American actress and writer
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3 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
5 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
2 episodes with Ruth Gordon
NOTDEVO test the gravity Ruth Gordon falls... 10 feet out of shock!
The celebration of March's Women's History Month continues as GGACP revisits Part 2 of a memorable two-part episode featuring veteran screen and stage actress Sally Struthers. In this episode, Sally regales Gilbert and Frank with entertaining backstage tales from “All in the Family,” “The Gilmore Girls” and the all-female production of Neil Simon's “The Odd Couple,” while sharing personal recollections of Joan Crawford, David Frost, Betty Garrett and idol and personal hero Ruth Gordon. Also, Burgess Meredith philosophizes, Katharine Hepburn paints a birthday card, Sally “gooses” Dennis the Menace and Mel Blanc shows off his vanity license plate. PLUS: Burt Mustin! “Harold and Maude”! “The Great Houdini”! The genius of Rupert Holmes! Colonel Potter goes to Russia! And Sally dates the King of Rock ‘n' Roll and…wait for it…Pat McCormick! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week's challenge: notice some good things.(Recorded on Wednesday, Feb 26, 2025)Episode LinksMerlin Mann - "That was good."Ruth Gordon's Unique and Defiant Journey to Oscar - YouTubeComedian Jerry Lewis made a landmark Holocaust movie called “The Day the Clown Cried.” Why can't anyone see it?movies with really good dog actorsDemi Lovato - "I Love Me" (Emo Version)Tampopo (1985) | The Criterion CollectionBest Doula Training Online & Childbirth Education Classes | BirthWorksThe Dubious Feminism of the Natural Childbirth Movement | The NationYouth Unleashed: China's Cultural Revolution Unveiled | History Documentary - Part 2 - YouTubeiOS 18.4 beta adds Ambient Music to Control Center via Apple Music - 9to5MacGary Numan - Cars HD - YouTubeBefore Are "Friends" Electric?: How Synth-Pop Became Synth-Pop - YouTubePortlandia - Milk Advisory Board - YouTube
EPISODE 76 - “MEMORABLE OSCAR SPEECHES OF THE GOLDEN ERA OF HOLLYWOOD” - 2/24/2025 Winning an Oscar is a dream for most people who work in Hollywood. But you can't just win the Oscar, you have to have a good speech once your name is called and you head to the podium. There have been some great ones — OLIVIA COLEMAN's funny and cheeky speech hit the right tone and who can forget JACK PALANCE's one-arm push-ups or CUBA GOODING's exuberance? There have also been some bad ones — don't we all still cringe a little at SALLY FIELDS' “You like me” speech? As we prepare to celebrate the 97th annual Academy Award ceremony, Steve and Nan look back on some of their favorite Oscar speeches and why they resonate. So put on your tux, don the gown and jewels, pop the champagne, and join us for a fun talk about … well, people talking. SHOW NOTES: Sources: “Five Times The Oscars Made History,” January 20, 2017, www.nyfa.edu; “Hollywood History: How World War II Forced the Academy to Rethink the 1942 Oscars,” April 16, 2021, Entertainment Weekly; “Charlie Chaplin vs. America Explores the Accusations that Sent a Star Into Exile,” October 24, 2023, byTerry Gross, www.npr.com; “The Most Memorable Oscar Speeches in Oscar History,” March 6, 2024, by Shannon Carlin, www.time.com; Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; www.Oscars.org; Movies Mentioned: Stella Dallas (1938), starring Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley, & Alan Hale; Gone With The Wind (1939), starring Vivian Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Thomas Mitchell, & Barbara O'Neil; How Green Was My Valley (1941), starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara, & Donald Crisp; Sergeant York (1941), starring Gary Cooper, Joan Leslie, & Walter Brennan; The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), staring Jean Arthur Robert Cummings, & Charle Coburn; Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), starring Robert Montgomery, Claude Rains, & Evelyn Keyes; Ball of Fire (1942), starring Barbara Stanwyck & Cary Cooper; Double Indemnity (1944), starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray & Edward G Robinson; Key Largo (1948); starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G Robinson, Claire Trevor, & Lionel Barrymore; All The King's Men (1948), starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, & Mercedes McCambridge; Pinky (1949), starring Jeanne Crain, Ethel Waters, Ethel Barrymore, Nina Mae McKinney, & Wiliam Lundigan; Marty (1955); starring Ernest Borgnine. Betsy Blair, Joe Mantell, & Esther Minciotti; The King and I (1956), starring Yul Brenner, Deborah Kerr, Rita Moreno, & Rex Thompson; Elmer Gantry (1960), starring Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Shirley Jones, Arthur Kennedy, Dean Jagger, and Patti Page; West Side Story (1961), Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chikiris, & Russ Tamblyn; Lillies of the Field (1963), starring Sidney Poitier; In the Heat of the Night (1967)l starring Rod Steiger, Sidney Poitier, & Lee Grant; The Producers (1967), starring Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder; Rosemary's Baby (1968), starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, & Charles Grodin; Faces (1968), starring Gena Rowlands, Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel, & John Farley; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968), staring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke, Cecily Tyson, Stacey Keach, & Percy Rodrigues; The Last Picture Show (1971), starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, & Eileen Brennan; Murder on the Orient Express (1974), starring Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Martin Balsam, & Jacqueline Bisset; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to our podcast series from The Super Network and Pop4D called Tubi Tuesdays Podcast! This podcast series is focused on discovering and doing commentaries/watch a longs for films found on the free streaming service Tubi, at TubiTVYour hosts for Tubi Tuesdays are Super Marcey, ‘The Terrible Australian' Bede Jermyn, Prof. Batch (From Pop4D & Web Tales: A Spider-Man Podcast) and Kollin (From Trash Panda Podcast), will take turns each week picking a film to watch and most of them will be ones we haven't seen before.Hello everyone and welcome to The Best Of The Tubi Tuesdays Podcast 2024 Part 2 presented by Bede Jermyn. In this fun best of compilation, Bede Jermyn runs down some fun episodes from the second half of 2024 with some highlights. It was a wild ride in 2024 for the Tubi Tuesdays Podcast, the second half of the year may have been more wacky than the first half! With all sorts of films that usually sit somewhere between genius and trash, check out some great highlights and relive some hilarious moments! So what are you waiting for? Dive in to Part 2 right now!Highlights include:* Welcome to the Best of 2024 Part 2* The double feature of Puppet Shark and Jaws Of The Shark* The Amazing Bulk breaks us!* We love Ruth Gordon in Mugsy's Girls* Marcey gets an exorcism in The Amityville Exorcism* Kollin's stories from Once Upon a Time at Christmas* Nightbeast's obessession with flanel* We'll never be the same after Night of 1000 Cats* Plus much, much more!* Stay tuned for The Awards Show Jan 23rd!Check out The Super Network on Patreon to gain early access to The Tubi Tuesdays Podcast!DISCLAIMER: This audio commentary isn't meant to be taken seriously, it is just a humourous look at a film. It is for entertainment purposes, we do not wish to offend anyone who worked on and in the film, we have respect for you all.Music provided by DeNNo, introduction and podcast editing by Super Marcey & Bede Jermyn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Rosemary's Baby: A young wife comes to believe that her offspring is not of this world. Waifish Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move to a New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and odd neighbors Roman and Minnie Castavet (Sidney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon). When Rosemary becomes pregnant she becomes increasingly isolated, and the diabolical truth is revealed only after Rosemary gives birth. Apartment 7A: Terry Gionoffrio dreams of fame and fortune in New York City, but after suffering an injury, an older, wealthy couple welcomes her into their home in Bramford. When she receives an offer at another chance at fame, it seems that all her dreams are coming true. However, disturbing circumstances soon have her second-guessing the sacrifices she's willing to make for her career as she realizes that something evil is living in apartment 7A. Keep up with all things cool about Steve here: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/ To check out more information about That Horrorcast, take a look at our website: https://thathorrorcast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/horrorpod666 Mallory Smart's writing and random publishing projects can be checked out here: https://mallorysmart.com
This week Conor picked the 1978 action comedy film Every Which Way But Loose. Directed by James Fargo the film stars Clint Eastwood as Philo a trucker and bare-knuckle brawler roaming the American West in search of a lost love while accompanied by his brother/manager Orville and his pet orangutan Clyde. The film also stars Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, Beverly D'Angelo and Ruth Gordon. Come join us!!! Website : http://tortelliniatnoon.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tortelliniatnoonpodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TortelliniAtNoon Twitter: https://twitter.com/PastaMoviePod
Listen to this PREVIEW of the 17th episode of A Woman Robbed, a special bonus series you can hear on the And the Runner-Up Is Patreon exclusive feed! A Woman Robbed is a series in which Kevin is joined by a special guest in discussing women who had significant Oscar buzz heading into the nominations but were ultimately robbed/snubbed/omitted from the Best Actress lineup. In this episode, Kevin speaks with Morgan Roberts about two performances of the '70s that weren't nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars: Ruth Gordon ("Harold and Maude") and Gena Rowlands ("Opening Night"). We discuss their performances, talk about why they came up short, and reveal whether we would have nominated them. You can listen to the full episode of A Woman Robbed by going to patreon.com/andtherunnerupis and contributing at the $3 per month tier. Clips included in this episode: "Harold and Maude" - Paramount Pictures
Today, we cover and overlooked gem that had the best cast of actors, doing their best with a pretty dreadful script. It's Scavenger Hunt, a wannabe It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, from 1979! Starring Richard Benjamin, James Coco, Scatman Crothers, Ruth Gordon, Cloris Leachman, Cleavon Little, Roddy McDowall, Robert Morley, Richard Mulligan, Tony Randall, Dirk Benedict, Willie Aames, Stephanie Faracy, Stephen Furst, Richard Masur and cameos from Meat Loaf, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Vincent Price! Directed by Michael Schultz, who also directed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Last Dragon! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thegenxfiles/support
In the first half of this episode, Tommie praises the local cannabis dispensaries, Patrick reports why dogs lick us, they meet the Olde English Bulldogge, wish a Happy Birthday to President John Adams and actress Ruth Gordon, pay their respects to Grateful Dead bass guitarist Phil Lesh and actress Terri Garr, praise the genius of Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds, wonder why there isn't a song called Tsar Bomba, look at the scandalous death of closeted silent film star Ramon Novarro, get Wicked, remind people to get their vaccinations, review the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and why it's important now, walk through the garbage of the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, and make an official endorsement.
Chris and Taylor are doing a double potential pick review covering Apartment 7A / Rosemary's Baby. In the 2024 psychological horror film, Apartment 7A, directed by Natalie Erika James from a screenplay she co-wrote with Christian White and Skylar James. It serves as a prequel to Rosemary's Baby (1968). Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Jim Sturgess, and Kevin McNally star. In the 1968 psychological horror film, Rosemary's Baby, written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel. The film stars Mia Farrow as a newlywed living in Manhattan who becomes pregnant, but soon begins to suspect that her neighbors are members of a Satanic cult who are grooming her in order to use her baby for their rituals. The film's supporting cast includes John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, Angela Dorian, and Charles Grodin in his feature film debut. Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepotential_podcast/ X: https://x.com/thepotentialpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thepotentialpodcast Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/thepotentialpodcast Thanks to our sponsor: LetsGetChecked: Get 25% off your health test at trylgc.com/potential and enter promo code POTENTIAL25
National candy corn day. Entertainment from 1970. Time clock invented, Soviets detonate largest nuclear bomb ever, Bosphorous Bridge opened in Turkey. Todays birthdays - John Adams, Ruth Gordon, Grace Slick, Henry Winkler, Harry Hamlin, T. Graham Brown, Kevin Pollack, Gavin Rossdale. Steve Allen died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Candy corn song - JensensI'll be there - Jackson 5Run woman run - Tammy WynetteBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/I want to be a cowboys sweetheart - Patsy MontanaSomebody to love - Jefferson AirplaneI aint got nothing - The TemptationsHell and High water - T. Graham BrownComedown - BushExit - In my dreams - Dokken http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook and cooolmedia.com
EPISODE 59 - "POLITICS: THROUGH THE LENS OF CLASSIC CINEMA" - 10/28/2024 As we all get ready to go to the polls and vote in what might be the most important election of our lives, we wanted to take a look at politics in the films of old Hollywood. This week, we explore the movies that reflected the politics and the issues of the day and left an indelible mark on cinema. From labor wars in New Mexico to a mayor's race in New England to the early years of Abraham Lincoln, join us as we take a look at some great political movies. SHOW NOTES: Sources: Hearst Over Hollywood (2002), by Louis Pizzitola; Pictures at A Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of a New Hollywood (2008), by Mark Harris; Hollywood's White House (2010), by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor; The Great Depression on Film (2022), by David Luhrssen; “The Best Man Took On Cutthroat Campaigning,” August 21, 2024, The Hollywood Reporter; “How Blacklisted Hollywood Artists Joined Forces to Make a Truly Subversive film,” June 6, 2024, forward.com; “Subversives: Salt of the Earth,” UCTV TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; IBDB.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned: Gabriel Over the White House (1933), starring Walter Huston, Karen Morely, Franchot Tone, Dickie Moore, David Landau, Arthur Byron, Jean Parker, and C. Henry Gordon; Salt of the Earth (1954), starring Juan Chacón, Rosaura Revueltas, Mervin Williams, Henrietta Williams, and Virginia Jencks; The Great McGinty (1940), starring Brian Donlevy, Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, William Demarest, Allyn Joslyn, Louis Jean Heydt, Thurston Hall, Jimmy Conlin, and Arthur Hoyt; The Best Man (1964), starring Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Edie Adams, Margaret Leighton, Ann Sothern, Lee Tracy, Shelley Berman, Kevin McCarthy, and Gene Raymond; The Last Hurrah (1958), starring Spencer Tracy, Jeffery Hunter, Dianne Foster, Pat O'Brien, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp, James Gleason, John Carradine, Willis Bouchey, Ricardo Cortez, Ken Curtis, Frank Albertson, Anna Lee, and Jane Darwell; The Parallax View (1974), starring Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, William Daniels, Walter McGinn, and Hume Cronyn; Three Days of the Condor (1975), starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max von Sydow, John Houseman, Addison Powell, Tina Chen, Walter McGinn, Michael Kane, Carlin Glynn, and Hank Garrett; Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), starring Raymond Massey, Ruth Gordon, Gene Lockhart, Mary Howard, Minor Watson, Howard Da Silva, and Alan Baxter; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Heather Graham is an absolute icon in film and television with countless credits to her name. You may know Heather from License to Drive, Boogie Nights, or her 2018 directorial debut Half Magic. Recently, Heather wrote, directed, and starred in the comedy film Chosen Family. She plays Ann, a yoga teacher struggling to achieve inner peace despite the fact her family is driving her crazy and her dating life is less than zen. This week, Heather joins Feeling Seen to talk about the film, friendship, AND how she feels seen by Ruth Gordon's spunky septuagenarian in the 1971 black comedy HAROLD AND MAUDE.Then Jordan has one quick thing about Smile 2! Pop stars and evil entities, oh my!***With Jordan Crucchiola and Heather Graham.
