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2 episodes with Prizzi
2 episodes with Prizzi
3 episodes with Prizzi
2 episodes with Prizzi
2 episodes with Prizzi
2 episodes with Prizzi
2 episodes with Prizzi
3 episodes with Prizzi
2 episodes with Prizzi
Er Ballerina en værdig John Wick-arvtager?I denne episode af Betacritic dykker Jacob Ege Hinchely og Rikke Collin ned i to film, der begge eksperimenterer med perspektivskifte og universudvidelser.Først diskuteres den norsk-danske film Den Stygge Stedsøster (2025), instrueret af Emilie Blichfeldt (debutfilm), en satirisk mørk komedie med body horror-elementer, der nyfortolker Askepot-eventyret. Filmen følger Elvira, der kæmper mod sin smukke stedsøster i en blodig kamp om skønhed. Med Lea Myren (Nudes, Hvite gutter), Thea Sofie Loch Næss (The Last Kingdom, One Night in Oslo), Ane Dahl Torp (The Wave, Charter) og Flo Fagerli (debutfilm) i hovedrollerne, udfordrer filmen traditionelle skønhedsidealer og eventyrkonventioner. Dernæst rettes opmærksomheden mod From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025), en spin-off i John Wick-universet instrueret af Len Wiseman (Underworld, Live Free or Die Hard). Filmen følger Eve Macarro, en ballerina-trænet lejemorder, på hendes hævntogt mod dem, der dræbte hendes familie. Med Ana de Armas (Blonde, Knives Out) i hovedrollen og biroller af Keanu Reeves (John Wick, The Matrix), Ian McShane (Deadwood, American Gods), Anjelica Huston (The Addams Family, Prizzi's Honor), Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead, Blade II), Lance Reddick (The Wire, Fringe) og Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects, Miller's Crossing), byder filmen på intens action og udvider franchisens mytologi.Episoden afsluttes med anbefalinger og nyheder fra filmverdenen.Tusind tak fordi du lytter med.
Issue 60 of the monthly magazine podcast for the discerning film nerd continues with Classics and Hidden Gems, where we finally get round to watching a celebrated film and tell you about a lesser known film you need to check out. This month all our featured films are from 1985 and enjoying their 40th Anniversary. Our Classic is a film which made a splash when it came out with multiple awards nominations and winning an Oscar: John Huston's Prizzi's Honor. For our Hidden Gem it's a cult favourite from forty years ago: To Live and Die in LA. Issue 60's Double Reel Monthly is already out, and next week we'll bring you the Remakes Tribunal.
In part two of our season finale, we explore the final decade of John Huston's life and career. As he was slowly dying of emphysema and undergoing massive turmoil in his personal life, Huston continued to work almost compulsively on both passion projects (The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood, Under the Volcano) and paycheck gigs (Annie). His career ended, fittingly, with two collaborations with the next generation of Hustons, Prizzi's Honor and The Dead. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Gay homosexuals Nick and Joseph discuss Prizzi's Honor - a 1985 American black comedy crime film directed by John Huston, starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston, and William Hickey. Additional topics include: -Our Hawaii trip -Hot Pot Heaven -Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson -The death of Chuck Woolery Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FishJellyFilmReviews Want to send them stuff? Fish Jelly PO Box 461752 Los Angeles, CA 90046 Find merch here: https://fishjellyfilmreviews.myspreadshop.com/all Venmo @fishjelly Visit their website at www.fishjellyfilms.com Find their podcast at the following: Anchor: https://anchor.fm/fish-jelly Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/388hcJA50qkMsrTfu04peH Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fish-jelly/id1564138767 Find them on Instagram: Nick (@ragingbells) Joseph (@joroyolo) Fish Jelly (@fishjellyfilms) Find them on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/ragingbells/ https://letterboxd.com/joroyolo/ Nick and Joseph are both Tomatometer-approved critics at Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critics/nicholas-bell https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critics/joseph-robinson --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fish-jelly/support
On this week's Film Seizure, Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner are killers in John Huston's 1985 Best Picture nominee Prizzi's Honor. Episodes release on Wednesday at www.filmseizure.com "Beyond My Years" by Matt LaBarber LaBarber The Album Available at https://mattlabarber.bandcamp.com/album/labarber-the-album Copyright 2020 Like what we do? Buy us a coffee! www.ko-fi.com/filmseizure Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/filmseizure/ Follow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/filmseizure.bsky.social Follow us on Mastodon: https://universeodon.com/@filmseizure Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/filmseizure/ You can now find us on YouTube as well! The Film Seizure Channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/c/FilmSeizure
Na última semana do ano termina também o ciclo NEPO BABY, com esta estranha escolha do David. Em papel tudo parece bater certo, John Huston a realizar e a dirigir a filha Anjelica (que recebe Oscar pela performance), Kathleen Turner e Jack Nicholson a encabeçar um elenco notável, mas algo estranho acontece. Tentamos perceber o quê, exactamente, até porque para além de ter sido um sucesso comercial tornou-se um filme amado por muita gente. Vá-se lá saber porquê.
This week on Peanuts and Popcorn…we open the bag of popcorn with Tommy's selection from 2010, Tony Scott's, Unstoppable. Next, we break down Leo's choice for this week, John Huston's, Prizzi's Honor (1985). In Peanuts, the League Championship Series are set, and some unlikely teams have made their way to Baseball's Final Four. We'll answer the question, is the current playoff format fair to the higher-seeded teams? Attendance was up in 2023, did the new rule changes have anything to do with it? It's been 20 years since the Bartman game, what have we learned. Next Show: Leo's Pick: Other People's Money (1991) Tom's Pick: The Long Goodbye (1973)
Stanley Tucci is an actor, director and writer who is known for his roles in a broad range of feature films including the Devil Wears Prada, Julie and Julia and the Hunger Games. More recently he has whetted the appetites of television viewers with his food and travel series Searching for Italy. Stanley's grandparents left Calabria in southern Italy for a new life in America, where his parents were born. Stanley himself was born in Peekskill, New York, and grew up in the nearby hamlet of Katonah. He studied drama at the State University of New York and in 1985 made his debut in John Huston's film Prizzi's Honour. In 1996 he co-wrote, co-directed and starred in Big Night about two brothers who run a struggling Italian restaurant. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film Festival. In 2002 he starred in Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition and he played a serial killer in Peter Jackson's film the Lovely Bones. He published his first cookbook in 2012. Stanley lives in London with his wife, the literary agent Felicity Blunt, and their family. DISC ONE: Let It Be - The Beatles DISC TWO: Compared to What (Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival) - Les McCann & Eddie Harris DISC THREE: Mozart: Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 - II. Adagio. Performed by Karl Leister (clarinet) and Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Marriner DISC FOUR: The Weakness in Me - Joan Armatrading DISC FIVE: What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong DISC SIX: Tchaikovsky: Serenade for String Orchestra in C Major, Op. 48, TH 48 - I. Pezzo in forma di sonatina: Andante non troppo - Allegro moderato. Performed by Berliner Philharmoniker and conducted by Herbert von Karajan DISC SEVEN: A Foggy Day (In London Town) - Frank Sinatra DISC EIGHT: Not Dark Yet - Bob Dylan BOOK CHOICE: Westward Ha! by S J Perelman LUXURY ITEM: Art supplies CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley
On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, specifically looking at the films they released between 1984 and 1986. ----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. And, in case you did not listen to Part 1 yet, let me reiterate that the focus here will be on the films and the creatives, not the Weinsteins. The Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and that Miramax logo and the names associated with it should not stop anyone from enjoying some very well made movies because they now have an unfortunate association with two spineless chucklenuts who proclivities would not be known by the outside world for decades to come. Well, there is one movie this episode where we must talk about the Weinsteins as the creatives, but when talking about that film, “creatives” is a derisive pejorative. We ended our previous episode at the end of 1983. Miramax had one minor hit film in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, thanks in large part to the film's association with members of the still beloved Monty Python comedy troupe, who hadn't released any material since The Life of Brian in 1979. 1984 would be the start of year five of the company, and they were still in need of something to make their name. Being a truly independent film company in 1984 was not easy. There were fewer than 20,000 movie screens in the entire country back then, compared to nearly 40,000 today. National video store chains like Blockbuster did not exist, and the few cable channels that did exist played mostly Hollywood films. There was no social media for images and clips to go viral. For comparison's sake, in A24's first five years, from its founding in August 2012 to July 2017, the company would have a number of hit films, including The Bling Ring, The Lobster, Spring Breakers, and The Witch, release movies from some of indie cinema's most respected names, including Andrea Arnold, Robert Eggers, Atom Egoyan, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Lynn Shelton, Trey Edward Shults, Gus Van Sant, and Denis Villeneuve, and released several Academy Award winning movies, including the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, Lenny Abrahamson's Room and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, which would upset front runner La La Land for the Best Picture of 2016. But instead of leaning into the American independent cinema world the way Cinecom and Island were doing with the likes of Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, Miramax would dip their toes further into the world of international cinema. Their first release for 1984 would be Ruy Guerra's Eréndira. The screenplay by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez was based on his 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, which itself was based off a screenplay Márquez had written in the early 1960s, which, when he couldn't get it made at the time, he reduced down to a page and a half for a sequence in his 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, Márquez would lose the original draft of Eréndira, and would write a new script based off what he remembered writing twenty years earlier. In the story, a young woman named Eréndira lives in a near mansion situation in an otherwise empty desert with her grandmother, who had collected a number of paper flowers and assorted tchotchkes over the years. One night, Eréndira forgets to put out some candles used to illuminate the house, and the house and all of its contents burn to the ground. With everything lost, Eréndira's grandmother forces her into a life of prostitution. The young woman quickly becomes the courtesan of choice in the region. With every new journey, an ever growing caravan starts to follow them, until it becomes for all intents and purposes a carnival, with food vendors, snake charmers, musicians and games of chance. Márquez's writing style, known as “magic realism,” was very cinematic on the page, and it's little wonder that many of his stories have been made into movies and television miniseries around the globe for more than a half century. Yet no movie came as close to capturing that Marquezian prose quite the way Guerra did with Eréndira. Featuring Greek goddess Irene Papas as the Grandmother, Brazilian actress Cláudia Ohana, who happened to be married to Guerra at the time, as the titular character, and former Bond villain Michael Lonsdale in a small but important role as a Senator who tries to help Eréndira get out of her life as a slave, the movie would be Mexico's entry into the 1983 Academy Award race for Best Foreign Language Film. After acquiring the film for American distribution, Miramax would score a coup by getting the film accepted to that year's New York Film Festival, alongside such films as Robert Altman's Streamers, Jean Lucy Godard's Passion, Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, and Andrzej Wajda's Danton. But despite some stellar reviews from many of the New York City film critics, Eréndira would not get nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and Miramax would wait until April 27th, 1984, to open the film at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, one of the most important theatres in New York City at the time to launch a foreign film. A quarter page ad in the New York Times included quotes from the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vincent Canby of the Times and Roger Ebert, the movie would gross an impressive $25,500 in its first three days. Word of mouth in the city would be strong, with its second weekend gross actually increasing nearly 20% to $30,500. Its third weekend would fall slightly, but with $27k in the till would still be better than its first weekend. It wouldn't be until Week 5 that Eréndira would expand into Los Angeles and Chicago, where it would continue to gross nearly $20k per screen for several more weeks. The film would continue to play across the nation for more than half a year, and despite never making more than four prints of the film, Eréndira would gross more than $600k in America, one of the best non-English language releases for all of 1984. In their quickest turnaround from one film to another to date, Miramax would release Claude Lelouch's Edith and Marcel not five weeks after Eréndira. If you're not familiar with the name Claude Chabrol, I would highly suggest becoming so. Chabrol was a part of the French New Wave filmmakers alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut who came up as film critics for the influential French magazine Cahiers [ka-yay] du Cinéma in the 1950s, who would go on to change the direction of French Cinema and how film fans appreciated films and filmmakers through the concept of The Auteur Theory, although the theory itself would be given a name by American film critic Andrew Sarris in 1962. Of these five critics turned filmmakers, Chabrol would be considered the most prolific and commercial. Chabrol would be the first of them to make a film, Le Beau Serge, and between 1957 and his death in 2010, he would make 58 movies. That's more than one new movie every year on average, not counting shorts and television projects he also made on the side. American audiences knew him best for his 1966 global hit A Man and a Woman, which would sell more than $14m in tickets in the US and would be one of the few foreign language films to earn Academy Award nominations outside of the Best Foreign Language Film race. Lead actress Anouk Aimee would get a nod, and Chabrol would earn two on the film, for Best Director, which he would lose to Fred Zimmerman and A Man for All Seasons, and Best Original Screenplay, which he would win alongside his co-writer Pierre Uytterhoeven. Edith and Marcel would tell the story of the love affair between the iconic French singer Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan, the French boxer who was the Middleweight Champion of the World during their affair in 1948 and 1949. Both were famous in their own right, but together, they were the Brangelina of post-World War II France. Despite the fact that Cerdan was married with three kids, their affair helped lift the spirits of the French people, until his death in October 1949, while he was flying from Paris to New York to see Piaf. Fans of Raging Bull are somewhat familiar with Marcel Cerdan already, as Cerdan's last fight before his death would find Cerdan losing his middleweight title to Jake LaMotta. In a weird twist of fate, Patrick Dewaere, the actor Chabrol cast as Cerdan, committed suicide just after the start of production, and while Chabrol considered shutting down the film in respect, it would be none other than Marcel Cerdan, Jr. who would step in to the role of his own father, despite never having acted before, and being six years older than his father was when he died. When it was released in France in April 1983, it was an immediate hit, become the second highest French film of the year, and the sixth highest grosser of all films released in the country that year. However, it would not be the film France submitted to that year's Academy Award race. That would be Diane Kurys' Entre Nous, which wasn't as big a hit in France but was considered a stronger contender for the nomination, in part because of Isabelle Hupert's amazing performance but also because Entre Nous, as 110 minutes, was 50 minutes shorter than Edith and Marcel. Harvey Weinstein would cut twenty minutes out of the film without Chabrol's consent or assistance, and when the film was released at the 57th Street Playhouse in New York City on Sunday, June 3rd, the gushing reviews in the New York Times ad would actually be for Chabrol's original cut, and they would help the film gross $15,300 in its first five days. But once the other New York critics who didn't get to see the original cut of the film saw this new cut, the critical consensus started to fall. Things felt off to them, and they would be, as a number of short trims made by Weinstein would remove important context for the film for the sake of streamlining the film. Audiences would pick up on the changes, and in its first full weekend of release, the film would only gross $12k. After two more weeks of grosses of under $4k each week, the film would close in New York City. Edith and Marcel would never play in another theatre in the United States. And then there would be another year plus long gap before their next release, but we'll get into the reason why in a few moments. Many people today know Rubén Blades as Daniel Salazar in Fear the Walking Dead, or from his appearances in The Milagro Beanfield War, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, or Predator 2, amongst his 40 plus acting appearances over the