Podcasts about motion picture academy

Frame & Reference Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2024 69:37

Author, Poet, Screenwriter, and speaker Sarah Archer is joining Fika with Vicky this week for one of our Classic Conversations. This week we're focussing on the classic Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus which was written by Mary Shelley in 1818. There will be scandal, heart wrenching realities, lost love, and unwise loves. (Yes, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, I'm pointing at you.) And all that's before we even get to the novel. Please join us as we look into this work, by a 19 year old, that still has us enthralled over 200 years later. About Sarah Archer - Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for the screen. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship, the Tracking Board's Launch Pad, and the Austin Film Festival. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and reached the finals of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. She has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries, and interviewed authors around the world as a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. You can find her online at saraharcherwrites.com. About Fika with Vicky - Eternally curious about life, Vicky learned early that answers could be found in stories. Whether those stories were tales of ghosts told by her grandmother or read on Romper Room with milk and cookies, she found herself transported to other worlds. Reading to her own children, she developed an appreciation for picture books, and the illustrations that accompanied them. It was then that she realized great truths could be found with the simplest of words, and that children's books are not only for children. Through their reading she saw how vast the Juvenile and Young Adult genres had become, and the way in which they brought understanding to difficult topics. Having written her own stories, in Stick to the Story the Book, Vicky began to be interviewed. And that's when everything clicked. The idea that she could speak to the people behind the stories she loved, and learn more about them, was too tempting to ignore. Fika with Vicky was born in 2019, and with it a desire to share her passion for used book stores on rainy afternoons, folklore and fairytales, and those moments when an author solidifies all you've been thinking in one sentence. https://www.facebook.com/FikawithVicky

138: Michael Cioni, CEO & Founder of Strada

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2024 86:47

Today we're joined by my friend Michael Cioni to talk about his new company Strada. Michael is a serial entrepreneur who's career includes numerous awards for his creative work and technical achievements. He is an accomplished director, cinematographer, musician, four-time Emmy winner, member of the Motion Picture Academy, and Associate Member of the American Society of Cinematographers. A U.S. patent holder of digital cinema technology, Michael was the founder and CEO of the post house Light Iron where he pioneered tools and techniques that emerged as global workflow industry standards. After Light Iron was acquired by Panavision, Michael served as product director for Panavision's Millennium DXL 8K camera ecosystem. He then joined the cloud startup company Frame.io where he served as Senior Vice President of Global Innovation at Frame.io. After Frame.io was acquired by Adobe, Michael he leads numerous workflow innovations including the breakthrough Camera to Cloud technology program as Senior Director of Global Innovation. He continues to be motivated by the desire to democratize professional workflows and focuses his efforts on inventing new ways for filmmakers to create through his technology. Michael is a well known and gifted speaker, advocate for the community, and serves as a mentor and educator throughout the global media industry. Enjoy! Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.frameandrefpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for everything F&R You can directly support Frame & Reference by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buying Me a Coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coast's leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs. Check out ⁠⁠Filmtools.com⁠⁠ for more. ProVideo Coalition is a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post. Check out ⁠⁠ProVideoCoalition.com⁠⁠ for the latest news coming out of the industry.

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Bonus Episode: 2024 Oscar Recap

2 Movie Jews

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2024 40:14

Jodi and Yechiel dish it out on the 2024 Oscars. They share their suprises, favorite speeches, least favorite moments and tips for the Academy for next year.Check out Jodi's Oscar Blog for a full rundown on EVERY movie nominated for a 2024 Academy Award and her latest blog entry about the Oscar telecast and winners.Movies discussed where to watch them:Oppenheimer | PeacockAmerican Fiction | MGM+Poor Things | AmazonThe Zone of Interest | AmazonAnatomy of a Fall | AmazonKillers of the Flower Moon | Apple+Barbie | MaxThe Holdovers | PeacockJews on Film can be found on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyFollow us on Instagram and Twitter @2MovieJewsKeep Track of Jodie and Yechiel's movie watching and listsby following Jodi's Letterboxd Yechiel's LetterboxdHosted and Produced by: Yechiel Hoffman and Jodi BermanTechnical Advisor: Vlad KustanovichLogo Design: Daria Lesnik HoffmanMusical Theme: Noel Berman

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Fika With Vicky - Author Sarah Archer - A Louisa May Alcott Chat

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2023 61:41

This week on Fika with Vicky we're chatting about Louisa May Alcott, best known for her novel Little Women. Please join returning guest Author Sarah Archer and I, as we explore the incredible life and works of this author. Not only a novelist, but also a short story writer, poet, abolitionist, suffragette, transcendentalist, domestic help, tutor, and whatever it took to get by. Her's is an amazing story. A talented author herself, it's always a joy to have these chats with Sarah. Here's her Bio: Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship, the Tracking Board's Launch Pad, and the Austin Film Festival. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast, through which she co-wrote the novella Death by Podcasting. You can find her online at saraharcherwrites.com.

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Fika With Vicky - Author Sarah Archer - A Louisa May Alcott Chat

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2023 61:41

This week on Fika with Vicky we're chatting about Louisa May Alcott, best known for her novel Little Women. Please join returning guest Author Sarah Archer and I, as we explore the incredible life and works of this author. Not only a novelist, but also a short story writer, poet, abolitionist, suffragette, transcendentalist, domestic help, tutor, and whatever it took to get by. Her's is an amazing story. A talented author herself, it's always a joy to have these chats with Sarah. Here's her Bio: Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship, the Tracking Board's Launch Pad, and the Austin Film Festival. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast, through which she co-wrote the novella Death by Podcasting. You can find her online at saraharcherwrites.com.

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The Bloody Hand Of Halloweenery

The Dana Gould Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2023 229:45

It's that time of year again! It's mid October. The leaves are turning, there's a chill in the air and the whole world smells pumpkin spice, which, oddly, smells neither like pumpkin or spice, but what can you do? Regardless, all that stuff adds up to two very important things! It's time for our annual Halloween spectacular, and Target has already put up its Christmas shit. Well, tough toenails Target! We're sticking with Halloween up to, well, Halloween, which is really just the night before the countdown to next Halloween, so there! Aaron Lee is with us today. He is what you'd call a fellow traveler. A horror movie nerd, comic book fan and The Cramps devotee who has come to unburden his sympatico soul with us. Aaron is a hilarious writer who's been an essential writer on, among others, Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, the upcoming TED TV and so many more. But it's Halloween, so we're talking monsters, with Aaron Lee. Also, my very dear friend Bill Corso is here. Bill is one of the most famous and successful make-up men in Hollywood today. In addition to being the governor of the make-up branch of the Motion Picture Academy, he is also the personal make-up artist of Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford and so many others. Here to talk latex, glue and other fun things to sniff, it's Bill Corso! True Tales From Weirdsville is going to take you down to the basement and unearth the down and the dirty in the world of James Warren Publications, which gave the world Creepy Magazine, Eerie, Magazine, Vampirella Magazine and, of course, Famous Monsters Of Filmland Magazine. It's the weird and wonderful world of James Warren and Forrest Ackerman, two dudes who could not be more different if they tried to be.

