Podcast appearances and mentions of patricia rozema

This week, we continue out look back at the films released by Miramax in the 1980s, focusing on 1987. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, concentrating on their releases from 1987, the year Miramax would begin its climb towards the top of the independent distribution mountain.   The first film Miramax would release in 1987 was Lizzie Borden's Working Girls.   And yes, Lizzie Borden is her birth name. Sort of. Her name was originally Linda Elizabeth Borden, and at the age of eleven, when she learned about the infamous accused double murderer, she told her parents she wanted to only be addressed as Lizzie. At the age of 18, after graduating high school and heading off to the private women's liberal arts college Wellesley, she would legally change her name to Lizzie Borden.   After graduating with a fine arts degree, Borden would move to New York City, where she held a variety of jobs, including being both a painter and an art critic for the influential Artforum magazine, until she attended a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard movies, when she was inspired to become a filmmaker herself.   Her first film, shot in 1974, was a documentary, Regrouping, about four female artists who were part of a collective that incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, as the collective slowly breaks apart. One of the four artists was a twenty-three year old painter who would later make film history herself as the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.    But Regrouping didn't get much attention when it was released in 1976, and it would take Borden five years to make her first dramatic narrative, Born in Flames, another movie which would also feature Ms. Bigelow in a supporting role. Borden would not only write, produce and direct this film about two different groups of feminists who operate pirate radio stations in New York City which ends with the bombing of the broadcast antenna atop the World Trade Center, she would also edit the film and act as one of the cinematographers. The film would become one of the first instances of Afrofuturism in film, and would become a cultural touchstone in 2016 when a restored print of the film screened around the world to great critical acclaim, and would tie for 243rd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films Ever Made. Other films that tied with include Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. A   Yes, it's that good, and it would cost only $30k to produce.   But while Born in Flames wasn't recognized as revolutionary in 1983, it would help her raise $300k for her next movie, about the lives of sex workers in New York City. The idea would come to her while working on Born in Flames, as she became intrigued about prostitution after meeting some well-educated women on the film who worked a few shifts a week at a brothel to earn extra money or to pay for their education. Like many, her perception of prostitution were women who worked the streets, when in truth streetwalkers only accounted for about 15% of the business. During the writing of the script, she began visiting brothels in New York City and learned about the rituals involved in the business of selling sex, especially intrigued how many of the sex workers looked out for each other mentally, physically and hygienically.   Along with Sandra Kay, who would play one of the ladies of the night in the film, Borden worked up a script that didn't glamorize or grossly exaggerate the sex industry, avoiding such storytelling tropes as the hooker with a heart of gold or girls forced into prostitution due to extraordinary circumstances. Most of the ladies playing prostitutes were played by unknown actresses working off-Broadway, while the johns were non-actors recruited through word of mouth between Borden's friends and the occasional ad in one of the city's sex magazines.   Production on Working Girls would begin in March 1985, with many of the sets being built in Borden's loft in Manhattan, with moveable walls to accommodate whatever needed to be shot on any given day. While $300k would be ten times what she had on Born in Flames, Borden would stretch her budget to the max by still shooting in 16mm, in the hopes that the footage would look good enough should the finished film be purchased by a distributor and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition.   After a month of shooting, which involved copious amounts of both male and female nudity, Borden would spend six months editing her film. By early 1986, she had a 91 minute cut ready to go, and she and her producer would submit the film to play at that year's Cannes Film Festival. While the film would not be selected to compete for the coveted Palme D'Or, it would be selected for the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel program that would also include Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, and Chantel Akerman's Golden Eighties.   The film would get into some trouble when it was invited to screen at the Toronto Film Festival a few months later. The movie would have to be approved by the Ontario Film and Video Review Board before being allowed to show at the festival. However, the board would not approve the film without two cuts, including one scene which depicted the quote unquote graphic manipulation of a man's genitalia by a woman. The festival, which had a long standing policy of not showing any movie that had been cut for censorship, would appeal the decision on behalf of the filmmakers. The Review Board denied the appeal, and the festival left the decision of whether to cut the two offending scenes to Borden. Of all the things I've researched about the film, one of the few things I could not find was whether or not Borden made the trims, but the film would play at the festival as scheduled.   After Toronto, Borden would field some offers from some of the smaller art house distributors, but none of the bigger independents or studio-affiliated “classics” divisions. For many, it was too sexual to be a straight art house film, while it wasn't graphic enough to be porn. The one person who did seem to best understand what Borden was going for was, no surprise in hindsight, Harvey Weinstein. Miramax would pick the film up for distribution in late 1986, and planned a February 1987 release.   What might be surprising to most who know about Harvey Weinstein, who would pick up the derisive nickname Harvey Scissorhands in a few years for his constant meddling in already completed films, actually suggested Borden add back in a few minutes of footage to balance out the sex with some lighter non-sex scenes. She would, along with making some last minute dialogue changes, before the film opened on February 5th, not in New York City or Los Angeles, the traditional launching pads for art house films, but at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, where the film would do a decent $8k in its first three days.   Three weeks after opening at the Opera Plaza, Miramax would open the film at the 57th Street Playhouse in midtown Manhattan. Buoyed by some amazing reviews from the likes of Siskel and Ebert, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, Working Girls would gross an astounding $42k during its opening weekend. Two weeks later, it would open at the Samuel Goldwyn Westside Pavilion Cinemas, where it would bring in $17k its first weekend. It would continue to perform well in its major market exclusive runs. An ad in the April 8th, 1987 issue of Variety shows a new house record of $13,492 in its first week at the Ellis Cinema in Atlanta. $140k after five weeks in New York. $40k after three weeks at the Nickelodeon in Boston. $30k after three weeks at the Fine Arts in Chicago. $10k in its first week at the Guild in San Diego. $11k in just three days at the TLA in Philly.   Now, there's different numbers floating around about how much Working Girls made during its total theatrical run. Box Office Mojo says $1.77m, which is really good for a low budget independent film with no stars and featuring a subject still taboo to many in American today, let alone 37 years ago, but a late June 1987 issue of Billboard Magazine about some of the early film successes of the year, puts the gross for Working Girls at $3m.   If you want to check out Working Girls, the Criterion Collection put out an exceptional DVD and Blu-ray release in 2021, which includes a brand new 4K transfer of the film, and a commentary track featuring Borden, cinematographer Judy Irola, and actress Amanda Goodwin, amongst many bonus features. Highly recommended.   I've already spoken some about their next film, Ghost Fever, on our episode last year about the fake movie director Alan Smithee and all of his bad movies. For those who haven't listened to that episode yet and are unaware of who Alan Smithee wasn't, Alan Smithee was a pseudonym created by the Directors Guild in the late 1960s who could be assigned the directing credit of a movie whose real director felt the final cut of the film did not represent his or her vision. By the time Ghost Fever came around in 1987, it would be the 12th movie to be credited to Alan Smithee.   If you have listened to the Alan Smithee episode, you can go ahead and skip forward a couple minutes, but be forewarned, I am going to be offering up a different elaboration on the film than I did on that episode.   And away we go…   Those of us born in the 1960s and before remember a show called All in the Family, and we remember Archie Bunker's neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson, who were eventually spun off onto their own hit show, The Jeffersons. Sherman Hemsley played George Jefferson on All in the Family and The Jeffersons for 12 years, but despite the show being a hit for a number of years, placing as high as #3 during the 1981-1982 television season, roles for Hemsley and his co-star Isabel Sanford outside the show were few and far between. During the eleven seasons The Jeffersons ran on television, from 1975 to 1985, Sherman Hemsley would only make one movie, 1979's Love at First Bite, where he played a small role as a reverend. He appeared on the poster, but his name was not listed amongst the other actors on the poster.   So when the producers of the then-titled Benny and Beaufor approached Hemsley in the spring of 1984 to play one of the title roles, he was more than happy to accept. The Jeffersons was about to start its summer hiatus, and here was the chance to not only make a movie but to be the number one listed actor on the call sheet. He might not ever get that chance again.   The film, by now titled Benny and Buford Meet the Bigoted Ghost, would shoot in Mexico City at Estudios America in the summer of 1984, before Hemsley was due back in Los Angeles to shoot the eleventh and what would be the final season of his show. But it would not be a normal shoot. In fact, there would be two different versions of the movie shot back to back. One, in English, would be directed by Lee Madden, which would hinge its comedy on the bumbling antics of its Black police officer, Buford, and his Hispanic partner, Benny. The other version would be shot in Spanish by Mexican director Miguel Rico, where the comedy would satirize class and social differences rather than racial differences. Hemsley would speak his lines in English, and would be dubbed by a Spanish-speaking actor in post production. Luis Ávalos, best known as Doctor Doolots on the PBS children's show The Electric Company, would play Benny. The only other name in the cast was boxing legend Smokin' Joe Frazier, who was making his proper acting debut on the film as, not too surprisingly, a boxer.   The film would have a four week shooting schedule, and Hemsley was back to work on The Jeffersons on time. Madden would get the film edited together rather quick, and the producers would have a screening for potential distributors in early October.   The screening did not go well.   Madden would be fired from the production, the script rewritten, and a new director named Herbert Strock would be hired to shoot more footage once Hemsley was done with his commitments to The Jeffersons in the spring of 1985. This is when Madden contacted the Directors Guild to request the Smithee pseudonym. But since the film was still in production, the DGA could not issue a judgment until the producers provided the Guild with a completed copy of the film.   That would happen in the late fall of 1985, and Madden was able to successfully show that he had directly a majority of the completed film but it did not represent his vision.   The film was not good, but Miramax still needed product to fill their distribution pipeline. They announced in mid-March of 1987 that they had acquired the film for distribution, and that the film would be opening in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg FL the following week.    Miramax did not release how many theatres the film was playing in in those markets, and the only market Variety did track of those that week was St. Louis, where the film did $7k from the four theatres they were tracking that week. Best as I can tell from limited newspaper archives of the day, Ghost Fever played on nine screens in Atlanta, 4 in Dallas/Fort Worth, 25 screens in Miami, and 12 in Tampa-St. Pete on top of the four I can find in St. Louis. By the following week, every theatre that was playing Ghost Fever had dropped it.   The film would not open in any other markets until it opened on 16 screens in the greater Los Angeles metro region on September 11th. No theatres in Hollywood. No theatres in Westwood. No theatres in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or any major theatre around, outside of the Palace Theatre downtown, a once stately theatre that had fallen into disrepair over the previous three decades. Once again, Miramax didn't release grosses for the run, none of the theatres playing the film were tracked by Variety that week, and all the playdates were gone after one week.   Today, you can find two slightly different copies of the film on a very popular video sharing website, one the theatrical cut, the other the home video cut. The home video cut is preceded by a quick history of the film, including a tidbit that Hemsley bankrolled $3m of the production himself, and that the film's failure almost made him bankrupt. I could not find any source to verify this, but there is possibly specious evidence to back up this claim. The producers of the film were able to make back the budget selling the film to home video company and cable movie channels around the world, and Hemsley would sue them in December 1987 for $3m claiming he was owed this amount from the profits and interest. It would take nine years to work its way through the court system, but a jury in March 1996 would award Hemsley $2.8m. The producers appealed, and an appellate court would uphold the verdict in April 1998.   One of the biggest indie film success stories of 1987 was Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.   In the early 1980s, Rozema was working as an assistant producer on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs television show called The Journal. Although she enjoyed her work, she, like many of us, wanted to be a filmmaker. While working on The Journal, she started to write screenplays while taking a classes at a Toronto Polytechnic Institute on 16mm film production.   Now, one of the nicer things about the Canadian film industry is that there are a number of government-funded arts councils that help young independent Canadian filmmakers get their low budget films financed. But Rozema was having trouble getting her earliest ideas funded. Finally, in 1984, she was able to secure funding for Passion, a short film she had written about a documentary filmmaker who writes an extremely intimate letter to an unknown lover. Linda Griffiths, the star of John Sayles' 1983 film Lianna, plays the filmmaker, and Passion would go on to be nominated for Gold Hugo for Best Short Film at the 1985 Chicago Film Festival.   However, a negative review of the short film in The Globe and Mail, often called Canada's Newspaper of Record, would anger Rozema, and she would use that anger to write a new script, Polly, which would be a polemic against the Toronto elitist high art milieu and its merciless negative judgements towards newer artists. Polly, the lead character and narrator of the film, lives alone, has no friends, rides her bike around Toronto to take photographs of whatever strikes her fancy, and regularly indulges herself in whimsical fantasies. An employee for a temporary secretarial agency, Polly gets placed in a private art gallery. The gallery owner is having an off-again, on-again relationship with one her clients, a painter who has misgivings she is too young for the gallery owner and the owner too old for her.    Inspired by the young painter, Polly anonymously submits some of her photographs to the gallery, in the hopes of getting featured, but becomes depressed when the gallery owner, who does not know who took the photos, dismisses them in front of Polly, calling them “simple minded.” Polly quits the gallery and retreats to her apartment. When the painter sees the photographs, she presents herself as the photographer of them, and the pair start to pass them off as the younger artist's work, even after the gallery owner learns they are not of the painter's work. When Polly finds out about the fraud, she confronts the gallery owner, eventually throwing a cup of tea at the owner.   Soon thereafter, the gallery owner and the painter go to check up on Polly at her flat, where they discover more photos undeniable beauty, and the story ends with the three women in one of Polly's fantasies.   Rozema would work on the screenplay for Polly while she was working as a third assistant director on David Cronenberg's The Fly. During the writing process, which took about a year, Rozema would change the title from Polly to Polly's Progress to Polly's Interior Mind. When she would submit the script in June 1986 to the various Canadian arts foundations for funding, it would sent out with yet another new title, Oh, The Things I've Seen.   The first agency to come aboard the film was the Ontario Film Development Corporation, and soon thereafter, the National Film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council would also join the funding operation, but the one council they desperately needed to fund the gap was Telefilm Canada, the Canadian government's principal instrument for supporting Canada's audiovisual industry. Telefilm Canada, at the time, had a reputation for being philosophically averse to low-budget, auteur-driven films, a point driven home directly by the administrator of the group at the time, who reportedly stomped out of a meeting concerning the making of this very film, purportedly declaring that Telefilm should not be financing these kind of minimalist, student films. Telefilm would reverse course when Rozema and her producer, Alexandra Raffé, agreed to bring on Don Haig, called “The Godfather of Canadian Cinema,” as an executive producer.   Side note: several months after the film completed shooting, Haig would win an Academy Award for producing a documentary about musician Artie Shaw.   Once they had their $350k budget, Rozema and Raffé got to work on pre-production. Money was tight on such an ambitious first feature. They had only $500 to help their casting agent identify potential actors for the film, although most of the cast would come from Rozema's friendships with them. They would cast thirty-year-old Sheila McCarthy, a first time film actress with only one television credit to her name, as Polly.   Shooting would begin in Toronto on September 24th, 1986 and go for four weeks, shooting completely in 16mm because they could not afford to shoot on 35mm. Once filming was completed, the National Film Board of Canada allowed Rozema use of their editing studio for free. When Rozema struggled with editing the film, the Film Board offered to pay for the consulting services of Ron Sanders, who had edited five of David Cronenberg's movies, including Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly, which Rozema gladly accepted.   After New Years 1987, Rozema has a rough cut of the film ready to show the various funding agencies. That edit of the film was only 65 minutes long, but went over very well with the viewers. So much so that the President of Cinephile Films, the Canadian movie distributor who also helped to fund the film, suggested that Rozema not only add another 15mins or so to the film wherever she could, but submit the film to the be entered in the Directors' Fortnight program at the Cannes Film Festival. Rozema still needed to add that requested footage in, and finish the sound mix, but she agreed as long as she was able to complete the film by the time the Cannes programmers met in mid-March. She wouldn't quite make her self-imposed deadline, but the film would get selected for Cannes anyway. This time, she had an absolute deadline. The film had to be completed in time for Cannes.   Which would include needing to make a 35mm blow up of the 16mm print, and the production didn't have the money. Rozema and Raffé asked Telefilm Canada if they could have $40k for the print, but they were turned down.   Twice.   Someone suggested they speak with the foreign sales agent who acquired the rights to sell the film at Cannes. The sales agent not only agreed to the fund the cost from sales of the film to various territories that would be returned to the the various arts councils, but he would also create a press kit, translate the English-language script into French, make sure the print showing at Cannes would have French subtitles, and create the key art for the posters and other ads. Rozema would actually help to create the key art, a picture of Sheila McCarthy's head floating over a body of water, an image that approximately 80% of all buyers would use for their own posters and ads around the world.   By the time the film premiered in Cannes on May 10th, 1987, Rozema had changed the title once again, to I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. The title would be taken from a line in the T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which she felt best represented the film.   But whatever it was titled, the two thousand people inside the theatre were mesmerized, and gave the film a six minute standing ovation. The festival quickly added four more screenings of the film, all of which sold out.   While a number of territories around the world had purchased the film before the premiere, the filmmakers bet big on themselves by waiting until after the world premiere to entertain offers from American distributors. Following the premiere, a number of companies made offers for the film. Miramax would be the highest, at $100,000, but the filmmakers said “no.” They kept the bidding going, until they got Miramax up to $350k, the full budget for the film. By the time the festival was done, the sales agent had booked more than $1.1m worth of sales. The film had earned back more than triple its cost before it ever opened on a single commercial screen.   Oh, and it also won Rozema the Prix de la Jeunesse (Pree do la Jza-naise), the Prize of the Youth, from the Directors Fortnight judges.   Miramax would schedule I've Heard the Mermaids Singing to open at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 11th, after screening at the Toronto Film Festival, then called The Festival of Festivals, the night before, and at the Telluride Film Festival the previous week. Miramax was so keen on the potential success of the film that they would buy their first ever full page newspaper, in the Sunday, September 6th New York Times Arts and Leisure section, which cost them $25k.   The critical and audience reactions in Toronto and Telluride matched the enthusiasm on the Croisette, which would translate to big box office its opening weekend. $40k, the best single screen gross in all Manhattan. While it would lose that crown to My Life as a Dog the following week, its $32k second weekend gross was still one of the best in the city. After three weekends in New York City, the film would have already grossed $100k. That weekend, the film would open at the Samuel Goldwyn West Pavilion Cinemas, where a $9,500 opening weekend gross was considered nice. Good word of mouth kept the grosses respectable for months, and after eight months in theatres, never playing in more than 27 theatres in any given week, the film would gross $1.4m in American theatres.   Ironically, the film did not go over as well in Rozema's home country, where it grossed a little less than half a million Canadian dollars, and didn't even play in the director's hometown due to a lack of theatres that were willing to play a “queer” movie, but once all was said and done, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing would end up with a worldwide gross of more than CAD$10m, a nearly 2500% return on the initial investment. Not only would part of those profits go back to the arts councils that helped fund the film, those profits would help fund the next group of independent Canadian filmmakers. And the film would become one of a growing number of films with LGBTQ lead characters whose success would break down the barriers some exhibitors had about playing non-straight movies.   The impact of this film on queer cinema and on Canadian cinema cannot be understated. In 1993, author Michael Posner spent the first twenty pages of his 250 plus page book Canadian Dreams discussing the history of the film, under the subtitle “The Little Film That Did.” And in 2014, author Julia Mendenhall wrote a 160 page book about the movie, with the subtitle “A Queer Film Classic.” You can find copies of both books on a popular web archive website, if you want to learn more.   Amazingly, for a company that would regularly take up to fourteen months between releases, Miramax would end 1987 with not one, not two, but three new titles in just the last six weeks of the year. Well, one that I can definitely place in theatres.   And here is where you just can't always trust the IMDb or Wikipedia by themselves.   The first alleged release of the three according to both sources, Riders on the Storm, was a wacky comedy featuring Dennis Hopper and Michael J. Polland, and supposedly opened in theatres on November 13th. Except it didn't. It did open in new York City on May 7th, 1988, in Los Angeles the following Friday. But we'll talk more about that movie on our next episode.   The second film of the alleged trifecta was Crazy Moon, a romantic comedy/drama from Canada that featured Keifer Sutherland as Brooks, a young man who finds love with Anne, a deaf girl working at a clothing store where Brooks and his brother are trying to steal a mannequin. Like I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Crazy Moon would benefit from the support of several Canadian arts foundations including Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board of Canada.   In an unusual move, Miramax would release Crazy Moon on 18 screens in Los Angeles on December 11th, as part of an Oscar qualifying run. I say “unusual” because although in the 1980s, a movie that wanted to qualify for awards consideration had to play in at least one commercial movie theatre in Los Angeles for seven consecutive days before the end of the year, most distributors did just that: one movie theatre. They normally didn't do 18 screens including cities like Long Beach, Irvine and Upland.   It would, however, definitely be a one week run.   Despite a number of decent reviews, Los Angeles audiences were too busy doing plenty of other things to see Crazy Moon. Miramax, once again, didn't report grosses, but six of the eighteen theatres playing the film were being tracked by Variety, and the combined gross for those six theatres was $2,500.   It would not get any award nominations, and it would never open at another movie theatre.   The third film allegedly released by Miramax during the 1987 holiday season, The Magic Snowman, has a reported theatrical release date of December 22, 1987, according to the IMDb, which is also the date listed on the Wikipedia page for the list of movies Miramax released in the 1980s. I suspect this is a direct to video release for several reasons, the two most important ones being that December 22nd was a Tuesday, and back in the 1980s, most home video titles came out on Tuesdays, and that I cannot find a single playdate anywhere in the country around this date, even in the Weinstein's home town of Buffalo. In fact, the only mention of the words “magic snowman” together I can find for all of 1987 is a live performance of a show called The Magic Snowman in Peterborough, England in November 1987.   So now we are eight years into the history of Miramax, and they are starting to pick up some steam. Granted, Working Girls and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing wasn't going to get the company a major line of credit to start making films of their own, but it would help them with visibility amongst the independent and global film communities. These guys can open your films in America.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1988.   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.