years, but in the early 1980s, he was a salsa and Latin Jazz musician and singer who had yet to break out of the New Yorican market. With an idea for a movie about a singer and musician not unlike himself trying to attempt a crossover success into mainstream music, he would approach his friend, director Leon Icasho, about teaming up to get the idea fleshed out into a real movie. Although Blades was at best a cult music star, and Icasho had only made one movie before, they were able to raise $6m from a series of local investors including Jack Rollins, who produced every Woody Allen movie from 1969's Take the Money and Run to 2015's Irrational Man, to make their movie, which they would start shooting in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City in December 1982. Despite the luxury of a large budget for an independent Latino production, the shooting schedule was very tight, less than five weeks. There would be a number of large musical segments to show Blades' character Rudy's talents as a musician and singer, with hundreds of extras on hand in each scene. Icasho would stick to his 28 day schedule, and the film would wrap up shortly after the New Year. Even though the director would have his final cut of the movie ready by the start of summer 1983, it would take nearly a year and a half for any distributor to nibble. It wasn't that the film was tedious. Quite the opposite. Many distributors enjoyed the film, but worried about, ironically, the ability of the film to crossover out of the Latino market into the mainstream. So when Miramax came along with a lower than hoped for offer to release the film, the filmmakers took the deal, because they just wanted the film out there. Things would start to pick up for the film when Miramax submitted the film to be entered into the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and it would be submitted to run in the prestigious Directors Fortnight program, alongside Mike Newell's breakthrough film, Dance with a Stranger, Victor Nunez's breakthrough film, A Flash of Green, and Wayne Wang's breakthrough film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart. While they were waiting for Cannes to get back to them, they would also learn the film had been selected to be a part of The Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films program, where the film would earn raves from local critics and audiences, especially for Blades, who many felt was a screen natural. After more praise from critics and audiences on the French Riviera, Miramax would open Crossover Dreams at the Cinema Studio theatre in midtown Manhattan on August 23rd, 1985. Originally booked into the smaller 180 seat auditorium, since John Huston's Prizzi's Honor was still doing good business in the 300 seat house in its fourth week, the theatre would swap houses for the films when it became clear early on Crossover Dreams' first day that it would be the more popular title that weekend. And it would. While Prizzi would gross a still solid $10k that weekend, Crossover Dreams would gross $35k. In its second weekend, the film would again gross $35k. And in its third weekend, another $35k. They were basically selling out every seat at every show those first three weeks. Clearly, the film was indeed doing some crossover business. But, strangely, Miramax would wait seven weeks after opening the film in New York to open it in Los Angeles. With a new ad campaign that de-emphasized Blades and played up the dreamer dreaming big aspect of the film, Miramax would open the movie at two of the more upscale theatres in the area, the Cineplex Beverly Center on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, and the Cineplex Brentwood Twin, on the west side where many of Hollywood's tastemakers called home. Even with a plethora of good reviews from the local press, and playing at two theatres with a capacity of more than double the one theatre playing the film in New York, Crossover Dreams could only manage a neat $13k opening weekend. Slowly but surely, Miramax would add a few more prints in additional major markets, but never really gave the film the chance to score with Latino audiences who may have been craving a salsa-infused musical/drama, even if it was entirely in English. Looking back, thirty-eight years later, that seems to have been a mistake, but it seems that the film's final gross of just $250k after just ten weeks of release was leaving a lot of money on the table. At awards time, Blades would be nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor, but otherwise, the film would be shut out of any further consideration. But for all intents and purposes, the film did kinda complete its mission of turning Blades into a star. He continues to be one of the busiest Latino actors in Hollywood over the last forty years, and it would help get one of his co-stars, Elizabeth Peña, a major job in a major Hollywood film the following year, as the live-in maid at Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler's house in Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which would give her a steady career until her passing in 2014. And Icasho himself would have a successful directing career both on movie screens and on television, working on such projects as Miami Vice, Crime Story, The Equalizer, Criminal Minds, and Queen of the South, until his passing this past May. I'm going to briefly mention a Canadian drama called The Dog Who Stopped the War that Miramax released on three screens in their home town of Buffalo on October 25th, 1985. A children's film about two groups of children in a small town in Quebec during their winter break who get involved in an ever-escalating snowball fight. It would be the highest grossing local film in Canada in 1984, and would become the first in a series of 25 family films under a Tales For All banner made by a company called Party Productions, which will be releasing their newest film in the series later this year. The film may have huge in Canada, but in Buffalo in the late fall, the film would only gross $15k in its first, and only, week in theatres. The film would eventually develop a cult following thanks to repeated cable screenings during the holidays every year. We'll also give a brief mention to an Australian action movie called Cool Change, directed by George Miller. No, not the George Miller who created the Mad Max series, but the other Australian director named George Miller, who had to start going by George T. Miller to differentiate himself from the other George Miller, even though this George Miller was directing before the other George Miller, and even had a bigger local and global hit in 1982 with The Man From Snowy River than the other George Miller had with Mad Max II, aka The Road Warrior. It would also be the second movie released by Miramax in a year starring a young Australian ingenue named Deborra-Lee Furness, who was also featured in Crossover Dreams. Today, most people know her as Mrs. Hugh Jackman. The internet and several book sources say the movie opened in America on March 14th, 1986, but damn if I can find any playdate anywhere in the country, period. Not even in the Weinsteins' home territory of Buffalo. A critic from the Sydney Morning Herald would call the film, which opened in Australia four weeks after it allegedly opened in America, a spectacularly simplistic propaganda piece for the cattle farmers of the Victorian high plains,” and in its home country, it would barely gross 2% of its $3.5m budget. And sticking with brief mentions of Australian movies Miramax allegedly released in American in the spring of 1986, we move over to one of three movies directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith that would be released during that year. In Australia, it was titled Frog Dreaming, but for America, the title was changed to The Quest. The film stars Henry Thomas from E.T. as an American boy who has moved to Australia to be with his guardian after his parents die, who finds himself caught up in the magic of a local Aboriginal myth that might be more real than anyone realizes. And like Cool Change, I cannot find any American playdates for the film anywhere near its alleged May 1st, 1986 release date. I even contacted Mr. Trenchard-Smith asking him if he remembers anything about the American release of his film, knowing full well it's 37 years later, but while being very polite in his response, he was unable to help. Finally, we get back to the movies we actually can talk about with some certainty. I know our next movie was actually released in American theatres, because I saw it in America at a cinema. Twist and Shout tells the story of two best friends, Bjørn and Erik, growing up in suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1963. The music of The Beatles, who are just exploding in Europe, help provide a welcome respite from the harsh realities of their lives. Directed by Billie August, Twist and Shout would become the first of several August films to be released by Miramax over the next decade, including his follow-up, which would end up become Miramax's first Oscar-winning release, but we'll be talking about that movie on our next episode. August was often seen as a spiritual successor to Ingmar Bergman within Scandinavian cinema, so much so that Bergman would handpick August to direct a semi-autobiographical screenplay of his, The Best Intentions, in the early 1990s, when it became clear to Bergman that he would not be able to make it himself. Bergman's only stipulation was that August would need to cast one of his actresses from Fanny and Alexander, Pernilla Wallgren, as his stand-in character's mother. August and Wallgren had never met until they started filming. By the end of shooting, Pernilla Wallgren would be Pernilla August, but that's another story for another time. In a rare twist, Twist and Shout would open in Los Angeles before New York City, at the Cineplex Beverly Center August 22nd, 1986, more than two years after it opened across Denmark. Loaded with accolades including a Best Picture Award from the European Film Festival and positive reviews from the likes of Gene Siskel and Michael Wilmington, the movie would gross, according to Variety, a “crisp” $14k in its first three days. In its second weekend, the Beverly Center would add a second screen for the film, and the gross would increase to $17k. And by week four, one of those prints at the Beverly Center would move to the Laemmle Monica 4, so those on the West Side who didn't want to go east of the 405 could watch it. But the combined $13k gross would not be as good as the previous week's $14k from the two screens at the Beverly Center. It wouldn't be until Twist and Shout's sixth week of release they would finally add a screen in New York City, the 68th Street Playhouse, where it would gross $25k in its first weekend there. But after nine weeks, never playing in more than five theatres in any given weekend, Twist and Shout was down and out, with only $204k in ticket sales. But it was good enough for Miramax to acquire August's next movie, and actually get it into American theatres within a year of its release in Denmark and Sweden. Join us next episode for that story. Earlier, I teased about why Miramax took more than a year off from releasing movies in 1984 and 1985. And we've reached that point in the timeline to tell that story. After writing and producing The Burning in 1981, Bob and Harvey had decided what they really wanted to do was direct. But it would take years for them to come up with an idea and flesh that story out to a full length screenplay. They'd return to their roots as rock show promoters, borrowing heavily from one of Harvey's first forays into that field, when he and a partner, Corky Burger, purchased an aging movie theatre in Buffalo in 1974 and turned it into a rock and roll hall for a few years, until they gutted and demolished the theatre, so they could sell the land, with Harvey's half of the proceeds becoming much of the seed money to start Miramax up. After graduating high school, three best friends from New York get the opportunity of a lifetime when they inherit an old run down hotel upstate, with dreams of turning it into a rock and roll hotel. But when they get to the hotel, they realize the place is going to need a lot more work than they initially realized, and they realize they are not going to get any help from any of the locals, who don't want them or their silly rock and roll hotel in their quaint and quiet town. With a budget of only $5m, and a story that would need to be filmed entirely on location, the cast would not include very many well known actors. For the lead role of Danny, the young man who inherits the hotel, they would cast Daniel Jordano, whose previous acting work had been nameless characters in movies like Death Wish 3 and Streetwalkin'. This would be his first leading role. Danny's two best friends, Silk and Spikes, would be played by Leon W. Grant and Matthew Penn, respectively. Like Jordano, both Grant and Penn had also worked in small supporting roles, although Grant would actually play characters with actual names like Boo Boo and Chollie. Penn, the son of Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn, would ironically have his first acting role in a 1983 musical called Rock and Roll Hotel, about a young trio of musicians who enter a Battle of the Bands at an old hotel called The Rock and Roll Hotel. This would also be their first leading roles. Today, there are two reasons to watch Playing For Keeps. One of them is to see just how truly awful Bob and Harvey Weinstein were as directors. 80% of the movie is master shots without any kind of coverage, 15% is wannabe MTV music video if those videos were directed by space aliens handed video cameras and not told what to do with them, and 5% Jordano mimicking Kevin Bacon in Footloose but with the heaviest New Yawk accent this side of Bensonhurst. The other reason is to watch a young actress in her first major screen role, who is still mesmerizing and hypnotic despite the crapfest she is surrounded by. Nineteen year old Marisa Tomei wouldn't become a star because of this movie, but it was clear very early on she was going to become one, someday. Mostly shot in and around the grounds of the Bethany Colony Resort in Bethany PA, the film would spend six weeks in production during June and July of 1984, and they would spend more than a year and a half putting the film together. As music men, they knew a movie about a rock and roll hotel for younger people who need to have a lot of hip, cool, teen-friendly music on the soundtrack. So, naturally, the Weinsteins would recruit such hip, cool, teen-friendly musicians like Pete Townshend of The Who, Phil Collins, Peter Frampton, Sister Sledge, already defunct Duran Duran side project Arcadia, and Hinton Battle, who had originated the role of The Scarecrow in the Broadway production of The Wiz. They would spend nearly $500k to acquire B-sides and tossed away songs that weren't good enough to appear on the artists' regular albums. Once again light on money, Miramax would sent the completed film out to the major studios to see if they'd be willing to release the movie. A sale would bring some much needed capital back into the company immediately, and creating a working relationship with a major studio could be advantageous in the long run. Universal Pictures would buy the movie from Miramax for an undisclosed sum, and set an October 3rd release. Playing For Keeps would open on 1148 screens that day, including 56 screens in the greater Los Angeles region and 80 in the New York City metropolitan area. But it wasn't the best week to open this film. Crocodile Dundee had opened the week before and was a surprise hit, spending a second week firmly atop the box office charts with $8.2m in ticket sales. Its nearest competitor, the Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas comedy Tough Guys, would be the week's highest grossing new film, with $4.6m. Number three was Top Gun, earning $2.405m in its 21st week in theatres, and Stand By Me was in fourth in its ninth week with $2.396m. In fifth place, playing in only 215 theatres, would be another new opener, Children of a Lesser God, with $1.9m. And all the way down in sixth place, with only $1.4m in ticket sales, was Playing for Keeps. The reviews were fairly brutal, and by that, I mean they were fair in their brutality, although you'll have to do some work to find those reviews. No one has ever bothered to link their reviews for Playing For Keeps at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. After a second weekend, where the film would lose a quarter of its screens and 61% of its opening weekend business, Universal would cut its losses and dump the film into dollar houses. The final reported box office gross on the film would be $2.67m. Bob Weinstein would never write or direct another film, and Harvey Weinstein would only have one other directing credit to his name, an animated movie called The Gnomes' Great Adventure, which wasn't really a directing effort so much as buying the American rights to a 1985 Spanish animated series called The World of David the Gnome, creating new English language dubs with actors like Tom Bosley, Frank Gorshin, Christopher Plummer, and Tony Randall, and selling the new versions to Nickelodeon. Sadly, we would learn in October 2017 that one of the earliest known episodes of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein happened during the pre-production of Playing for Keeps. In 1984, a twenty year old college junior Tomi-Ann Roberts was waiting tables in New York City, hoping to start an acting career. Weinstein, who one of her customers at this restaurant, urged Ms. Roberts to audition for a movie that he and his brother were planning to direct. He sent her the script and asked her to meet him where he was staying so they could discuss the film. When she arrived at his hotel room, the door was left slightly ajar, and he called on her to come in and close the door behind her. She would find Weinstein nude in the bathtub, where he told her she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable getting naked in front of him too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene. If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film. She was horrified and rushed out of the room, after telling Weinstein that she was too prudish to go along. She felt he had manipulated her by feigning professional interest in her, and doubted she had ever been under serious consideration. That incident would send her life in a different direction. In 2017, Roberts was a psychology professor at Colorado College, researching sexual objectification, an interest she traces back in part to that long-ago encounter. And on that sad note, we're going to take our leave. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1987. 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.