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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 xmen dublin labor day quentin tarantino traffic golden globes ghostbusters aussie 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 santa monica sundance perkins snow white rotten tomatoes film festival go go woody allen scandinavian peter jackson sam raimi apes ripper baton rouge christian bale mona lisa kevin bacon wes craven tarzan jekyll elmo arcane estes hooker sheridan val kilmer hollywood reporter matt reeves lethal weapon swamp thing cannes film festival star trek the next generation robert redford labour party best actor nine inch nails mcdowell steven soderbergh vincent price michael thomas aquila 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 toronto international film festival university college spider woman robert altman pretty in pink elephant man film critics bountiful criminal law honey i shrunk the kids 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 john constantine midnight express siskel anthony perkins soderbergh stop making sense riveter andie macdowell keeler karen allen cinema paradiso neil jordan best original screenplay james mason best screenplay barbara crampton charlotte gainsbourg best adapted screenplay directors guild proud mary animal behavior annual academy awards belinda carlisle jean pierre jeunet gotta have it driving miss daisy new york film festival sundance institute spirit award angel heart bernardo bertolucci profumo conquerer west los angeles peter gallagher bridget fonda movies podcast less than zero fiona shaw best foreign language film unbearable lightness jim wynorski philip kaufman century city fricker zhang yimou park city utah captain jean luc picard peter greenaway alan smithee 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 jury award joe boyd krzysztof kie meg tilly pretty hate machine day lewis motion picture academy street music clu gulager dimension films sarah douglas miramax films my left foot doug campbell stephen ward james belushi terry kiser new york film critics circle brenda fricker head like san giacomo entertainment capital laura san giacomo beverly center mister hyde bob weinstein david puttnam los angeles film critics association louis jourdan atco records christy brown uslan royal theatre chen kaige elizabeth daily world war ii france stephen gyllenhaal richard bowen wendy hughes michael e uslan greystoke the legend carnegie mellon school dick durock colin friels morgan mason monique gabrielle vincent canby

419 -- Pixar President Jim Morris

The Allan McKay Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2023 53:00

Jim Morris is President of Pixar Animation Studios, where he oversees all of the company's productions and operations. Morris began working at Pixar in 2005. Films under his supervision include RATATOUILLE, UP, TOY STORY 3, CARS 2, BRAVE, MONSTERS UNIVERSITY, INSIDE OUT, THE GOOD DINOSAUR, FINDING DORY, CARS 3, COCO and INCREDIBLES 2. As a producer, Morris most recently made the live-action Disney feature JOHN CARTER with director Andrew Stanton. He also produced Pixar's WALL•E, which won the Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature. Morris was also awarded Producer of the Year in Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures from the Producers Guild of America, the AFI Award, the Golden Globe and the Visual Effects Society Best Animated Feature Award for WALL•E. Prior to joining Pixar, Morris held a range of key positions for 17 years in various divisions of Lucasfilm Ltd. He served as President of Lucas Digital Ltd., and managed its three divisions, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Skywalker Sound and Lucasfilm Animation. As ILM's General Manager for more than 13 years, he supervised a staff of over 1,400 artists and technicians, and guided the largest visual effects facility in the entertainment industry. With Morris' oversight, ILM created the groundbreaking and Academy Award®-winning visual effects in JURASSIC PARK, DEATH BECOMES HER, TERMINATOR 2 and FORREST GUMP. Other notable projects completed under his management include MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, TWISTER, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, STAR WARS: EPISODE I, STAR WARS: EPISODE II, THE PERFECT STORM, PEARL HARBOR, MINORITY REPORT, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, MASTER AND COMMANDER, and three films in the HARRY POTTER series. Morris joined ILM in 1987 as a Producer of visual effects for films and commercials. Among Morris' producing credits are James Cameron's THE ABYSS (which earned the Academy Award® for Best Achievement in Visual Effects), and Steven Spielberg's ALWAYS. Before joining ILM, Morris was Executive Producer at Arnold & Associates, where he oversaw the company's three offices and produced commercials for clients such as Atari, Chevron and Mattel. Prior to that, Morris was Executive Producer at One Pass, where he headed the commercial production division. He also served in the production departments at advertising agencies J. Walter Thompson, and Foote, Cone & Belding in San Francisco. Morris worked as a producer and director for PBS, and began his career as a cameraman and editor at NBC. Morris is the recipient of the Producers Guild Digital 50 Award, the Visual Effects Society Board of Directors Award and the Visual Effects Society Founders Award. He has also been named a VES Fellow. Morris served for many years as President of the San Francisco Film Commission, and is Founding Chair of the VES. He is a member of AMPAS, PGA, BAFTA, VES and ASIFA, and currently serves as a member of Motion Picture Academy's Finance Committee. Morris earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Film and a Master of Science degree in Television/Radio from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. In this Podcast, Allan McKay interviews Pixar's President Jim Morris about his career both at ILM and Pixar; working with legendary Directors such as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Andrew Stanton and Robert Zemeckis; behind-the-scenes and Innovations of JURASSIC PARK and FORREST GUMP; the unpredictable magic of live action projects; how limitations inspire VFX inventions; and why “Problems aren't an impediment to the job. Solving problems IS the job.” For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/419.

america director president master disney science film san francisco innovation bachelor harry potter nbc cars films academy awards general managers brave pixar pbs golden globes terminator morris jurassic park steven spielberg coco executive producer toy story mission impossible james cameron pga inside out abyss pearl harbor forrest gump atari bafta mattel syracuse university incredibles chevron twister perfect storm wall e ratatouille attack of the clones minority report vfx robert zemeckis pirates of the caribbean saving private ryan john carter finding dory ilm foote visual effects ves death becomes her finance committee pixar animation studios good dinosaur monsters university best animated feature newhouse school master and commander producers guild andrew stanton jim morris walter thompson founding chair ampas lucasfilm ltd skywalker sound motion picture academy asifa lucasfilm animation best achievement afi award director's award television radio allan mckay

Miramax Films - Part Four

The 80s Movies Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2023 42:19

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

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Fika With Vicky & Author Sarah Archer Chat About Alice Munro - August 10, 2023

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2023 62:13

Fika with Vicky's returning guest this week is Author Sarah Archer. We'll be chatting about our mutual admiration for Alice Munro, and sharing thoughts on writing, life, and relationships, found in her work and interviews. Alice Munro, known as a master of short stories, was born and grew up in Southern Ontario, Canada. Her writing is honest, and not always comfortable. encouraging you to examine the story you're living in. If you're looking for an example of an authentic voice, you'll find it in her work. Ms. Munro won the Nobel prize in Literature, in 2013. You can find a full biography for Alice Munro here: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2013/munro/biographical/ About Sarah Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship and the Tracking Board's Launch Pad. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. No, I haven't found the exact word to describe Sarah's writing, but I am willing to keep reading her work until I do. I believe this is one of those, “It's all about the journey,” things. And this journey, so far, has been remarkable. You can find Sarah's website at: https://saraharcherwrites.com/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/archersarahp Twitter: https://twitter.com/SarahArcherM Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SarahArcherWrites/ Charlotte Readers Podcast: https://charlottereaderspodcast.com/ Writers without Borders: https://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/series/wwb/

canada uk japan germany ms snapchat literature writers nobel borders comedy central putnam launchpad munro booklist southern ontario fika alice munro motion picture academy nicholl fellowship sarah archer tracking board charlotte readers podcast

Fika With Vicky & Author Sarah Archer Chat About Alice Munro - August 10, 2023

Foxfire Farmhouse: the Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2023 62:13

Fika with Vicky's returning guest this week is Author Sarah Archer. We'll be chatting about our mutual admiration for Alice Munro, and sharing thoughts on writing, life, and relationships, found in her work and interviews. Alice Munro, known as a master of short stories, was born and grew up in Southern Ontario, Canada. Her writing is honest, and not always comfortable. encouraging you to examine the story you're living in. If you're looking for an example of an authentic voice, you'll find it in her work. Ms. Munro won the Nobel prize in Literature, in 2013. You can find a full biography for Alice Munro here: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2013/munro/biographical/ About Sarah Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship and the Tracking Board's Launch Pad. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. No, I haven't found the exact word to describe Sarah's writing, but I am willing to keep reading her work until I do. I believe this is one of those, “It's all about the journey,” things. And this journey, so far, has been remarkable. You can find Sarah's website at: https://saraharcherwrites.com/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/archersarahp Twitter: https://twitter.com/SarahArcherM Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SarahArcherWrites/ Charlotte Readers Podcast: https://charlottereaderspodcast.com/ Writers without Borders: https://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/series/wwb/

canada uk japan germany ms snapchat literature writers nobel borders comedy central putnam launchpad munro booklist southern ontario fika alice munro motion picture academy nicholl fellowship sarah archer tracking board charlotte readers podcast