This week, we continue out look back at the films released by Miramax in the 1980s, focusing on 1987. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, concentrating on their releases from 1987, the year Miramax would begin its climb towards the top of the independent distribution mountain.   The first film Miramax would release in 1987 was Lizzie Borden's Working Girls.   And yes, Lizzie Borden is her birth name. Sort of. Her name was originally Linda Elizabeth Borden, and at the age of eleven, when she learned about the infamous accused double murderer, she told her parents she wanted to only be addressed as Lizzie. At the age of 18, after graduating high school and heading off to the private women's liberal arts college Wellesley, she would legally change her name to Lizzie Borden.   After graduating with a fine arts degree, Borden would move to New York City, where she held a variety of jobs, including being both a painter and an art critic for the influential Artforum magazine, until she attended a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard movies, when she was inspired to become a filmmaker herself.   Her first film, shot in 1974, was a documentary, Regrouping, about four female artists who were part of a collective that incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, as the collective slowly breaks apart. One of the four artists was a twenty-three year old painter who would later make film history herself as the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.    But Regrouping didn't get much attention when it was released in 1976, and it would take Borden five years to make her first dramatic narrative, Born in Flames, another movie which would also feature Ms. Bigelow in a supporting role. Borden would not only write, produce and direct this film about two different groups of feminists who operate pirate radio stations in New York City which ends with the bombing of the broadcast antenna atop the World Trade Center, she would also edit the film and act as one of the cinematographers. The film would become one of the first instances of Afrofuturism in film, and would become a cultural touchstone in 2016 when a restored print of the film screened around the world to great critical acclaim, and would tie for 243rd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films Ever Made. Other films that tied with include Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. A   Yes, it's that good, and it would cost only $30k to produce.   But while Born in Flames wasn't recognized as revolutionary in 1983, it would help her raise $300k for her next movie, about the lives of sex workers in New York City. The idea would come to her while working on Born in Flames, as she became intrigued about prostitution after meeting some well-educated women on the film who worked a few shifts a week at a brothel to earn extra money or to pay for their education. Like many, her perception of prostitution were women who worked the streets, when in truth streetwalkers only accounted for about 15% of the business. During the writing of the script, she began visiting brothels in New York City and learned about the rituals involved in the business of selling sex, especially intrigued how many of the sex workers looked out for each other mentally, physically and hygienically.   Along with Sandra Kay, who would play one of the ladies of the night in the film, Borden worked up a script that didn't glamorize or grossly exaggerate the sex industry, avoiding such storytelling tropes as the hooker with a heart of gold or girls forced into prostitution due to extraordinary circumstances. Most of the ladies playing prostitutes were played by unknown actresses working off-Broadway, while the johns were non-actors recruited through word of mouth between Borden's friends and the occasional ad in one of the city's sex magazines.   Production on Working Girls would begin in March 1985, with many of the sets being built in Borden's loft in Manhattan, with moveable walls to accommodate whatever needed to be shot on any given day. While $300k would be ten times what she had on Born in Flames, Borden would stretch her budget to the max by still shooting in 16mm, in the hopes that the footage would look good enough should the finished film be purchased by a distributor and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition.   After a month of shooting, which involved copious amounts of both male and female nudity, Borden would spend six months editing her film. By early 1986, she had a 91 minute cut ready to go, and she and her producer would submit the film to play at that year's Cannes Film Festival. While the film would not be selected to compete for the coveted Palme D'Or, it would be selected for the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel program that would also include Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, and Chantel Akerman's Golden Eighties.   The film would get into some trouble when it was invited to screen at the Toronto Film Festival a few months later. The movie would have to be approved by the Ontario Film and Video Review Board before being allowed to show at the festival. However, the board would not approve the film without two cuts, including one scene which depicted the quote unquote graphic manipulation of a man's genitalia by a woman. The festival, which had a long standing policy of not showing any movie that had been cut for censorship, would appeal the decision on behalf of the filmmakers. The Review Board denied the appeal, and the festival left the decision of whether to cut the two offending scenes to Borden. Of all the things I've researched about the film, one of the few things I could not find was whether or not Borden made the trims, but the film would play at the festival as scheduled.   After Toronto, Borden would field some offers from some of the smaller art house distributors, but none of the bigger independents or studio-affiliated “classics” divisions. For many, it was too sexual to be a straight art house film, while it wasn't graphic enough to be porn. The one person who did seem to best understand what Borden was going for was, no surprise in hindsight, Harvey Weinstein. Miramax would pick the film up for distribution in late 1986, and planned a February 1987 release.   What might be surprising to most who know about Harvey Weinstein, who would pick up the derisive nickname Harvey Scissorhands in a few years for his constant meddling in already completed films, actually suggested Borden add back in a few minutes of footage to balance out the sex with some lighter non-sex scenes. She would, along with making some last minute dialogue changes, before the film opened on February 5th, not in New York City or Los Angeles, the traditional launching pads for art house films, but at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, where the film would do a decent $8k in its first three days.   Three weeks after opening at the Opera Plaza, Miramax would open the film at the 57th Street Playhouse in midtown Manhattan. Buoyed by some amazing reviews from the likes of Siskel and Ebert, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, Working Girls would gross an astounding $42k during its opening weekend. Two weeks later, it would open at the Samuel Goldwyn Westside Pavilion Cinemas, where it would bring in $17k its first weekend. It would continue to perform well in its major market exclusive runs. An ad in the April 8th, 1987 issue of Variety shows a new house record of $13,492 in its first week at the Ellis Cinema in Atlanta. $140k after five weeks in New York. $40k after three weeks at the Nickelodeon in Boston. $30k after three weeks at the Fine Arts in Chicago. $10k in its first week at the Guild in San Diego. $11k in just three days at the TLA in Philly.   Now, there's different numbers floating around about how much Working Girls made during its total theatrical run. Box Office Mojo says $1.77m, which is really good for a low budget independent film with no stars and featuring a subject still taboo to many in American today, let alone 37 years ago, but a late June 1987 issue of Billboard Magazine about some of the early film successes of the year, puts the gross for Working Girls at $3m.   If you want to check out Working Girls, the Criterion Collection put out an exceptional DVD and Blu-ray release in 2021, which includes a brand new 4K transfer of the film, and a commentary track featuring Borden, cinematographer Judy Irola, and actress Amanda Goodwin, amongst many bonus features. Highly recommended.   I've already spoken some about their next film, Ghost Fever, on our episode last year about the fake movie director Alan Smithee and all of his bad movies. For those who haven't listened to that episode yet and are unaware of who Alan Smithee wasn't, Alan Smithee was a pseudonym created by the Directors Guild in the late 1960s who could be assigned the directing credit of a movie whose real director felt the final cut of the film did not represent his or her vision. By the time Ghost Fever came around in 1987, it would be the 12th movie to be credited to Alan Smithee.   If you have listened to the Alan Smithee episode, you can go ahead and skip forward a couple minutes, but be forewarned, I am going to be offering up a different elaboration on the film than I did on that episode.   And away we go…   Those of us born in the 1960s and before remember a show called All in the Family, and we remember Archie Bunker's neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson, who were eventually spun off onto their own hit show, The Jeffersons. Sherman Hemsley played George Jefferson on All in the Family and The Jeffersons for 12 years, but despite the show being a hit for a number of years, placing as high as #3 during the 1981-1982 television season, roles for Hemsley and his co-star Isabel Sanford outside the show were few and far between. During the eleven seasons The Jeffersons ran on television, from 1975 to 1985, Sherman Hemsley would only make one movie, 1979's Love at First Bite, where he played a small role as a reverend. He appeared on the poster, but his name was not listed amongst the other actors on the poster.   So when the producers of the then-titled Benny and Beaufor approached Hemsley in the spring of 1984 to play one of the title roles, he was more than happy to accept. The Jeffersons was about to start its summer hiatus, and here was the chance to not only make a movie but to be the number one listed actor on the call sheet. He might not ever get that chance again.   The film, by now titled Benny and Buford Meet the Bigoted Ghost, would shoot in Mexico City at Estudios America in the summer of 1984, before Hemsley was due back in Los Angeles to shoot the eleventh and what would be the final season of his show. But it would not be a normal shoot. In fact, there would be two different versions of the movie shot back to back. One, in English, would be directed by Lee Madden, which would hinge its comedy on the bumbling antics of its Black police officer, Buford, and his Hispanic partner, Benny. The other version would be shot in Spanish by Mexican director Miguel Rico, where the comedy would satirize class and social differences rather than racial differences. Hemsley would speak his lines in English, and would be dubbed by a Spanish-speaking actor in post production. Luis Ávalos, best known as Doctor Doolots on the PBS children's show The Electric Company, would play Benny. The only other name in the cast was boxing legend Smokin' Joe Frazier, who was making his proper acting debut on the film as, not too surprisingly, a boxer.   The film would have a four week shooting schedule, and Hemsley was back to work on The Jeffersons on time. Madden would get the film edited together rather quick, and the producers would have a screening for potential distributors in early October.   The screening did not go well.   Madden would be fired from the production, the script rewritten, and a new director named Herbert Strock would be hired to shoot more footage once Hemsley was done with his commitments to The Jeffersons in the spring of 1985. This is when Madden contacted the Directors Guild to request the Smithee pseudonym. But since the film was still in production, the DGA could not issue a judgment until the producers provided the Guild with a completed copy of the film.   That would happen in the late fall of 1985, and Madden was able to successfully show that he had directly a majority of the completed film but it did not represent his vision.   The film was not good, but Miramax still needed product to fill their distribution pipeline. They announced in mid-March of 1987 that they had acquired the film for distribution, and that the film would be opening in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg FL the following week.    Miramax did not release how many theatres the film was playing in in those markets, and the only market Variety did track of those that week was St. Louis, where the film did $7k from the four theatres they were tracking that week. Best as I can tell from limited newspaper archives of the day, Ghost Fever played on nine screens in Atlanta, 4 in Dallas/Fort Worth, 25 screens in Miami, and 12 in Tampa-St. Pete on top of the four I can find in St. Louis. By the following week, every theatre that was playing Ghost Fever had dropped it.   The film would not open in any other markets until it opened on 16 screens in the greater Los Angeles metro region on September 11th. No theatres in Hollywood. No theatres in Westwood. No theatres in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or any major theatre around, outside of the Palace Theatre downtown, a once stately theatre that had fallen into disrepair over the previous three decades. Once again, Miramax didn't release grosses for the run, none of the theatres playing the film were tracked by Variety that week, and all the playdates were gone after one week.   Today, you can find two slightly different copies of the film on a very popular video sharing website, one the theatrical cut, the other the home video cut. The home video cut is preceded by a quick history of the film, including a tidbit that Hemsley bankrolled $3m of the production himself, and that the film's failure almost made him bankrupt. I could not find any source to verify this, but there is possibly specious evidence to back up this claim. The producers of the film were able to make back the budget selling the film to home video company and cable movie channels around the world, and Hemsley would sue them in December 1987 for $3m claiming he was owed this amount from the profits and interest. It would take nine years to work its way through the court system, but a jury in March 1996 would award Hemsley $2.8m. The producers appealed, and an appellate court would uphold the verdict in April 1998.   One of the biggest indie film success stories of 1987 was Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.   In the early 1980s, Rozema was working as an assistant producer on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs television show called The Journal. Although she enjoyed her work, she, like many of us, wanted to be a filmmaker. While working on The Journal, she started to write screenplays while taking a classes at a Toronto Polytechnic Institute on 16mm film production.   Now, one of the nicer things about the Canadian film industry is that there are a number of government-funded arts councils that help young independent Canadian filmmakers get their low budget films financed. But Rozema was having trouble getting her earliest ideas funded. Finally, in 1984, she was able to secure funding for Passion, a short film she had written about a documentary filmmaker who writes an extremely intimate letter to an unknown lover. Linda Griffiths, the star of John Sayles' 1983 film Lianna, plays the filmmaker, and Passion would go on to be nominated for Gold Hugo for Best Short Film at the 1985 Chicago Film Festival.   However, a negative review of the short film in The Globe and Mail, often called Canada's Newspaper of Record, would anger Rozema, and she would use that anger to write a new script, Polly, which would be a polemic against the Toronto elitist high art milieu and its merciless negative judgements towards newer artists. Polly, the lead character and narrator of the film, lives alone, has no friends, rides her bike around Toronto to take photographs of whatever strikes her fancy, and regularly indulges herself in whimsical fantasies. An employee for a temporary secretarial agency, Polly gets placed in a private art gallery. The gallery owner is having an off-again, on-again relationship with one her clients, a painter who has misgivings she is too young for the gallery owner and the owner too old for her.    Inspired by the young painter, Polly anonymously submits some of her photographs to the gallery, in the hopes of getting featured, but becomes depressed when the gallery owner, who does not know who took the photos, dismisses them in front of Polly, calling them “simple minded.” Polly quits the gallery and retreats to her apartment. When the painter sees the photographs, she presents herself as the photographer of them, and the pair start to pass them off as the younger artist's work, even after the gallery owner learns they are not of the painter's work. When Polly finds out about the fraud, she confronts the gallery owner, eventually throwing a cup of tea at the owner.   Soon thereafter, the gallery owner and the painter go to check up on Polly at her flat, where they discover more photos undeniable beauty, and the story ends with the three women in one of Polly's fantasies.   Rozema would work on the screenplay for Polly while she was working as a third assistant director on David Cronenberg's The Fly. During the writing process, which took about a year, Rozema would change the title from Polly to Polly's Progress to Polly's Interior Mind. When she would submit the script in June 1986 to the various Canadian arts foundations for funding, it would sent out with yet another new title, Oh, The Things I've Seen.   The first agency to come aboard the film was the Ontario Film Development Corporation, and soon thereafter, the National Film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council would also join the funding operation, but the one council they desperately needed to fund the gap was Telefilm Canada, the Canadian government's principal instrument for supporting Canada's audiovisual industry. Telefilm Canada, at the time, had a reputation for being philosophically averse to low-budget, auteur-driven films, a point driven home directly by the administrator of the group at the time, who reportedly stomped out of a meeting concerning the making of this very film, purportedly declaring that Telefilm should not be financing these kind of minimalist, student films. Telefilm would reverse course when Rozema and her producer, Alexandra Raffé, agreed to bring on Don Haig, called “The Godfather of Canadian Cinema,” as an executive producer.   Side note: several months after the film completed shooting, Haig would win an Academy Award for producing a documentary about musician Artie Shaw.   Once they had their $350k budget, Rozema and Raffé got to work on pre-production. Money was tight on such an ambitious first feature. They had only $500 to help their casting agent identify potential actors for the film, although most of the cast would come from Rozema's friendships with them. They would cast thirty-year-old Sheila McCarthy, a first time film actress with only one television credit to her name, as Polly.   Shooting would begin in Toronto on September 24th, 1986 and go for four weeks, shooting completely in 16mm because they could not afford to shoot on 35mm. Once filming was completed, the National Film Board of Canada allowed Rozema use of their editing studio for free. When Rozema struggled with editing the film, the Film Board offered to pay for the consulting services of Ron Sanders, who had edited five of David Cronenberg's movies, including Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly, which Rozema gladly accepted.   After New Years 1987, Rozema has a rough cut of the film ready to show the various funding agencies. That edit of the film was only 65 minutes long, but went over very well with the viewers. So much so that the President of Cinephile Films, the Canadian movie distributor who also helped to fund the film, suggested that Rozema not only add another 15mins or so to the film wherever she could, but submit the film to the be entered in the Directors' Fortnight program at the Cannes Film Festival. Rozema still needed to add that requested footage in, and finish the sound mix, but she agreed as long as she was able to complete the film by the time the Cannes programmers met in mid-March. She wouldn't quite make her self-imposed deadline, but the film would get selected for Cannes anyway. This time, she had an absolute deadline. The film had to be completed in time for Cannes.   Which would include needing to make a 35mm blow up of the 16mm print, and the production didn't have the money. Rozema and Raffé asked Telefilm Canada if they could have $40k for the print, but they were turned down.   Twice.   Someone suggested they speak with the foreign sales agent who acquired the rights to sell the film at Cannes. The sales agent not only agreed to the fund the cost from sales of the film to various territories that would be returned to the the various arts councils, but he would also create a press kit, translate the English-language script into French, make sure the print showing at Cannes would have French subtitles, and create the key art for the posters and other ads. Rozema would actually help to create the key art, a picture of Sheila McCarthy's head floating over a body of water, an image that approximately 80% of all buyers would use for their own posters and ads around the world.   By the time the film premiered in Cannes on May 10th, 1987, Rozema had changed the title once again, to I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. The title would be taken from a line in the T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which she felt best represented the film.   But whatever it was titled, the two thousand people inside the theatre were mesmerized, and gave the film a six minute standing ovation. The festival quickly added four more screenings of the film, all of which sold out.   While a number of territories around the world had purchased the film before the premiere, the filmmakers bet big on themselves by waiting until after the world premiere to entertain offers from American distributors. Following the premiere, a number of companies made offers for the film. Miramax would be the highest, at $100,000, but the filmmakers said “no.” They kept the bidding going, until they got Miramax up to $350k, the full budget for the film. By the time the festival was done, the sales agent had booked more than $1.1m worth of sales. The film had earned back more than triple its cost before it ever opened on a single commercial screen.   Oh, and it also won Rozema the Prix de la Jeunesse (Pree do la Jza-naise), the Prize of the Youth, from the Directors Fortnight judges.   Miramax would schedule I've Heard the Mermaids Singing to open at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 11th, after screening at the Toronto Film Festival, then called The Festival of Festivals, the night before, and at the Telluride Film Festival the previous week. Miramax was so keen on the potential success of the film that they would buy their first ever full page newspaper, in the Sunday, September 6th New York Times Arts and Leisure section, which cost them $25k.   The critical and audience reactions in Toronto and Telluride matched the enthusiasm on the Croisette, which would translate to big box office its opening weekend. $40k, the best single screen gross in all Manhattan. While it would lose that crown to My Life as a Dog the following week, its $32k second weekend gross was still one of the best in the city. After three weekends in New York City, the film would have already grossed $100k. That weekend, the film would open at the Samuel Goldwyn West Pavilion Cinemas, where a $9,500 opening weekend gross was considered nice. Good word of mouth kept the grosses respectable for months, and after eight months in theatres, never playing in more than 27 theatres in any given week, the film would gross $1.4m in American theatres.   Ironically, the film did not go over as well in Rozema's home country, where it grossed a little less than half a million Canadian dollars, and didn't even play in the director's hometown due to a lack of theatres that were willing to play a “queer” movie, but once all was said and done, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing would end up with a worldwide gross of more than CAD$10m, a nearly 2500% return on the initial investment. Not only would part of those profits go back to the arts councils that helped fund the film, those profits would help fund the next group of independent Canadian filmmakers. And the film would become one of a growing number of films with LGBTQ lead characters whose success would break down the barriers some exhibitors had about playing non-straight movies.   The impact of this film on queer cinema and on Canadian cinema cannot be understated. In 1993, author Michael Posner spent the first twenty pages of his 250 plus page book Canadian Dreams discussing the history of the film, under the subtitle “The Little Film That Did.” And in 2014, author Julia Mendenhall wrote a 160 page book about the movie, with the subtitle “A Queer Film Classic.” You can find copies of both books on a popular web archive website, if you want to learn more.   Amazingly, for a company that would regularly take up to fourteen months between releases, Miramax would end 1987 with not one, not two, but three new titles in just the last six weeks of the year. Well, one that I can definitely place in theatres.   And here is where you just can't always trust the IMDb or Wikipedia by themselves.   The first alleged release of the three according to both sources, Riders on the Storm, was a wacky comedy featuring Dennis Hopper and Michael J. Polland, and supposedly opened in theatres on November 13th. Except it didn't. It did open in new York City on May 7th, 1988, in Los Angeles the following Friday. But we'll talk more about that movie on our next episode.   The second film of the alleged trifecta was Crazy Moon, a romantic comedy/drama from Canada that featured Keifer Sutherland as Brooks, a young man who finds love with Anne, a deaf girl working at a clothing store where Brooks and his brother are trying to steal a mannequin. Like I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Crazy Moon would benefit from the support of several Canadian arts foundations including Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board of Canada.   In an unusual move, Miramax would release Crazy Moon on 18 screens in Los Angeles on December 11th, as part of an Oscar qualifying run. I say “unusual” because although in the 1980s, a movie that wanted to qualify for awards consideration had to play in at least one commercial movie theatre in Los Angeles for seven consecutive days before the end of the year, most distributors did just that: one movie theatre. They normally didn't do 18 screens including cities like Long Beach, Irvine and Upland.   It would, however, definitely be a one week run.   Despite a number of decent reviews, Los Angeles audiences were too busy doing plenty of other things to see Crazy Moon. Miramax, once again, didn't report grosses, but six of the eighteen theatres playing the film were being tracked by Variety, and the combined gross for those six theatres was $2,500.   It would not get any award nominations, and it would never open at another movie theatre.   The third film allegedly released by Miramax during the 1987 holiday season, The Magic Snowman, has a reported theatrical release date of December 22, 1987, according to the IMDb, which is also the date listed on the Wikipedia page for the list of movies Miramax released in the 1980s. I suspect this is a direct to video release for several reasons, the two most important ones being that December 22nd was a Tuesday, and back in the 1980s, most home video titles came out on Tuesdays, and that I cannot find a single playdate anywhere in the country around this date, even in the Weinstein's home town of Buffalo. In fact, the only mention of the words “magic snowman” together I can find for all of 1987 is a live performance of a show called The Magic Snowman in Peterborough, England in November 1987.   So now we are eight years into the history of Miramax, and they are starting to pick up some steam. Granted, Working Girls and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing wasn't going to get the company a major line of credit to start making films of their own, but it would help them with visibility amongst the independent and global film communities. These guys can open your films in America.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1988.   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.