On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, specifically looking at the films they released between 1984 and 1986. ----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. And, in case you did not listen to Part 1 yet, let me reiterate that the focus here will be on the films and the creatives, not the Weinsteins. The Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and that Miramax logo and the names associated with it should not stop anyone from enjoying some very well made movies because they now have an unfortunate association with two spineless chucklenuts who proclivities would not be known by the outside world for decades to come. Well, there is one movie this episode where we must talk about the Weinsteins as the creatives, but when talking about that film, “creatives” is a derisive pejorative. We ended our previous episode at the end of 1983. Miramax had one minor hit film in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, thanks in large part to the film's association with members of the still beloved Monty Python comedy troupe, who hadn't released any material since The Life of Brian in 1979. 1984 would be the start of year five of the company, and they were still in need of something to make their name. Being a truly independent film company in 1984 was not easy. There were fewer than 20,000 movie screens in the entire country back then, compared to nearly 40,000 today. National video store chains like Blockbuster did not exist, and the few cable channels that did exist played mostly Hollywood films. There was no social media for images and clips to go viral. For comparison's sake, in A24's first five years, from its founding in August 2012 to July 2017, the company would have a number of hit films, including The Bling Ring, The Lobster, Spring Breakers, and The Witch, release movies from some of indie cinema's most respected names, including Andrea Arnold, Robert Eggers, Atom Egoyan, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Lynn Shelton, Trey Edward Shults, Gus Van Sant, and Denis Villeneuve, and released several Academy Award winning movies, including the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, Lenny Abrahamson's Room and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, which would upset front runner La La Land for the Best Picture of 2016. But instead of leaning into the American independent cinema world the way Cinecom and Island were doing with the likes of Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, Miramax would dip their toes further into the world of international cinema. Their first release for 1984 would be Ruy Guerra's Eréndira. The screenplay by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez was based on his 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, which itself was based off a screenplay Márquez had written in the early 1960s, which, when he couldn't get it made at the time, he reduced down to a page and a half for a sequence in his 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, Márquez would lose the original draft of Eréndira, and would write a new script based off what he remembered writing twenty years earlier. In the story, a young woman named Eréndira lives in a near mansion situation in an otherwise empty desert with her grandmother, who had collected a number of paper flowers and assorted tchotchkes over the years. One night, Eréndira forgets to put out some candles used to illuminate the house, and the house and all of its contents burn to the ground. With everything lost, Eréndira's grandmother forces her into a life of prostitution. The young woman quickly becomes the courtesan of choice in the region. With every new journey, an ever growing caravan starts to follow them, until it becomes for all intents and purposes a carnival, with food vendors, snake charmers, musicians and games of chance. Márquez's writing style, known as “magic realism,” was very cinematic on the page, and it's little wonder that many of his stories have been made into movies and television miniseries around the globe for more than a half century. Yet no movie came as close to capturing that Marquezian prose quite the way Guerra did with Eréndira. Featuring Greek goddess Irene Papas as the Grandmother, Brazilian actress Cláudia Ohana, who happened to be married to Guerra at the time, as the titular character, and former Bond villain Michael Lonsdale in a small but important role as a Senator who tries to help Eréndira get out of her life as a slave, the movie would be Mexico's entry into the 1983 Academy Award race for Best Foreign Language Film. After acquiring the film for American distribution, Miramax would score a coup by getting the film accepted to that year's New York Film Festival, alongside such films as Robert Altman's Streamers, Jean Lucy Godard's Passion, Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, and Andrzej Wajda's Danton. But despite some stellar reviews from many of the New York City film critics, Eréndira would not get nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and Miramax would wait until April 27th, 1984, to open the film at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, one of the most important theatres in New York City at the time to launch a foreign film. A quarter page ad in the New York Times included quotes from the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vincent Canby of the Times and Roger Ebert, the movie would gross an impressive $25,500 in its first three days. Word of mouth in the city would be strong, with its second weekend gross actually increasing nearly 20% to $30,500. Its third weekend would fall slightly, but with $27k in the till would still be better than its first weekend. It wouldn't be until Week 5 that Eréndira would expand into Los Angeles and Chicago, where it would continue to gross nearly $20k per screen for several more weeks. The film would continue to play across the nation for more than half a year, and despite never making more than four prints of the film, Eréndira would gross more than $600k in America, one of the best non-English language releases for all of 1984. In their quickest turnaround from one film to another to date, Miramax would release Claude Lelouch's Edith and Marcel not five weeks after Eréndira. If you're not familiar with the name Claude Chabrol, I would highly suggest becoming so. Chabrol was a part of the French New Wave filmmakers alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut who came up as film critics for the influential French magazine Cahiers [ka-yay] du Cinéma in the 1950s, who would go on to change the direction of French Cinema and how film fans appreciated films and filmmakers through the concept of The Auteur Theory, although the theory itself would be given a name by American film critic Andrew Sarris in 1962. Of these five critics turned filmmakers, Chabrol would be considered the most prolific and commercial. Chabrol would be the first of them to make a film, Le Beau Serge, and between 1957 and his death in 2010, he would make 58 movies. That's more than one new movie every year on average, not counting shorts and television projects he also made on the side. American audiences knew him best for his 1966 global hit A Man and a Woman, which would sell more than $14m in tickets in the US and would be one of the few foreign language films to earn Academy Award nominations outside of the Best Foreign Language Film race. Lead actress Anouk Aimee would get a nod, and Chabrol would earn two on the film, for Best Director, which he would lose to Fred Zimmerman and A Man for All Seasons, and Best Original Screenplay, which he would win alongside his co-writer Pierre Uytterhoeven. Edith and Marcel would tell the story of the love affair between the iconic French singer Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan, the French boxer who was the Middleweight Champion of the World during their affair in 1948 and 1949. Both were famous in their own right, but together, they were the Brangelina of post-World War II France. Despite the fact that Cerdan was married with three kids, their affair helped lift the spirits of the French people, until his death in October 1949, while he was flying from Paris to New York to see Piaf. Fans of Raging Bull are somewhat familiar with Marcel Cerdan already, as Cerdan's last fight before his death would find Cerdan losing his middleweight title to Jake LaMotta. In a weird twist of fate, Patrick Dewaere, the actor Chabrol cast as Cerdan, committed suicide just after the start of production, and while Chabrol considered shutting down the film in respect, it would be none other than Marcel Cerdan, Jr. who would step in to the role of his own father, despite never having acted before, and being six years older than his father was when he died. When it was released in France in April 1983, it was an immediate hit, become the second highest French film of the year, and the sixth highest grosser of all films released in the country that year. However, it would not be the film France submitted to that year's Academy Award race. That would be Diane Kurys' Entre Nous, which wasn't as big a hit in France but was considered a stronger contender for the nomination, in part because of Isabelle Hupert's amazing performance but also because Entre Nous, as 110 minutes, was 50 minutes shorter than Edith and Marcel. Harvey Weinstein would cut twenty minutes out of the film without Chabrol's consent or assistance, and when the film was released at the 57th Street Playhouse in New York City on Sunday, June 3rd, the gushing reviews in the New York Times ad would actually be for Chabrol's original cut, and they would help the film gross $15,300 in its first five days. But once the other New York critics who didn't get to see the original cut of the film saw this new cut, the critical consensus started to fall. Things felt off to them, and they would be, as a number of short trims made by Weinstein would remove important context for the film for the sake of streamlining the film. Audiences would pick up on the changes, and in its first full weekend of release, the film would only gross $12k. After two more weeks of grosses of under $4k each week, the film would close in New York City. Edith and Marcel would never play in another theatre in the United States. And then there would be another year plus long gap before their next release, but we'll get into the reason why in a few moments. Many people today know Rubén Blades as Daniel Salazar in Fear the Walking Dead, or from his appearances in The Milagro Beanfield War, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, or Predator 2, amongst his 40 plus acting appearances over the years, but in the early 1980s, he was a salsa and Latin Jazz musician and singer who had yet to break out of the New Yorican market. With an idea for a movie about a singer and musician not unlike himself trying to attempt a crossover success into mainstream music, he would approach his friend, director Leon Icasho, about teaming up to get the idea fleshed out into a real movie. Although Blades was at best a cult music star, and Icasho had only made one movie before, they were able to raise $6m from a series of local investors including Jack Rollins, who produced every Woody Allen movie from 1969's Take the Money and Run to 2015's Irrational Man, to make their movie, which they would start shooting in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City in December 1982. Despite the luxury of a large budget for an independent Latino production, the shooting schedule was very tight, less than five weeks. There would be a number of large musical segments to show Blades' character Rudy's talents as a musician and singer, with hundreds of extras on hand in each scene. Icasho would stick to his 28 day schedule, and the film would wrap up shortly after the New Year. Even though the director would have his final cut of the movie ready by the start of summer 1983, it would take nearly a year and a half for any distributor to nibble. It wasn't that the film was tedious. Quite the opposite. Many distributors enjoyed the film, but worried about, ironically, the ability of the film to crossover out of the Latino market into the mainstream. So when Miramax came along with a lower than hoped for offer to release the film, the filmmakers took the deal, because they just wanted the film out there. Things would start to pick up for the film when Miramax submitted the film to be entered into the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and it would be submitted to run in the prestigious Directors Fortnight program, alongside Mike Newell's breakthrough film, Dance with a Stranger, Victor Nunez's breakthrough film, A Flash of Green, and Wayne Wang's breakthrough film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart. While they were waiting for Cannes to get back to them, they would also learn the film had been selected to be a part of The Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films program, where the film would earn raves from local critics and audiences, especially for Blades, who many felt was a screen natural. After more praise from critics and audiences on the French Riviera, Miramax would open Crossover Dreams at the Cinema Studio theatre in midtown Manhattan on August 23rd, 1985. Originally booked into the smaller 180 seat auditorium, since John Huston's Prizzi's Honor was still doing good business in the 300 seat house in its fourth week, the theatre would swap houses for the films when it became clear early on Crossover Dreams' first day that it would be the more popular title that weekend. And it would. While Prizzi would gross a still solid $10k that weekend, Crossover Dreams would gross $35k. In its second weekend, the film would again gross $35k. And in its third weekend, another $35k. They were basically selling out every seat at every show those first three weeks. Clearly, the film was indeed doing some crossover business. But, strangely, Miramax would wait seven weeks after opening the film in New York to open it in Los Angeles. With a new ad campaign that de-emphasized Blades and played up the dreamer dreaming big aspect of the film, Miramax would open the movie at two of the more upscale theatres in the area, the Cineplex Beverly Center on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, and the Cineplex Brentwood Twin, on the west side where many of Hollywood's tastemakers called home. Even with a plethora of good reviews from the local press, and playing at two theatres with a capacity of more than double the one theatre playing the film in New York, Crossover Dreams could only manage a neat $13k opening weekend. Slowly but surely, Miramax would add a few more prints in additional major markets, but never really gave the film the chance to score with Latino audiences who may have been craving a salsa-infused musical/drama, even if it was entirely in English. Looking back, thirty-eight years later, that seems to have been a mistake, but it seems that the film's final gross of just $250k after just ten weeks of release was leaving a lot of money on the table. At awards time, Blades would be nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor, but otherwise, the film would be shut out of any further consideration. But for all intents and purposes, the film did kinda complete its mission of turning Blades into a star. He continues to be one of the busiest Latino actors in Hollywood over the last forty years, and it would help get one of his co-stars, Elizabeth Peña, a major job in a major Hollywood film the following year, as the live-in maid at Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler's house in Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which would give her a steady career until her passing in 2014. And Icasho himself would have a successful directing career both on movie screens and on television, working on such projects as Miami Vice, Crime Story, The Equalizer, Criminal Minds, and Queen of the South, until his passing this past May. I'm going to briefly mention a Canadian drama called The Dog Who Stopped the War that Miramax released on three screens in their home town of Buffalo on October 25th, 1985. A children's film about two groups of children in a small town in Quebec during their winter break who get involved in an ever-escalating snowball fight. It would be the highest grossing local film in Canada in 1984, and would become the first in a series of 25 family films under a Tales For All banner made by a company called Party Productions, which will be releasing their newest film in the series later this year. The film may have huge in Canada, but in Buffalo in the late fall, the film would only gross $15k in its first, and only, week in theatres. The film would eventually develop a cult following thanks to repeated cable screenings during the holidays every year. We'll also give a brief mention to an Australian action movie called Cool Change, directed by George Miller. No, not the George Miller who created the Mad Max series, but the other Australian director named George Miller, who had to start going by George T. Miller to differentiate himself from the other George Miller, even though this George Miller was directing before the other George Miller, and even had a bigger local and global hit in 1982 with The Man From Snowy River than the other George Miller had with Mad Max II, aka The Road Warrior. It would also be the second movie released by Miramax in a year starring a young Australian ingenue named Deborra-Lee Furness, who was also featured in Crossover Dreams. Today, most people know her as Mrs. Hugh Jackman. The internet and several book sources say the movie opened in America on March 14th, 1986, but damn if I can find any playdate anywhere in the country, period. Not even in the Weinsteins' home territory of Buffalo. A critic from the Sydney Morning Herald would call the film, which opened in Australia four weeks after it allegedly opened in America, a spectacularly simplistic propaganda piece for the cattle farmers of the Victorian high plains,” and in its home country, it would barely gross 2% of its $3.5m budget. And sticking with brief mentions of Australian movies Miramax allegedly released in American in the spring of 1986, we move over to one of three movies directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith that would be released during that year. In Australia, it was titled Frog Dreaming, but for America, the title was changed to The Quest. The film stars Henry Thomas from E.T. as an American boy who has moved to Australia to be with his guardian after his parents die, who finds himself caught up in the magic of a local Aboriginal myth that might be more real than anyone realizes. And like Cool Change, I cannot find any American playdates for the film anywhere near its alleged May 1st, 1986 release date. I even contacted Mr. Trenchard-Smith asking him if he remembers anything about the American release of his film, knowing full well it's 37 years later, but while being very polite in his response, he was unable to help. Finally, we get back to the movies we actually can talk about with some certainty. I know our next movie was actually released in American theatres, because I saw it in America at a cinema. Twist and Shout tells the story of two best friends, Bjørn and Erik, growing up in suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1963. The music of The Beatles, who are just exploding in Europe, help provide a welcome respite from the harsh realities of their lives. Directed by Billie August, Twist and Shout would become the first of several August films to be released by Miramax over the next decade, including his follow-up, which would end up become Miramax's first Oscar-winning release, but we'll be talking about that movie on our next episode. August was often seen as a spiritual successor to Ingmar Bergman within Scandinavian cinema, so much so that Bergman would handpick August to direct a semi-autobiographical screenplay of his, The Best Intentions, in the early 1990s, when it became clear to Bergman that he would not be able to make it himself. Bergman's only stipulation was that August would need to cast one of his actresses from Fanny and Alexander, Pernilla Wallgren, as his stand-in character's mother. August and Wallgren had never met until they started filming. By the end of shooting, Pernilla Wallgren would be Pernilla August, but that's another story for another time. In a rare twist, Twist and Shout would open in Los Angeles before New York City, at the Cineplex Beverly Center August 22nd, 1986, more than two years after it opened across Denmark. Loaded with accolades including a Best Picture Award from the European Film Festival and positive reviews from the likes of Gene Siskel and Michael Wilmington, the movie would gross, according to Variety, a “crisp” $14k in its first three days. In its second weekend, the Beverly Center would add a second screen for the film, and the gross would increase to $17k. And by week four, one of those prints at the Beverly Center would move to the Laemmle Monica 4, so those on the West Side who didn't want to go east of the 405 could watch it. But the combined $13k gross would not be as good as the previous week's $14k from the two screens at the Beverly Center. It wouldn't be until Twist and Shout's sixth week of release they would finally add a screen in New York City, the 68th Street Playhouse, where it would gross $25k in its first weekend there. But after nine weeks, never playing in more than five theatres in any given weekend, Twist and Shout was down and out, with only $204k in ticket sales. But it was good enough for Miramax to acquire August's next movie, and actually get it into American theatres within a year of its release in Denmark and Sweden. Join us next episode for that story. Earlier, I teased about why Miramax took more than a year off from releasing movies in 1984 and 1985. And we've reached that point in the timeline to tell that story. After writing and producing The Burning in 1981, Bob and Harvey had decided what they really wanted to do was direct. But it would take years for them to come up with an idea and flesh that story out to a full length screenplay. They'd return to their roots as rock show promoters, borrowing heavily from one of Harvey's first forays into that field, when he and a partner, Corky Burger, purchased an aging movie theatre in Buffalo in 1974 and turned it into a rock and roll hall for a few years, until they gutted and demolished the theatre, so they could sell the land, with Harvey's half of the proceeds becoming much of the seed money to start Miramax up. After graduating high school, three best friends from New York get the opportunity of a lifetime when they inherit an old run down hotel upstate, with dreams of turning it into a rock and roll hotel. But when they get to the hotel, they realize the place is going to need a lot more work than they initially realized, and they realize they are not going to get any help from any of the locals, who don't want them or their silly rock and roll hotel in their quaint and quiet town. With a budget of only $5m, and a story that would need to be filmed entirely on location, the cast would not include very many well known actors. For the lead role of Danny, the young man who inherits the hotel, they would cast Daniel Jordano, whose previous acting work had been nameless characters in movies like Death Wish 3 and Streetwalkin'. This would be his first leading role. Danny's two best friends, Silk and Spikes, would be played by Leon W. Grant and Matthew Penn, respectively. Like Jordano, both Grant and Penn had also worked in small supporting roles, although Grant would actually play characters with actual names like Boo Boo and Chollie. Penn, the son of Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn, would ironically have his first acting role in a 1983 musical called Rock and Roll Hotel, about a young trio of musicians who enter a Battle of the Bands at an old hotel called The Rock and Roll Hotel. This would also be their first leading roles. Today, there are two reasons to watch Playing For Keeps. One of them is to see just how truly awful Bob and Harvey Weinstein were as directors. 80% of the movie is master shots without any kind of coverage, 15% is wannabe MTV music video if those videos were directed by space aliens handed video cameras and not told what to do with them, and 5% Jordano mimicking Kevin Bacon in Footloose but with the heaviest New Yawk accent this side of Bensonhurst. The other reason is to watch a young actress in her first major screen role, who is still mesmerizing and hypnotic despite the crapfest she is surrounded by. Nineteen year old Marisa Tomei wouldn't become a star because of this movie, but it was clear very early on she was going to become one, someday. Mostly shot in and around the grounds of the Bethany Colony Resort in Bethany PA, the film would spend six weeks in production during June and July of 1984, and they would spend more than a year and a half putting the film together. As music men, they knew a movie about a rock and roll hotel for younger people who need to have a lot of hip, cool, teen-friendly music on the soundtrack. So, naturally, the Weinsteins would recruit such hip, cool, teen-friendly musicians like Pete Townshend of The Who, Phil Collins, Peter Frampton, Sister Sledge, already defunct Duran Duran side project Arcadia, and Hinton Battle, who had originated the role of The Scarecrow in the Broadway production of The Wiz. They would spend nearly $500k to acquire B-sides and tossed away songs that weren't good enough to appear on the artists' regular albums. Once again light on money, Miramax would sent the completed film out to the major studios to see if they'd be willing to release the movie. A sale would bring some much needed capital back into the company immediately, and creating a working relationship with a major studio could be advantageous in the long run. Universal Pictures would buy the movie from Miramax for an undisclosed sum, and set an October 3rd release. Playing For Keeps would open on 1148 screens that day, including 56 screens in the greater Los Angeles region and 80 in the New York City metropolitan area. But it wasn't the best week to open this film. Crocodile Dundee had opened the week before and was a surprise hit, spending a second week firmly atop the box office charts with $8.2m in ticket sales. Its nearest competitor, the Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas comedy Tough Guys, would be the week's highest grossing new film, with $4.6m. Number three was Top Gun, earning $2.405m in its 21st week in theatres, and Stand By Me was in fourth in its ninth week with $2.396m. In fifth place, playing in only 215 theatres, would be another new opener, Children of a Lesser God, with $1.9m. And all the way down in sixth place, with only $1.4m in ticket sales, was Playing for Keeps. The reviews were fairly brutal, and by that, I mean they were fair in their brutality, although you'll have to do some work to find those reviews. No one has ever bothered to link their reviews for Playing For Keeps at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. After a second weekend, where the film would lose a quarter of its screens and 61% of its opening weekend business, Universal would cut its losses and dump the film into dollar houses. The final reported box office gross on the film would be $2.67m. Bob Weinstein would never write or direct another film, and Harvey Weinstein would only have one other directing credit to his name, an animated movie called The Gnomes' Great Adventure, which wasn't really a directing effort so much as buying the American rights to a 1985 Spanish animated series called The World of David the Gnome, creating new English language dubs with actors like Tom Bosley, Frank Gorshin, Christopher Plummer, and Tony Randall, and selling the new versions to Nickelodeon. Sadly, we would learn in October 2017 that one of the earliest known episodes of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein happened during the pre-production of Playing for Keeps. In 1984, a twenty year old college junior Tomi-Ann Roberts was waiting tables in New York City, hoping to start an acting career. Weinstein, who one of her customers at this restaurant, urged Ms. Roberts to audition for a movie that he and his brother were planning to direct. He sent her the script and asked her to meet him where he was staying so they could discuss the film. When she arrived at his hotel room, the door was left slightly ajar, and he called on her to come in and close the door behind her. She would find Weinstein nude in the bathtub, where he told her she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable getting naked in front of him too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene. If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film. She was horrified and rushed out of the room, after telling Weinstein that she was too prudish to go along. She felt he had manipulated her by feigning professional interest in her, and doubted she had ever been under serious consideration. That incident would send her life in a different direction. In 2017, Roberts was a psychology professor at Colorado College, researching sexual objectification, an interest she traces back in part to that long-ago encounter. And on that sad note, we're going to take our leave. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1987. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
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La Semana Santa es un periodo religioso que en todos los territorios de influencia cristiana se vive de maneras muy diferentes. En Jerusalén y en Roma se hacen muchos actos religiosos cargados de sentimiento. También hay procesiones de Semana Santa que se mezclan con rituales paganos, como en la población siciliana de Prizzi. En muchos lugares, los huevos son el símbolo indiscutible de esta fiesta, desde los huevos escondidos de los Estados Unidos a la artesanía de los pysanka, los huevos pintados típicos de Ucrania. Busca tu copa y acompáñanos a conocer un poco más sobre el origen de los huevos de pascua. Salud! @entrecopasycharlas --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/entrecopasycharlas/message
Podcast for a deep examination into the career and life choices of Jack Nicholson. The podcast make enemies of the world when they boast very controversial (but very accurate) scorching hot takes? Will their newly minted foes keep them from enjoying their new Criterion purchases? Find out on this week's episode of 'What the Hell Happened to Them?' Email the cast at whathappenedtothem@gmail.com Disclaimer: This episode was recorded in March 2023. References may feel confusing and/or dated unusually quickly. 'Prizzi's Honor' is available on Blu-ray, DVD, & VHS (for you hipsters out there): https://www.amazon.com/Prizzis-Honor-Blu-ray-Jack-Nicholson/dp/B071NWDSCD/ref=sr_1_4?crid=23S2SLOQGBSTE&keywords=prizzis+honor&qid=1679455544&sprefix=prizz%2Caps%2C222&sr=8-4 Music from 'The Godfather Theme (Trap Remix)' by LBLVNC 'Corleone' by Notorious B.I.G. feat. Big Syke remix Artwork from BJ West quixotic, united, skeyhill, vekeman, jack, nicholson, syzygy, prizzi, honor, italian, italy, stereotype, mafia, mob, turner, xfl, football, 80s, roger, ebert
The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro) TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago? For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt. That was the logo of the disc's distributor. Vestron Video. A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it. But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time. The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company. But what to call the company? It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point. At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future. Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling. The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet. Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great. Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night. For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron. They were doing pretty good. And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever. When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video. It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars. Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with. In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made. Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies. Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build. But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company. Lots of money. Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day. It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution. Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure. Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000. Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside. And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year. Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2. The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner. The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again. In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco. Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross. Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week. It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for. Dirty Dancing. Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname. Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle. But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it. They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise. To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special. Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget. For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials. Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny. Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role. Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming. Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released. After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th. Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance. But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set. The music. Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film. Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording. The writer nailed all ten. But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle. The closing song. While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.” Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version. The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there. While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals. With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably. RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts. When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts. The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds. But then a funny thing happened… Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack. Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place. In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales. Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better. When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago. On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong. The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988. Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets. Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then. Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola. The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role. New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.” Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck. But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales. Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves. Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo. The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales. And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting. Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot. One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either. John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6. The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres. Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label. The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film. The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them. After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run. While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school. People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years. Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was. Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right? We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week. 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.