For the Love of Movies (RRR)

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2023 56:37

If you smashed "The Fox and the Hound", "Ip Man", and "Braveheart" together in a blender and threw in a musical dance number for good measure, you might just get "RRR" one of Josh and Elijah's favorite films from 2022. Aside from gaining recognition for being the most expensive movie production in India at the time of its release, it also caught the attention of the Motion Picture Academy, achieving them an Oscar for best original song. Listen in to this week's episode to hear Josh and Elijah's thoughts on the movie and how it encourages virtuous brotherhood across cultures. For more movie recommendations and commentary, go to our website, www.FoxfireFarmhouse.com. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for future episode topics, reach out to us on Facebook or Instagram or email us at josh@foxfirefarmhouse.com. Cheers!

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Fika with Vicky and Author Sarah Archer Chat about Ray Bradbury

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2023 61:54

Our Guest this week is Author Sarah Archer. We'll be discussing one of our favourite authors, Ray Bradbury. And focusing on his books Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This way Comes, and Zen in the Art of Writing. “Ray Bradbury 1920 - Forever During a career that spanned seventy-plus years, he wrote more than 400 short stories and nearly fifty books across a variety of genres. He also penned numerous poems, essays, plays, operas, teleplays, and screenplays, making him one of the most productive and admired writers of our time, as well as one of the most widely translated in the world.” From - https://raybradbury.com/ Sarah Archer Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship and the Tracking Board's Launch Pad. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast You can find Sarah's website at: https://saraharcherwrites.com/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/archersarahp

art uk japan germany writing snapchat zen comedy central fahrenheit ray bradbury putnam launchpad booklist fika motion picture academy dandelion wine nicholl fellowship sarah archer tracking board

Fika With Vicky And Author Sarah Archer Chat About Ray Bradbury

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2023 61:54

Our Guest this week is Author Sarah Archer. We'll be discussing one of our favourite authors, Ray Bradbury. And focusing on his books Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This way Comes, and Zen in the Art of Writing. “Ray Bradbury 1920 - Forever During a career that spanned seventy-plus years, he wrote more than 400 short stories and nearly fifty books across a variety of genres. He also penned numerous poems, essays, plays, operas, teleplays, and screenplays, making him one of the most productive and admired writers of our time, as well as one of the most widely translated in the world.” From - https://raybradbury.com/ Sarah Archer Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship and the Tracking Board's Launch Pad. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast You can find Sarah's website at: https://saraharcherwrites.com/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/archersarahp

art uk japan germany writing snapchat zen comedy central fahrenheit ray bradbury putnam launchpad booklist fika motion picture academy dandelion wine nicholl fellowship sarah archer tracking board

Episode 227: Hoes of History: Bette Davis

The Homance Chronicles

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 23, 2023 72:40

Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. Often referred to as “The First Lady of the American Screen,” Bette Davis created a new kind of screen heroine. She was a liberated woman in an industry dominated by men. She was known as an actress that could play a variety of difficult and powerful roles, and because of this she set a new standard for women on the big screen. With a career total of more than 100 films, Bette changed the way Hollywood looked at actresses. In 1977, she was the first woman to be honored with the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. She was also the first woman to be president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. NEW MERCH! Shop on Etsy Email us: homancepodcast@gmail.com Connect with us: https://linktr.ee/homance Instagram: @homance_chronicles

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Fika With Vicky Welcomes Guest Sarah Archer February 9th, 2023

Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2023 61:35

Visiting from Concord, North Carolina, our guest this week is author Sarah Archer. There's something earthy, twisty, and impactive about Sarah's writing. I actually laughed out loud, while reading The Plus One, and yet her poem Salem has inspired the mantra, “Those bearing stones will not crush me,” for a certain type of day. Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship and the Tracking Board's Launch Pad. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. No, I haven't found the exact word to describe Sarah's writing, but I am willing to keep reading her work until I do. I believe this is one of those, “It's all about the journey,” things. And this journey, so far, has been remarkable. You can find Sarah's website at: https://saraharcherwrites.com/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/archersarahp Twitter: https://twitter.com/SarahArcherM . Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SarahArcherWrites/ Charlotte Readers Podcast: https://charlottereaderspodcast.com/ Writers without Borders: https://writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/series/wwb/

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A Recipe for Change Feat. Valerie Van Galder, CEO of Depressed Cake Shop

Coming From the Heart

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2023 61:00

Meet my friend, Valerie Van Galder, a mental health advocate and the CEO of Depressed Cake Shop, a 501(c)(3) organization that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and priceless awareness for charities around the world. In addition to her work with Depressed Cake Shop, Val is also on the Board of Directors for St. Joseph Center in Venice, California and is a member of the Motion Picture Academy. Val's mission with Depressed Cake Shop is “to bake the world a better place by raising mental health awareness”. Taking a mental health break saved her life, and she reflects upon her and her family's personal struggles with mental health. As we chat further, we discover Val's "superpower" is giving a voice to those who experience mental health conditions and make sure they don't have to encounter the same difficulties she had. Thank you, Val, for sharing your journey as an accomplished, award-winning, and versatile executive with over 25 years of experience in publicity, film marketing, producing, journalism, social media and brand building experience. Thank you Val for being on the podcast! We thoroughly enjoyed hearing your stories on running the Hard Rock Cafe under founder Peter Morton, and your time on the marketing team for Searchlight Pictures and Sony Screen Gems. We're excited to have you be a part of the CFTH community, and are looking forward to our future Women's Health Collaboration in April! You can follow Val and Depressed Cake Shop on Instagram @depressedcakeshop, and you can read more about Depressed Cake Shop's platform on their website, depressedcakeshop.org. Please join our community and follow us on: Instagram: @coming_fromtheheartpodcast Twitter: @cfthpodcast Facebook: Coming From the Heart Podcast https://www.comingfromtheheart.net/ Please subscribe, rate, review, & share with the ones closest to your hearts! Shout out to our amazing sound engineer Alex Wiederock (@ajwiede on Instagram) for editing the podcast! Intro music: The Podcast Intro by Music Unlimited, from Pixabay Outro music by Alex Wiederock --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/comingfromtheheartpodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/comingfromtheheartpodcast/support

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Dont Be A Sell Out - With Acclaimed Documentary Filmmaker Robert Richter

America Speaks Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2022 38:16

Few documentary producers have received as many honors: National Emmy for "exceptional merit in nonfiction filmmaking"; ten Richter credited films honored by Motion Picture Academy; three DuPont Columbia Broadcast Journalism awards (TV's Pulitzer Prize); Distinguished Science Reporting Award from AAAS (American Academy for Advancement of Science); Peabody Awards; many US and international film festival awards; critical acclaim in the New York Times and other major papers. Robert Richter's documentaries have been telecast in prime time on HBO, PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, TBS, Discovery, BBC and many other major overseas television outlets. Robert Richter has received several Oscar nominations and has made or helped to make over 90 films. In his early years, he was at CBS covering U.S. national politics and producing Walter Cronkite's acclaimed nightly news. Robert has released his new book a few months ago titled DOCUMENTARIES AND SERENDIPITY sold on Amazon.com Please also listen to Robert's previous interview on America Speak https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/americaspeakspodcast/_KFSR_RR_FINAL_05.04.18_01.mp3 And https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/americaspeakspodcast/_KSFR_RR2_5.10.18_01.mp3