Once again Mellisa Miller joins Andrew Hunter Scholey to discuss this landmark of Canadian and Queer Cinema, "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing" (1987). Topics covered are the background and career of writer/director Patricia Rozema, what it means to be an artist, and what early exposure to Japanese food was like in the 80s.

Gentle listeners, join us as we finally review this 1999 movie adaptation of Mansfield Park, written and directed by Patricia Rozema. We delve into the artistic choices made by the director and weigh in on their merits in a very calm and evenhanded manner until about halfway through when Kristin gets shouty. This movie is undoubtedly an important acheivement in Austen filmmaking. Rozema makes the slavery subtext in the book explicit, challenging the way Austen stories are usually told on screen. She also takes a "prismatic" approach to the book's much-maligned heroine Fanny Price, infusing her with elements of Austen's own life to create a character that is more relatable to modern audiences. The results provide Much To Think About.    Special thanks to Arnie Perlstein for directing us to his useful literature review on his blog, the Sharp Elves Society! Read it here: Jane Austen's Dead Silence: The History of Slavery Subtext in Mansfield Park

Our Guest today is Wendy Crewson Wendy Crewson was the recipient of a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in 2015; and the Earle Grey Award, given to fewer than 32 collective recipients since 1986, in recognition by the ACCT and the Canadian Entertainment Industry, for Lifetime Achievement in Television. One of Canada's premier actresses, Wendy Crewson has garnered critical and popular acclaim, as well as multiple awards, for her extensive body of work in film and television. Her resume features more than 100 titles, including credits like: Sarah Polley's indie feature AWAY FROM HER; THE VOW, with Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum; the Winnie Mandela biopic WINNIE, alongside Jennifer Hudson and Terrance Howard; THE SANTA CLAUSE trilogy opposite Tim Allen; THE CLEARING, with Robert Redford; Eduardo Ponti's BETWEEN STRANGERS, with Sophia Loren; THE LAST BRICKMAKER IN AMERICA, with Sidney Poitier; BICENTENNIAL MAN with Robin Williams; THE SIXTH DAY with Arnold Schwarzenegger; and of course, her role as Harrison Ford's First Lady in AIR FORCE ONE. Throughout her illustrious career, Wendy has amassed more nominations and awards in Canada than any other actress for portraying real women. These are some of her most wellregarded roles and they include: Sue Rodriguez (who went all the way to The Supreme Court of Canada to fight Doctor Assisted suicide while fighting ALS); “Jane Doe” (who made legal history when she sued the police for negligence after being the fifth victim of a serial rapist and realizing that the police knew details and had done nothing to prevent further rapes); Lorraine Evenshen (who tells the story from her own perspective as the wife of popular CFL star Terry Evanshen, who lost his memory after waking up from a coma caused by a car crash); and finally, Louise Arbour (who as the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for both the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda, made history with the first indictment of a sitting head of state, for war crimes, the first conviction for genocide and the first to recognize sexual crimes as crimes against humanity). Wendy starred in five seasons of CTV's hit medical drama SAVING HOPE, for which she won Best Actress in a Featured Supporting Role at the 2013 CSAs. Wendy was also in the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film, ROOM with Brie Larson; and appeared opposite Ellen Page in Patricia Rozema's INTO THE FOREST. Wendy was recently seen in the films KODACHROME, with Ed Harris and Jason Sudeikis; DEATH WISH with Bruce Willis.; and director Mimi Leder's timely feature, ON THE BASIS OF SEX. On the small screen, Wendy recently starred on CBS's hit medical drama, GOOD SAM; CBC's popular series FRANKIE DRAKE; in addition to the Hallmark series, WHEN HOPE CALLS; while also shooting the second season of DEPARTURE for Peacock/Global; and her recurring role on TITANS for HBO Max. Before that, she starred in the CTV/ION series THE DETAIL, for which she was nominated for a 2019 CSA. She also recurred in the AMC series THE SON, opposite Pierce Brosnan; and in THE OCTOBER FACTION for Netflix. Wendy continues to be as busy as ever. She joined the cast of CBC's hit procedural, PRETTY HARD CASES for its final season, while also shooting in the highly anticipated series GRAY, opposite Patricia Clarkson. Next, she appears in the independent films BACKSPOT, from director D.W. Waterson; and SAM opposite Elliot Page. We dived right in and started our conversation with the all-consuming fear of ‘coming out' --and we ended – appropriately, with her sense of belonging in a community and industry that she is so passionate about.

Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams remembers Queen Elizabeth's legacy through the way she was portrayed in film, TV and art. Director Patricia Rozema discusses her work chairing the Toronto International Film Festival's Platform jury, a competitive programme that includes 10 contemporary filmmakers who've been selected because of their bold directorial visions. Singer-songwriter and dancer Tate McRae reflects on her whirlwind career, from So You Think You Can Dance to the release of her debut album, I Used to Think I Could Fly. Actor Fiona Reid talks about portraying Queen Elizabeth in Peter Morgan's play The Audience, which was the basis for Netflix's big hit The Crown.

I'VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING is a charming and whimsical story about a daydreamer with artistic aspirations, Patricia Rozema's fanciful character study follows an amateur photographer Polly (Sheila McCarthy) as she lands a temp job at a Toronto art gallery run by elegant and sophisticated Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon), who is also a painter. Polly is impressed with Gabrielle's paintings, but as Polly gets to know Gabrielle's lover, Mary (Ann-Marie MacDonald), and becomes entangled in their lives, she realizes that Gabrielle isn't exactly who she appears to be. The absent-minded temp with spiky orange hair and the polished curator with a gift for gab are like night and day, yet a strong connection builds between these two women through their shared love of art, and their genuine curiosity and need for love. Director, producer and writer Patricia Rozema stops by to talk about why I've Heard the Mermaids Singing was such a a groundbreaking film in 1987, the casting of the pitch-perfect Sheila McCarthy in the title role of Polly, her own career post-Mermaids and the re-release of the film by the prestigious film distributor Kino Lorber. For news and updates go to: kinolorber.com/ive-heard-the-mermaids-singing

Anniversaries tend to sneak up on you...especially big ones like this...On this episode we have the unique pleasure of sitting down with writer/director Patricia Rozema as her film 'I've Heard The Mermaids Singing' has just had a brand new 4K restoration as is having a theatrical run at the Metrograph in New York starting on March 11th and the Alamo Drafthouse in LA on March 18th before expanding out across North America during the spring.I've Heard The Mermaids Singing is a charming and whimsical story about a daydreamer with artistic aspirations, Patricia Rozema's fanciful character study follows an amateur photographer Polly (Sheila McCarthy) as she lands a temp job at a Toronto art gallery run by elegant and sophisticated Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon), who is also a painter. Polly is impressed with Gabrielle's paintings, but as Polly gets to know Gabrielle's lover, Mary (Ann-Marie MacDonald), and becomes entangled in their lives, she realizes that Gabrielle isn't exactly who she appears to be. Winner of the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, it's hard to believe that this charming Queer character study is celebrating it's 35th anniversary.I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Patricia to talk about how a restoration like this gets kicked off, the legacy of the film, the brilliance of Shelia McCarthy, how the film has aged and the evolution of Canadian cinema on the world stage.

We love talking about Canadian films so much we teamed up with Thom Ernst to create a podcast where we invite Canadian filmmakers to talk about their artistic influences past and present.  For more information on Patricia Rozema's filmography, visit: https://patriciarozema.com For more information on KCFF, please check us out at kingcanfilmfest.com or @kingcanfilmfest Hosted by Thom Ernst  Produced by Moira Demorest Support for this podcast comes from the Kingston Canadian Film Festival which is situated on the traditional homeland of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat. This podcast is generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.  Thanks for listening!

Episode 263."Manchester by the Sea"Composer.Lesley Barber.Lesley Barber has scored a string of award-winning and highly acclaimed projects, most notably Kenneth Lonergan's Oscar-nominated film, Manchester by the Sea. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Class of 2016, Lesley was recently elected to represent the music branch on the Board of Governors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.A multi-instrumentalist, conductor and pianist, Lesley writes music marked by intelligence and emotional depth. Barber's interest in modern electronic programming, loops, and effects adds dimension to her work, creating hybrid atmospheric scores with lush orchestration with an innate ability to bring the essential to light and avoid the cliché.Lesley's recent films include Late Night, directed by Nisha Ganatra and starring Emma Thompson; Mindy Kaling's Four Weddings and a Funeral. series; American Woman, produced by Killer Films and directed by Semi Chellas; Stephanie Laing's Irreplaceable You; and Nappily Ever After, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour.Her distinguished list of credits also includes Lonergan's Oscar-winning You Can Count On Me; Jerry Rothwell's award-winning documentary How to Change the World; Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park; Mira Nair's Golden Globe winning Hysterical Blindness; Mary Harron's Moth Diaries; the children's classic Little Bear with Maurice Sendak; Yo-Yo Ma: Six Gestures; and Boaz Yakin's Boarding School.Lesley is a proud and active member of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, which has taken a leading role in the much-publicized diversity conversation now occurring in Hollywood. She has a passion for good food, great cities and interesting company.Welcome, Lesley Barber.Instagram: Monday Morning Critic Podcast.Facebook: Monday Morning Critic Podcast.Twitter:  @mdmcriticWebsite: www.mmcpodcast.comContact: Mondaymorningcritic@gmail.com