Welcome to our podcast series from The Super Network and Pop4D called Tubi Tuesdays Podcast! This podcast series is focused on discovering and doing commentaries/watch a longs for films found on the free streaming service Tubi, at TubiTVYour hosts for Tubi Tuesdays are Super Marcey, ‘The Terrible Australian' Bede Jermyn, Prof. Batch (From Pop4D & Web Tales: A Spider-Man Podcast) and Kollin (From Trash Panda Podcast), will take turns each week picking a film to watch and most of them will be ones we haven't seen before.Film Starts Playing At: 00:08:45Welcome back to The Tubi Tuesdays Podcast, the number one Tubi related podcast that's hosted by two Australians, one Canadian and one American! All four co-hosts are here this week with Super Marcey, Bede Jermyn, Prof. Batch and Kollin, which is weird because it's Bede's pick of film this week and that's always a gamble! Bede's pick of film this week is Mugsy's Girls (1984) aka Delta Pi, a film about mud wrestling ... hmmm why wasn't this the film for Oil Mania? Anyways though, did Bede choose wisely with his choice of film?! Listen in and find out! Enjoy the show!Mugsy's Girls was directed by Kevin Brodie, it stars Ruth Gordon, Laura Branigan, Joanna Dierck, Eddie Deezen, James Wilder, Estrellita, Rebecca Forstadt, Candace Pandolfo, Kristi Somers, Steve Brodie and Teacup the rabbit.If you have never listened to a commentary before and want to watch the film along with the podcast, here is how it works. You simply need to grab a copy of the film or load it up on Tubi (you may need alcohol), and sync up the podcast audio with the film. We will tell you when to press and you follow along, it is that easy! Because we have watched the films on Tubi, it is a free service and there are ads, however we will give a warning when it comes up, so you can pause the film and provide time stamps to keep in sync.Highlights include:* Did Bede pick well this week?* The film stars Ruth Gordon, who might be a new character on the show??* Future Louise and Present Louise show up ... urgh double Louise!* So this bunny rabbit smokes pot? Right on!* Are they wrestling in ectoplasm? Maybe!* Do not sing Gloria by Laura Branigan to Kollin ... seriously!* Acknowledge your tribal kief!* Plus much, much more!Check out The Super Network on Patreon to gain early access to The Tubi Tuesdays Podcast!DISCLAIMER: This audio commentary isn't meant to be taken seriously, it is just a humourous look at a film. It is for entertainment purposes, we do not wish to offend anyone who worked on and in the film, we have respect for you all.Music provided by DeNNo, introduction and podcast editing by Super Marcey & Bede Jermyn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ar an Aoine an 20ú lá Meán Fómhair, beidh Oiche Chultúir 2024 buailte linn agus beidh imeachtaí chulturtha ar fail saor in aisce i ngach cúinne den tír. Bhí seans againn labhairt le Ruth Gordon faio cad a bhéas ar fail i nGaillimh i mbliana.
It's a Jewish-themed episode of the BFG Podcast this week. What else is new, you're asking, and you will be right to some extent, but that's just how the dreidel fell, content-wise. First up, host Neal Pollack visits the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, and finds the Jewish content extremely wanting, particularly in the 'Hollywoodland' exhibit, which purports to be about the Jewish founders of the eight major studios of Hollywood's golden age but quickly descends into stereotypes, calling the studio heads "predators" and tyrants" and not spending any time interested in their actual Judaism. Neal laments the lack of pride in Jewish identity in the exhibit.Special guest Michael Kaplan, a former writer for Roseanne and Frasier (not Friends), part of a group of L.A. writers who have protested the exhibit, laments the obvious tokenism of the museum display, as well as its smallness and lack of consequence. Not once, he points out, does the exhibit celebrate the Jewish tradition of storytelling that led the founders to establish the movie business in the first place. The exhibit is a cryin' shame, and both Neal and Michael worry about the imprint it will have on the many thousands of schoolchildren who march through the museum every year.Speaking of Jewish storytelling, Rebecca Kurson drops in to talk to Neal about 'Between the Temples,' a new movie that celebrates ordinary Judaism in all its messy glory. Becky saw Between the Temples on the date that we learned Hamas had murdered six Jewish hostages, and boy did she need this tonic, which depicts American Jewish life and celebrates it as not only normal, but necessary. Carol Kane, in full Ruth Gordon mode, is an older lady who decides, late in life, to become a Bat Mitzvah. Despite some twitchy direction, this is one of the best and most accurate depictions of Jewish devotional life in recent memory. If only the Academy Museum would have done the same.If you're listening this week, then Mazel tov!
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher on Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, favorite mysteries and more!LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Jeffrey Hatcher Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/jeffrey.hatcher.3/The Good Liar (Trailer): https://youtu.be/ljKzFGpPHhwMr. Holmes (Trailer): https://youtu.be/0G1lIBgk4PAStage Beauty (Trailer): https://youtu.be/-uc6xEBfdD0Columbo Clips from “Ashes to Ashes”Clip One: https://youtu.be/OCKECiaFsMQClip Two: https://youtu.be/BbO9SDz9FEcClip Three: https://youtu.be/GlNDAVAwMCIEli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastTRANSCRIPTJohn: Can you remember your very first mystery, a movie, book, TV show, play, a mystery that really captured your imagination? Jeffrey: You know, I was thinking about this, and what came to mind was a Disney movie called Emile and the Detectives from 1964. So, I would have been six or seven years old. It's based on a series of German books by Eric Kastner about a young man named Emile and his group of friends who think of themselves as detectives. So, I remember that—I know that might've been the first film. And obviously it's not a play because, you know, little kids don't tend to go to stage thrillers or mysteries and, “Daddy, please take me to Sleuth.But there was a show called Burke's Law that I really loved. Gene Barry played Captain Amos Burke of the Homicide Division in Los Angeles, and he was very rich. That was the bit. The bit was that Captain Burke drove around in a gorgeous Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, and he had a chauffeur. And every mystery was structured classically as a whodunit.In fact, I think every title of every episode was “Who Killed Cock Robin?” “Who Killed Johnny Friendly?” that kind of thing. And they would have a cast of well-known Hollywood actors, so they were all of equal status. Because I always think that's one of the easiest ways to guess the killer is if it's like: Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy, Derek Jacobi, Unknown Guy, Unknown Guy. It's always going to be Derek Jacobi. John: Yeah, it's true. I remember that show. He was really cool. Jim: Well, now I'm going to have to look that up.Jeffrey: It had a great score, and he would gather all of the suspects, you know, at the end of the thing. I think my favorite was when he caught Paul Lynde as a murderer. And, of course, Paul Lynde, you know, kept it very low key when he was dragged off. He did his Alice Ghostly impersonation as he was taken away.John: They did have very similar vocal patterns, those two.Jeffrey: Yep. They're kind of the exact same person. Jim: I never saw them together. John: You might have on Bewitched. Jim: You're probably right.Jeffrey: Well, I might be wrong about this, either Alice Ghostly or Charlotte Ray went to school with Paul Lynde. And Charlotte Ray has that same sound too. You know, kind of warbly thing. Yes. I think they all went to Northwestern in the late 40s and early 50s. So maybe that was a way that they taught actors back then. John: They learned it all from Marion Horne, who had the very same warble in her voice. So, as you got a little older, were there other mysteries that you were attracted to?Jeffrey: Yeah. Luckily, my parents were very liberal about letting me see things that other people probably shouldn't have. I remember late in elementary school, fifth grade or so, I was reading Casino Royale. And one of the teachers said, “Well, you know, most kids, we wouldn't want to have read this, but it's okay if you do.”And I thought, what's that? And I'm so not dangerous; other kids are, well they would be affected oddly by James Bond? But yeah, I, I love spy stuff. You know, The Man from Uncle and The Wild Wild West, all those kind of things. I love James Bond. And very quickly I started reading the major mysteries. I think probably the first big book that I remember, the first novel, was The Hound of the Baskervilles. That's probably an entrance point for a lot of kids. So that's what comes in mind immediately. Jim: I certainly revisit that on—if not yearly basis, at least every few years I will reread The Hound of the Baskervilles. Love that story. That's good. Do you have, Jeffrey, favorite mystery fiction writers?Jeffrey: Oh, sure. But none of them are, you know, bizarre Japanese, Santa Domingo kind of writers that people always pull out of their back pockets to prove how cool they are. I mean, they're the usual suspects. Conan Doyle and Christie and Chandler and Hammett, you know, all of those. John Dickson Carr, all the locked room mysteries, that kind of thing. I can't say that I go very far off in one direction or another to pick up somebody who's completely bizarre. But if you go all the way back, I love reading Wilkie Collins.I've adapted at least one Wilkie Collins, and they read beautifully. You know, terrifically put together, and they've got a lot of blood and thunder to them. I think he called them sensation novels as opposed to mysteries, but they always have some mystery element. And he was, you know, a close friend of Charles Dickens and Dickens said that there were some things that Collins taught him about construction. In those days, they would write their novels in installments for magazines. So, you know, the desire or the need, frankly, to create a cliffhanger at the end of every episode or every chapter seems to have been born then from a capitalist instinct. John: Jeff, I know you studied acting. What inspired the move into playwriting?Jeffrey: I don't think I was a very good actor. I was the kind of actor who always played older, middle aged or older characters in college and high school, like Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler, those kind of people. My dream back in those days was to play Dr. Dysart in Equus and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. So, I mean, that was my target. And then I moved to New York, and I auditioned for things and casting directors would say, “Well, you know, we actually do have 50 year old actors in New York and we don't need to put white gunk in their hair or anything like that. So, why don't you play your own age, 22 or 23?” And I was not very good at playing 22 or 23. But I'd always done some writing, and a friend of mine, Graham Slayton, who was out at the Playwrights Center here, and we'd gone to college together. He encouraged me to write a play, you know, write one act, and then write a full length. So, I always say this, I think most people go into the theater to be an actor, you know, probably 98%, and then bit by bit, we, you know, we peel off. We either leave the profession completely or we become directors, designers, writers, what have you. So, I don't think it's unnatural what I did. It's very rare to be like a Tom Stoppard who never wanted to act. It's a lot more normal to find the Harold Pinter who, you know, acted a lot in regional theaters in England before he wrote The Caretaker.Jim: Fascinating. Can we talk about Columbo?Jeffrey: Oh, yes, please. Jim: This is where I am so tickled pink for this conversation, because I was a huge and am a huge Peter Falk Columbo fan. I went back and watched the episode Ashes To Ashes, with Patrick McGowan that you created. Tell us how that came about. Jeffrey: I too was a huge fan of Columbo in the 70s. I remember for most of its run, it was on Sunday nights. It was part of that murder mystery wheel with things like Hec Ramsey and McCloud, right? But Columbo was the best of those, obviously. Everything, from the structure—the inverted mystery—to thw guest star of the week. Sometimes it was somebody very big and exciting, like Donald Pleasence or Ruth Gordon, but often it was slightly TV stars on the skids.John: Jack Cassidy, Jim: I was just going to say Jack Cassidy.Jeffrey: But at any rate, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I remembered in high school, a friend and I doing a parody of Columbo where he played Columbo and I played the murderer of the week. And so many years later, when they rebooted the show in the nineties, my father died and I spent a lot of time at the funeral home with the funeral director. And having nothing to say to the funeral director one day, I said, “Have you got the good stories?”And he told me all these great stories about, you know, bodies that weren't really in the casket and what you can't cremate, et cetera. So, I suddenly had this idea of a Hollywood funeral director to the stars. And, via my agent, I knew Dan Luria, the actor. He's a close friend or was a close friend of Peter's. And so, he was able to take this one-page idea and show it to Peter. And then, one day, I get a phone call and it's, “Uh, hello Jeff, this is Peter Falk calling. I want to talk to you about your idea.” And they flew me out there. It was great fun, because Falk really ran the show. He was the executive producer at that point. He always kind of ran the show. I think he only wrote one episode, the one with Faye Dunaway, but he liked the idea.I spent a lot of time with him, I'd go to his house where he would do his drawings back in the studio and all that. But what he said he liked about it was he liked a new setting, they always liked a murderer and a setting that was special, with clues that are connected to, say, the murderer's profession. So, the Donald Pleasant one about the wine connoisseur and all the clues are about wine. Or the Dick Van Dyke one, where he's a photographer and most of the clues are about photography. So, he really liked that. And he said, “You gotta have that first clue and you gotta have the pop at the end.”So, and we worked on the treatment and then I wrote the screenplay. And then he asked McGoohan if he would do it, and McGoohan said, “Well, if I can direct it too.” And, you know, I've adored McGoohan from, you know, Secret Agent and The Prisoner. I mean, I'd say The Prisoner is like one of my favorite television shows ever. So, the idea that the two of them were going to work together on that script was just, you know, it was incredible. John: Were you able to be there during production at all? Jeffrey: No, I went out there about four times to write, because it took like a year or so. It was a kind of laborious process with ABC and all that, but I didn't go out during the shooting.Occasionally, this was, you know, the days of faxes, I'd get a phone call: “Can you redo something here?” And then I'd fax it out. So, I never met McGoohan. I would only fax with him. But they built this whole Hollywood crematorium thing on the set. And Falk was saying at one point, “I'm getting pushback from Universal that we've got to do all this stuff. We've got to build everything.” And I was saying, “Well, you know, 60 percent of the script takes place there. If you're going to try to find a funeral home like it, you're going to have all that hassle.” And eventually they made the point that, yeah, to build this is going to cost less than searching around Hollywood for the right crematorium, And it had a great cast, you know, it had Richard Libertini and Sally Kellerman, and Rue McClanahan was our murder victim.Jim: I'll tell you every scene that Peter Falk and Mr. McGoohan had together. They looked to me as an actor, like they were having a blast being on together. Jeffrey: They really loved each other. They first met when McGoohan did that episode, By Dawn's Early Light, where he played the head of the military school. It's a terrific episode. It was a great performance. And although their acting styles are completely different, You know, Falk much more, you know, fifties, methody, shambolic. And McGoohan very, you know, his voice cracking, you know, and very affected and brittle. But they really loved each other and they liked to throw each other curveballs.There are things in the, in the show that are ad libs that they throw. There's one bit, I think it's hilarious. It's when Columbo tells the murderer that basically knows he did it, but he doesn't have a way to nail him. And, McGoohan is saying, “So then I suppose you have no case, do you?” And Falk