The Myth that MAGA is Driven by "White Rage"

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2022 44:25

No matter how justified you think it is, prosecuting someone for what lives inside their minds and hearts is a road to ruin. It's even worse than that. It's a road to moral panics that lead to systematic dehumanization that wrecks whole societies. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg might have been selling secrets to the Soviets but that didn't mean everyone in America who ever supported Marxist ideology was a traitor. Fear of what you can't see leaves it up to your imagination, and when it comes to human beings, that is an unreliable source. Systematic dehumanization meant that newly freed slaves had to be turned into existential threats to an otherwise pristine uoptia in the South. They were thieves, murderers and rapists. In Nazi Germany, Jews were parasites, draft dodgers, and uniquely evil. It's been decided that Trump supporters, or MAGA, are all angry white men. They are an existential threat because inside their minds and hearts is the unique evil of racism. This has never been questioned. It is a fear that has become a certainty across all institutions, culturally and politically, not just on the Left but on the Establishment Right. That is the kind of rot that must live inside the mind and heart of Hillary Clinton so that she could casually compare working class people to Nazi Germany. She saw them raising their hands to Trump without looking a little more closely to see that wasn't the Nazi salute but cell phones.Trump supporters have no status. They don't have a net worth of $120 million, or an Apple-TV show, or a house in Chappaqua, New York. They've been beaten, spit on, screamed at, demonized, and called every name imaginable from Nazi to Fascist to Racist, and now to “domestic extremist,” “insurrectionist,” “election deniers.” Even before Trump won, the Left believed their violence against Trump supporters was justified: We can survive political differences. We can't survive this. What I realized over the past few years as I've gotten to know the world of MAGA it's that we have a choice: assume the worst about people or give them the benefit of the doubt.I would like to say I would give Hillary the benefit of the doubt. After all, I was the person who made this sign and marched along with millions for the Women's March:But with a teenager possibly run down and smeared as a “Republican extremist,” with Biden's militant fascist speech, with a death threat on Justice Kavanaugh's life, all running parallel to a dangerously politicized Department of Justice, I'm much too concerned with the fate of the country to worry about protecting Hillary one more time.White men and women are the new existential threat to the Left. But it is existential, not based on skin color. Black men can be “white supremacists in BlackFace,” like Larry Elder. Non-white women can be “Far Right Latinas” like Mayra Flores. Black women can be viciously attacked and trend for days on Twitter, like Candace Owens, receiving none of the protection she would get from the “antiracists.” Steve Bannon's secret weapon is that he knows MAGA isn't driven by “white rage.” He's been actively engaged in building a coalition of working-class Black and Hispanic voters, or what he calls “inclusive, participatory, nationalist populism” for at least five years. Anyone who dips a toe into MAGA Land quickly sees it's not about racism at all. It's driven more by class and yes, by Judeo-Christianity. From a story on Breitbart:“We've got to start having access to capital to black and Hispanic entrepreneurs,” Bannon said.During the financial crisis, Bannon said that the Wall Street class were taken care of by the government but that the smaller banks got crushed since many of them loaned money to working-class people who didn't get rescued by the government.“The elites took care of themselves,” he said.Bannon said that he was putting together a “task force” of black and Hispanic entrepreneurs to help them build their communities.That, he explained, was the way to evolve the Republican party into a working-class party for all Americans.“That's why the media and that's why the Democrats are freaked out about that,” he said.Up until recently, Christianity was the beating heart of this country that united most Americans by roughly 80%. I was never raised with any kind of religion because I am a child of the Left. Most Conservatives, though, don't look to politics for their collective sense of purpose. They look to God. This might explain why all of a sudden a new term has been dropped into the mix to demonize the MAGA movement: White Christian Nationalism:Only recently has the idea of someone being a Christian become a clear and present threat to the newfound religion of the Left. Says a story in Politico by Stella Rouse and Shibley Telhami:Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right.Prominent Republican politicians have made the themes critical to their message to voters in the run up to the 2022 midterm elections. Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, has argued that America is a Christian nation and that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia hard-liner, declared: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I'm a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.” Amid a backlash, she doubled down and announced she would start selling “Christian Nationalist” shirts. Now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to be flirting with Christian nationalist rhetoric, as well.Always pivoting to racism is a convenient out for the Biden administration, which is disgraceful. But it's also a great way to sabotage this country, to keep us weak and divided. Although they don't yet realize it, the Left is gambling with its own existence. They're hoping to solve our population decline with the migrants flooding in from mostly Latin American countries. Most of the countries are rooted not in Wokeness but in Catholicism. Democrats believe they will be so grateful they'll vote Blue no matter who, but are they so sure about that?By hanging their entire platform on urging women to see abortions as no big deal, or even an act of empowerment, they're flirting with disaster if America begins to rise once again as a Christian nation, thanks to the influx of millions of new migrants. Not to mention most of them are likely to be socially conservative, which will run counter to the platform of the new Left.With declining sperm counts and fertility rates, not to mention population decline our future will not be siding with those who have the most abortions, but with those who have the most babies. It's simple math. Awaiting the RaptureUnless you were part of it, it's hard to explain the rapture most of us experienced when Obama rose to power. It was not just pure love for him, or that he had so much charisma, no scandals or baggage, a perfect family, or that he'd graduated from Harvard and had such sophisticated tastes, it was the idea that America had its first Black president. A new religion was born. For my generation and the one that came before, growing up without religion was cool. Only Republicans were church goers. Boomers traded their Christian upbringings in the 1950s for a cultural renaissance in the 1960s, Black Power, the Feminist movement, Civil Rights - it all exploded outward, away from traditional religion.As children of the “me” generation, we helicopter parents were spiritually adrift, aimless, and emotionally destroyed. We sought fulfillment in self-help therapy, where we talked about the abuse we suffered at the hands of narcissistic parents. We had Oprah every day at 3 pm where we worked out all of our problems as a society. Then came the McMartin preschool scare, Columbine, and 9/11. By the turn of the millennium, we were dealing with one threat after another. A 24-hour news cycle thanks to the OJ Trial, and now, the internet would provide us with second-to-second input of all the threats everywhere. We were primed and ready for one person to rise and give us all a collective sense of purpose. That person was President Barack Obama and the Obama coalition he built mostly online, Twitter specifically. As our kids took to the internet to escape our nonstop attentive coddling, an entire generation came of age as social media natives. They were forging new virtual identities, with new rules and new ways of seeing and identifying themselves with one another. What better way to do that than by skin color, gender, or victim status? If you were marginalized, you were protected. If you weren't, you were an oppressor; therefore, it was open season. For white kids without any cultural identity, gender became their way of distinguishing themselves from “cis-gendered, hetero-normative, colonizing white supremacists.”To them, identity was and is everything. They absorbed our growing fear about the rise of racism in America, which took root in 2008, with Conservatives like Steve Schmidt and John McCain concluding Sarah Palin was a xenophobic warrior for the White Race. We see this epiphany play out in the HBO movie Game Change. And just like that, the birth of the Never Trump movement and the idea that there were “good” Republicans and “bad” Republicans, and all of it was based on racism, was born. It just so happened that The Tea Party was challenging the whole system, Democrats and Republicans alike, who had sold out the country with a $700 billion bank bailout and bad trade