Hello friends,Today, a podcast episode!It would not have been possible to have our Everything Emma month here at the Austen Connection without consulting Professor George Justice. Dr. Justice is the editor of the 2011 Norton Critical Edition of Emma, a professor of 18th Century British literature, and a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education. And he's also the husband of Austen scholar, author, and friend Devoney Looser, who tells the story of their romantic meet-cute in a previous Austen Connection episode. Consult him we did, and the conversation was really fun, because: Emma is fun, just as it is also complex, surprising, baffling, and romantic. All of this complexity comes out in the conversation with George Justice. We explore what's going on with Austen men, what's going on with Austen women, and how romance and power get wrapped up in the stories of Austen. I first met Dr. Justice on the campus of the University of Missouri, where he served as dean of the graduate school. Now, he is a professor of English at Arizona State University. But in the process of that journey, from Missouri to Arizona, and from administration back to the classroom, he rediscovered the power of teaching Jane Austen.  This journey also has involved a recovery from a serious illness, and Dr. Justice says one of the things that got him through tough times has been reading Jane Austen, and talking about Jane Austen with his students. We spoke on a recent sunny Saturday, by Zoom. Here's an edited excerpt from our conversation:*Please note: There is a light mention of sexual assault in this conversation, about 20 minutes in, and again at 40 about minutes.Plain JaneI'm so glad that you're sharing your beautiful Saturday morning. Let me just ask a little bit about your work, George. So you're obviously on English literature with a focus on women's writing and publishing. And you're writing a book on Jane Austen, as a writer for Reaktion Books, the “Critical Lives” series. You also write about higher education, very compellingly, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. What, in all of this, are you most focused on and most passionate about, like, right this minute?George JusticeI can't say there is one thing because you're right, you just outlined the two major threads of my career as they've evolved. They both involve students, higher education, and places where I think I can contribute. But on the literature side, it feels like a miracle to me to be able to write about Jane Austen, to do research on Jane Austen, and especially, to teach Jane Austen to undergraduate students, which I can't imagine a more enjoyable thing that I can pretend is productive for myself to do. But my most recently published book is How to Be a Dean from the Johns Hopkins University Press. So figuring out ways, outside of administration, to take my passion for higher education to make structural change, structural change that is also focused on the individual. And I think that's something that maybe I'll be able to bring back to a discussion of the novels, genre, and to teaching. I love thinking about what the novel is. But what I also love is what it means to individual human beings to change their lives and do great things in the world.Plain Jane George, you said something else, about your illness, which you handled, it seemed, so gracefully. But I know that it's been huge. And in some ways, you were hit by this turn-the-world-upside-down thing. And then the world itself was turned upside down, not too long later. So in some ways, we're all kind of stunned. But you look the picture of health, and it's so great to see it. What were you reading during this time? Can Jane Austen get you through something like that?George JusticeTo me, it was therapeutic. It was therapeutic not only to reread her books, and to dig back in, more generally, to 18th century literature, but I was a little shaky, you know, I had been very sick. I had not from my own choice been thrust out of a job that I had spent 70 hours working on actively, and the rest of my life kind of thinking about, when I got into the classroom, and started teaching Jane Austen again. And it was absolutely life-changing. And I realized, that is what the life of an educator should be. And it was really … a life-changing class for me, not only because it marked kind of re-entry into a different kind of career: But the students were so shockingly great to me. To me, having these students in that class, loving Jane Austen and understanding things about Jane Austen, was transformational in my understanding about what the rest of my life and the rest of my career are going to be. I can bring together a complete passion for bringing Jane Austen not just to white, upper-middle class students at a private liberal arts college, but at Arizona State University, 120,000 students. It's now a Hispanic serving institution. It serves many, many first generation and low-income students, and they love Jane Austen. Not only with as much passion, but with at least as much insight as any students I've ever had anywhere else in my life. That class changed my life, when I had these students engaging with such depth and brilliance with the texts.Plain Jane That's amazing. I hear you George, I think that's true. It is life changing. And this project arose also from the difficult times, the winter of the pandemic, and just looking for something to lift you up and a community to engage in. What you're describing, going into that classroom, sharing Austen, but then also having some brilliance shared back at you and just literally connecting around the stories. But you know, the Norton Anthology that you edited and curated came out almost 20 years ago. And you may have not looked at it recently. I have. But you were talking about the power of Jane Austen, then, so it's Everything Emma in the Austen connection right now.George JusticeGood for me.Plain Jane Yes. Well, is Emma your favorite novel of all time?George JusticeOh, that is a a very difficult question. And I know because you talked to Devoney and you had Devoney on your podcast a couple of weeks ago. In that now infamous conversation, I declared to Devoney that Mansfield Park was my favorite novel. And I do love Mansfield Park … because it was the first one that grabbed me. I mean, I was assigned it in a class my first year of grad school. I didn't read it until then, and I started reading it and it was just one of those amazing things, but my life was changed: How could I not have seen this or understood this in my past 22 years of life? I stayed up all night reading it, and it was like an onslaught. If you ask me, yes, that was my favorite. Plain Jane Well, I'm just curious. It seems to me like you were a more mature 22 year old. I mean, I read Mansfield Park when I was just out of college. Weirdly, I've never been assigned much Jane Austen at all. I just discovered it after all of the degrees - it was only two degrees - in English. … It wasn't until later that I realized there's a heck of a lot going on with Austen. What were you noticing? Why were you reading it up late at night? I mean … I had kind of a weird education, up until college. But you had a good education. So maybe you did have the training to spot the subtexts.George JusticeI don't know if it was about the subtext. I think it was about Fanny Price. Plain JaneYou like the underdog! Devoney said this … George Justice  The underdog and the person with depth, with a strong, correct, and unassailable moral code, oppressed by the world. I mean, that was a thing that just for whatever reason, maybe, from my high school years, which were kind of miserable, the person who was neglected. I mean, it just spoke to me, this whole world moving around in a cynical and nasty way. And yet, there's a moral center to that world, which was Fanny Price. So it wasn't even, it was not a literary reading, where I was looking at themes and context. It was Fanny Price. Who is, as you know, of such huge controversy in the Jane Austen world, because there are so many self-proclaimed Janeites who hate Fanny Price. To me, Fanny Price is the true center of Jane Austen. Which is why I found the film both interesting and disturbing, because Patricia Rozema melds Jane Austen and Fanny Price together, which I think actually weakens Fanny Price. But I do believe that the role of Fanny Price in the world, and especially in her world, is a truth about the social world. And it grabbed me. To me, Fanny Price is the true center of Jane Austen. … I do believe that the role of Fanny Price in the world, and especially in her world, is a truth about the social world. And it grabbed me. And the unbelievable moment when she turns down Henry Crawford. I always bring it up in class and I ask my students, “Should she have accepted Henry Crawford?” And the ones who read it correctly but glibly, always say, “Of course not.” The ones who are very cynical say, “Of course she should.” The real answer is, “I don't know.” Because that actually is the answer that the narrator provides to some extent. I just thought it captured a truth about the choices we have to make in the world, and the possibility of choosing good, not as an obvious choice, and not as a glibly self-justifying choice. But as a choice that resonates as truth within one's own moral complexity.Plain JaneI agree with everything you're saying about Fanny Price. … She is ascendant. And you talk about Henry Crawford: She's superior. Like, you can't read that without thinking, “This child, this female child of the species, is superior to everyone. What are you gonna do with that, people? What are you going to do with that? Not even the parsonage and Edmund and not even the grand estate of Mansfield Park is worthy of this child. So, take that!” And I don't know if people really see it that way. You say it's still a little controversial. But you saw this when you were 22?George Justice Well, I think it was a weakness in my psychology.Plain Jane No, because Austen was showing you. Austen was showing you. But we just, I feel like there's still so much to unpack with Austen with every new generation. George JusticeAnd she shows it to you both without humiliating her and without glorifying her. So, as you were talking so eloquently, what came into my mind [is] another woman author of the 19th century, George Eliot and Middlemarch and Dorothea Brooke, and Dorothea Brooke is both humiliated and glorified. You are right, Fanny Price tears everything down. The humiliations are our humiliations from society, not from the writer. I mean, Dorothea Brooke is somewhat humiliated by George Eliot. Jane Austen never humiliates Fanny Price, even if Mrs. Norris is there brutalizing her, but she's definitely not glorifying her either. Fanny Price comes back, and in some ways you could say she assimilates herself to the patriarchy, she marries her cousin, the bossy Edmund  - I don't even think he even fully 100% appreciates her but maybe that's just me. I think I would have been better for Fanny Price than he is.Plain JaneYou would have, George! And no, Austen does not want us to love Edmund, you know? That's clear. She does not love Edmund. We're giving our opinions here! So let us know, people, if you disagree. But yeah, but I love what you're saying, George, that Austen is not humiliating. And in fact, it's not really Fanny tearing things down. Right? Fanny is not doing that; Austen is doing that. And the world is humiliating. The world is full of humiliations, insults, injuries. And here's how you stand. Here's how you stand in this. You point out something in your writing that I want to get to too, which is that there's imagination. This is, in some ways, a fantasy of what can happen. This is re-envisioning a world where a young woman, a young person who identifies as female, a young person who identifies as however you identify, whatever your race, color, sexuality, gender, you - just as a human - you can stand, and this is how you might survive and maybe even be ascendant. Even though it's not necessarily going to happen in real life.So, Mansfield Park. The next novel Austen wrote, I believe, right after Emma. How does she go from Fanny Price to this heroine that has so little to vex her?George Justice When you look at Mansfield Park, which is certainly an experiment in light of Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, and a novelist who is a genius and who is shaping the form and breaking the form at the same time that she's inhabiting it. In a way it's the right next experiment. You take somebody who's very much unlike Fanny Price. She's wealthy. She's beautiful. She's admired. She never makes social mistakes. Really. She is the queen of the world, as opposed to Cinderella. So Fanny Price is Cinderella. Emma is one of the wicked sisters. Yet, and the brilliant ... “I'm going to create a heroine nobody but myself will much like”: That's something an artist would do. It's a kind of intellectual game. But unlike the way postmodern novels sometimes [create] experiments without a heart. It's an experiment in which life overwhelms whatever kind of intellectual experiment may have given rise, to trying to write about an entirely different character, because there is just as much life in Emma, as there is in Mansfield Park. And there is in its own way, just as much integrity in the character of Emma, as there is in the character Fanny Price.Plain Jane It's interesting because she's taking us on this roller coaster ride. So she's like, “Here, I showed you the poor, mousy Cinderella, who becomes ascendent. How does that happen? Now I'm going to show you somebody who - as you say, George - the queen, she's at the top. But she also is going to change and evolve. And in both cases, she's focusing on what matters to her, which is character, and kindness, and how to exist in the world - not to just be on top because that's not the goal, people - we're still getting that memo. But it's to be a contributor, a good citizen, a kind person. How do you feel about that, that aspect of this, that she's got someone on the bottom there, she's got a female character that's already at the top. But yet, what are the themes that remained the same? George JusticeWell, I think you actually just put it in a way that crystallizes something for me. And it's what I become much more self-conscious about …  in life: which is that kindness is at the core. And so that's not something that I wrote about in the introduction that you very kindly mentioned, to the Norton Critical Edition. But it is something that is absolutely true. And I point out to students, you know, [Emma] does what she's supposed to do. She visits the poor, she's charitable to the poor. And that's the kind of structural kindness, and she doesn't do it cynically. So there is a goodness to her character that gets expressed. And kindness. Of course, as we know, she's not always kind to some of the people that are closest to her, including Miss Bates, including Jane Fairfax. … One of the prevalent readings of Emma continues to be that Emma is … humiliated into kindness. The scene on Box Hill, where she is so cruel to Miss Bates, and so out of touch with her surroundings, because one thing about Emma is that she is unbelievably … perceptive about the world around her, at the same time that she doesn't put all the clues together. So she's this detective who's taking in all the evidence, and then she can't quite put it together to understand what's going on. Like Mr. Elton trying to rape her in the carriage - when anybody who had been reading it, anybody in Emma's position should have been able to see exactly what was happening. But that's very different from Box Hill, where she's not even perceptive. … But at the same time, that is a crucial moment in which she certainly sees the world more clearly and is able to correlate her kindness as you put it, this is correlated with her role in the social hierarchy, and her own personal satisfaction and romance. And it doesn't stamp out her imagination. Her imagination is still there. … No, she's a brilliantly imaginative person who doesn't have a job where