says, “Ah, no, sir, I don't.” And he walks right off camera, you know, like down a hallway. And McGoohan stares off and says, “Have you gone?” And none of that was scripted. Peter just walks off set. And if you watch the episode, they had to dub in McGoohan saying, “Have you gone,” because the crew was laughing at the fact that Peter just strolled away. So McGoohan adlibs that and then they had to cover it later to make sure the sound wasn't screwed up. Jim: Fantastic. John: Kudos to you for that script, because every piece is there. Every clue is there. Everything pays off. It's just it is so tight, and it has that pop at the end that he wanted. It's really an excellent, excellent mystery.Jim: And a terrific closing line. Terrific closing line. Jeffrey: Yeah, that I did right. That was not an ad lib. Jim: It's a fantastic moment. And he, Peter Falk, looks just almost right at the camera and delivers that line as if it's, Hey, check this line out. It was great. Enjoyed every minute of it. Can we, um, can I ask some questions about Sherlock Holmes now?Jeffrey: Oh, yes. Jim: So, I enjoyed immensely Holmes and Watson that I saw a couple summers ago at Park Square. I was completely riveted and had no, absolutely no idea how it was going to pay off or who was who or what. And when it became clear, it was so much fun for me as an audience member. So I know that you have done a number of Holmes adaptations.There's Larry Millet, a St. Paul writer here and I know you adapted him, but as far as I can tell this one, pillar to post was all you. This wasn't an adaptation. You created this out of whole cloth. Am I right on that? Jeffrey: Yes. The, the idea came from doing the Larry Millet one, actually, because Steve Hendrickson was playing Holmes. And on opening night—the day of opening night—he had an aortic aneurysm, which they had to repair. And so, he wasn't able to do the show. And Peter Moore, the director, he went in and played Holmes for a couple of performances. And then I played Holmes for like three performances until Steve could get back. But in the interim, we've sat around saying, “All right, who can we get to play the role for like a week?” And we thought about all of the usual suspects, by which I mean, tall, ascetic looking actors. And everybody was booked, everybody was busy. Nobody could do it. So that's why Peter did it, and then I did it.But it struck me in thinking about casting Holmes, that there are a bunch of actors that you would say, you are a Holmes type. You are Sherlock Holmes. And it suddenly struck me, okay, back in the day, if Holmes were real, if he died—if he'd gone over to the falls of Reichenbach—people probably showed up and say, “Well, I'm Sherlock Holmes.”So, I thought, well, let's take that idea of casting Holmes to its logical conclusion: That a couple of people would come forward and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes,” and then we'd wrap it together into another mystery. And we're sitting around—Bob Davis was playing Watson. And I said, “So, maybe, they're all in a hospital and Watson has to come to figure out which is which. And Bob said, “Oh, of course, Watson's gonna know which one is Holmes.”And that's what immediately gave me the idea for the twist at the end, why Watson wouldn't know which one was Holmes. So, I'm very grateful whenever an idea comes quickly like that, but it depends on Steve getting sick usually. Jim: Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. If it's ever staged again anywhere, I will go. There was so much lovely about that show, just in terms of it being a mystery. And I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I don't want to give too much away in case people are seeing this at some point, but when it starts to be revealed—when Pierce's character starts talking about the reviews that he got in, in the West End—I I almost wet myself with laughter. It was so perfectly delivered and well written. I had just a great time at the theater that night. Jeffrey: It's one of those things where, well, you know how it is. You get an idea for something, and you pray to God that nobody else has done it. And I couldn't think of anybody having done this bit. I mean, some people have joked and said, it's kind of To Tell the Truth, isn't it? Because you have three people who come on and say, “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” “I'm Sherlock Holmes.” Now surely somebody has done this before, but Nobody had. Jim: Well, it's wonderful. John: It's all in the timing. So, what is the, what's the hardest part about adapting Holmes to this stage?Jeffrey: Well, I suppose from a purist point of view‑by which I mean people like the Baker Street Irregulars and other organizations like that, the Norwegian Explorers here in Minnesota‑is can you fit your own‑they always call them pastiches, even if they're not comic‑can you fit your own Holmes pastiche into the canon?People spend a lot of time working out exactly where Holmes and Watson were on any given day between 1878 and 1930. So, one of the nice things about Holmes and Watson was, okay, so we're going to make it take place during the three-year interregnum when Holmes is pretending to be dead. And it works if you fit Holmes and Watson in between The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House, it works. And that's hard to do. I would say, I mean, I really love Larry Millett's book and all that, but I'm sure it doesn't fit, so to speak. But that's up to you to care. If you're not a purist, you can fiddle around any old way you like. But I think it's kind of great to, to, to have the, the BSI types, the Baker Street Irregular types say, “Yes, this clicked into place.”Jim: So that's the most difficult thing. What's the easiest part?Jeffrey: Well, I think it's frankly the language, the dialogue. Somebody pointed out that Holmes is the most dramatically depicted character in history. More than Robin Hood, more than Jesus Christ. There are more actor versions of Holmes than any other fictional character.We've been surrounded by Holmes speak. Either if we've read the books or seen the movies or seen any of the plays for over 140 years. Right. So, in a way, if you're like me, you kind of absorb that language by osmosis. So, for some reason, it's very easy for me to click into the way I think Holmes talks. That very cerebral, very fast, sometimes complicated syntax. That I find probably the easiest part. Working out the plots, you want them to be Holmesian. You don't want them to be plots from, you know, don't want the case to be solved in a way that Sam Spade would, or Philip Marlowe would. And that takes a little bit of work. But for whatever reason, it's the actor in you, it's saying, all right, if you have to ad lib or improv your way of Sherlock Holmes this afternoon, you know, you'd be able to do it, right? I mean, he really has permeated our culture, no matter who the actor is.Jim: Speaking of great actors that have played Sherlock Holmes, you adapted a movie that Ian McKellen played, and I just watched it recently in preparation for this interview.Having not seen it before, I was riveted by it. His performance is terrific and heartbreaking at the same time. Can we talk about that? How did you come to that project? And just give us everything.Jeffrey: Well, it's based on a book called A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen, and it's about a very old Sherlock Holmes in Surrey, tending to his bees, as people in Holmesland know that he retired to do. And it involves a couple of cases, one in Japan and one about 20 years earlier in his life that he's trying to remember. And it also has to do with his relationship with his housekeeper and the housekeeper's son. The book was given to me by Anne Carey, the producer, and I worked on it probably off and on for about five years.A lot of time was spent talking about casting, because you had to have somebody play very old. I remember I went to meet with Ralph Fiennes once because we thought, well, Ralph Fiennes could play him at his own age,‑then probably his forties‑and with makeup in the nineties.And Ralph said‑Ralph was in another film that I'd done‑and he said, “Oh, I don't wear all that makeup. That's just far too much.” And I said, “Well, you did in Harry Potter and The English Patient, you kind of looked like a melted candle.” And he said, “Yes, and I don't want to do that again.” So, we always had a very short list of actors, probably like six actors in the whole world And McKellen was one of them and we waited for him to become available And yeah, he was terrific. I'll tell you one funny story: One day, he had a lot of prosthetics, not a lot, but enough. He wanted to build up his cheekbones and his nose a bit. He wanted a bit, he thought his own nose was a bit too potatoish. So, he wanted a more Roman nose. So, he was taking a nap one day between takes. And they brought him in, said, “Ian, it's time for you to do the, this scene,” and he'd been sleeping, I guess, on one side, and his fake cheek and his nose had moved up his face. But he hadn't looked in the mirror, and he didn't know. So he came on and said, “Very well, I'm all ready to go.” And it was like Quasimodo.It's like 5:52 and they're supposed to stop shooting at six. And there was a mad panic of, Fix Ian's face! Get that cheekbone back where it's supposed to be! Knock that nose into place! A six o'clock, we go into overtime!” But it was very funny that he hadn't noticed it. You kind of think you'd feel if your own nose or cheekbone had been crushed, but of course it was a makeup. So, he didn't feel anything. Jim: This is just the, uh, the actor fan boy in me. I'm an enormous fan of his work straight across the board. Did you have much interaction with him and what kind of fella is he just in general?Jeffrey: He's a hoot. Bill Condon, the director, said, “Ian is kind of methody. So, when you see him on set, he'll be very decorous, you know, he'll be kind of like Sherlock Holmes.” And it was true, he goes, “Oh, Jeffrey Hatcher, it's very good to meet you.” And he was kind of slow talking, all that. Ian was like 72 then, so he wasn't that old. But then when it was all over, they were doing all those--remember those ice Dumps, where people dump a tub of ice on you? You have these challenges? A the end of shooting, they had this challenge, and Ian comes out in short shorts, and a bunch of ballet dancers surrounds him. And he's like, “Alright, everyone, let's do the ice challenge.” And, he turned into this bright dancer. He's kind of a gay poster boy, you know, ever since he was one of the most famous coming out of the last 20 some years. So, you know, he was suddenly bright and splashy and, you know, all that old stuff dropped away. He has all of his headgear at his house and his townhouse. He had a party for us at the end of shooting. And so, there's a Gandalf's weird hat and there's Magneto's helmet, you know, along with top hats and things like that. And they're all kind of lined up there. And then people in the crew would say, can I take a picture of you as Gandalf? “Well, why, of course,” and he does all that stuff. So no, he's wonderful. Jim: You do a very good impression as well. That was great. Now, how did you come to the project, The Good Liar, which again, I watched in preparation for this and was mesmerized by the whole thing, especially the mystery part of it, the ending, it was brilliant.How did you come to that project?Jeffrey: Well, again, it was a book and Warner Brothers had the rights to it. And because Bill and I had worked on Mr. Holmes--Bill Condon--Bill was attached to direct. And so I went in to talk about how to adapt it.This is kind of odd. It's again based in McKellen. In the meeting room at Warner Brothers, there was a life size version of Ian as Gandalf done in Legos. So, it was always, it'll be Ian McKellen and somebody in The Good Liar. Ian as the con man. And that one kind of moved very quickly, because something changed in Bill Condon's schedule. Then they asked Helen Mirren, and she said yes very quickly.And it's a very interesting book, but it had to be condensed rather a lot. There's a lot of flashbacks and going back and forth in time. And we all decided that the main story had to be about this one con that had a weird connection to the past. So, a lot of that kind of adaptation work is deciding what not to include, so you can't really be completely faithful to a book that way. But I do take the point with certain books. When my son was young, he'd go to a Harry Potter movie, and he'd get all pissed off. Pissed off because he'd say Dobby the Elf did a lot more in the book.But if it's a book that's not quite so well-known—The Good Liar isn't a terribly well-known book, nor was A Slight Trick of the Mind--you're able to have a lot more room to play. Jim: It's a very twisty story. Now that you're talking about the book, I'll probably have to go get the book and read it just for comparison. But what I saw on the screen, how did you keep it--because it was very clear at the end--it hits you like a freight train when it all sort of unravels and you start seeing all of these things. How did you keep that so clear for an audience? Because I'll admit, I'm not a huge mystery guy, and I'm not the brightest human, and yet I was able to follow that story completely.Jeffrey: Well, again, I think it's mostly about cutting things, I'm sure. And there are various versions of the script where there are a lot of other details. There's probably too much of one thing or another. And then of course, you know, you get in the editing room and you lose a couple of scenes too. These kinds of things are very tricky. I'm not sure that we were entirely successful in doing it, because you say, which is more important, surprise or suspense? Hitchcock used to have that line about, suspense is knowing there's a bomb under the table. And you watch the characters gather at the table. As opposed to simply having a bomb blow up and you didn't know about it.So, we often went back and forth about Should we reveal that the Helen Mirren character knows that Ian's character is doing something bad? Or do we try to keep it a secret until the end? But do you risk the audience getting ahead of you? I don't mind if the audience is slightly ahead. You know, it's that feeling you get in the theater where there's a reveal and you hear a couple of people say, “Oh, I knew it and they guessed it may be a minute before. But you don't want to get to the point where the audience is, you know, 20 minutes or a half an hour ahead of you.Jim: I certainly was not, I was not in any way. It unfolded perfectly for me in terms of it being a mystery and how it paid off. And Helen Mirren was brilliant. In fact, for a long time during it, I thought they were dueling con men, the way it was set up in the beginning where they were both entering their information and altering facts about themselves.I thought, “Oh, well, they're both con men and, and now we're going to see who is the better con man in the end.” And so. when it paid off. In a way different sort of way, it was terrific for me. Absolutely. Jeffrey: Well, and I thank you. But in a way, they were both con men. Jim: Yes, yes. But she wasn't a professional con man.Jeffrey: She wasn't just out to steal the money from him. She was out for something else. She was out for vengeance. Jim: Yes. Very good. Very, if you haven't seen it, The Good Liar folks, don't wait. I got it on Amazon prime and so can you.Jeffrey: I watched them do a scene, I was over there for about five days during the shooting.And watching the two of them work together was just unbelievable. The textures, the tones, the little lifts of the eyebrow, the shading on one word versus another. Just wonderful, wonderful stuff. Jim: Yeah. I will say I am a huge Marvel Cinematic Universe fan along with my son. We came to those together and I'm a big fan of that sort of movie. So I was delighted by this, because it was such a taut story. And I was involved in every second of what was going on and couldn't quite tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and how is this going to work and who's working with who?And it was great. And in my head, I was comparing my love for that sort of big blow it up with rayguns story to this very cerebral, internal. And I loved it, I guess is what I'm saying. And, I am, I think, as close to middle America as you're going to find in terms of a moviegoer. And I thought it was just dynamite. Jeffrey: It was very successful during the pandemic--so many things were when people were streaming--but it was weirdly successful when it hit Amazon or Netflix or whatever it was. And, I think you don't have to be British to understand two elderly people trying to find a relationship. And then it turns out that they both have reasons to hate and kill each other. But nonetheless, there is still a relationship there. So, I pictured a lot of lonely people watching The Good Liar and saying, “Yeah, I'd hang out with Ian McKellen, even if he did steal