The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro) TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago? For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt. That was the logo of the disc's distributor. Vestron Video. A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it. But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time. The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company. But what to call the company? It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point. At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future. Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling. The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet. Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great. Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night. For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron. They were doing pretty good. And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever. When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video. It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars. Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with. In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made. Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies. Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build. But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company. Lots of money. Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day. It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution. Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure. Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000. Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside. And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year. Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2. The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner. The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again. In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco. Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross. Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week. It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for. Dirty Dancing. Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname. Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle. But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it. They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise. To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special. Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget. For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials. Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny. Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role. Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming. Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released. After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th. Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance. But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set. The music. Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film. Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording. The writer nailed all ten. But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle. The closing song. While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.” Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version. The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there. While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals. With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably. RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts. When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts. The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds. But then a funny thing happened… Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack. Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place. In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales. Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better. When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago. On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong. The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988. Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets. Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then. Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola. The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role. New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.” Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck. But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales. Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves. Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo. The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales. And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting. Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot. One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either. John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6. The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres. Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label. The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film. The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them. After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run. While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school. People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years. Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was. Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right? We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week. 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.
Pictures Powwow is the show in which we discuss a film that has been recommended whether it by us or you the listening people! In this episode, we covered "Prizzi's Honor" (1985) which came highly recommended by Ryan's parents. Bartek's recommendation for next episode is “Treasure Island” (1988), so make sure to check that out. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, recommendations or interested in having your podcast promoted on the show make sure to email us at spitandpolished@gmail.com FOLLOW US: Twitter: @SpitPolishPre Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spitandpolishpresents/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/spit-polish-presents/id1059224536 Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/5ycjMXxAbhlcSEEpihSax0 Podbean: http://spitandpolish.podbean.com/ RadioPublic: https://radiopublic.com/spit-polish-presents-6VQzVW TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy-Podcasts/Spit--Polish-Presents-p1087434/ iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-spit-polish-presen-29693268/ Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/spit-polish-presents
Pictures Powwow is the show in which we discuss a film that has been recommended whether it by us or you the listening people! In this episode, we covered “A Town Called Panic” (2009) which came highly recommended from Bartek. Ryan's recommendation for next episode is “Prizzi's Honor” (1985) so make sure to check that out. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, recommendations or interested in having your podcast promoted on the show make sure to email us at spitandpolished@gmail.com FOLLOW US: Twitter: @SpitPolishPre Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spitandpolishpresents/ LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/spit-polish-presents/id1059224536 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ycjMXxAbhlcSEEpihSax0 Podbean: http://spitandpolish.podbean.com/ RadioPublic: https://radiopublic.com/spit-polish-presents-6VQzVW TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy-Podcasts/Spit--Polish-Presents-p1087434/ iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-spit-polish-presen-29693268/ Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/spit-polish-presents
For our second episode of 2023, we look back, as we did with Neil Diamond's only starring role last week, at the one and only acting role the late, great football star Pelé would ever make: Escape to Victory, a football-themed World War II drama that would also feature Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Max von Sydow. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On December 29th, while this show was on hiatus, the football world lost Edson Arantes de Nascimento, the legend known around the world by his single word nickname, Pelé. Even if you weren't a particular fan of football in the 1960s and 1970s, you more than likely knew who Pelé was. The International Olympic Committee named him the Athlete of the Century in 1999. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the Twentieth Century. In the Brazilian city of Santos, where a fifteen year old Pelé got his professional start in 1956, a museum dedicated to all things Pelé opened in 2014, with more than 2400 items devoted to his life and careers. After he retired from football in 1977, in an exhibition game between the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, where Pelé had been playing for three years, and Santos, his former club of nineteen years, Pelé would become a global ambassador for the sport, and record an album of music alongside fellow Brazilian Sergio Mendes to accompany a documentary about his life. And because this is a podcast about 80s movies, he would, of course, attempt a career in motion pictures. And those who were going to be responsible for making Pelé a movie star were not going to take any chances. Because Pelé was the most famous footballer on the planet, the movie was going to somehow be about football. American film producer Freddie Fields and his partner on the film, future Carolco Films co-owner Mario Kassar, would find their story for Escape to Victory in a Hungarian movie from 1961 called Two Halves in Hell. The film was based on a tale of a 1942 football match between German soldiers and their Ukrainian prisoners of war during World War II, known as the Death Match. That film, directed by Zoltán Fábri, would win several awards at film festivals worldwide, and was ripe for the American remake treatment. However, there would need to be some changes to the story. The action would be moved from Soviet Russia to France, and the character being built for Pelé, Corporal Luis Fernandez, would be identified as being from Trinidad, as Brazil would not enter the European theatre of war until July of 1944. While the script was being written, Fields and Kassar would get busy putting the film together. In July 1979, it was announced that Brian Hutton, who had directed two other World War II-set movies, 1968's Where Eagles Dare and 1970's Kelly's Heroes, would helm this new movie, and that Lloyd Bridges was being considered for a role. A writer for Daily Variety reporting on Hutton's hire speculated that Clint Eastwood, who had starred in both Where Eagles Dare and Kelly's Heroes, would also star in the film, but that never happened. In mid-September 1979, it was announced that legendary French actor Alain Delon would star in the film, and that Hutton had already left the project. Two weeks later, it was announced that two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Huston would direct the project, which would now star Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone. Amongst the locations Huston scouted to shoot the film at included Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and Ireland, but in the end, they would shoot in and around Budapest, Hungary, because they could shoot the film in the then-communist country for around $12m, versus $30m to $35m it would have cost to shoot in a more democratic country. On a side note, Stallone ended up coming on to the film in a most unusual way. The actor was looking to buy a beach house in Malibu, and one of the houses he looked at was owned by Freddie Fields. After touring the house, Stallone found Fields sitting on the sundeck, and the actor informed the producer that the house was not quite big enough for himself, his wife and two sons. The two men got to talking, and Fields started to tell Stallone about this sports-based World War II movie he was about to make with John Huston as director. Although Stallone knew almost nothing about football, he was intrigued by the idea of getting to work with a director of Huston's stature. And wouldn't you know it, Fields just happened to have a copy of the script right here. Stallone took the script home, and agreed to be in the film three days later. Not only would Pelé star in the film alongside Caine and Stallone, he would also work with Huston and the crew to design the football action in the film. Nearly two dozen professional football players, including Bobby Moore, the captain of the World Cup-winning 1966 British football team, would either have major roles in the film or play secondary characters in the film. Another member of that team, goalkeeper Gordon Banks, would assist Pelé in getting Stallone to look more like a goalkeeper on camera. The movie would also hire Desmond Llewelyn, the beloved British character actor best known as Q in 17 James Bond movies made between 1963 and 1999, as a technical advisor, as Llewelyn had spent five years as a POW in German prison camps during World War II. In early 1980, Max von Sydow, still shooting his role as Ming the Merciless in Mike Hedges' big screen adaptation of Flash Gordon, would be cast as Von Steiner, the Nazi Major who operates the POW camp. Shooting would begin on May 26, 1980, after Stallone was done shooting Nighthawks in New York City. Stallone would spend his weekends off that film to work with Gordon Banks on how to better look like a goalie, and to lose no less than forty pounds to better look like a prisoner of war, a sort of method acting Stallone was not really known for. But apparently, Stallone didn't really listen to Banks at first, as on his first day of shooting, the actor would throw himself around his goal area with a kind of reckless abandon, dislocating his shoulder and breaking a rib. The production would need to rearrange the shooting schedule to give Stallone time to heal. After he returned to the set, he would better heed Banks' advice, although he would end up breaking another rib and, in one scene with Pelé, breaking a finger trying to stop one of the superstar footballer's shots. Other than Stallone's injuries, production on the film ran rather smoothly for nearly two months, until they were forced to shut production down completely on July 29th, eight days after the American Screen Actors Guild went on strike over residuals from emerging revenue streams like videocassettes and pay television. Since several actors like Stallone were SAG members, they had to stop working on the 21st, and the film completed all shots not using those actors a week later. Although the strike would last for slightly more than three months, Fields and Kassar were able to sign an interim agreement with the Guild to allow the film, which only had five days of shooting left when production was shut down, to resume shooting on August 31st. Huston would spend the rest of 1980 and the first four months of 1981 working with his production team to get the film edited and ready for release. At the suggestion of Sylvester Stallone, Huston would hire Bill Conti to compose the score, the fifth movie starring Stallone that Conti would write the score to in as many years. In May 1981, two months before the film's release, its American distributor, announced a slight change in the name of the movie. Instead of Escape to Victory, which would be retained by most every other distributor around the world, the film would simply be called Victory when it hit theatres on July 31st. Because the studio was worried that the full title would be a spoiler. And it actually would be. You'll notice I have not really said anything about the story, because if you haven't seen the movie yet, and you feel compelled to check it out because of this episode, I don't want to spoil it for you. And if you have seen the movie before, you already know what happens. Victory would face very stiff competition when it opened at 692 theatres on July 31st. In addition to the Chevy Chase comedy Under the Rainbow, the film would go up against a re-release of The Empire Strikes Back and also contend with the continued success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and and Superman II. The film would gross $2.4m in its first weekend, which would place it sixth on the box office charts, but that was slightly more than a third of what the Star Wars sequel would bring in that weekend, after having initially opened in theatres 14 months earlier. Victory would barely beat Arthur, which was in its third week of release but hadn't become the breakout success it would be in the weeks to come, but it lose out to the critically panned disaster known as John Derek's Tarzan the Ape Man in its second week. But hey, naked Bo Derek on the big screen, even more naked than in 10. Can't blame horny guys at the time for that. In its second week of release, Victory would drop from sixth place to twelfth, with only $1.6m in ticket sales, and lose half of its screens in its third week, falling to thirteenth place with barely $1m taken in at the box office. After that fourth week, the film was no longer being tracked by Paramount, having earned just $10.85m. Internationally, the film would gross another $16m, since football was a more popular sport outside America. In fact, it was the seventh most popular movie released in 1981, outside of America. The film would barely break even once it was gone from theatres, but it would never become much of a cult film once it was released on videotape and to cable channels. Although audiences didn't quite go for the movie, critics were rather kind to the film. Vincent Canby of the New York Times would note that while the form of the film was highly conventional, the manner in which it was executed was not. An unnamed critic for the Hollywood trade publication would call the film “old fashioned,” and meant it as a compliment. And Gavin Bainbridge of the UK movie magazine Empire would highlight how John Huston created enough on-field magic and nostalgia for the game, and would note the kind of sportsmanship shown in the film that had sadly become extinct in the succeeding forty years. In later years, Huston would admit he hated the idea of the movie and only did it for the paycheck, while Caine would tell one reporter while doing press for another movie that the only reason he made Victory was to meet and work with Pelé. Stallone would admit that shooting his scenes as a goalie were more physically and mentally demanding than on either of the Rocky movies that had been made up to that time. Of course, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone would see far greater successes in their careers as the 80s continued on, while Pelé pretty much kept future on-screen appearances more rooted in reality, appearing as himself on a few global television shows and movie documentaries. We're actually planning on a small series for the final decade of John Huston's directing career, with a diverse set of movies that include the musical Annie, the mob comedy Prizzi's Honor, and the lyrical adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead. Look for that to come later this year. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 100 is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Pelé and the movie Victory. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