policies. How convenient, then, to target them as racists: And when Trump questioned Obama's birth certificate, what else could that be, we all thought, except blatant racism? Obama graciously supplied a copy of his birth certificate but then mocked Trump publicly at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The two locked horns in 2011, and we're still watching a battle between Obama's America and Trump's. It also has morphed into a war between the Great Awokening and the Judao-Christian ethic. Many of the Zoomers, children of the newly Woke religious Left, grew up with the certainty that America was not only a systemically racist country, but they were living among millions of their fellow Americans who were racists. The social justice movement that now dominates the Left began in virtual hives on social media. Those kids went to the indoctrination factories our universities have become, grew up, joined the workforce and essentially did to America in 2020 what a group of activists did to Evergreen University. The Democrats, like the administration at Evergreen, the people who run the Motion Picture Academy, and all other members of the 1% buckled under the pressure. The New “Red” ScareIf history had gone differently, a moral panic in America in 2022 might have looked like another Red Scare. A discovery of Harvard professors selling information to the Chinese Communist Party, colliding with the virus from Wuhan, not to mention a near-complete takeover of our manufacturing jobs, might have set Americans on edge that Communists were once again at the gates. But look at the date. January 28, 2020. The focus wasn't on China, Chinese spies, or even the COVID pandemic, which was just starting to make its way into the United States. Americans were in the grips of a different kind of moral panic.This moral panic is destroying us in all ways, turning us against ourselves and making us much more vulnerable and weak to our adversaries. Russia, China, North Korea or any major enemy of the United States would no doubt have figured out that there was one surefire way to bring the most powerful country in the world to its knees: accusations of racism. The Chinese have our number. They even have a special name for it:Sooner rather than later, we'll need leadership that can't be so easily undone, that isn't given to nonstop fits of mass hysteria. We need a steady hand to guide this ship at such a dangerous time. MAGA LandAt some point in 2020, I found myself staring at my Twitter feed and had what I can only describe as blood poisoning. There was so much hate - it was in my heart, it was in my veins. I just could not live with it anymore. I decided I had to find out - was it true, were they really racists?I'd already experienced what it was like to be called a racist. When I pointed out on Twitter that not all Asian hate crimes were “white supremacy,” members of my own community targeted me as a white supremacist. It didn't matter that I'd spent at least ten years advocating for Black artists to win Oscars on my website. It made no difference. I was seen only by my identity as a white woman online. I then decided to take a trip to MAGA Land. I began following a youtube site called Right Side Broadcasting. They are Christian-based and staunchly pro-life. Each video begins with an image of a fetus in the womb. They hold weekly prayer meetings and live stream all of Trump's rallies. They usually set up early in the day and begin recording as the crowd begins to form. Hours later, the music plays - the same song introducing Trump to the crowd. … And I'm proud to be an AmericanWhere at least I know I'm freeAnd I won't forget the men who diedWho gave that right to meAnd I'd gladly stand up next to youAnd defend Her still today'Cause there ain't no doubtI love this landGod Bless the U.S.A.Then Trump finally shows. He often has a handful of red hats that he tosses out into the crowd. Trump's speeches are almost always the same. They're funny. He tells jokes, a lot of the time, at his own expense. In the old days, back in 2016, his speeches were much darker and angrier. Now, they aren't. Being banned from Twitter seems to have changed Trump for the better. This is a cautionary tale of the evils of a social media algorithm that feeds off of outrage and hysteria.You can't dip a toe in MAGA land and come away seeing it as a movement driven by racism, not if you're being honest. That tells you a lot already about what kind of media class we have in this country, that they were leading the charge for what has become shameful, systematic dehumanization of a whole group of people with no benefit of the doubt, no due process, no path to redemption. But the truth still matters, even if it's met with a tsunami of mass hysteria and moral panic. I have watched every Trump rally since he began holding them in 2020 - every single one — and not only is the MAGA movement not driven by “white rage,” but they are far more diverse and multicultural than the media or the Democrats seem to believe. And these Trump supporters I follow on TikTok:And if you want to know why so many Latinos are flipping red? So if it's not about racism, what's it about? Well, Ungar-Sargon has an idea: She has been fearless in her efforts to bridge the divide between the mass hysteria on the Left and the working class on the Right. She and Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Megyn Kelly, Walter Kirn, and Tulsi Gabbard have maintained their objectivity, humanity, empathy, and willingness to see the bigger picture.As Matt Taibbi often points out, we seem to be missing the old-school lefties like William Kunstler, who would defend Civil Liberties at all costs. Now, only one remains—Alan Dershowitz, who has taken on the lost cause of Mike Lindell. Lindell is a hero in MAGA land and a joke to high-status folks like Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart. A man whose life was nearly ruined by addiction found God and started not just a charity, but a business called My Pillow. When you see how beloved Lindell is with MAGA, much of it is to do with their shared faith, that cross that hangs around his neck. He, like Trump, gives them hope. These are people not driven by hate or rage, but by love. For people who had been shut out of every part of American culture, demonized for six long years, called the worst names imaginable, not welcomed in many places, lost friends and family, they somehow haven't lost their hope and their optimism. A lot of that has to do with Trump, believe it or not. He's one thing they haven't been able to take away from them. As enemies of the state - they have plenty of reasons to be angry. We saw some of that on January 6th. But 2020 was a year that broke people. Only one group was ever held accountable for losing it, even though Trump supporters pride themselves on being non-violent. Now, the state has managed to intimidate them to prevent them from using their Constitutional right to protest. But to take love of country away from people whose entire identity is wrapped up in patriotism seems to me an act of unimaginable cruelty. However, they still have a vote, and if they turn out in large enough numbers, they can have more of a voice in DC.MAGA voters have every reason to be mean and bitter. But you know what? It's people like Hillary Clinton, the Never Trump Republicans, and most in the media and on blue-check Twitter who have become the mean and bitter ones, abandoning basic human decency in their desire to eliminate a group of people they see as an existential threat to their otherwise pristine utopia. But, as with the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, they will soon learn that what MAGA voters care about most is not something they can't take away. I don't know what Hillary saw. My guess is that she was looking for what she wanted to see, not what was really there. If she watched a MAGA rally, really watched it, she would not see miserable people, upset that they aren't allowed into the country club, or mouth-frothing Nazis. Instead, she'd see mostly happy people, like the Whos in Whoville. That is happiness that only comes when your mind and your heart are free.So if you want to understand MAGA start there. Plenty of people gravitate to Trump for different reasons - a rebellious spirit, their religious faith, but what unites them as a movement is love of country. Nationalism is not itself fascism or even racism. James Strock's Substack focuses on the need for an invigorated new nationalism, writing:What a calling is to an individual, nationalism can be to a commonwealth. It can be a source of solidarity. It's expressed over space and time through a unifying narrative. From history it derives values and experiences that can inform our navigation of the present. These elements yield a vision for conjuring and creating a future.Our moral panic that there are racists, racists everywhere is nowhere near finished. At the very least, however, we must vote out those politicians who are primed and ready to convict people on what they think exists inside their minds and hearts. Liz Cheney and the January 6th Committee will continue Joe Biden's ignorant campaign to use racism as the justification for their authoritarian show trial, and politicization of the DOJ. History will shame them for it.Ultimately, though, the way I figure it, hate eventually exhausts itself. Love wins. Get full access to Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone at sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