all my money.” John: Well, speaking of movies, I am occasionally handed notes here while we're live on the air from my wife. And she wants you to just say something about the adaptation you did of your play, Stage Beauty, and what that process was like and how, how that process went.Jeffrey: That was terrific because, primarily Richard Eyre--the director who used to run the National Theater and all that--because he's a theater man and the play's about theater. I love working with Bill Condon and I've loved working with Lassa Hallstrom and other people, but Richard was the first person to direct a film of any of my stuff. And he would call me up and say, “Well, we're thinking of offering it to Claire Danes.” or we're thinking…And usually you just hear later, Oh, somebody else got this role. But the relationship was more like a theater director and a playwright. I was there on set for rehearsals and all that.Which I haven't in the others. No, it was a wonderful experience, but I think primarily because the, the culture of theater saturated the process of making it and the process of rehearsing it and—again--his level of respect. It's different in Hollywood, everybody's very polite, they know they can fire you and you know, they can fire you and they're going to have somebody else write the dialogue if you're not going to do it, or if you don't do it well enough. In the theater, we just don't do that. It's a different world, a different culture, different kind of contracts too. But Richard really made that wonderful. And again, the cast that he put together: Billy Crudup and Claire and Rupert Everett and Edward Fox and Richard Griffiths. I remember one day when I was about to fly home, I told Richard Griffiths what a fan Evan-- my son, Evan--was of him in the Harry Potter movie. And he made his wife drive an hour to come to Shepperton with a photograph of him as Mr. Dursley that he could autograph for my son. John: Well, speaking of stage and adaptations, before we go into our lightning round here, you did two recent adaptations of existing thrillers--not necessarily mysteries, but thrillers--one of which Hitchcock made into a movie, which are Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark. And I'm just wondering what was that process for you? Why changes need to be made? And what kind of changes did you make?Jeffrey: Well, in both cases, I think you could argue that no, changes don't need to be made. They're wildly successful plays by Frederick Knott, and they've been successful for, you know, alternately 70 or 60 years.But in both cases, I got a call from a director or an artistic director saying, “We'd like to do it, but we'd like to change this or that.” And I'm a huge fan of Frederick Knott. He put things together beautifully. The intricacies of Dial M for Murder, you don't want to screw around with. And there are things in Wait Until Dark having to do just with the way he describes the set, you don't want to change anything or else the rather famous ending won't work. But in both cases, the women are probably not the most well drawn characters that he ever came up with. And Wait Until Dark, oddly, they're in a Greenwich Village apartment, but it always feels like they're really in Westchester or in Terre Haute, Indiana. It doesn't feel like you're in Greenwich Village in the 60s, especially not in the movie version with Audrey Hepburn. So, the director, Matt Shackman, said, why don't we throw it back into the 40s and see if we can have fun with that. And so it played out: The whole war and noir setting allowed me to play around with who the main character was. And I know this is a cliche to say, well, you know, can we find more agency for female characters in old plays or old films? But in a sense, it's true, because if you're going to ask an actress to play blind for two hours a night for a couple of months, it can't just be, I'm a blind victim. And I got lucky and killed the guy. You've got a somewhat better dialogue and maybe some other twists and turns. nSo that's what we did with Wait Until Dark. And then at The Old Globe, Barry Edelstein said, “well, you did Wait Until Dark. What about Dial? And I said, “Well, I don't think we can update it, because nothing will work. You know, the phones, the keys. And he said, “No, I'll keep it, keep it in the fifties. But what else could you What else could you do with the lover?”And he suggested--so I credit Barry on this--why don't you turn the lover played by Robert Cummings in the movie into a woman and make it a lesbian relationship? And that really opened all sorts of doors. It made the relationship scarier, something that you really want to keep a secret, 1953. And I was luckily able to find a couple of other plot twists that didn't interfere with any of Knott's original plot.So, in both cases, I think it's like you go into a watch. And the watch works great, but you want the watch to have a different appearance and a different feel when you put it on and tick a little differently. John: We've kept you for a way long time. So, let's do this as a speed round. And I know that these questions are the sorts that will change from day to day for some people, but I thought each of us could talk about our favorite mysteries in four different mediums. So, Jeff, your favorite mystery novel”Jeffrey: And Then There Were None. That's an easy one for me. John: That is. Jim, do you have one?Jim: Yeah, yeah, I don't read a lot of mysteries. I really enjoyed a Stephen King book called Mr. Mercedes, which was a cat and mouse game, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. That's only top of mind because I finished it recently.John: That counts. Jim: Does it? John: Yeah. That'll count. Jim: You're going to find that I am so middle America in my answers. John: That's okay. Mine is--I'm going to cheat a little bit and do a short story--which the original Don't Look Now that Daphne du Murier wrote, because as a mystery, it ties itself up. Like I said earlier, I like stuff that ties up right at the end. And it literally is in the last two or three sentences of that short story where everything falls into place. Jeff, your favorite mystery play? I can be one of yours if you want. Jeffrey: It's a battle between Sleuth or Dial M for Murder. Maybe Sleuth because I always wanted to be in it, but it's probably Dial M. But it's also followed up very quickly by Death Trap, which is a great comedy-mystery-thriller. It's kind of a post-modern, Meta play, but it's a play about the play you're watching. John: Excellent choices. My choice is Sleuth. You did have a chance to be in Sleuth because when I directed it, you're the first person I asked. But your schedule wouldn't let you do it. But you would have been a fantastic Andrew Wyke. I'm sorry our timing didn't work on that. Jeffrey: And you got a terrific Andrew in Julian Bailey, but if you wanted to do it again, I'm available. John: Jim, you hear that? Jim: I did hear that. Yes, I did hear that. John: Jim, do you have a favorite mystery play?Jim: You know, it's gonna sound like I'm sucking up, but I don't see a lot of mystery plays. There was a version of Gaslight that I saw with Jim Stoll as the lead. And he was terrific.But I so thoroughly enjoyed Holmes and Watson and would love the opportunity to see that a second time. I saw it so late in the run and it was so sold out that there was no coming back at that point to see it again. But I would love to see it a second time and think to myself, well, now that you know what you know, is it all there? Because my belief is it is all there. John: Yeah. Okay. Jeff, your favorite TV mystery?Jeffrey: Oh, Columbo. That's easy. Columbo.John: I'm gonna go with Poker Face, just because the pace on Poker Face is so much faster than Columbo, even though it's clearly based on Columbo. Jim, a favorite TV mystery?Jim: The Rockford Files, hands down. John: Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Last question all around. Jeff, your favorite mystery movie? Jeffrey: Laura. Jim: Ah, good one. John: I'm going to go with The Last of Sheila. If you haven't seen The Last of Sheila, it's a terrific mystery directed by Herbert Ross, written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. Fun little Stephen Sondheim trivia. The character of Andrew Wyke and his house were based on Stephen Sondheim. Jeffrey: Sondheim's townhouse has been for sale recently. I don't know if somebody bought it, but for a cool seven point something million, you're going to get it. John: All right. Let's maybe pool our money. Jim, your favorite mystery movie.Jim: I'm walking into the lion's den here with this one. Jeffrey, I hope this is okay, but I really enjoyed the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies. And I revisit the second one in that series on a fairly regular basis, The Game of Shadows. I thought I enjoyed that a lot. Your thoughts on those movies quickly? Jeffrey: My only feeling about those is that I felt they were trying a little too hard not to do some of the traditional stuff. I got it, you know, like no deer stalker, that kind of thing. But I thought it was just trying a tad too hard to be You know, everybody's very good at Kung Fu, that kind of thing.Jim: Yes. And it's Sherlock Holmes as a superhero, which, uh, appeals to me. Jeffrey: I know the producer of those, and I know Guy Ritchie a little bit. And, I know they're still trying to get out a third one. Jim: Well, I hope they do. I really hope they do. Cause I enjoyed that version of Sherlock Holmes quite a bit. I thought it was funny and all of the clues were there and it paid off in the end as a mystery, but fun all along the road.Jeffrey: And the main thing they got right was the Holmes and Watson relationship, which, you know, as anybody will tell you, you can get a lot of things wrong, but get that right and you're more than two thirds there.
National red wine day. Entertainment from 1999. 1st steam locomotive build, Midway Islands become US teritory, Martin Luter King gave "I have a dream speech". Todays birthdays - Elizabeth Seton, Roxie Roker, David Soul, Daniel Stern, Rick Rossovich, Emma Samms, Shania Twain, Jason Priestly, Jack Black, Leann Rimes. Ruth Gordon died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Red Red Wine - UB40How can you mend a broken heart - Bee GeesGood Lovin" - Tammy WynetteI have a dream - Marin Luther KingBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/The Jeffersons TV theme songDon't give up on us - David SoulWhose bed have your boots been under - Shania TwainWonderboy - Tenacious DBlue Leann RimesExit - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook and cooolmedia.com
This week on the blog, a podcast interview with Ari Kahan, who assembled and oversees the most complete compendium of on-line information on Brian DePalma's classic rock music horror classic, Phantom of the Paradise. LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/The Swan Archives: https://www.swanarchives.org/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastINTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTDo you remember when you first saw it? What were the circumstances? How old are you? What was your reaction? ARI KAHAN: Sure. I first saw it when I was 12. It was double billed with Young Frankenstein. This would have been in early 1975, and my mom took me to see Young Frankenstein, which was okay. It was pretty good, but I was really enamored with the second feature on the bill, which was Phantom. And I've been in love with it ever since.Did you know anything about it before you went in? ARI KAHAN: Nothing. Nothing at all. So, what has been the attraction for you for that film, low those many, many years ago?ARI KAHAN: It may have just hit me at an impressionable time. But I think that, you know, being 12 and being kind of a nerd, I probably identified with Winslow and his fervent belief that if the world could only hear from his heart, and especially if all the girls in school could only hear from his heart, then they would love him and not the jerk that they always went out with.So, there's probably some of that. There was certainly, I do remember very, very clearly that the direction in some respect stood out to me. I had seen a lot of movies when I was 12, and I remember even today, thinking when I was 12, that there was a moment where the Phantom is rising up into the rafters in the foreground as Beef is descending in the background. And I looked at that and I thought, boy, that's complex. Anybody else would have done a shot of the Phantom starting to climb a rope, and then cut away, and then come back to him up in the rafters. This guy is trying to do things that are more interesting than he needs to and I thought that was really fun.After seeing Phantom I went back and saw Sisters.Which was no mean feat back then. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I know and in fact, I had to see Sisters by buying a 16-millimeter print of it. That was the only way I could. I had fixed up a couple of—this is probably a year or two later—I had fixed up a couple of 16-millimeter projectors that my school was discarding, so I could even do changeovers in my bedroom. And I got a copy of Sisters just so I could see it because it was unseeable otherwise. Well, kudos to you for finding Sisters, because it took me a long time. I imagine it showed up at the Film society at the university or something finally. So getting to see William Findlay in a markedly different role and also seeing, oh, okay, this is a director who likes split screen. Although I probably would have gotten that from Carrie, because I'm sure I saw Carrie first. He's accused of doing stuff like that just for showing off. In fact, I think it's always for a cinematic or emotional reason. And Sisters is the best example of that. The suspense of getting rid of that dead body before they get to the door is enhanced by the fact that you're watching two things happen at the same time. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, I think in Sisters and Phantom both, it works really well. And I think, and I think even DePalma would agree that it didn't work as well in Carrie. Because the split screen calls for intellectualizing on the part of the audience. And it takes you out emotionally and wasn't really working that well. I understand why he did it, because it'd be boring to like, cut to Carrie's face, cut the things happening, cut back to Carrie's face, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think both he and Paul Hirsch, the editor, feel it would have been better off to do something else.But anyway, after Phantom, you know, every new De Palma film to come out—all the way through Domino—has been a much anticipated event for me, you know, and I'm in the theater on the first day. And there have been a couple of disappointments along the way, but by and large, it's been awesome. Since you've seen Phantom so many times, were there any surprises that popped up over the years as you've watched again and again and things that you hadn't seen or hadn't realized?ARI KAHAN: It took me a really long time to notice that there was a frame or two of Jessica Harper being one of the backup singers on stage when Beef's performing life at last and only because I think it was unavoidable to use those frames. I think somebody figured out in editing that it didn't make any sense for her to be one of those backup singers and then in a white dress. So that took a while. It also was only within the past couple of years that I realized that a lot of the sort of classical, but silent movie sounding music that I had always thought was composed by the guy who did the incidental music was actually Beethoven. Oh, really?ARI KAHAN: Because Beethoven's not credited. So that little like a little violin thing that happens …ARI KAHAN: Or when Swan is going into phoenix's dressing room. When Winslow is escaping from prison. Well, it's Beethoven piano trios for the most part. So, you don't need to get permission from the Beethoven estate on that…ARI KAHAN: Well, I think that they would have had to pay the orchestra involved and I can easily imagine them omitting credit to avoid doing that. Hoping nobody would notice. And nobody did, obviously.Until you've just brought it up. ARI KAHAN: Yeah, sorry. That's okay. It's not, it's not our problem. One of the things that, that I found the Swan Archives to be so helpful on—well, lots of things, uh, when I discovered it years ago and I've returned to it as new things have popped up or I've dug a little deeper—was your explanation of the Swan Song debacle. As a frequent viewer of the movie. I wasn't noticing truncated shots. That I didn't notice until you showed us those shots. But obviously the mattes, particularly at the press conference, are really, really terrible. If I'm noticing them, they're bad. Can you just give us a brief history of why they had to do that? ARI KAHAN: Sure. So, it goes to Beef electrocution. In the early seventies, there was a band called Stone the Crows, whose