For our second episode of 2023, we look back, as we did with Neil Diamond's only starring role last week, at the one and only acting role the late, great football star Pelé would ever make: Escape to Victory, a football-themed World War II drama that would also feature Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Max von Sydow. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On December 29th, while this show was on hiatus, the football world lost Edson Arantes de Nascimento, the legend known around the world by his single word nickname, Pelé. Even if you weren't a particular fan of football in the 1960s and 1970s, you more than likely knew who Pelé was. The International Olympic Committee named him the Athlete of the Century in 1999. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the Twentieth Century. In the Brazilian city of Santos, where a fifteen year old Pelé got his professional start in 1956, a museum dedicated to all things Pelé opened in 2014, with more than 2400 items devoted to his life and careers. After he retired from football in 1977, in an exhibition game between the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, where Pelé had been playing for three years, and Santos, his former club of nineteen years, Pelé would become a global ambassador for the sport, and record an album of music alongside fellow Brazilian Sergio Mendes to accompany a documentary about his life. And because this is a podcast about 80s movies, he would, of course, attempt a career in motion pictures. And those who were going to be responsible for making Pelé a movie star were not going to take any chances. Because Pelé was the most famous footballer on the planet, the movie was going to somehow be about football. American film producer Freddie Fields and his partner on the film, future Carolco Films co-owner Mario Kassar, would find their story for Escape to Victory in a Hungarian movie from 1961 called Two Halves in Hell. The film was based on a tale of a 1942 football match between German soldiers and their Ukrainian prisoners of war during World War II, known as the Death Match. That film, directed by Zoltán Fábri, would win several awards at film festivals worldwide, and was ripe for the American remake treatment. However, there would need to be some changes to the story. The action would be moved from Soviet Russia to France, and the character being built for Pelé, Corporal Luis Fernandez, would be identified as being from Trinidad, as Brazil would not enter the European theatre of war until July of 1944. While the script was being written, Fields and Kassar would get busy putting the film together. In July 1979, it was announced that Brian Hutton, who had directed two other World War II-set movies, 1968's Where Eagles Dare and 1970's Kelly's Heroes, would helm this new movie, and that Lloyd Bridges was being considered for a role. A writer for Daily Variety reporting on Hutton's hire speculated that Clint Eastwood, who had starred in both Where Eagles Dare and Kelly's Heroes, would also star in the film, but that never happened. In mid-September 1979, it was announced that legendary French actor Alain Delon would star in the film, and that Hutton had already left the project. Two weeks later, it was announced that two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Huston would direct the project, which would now star Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone. Amongst the locations Huston scouted to shoot the film at included Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and Ireland, but in the end, they would shoot in and around Budapest, Hungary, because they could shoot the film in the then-communist country for around $12m, versus $30m to $35m it would have cost to shoot in a more democratic country. On a side note, Stallone ended up coming on to the film in a most unusual way. The actor was looking to buy a beach house in Malibu, and one of the houses he looked at was owned by Freddie Fields. After touring the house, Stallone found Fields sitting on the sundeck, and the actor informed the producer that the house was not quite big enough for himself, his wife and two sons. The two men got to talking, and Fields started to tell Stallone about this sports-based World War II movie he was about to make with John Huston as director. Although Stallone knew almost nothing about football, he was intrigued by the idea of getting to work with a director of Huston's stature. And wouldn't you know it, Fields just happened to have a copy of the script right here. Stallone took the script home, and agreed to be in the film three days later. Not only would Pelé star in the film alongside Caine and Stallone, he would also work with Huston and the crew to design the football action in the film. Nearly two dozen professional football players, including Bobby Moore, the captain of the World Cup-winning 1966 British football team, would either have major roles in the film or play secondary characters in the film. Another member of that team, goalkeeper Gordon Banks, would assist Pelé in getting Stallone to look more like a goalkeeper on camera. The movie would also hire Desmond Llewelyn, the beloved British character actor best known as Q in 17 James Bond movies made between 1963 and 1999, as a technical advisor, as Llewelyn had spent five years as a POW in German prison camps during World War II. In early 1980, Max von Sydow, still shooting his role as Ming the Merciless in Mike Hedges' big screen adaptation of Flash Gordon, would be cast as Von Steiner, the Nazi Major who operates the POW camp. Shooting would begin on May 26, 1980, after Stallone was done shooting Nighthawks in New York City. Stallone would spend his weekends off that film to work with Gordon Banks on how to better look like a goalie, and to lose no less than forty pounds to better look like a prisoner of war, a sort of method acting Stallone was not really known for. But apparently, Stallone didn't really listen to Banks at first, as on his first day of shooting, the actor would throw himself around his goal area with a kind of reckless abandon, dislocating his shoulder and breaking a rib. The production would need to rearrange the shooting schedule to give Stallone time to heal. After he returned to the set, he would better heed Banks' advice, although he would end up breaking another rib and, in one scene with Pelé, breaking a finger trying to stop one of the superstar footballer's shots. Other than Stallone's injuries, production on the film ran rather smoothly for nearly two months, until they were forced to shut production down completely on July 29th, eight days after the American Screen Actors Guild went on strike over residuals from emerging revenue streams like videocassettes and pay television. Since several actors like Stallone were SAG members, they had to stop working on the 21st, and the film completed all shots not using those actors a week later. Although the strike would last for slightly more than three months, Fields and Kassar were able to sign an interim agreement with the Guild to allow the film, which only had five days of shooting left when production was shut down, to resume shooting on August 31st. Huston would spend the rest of 1980 and the first four months of 1981 working with his production team to get the film edited and ready for release. At the suggestion of Sylvester Stallone, Huston would hire Bill Conti to compose the score, the fifth movie starring Stallone that Conti would write the score to in as many years. In May 1981, two months before the film's release, its American distributor, announced a slight change in the name of the movie. Instead of Escape to Victory, which would be retained by most every other distributor around the world, the film would simply be called Victory when it hit theatres on July 31st. Because the studio was worried that the full title would be a spoiler. And it actually would be. You'll notice I have not really said anything about the story, because if you haven't seen the movie yet, and you feel compelled to check it out because of this episode, I don't want to spoil it for you. And if you have seen the movie before, you already know what happens. Victory would face very stiff competition when it opened at 692 theatres on July 31st. In addition to the Chevy Chase comedy Under the Rainbow, the film would go up against a re-release of The Empire Strikes Back and also contend with the continued success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and and Superman II. The film would gross $2.4m in its first weekend, which would place it sixth on the box office charts, but that was slightly more than a third of what the Star Wars sequel would bring in that weekend, after having initially opened in theatres 14 months earlier. Victory would barely beat Arthur, which was in its third week of release but hadn't become the breakout success it would be in the weeks to come, but it lose out to the critically panned disaster known as John Derek's Tarzan the Ape Man in its second week. But hey, naked Bo Derek on the big screen, even more naked than in 10. Can't blame horny guys at the time for that. In its second week of release, Victory would drop from sixth place to twelfth, with only $1.6m in ticket sales, and lose half of its screens in its third week, falling to thirteenth place with barely $1m taken in at the box office. After that fourth week, the film was no longer being tracked by Paramount, having earned just $10.85m. Internationally, the film would gross another $16m, since football was a more popular sport outside America. In fact, it was the seventh most popular movie released in 1981, outside of America. The film would barely break even once it was gone from theatres, but it would never become much of a cult film once it was released on videotape and to cable channels. Although audiences didn't quite go for the movie, critics were rather kind to the film. Vincent Canby of the New York Times would note that while the form of the film was highly conventional, the manner in which it was executed was not. An unnamed critic for the Hollywood trade publication would call the film “old fashioned,” and meant it as a compliment. And Gavin Bainbridge of the UK movie magazine Empire would highlight how John Huston created enough on-field magic and nostalgia for the game, and would note the kind of sportsmanship shown in the film that had sadly become extinct in the succeeding forty years. In later years, Huston would admit he hated the idea of the movie and only did it for the paycheck, while Caine would tell one reporter while doing press for another movie that the only reason he made Victory was to meet and work with Pelé. Stallone would admit that shooting his scenes as a goalie were more physically and mentally demanding than on either of the Rocky movies that had been made up to that time. Of course, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone would see far greater successes in their careers as the 80s continued on, while Pelé pretty much kept future on-screen appearances more rooted in reality, appearing as himself on a few global television shows and movie documentaries. We're actually planning on a small series for the final decade of John Huston's directing career, with a diverse set of movies that include the musical Annie, the mob comedy Prizzi's Honor, and the lyrical adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead. Look for that to come later this year. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 100 is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Pelé and the movie Victory. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
Maerose Prizzi did nothing wrong. Twitter https://twitter.com/VStarcovich https://twitter.com/300Passions twitter.com/Zita_Short Grant Zepernick provided the artwork for this podcast. Please rate and review the podcast in order to increase its visibility. Thanks for listening.
Our 80th Golden Globe Awards countdown continues with a replay of our recent conversation with Golden Globe winning actress and singer Kathleen Turner, who sat down with HFPA journalist Michele Manelis earlier this year to discuss her long career. They discuss her first nomination 40 years ago for Best New Star with her performance in Body Heat, her back to back Golden Globe wins as Best Actress, Comedy or Musical in 1985 for Romancing the Stone and 1986 for Prizzi's Honor, her other Golden Globe memories, and more.
Original Air Date: Monday 21 November, 9 pm EasternDescription:Dean is on a crazy road trip from Detroit, one that has led him to Des Moines and Denver. What city beginning with "De" will be his next stop? You will find out! The show opens with a tale of bad behavior by one of the biggest stars currently living in the Hollywood Hills. The latest on the Rust on-set shooting tragedy, and ensuing legal chaos, gets covered. A holocaust survivor-turned-sitcom star, the composer of one of the most iconic themes in cinema history, and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker all get remembered in "Celebrity Deaths". A whole mess of 2022 movies get reviewed, including leading “Best Picture" hopeful Women Talking, as well as The Woman King, Where the Crawdads Sing, and The Outfit. An overlooked noir-ish classic from Carol Reed gets reappraised, as does a Nazi gold caper film from the 1970s, and a truly bizarre satire about presidential assassination from the author of "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Prizzi's Honor".
Résumé : John Huston a été un cinéaste prolifique. Plus de 40 films sur plus de quatre décennies. Ce passionné de chevaux et de peinture a toujours su garder sa liberté, même au prix de certaines compromissions. Boxeur amateur, trublion distingué, buveur invétéré, John Huston était une force de caractère, qui n'était pas du genre à s'en laisser conter. Si le cinéaste n'a pas réalisé que des chefs d'œuvre, il a signé plusieurs films rentrés dans l'histoire du cinéma : Le Faucon Maltais, Quand la ville dort, L'Homme qui voulut être roi, Les Désaxés, L'Honneur des Prizzi et Gens de Dublin, son œuvre ultime. À l'occasion de la sortie en DVD/Blu-Ray de Moulin Rouge et African Queen, édités par Studio Canal, Antoine Jullien vous raconte ces deux aventures cinématographiques majeures dans la carrière d'un réalisateur qui a toujours su être lucide face à la nature humaine. Musique : Bande originale du film Gens de Dublin composée par Alex North / Bande originale du film African Queen composée par Allan Grey / Bande originale du film Moulin Rouge composée par Georges Auric
Kathleen Turner is an award-winning American actress and director, celebrated for her acclaimed work in film, television and theater. With an over forty year career, Kathleen's bold and brave choices as an artist has led to a groundbreaking body of work that has changed cultural perceptions of how women are portrayed on the screen and stage. Always insisting on playing by her own rules, the two time Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee has created some of the most iconic performances in history. Kathleen Turner's extensive filmography includes her quintessential debut performance as Matty Walker in Body Heat. Her other memorable films include Crimes of Passion, Romancing the Stone, Prizzi's Honor, Peggy Sue Got Married and War of the Roses. On the Broadway and London stages, Kathleen is known for her intrepid performances, including such starring roles as Maggie in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, both for which she received Tony nominations. Additionally, she originated the role of Mrs. Robinson inThe Graduate for the London and New York stages.We spoke intimately with Kathleen about her drive to challenge herself and her passion for reinvention , overcoming demons and struggles, her commitment to activism, which means just as much to her as her art, and why she'll never quit.
Welcome back to the podcast! Taking a look at the work of legendary director John Huston and the films "Key Largo," "Fat City," and "Prizzi's Honor," today's installment, featuring "New York Times" bestselling "Razorblade Tears" author S.A. Cosby, is a little different from what longtime listeners are used to hearing on the pod. Sprinkled throughout this extended conversation, which covers everything from post-war existential noir to down-and-outers, hitmen, and southpaws, you'll discover memorable excerpts I've recorded about Huston's life and incorporated for your listening pleasure.A high-water mark for the series so far, our 2022 premiere is only the beginning. For the past month and a half, I've been busily planning for the exciting third season launch of Watch With Jen. This year, you'll be treated to not only the return of some of your favorite guests but the appearance of some wonderful new ones and VIPs as well so I hope you'll check back often to see which contributors and themes we'll have available for you soon. Thank you for your support and happy listening.Originally Posted on Patreon (2/1/22) with links to items discussed here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/61911795Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive
Mystic Ink, Publisher of Spiritual, Shamanic, Transcendent Works, and Phantastic Fiction
Janet Roach is an https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vereinigte_Staaten (American )https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorin (writer) , https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmproduzentin (producer) and filmmaker, best known for her collaboration with https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Condon (Richard Condon) in the black comedy https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Ehre_der_Prizzis (Die Ehre der Prizzis) , both of which were https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscarverleihung_1986 (nominated) for an https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar (Oscar) in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscarverleihung_1986 (1986), the same year she spoke at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. With the documentary When Women Kill Roach made her debut in the film business in 1984. She wrote the template and the script for the independent film, which https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Grant (Lee Grant) accompanied as a narrator. Roach wrote the screenplay for the 1985 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Mafiafilmen (mafia film )https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Ehre_der_Prizzis (The Honor of the Prizzis) together with https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Condon (Richard Condon) , the author of the novel. Both were nominated for an https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar (Oscar) in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscarverleihung_1986 (1986) in the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar/Bestes_adaptiertes_Drehbuch (“Best Adapted Screenplay”) category. In 1988, Roach provided the script for https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Huston (Danny Huston's) comedic drama Mr. North, starring https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Edwards (Anthony Edwards) , https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mitchum (Robert Mitchum) and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Bacall (Lauren Bacall) . This was followed by work for television series, for example on the comedian group https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stooges (The Three Stooges) . Filmography 1984: When Women Kill (documentary; author) 1984: A Walk Through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers - Come to the Fairs (TV documentary series; producer, writer) 1985: American Almanac (TV movie; producer) 1985: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Ehre_der_Prizzis (The Honor of the Prizzis) (Prizzi's Honor; screenwriter) 1988: Mr. North - Darling of the Gods ( Mr. North ; screenwriter) 1997: Hyvän tekijät (script editor) 2000: Die 3 Stooges ( The Three Stooges , TV film; story) 2001: A Nero Wolfe Mystery (TV series, 2 episodes; script adapted) 2005: Dare (short film; thanks) 2009: Prvi dan mira (short film; thanks) 2009: Dare - Don't be afraid, just do it! (Thanksgiving)
Starring a man who sounds like he plays golf.