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Michael Long: The Molecule Of More - Author, Writer, Educator

PhysioChains Education

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 22, 2022 36:06

It was an absolute honor to talk with Michael Long! Michael Long is a writer and educator. Actor and author Ben Stein calls him “a poet.” Mr. Long is the co-author of The Molecule of More, a Number Ten Bestseller at Amazon and a Number Two Bestseller as an audiobook at Audible. He is also a winner for two consecutive years of the Neil LaBute New Theater Festival. In addition, Mr. Long has collaborated on several non-fiction books and has been published three times in Vital Speeches of the Day, twice for speeches he delivered. As director of writing for the graduate program in public relations at Georgetown University, he created the original writing curriculum there and continues to teach courses in professional and creative writing, as well as speechwriting. He has also led reading programs for children of migrant farm workers, taught remedial mathematics to adults, designed writing curriculum for Columbia University, and delivered guest lectures on humor at American University and at the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University. He has taught writing to audiences around the U.S. and in London, Lisbon, Panama, Paris, Saskatchewan, The Hague, and in a seminar and keynote at Oxford University. In addition, he is the resident writing coach for the Professional Speechwriters Association (PSA), which publishes “Prose for Pros,” his long-running weekly column on writing. Mr. Long's career as a writer began while he was a graduate student in physics at Vanderbilt University when he began performing comedy, becoming a house emcee for one of the oldest comedy clubs in America. His first job as a writer off-stage was sole speechwriter to one of America's highest-profile senators. * Mr. Long has written remarks for members of congress, U.S. cabinet secretaries, governors, diplomats, business leaders, CEOs, and presidential candidates. In addition, he has served as chief speechwriter for the largest trade association in the world, and contributes to numerous print publications and websites. His seminar clients include Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, The Panama Canal Rev Aug 31 2022 1 Authority, the Premier's Office of the Government of Saskatchewan, Target Corporation, the United States Navy, the United States Secret Service, and the speechwriting team for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A provocative speaker and writing educator, he has appeared as a guest on CNBC and Good Day New York with Greg Kelly. He is also an occasional commentator on CBC News: Morning with Heather Hiscox in Canada. Beyond his work in politics and policy, he has been consulted for material in The Onion and for Saturday Night Live. * In addition to writing on business and public policy, Mr. Long is an often- honored writer of stage plays and screenplays. He was a winner for two consecutive years in the Neil LaBute New Theatre Festival for his dramas Color Timer and The Gettier Problem. In addition, more than 20 of his one-acts have been festival selections around the nation, most often on New York City stages. He is a five-time winner of “best of festival” honors in the Players Theatre Short Play and Musical Festival in Greenwich Village: three times for the thrillers Hostages, Catchpole, and Details, and twice for the romantic comedies Brad Pitt and The Test. He was a finalist for the Grand Prize for Screenwriting at the Slamdance Film Festival for his screenplay How to Save Your Own Life; the script was also a Top 15 percent finisher for the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship. In addition, How to Save... was chosen as a finalist in competitions at the Vail Film Festival, the Creative World Awards, and the World Series of Screenwriting. A stage version of the show was produced in a two-week run at Manhattan Repertory Theater.

Fostering Innovation at Scale with Barbara Ford Grant Ep 29

CG Pro Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2022 64:56

Barbara Ford Grant is President, NEP Prysm Stages, a business of NEP Virtual Studios. She is responsible for growing NEP's global network of permanent virtual production facilities, stage partnerships and client relationships in Film and TV, and for building solutions with her team to empower artists and storytelling.Barbara has contributed to media and entertainment for nearly 30 years across both creative and technical aspects of film production. Her experience includes emerging technologies, large-scale production operations, research and development, visual effects, animation and enterprise level management. Before joining NEP, Barbara was Chief Technology Officer at arts and entertainment company Meow Wolf overseeing the company's mixed-reality platform and IT divisions. Before Meow Wolf, she served as SVP, Digital Production Services at HBO overseeing studio production and post-production operations and growth, and next-gen technologies. Prior to that, she worked at entertainment companies Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and DreamWorks Animation, where she enabled new digital human animation and rendering, digital story and post production workflows, and simulations technologies. Her credits include groundbreaking Film and TV productions Game of Thrones, Maleficent, Alice in Wonderland and the Shrek franchise. Barbara has been active throughout her career in recognizing and mentoring current and new talent. She is a member of both the Television Academy and the Motion Picture Academy, currently serving as Chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee, is a member of the Technology Committee of the Visual Effects Society, and recently worked as a strategy consultant to MovieLabs, a non-profit R&D joint venture providing universities, corporations, start-ups and others technical guidance and funding for innovative technologies in the distribution and use of motion pictures. She studied Art History and Photography at the University of New Mexico and currently lives in Los Angeles with her family. Highlights of the Episode:0:23 Introduction to Barbara Ford Grant1:19 Journey into visual effects7:11 Coding16:28 Starting in New Mexico20:45 What it's like working on….24:16 Is it possible to retain creative spirit in a bigger institution31:38 The hardest part to scale34:10 Role as President of NEP Prysm Stages39:02 Currently working in Production40:43 Building tools independent of the engine43:51 Having a healthy R&D team48:41 Stage plans for the New York Metro area48:56 Opportunities to see the Atlanta stage50:19 Favorite aspects in virtual production53:08 Machine learning AI tools coming out1:01:39 A short film1:02:57 Being multi disciplinary Quotes: "If you've been in visual effects this long nothing drives you're more crazy than rebuilding the same asset over and over again for a different purpose." - Barbara Ford Grant "The advantage of a big company is that they were the IP and the advantage of a small company is they were kind of a punk scrappy collective that kinda started the whole thing." - Barbara Ford Grant "It's a sketch with technology, they're sketching out something that's never been sketched before and using some amounts of technology to help illustrate that." - Barbara Ford Grant “It's not about policy it's like what's necessary, what's actually gonna have the biggest impact.” - Barbara Ford Grant “Maintaining our passions is important to our career growth.” - Barbara Ford Grant Connecting with the Guest:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbaraanneford/Instagram: @barbarafordgrantTwitter: https://twitter.com/barbarafordgra1?lang=en Connecting with CG Pro:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/becomecgproInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/becomecgpro/Website: https://www.becomecgpro.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/edgevisualCG RSVP here for upcoming CG Pro Podcasts: https://www.eventbrite.com/o/cg-pro-39748423833 #virtualproduction #filmmaking #innovation

Please Look Up and Follow The Money

The Jesse Ventura's Independent Streak Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2022 28:25

Welcome to the Independent Streak Podcast, only on Jesse Ventura's Die First, Then Quit. Here we showcase candidates, activists, and influencers who are fighting to bring something new, fresh, and game changing to the worlds of politics and pop culture.On this episode, Gov. Jesse Ventura sits down with the award winning journalist and screenwriter, David SirotaDavid Sirota, the journalist, author, and Academy Award nominated screenwriter, has made an illustrious career shining a light on the corruption, graft, and downright lunacy found in both U.S. politics and Wall Street. Dubbed a “new generation populist” by famed columnist Molly Ivins, Sirota's fearless investigative journalism and unique voice as a writer has not only uncovered shady deals between corporate power and public institutions it also landed him on the 2020 campaign trail where he worked as a speech writer for Sen. Bernie Sanders during his run for President. Staying ever vigilant to his profession, 2020 also witnessed Sirota launch The Lever, a reader supported, online news outlet dedicated to bringing true independent investigative journalism to its subscribers. Most recently, he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay by the Film and Motion Picture Academy for his work, along side director Adam Mckay, on the Netflix smash hit, Don't Look Up.David Sirota embodies exactly what the Fourth Estate was originally meant to be, the people's watchdog against government corruption and oppression. This makes him the perfect guest for this edition of the Independent Streak Podcast, only on Jesse Ventura's Die First, Then Quit. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jesseventura.substack.com/subscribe