guitarist was a guy named Les Harvey and Peter Grant, who would later manage Led Zeppelin, managed Stone The Crows. And Les Harvey was—in a freak accident—electrocuted on stage. I think his guitar was badly grounded or something along those lines, in 1971 or 72.And when Peter Grant learned that there was a film coming out in which a rock guitarist is electrocuted on stage, he assumed, that it was making fun of what had happened to his friend, Les Harvey. And by that time he was managing Led Zeppelin. I should say in De Palma's defense that Beef's electrocution shows up in early drafts of the script that were written before Les Harvey suffered his accident. So, this was life imitating art, imitating life, you know, rather than the other way around. De Palma clearly did not take that plot and probably didn't even know about what had happened to Les Harvey. But anyway, by the time Peter Grant got wind of this, Phantom had already been shot, but not yet released. This was in the summer of 1974. And by sheer absolute sheer coincidence, Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin had just gotten a trademark on Swan Song for their record label. And the first record to come out on the Swan Song label was Bad Company's first record, and that was in somewhere around June of 1974. So that's when their trademark was perfected, and Phantom was scheduled to be released a few months later at the end of October.And Peter Grant went to 20th Century Fox, which had just purchased Phantom from Ed Pressman and DePalma. You know, it's important for the story to know that Phantom was independently produced. It wasn't financed by Fox. Pressman and DePalma raised money to make this movie in the hopes that they would then sell it to some distributor for more than they had paid to make it.And it turned out that there was a, quite a bidding war among several studios, which Fox won. And Fox paid more for Phantom than anyone had ever paid for an independent film to that point in history. They had very high expectations for it. So that sale had just closed, but Pressman and De Palma and everyone else hadn't been paid yet by Fox.And of course, they had run out of money and owed everybody money, everyone who had worked on the film. So, they were in kind of a desperate situation. And Peter Grant went to Fox and said, “I'll sue you and prevent release of this film.” And the only thing that Fox could do was to tell Pressman and De Palma, you need to fix this.And the only way they could fix it was by removing all of the references to Swan Song, so that Peter Grant wouldn't have grounds for his claim, because he obviously can't claim you can't have a film with an electrocution of a rock star. Really, all he had was the Swan Song thing. And so that was done very, very hastily. They were still working on it in early October, even though the film was scheduled for release at the end of October. And so, basically, Fox signed a deal with Led Zeppelin saying we won't release the film with any of this Swan Song prominently shown. Which is a very stupid resolution really because Peter Grant in the end did not prevent distribution of a film with an electrocution of a rock star, which was his original concern.All he really managed to do was mangle somebody else's. And so the end result is that the film that we've all been watching for the last 50 years, there's a little bit cut out of it. There's some lovely crane shots that you missed because what the DePalma had done through the film was start on this Swan Song logo or the Swan name and then move away from it to whatever was going on. So that you have the impression that Swan was everywhere. And so that whole thing was lost and, you know, as you and everybody else noticed, some of it's very noticeable, particularly the bird at the airport. Which is too bad.I understand that you have a secret print of the film in which all those logos had been restored. In addition to fixing the crane shots and having shots that no longer have the terrible matte on them, is there anything else in that version that we wouldn't have seen before? ARI KAHAN: It's not a secret print, really. It was just reconstructing the film the way that it was intended to be, using footage that had been assumed to have been destroyed decades ago, but which I eventually found and digitized. And then with the help of a couple of other folks, put the movie back together. The most challenging part: there's a couple of challenging parts to that.You know, it's not just a matter of sticking things in. The footage was without sound. And so, if you're making a scene a few seconds longer, for example, and there's music underlying that scene, what are you going to do? Are you going to start the music a little bit later? Are you going to end it a little bit earlier?Are you going to play it a little bit slower so that it fills up these extra seconds? Are you going to loop it? Are you going to find some other piece of music that was probably intended to go there in the first place? So there's that problem. And then the podium scene, which is the worst offender—at the airport—the original, they actually worked on the negative to put the dead bird on. And so, the original footage for that podium didn't exist. But we knew what the podium was supposed to look like, because there's a photo that was used for the German promotional campaign—created obviously months before the film is released—and that still shows the podium the way that it's supposed to look. So, I got my friend, Steve Rosenbaum, who is a special effects supervisor. He won Oscars for Forrest Gump and Avatar, I think. And he's about to win an Emmy—I will bet you a box of donuts—he's about to win an Emmy for his work on Masters of the Air. I gave him this image and the footage that's shown, you know, in the theater normally, and he reconstructed the podium for me. So that's how we did the podium. But the other thing that was that if you go see the film now in the theater projected from DCP, the DCP master—which is the same master that we've used for the current blu rays—it was done by a company called Reliance Media Works in Burbank. And, I don't know what 17 year olds they had working on it, but they did the coloring and grading the way it's fashionable to do when they did it, you know, 10 years ago, which was a lot of orange, teal and the blacks are crushed so that anything that's really dark gray or dark brown, just black, so that the colors pop more, but you lose a lot of the detail, and to my eye it looks terrible.And so, I used an earlier master of the film that looks more like it looked in the 70s as the base for the reconstruction. And then color matched the replacement footage to that. It sounds beautiful. ARI KAHAN: It's gorgeous. The only other thing that I suppose we could have done, but didn't, is there's originally footage of Winslow's face coming out of the record press looking all mangled. And I have that footage, but I didn't put it back in because that footage that DePalma deemed not appropriate to the tone of the film that he was making. And so, since the object of this game was to restore the film to the way that he would have wanted it, I let that out. I think that was a wise choice. You know, I talked to Pete Gelderblom, who did the Raising Cainreconstruction. And it's a beautiful piece of work that he did. He was more constrained than you, because he was only allowed to use the footage which was there, and he just had to rearrange it. He repeats one shot, but he got it as close to the original shooting script as he could. I don't think Paul Hirsch was particularly thrilled with it, but De Palma was and has referred it as his director's cut. Did De Palma see your version and did he like it? ARI KAHAN: Yeah. I did a cast and crew sort of screening in Los Angeles and Paul Williams came to that and Archie Hahn and so on. Ed Pressman, the producer. And there was tremendous enthusiasm, because none of them had ever seen the film that they made the way that it was supposed to be.And I sent a copy to Paul Hirsch and I'm not sure whether DePalma heard about it from Pressman or from Paul Hirsch, but he asked to see it. And I sent it to him and I got a nice note from him saying, you know, that it was great, good job, la la la, it's great to see the film the way that it was, you know, the original cut.So. Yes, he is. Definitely. He's seen it. He's happy with it. And Ed Pressman, in particular, wanted to have that version released on home video or in some other way. And we went to Fox. This is before Disney. It was still Fox. And Fox said, well, you know, we could consider doing that under two conditions. First, Mr.DePalma approves. Well, yes, check box checked there. He does. And second, we made this deal with Led Zeppelin back in 1974, where we agreed not to do this. And if you can get them to waive their rights under that agreement, then yeah, sure. So, I worked with Ed Pressman and we put together a bunch of testimonials from people that we thought Led Zeppelin might respect, like Brett Easton Ellis and I think Guillermo del Toro and others, and sent a package off to Led Zeppelin through their lawyers. And God bless them, they got back to us in less than a week and said no. At least they didn't leave you hanging. ARI KAHAN: At least they didn't leave us hanging. That's right. So, your archive is amazing and is hour's worth of fun to go through it. ARI KAHAN: It's a rabbit warren. Yeah, I wish it were a little better organized.How did it get started? Well first, when did you start collecting memorabilia and then how did that grow into the archive? ARI KAHAN: I started collecting memorabilia right after I saw the film when I was 12. And that was obviously pre internet and pre-eBay. And it was a lot harder to get stuff. Bt I would frequent science fiction conventions and horror conventions and comic book shops.And there were a whole bunch of people who knew me as that kid who's always looking for Phantomstuff. And I was the kind of nerd who kept a log with the what everybody else was also looking for. And so, if I were at some convention and the guy who was collecting Olivia Newton, John's stuff, if I saw something interesting—not that there is anything interesting about it, but anyway—if I saw something interesting about Olivia Newton, John, I would run to the pay phone and call him and say, Hey, you want this? And I would pick it up for him. And so, there was a lot of returning of favorites where there would be people who were going to cons that I wasn't going to. And if they saw Phantom stuff, they would pick it up for me and that kind of thing. And so, you know, that became the way to get the posters from every country in the world that it was released in and the lobby cards and everything else and it started filling up, taking up more and more space over time and grew into, you know, trailers and magazines and everything else.And then when the site came out in around 2006, I put up the first version of the site. People who either had worked on the film or had something interesting would get in touch with me and say, “You know, I have this. I see you have a good home for it. Do you want it?” And of course, you know, eBay was a way to fill in some gap.Is there, within what your current collection holds, is there a prized possession that, you know, if there was a fire and you only grabbed one of those pieces, what would you take with you? ARI KAHAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, in every dorm room and every apartment and every house I've ever lived in has hung John Alvin's art from the one sheet, and it's the same art that's on the cover of the soundtrack album. I just thought that was beautiful piece of art. And I think it was his second movie poster he painted. The first one would be for Blazing Saddles. And then he did Young Frankenstein, and if you look at the Young Frankenstein poster and the Phantom poster, you can see that there's a lot of stylistic similarities there.But he went on to do, you know, E. T. and, you know, 130 odd other posters. And at some point, he and I started corresponding and he finally said, “You know, I have something that I think you should have. Give me your mailing address.” And a few days later what showed up was his original painting, the comp painting for that poster, which he had had all this time. And so that would be the prize possession for sure. Well, that qualifies, I think. Is there a Holy Grail out there that you're still looking for? ARI KAHAN: The original art for the Corbin poster. Which is the “he's been maimed and framed, beaten, robbed, and mutilated.” That artwork would be a Holy Grail. As well as, well, the Phantom's original helmet. Now, it turns out there's a couple of them, at least. And one of them Guillermo del Toro now has. He just bought the Phantom's costume after it failed to sell at auction at Bonham's. And the other helmet the Pressmanfamily has, so those would be a grail. There's a lot of things that I'm sure no longer exist that would be the grail, like, you know, the Phantom's contract.Any number of props would be fun, but there's not very many known to still exist. I think Peter Elbling still has—or I think his son has it right now—the microphone that he used with a knife on it. And Garrett Graham still has his guitar strap, Beef's guitar strap. And I think he may still have the plunger.But not the antler belt? ARI KAHAN: No, not as far as I know. That'd be tough to ship. It would be. Yes. Dangerous to keep around the house. You could bump into it. On the site you kindly show all kinds of different memorabilia that you have or that exists around the world. And you also have a section called Inexplicable Crap. Is there one piece in there that just stands out for you as what in the world were they thinking? ARI KAHAN: Maybe the Death Records pillow. Like I can understand why they did. They made prototypes that never went out for sale. Why anybody would want it, you know, a dead bird, probably somebody wants a dead bird pillow, but the market would be limited.When the DVD for Phantom Palooza 2 came out, I bought that and then heard you talking somewhere about getting Jessica Harper to sing Old Souls, which is on the DVD. We just see the very end of her singing it. I'm guessing there were some technical problems or something with that. ARI KAHAN: It wasn't technical problems. It was the Paul Williams rider, which required that the show not be recorded. And I think that midway through Jessica singing, somebody might have said, or actually I think that's an audience--t might be an audience shot thing that we have. There's probably lots and lots of cell phone video out there of the show, but nobody related to who worked on Phantom Palooza—and I was one of the people who worked on Phantom Palooza—is going to be out there distributing anything that we agreed with Paul we would not even shoot. But, but yes, Jessica was absolutely a highlight of the show there. I was surprised that she went full force on the end of that song. ARI KAHAN: Well, there were no plans for her to perform. And the morning of the rehearsal, I said, “Hey, Jessica, you want to go down and watch Paul rehearse?” And I took her over to the auditorium and I was hoping that, you know, seeing that and being a performer at heart, she might be inspired to maybe, you know, participate. And she decided she would do Old Souls with Paul's band. And then she went back to the hotel and practiced the song, I think, all day in her hotel room and then, you know, knocked it out of the park that night. That's how I remember it. And then she came off stage and said, you know, now I know how Mick Jagger feels. It's a pretty stunning debut for her in that movie, to come from essentially nowhere—although she'd done things before that. And then the run that she had in the seventies, pretty unequaled when it comes to being the, um…ARI KAHAN: The queen of cult. Yeah. The queen of cult. And just the range, from Suspiria to My Favorite Year. You don't get a much broader range than that. ARI KAHAN: Pennies From Heaven. Yes, just phenomenal. Even just the wheat speech in Love and Death is worth the price of admission alone. ARI KAHAN: She played, uh, Gary Shandling's wife on The Gary Shandling show in the last season, named Phoebe, of all things. And in, I'm pretty sure it was the last episode of that show, she's held hostage by a phantom who lives under the set, who threatens to sabotage Gary's show, unless she will sing his song. And she ends up singing his song, which turns out to be YMCA. Wearing a dress that is very, very reminiscent of the one she wore to sing Old Souls in. And they even make a Pennies From Heaven joke. So, it's very inside baseball, I should say. Speaking of actors from that, I've always been blown away by William Finley's performance in the movie. I think it was Paul Williams who said something like, you know, he spends three quarters of the movie acting with one eye and metal teeth, and that's all he's got. And it's just flawless