she can do anything with it. … I love Mr. Knightley. But Emma, Emma wins the novel. And she wins novel not because she makes some sort of cynical or moral change from who she was, to who she will be as Mrs. George Knightley. It's because she has reshaped her world - uncomfortably because we're still in patriarchal, early 19th century England. But she shaped a world in which she can continue to love, be kind, have a lot of nice things, be admired by other people, which she certainly loves to do. And do good in the world. Plain JaneSo speaking of Knightley: You love Knightley. You say something in your intro [to the Norton Critical Edition]: Emma is being forced to recalibrate the cultural and the social hierarchy. She thinks she knows this social hierarchy. She has that classic definition of privilege, where it's not something she has to think about. She's just at the top of it. But she in fact is wrong about it, and then it turns out - you point this out - she's recalibrating, but that recalibration is coming every single time from challenges from Knightley. How does a romance and marriage and all of this fit into this recalibration and what is it like, also George, reading this as as a person identifying as a man reading that?George Justice Hmm, let me backtrack a little bit into how you've set this up in a very interesting, complicated way. It is Austen who has given Knightley those characteristics and that genuine insight into the world. Mr. Knightley really does understand and he's older - I mean, it grosses my students out how significantly older Mr. Knightley is. And he's kind to her and he's loved her since  - that also grosses out the students ...Plain Jane … for some reason Austen likes that older, very older, powerful guy to be the one just kind of showing us the way. I mean, she gives that power, and who knows why she does that. George JusticeBut it's not just giving him the power. It's also, I do believe, he is speaking for her. He is speaking correctly. The brilliant, writer, critic named Sarah Raff wrote a wonderful essay that talks about Emma and Mr. Knightley and Emma's relationship in the context of the letters of advice that Jane Austen is writing to her niece, who's trying to decide whom to marry. And there is a bullying, authoritative voice and approach to her niece, that mirrors a little bit of this relationship. It's a it's a great essay about it.Emma wins the novel. … because she has reshaped her world - uncomfortably because we're still in patriarchal, early 19th century England. But she shaped a world in which she can continue to love, be kind, have a lot of nice things, be admired by other people, which she certainly loves to do. And do good in the world. Plain JaneIf you're a woman, Regency writer, you're a genius, and you see the world and you're reflecting the world, there'll be some things that … occur when you have genius and imagination and art intersecting, right? Some things are going to occur to us 206 years later that you didn't envision, but … she's giving Knightley her viewpoints because people will listen to Knightley. People will listen to Knightley and not necessarily listen to someone else.George Justice And maybe in a romantic relationship - this is utter speculation! - she'd be more the Knightley character. And so you know, we do have these interesting intersections of gender, power and attraction. Plain JaneI love that we don't know how Jane Austen identified 100%. We have no idea. She may have identified with Knightley, she might have been in love with Emma, she might have ... Who knows? I think that's wonderful. And that's a whole other aspect we could dive into which is the LGBTQI critical approaches and queer theory approaches to Austen. Really the question we were discussing, sorry, is how it all ends up in the hands of Knightley, but also how to channel all of this into romance?George Justice Oh, yeah. I mean, because it is romantic. And I know there are some against-the-grain readers who don't find the love between Emma and Mr. Knightley plausible. I am not one of them. I find the scene - and it's a scene in which despite the fact that Mr. Knightley has just dressed her down and made her weep - the narrative is constructed so that Emma is allowed in private to have her moment of internal revelation that no one but she must marry Mr. Knightley. And then she also finally, instead of being clueless, she figures out that he likes her. So in that, it is a, to me, it's a wonderful thing. When he he starts, you know, “Can I talk to you?” And Emma's a little nervous. Because she doesn't 100% know. But as the conversation gets going, she knows exactly what's coming. And so the power is turned. Emma actually knows before he knows that Mr. Knightley is going to propose to her and that she will say yes. Before Mr. Knightley understands that. And so he's, like, mortified: I shouldn't go on. And she's like: No, no, go ahead and go on. And it's an interesting power dynamic. And I'm certainly not the person who's seen this first or seen it best. Claudia Johnson's [written] about Mr. Knightley as a character who is very masculine. And yet he's a kind of new man, because he is truly emotionally sensitive to Emma. [I]t is romantic. And I know there are some against-the-grain readers who don't find the love between Emma and Mr. Knightley plausible. I am not one of them.What is interesting in the romance is that power is so completely built into the sexual energy between Mr. Knightley and Emma. He was a teenager, looking at a little girl. And as they grew up, he would kind of mock her and tease her. And she'd flirt with him, totally unafraid of this older guy, really. So I mean, she was herself, who really has the power there? And …  in the context of Box Hill, where he really has, you know, put his hand down, if you reread the novel from the beginning, Mr. Knightley doesn't have really any power over her. He has her total respect, but she has the power of doing what she wants. And that really is what comes through at the end - that this powerful romance, which I think it is not a kind of dominance-submission thing. It is really a romance of two morally and intellectually equal people. They are very masculine and very feminine - it's interesting if you get into the GLBTQ thing, because there is a long history of people seeing Emma not as being a woman. But we shouldn't forget that it's very clear … and Jan Fergus points this out really beautifully in an essay that I put at the back of my Norton Critical Edition: We linger over the feminine, beautiful form of Emma. But her mind is powerfully intellectual. … Even as it's kind. She is a kind, intellectually brilliant person who answers to nobody. So where you might see it as, “She makes all these lists of books that she hasn't read!” … That shows her power. She has the intellectual power to know what she should do. And she has the intellectual power and the judgment to say, “I'm not going to do it.” And is happy to live within the structures, the class structures, the social structures, the architectural structures of her society. But she kind of scoffs at any structures that would restrain her moral and intellectual worth. Plain Jane  Well, it's almost like she doesn't even notice those structures. She's like, clueless in some interesting ways.George Justice Yes, but I, but I don't think it's clueless overall.  … She's clear-sighted and not insecure. She's totally non-insecure. It's kind of amazing.Plain JaneWell, it's interesting describing her power. It's true. Like you say, Austen's not humiliating these characters with Emma, she's doing the opposite. She's showing someone who is not only superior, but she's artificially superior. Emma's so powerful, she can be as wrong as the Eltons and the, you know, all of the wrong patriarchal figures. Emma's wrong and artificially propped up just like they are. But she has this transformation that comes from this this man. .. There was a little post I did called The Smartest Person in the Room. ...I feel like maybe Austen wanted someone, man/woman/person to be as smart as she was. That's a hard way to go through the world when marriage is your option. Who is going to be smart enough for Jane Austen? She didn't find it. She created stories with people who find it. But at the same time, obviously, she showed us so much more than that romance.George Justice  That's sad! And it's very true. Let's go through from the beginning: I'm just going to ask you. Do you think Mr. Darcy is worthy of Elizabeth Bennet?Plain Jane  Yes, I believe that. It seems to me like Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett make each other worthy of each other. It seems to me like the both characters You want to just focus on Darcy and Elizabeth for a minute? George Justice  Yeah, I mean, I'm going to go through the whole list.Plain Jane Externally, he's worthy, right? He's a ticket. Internally, not so much. But because he transforms, they make each other better. I feel like they make each other better. And I feel like Austin is showing us that marriage - if you're going to get married, make sure it's somebody who will make you better and not make you worse. And she's full of examples of people who make each other worse.George JusticeThe Crofts. Admiral and Mrs. Croft make each other better.Plain JaneAnd are they the only ones?!George JusticeThey probably are. I want to go [through the list] because I think this is something I haven't thought of. We already said that Edmund really isn't worthy of Fanny. But Darcy is worthy of Elizabeth. Would you say that Edward is worthy of Elinor.Plain Jane Almost! He has potential. That little engagement on the side is extremely disappointing. But he needs to speak up. He needs to grow a spine. But he has potential Maybe with Elinor's extremely strong spine, those two will be all right. What do you think?George JusticeI don't think he's worthy of her. But he's whom she chose. And he's not terrible. That's like Edmund. It's, that's who Fanny wanted and he's not terrible. I'd say the same thing about Henry Tilney. Catherine Morland's not as fully developed a character. But he's, he's not a bad guy. We linger over the feminine, beautiful form of Emma. But her mind is powerfully intellectual. … Even as it's kind. She is a kind, intellectually brilliant person who answers to nobody.But if you take Mr. Darcy, and you take Captain Wentworth, and you take, Mr. Knightley, those are characters who embody - as I said, Claudia Johnson talks about it - these new men who are masculine and powerful, and yet have a sensitive intelligence to them, as well. And respect and value deeply the women that they're with. … This conversation has made me want to think about that. And why the last two, thinking about Persuasion, and Emma, the last two of those powerful men are truly worthy, I think. And you know, of course, I think the moment at the end of that letter, in Persuasion, is one of the most intense things. But I know a colleague who thinks it's camp, that it's purposely overdone. I don't believe that at all. I think it's one of the most beautiful things ever written in the English language.Plain Jane  It's so beautiful. I love your categorizing all these leading men, who's worthy, who's not. It's really interesting. You, okay, I had to pick up the Norton Edition, Claudia Johnson. Here's what she says: She says Knightley is “a fantastically wishful creation of benign authority, in whom the benefits and attractions of power are preserved, and the abuses and encroachments expelled.” So what do you think is going on with that as you categorize the leading men? That's Claudia Johnson's Knightley, wrapped up in power.George Justice And because authority and power are inherently not wrong things in these books. When I'm teaching classes, I bring it back to the authority and the power of the narrator, who is the actual authority and power in all of these novels. And I think that's partly why the turn from an epistolary novel, where, you know, it's harder to weld that to increasingly intense narrative strategies that express their authority, often by merging the voice through free indirect discourse, with the voice of the main character. So it is such a trick to have the most fully controlling and authoritative and benign narrators who efface themselves and express their authority and power, almost through their own self effacement.Plain Jane Let me George, read your own writing back to you, because this is so amazing. And it just kind of sums up everything that we said, and I have this kind of as our last question. You write almost 20 years ago in your introduction to the Norton Critical Edition. Here's what you wrote: “Reading Emma requires interaction. We impose meaning on the text just as the text pushes its various meanings on to us. Trying to understand Emma, with its interplay of psychological realism and moral vision, is like trying to understand ourselves and the world. We must be both introspective and exceedingly observant of what lies around us. Complete success eludes us. We must reread, reflect and change our minds, and perhaps become better people for having done so.” I almost cried when I read that!George Justice That's very kind (laughing). I can't believe I wrote that. It does sound pretty good. Plain JaneMy question for you with that is, Do you still think that? Twenty years later, almost 20 years later?George Justice Yeah. And that's an interesting thing I do. And it's an interesting thing, and it's humbling about teaching, and it's a wonderful thing about teaching. Like any teacher, when I teach a novel a lot of times, like I do with Emma, I have go-to points, I have shticks. I have different scenes I like to focus on. … So I'm, you know, leading, I like to talk about the carriage theme, for example, and I do have a strong reading, and Mr. Elton is basically raping Emma, and I want students to see the actual violence that is in that scene. It isn't just the sloppy, silly guy who is physically menacing in that space and in the way that he approached. But then students will say, “Well, I read it in this way.” And any good teacher has to be able to say, “Wow, I hadn't thought about that.” Just as your focusing on just your use of the word kindness, and putting that deeply into our conversation about Emma. I had not articulated it to myself in that way before. That's new to me. And I can tell you, I'm going to be thinking about that for months to come. So I do believe that every time I read this book, it's a new book to me. She's constructed the books so carefully that it's impossible to understand even what's happening, 20 times through the book, for me. And then when you add the increased complexity of how human beings interact with each other, and how the fixed and unfixed parts of their personality come into this complicated matrix of interaction. Yeah, it's a new book every time. And it's a new book that is morally compelling. Because it tells us to look at everything anew.Thanks for joining this conversation, friends.As always, let us know your thoughts on: Austen's men - who's Worthy and who's Not Worthy? Who makes your list? What are your thoughts on Emma, Knightley, and the power dynamics in Austen's romances? You can comment here!You can also find us on Twitter, at @AustenConnect and on Insta at @austenconnection.Meanwhile, stay in touch, and hope you enjoy a beautiful autumn with soups, teas, and lots of great novels.Yours truly,Plain JaneIf you liked this post, feel free to share it!Links:“Critical Lives” series - Reaktion Books: http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/results.asp?SF1=series_exact&ST1=CRITICALLIVES&DS=Critical%20Lives&SORT=sort_titleThe Norton Critical Edition of Emma:  https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393927641More on scholar and critic Claudia Johnson: https://english.princeton.edu/people/claudia-l-johnsonDever Justice LLC: https://deverjustice.com/about/How to Be a Dean - from Johns Hopkins University Press: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/how-be-dean Get full access to The Austen Connection at austenconnection.substack.com/subscribe