Movie Money Confidential - Navigating Film Finance in the Streaming World

Filmmakers On

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 3, 2022 48:35

RICK PAMPLINScreenwriter and motion picture director Rick Pamplin spent the early years of his career as an award-winning print and broadcast journalist (CBS News) in Michigan before heading to Hollywood. He spent 18 years in Los Angeles, writing and selling movies to Warner Bros., Walt Disney Pictures and Universal Studios, writing and directing on the syndicated TV series GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986) and writing and directing his first feature film Provoked (1989).Pamplin left to begin an independent production company at Universal Studios Florida where he developed, wrote and directed a series of award-winning projects including Michael Winslow Live (1999), Hoover (2000) starring Academy Award-winner Ernest Borgnine, Magic 4 Morons (2000) also starring Winslow and A Dog's Life: The Oscar Lose Story (2008).The original screenplay for "Hoover" is included in the permanent collection of the Motion Picture Academy library in Los Angeles. Pamplin has been nominated on "Best Director" ballots by the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, among other recognition, awards and achievements.Films and television shows written and/or directed by Rick Pamplin are currently in distribution worldwide and have been seen theatrically, on premium cable and commercial television, on multiple streaming and on-demand sites, on DVDs, digital downloads and other formats, generating millions and millions of dollars of revenue.Pamplin created, wrote and directed his latest feature-length documentary Movie Money CONFIDENTIAL (2022) featuring Burt Reynolds and Salma Hayek, inspired by the Louise Levison book "Filmmakers & Financing." Worldwide distribution rights were acquired by Kaczmarek Digital Media Group (KDMG) for a March 2022 release.Currently Pamplin is writing and directing a new documentary feature film for distributor KDMG for release in 2022. After that, he will also write and direct four new independent feature films, a comedy, a documentary and two dramas, slated for production in 2022-25.Support the show

Ep. 22-144 - Permanent Stain

The Kevin Jackson Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2022 38:40

In this episode, real estate scandal involving the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The first of many Jan 6 acquittals to come. The slap comes with a ten year ban and a stain on the Motion Picture Academy.

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Inside Edition for Friday, April 8, 2022

World News Roundup Late Edition

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2022 19:02

It's judgment day for Will Smith. Today, the Motion Picture Academy banned the actor from attending any future Oscar events- for the next decade. Jim Moret was outside Oscar headquarters as the punishment came down. And there is a video of a man being shot to death by his ex-wife's boyfriend… and since the whole thing was caught on tape you would think it would be an open and shut case against the shooter. But he's not facing any charges… and the dead man's widow tells Steven Fabian she is heartbroken. Plus, it's day two for Tiger Woods' big comeback at the Masters and he struggled a bit compared to day one. Something to be expected considering his car crash injuries… but one of those rooting for Tiger is the sheriff's deputy who was credited with saving Tiger's life. And carjacking's have been on the rise during the pandemic- and the crime wave continues. Across the country, brazen thieves are targeting drivers to steal their vehicles- and far too often young children end up being put in danger.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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WORLD NEWS ROUNDUP LATE EDITION: 04/08

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2022 5:37

Despite its denial, the U.S. says Russia was behind the rocket attack on a Ukrainian train station that killed at least 50 people. Actor Will Smith is banned from the Oscars and other Motion Picture Academy events for 10 years following the infamous Chris Rock slap. A Jury fails to convict four men in the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan's governor. And Capitol riot plea deals are made. CBS News Correspondent Jennifer Keiper reports in tonight's World News Roundup Late Edition.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Inside Edition for Monday, April 4, 2022

russia ukraine russian oscars cnn will smith strike fuel chris rock kyiv zelensky volodymyr zelenskyy confirm ordering depot wolf blitzer motion picture academy

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2022 9:44

What in heaven's name is going on in America? It seems no matter where you are…crime is on the upswing. Inside Edition reports on a lady who is one of the victims. She says she'll never come back to Manhattan after she says she was tripped on purpose just trying to go to a Broadway show. And Will Smith may have preempted one possible sanction from the Motion Picture Academy by resigning from the organization before they could ban him. Meantime, Denzel Washington, one of the stars who tried to keep the calm after that Oscar slap is talking about the meltdown. Plus, while the Oscars barely acknowledged the war in Ukraine, Grammy producers not only featured a tribute to the Ukrainian people…President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a surprise appearance. And the State Department says 70% of the drugs that come into the United States does so by Mexico…and some Americans on a birdwatching trip south of the border thought they may have gotten in the way of that trafficking. As Ann Mercogliano reports, they were on a back road looking for wildlife when they got the fright of their lives. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Radio Killed the Podcasting Star

Verge of the Fringe

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2022

Hey Dude, while listening to KPCC on the radio, I heard a mashup episode of Snap Judgement and Love + Radio, featuring Nick van der Kolk interviewing Glynn Washington. The whole thing made me trip on the blurred lines between podcasting and radio.QUOTE: "I freakin' love radio."CHARACTERS: Will Smith, Chris Rock, Nick van der Kolk, Glynn Washington, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Evo Terra,Tee Morris, Tim Coyne, Lightnin' Hopkins, Les Blank, Muddy Waters, Howlin' WolfSETTINGS: Wawona, Ukraine, Altadena, Los Angeles, The Brewery Art Colony, Barbara's at the BreweryPODCASTS/RADIO: Verge of the Fringe, Love + Radio, KPCC, Snap Judgement, Podcast Hall of Fame, Dawn and Drew, Keith and the Girl, Podcasting for Dummies, Podiobooks, Podcamp, Podcast Movement, National Public Radio, Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, SiriusXMTHINGS: Kombucha, Motion Picture Academy, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Every Grain of Sand, Blowin' in the Wind, Blues, Video Killed the Radio StarSOUNDS: Laguna Sawdust Cowbell Chimes footsteps, birds, jet, freeway, virgin cocktail, hornGENRE: storytelling, personal narrative, personal journalPHOTO: "Wawona Podcast Studio" iPhone XSRECORDED: April 2, 2022 from the "Wawona Lawn" under the flight path of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, CaliforniaGEAR: Sony ICD PX370 digital voice recorder and Sony ECM CS3 "tie-clip" microphone.HYPE: "It's a beatnik kinda literary thing in a podcast cloak of darkness." Timothy Kimo Brien (cohost on Podwreckedand host of Create Art Podcast)DISCLAIMER/WARNING: Proudly presented rough, raw and ragged. Seasoned with salty language and ideas. Not for most people's taste. Please be advised.

Radio Killed the Podcasting Star

Verge of the Dude

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2022 18:46

Hey Dude, while listening to KPCC on the radio, I heard a mashup episode of Snap Judgement and Love + Radio, featuring Nick van der Kolk interviewing Glynn Washington. The whole thing made me trip on the blurred lines between podcasting and radio. QUOTE: "I freakin' love radio." CHARACTERS: Will Smith, Chris Rock, Nick van der Kolk, Glynn Washington, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Evo Terra, Tee Morris, Tim Coyne, Lightnin' Hopkins, Les Blank, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf SETTINGS: Wawona, Ukraine, Altadena, Los Angeles, The Brewery Art Colony, Barbara's at the Brewery PODCASTS/RADIO: Verge of the Fringe, Love + Radio, KPCC, Snap Judgement, Podcast Hall of Fame, Dawn and Drew, Keith and the Girl, Podcasting for Dummies, Podiobooks, Podcamp, Podcast Movement, National Public Radio, Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, SiriusXM THINGS: Kombucha, Motion Picture Academy, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Every Grain of Sand, Blowin' in the Wind, Blues, Video Killed the Radio Star SOUNDS: Laguna Sawdust Cowbell Chimes footsteps, birds, jet, freeway, virgin cocktail, horn GENRE: storytelling, personal narrative, personal journal PHOTO: "Wawona Podcast Studio" iPhone XS RECORDED: April 2, 2022 from the "Wawona Lawn" under the flight path of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California GEAR: Sony ICD PX370 digital voice recorder and Sony ECM CS3 "tie-clip" microphone. HYPE: "It's a beatnik kinda literary thing in a podcast cloak of darkness." Timothy Kimo Brien (cohost on Podwrecked and host of Create Art Podcast) DISCLAIMER/WARNING: Proudly presented rough, raw and ragged. Seasoned with salty language and ideas. Not for most people's taste. Please be advised.

