren Toomey (Dennis Franz). Despite a new friendship with a waitress (Meg Tilly) and a job busing tables at a diner, Norman begins to hear voices once again. No matter how hard he tries, Norman cannot keep "Mother" from returning and coaxing him to unleash the homicidal maniac within.   Hit up E Society on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/ESocietyPodcast/ Check out our ESP Anchor feed: https://anchor.fm/mac-nez E Society YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCliC6x_a7p3kTV_0LC4S10A E Society and Mac-Nez t-shirts Tee Public: http://tee.pub/lic/9ko9r4p5uvE Twitter: @esocietypod @macnezpod @TheoZissou Instagram: @esocietypodcast @thezissou @macnezpod Nez and Taylor Blu-ray IG pages: @bluraynez @blurayterror TikTok: @esocietypod

Horror 101 Podcast
Episode 126: Horror 101 - Episode 126: One Dark Night (1982)

Horror 101 Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2022 56:33


What do you get when a telekinetic vampire lays siege to a mausoleum from within his coffin during a cruel high school hazing stunt?  You get this movie, starring Meg Tilly and Adam West.  This is director Tom Mcloughlin's first film.  We hope you like our Horror 101 Treatment of One Dark Night from 1982.  Show Highlights:01:00 Prelude to Terror...04:30  Introducing the film...13:20  Raymar's Apartment...14:50  Sister's Initiation...18:20  Your father was no fake...22:30  Arriving at the Mausoleum...26:15  Terrorizing their Pledge...32:50  Raymar Awakes...37:30  Corpse Attack...40:40  Redirecting Energy...45:00  Scoring the Film...54:15  Conclusion!  Thanks for listening!

Kill By Kill
Psycho II (1983)

Kill By Kill

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2022 67:44 Very Popular


You can check in to the Bates Motel, but then you need to check out Kill By Kill as we explore the highly underrated PSYCHO II! Along the way we discuss how where Norman fits in Reagan's America, debate why the Bates' fruit cellar turns so many couples on, consider the erotic power of toasted cheese sandwiches, Patrick spills his behind-the-scenes A Christmas Carol cast stories, uncover the film's crooked path to the screen, unpack the film's deep sympathy for the plight of its characters within the movie, pine for a movie with a killer on rollerblades, and delve into that absolutely amazing final scene! All this, plus a fresh from the cupboard Choose Your Own Deathventure and we dig into one of the 80s best “ethereal weird girls” Meg Tilly! Listen to Mother and stay over with us today!! Never fear - new episodes of Kill By Kill are made available every other Friday! Dish By Dish: A Hannibal Rewatch on the Fridays in-between.  Our linker.ee Our TeePublic shop for killer merch is right here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/kill-by-kill-podcast?utm_campaign=18042&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=Kill%2BBy%2BKill%2Bpodcast%2B      Have something to say? Find us on Twitter @KillByKillPod Join the conversation about any episode on the Facebook Group! Follow us on IG @killbykillpodcast  Check out the films we've covered & what might come soon on Letterboxd! Get even more episodes exclusively on Patreon!   Follow our station on vurbl: https://vurbl.com/station/2bdTISeI3X/ Artwork by Josh Hollis: joshhollis.com Kill By Kill theme by Revenge Body. For the full-length version and more great music, head to revengebodymemphis.bandcamp.com today!

How Did This Get Made?
Music From Another Room

How Did This Get Made?

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2022 79:04 Very Popular


This week Jason, June and Paul are breaking down the 1998 romantic comedy, Music From Another Room starring Jude Law, Gretchen Mol, and Jennifer (not Meg) Tilly. The crew discusses how giving birth really works, Russian literature, ponder when and where this film takes place, and Paul is finally right for once.  HDTGM is going on tour! For tickets and info check out www.hdtgm.comFor more Matinee Monday content, check out Paul's Youtube pageHDTGM Discord: discord.gg/hdtgmPaul's Discord: https://discord.gg/paulscheerCheck out Paul and Rob Huebel live on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/friendzone) every Thursday 8-10pm ESTSubscribe to The Deep Dive with Jessica St. Clair and June Diane Raphael here: listen.earwolf.com/deepdiveSubscribe to Unspooled with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson here: listen.earwolf.com/unspooledCheck out The Jane Club over at www.janeclub.comCheck out new HDTGM merch over at https://www.teepublic.com/stores/hdtgmWhere to Find Jason, June & Paul:@PaulScheer on Instagram & Twitter@Junediane on IG and @MsJuneDiane on Twitter Jason is Not on Twitter

One of Us. a horrorshow
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

One of Us. a horrorshow

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 25, 2022 43:31


Three loofahs discuss Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the award-winning 1956, 1978, and 1993 films starring Kevin McCarthy, Donald Sutherland, and Meg Tilly.