In this week's episode, we discuss Prizzi's Honor (1985), the penultimate film directed by the late, great (friend of the show) John Huston. It stars Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner as two mob assassins in an unorthodox relationship. The film was well received at the time and garnered 8 Oscar nominations, with Anjelica Huston winning for Best Supporting Actress. *Spoilers* – We did not enjoy this film very much. Timestamps What We've Been Watching (00:00:53) Andy – School of Rock, Geowizard – Attempting to cross Scotland in a completely straight line, Real Kashmir FC, The Pembrokeshire Murders Donnchadh – A United Kingdom, Batman Begins, Mare of Easttown Finale, The Man Who Would Be King. This Week's Film: Prizzi's Honor (00:25:55) Coin Toss (01:04:00) Links Instagram - @callitfriendopodcast @munnywales @andyjayritchie Justwatch.com – streaming and rental links https://www.justwatch.com Lawrence Tierney – One Big Teddy Bear https://youtu.be/T2ohXTtJP7A Geowizard - Attempting to cross Scotland in a completely straight line https://youtu.be/SiyGdOHobsY
Share your love for The Beard & The Bald with official merch! T-shirts, hoodies and posters now available as well as other cool Movie-Themed Designs! Check out the shop HEREFor those new to the podcast, please give us a follow on our social pages: @thebeardthebald on Twitter The Beard and The Bald Podcast on Facebook And for those who have been with us for a while, please take a moment, please take a moment to give us a rating and a review! CLICK HERE TO LEAVE US A REVIEW!This Week's Agenda:John Cena apologizes to China for calling Taiwan a country. A discussion on celebrity commentary on polarizing topics and what the difference is between shutting up or selling out.Seth Rogen says comedians shouldn't complain about cancel culture, while claiming he doesn't say anything horrible on Twitter. Hypocrisy much? JJ Abrams reflects on the hard lessons he's learned from working on franchises that you need to have a plan - No Shit news of the last decade?Terry Silver is officially returning for Cobra Kai - Season 4 - How awesome is this and what could the potential story be?Spider-Man: Far From Home to finally merge with Sony's Spider-Verse - Aaron Taylor-Johnson to play Kraven - Is there any downside to this news?New Trailers - The Eternals, Invincible, The Tomorrow War, Last Night In Soho, Gunpowder MilkshakeBlack Panther spinoff rumor - Is Danai Guirera getting her own show as Okoye - Thoughts?Todd Phillips to co-write a Joker sequel - Does the world need/want this and where do they go after the first film?Timothee Chalamet to play Willy Wonka - Can he capture the absurd, yet genuine oddity of the character or is this just a tossaway role?Amazon buying MGM, but No Time To Die still slated for theaters - What does this mean for the future of MGM properties? Is it even that big of a deal?What We're Watching - Paul - Friends Reunion + Friends episodes, Galaxy Quest, Lone Survivor, Jaws, Rambo IV, Point Break, Top Gun - Chris - A Quiet Place: Part II, Natural Born Killers, True Romance, Prizzi's HonorListener Questions
The glitz! The glamor! The discourse! That's right, it's Oscar season, and we're contractually obligated to discuss all of the bland prestige films that you'll completely forget about in another week. This year, we're broadcasting LIVE from your favorite left-of-the-dial AM radio station for a comprehensive breakdown of the 58th Annual Academy Awards with international film correspondent, Alistair Ryder. THIS WEEK: Out of Africa (1985), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Prizzi's Honor (1985), The Color Purple (1985), and Witness (1985) Rate and Review Optimism Vaccine on iTunes: https://bit.ly/OptimismVaccine Support Optimism Vaccine on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/optimismvaccine Support this podcast
The first members of the Milwaukee Mafia originated from Italy. In this episode, Gavin discusses Santa Flavia and Prizzi. A quote from Gavin in this episode: "The mafia, as most people know, comes from Sicily. Sicily is an Island off the coast of the southern part of Italy. What I find interesting is that each different mafia group in the United States, whether it's Milwaukee or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or any major city that has one, they come from different cities in Sicily." Visit https://milwaukeemafia.com/ (MilwaukeeMafia.com) for more information Gavin's Books: https://amzn.to/3ssKOQH (https://amzn.to/3ssKOQH) Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Milwaukeemafia (https://www.patreon.com/Milwaukeemafia) 11/04/21: Audio has been re-uploaded with better quality. Enjoy!
This is more of the interview with Laila Nablusi where we discuss her work on Nothing Lasts Forever, Prizzi's Honor, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some things hopefully happening in 2021! Hear the rest of our interview with Ms. Nablusi on our Blues Brothers episode.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This is more of the interview with Laila Nablusi where we discuss her work on Nothing Lasts Forever, Prizzi's Honor, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some things hopefully happening in 2021! Hear the rest of our interview with Ms. Nablusi on our Blues Brothers episode.
And we're back! And this time it's 1985! Over the last few months Kerry and Allison have watched the five fantastic (but hard to find) best picture nominees for 1985 which include "Witness", "Kiss of the Spiderwoman", "Prizzi's Honor", "The Color Purple" and "Out of Africa". In this episode they recap the films, discuss the Oscar ceremony (and it's insane, very random choice of show hosts and musical tributes) and debate over who's favourite film of that year should have won. 1985 was a great year for the Oscars, come and join us and listen for yourself. (Disclaimer: this episode has been in the can for a while and unfortunately we were unable to publish until now, so if some of our references are a little dated, now you know why!)
The first episode of a new podcast where we watch everything on Stanley Tucci's IMDB page in order. We start with some introductions, then jump right in to Tucci's first film roles: Prizzi's Honor, Kojak: The Price of Justice, and Who's that Girl starring Madonna. You can watch the video podcast here https://youtu.be/-LvNUi8jbjs Or tweet at us @talkingTropes
Actor Kathleen Turner talks about not bringing characters home. Neil wonders if he himself created COVID. ABOUT THE GUEST Among Kathleen Turner’s numerous accolades are Golden Globes for Romancing The Stone and Prizzi’s Honor, an Academy Award nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married, Tony Award nominations for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Most recently she guest starred on The Kominsky Method, Mom and Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings. Her film credits include The Man With Two Brains, Jewel Of The Nile, The Accidental Tourist, The Virgin Suicides, among many others. On Broadway, she has starred in High, The Graduate and Indiscretions. Also a best-selling author, she wrote the books Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts On My Life, Love, and Leading Roles and Kathleen Turner On Acting. ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny.” His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he’s a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com. ABOUT THE TITLE SHE’S A TALKER was the name of Neil’s first video project. “One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate’s cat and found myself saying the words ‘She’s a talker.’ I wondered how many other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying ‘She’s a talker.’” A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast. CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund. Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor TRANSCRIPTION NEIL: Kathleen Turner, thank you so much for being on SHE'S A TALKER. KATHLEEN: I think this is going to be a pleasure. NEIL: Oh. Let's check in at the end and see. What's something that you find yourself thinking about today, May 16th? KATHLEEN: Oh my. I'll tell you, being able to tolerate this isolation. Because I live alone. I have a wonderful cat, thank you very much, but this really means that I ... I don't have a spouse or a kid or something with me. And I've had a women's poker group for about ... some of them have played together for over 30 years. NEIL: Wow. KATHLEEN: And we get together at least once a month and play poker and eat and have a silly time. And so, we are Zooming together every Sunday evening, but they almost ... well all of them have spouses or people that they are isolating with, but it's hard. It's really hard right now. NEIL: I can totally imagine. Are you finding outside comfort in having your cat there? KATHLEEN: Yes, I do. He's this beautiful black. A little black cat. He can seemingly pretty much sense when I need him. NEIL: This podcast, the mascot of this podcast, is my black cat, Beverly. What's your cat's name and what color are his eyes? KATHLEEN: His name is Simon and his eyes are mostly yellow, sometimes into green. But when I went to get another rescue, I'd had one that died, I've been told that black cats are hard to get adopted out of superstition, or I have found out, being difficult to see in the middle of the night, especially if you have a dark rug. NEIL: Yes. Yeah. Often, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I will mistake certain things for the cat. Let's say I've left my backpack on the floor, and the tender way I touch my backpack makes me kind of think about the backpack differently. If only I touched everything as tenderly as the things I thought are my cat. I know you were born here, but you seem like such a quintessential New Yorker to me. Do you feel that way? KATHLEEN: Oh yeah. I do. I always knew I was coming to New York. I never thought of settling in Los Angeles. And even the time I've spent there working, which is the only reason I go, I'm not comfortable. I'm just not comfortable there at all. Never have been. Never lived there, never invested, which people tell me makes a difference. But no, all I ever wanted was New York, which I consider to be as close to the rest of the world as possible. NEIL: Can you identify what it is about Los Angeles that made you know it wasn't for you? KATHLEEN: Oh, heavens. There's no communication, there's no commune, there's no colony. People get to know each other's cars better than they do the people. They go, "Oh yeah, you're the black BMW 550," or something. You go, "Well, yeah." And it's so isolating. It's so lonely. I don't know how people survive. NEIL: The experience you're describing I connect to in my own way powerfully. My work has always been about New York, and I question everything about my life, but I never question New York, even now. KATHLEEN: Right. NEIL: But this is the first time in my whole time in New York where I'm finding it unpleasant to be on the street. And how are- KATHLEEN: It's hard. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: It's hard to go out and not being able to see people's faces. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: I miss that because I love looking at people's faces and seeing how they use them, and it might give me ideas for a character or something. So now this seeing just part of people, and then the shock of seeing somebody with no precautions, without a mask, without anything. NEIL: Yeah. I know. It does bring up a whole level of, for me, among other things, a type of not crankiness, but a like, "What the hell are you doing?" KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: In New York, I can often feel pre-COVID, sort of, I appreciate generally how New York relative to other cities, there's a kind of sense of your body and space. That's something I noticed in LA, for instance, going into a supermarket. The way people occupied space there suggested that they didn't fully take in, "Hey, you know what? We're all sharing this space, so we have to be attuned to the fact that- KATHLEEN: Oh, I agree with that. Yeah, no, I like the unspoken treaties we have. NEIL: Thinking about what you're saying about the masks and not being able to read people's faces, it makes me realize how much I use ... One of my cards is I love mouthing, "Sorry." KATHLEEN: Yeah. Mouthing, "I'm sorry." Yes, I know it. The way somebody moves, holds their lips, you can immediately get a grasp of that person's personality. Does their mouth turn down at the corners in rest, or does it turn up? When they're not thinking about it, when they're not doing anything, what are the signs that their personality is left on their face? I like that stuff. NEIL: First of all, when you're wearing a mask and you want to kind of communicate, I don't know, acknowledgement to someone, do you find you're kind of making a lot of extra use from the nose up or something? KATHLEEN: Well, yeah. I think you kind of see when someone's smiling just from the eyes. I don't know. Yeah, it turns into a kind of sign language, but you use your body for that too. It's its own challenge, but I do miss seeing people's faces. NEIL: Let's just launch right into some of these cards. First card is, "I could see when I get toward the end of my life thinking, 'I'm done with this particular personality, I've worn it out.'" KATHLEEN: It seems to me that I've already had several lives. And I expect that this is the beginning of another. I kind of accept that easily, actually. I like change and having to adapt, it's not frightening to me. NEIL: Where do you think that comes from? KATHLEEN: I think I'm a pretty down to earth person, pretty practical, and some of my experiences fighting rheumatoid arthritis for years and other injuries have just made me more accepting. NEIL: It also seemed like your childhood involved a lot of the need to adapt. KATHLEEN: Oh yeah. A lot of change. NEIL: Yeah. KATHLEEN: Yeah. Yeah. I was the only one of the siblings born in the States, but then we moved to Canada by the time I was three months, and then from there, to Cuba. From Cuba, we had a year or so in Washington, and then Caracas, Venezuela for five years. And then we transferred from Venezuela to London, which was a marvelous thing because it was my high school years, and that's where I was so sure. I became so sure that this was the career I wanted. Many, many actors have had a kind of transitory background, either in the service, or with their parents being high-level executives, or in the military. And I think it kind of makes for good actors, I guess. NEIL: Could you break that down? What about that, do you think? KATHLEEN: Well, I can remember vividly when I went from Venezuela to London thinking, "Well, I can be anybody now. I can be anybody I want to be because nobody there knows me, nobody has any history with me. So how I present myself when I start school or something is completely up to me." And I thought that was rather exhilarating. NEIL: That's interesting. You also in your book talk a lot about the role of empathy in acting. KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: I wonder if having to move around a lot develops empathy. KATHLEEN: Well, I'll tell you one thing it does is it takes away some of your sense of control. These things are out of your control, and that's kind of how I've approached the dealing with the rheumatoid arthritis and other things. I don't control this. Now, if you give up the idea that you control everything around about your life, then you are open to thinking about others and their choices and their needs because you're kind of advocated here. NEIL: So as long as we're talking about thinking about others and empathy, I'd love to talk about this card, which simply says, "Empathy poisoning." And that comes from a place in me where I found myself often as a kid overwhelmed by the empathy I felt for my parents who were going through some tough stuff, and I found that past a certain point, empathy can almost feel toxic. KATHLEEN: Empathy poisoning. If anything, I might get that more from the characters that I play than other people. You play Martha in Virginia Woolf for 500 performances and there's no way you're going to keep yourself completely separate from her. So I would say that that's more empathy poisoning to me than other people. NEIL: So in other words, your empathy with the character can kind of embody itself in you. KATHLEEN: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yes. It's like when you're creating a character, take Martha. At first when you really start to study her, you think, "What is wrong with this woman? She's sitting around drinking endlessly and ruining the one friendship relationship in her life, what the hell?" And then you go a little deeper and you think, "All right, this is 1962, and no women held any tenured position in any university. All their energies and praise came from the status of their husbands." KATHLEEN: She has a husband who has assiduously worked to remain an associate professor for 17 years. She's ambitious, she's intelligent, she has energy, and absolutely no way to use it. What's she going to do? Just host faculty wives teas? And then you start to understand, "Okay, wait a minute now. If I had these endless barriers in my life, how would I fight?" Anyway, you can understand how you would start to really, really feel something for this woman and with her. The rage, I think more than anything. Yeah. NEIL: At the end of a performance, is there a process by which that empathic connection is released, or is it over the course of a run? KATHLEEN: Well, I used to believe that I did not bring any characters home. My ex-husband and my daughter have made it clear that that's not entirely true. Anyway, part of it's the energy at the end of a performance, say. Maybe you just had a standing ovation of 1100 people. It's thrilling, it's fantastic, and you can't just say, "Okay. Well that's all right, now I'm going to go home and have a different life." I have to work it off. I've been known to go up and down the stairs in my building just to get rid of some of this energy that keeps me going. I try to just, I don't know, tire myself a bit, I guess. NEIL: Since we're talking about acting, which I'd love to keep talking with you about, next card would be acting. Pretending to notice something when you walk into a room. I could never do that. That, to me, seems like a monumental challenge. KATHLEEN: But if you wanted to talk about what acting is, I'll tell you that acting is a very carefully chosen series of communications, both physically and through the text. It is incredibly deliberate and detailed, and never really spontaneous. I don't do ... what do you call it when you get thrown something and the- NEIL: Improvisation? KATHLEEN: Yes. I'm not good at improv, no. NEIL: But how does one perform surprise? KATHLEEN: Oh. Well, it isn't just performing. You allow yourself to be surprised. This stuff is half physical, half in the body, and half in your mind making the choices, but then you feel them in the body. NEIL: You teach acting, correct? KATHLEEN: I do. I coach, and now I'm starting to teach online a bit, which is very difficult, really, because I can really work on the text. I can really work with them on the meanings and the basic, but I cannot get them on their feet and have them move. Because then I really wouldn't be able to see them well. And so that, I really miss. I miss being in the room with somebody and looking at them from their feet to their head and going, "Okay, wait a minute. You