Kelly McCrillis and Ryan Graves (hosts of the Rom Com Gents Podcast) join hosts Allie and Mia for Austen August! They chat about Patricia Rozema's 1999 adaptation of "Mansfield Park" starring Frances O'Connor and Jonny Lee Miller. They talk about Rozema's reimaging of Fanny Price, the attypical structure of Mansfield Park the novel, and get a reading from Jane Austen tarot cards! __ SHOW INFORMATION Instagram: @P.S.ILoveRomComsPod Twitter: @P.S.ILoveRomComsPod Email: P.S.ILoveRomComsPod@gmail.com

Quand une terrible crise ravage les Etats-Unis, deux soeurs doivent apprendre à survivre...  Ce mois-ci, nous avons le plaisir de recevoir Laura et Pauline de Sorociné , le podcast cinéma féminin et féministe, dont la revue vient de sortir  ! Le premier numéro est encore disponible en ligne et en librairies et on vous invite vraiment à le lire. On parle de Dans la forêt, le premier roman de l'Américaine Jean Hegland paru en 1996, qui a été adapté en film par Patricia Rozema en 2015. On y suit Eva et Nell, deux soeurs de 18 et 17 ans qui, suite à une panne d'électricité généralisée dans tout le pays, se retrouvent isolées dans leur maison au coeur de la forêt californienne. Elles attendent désespérément le retour à la vie normale, mais celle-ci est-elle encore possible ? Et surtout, l'adaptation est-elle fidèle au roman d'origine ? Réponse dans l'épisode !   Si vous avez lu ou vu Dans la Forêt, n'hésitez pas à nous donner votre avis !

On this episode, we celebrate the work of great Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, focusing on Europa Europa, Washington Square, and Charlatan. This episode features Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney, Executive Editor Orla Smith, and Fiona Underhill, Editor-in-Chief of JumpCut Online Episode Notes: Sign up for our Lockdown Film School session with Agnieszka Holland Read Alex's interview with Holland, about her 2017 film Spoor Read Alex's review of Charlatan View our other Lockdown Film School sessions, including Patricia Rozema, Mike Leigh, Amma Asante, and Alice Winocour Related Episodes Episode 55: Comparing Adaptations of The Secret Garden Episode 88: The 2021 Oscar Best International Feature Category Follow Seventh Row on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and read our articles at seventh-row.com.    

Finn & Uther watch 'Modern Times,' Charlie Chaplin's 1936 silent comedy which stands as possibly the best example of that genre, and 'Kit Kittredge - An American Girl,' Patricia Rozema's 2008 cheaply produced toy ad about the Great Depression, hobo code and Stanley Tucci as an evil magician, which also stands as possibly the best example of its genre. Topics include: The New Zealand chocolate milk riots; Alan Partridge facing escaped convicts; The Bear that ate Finn sits down for an interview; The song RuPaul and Henry Rollins recorded. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Composer Mark Korven is the featured guest on this Score to Screen podcast. Korven elaborates on his experience working alongside director Robert Eggers while composing the hypnotic score for The Lighthouse. From Robert Eggers, the visionary filmmaker behind modern horror masterpiece The Witch, comes his latest The Lighthouse, a hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s. Starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, A24's The Lighthouse made its world premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Mark Korven is a Toronto based composer for film and television. He is best known for his work on the 2016 period horror film The Witch, which won Robert Eggers the best director award at the 2015 Sundance Festival. His scores have been nominated fourteen times for Canadian film and television awards, winning several. He has also composed feature film scores for acclaimed directors Deepa Mehta, Patricia Rozema and Vincenzo Natale. Korven is also a multi-instrumentalist specializing in world music. The Score to Screen podcast series is produced and hosted by Crossover Media's Max Horowitz. Listen to The Lighthouse Soundtrack and get the vinyl here. Listen to the official Mark Korven Spotify playlist here. To learn more about Sony Soundtracks visit: https://lnk.to/sonysoundtracksPD

In today's episode, Amanda sits down over some cold beers (shout out to High Park Brewery in Toronto, Canada!) with actor, writer, improvisor Paloma Nuñez (Baroness Von Sketch Show, Shazam!, Mouthpiece) to discuss flirting, why the 3rd grade was the worst year of her life, and why Mark Ruffalo is the absolute sweetest! Paloma is an award-winning actor on screen and on stage, including a Screen Actor's Guild Award for her role in the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight! You can see her on the big screen in films like the 2019 action comedy Shazam! and in Patricia Rozema's rad feminist film Mouthpiece. On TV, you can see her on shows like Kim's Convenience, Designated Survivor, and all 5 seasons of the award-winning Baroness Von Sketch Show, some of which she also wrote on. She is an indisputably fabulous actor, improvisor, and I've never met a person who didn't think she was a stellar human being as well!   The Liquid Courage Podcast: insta @liquidcouragepodcast twitter @liquidcpodcast YouTube Video Episodes & more! email podcastliquidcourage@gmail.com   Amanda Pereira: insta @hotcoldspicy / twitter @amanda_pereira Paloma Nuñez: insta @thepalomanunez / twitter @palomanunez / website www.palomanunez.com   Paloma would to encourage viewers and listeners to support Black Lives Matter Toronto and the efforts to Defund the police.   This episode is sponsored by High Park Brewery! They offer delivery if you're not comfortable visiting in person, and make sure to include at least one of their Make It Matter German Kölsch - $1 from every bottle sold is donated to a handful of charities that support Black and Indigenous Peoples in Cananda including Black Lives Matter Canada and The Native Women's Resource Center of Toronto. *Warning: This episode contains swearing.