Gaylords of Darkness
Episode 170 - Wicked Up

Gaylords of Darkness

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 13, 2022 59:51


Episode 170: Wicked Up The Gaylords go to sleep during Body Snatchers (1993)! Stacie and Anthony discuss worm tubes, Meg Tilly and Christine Elise, more Horror in the High Desert, and gaydar troubles before a vaguely redemptive new Chopping Block. Find out more at https://gaylords-of-darkness.pinecast.co

The History of Literature
421 HOL Goes to the Movies (A Best-of Episode with Brian Price, Meg Tilly, and Mike Palindrome)

The History of Literature

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2022 67:13 Very Popular


Summertime! The season for watching blockbuster movies in arctic conditions, heart-pounding suspense flicks that heat the blood, and cool-breeze dramas that stir the soul. In this best-of episode, Jacke celebrates the summer with portions of conversations with three previous guests, Brian Price, Meg Tilly, and Mike Palindrome. Additional listening suggestions: 135 Aristotle Goes to the Movies (with Brian Price) 338 Finding Yourself in Hollywood (with Meg Tilly) Alfred Hitchcock (with Mike Palindrome) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Literary License Podcast
Season 5\;Episode 248 - THE 80s: One Dark Night (1983)/ Lady In White (1988)

The Literary License Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2022 134:55


Lady in White (1988)   An American supernatural mystery film directed, produced, written and scored by Frank LaLoggia, and starring Lukas Haas, Len Cariou, Alex Rocco and Katherine Helmond. The plot follows a schoolboy in 1962 upstate New York who becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding a series of child murders after he witnesses the ghost of a young girl who was murdered in his school's coat closet.   Much of filming took place in Lyons, New York, which took advantage of the appropriate local lore and scenery. The story is based on a version of The Lady in White legend, concerning a woman who supposedly searches for her daughter in Durand-Eastman Park in Rochester, New York, where the director hails from.   One Dark Night (1983)   An American supernatural horror film directed by Tom McLoughlin and starring Meg Tilly, E. G. Daily, and Adam West. The film follows three teenagers sent to a mausoleum for the night as part of a high school initiation rite. A dead, telekinetic occultist returns from the dead and haunts them, forcing the three to survive the night inside the crypt. The film was conceived and filmed under the title Rest in Peace before Poltergeist, but due to post-production problems, the film was delayed and was released in theatres in 1983.  After a period of four years failing to sell the script to various studios McLoughlin and Hawes found a group of Mormon investors who were willing to finance the film for one million dollars on the condition that they started filming in three weeks.   Opening Credits/Introduction (01.52); With Nothing To Say Kitten Podcast (19.08); Oh My GOD!!! (19.39; One Dark Night Trailer (19.49); What's the Gag (22.21); That Is Like So Tubular (22.57); It Is Totally Rad (1:04.14);  Lady In White Trailer (1:04.48); Bodacious Talk (1:06.42); Firey Kitten Podcast (2:09.29); End Credits (2:10.04); Closing Theme (2:11.35)   Opening Credits– Planet Synth by Dan Hughes   Closing Credits – Did You Ever See A Dream Walking by Bing Crosby.  Taken from the album The Very Best of Bing Crosby.  Copyright 1933. Universal Classics.   Original Music copyrighted 2020 Dan Hughes Music and the Literary License Podcast.    All rights reserved.  With Kind Permission.   All songs available through Amazon.  

Forgotten Cinema
The Big Chill

Forgotten Cinema

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2022 68:20


The Mikes are going back to 1983 to sit down and have a long talk and hang out for the weekend. A "Big Chill" if you would. Get it?! That's right; Mike Butler and Mike Field are discussing the Lawrence Kasdan written and directed film The Big Chill, starring Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, Glenn Close, William Hurt, Tom Berenger, JoBeth Williams, Mary Kay Place, and Meg Tilly. What a cast! Field and Butler will talk about the amazing dialogue in this film and what the title is actually referring to. They also bring up fun facts about the movie such as that during the rehearsal process, the characters had a dinner where they all ate and talked in character. The Mikes also talk about a now-famous star whose fairly important role was left on the cutting room floor. So, grab your popcorn and soda, please notice the exits to the left and right of you and settle down for https://www.forgottencinemapodcast.com/ (Forgotten Cinema). 