just said, 'I hate you,' and your legs are crossed." It doesn't work like that. The body is not saying the same thing your mouth is. So I miss not being able to be in the room with them, but still, we can do good work. NEIL: Do you feel effective as a teacher? Yeah. Do you feel- KATHLEEN: Yes. Yeah. I find it very fulfilling. I really enjoy it. NEIL: See, I teach art, visual art, and I also find it super fulfilling, and I also feel effective, but sometimes when I step back, and I'm curious how this is for you, recommending references and theory. I do believe it works, but I don't know. I don't know, I sometimes feel like an effective quack or something like that. KATHLEEN: Well, heavens to Betsy. I'm not sure that's our responsibility. We give them what tools we think they can use, but we're not responsible for what they actually do with them. NEIL: I love that you're able to comfortably ... to own that. And it may be a difference between teaching acting and teaching visual art in that I wonder if there's something less mediated, more direct, I wonder, about teaching acting. KATHLEEN: Well in acting, we have a specific text. Chosen words to work with, which is a structure, and I don't know that you have that in art. NEIL: Not really, no. And I think so much of the teaching of art involves almost manufacturing parameters to contain the ideas. The worst thing you can do for a student is to say like, "Make a video," versus, "Make a video that has to be two minutes long and that doesn't use sound and that involves some aspect of memory." Whereas I guess, as an actor, that's such a great point. You always have the text as a kind of infrastructure for your teaching, correct? KATHLEEN: Yes. Yes. NEIL: I love it. Next card. Actors and animals. They're both about commitment. I feel like my cat is never fully other than 100% in what she's doing, and that could just be a question of I don't know if I'm interpreting her correctly. But it seems to me that actors, to be effective, kind of have to have something akin to that. Do you sense a connection? KATHLEEN: I do. I do. I believe very strongly in getting commitment. Again, you make your choices, and then you have to fill them. You have to fill them physically, vocally, mentally. I can tell when an actor hasn't committed to the role they're playing. It's very clear to me. NEIL: And when you look at Simon, are you ever inspired as an actor? KATHLEEN: I look at Simon and I see just a cat boy. He walks around with this swagger with his ass kind of swinging around and you go, "Oh, you're a real Butch, aren't you, cat?" No, I enjoy him that way, yes. NEIL: Oh, I love their embodied presence. I love the way they walk. KATHLEEN: Yeah. NEIL: You mentioned you can tell when actors aren't committed. Next card would be actors who are bad at acting, even in the posters. KATHLEEN: Oh. Wow. Well, that's very poor photography or choice then. I find still photography very difficult because I feel so fake. I feel staged- NEIL: Interesting. KATHLEEN: ... as opposed to the actual doing of the character, which feels quite natural to me. So then I really have to say, "All right. The PR people, the photographer they choose, I'll listen to them." NEIL: That's interesting. So it's sort of that fact that your character, when you're performing, unfolds in time. KATHLEEN: Yeah. He's moving. NEIL: Right. KATHLEEN: And it's stopped in a poster, in a photograph. NEIL: So do you have any tricks for that? Are you trying to kind of- KATHLEEN: No, I've never been very good at it. I don't like being photographed. Just still photography. It makes me uncomfortable to be just still. NEIL: What's your relationship to a fear of failing? KATHLEEN: Oh, I'm going to. I have to. If I don't risk failure, then I'm not going far enough. If you don't, and I say this to all my students as well, look, you go to the point of failure, you will have to risk to the point of failure. Now, sometimes that means, uh-huh (affirmative), yeah, you will go over the edge. But at the other times it means that have pushed yourself further and found more than you had previously, and I think that's our job. NEIL: Do you feel like in acting, is there the notion of having succeeded? KATHLEEN: Yes, I think so. I know when I've done a good performance when I've hit all the marks that I set up for myself. I know when I have done what I hoped and wanted, what I set out to do. I will never forget opening night on Broadway. Well, any opening night on Broadway, but Virginia Woolf, and there were four of us in that play. And when the curtain came down, I was holding onto two of my co-stars, and I said, "Do not ever forget this moment. Don't ever allow yourself to forget this because they are few and far between." NEIL: As a visual artist, you rarely get that experience. KATHLEEN: Yes. NEIL: It's always mediated. I always say I love attention, but I like it kind of bounced off a wall. But what you're describing sounds so powerful, for lack of a better word. KATHLEEN: It is. It's astounding. There's such an extraordinary phenomena in theater where people sit so close, or they used to sit so close to each other. Total strangers. Closer than they sit in their own homes to people and they start to breathe together and they start to hold their breath at the same time and they laugh at the same time. So in a way, they become one body, one person, and it works for them in that they leave the theater feeling that they were part of something. They weren't just the individual that walked in that door to begin with. That it was something more than that. And as they become more attuned to each other and more one, they're easier in a way for me to work with. NEIL: Is there work that has to be front-loaded in a performance to kind of help create that feeling of coalescent? KATHLEEN: A lot of it has to do with the actor's confidence. Because if they see that you feel confident and good about what you're doing, then they'll trust more easily. NEIL: Do you always go out feeling confident, or do you perform confidence? KATHLEEN: I always think that I'm so much more confident in my working self than in my private self that I'm quite sure the decisions I make as an actor are right. But then take me off the stage and give me a decision to make about whether you want to see these people or not and I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know." Yeah. And so it's very difficult sometimes. NEIL: I'd love to do sort of a quick lightning round of a couple of quick cards. First card would be gratuitous eye work in movies. I notice certain actors sort of try and telegraph a type of subtlety or something by way of a whole lot of stuff going on in the eyes that doesn't need to happen. KATHLEEN: That's interesting. Yeah, I can see that. I don't know, I guess. To me, for example, it will be too much smiling also. It's hiding. It's hiding yourself. It's feeling like you're keeping busy and you're doing something, but in fact, you're just dodging. NEIL: One of the cards here says, "Friendships that are tenured." KATHLEEN: That are what? NEIL: Tenured. KATHLEEN: Oh, yes. Well, to me, and this is something that I learned from my mother, for me, women friends. Really strong, interesting women friends are essential. And out of this poker group, we have an investment banker, a gynecologist, a film editor, a retired lawyer. I don't think any of the businesses are repeated, necessarily. And these are women I've met over the years through some reason or another and wanted in my life and said, "Come on. I want you in my life." I will actually say that. KATHLEEN: Anyway, my mom, when she got older, she had three or four very, very important friends in her life, and they would check on each other, and they would celebrate birthdays together, and they'd go to concerts together, and they'd volunteer at the library together. And so there was a constant. She didn't end up feeling that she was that alone. NEIL: People are less surprised by my age as they used to be. It used to be I would tell people, especially students, I'd say, let's say 10 years ago, I'd say, "I'm 45," and there'd be a, "What?" Now, when I tell them I'm 56, they're like, "That's about right." That's what the look says. KATHLEEN: No. For years and years, I always played characters older than I was, and it started with Body Heat, that once I was cast, only then did the director, Larry Kasdan, say, "By the way, how old are you?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to be 26." "No, you're not. No, you're not. You're 29." It was wrong for a woman to be that powerful that young is what he said. So then for years I played women who were older. I was not 42 when I did Peggy Sue Got Married, for God's sake. I don't think it was until Virginia Woolf, where the character is 50, that I actually got to be 50 playing 50. KATHLEEN: And now, I tell you, the thing that I find most extraordinary, I'm turning 66 next month, and I find it fascinating how the looks have changed over the years. How time and everything that contributes to your life has affected how you look or if you care. NEIL: What is your relationship to caring? KATHLEEN: Yeah. I don't. I certainly don't care as much as I know I used to. I still like to look nice as it were, but no, I don't set out to knock somebody out, you know what I mean? NEIL: I'd love to end, if you don't mind, with two questions I like to ask. First question is, fill in the blank for X and Y. What is a bad X you would take over a good Y? KATHLEEN: What is a bad ... Oh. Hell, why would you? Well, I suppose a bad meal but with good company would be doable. NEIL: I love it. And what's something you're looking forward to when this crisis, as it were, is over? KATHLEEN: Oh, getting back on stage. Theater is just shut down. I was booked for the fall at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and looking forward to that, and they've closed their whole fall season. There's to lot of figure out how you can get an audience again. And if you can only sell half the seats, how do you survive? Because these companies need full houses. So there's a lot of figuring out that's going to be there, and whether we survive or not. And I miss it. I miss being on stage. NEIL: What's something that keeps you going? KATHLEEN: Oh, I suppose a kind of a belief. I'm thinking that there will be something after this and there will be changes to be made and understood, and that keeps me going. NEIL: That seems like such a wonderful place to end it. Kathleen Turner, huge, huge, thank you for being on SHE'S A TALKER. I so appreciate it. KATHLEEN: Well, it was good, Neil. You said I'd know at the end. NEIL: Oh, right. KATHLEEN: Yes. It was good. NEIL: Thank you. I really, really appreciate it. KATHLEEN: You're most welcome. NEIL: All right. Have a great rest of your day. KATHLEEN: I'm leaving the meeting. NEIL: All right, bye-bye. KATHLEEN: Bye-bye.
Beave and Len provide their expertise on the movies of Jack Nicholson. They discuss his greatest performances, argue over Prizzi's Honor, and even get into Sir Laurence Olivier (way over their heads). Tune in for a fun hour of cinema discussion.
The Crazy Folks review the viewers' choice The Untouchables (1987), starring Kevin Costner, Robert DeNiro, Andy Garcia and Sean Connery. Directed by Brian De Palma. Treasury Department guy Eliott Ness comes to Chicago to 'do some good' and nabs Al Capone for not paying Uncle Sam his cut. We also will give an honorable mention to Prizzi's Honor and other great mobster flicks of the 80's and 90's (no Godfather Part III), plus a side rant on the worst successful actors and actresses of all-time.
Anjelica Huston has lived many lives, all with grace and charisma. As the daughter of John Huston (director of The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, and more) she was movie royalty from birth. But she grew up in rural Ireland and went to high school in Swinging-Sixties London. That meant she developed a set of values far removed from Hollywood high society. Her first career was as a high-end fashion model, a favorite subject of Richard Avedon and later a muse of Halston. But she had always wanted to be a movie actress, and she spent time in the trenches, working on her craft in classes and smaller roles before her Oscar-winning turn in Prizzi's Honor. Right as she was leaving the photo studio for the movie studio, she met Jack Nicholson: "he made me laugh," she tells Alec. The couple defined Hollywood cool for almost two decades. Huston tells Alec the story of all of her transitions -- romantic, professional, and geographic. Her two wonderful memoirs are A Story Lately Told and Watch Me.
Soñador@ en Ladrones de Sueños 154: Comenzaremos con nuestra sección Universonal. Manuel Estrada, en esta ocasión, nos hablará sobre los ángeles. Recibiremos un nuevo Mensaje de las Estrellas. En la sección Con el cine aprendimos a soñar, Raúl Sanchidrián nos presenta la película El Honor de los Prizzi. En la recta final Reflexiones Compartidas con Emilio Arias con el que hablaremos de la Vida y la Amistad.
Sean De Tore joins Luke and Andrew to discuss his alter ego, Prizzi. Also, while Andrew insists he will not be doing stand-up comedy any time soon, Luke has other ideas. . . . Today's show is sponsored by Everlane. Visit Everlane.com/tbtl to get free shipping on your first order.
Sean De Tore joins Luke and Andrew to discuss his alter ego, Prizzi. Also, while Andrew insists he will not be doing stand-up comedy any time soon, Luke has other ideas. . . . Today's show is sponsored by Everlane. Visit Everlane.com/tbtl to get free shipping on your first order.
Soñador@ en Ladrones de Sueños 154: Comenzaremos con nuestra sección Universonal. Manuel Estrada, en esta ocasión, nos hablará sobre los ángeles. Recibiremos un nuevo Mensaje de las Estrellas. En la sección Con el cine aprendimos a soñar, Raúl Sanchidrián nos presenta la película El Honor de los Prizzi. En la recta final Reflexiones Compartidas con Emilio Arias con el que hablaremos de la Vida y la Amistad.
Episodio especial con el que comenzamos el año, lo hacemos junto a al director y actor Alfonso Sánchez y el actor Alberto López, más conocidos en el mundo mundial del cine de comedia como “Los Compadres”, aquellos dos tipos que saltaron a escena con sus profundas y filosóficas charlitas en la terracita de un bar cualquiera de Sevilla, y que se consagraron en el cine con su primera película juntos “El mundo es nuestro” y cuya secuela “El mundo es Suyo” pudimos ver hace poco en cines. En esta ocasión Alfonso y Alberto dejan atrás, solo de cierta forma, sus típicos papeles para realizar una nueva comedia llamada “Hasta la Muerte”. El humor ácido y de tintes negros son los protagonista en la cinta, que nos traslada al cine costrumbrista de Berlanga e incluso al cine español de los 60, recordándonos a títulos como “Usted puede ser el Asesino”. Al hablar con ellos de esta película, no podiamos olvidarnos de grandes comedias ochenteras relacionadas como “Que he hecho yo para merecer esto” 1984 (Almodovar), “El honor de los Prizzi” divertida comedia de gángsters dirigida por John Huston que nos sitúa al enorme Jack Nicholson como Charley Partanna, “Este muerto está muy vivo” (1989) película homenajeada en el cartel de “Hasta la Muerte”, “No matarás al vecino” (Joe Dante 1989), “Tira a mamá del Tren”(1987) con un espectacular Danny de Vito y Bily Cristal o “No me chilles que no te veo” (1989), con Gene Wilder y Rychar Pryor. Además de todo esto, nos dio tiempo a charlar con Alberto López sobre su primer trabajo precario y con Alfonso Sánchez de su mini romance platónico con Natalie Portman entre muchas otras cosas.Una hora de podcast bien aprovechada a cargo de Javi Garcia, Fran Delgado, Carlos Aceituno y la dirección de Juan Pablo Videoclubsero. voox – https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-remake-… Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/1gmtv3M… Itunes – https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast… y síguenos en nuestras sedes sociales Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Remakealos80/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/remakealos80/ Twiter – @remakealos80
Episodio especial con el que comenzamos el año, lo hacemos junto a al director y actor Alfonso Sánchez y el actor Alberto López, más conocidos en el mundo mundial del cine de comedia como “Los Compadres”, aquellos dos tipos que saltaron a escena con sus profundas y filosóficas charlitas en la terracita de un bar cualquiera de Sevilla, y que se consagraron en el cine con su primera película juntos “El mundo es nuestro” y cuya secuela “El mundo es Suyo” pudimos ver hace poco en cines. En esta ocasión Alfonso y Alberto dejan atrás, solo de cierta forma, sus típicos papeles para realizar una nueva comedia llamada “Hasta la Muerte”. El humor ácido y de tintes negros son los protagonista en la cinta, que nos traslada al cine costrumbrista de Berlanga e incluso al cine español de los 60, recordándonos a títulos como “Usted puede ser el Asesino”. Al hablar con ellos de esta película, no podiamos olvidarnos de grandes comedias ochenteras relacionadas como “Que he hecho yo para merecer esto” 1984 (Almodovar), “El honor de los Prizzi” divertida comedia de gángsters dirigida por John Huston que nos sitúa al enorme Jack Nicholson como Charley Partanna, “Este muerto está muy vivo” (1989) película homenajeada en el cartel de “Hasta la Muerte”, “No matarás al vecino” (Joe Dante 1989), “Tira a mamá del Tren”(1987) con un espectacular Danny de Vito y Bily Cristal o “No me chilles que no te veo” (1989), con Gene Wilder y Rychar Pryor. Además de todo esto, nos dio tiempo a charlar con Alberto López sobre su primer trabajo precario y con Alfonso Sánchez de su mini romance platónico con Natalie Portman entre muchas otras cosas.Una hora de podcast bien aprovechada a cargo de Javi Garcia, Fran Delgado, Carlos Aceituno y la dirección de Juan Pablo Videoclubsero. voox – https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-remake-… Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/1gmtv3M… Itunes – https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast… y síguenos en nuestras sedes sociales Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/Remakealos80/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/remakealos80/ Twiter – @remakealos80
Director, guionista y actor: esto y mucho más era John Huston. Desde El halcón maltés hasta Dublineses, cinco décadas en las que encontramos algunas de las obras maestras indiscutibles del séptimo arte, con bandas sonoras firmadas por genios como Rózsa, Steiner, North o Goldsmith. En el programa he seleccionado musicalmente las siguientes partituras: El halcón maltés, El tesoro de Sierra Madre, Cayo Largo, La jungla de asfalto, Moby Dick, El bárbaro y la geisha, Las raíces del cielo, Vidas rebeldes, Freud,pasión secreta, La Biblia...en su principio, El hombre de Mackintosh, El hombre que pudo reinar, Bajo el volcán, El honor de los Prizzi, Dublineses.
Director, guionista y actor: esto y mucho más era John Huston. Desde El halcón maltés hasta Dublineses, cinco décadas en las que encontramos algunas de las obras maestras indiscutibles del séptimo arte, con bandas sonoras firmadas por genios como Rózsa, Steiner, North o Goldsmith. En el programa he seleccionado musicalmente las siguientes partituras: El halcón maltés, El tesoro de Sierra Madre, Cayo Largo, La jungla de asfalto, Moby Dick, El bárbaro y la geisha, Las raíces del cielo, Vidas rebeldes, Freud,pasión secreta, La Biblia...en su principio, El hombre de Mackintosh, El hombre que pudo reinar, Bajo el volcán, El honor de los Prizzi, Dublineses.