and so heartbreaking.And I'm just sorry we didn't get to see him in more movies. He's delightful in The Fury in a very small part. He's all over the early films. And I got the sense since I read somewhere that you did a eulogy for him, that you must have developed a friendship over the years. ARI KAHAN: Yeah. And, before we get to that, you say heartbreaking, right?And I think that that's one of the things about Phantom that was so ballsy. It's obviously a spoof of many things, but while being a spoof, it tries to get you to care about the characters. If, if you were not, you know, devastated at the end when Winslow dies just before Phoenix recognizes that it was him all along, you know, the film has failed.Whereas in other spoofs, you know, Rocky Horror doesn't ask you to care whether Brad and Janet will get back together after their experience or anything like that. Nobody asked you to care about the characters at all. And I think it's a huge risk that DePalma took in making a film like this: while simultaneously being a parody and a satire and a spoof and everything else, he wants you to care about the outcome. As far as Finley, I got to know Bill a little bit towards the end of his life after meeting him at Phantom Palooza. I went to New York and spent a little time with him and now I know his wife Susan pretty well and his son Dash a little bit. And when he died, Susan asked If I would put together some kind of a video montage for the funeral, which wasn't that—it's a celebration of life was what she was calling it. And I did that. And every time I had it finished—and, you know, I had like a day and a half to do this. And then I had to take the red eye to New York from California for this, for this event—every time I had it finished, she would send me a few more pictures and I'd have to, you know, redo it.And then she asked, could you set it to music? Could it be set to Faust? You know, okay. You know, you don't say no to a widow, right? And I was working at the time too. So, when I finally flew to New York, I was completely exhausted. And I got to the chapel I guess a couple of hours before the ceremony was supposed to start, so that we could make sure that this thing would play on their equipment and so on.And I'm taking a nap on one of the pews and Susan showed up with, you know, programs under her arm. And I picked up a program and saw that, right after Garrett Graham and Jessica Harper was supposed to speak, I'm supposed to speak. But I this was the first I was hearing about it. And so, I spent the first, unfortunately, the first part of the ceremony—where I really wanted to be paying full attention—kind of scrambling together what I was going to say.I have no idea what I said at this point. I hope it did Bill justice and didn't offend anybody, but I couldn't tell you now a single word of what I ended up saying there. And it's in front of, you know, various of the icons of my childhood, right, are in that chapel. So it's kind of like all of the nightmares of going to school and realizing that there's a test in the subject that you never took, and that you're not wearing pants, and all your ex-girlfriends are there laughing at you. Because I have my own podcast that has to do with my series of books, and like your site, I want to make it perpetual. But there's really no way to do that unless I set up a fund so that after I die they keep paying the site to keep running it. Because as soon as that site shuts down, the podcast goes away. And the same thing will happen to the archive. Whoever is hosting it, unless they're paid, it's gonna go away. I'm wondering, do you have a plan in place for all that information? ARI KAHAN: When I go, it goes.Oh, I feel like I set you up for that. Okay. Can I propose an alternate ending to that? ARI KAHAN: Sure. You essentially have a book there. You just have it in web form. You should put that together so that when it is done, when you are done, it can just be put into a book because it already reads like a book.ARI KAHAN: People have suggested that, and I've resisted doing a book because every now and then, some new fact comes to light that shows that something I had in there was wrong. And everything in there—virtually everything—is based on conversations that I've had with participants or material that came out at the time. None of it is taken from someone else's book or anything. So it's all fairly firsthand, but people have fallible memory. So, for example, the guy who made the phantom's helmet assured me that he had made only one. And it's crazy, because every production wants to have multiple copies of any key prop, because if something happens to the prop during shooting, shooting would have to, you know, it's an incredibly expensive problem to stop shooting waiting for another one.But as it turns out, he's, he's wrong. He made more than one. There is more than one. And so, every now and then, I have to correct something on the site. And if I put it out in book form, these books would be wrong. Potentially, something could come out in the future that that would make something with my name on it. Wrong. Imagine a book with a mistake. I can't imagine. ARI KAHAN: Exactly. And I can't abide that. So, it exists in electronic form so that I can edit it and improve it. Well, I would argue that you can do the ebooks, but that's, you know, that's your circus. It's not my circus. But you do raise an interesting question about misconceptions. I know that one of the biggest misconceptions is that it ran in Winnipeg forever and it didn't. I can—as someone who lived here in Minneapolis when Harold and Maude ran at the Westgate Theater for two and a half years—I can assure you it ran there for two and a half years, because I was there those two and a half years. So that was real. Is there another misconception out there about the movie that you just can't—like a whack a mole—get rid of? ARI KAHAN: So many. In fact, um, I think on my FAQ page, I list some of them. Is there an egregious one that just gets under your skin? ARI KAHAN: Yeah. The idea that it was only popular in Winnipeg and a couple other places is just completely wrong. It was big in Japan. It eventually became a big in Los Angeles. It never did anything in New York. Where it was actually biggest was not Winnipeg, it was El Salvador, where the songs hit number one on the radio. More than once. And it was brought back and revived many times. I get more mail from El Salvador than from anybody else.As we wrap up here, my favorite scene in the movie is the closing credits. I just love the music. I love what Paul Hirsch did with the assembly of that. And for years, I was living under the mistaken impression that in the credits, when it said Montage by Paul Hirsch, that that's what I was looking at was that montage. That's a montage. Then I was disabused of that in an interview with him—which I clarified with him. It was very nice to get back to me on Facebook when I said, “Am I correct in my understanding that the montage in the middle of the movie, the writing montage, you never saw that until the film was done? You had to put all the timing of that together, the animation of the writing, the placement of Phoenix's face on this part of the screen, and the Phantom and that, all the dissolves, all that timing?” And he said, “Yes it was a one-shot thing.” And I think for that he does deserve a special “Montage by Paul Hirsch,” because even today, with all the stuff we have, that would still be a challenging thing to do. And then not to be able to see the end result.But even with that, I just still love the closing credits. It's a combination of music, it allows me to revisit all my favorite scenes in the movie and a lot of my favorite shots. Do you have a favorite scene? ARI KAHAN: Well, I actually like those closing credits too, because most of the shots in those closing credits aren't actually in the film. Most of them are outtakes. And so, for example, in those closing credits, you have Swan splashing in the tub. There's Archie Han twirling around like this. And most of them, alternate takes. And they're clearly things that Paul Hirsch thought were charming and wanted to include that he couldn't put in the film.I suspect that you've held 35-millimeter film in your hands and cut shot A to shot B. I've only done that in 16mm. To keep a piece of film that short, hanging on a hook somewhere going, “I know I'm going to want to use that later.” Then finding that. I don't think people today understand what skill level was involved in, you know, that sort of thing, or the TIE Fighters in Star Wars that he did, or all that connection of little pieces, and tracking that and knowing that that's going to go there and that's going to go. It's so much easier today. And you had to make firmer decisions then earlier in the process than you do now, right? And fixing things was much more arduous. ARI KAHAN: You know, I think if they had to fix the Swan Song stuff out of Phantom and they were doing it using digital technology today, obviously, it'd be much faster and so on, but, uh, doing it on film. And having to send each change into the processing house, and then getting it back a few days later, and, uh, you know, it's a lot of work. It'd be horrible.But favorite scenes: The Goodbye Eddie number just remains a favorite. Do you know why? It's not fancy DePalma. It's a wide shot, two shot, a single. ARI KAHAN: That's right. It's the most conventionally shot thing in the film, but Archie Han is just so great in it. His delivery boy in My Favorite Year—when he does the punching—he just does the exact right thing at the right time. And I wish there'd been bigger movies with more Archie Han in them than what we got. ARI KAHAN: So does Archie. Okay, last question. If you take Phantom of the Paradise out of the mix, what would you say is your favorite De Palma movie?ARI KAHAN: Well, I'm not sure that Phantom of the Paradise is my favorite De Palma movie. It is a sentimental childhood favorite. But I go back and forth between Carlito's Way, Casualties of War, Femme Fatale, Carrie. And Raising Cain.I think that Femme Fatale is probably the one that came closest to his intention.It's the one that I think of as being, like, the most successfully realized, and I love it for that reason. Carlito's Way is just, by, I think, any objective standard, probably his best work. Then I love Blow Out. I'm not on the Blow Out train as much as everybody else. Maybe because it just, it goes so dark.ARI KAHAN: That's what I love about it is the devastating ending. I really love Peet Gelderboom's version of Raising Cain. Given all that, and given that you're 12 years old in 1974, 75, somewhere in there, and you're you're a movie freak at this point, which is a really good time in film history from that era. Is there a favorite? ARI KAHAN: So, I was really lucky that I was when I was 15 or 16, I was working at a theater called the UC theater in Berkeley, which was a repertory house that showed a different double bill every night. And any night that I wasn't working, I was there seeing movies.So, I saw lots and lots and lots of movies. And despite all that and all the weird stuff I saw, my favorites are probably the same things that every 70s kid's favorites were: Star Wars, Harold and Maude, The Godfather. I loved Harold and Maude so much that I bought an old hearse at one point.Okay, you win. ARI KAHAN: And I didn't keep it for long. It got like, I don't know how many gallons per mile. It was just not economical to have as a car, but it was fun for a while. I was very lucky when they hit the two-year mark here in Minneapolis, and I was a junior in high school, maybe. I happen to know the son of the local movie critic for the paper, and the critic knew that I was a big fan of Harold and Maude. And so he took me along on his press junkets. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort, got to chat with him. I got to hang out with Ruth Gordon for the day. ARI KAHAN: The only one I can propose to top that would be when I was in high school, I was writing for the school paper. Actually, I had stopped going to high school. I was the entertainment editor for the school paper, and I had stopped going to high school. I dropped out, but I kept submitting articles to the paper. And at some point, the newspaper staff changed my title from Entertainment Editor to Foreign Correspondent. And on the strength of that—when Tim Curry's first record, Read My Lips, came out, and he was coming to town to sign autographs at Tower Records—myself and a writer from the Berkeley Bar, which was a newspaper back then, had lunch with him around the corner from Tower Records just before he went off to do his autographing. And I was a huge Tim Curry fan. And I had to try to keep that under wraps and, you know, not ask any Rocky Horror related questions. And that was my claim to fame until all of the Phantom nonsense started.
Horror films do not typically win Academy Awards but Ruth Gordon won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the Upper West Side NYC witch-next-door in the terrifying thriller that defined lead actress Mia Farrow's career, Rosemary's Baby. Based on the best-selling novel by Ira Levin and cementing the legendary status of director Roman Polanski, this movie was a huge box office hit and generated endless articles debating its feminist message, in one of the most chilling gaslighting stories of all time. Since its release we've seen the horror genre grow increasingly bloody, gruesome and explicit. So while Rosemary's Baby focuses on the psychological body-horror of something evil growing inside of an expectant mother, does it still have the same impact on today's audience that it had over half a century ago. Find out what if our panel of young film-lovers got those same chills from this horror classic. An ElectraCast Production. • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary's_Baby_(film) • IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/ (#9 Top Horror Film of All Time) • The Guardian: The 25 best horror films of all time (#2) • American Film Institute 100 Most Thrilling American Films (#9) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After Kris takes a bubble bath with a toaster, writer and publisher Rod Lott joins Allan in the Shamequarters to discuss Hal Ashby's HAROLD & MAUDE. Follow us on Twitter @CinemaShame, Bsky @cinemashame.bsky.social, and on Instagram @CinemaShamePodcast.
Going deep into the archives for a not-previously-reduxed discussion with my wife on a matter important to any generation: What's funny, what's not, and why? We are Gen X-ers who think Quick Change is brilliant and funny. My mother-in-law thought Where's Poppa was brilliant and funny. You'll have to make up your own mind on which of us was right. As mentioned, it's one of the first recordings I did, and it's ... rough. But understandable. Quick Change, with Bill Murray, Geena Davis, Randy Quaid, and Jason Robards, is one of my favorite comedy films. Where's Poppa, with George Segal and Ruth Gordon, was one of my mother-in-law's favorite comedy films. My wife and I discuss possibilities for why what we find funny and what our parents find funny is often so different. Silent and Gen X on Lifecourse http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/def/silent-gen.html http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/def/13th-gen.html Quick Change and Where's Poppa? on IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100449/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066563/ Carl Reiner - born 1922 (G.I.) Drafted in October 1942, served in the Pacific theater (despite initially learning to be a French interpreter), ending up in Special Services (i.e. entertainment). Mel Brooks - born 1926 (Silent) Brooks served in World War II in the European theater starting in 1944, which is very unusual for Silent generation members. (One reason he seems like he should be G.I.) Quick Change - Floras para los muertos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGj9QkslyE0 Quick Change - Joust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQNI7q6ABnc Where's Poppa - We didn't discuss this scene, but it fits in a lot of ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzT27N2F45Q If you search for Campfire Scene - with or without “Blazing Saddles” - this comes up early: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPIP9KXdmO0 Which I'd noticed before, in this post about another offensive western http://crisis.generationalize.com/2014/06/runaway.html What my wife is doing instead of podcasts: Gift of Music Foundation http://agiftofmusic.org You can still find me on Twitter: @generationalize and blogging at http://crisis.generationalize.com, but also on bluesky and sometimes on Post, also as @generationalize
En este episodio conversamos sobre la película del año 1968, “Rosemary's Baby” (El Bebé de Rosemary) del director Roman Polanski, protagonizada por Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon y Sidney Blackmer.