Single Serving Cinema
SSC 17: The Big Chill (Kasdan, 1983) — Getting What We Need

Single Serving Cinema

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2022 69:38


Tim & Tay talk needle drops, the New Year, and old friends in this discussion about The Big Chill. Tune in to hear why this script is a great example of graceful exposition without the usual crutches.  SynopsisA once-close group of college friends reunites over the course of a weekend to mourn their departed friend, reflecting on how they and the world have changed since they were last together. The Big Chill, released Sept. 28, 1983, was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, and stars Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly and JoBeth Williams. The Big Chill is available to stream on Amazon Prime.Scene [13:35-19:45]As the central cast of characters departs from Alex's funeral, Karen begins playing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" on the organ, transitioning into a needle drop in the film that brings about a series of character interactions during the funeral procession.Links3:45 - The Big Bounce (Armitage, 2004)4:40 - New Year's Eve (Marshall, 2011)7: 25 - Lawrence Kasdan38:02 - How To Do Visual Comedy (Every Frame a Painting) 1:04:30 - GQ on Jeff GoldblumRecommendationsTim: Start your own film club!Tay: Le Déclin de l'empire américain (Arcand, 1986). Stream on HooplaAll links are verified at the time of publication and based on availability in Canada.Next episode: The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001). Stream on Disney+

Horror_Fan
Psycho II (1983) clips

Horror_Fan

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 3, 2021 25:47


Here are the movie clips from the 1983 horror & thriller movie Psycho II, based on the real-life serial killer, Ed Gein! Plot: Two decades after the original murders at the Bates Motel, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) completes his treatment at a mental institution and returns home to find his hotel run down under the management of Warren Toomey (Dennis Franz). Despite a new friendship with a waitress (Meg Tilly) and a job busing tables at a diner, Norman begins to hear voices once again. No matter how hard he tries, Norman cannot keep "Mother" from returning and coaxing him to unleash the homicidal maniac within. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Horror_Fan
Psycho II (1983)

Horror_Fan

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2021 113:25


Here's the full movie of the 1983 horror & thriller movie, Psycho II, based on the real-life serial killer, Ed Gein! Plot: Two decades after the original murders at the Bates Motel, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) completes his treatment at a mental institution and returns home to find his hotel run down under the management of Warren Toomey (Dennis Franz). Despite a new friendship with a waitress (Meg Tilly) and a job busing tables at a diner, Norman begins to hear voices once again. No matter how hard he tries, Norman cannot keep "Mother" from returning and coaxing him to unleash the homicidal maniac within. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Watching Movies at the Bar
PSYCHO II with BenDavid Grabinski

Watching Movies at the Bar

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 27, 2021 60:11


BenDavid Grabinski (HAPPILY, ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK, THOMAS' BROTHER) joins us to talk about the weirdly good Psycho II. A movie that has no right to be as good as it is. A movie that uses a lot of the same sets as Back to the Future. A movie that is, in many ways, about Meg Tilly's hair. This podcast is SEQUELS ONLY. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Suspense Radio
Interview with Meg Tilly

Suspense Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 8, 2021 39:11


Golden Globe winning actress Meg Tilly, is back with her latest book "The Runway Heiress." We are thrilled to have her on the show to talk about it and much more. She may be best known for her acclaimed Golden Globe-winning lead performance in the movie “Agnes of God,” but Meg Tilly is taking on an exciting new persona these days, as a romance novelist. After successfully publishing six standout young adult and literary women's fiction novels, the Canadian American actress/author decided to write the kind of books she loves to read—romance novels. She self-published SOLACE ISLAND, a romantic suspense set in the Pacific Northwest, to rave reviews in spring 2017. However, that experience taught her she's happiest when she's writing and not involved in the myriad tasks of publishing. She closed out 2017 by signing with Berkley Books for three novels, including a new, improved edition of SOLACE ISLAND, which was released in November 2018. Book 2 in Meg's series, CLIFF'S EDGE, was published in May 2019, and the series finale, HIDDEN COVE, in October 2019. Meg's latest novel, THE RUNAWAY HEIRESS, is a standalone novel set in the world of Hollywood. In this spin-off of Meg's Solace Island series, on the run from her estranged, police lieutenant husband, Sarah Rainsford assumes a new identity and lands a job as personal assistant to Hollywood golden boy director, Mick Talford. Soon their relationship becomes more than boss and employee, and Sarah and Mick join forces to keep her out of harm's way. But danger trails them. Will their desperate efforts be enough to keep them both alive? Meg's exciting new novel will be published July 27, 2021 as a mass market paperback, eBook and audiobook.