Deux adolescentes dans une forêt, un journal intime et le reste du monde qui s’écroule. C’est la trame du premier roman de Jean England sorti en 1996, Dans la forêt. Dans cet univers post-apocalyptique, Nell et sa soeur, isolées dans leur maison au fond des bois, tentent d’échapper au chaos dans lequel les États-unis sont plongés. Sur fond de crise sociale et écologique, les jeunes femmes vont devoir survivre sans électricité et sans eau. Tout en devant se protéger des menaces venues de l’extérieur, elles découvriront leurs corps et les potentialités nouvelles que cette vie leur offre. Alors que l’actualité lui donne une résonnance particulière, Clémentine et Pauline reviennent et vous donnent leurs avis sur ce roman d’apprentissage éco-féministe à glisser dans toutes les cabanes. Références entendues dans l’épisodeL’Amie prodigieuse (Gallimard, 2014) est le premier livre de la tétralogie homonyme d’Elena Ferrante. Le Chœur des femmes (Gallimard, P.O.L, 2009) est un roman de Martin Winckler. Dans la forêt (en anglais Into the Forest) est le premier roman de Jean Hegland publié en 1996. Et traduit en français par Josette Chicheportiche en 2017 aux éditions Gallmeister.Dans la forêt est un film de Gilles Marchand réalisé en 2016 avec l’acteur Jérémie Elkaïm. Calyx Books est une maison d’édition féministe qui a publié les premiers livres de Jean Hegland. Into the Forest une adaptation canadienne au cinéma du roman de Jean England réalisée par Patricia Rozema avec Ellen Page et Evan Rachel Wood et la musique de Max Richter. Contagion est un film réalisé par Steven Soderbergh en 2011.Panic Room est un thriller réalisé par David Fincher en 2002. Sally Bell était une survivante de la tribu indienne-américaine Sinkyones décimée au XIXème siècle. The Life Within : Celebration of a Pregnancy (Humana Press, 1991) est le premier livre de Jean Egland. La Route est un roman post-apocalyptique de Cormac McCarthy publié en 2006 (Alfred A. Knopf aux États-Unis et en France en 2008 (éditions de l'Olivier) traduit de l'anglais par François Hirsch.Margaret Atwood est une romancière, poétesse et critique littéraire canadienne connue pour son roman La Servante écarlate (Robert Laffont, 1987). La sorcière Starhawk est une écrivaine et militante écoféministe américaine, autrice de plusieurs best-sellers dont Rêver l'obscur. Femmes, Magie et Politique (Cambourakis, 2015).Zoyâ Pirzâd est une autrice iranienne qui a publié le recueil de nouvelles Le Goût âpre des kakis (éditions Zulma, 2009) et C'est moi qui éteins les lumières (éditions Zulma, 2011) traduit en français par Christophe Balaÿ. L'Art de perdre (Flammarion, 2017) est un roman d'Alice Zeniter ayant obtenu le Prix Goncourt des lycéens 2017. La vie mensongère des adultes (Gallimard, 2020) est le nom du nouveau roman d’Elena Ferrante à paraître le 9 juin 2020. John Macnaught est le dessinateur de la BD L’été à Kingdom Fields (Dargaud, 2020). Robin MacArthur est l’autrice du recueil de nouvelles Le Coeur Sauvage (Albin Michel, 2017) et du roman Les femmes de Heart Spring Mountain (Albin Michel, 2019). Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) est un roman de Sally Rooney adapté par la BBC dans une série du même nom. Rassemblez-vous en mon nom (Notabilia, 2020) est le nom du nouveau livre de Maya Angelou à paraître le 20 août 2020. Quoi de Meuf est une émission de Nouvelles Écoutes, cet épisode est conçu par Clémentine Gallot avec Pauline Verduzier, mixé par Laurie Galligani. Générique réalisé par Aurore Meyer Mahieu. Montage et coordination Ashley Tola.

Who inspired you to become a filmmaker? You've no doubt wondered how they got to where they are today. It may be a bit intimidating to reach out to this individual for guidance, at first. But have no fear. Eva shares her experiences contacting her own mentors, Patricia Rozema and the late Robert Forster. She gives valuable advice to reaching out and fostering this important relationship. With a mentor, you have access to not only an opportunity that can potentially advance your career, but also to forge a lifelong friendship. ​ HOSTED AND WRITTEN BY: EVA ZIEMSEN PRODUCED BY: JESSICA F. BELLAMY (c) Cineva Films Inc. 2015

Lee is joined the writer/director of A24's Into The Forest, Patricia Rozema. Into The Forest sees two sisters after a massive power outage learn to survive on their own in their isolated woodland home.Patricia shares with me about how she went from not watching a movie until she was sixteen to becoming one of Canada's most prominent filmmakers. Patricia talks about the success at Cannes for her debut film, I've Heard The Mermaids Singing, tackling an adaptation of Mansfield Park, working with Miramax and the Weinstein's, directing for HBO and streaming, adapting Into The Forest and collaborating with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and we look at her new film, Mouthpiece.

Lee is joined the writer/director of A24's Into The Forest, Patricia Rozema. Into The Forest sees two sisters after a massive power outage learn to survive on their own in their isolated woodland home. Patricia shares with me about how she went from not watching a movie until she was sixteen to becoming one of Canada's most prominent filmmakers. Patricia talks about the success at Cannes for her debut film, I've Heard The Mermaids Singing, tackling an adaptation of Mansfield Park, working with Miramax and the Weinstein's, directing for HBO and streaming, adapting Into The Forest and collaborating with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and we look at her new film, Mouthpiece.

Lee is joined the writer/director of A24's Into The Forest, Patricia Rozema. Into The Forest sees two sisters after a massive power outage learn to survive on their own in their isolated woodland home. Patricia shares with me about how she went from not watching a movie until she was sixteen to becoming one of Canada's most prominent filmmakers. Patricia talks about the success at Cannes for her debut film, I've Heard The Mermaids Singing, tackling an adaptation of Mansfield Park, working with Miramax and the Weinstein's, directing for HBO and streaming, adapting Into The Forest and collaborating with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and we look at her new film, Mouthpiece.

Lee is joined the writer/director of A24's Into The Forest, Patricia Rozema. Into The Forest sees two sisters after a massive power outage learn to survive on their own in their isolated woodland home.Patricia shares with me about how she went from not watching a movie until she was sixteen to becoming one of Canada's most prominent filmmakers. Patricia talks about the success at Cannes for her debut film, I've Heard The Mermaids Singing, tackling an adaptation of Mansfield Park, working with Miramax and the Weinstein's, directing for HBO and streaming, adapting Into The Forest and collaborating with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and we look at her new film, Mouthpiece.

I had a great weekend at Filmfort watching so many feature, documentary, and short films! It was especially interesting to me how some of the short films compare to the cinematic and episodic storytellers on YouTube like Peter McKinnon, Casey Neistat, and Dan Mace. Oh, you have to go see the feature films “Ham on Rye” by Tyler Taormina and “Mouthpiece” by Patricia Rozema when these are available–so good!www.jefferyoliver.com 3.25.2019 (C) Sunset Grove Media

Following the April 18, 2018, screening of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) at Toronto's Revue Cinema for National Canadian Film Day, writer-director Patricia Rozema discussed her feature film debut with cléo journal’s Kiva Reardon. Topics include the casting of Sheila McCarthy, developing the story, filming in Toronto, a short bit on Harvey Weinstein, Calvinist self-discipline, and Rozema’s latest work, Mouthpiece. Bookending the podcast are some thoughts on my shifting tastes since 1987, and at KQEK.com I've posted additional thoughts on the film, related links, and reviews of Rozema's first two features, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and White Room  (1990). If you enjoyed this bonus podcast, connect with us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

It's the 76th episode of Final Girls Horrorcast and it's Listener Request Month so things just couldn't be better in Final Girl Land! This week The Girls search for the deeper meaning of 'Escape from Tomorrow' as requested by listener Fred B. and enjoy the wonderland that is 'Coraline'. In their final segments The Girls also partake in a spoiler-free review of "A Quiet Place" and answer a bunch of questions submitted by Justin from The Horror Business Podcast. Trailer Trashtalk Segment: "The First Purge" with a July 4th release date Stay tuned next week when we continue Listener Request Month:Listener Zanna Requested "Asmodexia" directed by Marc Carreté (this film is streaming on Hulu) Listener Monica Requested "Into the Forest" directed by: Patricia Rozema (this film is streaming on Amazon Prime)

Jack O'Connell, who starred in the TV series Skins, and on the big screen in Starred Up, '71 and Unbroken, discusses his latest role as Brick in Tennessee Williams's classic play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.Tomorrow the conductor Jules Buckley will perform the first of his two BBC Proms 2017. Buckley - who founded The Heritage Orchestra and in 2015 performed The Ibiza Prom in conjunction with Radio 1's Pete Tong - discusses this year's works which will be taking their inspiration from Scott Walker and Charles Mingus. For our Queer Icons series, best-selling novelist Emma Donoghue champions Patricia Rozema's film, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.Plus, Ashley Gething is the producer/director of the much talked about television film Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, in which Princes William and Harry give a rare interview about their mother Diana Princess of Wales who died 20 years ago. Ashley explains how the programme came about, and the insight it gives into how the Princes coped with her death.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Jerome Weatherald (Main Image: Jack O'Connell as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Photographer credit: Johan Persson).

The trite is made podcast when William and Alexander talk about I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. The lads explore their feelings over director Patricia Rozema's 1987 movie about love among ladies. Digressions and tangents abound. Check out Alexander's compiled list of the TIFF Canada's All-Time Top Ten ballots.Download this episode here. (45 MB) IMDb links to some of the movies mentioned in this episode are here: I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Moonlight and Mr. Holland's Opus.

Gil Mansergh’s SeptemberWord By Word conversation is with Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest, the bestselling novel of a near future, and the soon to be released Still Time, a novel about a Shakespeare scholar with alzheimers. Long time listens may recall that Jean joined novelist Greg Sarris on Gil's very first Word By Word broadcast, way back in May, 2007. A lot has happened in the intervening years, including actress Ellen Page falling in love with Into the Forest and guiding the book’s transformation to a film as its producer. The Canadian-made movie stars Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood and is directed and written by Patricia Rozema who created two of Gil's favorite films (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and Kit Kittredge: An American Girl), and is pleased to announce that the movie version of Into the Forest will open at Sebastopol’s Rialto Cinemas next Friday, September 16. The book launch for Still Time begins at 7:00, Friday, October 7th at the Occidental Center for the Arts.

Episode 23 of One Week Only! This week, our key film is the documentary “Gleason” by Clay Tweel. Steve Gleason was a successful NFL player who retired to start a family, but was struck by a sudden diagnosis of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The film follows his struggle to fight the diagnosis & be an inspiring figure for this disability, while also being a good husband and father, despite his condition. A powerful, tear-jerking story, the film comes to LA & NY this weekend, courtesy of Open Road Films. We also cover Hollywood documentary “Women He’s Undressed” about Oscar-Winning Costumer Orry-Kelly, by Gillian Armstrong; Wall Street thriller “Equity” starring Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad), from Meera Menon; documentary “Hollywood Beauty Salon” about a Philadelphia Recovery Community, by Glenn Holsten; science fiction end-of-the-world drama “Into the Forest” starring Ellen Page & Evan Rachel Wood, by Patricia Rozema; and “Heironymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil,” a documentary about celebrating the 500th anniversary of the famed Medieval painter, by Pieter van Huystee. Hosted by Carlos Aguilar & Conor Holt. Music by Kevin MacLeod at www.incompetech.com

Michael serves as President of the Chlotrudis Society's Board of Directors, and he is one of the Founders of the Chlotrudis Awards.Michael is cinematically drawn to our neighbors to the north in Canada, especially the work of filmmakers Atom Egoyan, Don McKellar, Molly Parker, Sarah Polley, and Patricia Rozema to name a few. Although he is devoted to independent cinema, he has enjoyed reading comics for over four decades, but has finally realized that he's not a fan of comics; he's a fan of reading stories about women with super powers. When he's finished with all of that, he works at the Boston Public Library as the Director of Library Services.