There are lots of famous people named Gordon, people like chef Gordon Ramsay, actress Ruth Gordon, musician Gordon Lightfoot, and even Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner. Joining us are today are two Modernist Gordons, author Alistair Gordon and Chicago preservationist Barbara Gordon. Later, jazz with North Carolina's own Kate McGarry.
This episode we travel back to 1968 to discuss the Roman Polanski psychological horror "Rosemary's Baby" starring Mia Farrow and Ruth Gordon. Newlywed Rosemary has moved to Manhattan and become pregnant, things seem to be going well until she meets the over enthusiastic neighbours. Brace yourself for this classic and remember..."I can't hear you, you're in Dubrovnik!"
Welcome to the Horror Project Podcast. Join hosts Laura and Phil as they review Rosemary's Baby (1968).This week on the pod we are travelling to New York City and moving into an apartment with Mia Farrow and her husband Guy, who begins to experience creepy things happening to her. However, when she gets pregnant she realises that her fears are about to come true.We discuss living with overbearing neighbours. Constantly popping round with drinks and 'chalky' tasting chocolate pudding! Yuk! We also look at Guy and Rosemary's marriage and how their relationship appear's to a modern audience looking back at 60s life. Plus we shall be finding a place on the leaderboard for the movie during our Ranking.We hope you enjoy the show, thanks for listening!Email - Horrorprojectpodcast@hotmail.com X (Formerly Twitter) - @TheHorrorProje1Instagram - horrorprojectpodcastTikTok - @horrorprojectpodcast
Holy Smokes, it's one of my very favourite bands of the 'right now' chatting about one of my very favourite films from the 'back then'. Los Bitchos discuss Rosemary's Baby to play out this big hitter of A Year In Horror where we are exploring the greatest horror movies from 1968.LOS BITCHOS Spotify Instagram
We begin Romance Month with one of the most unconventional romantic films of all time with one hell of a soundtrack: Harold and Maude. Adam's Corners Adam Long joins the episode to talk all about Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, and that soundtrack by Cat Stevens.Written by Colin Higgins as his senior film thesis, it follows the titular Harold and Maude, one obsessed with death, one obsessed with living life, as they fall in love. To say its an unconventional relationship may be to understate the genuine charm and magic of the film and its leads. For more Kulturecast episodes and podcasts guaranteed to be your new favorite audio obsession, check out Weirding Way Media at weirdingwaymedia.com.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-kulturecast--2883470/support.
En el noveno episodio de Manderley —en el que contamos con la participación de Marta Medina— hablamos del hito del terror psicológico de 1968, LA SEMILLA DEL DIABLO de Roman Polanski, que adapta la novela de Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) publicada el año anterior. En el primer bloque exploramos la génesis del proyecto y su adaptación, así como su contexto dentro de la filmografía del cineasta polaco y la leyenda negra asociada a la película. Después abordamos su relación con el terror y sus vínculos con otros títulos del género, además del concepto del «gótico ginecológico». A continuación damos un repaso a los principales miembros de su reparto, entre los que destacan Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes y Ruth Gordon. Para terminar, en la última parte del programa, analizamos temática y discursivamente diversos aspectos del filme relacionados con la religión, el materialismo, la presencia de la violación vinculada a la vida y la obra del director y las implicaciones de la representación de la maternidad traicionada en la que se fundamente su premisa ocultista.
You can watch the VIDEO version of this episode here: RETRO TV HORROR MOVIE REVIEW: Don't Go To Sleep (1982) - YouTube On Terror On The Tube, Joel, Peter, and Allyson pick, at random, a made-for-TV horror/suspense movie that aired sometime during the decades of the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. In this episode we talk about Don't Go To Sleep from 1982. Originally released on ABC on Friday, December 10th, 1982, Don't Go To Sleep stars Dennis Weaver, Valerie Harper, Robin Ignico, Oliver Robins, and Ruth Gordon. ................................................................................................................................................ Synopsis: A young girl begins seeing the ghost of her sister who died in an accident a year earlier. ................................................................................................................................................ ................................................................................................................................................ Special thanks to Ross Bugden for the use of his music for the theme of this podcast under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You can find the track titled Something Wicked here.
Do you struggle with how to handle postpartum visitors and setting boundaries? Setting boundaries isn't the easiest thing to do for some either. Personally, I was never good at this. After stumbling upon an article written by our guest, I instantly knew more folks needed to think about this ahead of time! We'll touch upon when to have visitors meet your newborn, vaccinations, how to communicate to folks that you are or aren't ready for guests, is the new parent the host (NO!), and even ways to politely ask folks to leave after overstaying their welcome. To dive deep into this conversation on Yoga| Birth| Babies, we have Ruth Gordon-Martin. She's the founder of CODDLE, an online community that supports and empowers new and expectant parents. Ruth reminds us not only to prepare for postpartum, but having this conversation with your team ahead of time is a part of the preparation too! I've heard many stories from our PYC community of those who didn't set clear boundaries and were put in awkward positions to navigate. Ruth has a lot of wisdom to offer as a parent and postpartum doula who's helped to facilitate necessary boundaries for families. If you're a new or expectant parent, I trust you'll receive so much from this week's episode. I'm excited to share this episode with you. Get the most out of each episode by checking out the show notes with links, resources and other related podcasts at: prenatalyogacenter.com Don't forget to grab your FREE guide, 5 Simple Solutions to the Most Common Pregnancy Pains HERE If you love what you've been listening to, please leave a rating and review! Yoga| Birth|Babies (Apple) or on Spotify! To connect with Deb and the PYC Community: Instagram & Facebook: @prenatalyogacenter Youtube: Prenatal Yoga Center Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Not Ready for Prime Time Podcast: The Early Years of SNL
Its Saturday Night! And nothing says "hip" and/or "edgy" in 1977 more than Ruth Gordon. And, if that wasn't enough, she brought her good friend Chuck Berry with her (all the way from the 1950s!). Ageism aside, this turns out to be a rather enjoyable episode with many familiar faces (including Mr. Bill & Mr. Mike) and even some new ones! To top things off, special guest Ricky Jay is in the studio to entertain everyone with some great slight of hand work.If we didn't have enough to say about this episode we brought in Jordan Runtagh from the amazing podcast "Too Much Information" to help give us all...well, too much information. We dive deep on Ruth, Chuck, and even get a few Beatles references (he couldn't help himself).Subscribe today! And follow us on social media on X (Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook.
Nick And Simon talk about the Jazz Novel Blow up a storm published in 1959 [ a seminal year in Jazz history]This is a first novel by the director, producer and dramatist, Garson Kanin, whose short stories have appeared in Esquire, Vogue and the Atlantic Monthly. Written in the first person and told in flashback this is a dramatist's recollections of his early days in jazz -- during the depression and the close of prohibition. While in Chicago, on tour with his actress wife, the narrator receives a phone call from a forgotten Lee Woodruff which brings back a flood of impressions and memories of their small combo shaped and led by Woody. Through a haze of half remembered incidents he recalls the growth of their trio into a sextet, the men who gave the group impetus and the women who were tenuously involved with the band. Woodruff, now an emotional wreck, unable to play, in and out of hospitals, insists upon unburdening himself to the narrator and attempts to explain the eventual failure of their group.Kanin's best-remembered for his screenplays, however, which were written in collaboration with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, whom he married in 1942. Together, they wrote many screenplays, including six that were directed by George Cukor. These included the Spencer Tracy - Katharine Hepburn film comedies Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), as well as A Double Life (1947), starring Ronald Colman.This is our website This is our InstagramThis is our Facebook group
We're re-examining and redeeming the genre of films lovingly (and somewhat controversially) called "Hagsploitation" or "Psycho Biddy" films, including 1964's Strait-Jacket (with Joan Crawford) and 1969's What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (starring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon). Mike and Eric also discuss the qualities these movies have in common with another shocking flick, 1965's Who Killed Teddy Bear? (with Sal Mineo).
National candy corn day. Entertainment from 1998. Time clock invented, Soviets detonate largest nuclear bomb ever, Bosphorous Bridge opened in Turkey. Todays birthdays - John Adams, Ruth Gordon, Grace Slick, Henry Winkler, Harry Hamlin, t. Graham Brown, Kevin Pollack, Gavin Rossdale. Steve Allen died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Candy corn song = JensensThe first night - MonicaHoney I'm home - Shania TwainBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/Somebody to love - Jefferson AirplaneHell and High water - T. Graham BrownComedown - BushExit - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/ https://coolcasts.cooolmedia.com/
Alex finds himself in a moral quandary as he balances his new friendship with an eccentric fare (played by the incomparable Ruth Gordon in an Emmy-winning performance) and her controlling behavior. HP and Father Malone examine this odd couple as they discuss season 1 episode 14, "Sugar Mama".Father Malone: FatherMalone.comHP: hpmusicplace.bandcamp.com
Hold onto your seat belts, because we're reviewing the cult classic that defies all conventions. Harold and Maude falls at number 46 on The 50 Best Rom-Coms list and first-time guest, Jenna Hodges Struble, joins us to explore the eccentric and endearing title characters, played brilliantly by Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. From their hilarious antics to their deep emotional connection, we'll unpack it all. We'll take you on a rollercoaster of emotions as we discuss the film's dark humor, offbeat charm and its poignant message about embracing life and love in all its unconventional forms. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you might just start craving a banjo serenade in your own life.
Sean and Steve make an appearance on The Novice Elitists podcast to discuss the classic Columbo episode "Try and Catch Me", starring Peter Falk and Ruth Gordon.
Today on Bloodhaus, it's Josh's favorite movie of all time: Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. From wiki: “Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 American psychological horror film written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name. The film stars Mia Farrow as a young (soon pregnant) wife living in Manhattan who comes to suspect that her elderly neighbors are members of a Satanic cult and are grooming her in order to use her baby for their rituals. The film's supporting cast includes John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, Angela Dorian, and, in his feature film debut, Charles Grodin. “ But first: which animal is the most punk? Also, Drusilla saw Asteroid City and they discuss Wes Anderson, who created the millennial aesthetic. (The infamous pickle cut comes up, too.) Plus! We are so, so excited about Vidiots! (https://vidiotsfoundation.org/) Josh was at Portland Horror Fest and it won an award! He also saw a feature called T Blockers by a trans teen girl and was blown away. He also watched 1981's Dark Night of the Scarecrow and it really scared him. On Rosemary's Baby, they also discuss the following: also, The Tenant, Cul De Sac, Chinatown, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Bonnie & Clyde, Robert Evans, William Castle, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Documentary Now!, Mia Farrow's taste in men, Ruth Gordon, gaslighting, Buñuel, Straw Dogs, rape revenge fantasies, A Clockwork Orange, folk horror, Every Which Way But Loose, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mikey & Nicky, Cruising, and more! NEXT WEEK: The Lodge (2019) Website: http://www.bloodhauspod.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/BloodhausPodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/Email: bloodhauspod@gmail.comDrusilla's art: https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/Drusilla's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydesister/ Drusilla's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/drew_phillips/ Joshua's website: https://www.joshuaconkel.com/Joshua's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshuaConkelJoshua's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/Joshua's Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/joshuaconkel
As the Takeaway comes to an end, we get one last set of movie prescriptions from Kristen Meinzer, a culture critic and host of the podcast "By The Book" and Rafer Guzman, a film critic for Newsday, and they bring us movie prescriptions about embracing change and fresh starts. Together Kristen and Rafer are the co-hosts of the podcast, Movie Therapy. KRISTEN'S PICKS: Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar, 2021 When middle aged best friends Barb and Star lose their jobs, they decide that a restorative vacation in Vista Del Mar is just what they need to help them ease into the next chapter. But things don't go quite as planned - with mysterious men, villains, and more throwing monkey wrenches into their getaway. Fortunately their friendship, optimism, and sense of humor keeps them strong and ready for anything that's thrown their way. The movie stars Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. The lesson: Things in life don't always go as planned. Sometimes we lose a job, and then things get worse from there. But leaning on our friends, and laughing at the absurdity of life can make it all more manageable. Sister Act, 1992 Whoopie Goldberg stars as a nightclub singer who's forced to go into witness protection in a convent after witnessing a mob hit. While there, she struggles with the regimented life of the nuns. But thanks to her outstanding musical talents and charisma, she's able to turn the convent choir into a soulful chorus complete with a Motown repertoire. The lesson: Sometimes we're thrown into situations that feel wildly out of our purview. But that doesn't mean we can't handle them. In fact, those situations combined with our unique skills mean that we might excel in new ways. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, 2010 This documentary follows one year in the life of Joan Rivers. It was filmed when Rivers was 75, and coming out of what she considered a down year...after 40+ years of ups and downs as an actor, writer, and comedian. Along the way, she reveals some of her darker moments, biggest struggles, and incredible work ethic...along with lots of her biting wit. The lesson: Even a legend like Joan Rivers has had lots of down years...times that could have broken her...but she chose to keep working, evolving, and trying new things. I'll also add that this film has a special place in my heart because when she was on her press tour for it, Rafer and I got to interview her...and she ended up being our first celebrity interview for the Movie Date podcast. RAFER'S PICKS: Harold and Maude, 1971 This is kind of the original cult movie, from 1971 -- before Rocky Horror, before Pink Flamingos, there was Harold and Maude. It's the story of Harold, played by Bud Cort, and he's a very rich, very mobrid young man who spends most of his time staging fake suicides to upset his mother. He hangs himself, cuts his throat, immolates himself and so on. For fun he attends random funerals, and that's where he meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude, played by the great Ruth Gordon. And Maude is a rebel, even kind of an outlaw -- she's kind of a hippie, she poses nude for artists and for some reason she love to steal cars. She just loves to live. And these two start a friendship and despite their vast age difference, they fall in love. There was a time when you could see this movie at an art-house theater just about once a week, and I pretty much did, but I think it got oversaturated and it's really fallen off the radar these days. But I think it's worth revisiting. I like this movie because it seems morbid and perverse, and the humor is very dark. But as it goes on, it gets more and more tender and sincere, and these two characters start to feel very real. And in the end, Maude changes Harold, she gives him a new way of looking at life, she gives him a new spirit and she gives him a new way of expressing himself. She teaches him to play the banjo (and like Steve Martin always said, it's impossible to be in a bad mood when you play a banjo.) And the final scene in the movie, which involves that banjo, it's a really hopeful, happy scene that tell us Harold is about to embark on a whole new life. Castaway, 2000 Probably most adult humans have seen Castaway but just to refresh you: Tom Hanks plays a guy named Chuck Noland. Happy, likeable guy, works for Fed Ex, he has a girlfriend, played by Helen Hunt, they're both deeply in love. He's really got it all. And then he's in a plane crash. He wakes up on a tiny island, somewhere in Pacific Ocean, surrounded by junk and debris from the plane, completely alone. And he's stuck there for FOUR YEARS. And of course, the most famous thing about this film is probably Wilson, a soccer ball that becomes Chuck's best friend as Chuck starts to go a little crazy. The scenes that always get me are in the second half of the film. Spoiler alert, Chuck gets rescued. And now he's facing a world that moved on without him. His girlfriend is married! She thought he was dead, so she he had to move on. (What a scene that is -- I can't believe Hunt didn't get an Oscar nomination for that.) Anyway, in these scenes, Chuck actually starts to miss his life on the island. He misses sleeping on the hard ground, he misses the act of trying to spear a fish for food. And that really struck me as true. The thing about people is, they can adapt to anything. And once they do, they love it. But then things change and you have to adapt again. So I guess the lesson of this film is that no matter where you are, you aren't at the end, you're always in the middle. You're always between the past and the future. But if you want to keep living, you've got to get to that next future. Inside Out, 2015 I loved this movie so much back in 2015 that I just fell all over myself praising it. I'm pretty sure it was number one on my top ten that year. It's the story of two emotions, one named Joy, with the voice of Amy Poehler, and one named Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith. And this is your classic Pixar buddy comedy, with two opposing personalities, and it all takes place in these imaginary realms of your brain and your personality, like the Train of Thought and Friendship Island and Dream Productions, which is basically a movie studio in the mind. And it does a great job of bringing abstract concepts to life in these really, clever funny ways. But the reason I picked this movie is because Joy and Sadness live in the brain of a pre-teen girl named Riley. Her family has just moved from Minnesota to San Francisco when her father gets a new job. It's a huge change, Riley doesn't want to leave her old life, and she's afraid of what her new life might be. So what we're seeing as Joy and Sadness go on their adventure, is what's happening in the mind of Riley as she grapples with change. And I really like how this movie shows that Sadness is important -- you have to feel it, you have to express it, and you can't just bury it or shut it off, if you're going to move forward on to the next thing.