Zelensky Won't Confirm Or Deny Ordering Fuel Depot Strike Inside Russia

CNN Tonight

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2022 40:42

Ukraine's President Zelensky refuses to confirm or deny ordering an airstrike which resulted in a direct hit on a Russian fuel depot containing millions of gallons of fuel. That, as satellite images show Russian forces are gone from an airport outside of Kyiv, now the site of Ukraine's first big victory. And, the next round of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia resume, with Zelensky's chief of staff telling CNN he has a “very, very small portion of optimism”. Plus, Ukrainian Parliament Member Oleksandra Ustinova speaks out about the death of her best friend's husband, killed by Russian shelling, Will Smith resigns from the Motion Picture Academy after slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars and the U.S. is to provide $300 million more in security assistance to Ukraine. Hosted by Wolf Blitzer. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

Zelensky Won't Confirm Or Deny Ordering Fuel Depot Strike Inside Russia

Don Lemon Tonight

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2022 40:42

Ukraine’s President Zelensky refuses to confirm or deny ordering an airstrike which resulted in a direct hit on a Russian fuel depot containing millions of gallons of fuel. That, as satellite images show Russian forces are gone from an airport outside of Kyiv, now the site of Ukraine’s first big victory. And, the next round of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia resume, with Zelensky’s chief of staff telling CNN he has a “very, very small portion of optimism”. Plus, Ukrainian Parliament Member Oleksandra Ustinova speaks out about the death of her best friend's husband, killed by Russian shelling, Will Smith resigns from the Motion Picture Academy after slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars and the U.S. is to provide $300 million more in security assistance to Ukraine. Hosted by Wolf Blitzer.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

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Kremlin Blames Ukraine For Strike On Russian Fuel Depot

Don Lemon Tonight

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2022 78:56

The Kremlin accuses Ukraine of attacking a fuel depot inside Russia, but President Zelensky refuses to confirm or deny if he ordered the airstrike. That, as new satellite images confirm Russian forces have apparently abandoned their positions at a key air base just outside of Kyiv. Plus, Odessa is hit with Russian missiles, western sanctions in Russia kick in, how the west is using intelligence in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and Will Smith resigns from the Motion Picture Academy after the Oscars slap. Hosted by Don Lemon, live From Lviv. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

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Taking The Oscars Online, And Talking With Topico CEO Andy Walraven

Bloom in Tech

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 2, 2022 46:47

There's been a whole lot of talk about That Slap, but I'm more interested in what happens to the Oscar broadcast now that the Motion Picture Academy has embraced streaming enough to hand out awards for Best Picture, Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and other major categories for projects that were mostly or solely online. How long will Oscar remain a broadcast event, rather than one that is mostly streamed online? And what more can you do once the event is online? I have a few ideas. I also talk with Andrew Walraven, CEO and founder of a very interesting free mobile app called Topico, that allows you to create a very different kind of newsfeed than the one on social media that's been so problematic. Topico focuses on, yes, topics rather than the people or outlets posting the story, and relies on only vetted real news sources, with no user-generated content, memes, videos, etc. It's an intriguing approach to one of journalism's worst problems, and I quite like it. Give a listen. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/davidlbloom/support

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Inside Edition for Thursday, March 31, 2022

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Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2022 17:26

Multiple standing ovations for Chris Rock as the funnyman appears in his first standup shows since being slapped by Will Smith. He provided lots of laughs…however, he said he wouldn't be talking much about the incident. Meantime, the Motion Picture Academy says it will be disciplining Smith…saying immediately after the assault, Smith was asked to leave and he refused. And while Smith waits to find out what action the Academy might take…others wait to see what the impact might be on the new Oscar winner's career. As Jim Moret reports, at least one of his former co-stars says, he'll never work with him again.Plus, did Bruce Willis' cognitive challenges put others on the movie set at risk? Now that his family has gone public with his aphasia diagnosis, disturbing stories of his troubles on set are emerging, including one from two years ago when more than once Willis allegedly fired a prop gun loaded with a blank on the wrong cue. And 20 years ago she married her dream man - but not in her dream dress. Now all these years later she's doing an “I do” redo. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Inside Edition for Wednesday, March 30, 2022

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2022 19:02

Stunning news today about one of Hollywood's most popular stars. Bruce Willis' family has revealed he's been diagnosed with a devastating brain condition that is affecting his cognitive abilities. As a result, they say he is stepping away from his acting career. And Chris Rock is in Boston today where he'll be taking the stage tonight for a sold out show kicking off his comedy tour. It is his first sighting since Oscar night. Meantime the Motion Picture Academy board is meeting today to decide what consequences - if any - Will Smith should face for his act of violence. Plus, it's always a story with a happy ending when the victim in a dramatic rescue gets to watch it all play out on television. And that's exactly what Scooby the dog who didn't drown is doing today. And the Oscars smackdown that's been making headlines all started with a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's cropped hair. Others with the hair loss syndrome say they can understand why a gag about hair hit so close to home for the Smiths.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mel Damski - Acclaimed Film Director & Columnist Ep. #89

A Mick A Mook and A Mic

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 30, 2022 75:58

Few people in the entertainment business have achieved the level of success of Mel Damski. The versatile New York born director has helmed some of America's finest work in television; M* A*S*H, LOU GRANT, BOSTON LEGAL and PYSCHE …to MOW's, BADGE OF THE ASSASIAN, A WINNER NEVER QUITS (starring Keith Carradine and Ed O'Neil) … to AMERICA'S BABY: THE RESUCE OF JESSICA MC CLURE.Mel's feature films include YELLOWBEARD, starring the lads from Monty Python, to MISCHIEF. Mel won an Academy Award for his documentary, STILL KICKING; THE FABULOUS PALM SPINGS FOLLIES. He also has numerous Emmy Award nominations.A former Newsday reporter, Mel writes a column, If I Ran The Zoo, which was recently awarded first place by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association. His columns can be found at IfMelRanTheZoo.com.Mel is a member of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Director's Guilds of America and Canada.

Inside Edition for Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Bill Oâ€™Reillyâ€™s No Spin News and Analysis

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 30, 2022 19:29

What will they do to Will? That's the question a lot of people in Hollywood are asking now that the Motion Picture Academy has launched a formal review of Will Smith's assault on Chris Rock. Smith has apologized to rock via social media - but as Jim Moret reports its anyone's guess whether that will smooth things over. And while the Academy figures out what action if any to take against Smith, people who make their living being funny have a new concern…are they in danger the next time they make a wisecrack? Plus, a somber day for Britain's royal family as they gather at Westminster Abbey for prince Phillip's memorial. The queen's husband died last year. And in what could be an indicator of just how wide the rift is in the royal family, Harry and Meghan were not there. And no doubt you've noticed…things cost more even though they've been downsized.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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The O'Reilly Update, March 29, 2022

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 29, 2022 12:44

Major news networks provide cover for Hunter Biden, the Motion Picture Academy opens a formal investigation into Will Smith, Disney challenges Florida's new education law, a survey reveals the most stressed-out states in the country. Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, truth, lies, and videotape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Mayhem and Drama at the Academy Awards. Talking with Shaun Chang of the Hill Place Movie and TV Blog.

The San Francisco Experience

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 29, 2022 39:13

The 94th Academy Awards was one for the history books to paraphrase Chris Rock, one of the presenters. The best actor award went to Will Smith for his starring role in King Richard. But the Motion Picture Academy is weighing whether to sanction Smith. Jessica Chastain won best actress for The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Best film went to Coda. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/james-herlihy/message

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Inside Edition for Friday, March 25, 2022