Why don’t you do right, bbs? This week Damian and Anne are with Oscar nominee Kathleen Turner. You Might Know Her From Peggy Sue Got Married, Body Heat, The War of the Roses, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile, The Virgin Suicides, Serial Mom, Moonlight and Valentino, and Prizzi’s Honor. She’s also on the upcoming season of the The Kominsky Method. We talk to Kathleen about her journey from ‘80s bombshell to Broadway stalwart, playing pranks with Danny Devito and Michael Douglas, and making the choice to stay in New York City. Follow us on social media @damianbellino || @rodemanne Discussed this week Céline Dion in Las Vegas Mariah Carey in Toronto Fantasy ODB Remix Joe Luft Mariah Carey Unplugged Monroe & Moroccan Cannon Kathleen’s IMDB & IBDB Serial Mom (dir: John Waters) Edward Albee Bill Irwin Austin Pendleton on Uta Hagen’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Hudson River Park Bond 45 Restaurant Matthew Lillard Earnestness of Sam Waterston 80s/90s crop of female stars: Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver Moonlight and Valentino Meryl in Taming of the Shrew Crimes of the Heart (dir: Kathleen Turner) Cherry Jones touring in Doubt Carol Channing by way of The Lunts: “you must tour the provinces” Will be playing Michael Douglas’s ex-wife The Kominsky Method Power Trio: Michael Douglas || Danny DeVito || Kathleen Turner War of the Roses List of male directors: Francis Ford Coppola, John Huston, Robert Zemeckis, Larry Kasdan, Ken Russell The Virgin Suicides (dir: Sofia Coppola, who played her younger sister in PSGM) Selma Blair @ Oscars Brunette Amy Irving vs Debra Winger Blonde, kinky curled Amy Irving Amy Madigan + Ed Harris not standing for Elia Kazan @ the Oscars Elia Kazan named names Bill Macy + Felicity Huffman Burt Reynolds - Nicolas Cage - James Woods Nic Cage controversy Top 5 voices: Aretha, Judy, Nina
In this podcast episode, New York Film Academy sits down with Academy Award® Nominated Actor, Kathleen Turner. Kathleen Turner discusses her past acting experiences in classic movies, such as, "Body Heat," "Romancing The Stone," "Prizzi's Honor," as well as the importance of not letting yourself be typecast.
TV Superheroes that rule, a Tom Cruise Mummy that's not cool and Elvis ain't no fool! On this week's DigiGods! DigiGods Podcast, 09/12/17 (MP3) — 34.69 MB right click to save Subscribe to the DigiGods Podcast In this episode, the Gods discuss: 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag (Blu-ray) Batman and Harley Quinn (4k UHD Blu-ray) Beatrice et Benedict (Blu-ray) Beatriz at Dinner (DVD) Change Begins Within (DVD) The Churchills (DVD) Cinematic Titanic (DVD) Criminal Minds: The Twelfth Season (DVD) Cross Fire (DVD-R) Dead Again in Tombstone (Blu-ray) Decline and Fall (DVD) Designated Survivor: The Complete First Season (DVD) Effects (Blu-ray) Elementary: The Fifth Season (DVD) The Emperor in August (Blu-ray) The Flash: The Complete Third Season (Blu-ray) Franco Faccio: Hamlet (Blu-ray) Freebie and the Bean (Blu-ray) Giacomo Puccini: Tosca (DVD) Handel: Messiah (Blu-ray) Hawaii Five-O (2010): The Seventh Season (DVD) Just Shoot Me!: The Complete Series (DVD) Kid Galahad (Blu-ray) The Lion and the Horse (DVD-R) The Long, Hot Summer (Blu-ray) Marriage Double Feature – Divorce American Style, How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life (DVD) Marvel's Daredevil: The Complete Second Season (Blu-ray) Marvel's Jessica Jones: The Complete First Season (Blu-ray) Minor Major (Blu-ray) The Mummy (2017) (Blu-ray/DVD) Musical Explorers - Krishna in Spring (DVD) Musicals 20 Movie Collection (DVD) My Blue Heaven (Blu-ray) Narcos: Season 2 (Blu-ray) NCIS: The Fourteenth Season (DVD) Night Moves (Blu-ray) Prizzi's Honor (Blu-ray) RAKE Series 3 (DVD) Scorpion - Season Three (DVD) Son of Paleface (Blu-ray) Spirits of the Somme (DVD) The Stranger (Blu-ray) Suddenly, Last Summer (Blu-ray) Supernatural: The Complete Twelfth Season (Blu-ray) Sylvia Scarlett (DVD-R) The Tempest (Blu-ray) Those Redheads from Seattle (Studio Classics) (Blu-ray 3D) The Wedding Banquet (Blu-ray) Wiliam Tell (Blu-ray) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem (Blu-ray) The Zodiac Killer (Blu-ray) Please also visit CineGods.com.
Journeyman podcaster Mark McConville returns for the adventures of Tiny Stonehenge. Tiny Stonehenge in North Hollywood. Tiny Stonehenge in Times Square. And perhaps Tiny Stonehenge coming soon to a minute near you. Show links: The Steve Harvey memo Prizzi’s Honor trailer History for Hire Captain Eo I Was There, Too – Captain Eo with Doug Benson … Continue reading
Título original Prizzi's Honor Año 1985 Duración 130 min. País Estados Unidos Estados Unidos Director John Huston Guión Richard Condon & Janet Roach (Novela: Richard Condon) Música Alex North Fotografía Andrzej Bartkowiak Reparto Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston, Robert Loggia, John Randolph, William Hickey, Lawrence Tierney, CCH Pounder, Lee Richardson Productora ABC Motion Pictures Género Drama. Romance. Comedia. Thriller | Mafia. Crimen. Comedia negra Sinopsis Charley Partanna es un asesino a sueldo al servicio de los Prizzi, una de las familias más poderosas de la mafia. La nieta del Don está enamorada de él, aunque entre ellos va a interponerse una bella y enigmática rubia: Irene Walker.
In her new book Watch Me, Huston tells the story of falling in love with Jack Nicholson and her adventurous, turbulent, high-profile, spirited 17-year relationship with him and his intoxicating circle of friends. She writes about learning the art and craft of acting, her rise to stardom, her work with the many of greatest directors in Hollywood, including Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Bob Rafelson, Francis Ford Coppola and Stephen Frears; about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor; about her roles as Morticia Addams in the Addams Family films, Etheline Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums and Lilly Dillon in The Grifters; and she movingly and beautifully writes about the death of her father, the legendary director John Huston, and her marriage to sculptor Robert Graham. She shares all in this talk with Joy Behar. Recorded November 12, 2014 at 92nd Street Y.
Recorded 8 March 2013. You can download the m4a file. We talk about changing your mind. Fantastical adds a date badge — when Michael said he was against it. He explains why. This episode is sponsored by Windows Azure Mobile Services, which makes it easy to add a backend to your iOS app — you can store data in a SQL database, run periodic scripts, send push notifications, and more. You write code in JavaScript. You don’t have to get Visual Studio. It’s lightweight in the best sense possible — and very easy to get started. A note about the audio: I (Brent) screwed up Michael’s audio — I had my headphones on and didn’t realize Michael’s audio was playing through my computer speakers. Oops. It’s due to Michael’s Awesome Audio Editing Prowess (tm) that the episode is salvaged. You mostly don’t hear any echo. Mostly. (Sorry about that!) Some things we mention: Fantastical 1.1 for iPhone Microsoft Olga Korbut Google Reader Microsoft investing in Apple Pirates of Silicon Valley Weird Domino’s Pizza Thing on YouTube Vocaloids Letterpress release notes HockeyApp Prizzi's Honor In the podcast, Brent erroneously credited Mario Puzo as the author of Prizzi’s Honor. It was Richard Condon. (Puzo wrote The Godfather.) We regret the error. Nowhere in the podcast do we mention Jerzy Kosinski, who wrote Being There. We bring it up now just because we like it. Another random note: Daniel Jalkut has a nice piece on indie podcasts. While we love 5by5, Mule Radio Syndicate, and Mobile Nations, like Daniel and Marco Arment we’re proud to be indie. We enjoy having sole control of the things we make.
It's Valentine's Day, and what better way to end our current John Huston series than with his 1985 romantic mafia comedy, Prizzi's Honor? Huston was struggling with his health in the 80s but still a vibrant and essential director when he made this film that garnered 8 Oscar nominations. Join us — Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — as we celebrate love and death in this quirky film. We chat about what works and what doesn't with the performances in the film, particularly Jack Nicholson's and Anjelica Huston's, and how essential they are in a film with such a variety of characters like this film has. We discuss what Huston was trying to say with the film and how it fits into his body of work. We talk about the amazing crew and what they bring to the table as well as the kudos they received for their work. And we chat about the nature of the story — a mafia comedy — and what Richard Condon, who wrote the novel on which it was based, was saying with the story. It's a fun film and we have a great time talking about it. Check it out!
It's Valentine's Day, and what better way to end our current John Huston series than with his 1985 romantic mafia comedy, Prizzi's Honor? Huston was struggling with his health in the 80s but still a vibrant and essential director when he made this film that garnered 8 Oscar nominations. Join us — Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — as we celebrate love and death in this quirky film. We chat about what works and what doesn't with the performances in the film, particularly Jack Nicholson's and Anjelica Huston's, and how essential they are in a film with such a variety of characters like this film has. We discuss what Huston was trying to say with the film and how it fits into his body of work. We talk about the amazing crew and what they bring to the table as well as the kudos they received for their work. And we chat about the nature of the story — a mafia comedy — and what Richard Condon, who wrote the novel on which it was based, was saying with the story. It's a fun film and we have a great time talking about it. Check it out!
It's Valentine's Day, and what better way to end our current John Huston series than with his 1985 romantic mafia comedy, Prizzi's Honor? Huston was struggling with his health in the 80s but still a vibrant and essential director when he made this film that garnered 8 Oscar nominations. Join us — Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — as we celebrate love and death in this quirky film. We chat about what works and what doesn't with the performances in the film, particularly Jack Nicholson's and Anjelica Huston's, and how essential they are in a film with such a variety of characters like this film has. We discuss what Huston was trying to say with the film and how it fits into his body of work. We talk about the amazing crew and what they bring to the table as well as the kudos they received for their work. And we chat about the nature of the story — a mafia comedy — and what Richard Condon, who wrote the novel on which it was based, was saying with the story. It's a fun film and we have a great time talking about it. Check it out!
It's Valentine's Day, and what better way to end our current John Huston series than with his 1985 romantic mafia comedy, Prizzi's Honor? Huston was struggling with his health in the 80s but still a vibrant and essential director when he made this film that garnered 8 Oscar nominations. Join us — Pete Wright and Andy Nelson — as we celebrate love and death in this quirky film. We chat about what works and what doesn't with the performances in the film, particularly Jack Nicholson's and Anjelica Huston's, and how essential they are in a film with such a variety of characters like this film has. We discuss what Huston was trying to say with the film and how it fits into his body of work. We talk about the amazing crew and what they bring to the table as well as the kudos they received for their work. And we chat about the nature of the story — a mafia comedy — and what Richard Condon, who wrote the novel on which it was based, was saying with the story. It's a fun film and we have a great time talking about it. Check it out!
CCH Pounder plays the enigmatic Mrs. Frederic in Syfy’s series Warehouse 13. All other information on Mrs. Frederic is strictly CLASSIFIED. Award-winning actress CCH Pounder last performed on screen in the James Cameron film, “Avatar,” for 20th Century Fox. Other most recent credits include the FOX comedy series, “Brothers,” the feature film “Orphan,” HBO's “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which garnered Pounder her fourth Emmy nomination (‘Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series’) and the independent feature film “Rain,” which earned praise at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival. For seven years, Pounder portrayed Claudette Wyms on the critically acclaimed FX series, “The Shield,” which earned her many accolades including a Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Emmy nomination, NAACP Image Award nominations for Best Actress in a Drama Series, the MIB Prism Award for Outstanding Actress in a Television Drama, two Golden Satellite Awards for Performance by an Actress in a Series Drama, the Genii Excellence in TV Award from the Southern California Chapter of the American Women in Radio & TV and the LOOP Award from Lupus LA. Other honors for Pounder include an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as ‘Dr. Angela Hickson’ the NBC series “ER” and an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her role in FOX's “The X-Files.” In addition, she received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album for Grow Old Along With Me, The Best Is Yet To Come and won an AUDI, the Audio Publishers Association's top honor, for Women in the Material World. Film credits include “Bagdad Café,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” “Postcards from the Edge,” “Robocop 3,” “Sliver,” “Tales from the Crypt,” “Face/Off” and “End of Days.”
Sam Barry, author of "How to Play the Harmonica" will make you laugh, inspire you to try new things, and yes—teach you how to play. As a former minister, reporter, activist, bohemian, artist and musician Sam Barry knows a great many things about life – and playing the harmonica. Barry currently works as a marketing and promotions manager at HarperOne and plays the harmonica in The Rock Bottom Remainders with his brother Dave Barry. He and his partner, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, write the national column “The Author Enabler” in BookPage. WWW.REDROOM.COM/AUTHOR/SAM-BARRY Also on today's show Christopher Dalrymple, two-time Emmy-winning filmmaker 1980, The War Machine: The Defense of the United States, CBS Reports, and 1990, Interview with Marlon Brando, "Saturday Night with Connie Chung") His new Film "And Then..., a Cassevettes-style black comedy shot in HDV about a former leading man who is given a second chance at stardom, but his obligations trump opportunity and twists, turns, and murders abound. www.dalrymplepictures.com also guest John Galasso Producer and Anton Evangelista,Actor/Director appeared in"The Cotton Club," "Prizzi's Honor," TV's "Law and Order," "Search for Tomorrow," "As the World Turns" and in Ron Howard's "Ransom" with Mel Gibson. In 1995, he produced and directed his first short film "Beyond Reason" It wasn't until after Anton's completion of his film that the two seriously discussed laughing -- an idea for a movie about laughing and healing. A subject John was well aware of, after experiencing a back injury that nearly crippled him. "The idea of laughing towards better health appealed to me. I wish I knew what I know now back then." The two agreed and "Just Laugh" would be the documentary they would make, exploring the many gifts of laughter. www.justlaugh.org
Richard Condon has written 23 novels since becoming a full-time writer at the age of 42. These include The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honour. In conversation with Michael Parkinson, he talks about his upbringing in Manhattan, his career in the film world where he ended up as a publicity executive for Walt Disney, and his escape into writing.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: Baubles, Bangles and Beads by Peggy Lee Book: Boy Scout manual Luxury: Calendar watch
ONE HEAT MINUTE is the podcast examining Michael Mann’s 1995 crime opus HEAT minute by minute. It’s the 159th minute (2:38:00 - 2:39:00) - host Blake Howard joins a filmmaker who contributed to such masterworks as Prizzi’s Honor, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and academy award-winning Kramer vs. Kramer - Tom Kane. Blake and Tom discuss taking a shotgun like it’s a “fucking shopping cart,” meeting Al Pacino in a Lee Strasberg directing class and De Niro staying inside “to keep the character going.”Guest Bio:TOM KANETom Kane has had a long and distinguished career in the film and television industry. As a Producer, Production Manager and Assistant Director, his clients have included Twentieth Century Fox, Miramax Films, Columbia Pictures, United Artists, Warner Bros., ABC Motion Pictures, Turner Network Television, CBS, NBC, ABC-TV and Hallmark Entertainment, among many others.Tom began his career in New York City working on numerous box office successes such as Prizzi’s Honor, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, academy award-winning Kramer vs. Kramer, An Unmarried Woman, The Turning Point, Night Hawks, Swimming to Cambodia andThe Flamingo Kid, alongside distinguished directors that include John Huston, Martin Scorsese, Robert Benton, Paul Mazursky, Herb Ross and Garry Marshall. Tom has worked with such notable actors as Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Ed Harris, Glenn Close, Elijah Wood, Pierce Brosnan, Sylvester Stallone, Spaulding Gray and Matt Dillon. For a complete list of actors, click here.After 16 years in New York City, Tom moved to Los Angeles to produce two television series, Fortune Dane, followed by the critically acclaimed Sledgehammer! both for ABC-Television. From 1988 to 1990, he served as Vice President of Production for the Weintraub Entertainment Group, overseeing all production. Immediately following, he produced for TNT, Riders of the Purple Sage (Ed Harris), Last Stand at Saber River (Tom Selleck), The Day Lincoln Was Shot (Rob Morrow), and Crossfire Trail (Tom Selleck). Tom most recently served as Producer on the Hallmark Hall of Fame production Brush With Fate, which is based on the best selling novel Girl In Hyacinth Blue, and filmed in The Netherlands. The film aired on CBS and starred Glenn Close, Ellen Burstyn and Thomas Gibson. He currently freelances as a Producer and/or Production Manager and is a long-time member of the Directors Guild of America.Since 1984, Tom has taught film and television production to hundreds of students from all over the world. He created “The Line Producer,UPM, AD Workshop” for The International Film & Television Workshops in Rockport, Maine (www.mainemedia.edu), where he taught for 12 years. Tom currently teaches his 3-day film/video production workshop throughout the U.S. and abroad.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/one-heat-minute-productions/donations
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