As the Takeaway comes to an end, we get one last set of movie prescriptions from Kristen Meinzer, a culture critic and host of the podcast "By The Book" and Rafer Guzman, a film critic for Newsday, and they bring us movie prescriptions about embracing change and fresh starts. Together Kristen and Rafer are the co-hosts of the podcast, Movie Therapy. KRISTEN'S PICKS: Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar, 2021 When middle aged best friends Barb and Star lose their jobs, they decide that a restorative vacation in Vista Del Mar is just what they need to help them ease into the next chapter. But things don't go quite as planned - with mysterious men, villains, and more throwing monkey wrenches into their getaway. Fortunately their friendship, optimism, and sense of humor keeps them strong and ready for anything that's thrown their way. The movie stars Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. The lesson: Things in life don't always go as planned. Sometimes we lose a job, and then things get worse from there. But leaning on our friends, and laughing at the absurdity of life can make it all more manageable. Sister Act, 1992 Whoopie Goldberg stars as a nightclub singer who's forced to go into witness protection in a convent after witnessing a mob hit. While there, she struggles with the regimented life of the nuns. But thanks to her outstanding musical talents and charisma, she's able to turn the convent choir into a soulful chorus complete with a Motown repertoire. The lesson: Sometimes we're thrown into situations that feel wildly out of our purview. But that doesn't mean we can't handle them. In fact, those situations combined with our unique skills mean that we might excel in new ways. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, 2010 This documentary follows one year in the life of Joan Rivers. It was filmed when Rivers was 75, and coming out of what she considered a down year...after 40+ years of ups and downs as an actor, writer, and comedian. Along the way, she reveals some of her darker moments, biggest struggles, and incredible work ethic...along with lots of her biting wit. The lesson: Even a legend like Joan Rivers has had lots of down years...times that could have broken her...but she chose to keep working, evolving, and trying new things. I'll also add that this film has a special place in my heart because when she was on her press tour for it, Rafer and I got to interview her...and she ended up being our first celebrity interview for the Movie Date podcast. RAFER'S PICKS: Harold and Maude, 1971 This is kind of the original cult movie, from 1971 -- before Rocky Horror, before Pink Flamingos, there was Harold and Maude. It's the story of Harold, played by Bud Cort, and he's a very rich, very mobrid young man who spends most of his time staging fake suicides to upset his mother. He hangs himself, cuts his throat, immolates himself and so on. For fun he attends random funerals, and that's where he meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude, played by the great Ruth Gordon. And Maude is a rebel, even kind of an outlaw -- she's kind of a hippie, she poses nude for artists and for some reason she love to steal cars. She just loves to live. And these two start a friendship and despite their vast age difference, they fall in love. There was a time when you could see this movie at an art-house theater just about once a week, and I pretty much did, but I think it got oversaturated and it's really fallen off the radar these days. But I think it's worth revisiting. I like this movie because it seems morbid and perverse, and the humor is very dark. But as it goes on, it gets more and more tender and sincere, and these two characters start to feel very real. And in the end, Maude changes Harold, she gives him a new way of looking at life, she gives him a new spirit and she gives him a new way of expressing himself. She teaches him to play the banjo (and like Steve Martin always said, it's impossible to be in a bad mood when you play a banjo.) And the final scene in the movie, which involves that banjo, it's a really hopeful, happy scene that tell us Harold is about to embark on a whole new life. Castaway, 2000 Probably most adult humans have seen Castaway but just to refresh you: Tom Hanks plays a guy named Chuck Noland. Happy, likeable guy, works for Fed Ex, he has a girlfriend, played by Helen Hunt, they're both deeply in love. He's really got it all. And then he's in a plane crash. He wakes up on a tiny island, somewhere in Pacific Ocean, surrounded by junk and debris from the plane, completely alone. And he's stuck there for FOUR YEARS. And of course, the most famous thing about this film is probably Wilson, a soccer ball that becomes Chuck's best friend as Chuck starts to go a little crazy. The scenes that always get me are in the second half of the film. Spoiler alert, Chuck gets rescued. And now he's facing a world that moved on without him. His girlfriend is married! She thought he was dead, so she he had to move on. (What a scene that is -- I can't believe Hunt didn't get an Oscar nomination for that.) Anyway, in these scenes, Chuck actually starts to miss his life on the island. He misses sleeping on the hard ground, he misses the act of trying to spear a fish for food. And that really struck me as true. The thing about people is, they can adapt to anything. And once they do, they love it. But then things change and you have to adapt again. So I guess the lesson of this film is that no matter where you are, you aren't at the end, you're always in the middle. You're always between the past and the future. But if you want to keep living, you've got to get to that next future. Inside Out, 2015 I loved this movie so much back in 2015 that I just fell all over myself praising it. I'm pretty sure it was number one on my top ten that year. It's the story of two emotions, one named Joy, with the voice of Amy Poehler, and one named Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith. And this is your classic Pixar buddy comedy, with two opposing personalities, and it all takes place in these imaginary realms of your brain and your personality, like the Train of Thought and Friendship Island and Dream Productions, which is basically a movie studio in the mind. And it does a great job of bringing abstract concepts to life in these really, clever funny ways. But the reason I picked this movie is because Joy and Sadness live in the brain of a pre-teen girl named Riley. Her family has just moved from Minnesota to San Francisco when her father gets a new job. It's a huge change, Riley doesn't want to leave her old life, and she's afraid of what her new life might be. So what we're seeing as Joy and Sadness go on their adventure, is what's happening in the mind of Riley as she grapples with change. And I really like how this movie shows that Sadness is important -- you have to feel it, you have to express it, and you can't just bury it or shut it off, if you're going to move forward on to the next thing.
Learn about the life, work, struggles, and achievements of Ruth Gordon Schnapp. For show notes and more information check out our website https://www.shebuildspodcast.com/episodes/ruthgordonschnappMentioned in this episode:Gabl Membership
Adams Presidential Center event recap, MBTA update, new downtown building & the future of the Ruth Gordon Amphitheater.
On this week's APE-ril episode, the guys check back in with Philo, Orville and Clyde in the cigarette and bad beer-filled sequel, Any Which Way You Can! How are these fellas bareknuckle boxing in those tight slacks? How great was it back in the day when Truckers outranked Police in this country? And boy, oh boy, will this movie remind you to always check the car seat cushion before you sit down! PLUS: Behold! One of the wildest, most disgusting sex scenes in cinema history! Any Which Way You Can stars Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, William Smith, Harry Guardino, Ruth Gordon, Barry Corbin, Al Ruscio, and the late Buddha the Orangutan as Clyde; directed by Buddy Van Horn. DO NOT miss our WORLDWIDE virtual live show THIS THURSDAY, 4/20, where we're talking Peter Jackson's KING KONG, PLUS, doing a full hour, post-show Q&A after party! Can't make it the night of? No worries! The show AND after party are available for replay for a full week after! San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Brunswick, NJ—tickets are on sale now for our upcoming spring and summer shows! Check out the WHM Merch Store featuring new DILF Den, Grab-Ass & Cancer, SW Crispy Critters, MINGO! & WHAT IF Donna? designs!Advertise on We Hate Movies via Gumball.fmUnlock Exclusive Content!: http://www.patreon.com/wehatemoviesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mayor Koch talks about the teachers contract process, the updates at Pageant Field & The Ruth Gordon Amphitheater, updates with Quincy Center
This week Gary and Iain review and discuss, (1971) by Director, Hal Ashby. Starring, Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon and Vivian Pickles. Merch: https://off-the-shelf-reviews.creator-spring.com For more Off The Shelf Reviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWxkAz-n2-5Nae-IDpxBZQ/join Podcasts: https://offtheshelfreviews.podbean.com/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/@OTSReviews Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OffTheShelfReviews Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OffTheShelfReviews Support us: http://www.patreon.com/offtheshelfreviews Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/offtheshelfreviews Discord: https://discord.gg/Dyw8ctf
Deciding to give comedy a crack with a movie originally intended for Burt Reynolds, this 1978 movie stars Clint Eastwood along with Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, Beverly D'Angelo, Ruth Gordon. This was a favourite of both Chris and Dave's and we'll see how it holds up. If you enjoy the show we have a Patreon, become a supporter. www.patreon.com/thevhsstrikesback Plot Summary: Philo Beddoe (Clint Eastwood) is an easy-going trucker and a great fist-fighter. With two friends, Orville (Geoffrey Lewis), who promotes prize-fights for him, and Clyde (Manis the Orangutan), the orangutan he won on a bet, he roams the San Fernando Valley in search of cold beer, country music, and the occasional punch-up. But he is floored by country and western singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor (Sondra Locke), who gives him the slip when she realizes he's getting too serious. Phil, Clyde, and Orville set off in pursuit, pestered by bikers. thevhsstrikesback@gmail.com https://linktr.ee/vhsstrikesback --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thevhsstrikesback/support
Ahh… the 80's. The days of Salmonella kisses and pizza cutter dreams! No matter how you slice it, levitating iguana's & ghostly apparitions of a Swiss Miss girl were the stuff of our childhood nightmares. Join Keri and Yvette as they marvel over Ruth Gordon's portrayal of a Smokin' Granny. SMOKING as in cigarettes! Jeez, get your minds out of the gutter. Episode 29-the made for TV movie Don't Go to Sleep (1982) is available now for your tender ears. Las Pesadillas Son Gratis!! Don't forget to Subscribe, Rate & Review! We thank you from the bottom of our black little hearts!
Book Vs. Movie: Rosemary's BabyThe Ira Levin Novel Vs. 1968 Classic FilmIt's October, and the Margos are filling the month with scary, spooky films based on creepy books, and few have a more sinister premise than Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin. The story of a 1960s housewife who is married to a struggling actor who will make a deal with the devil himself in order to succeed. Released in 1967, the story is set in NYC, where Guy and Rosemary settle into the Gothic Bramford apartment building with a strange history of murder and witchcraft. The nosy, older neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet, start to meddle in their lives, and soon enough Guy is becoming a successful actor, and Rosemary becomes pregnant. What should be the happiest time in her soon becomes a hellscape of pain, tannis root drinks, creepy sex, and “chocolate mouse.” Is Rosemary carrying the spawn of Satan? The movie stars Mia Farrow, is directed by the deeply problematic Roman Polanski, and is now considered a classic thriller. So between the book & movie, which did we like better?In this ep the Margos discuss:The life and work of Ira Levin & Roman PolanskiHow closely the film resembles the bookThe controversy around the movie The cast: Mia Farrow (Rosemary Woodhouse,) John Cassavetes (Guy Woodhouse,) Ruth Gordon (Minnie Castevetes,) Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevets,) Maurice Evans (Hutch,) Ralph Bellamy (Dr. Saperstein,) Angela Dorian (Terry Gionffrio,) Charles Grodin (Dr. Hill,) and Tony Curtis as Donald Baumgart.)Clips used:Guy Woodhouse is THE WORSTRosemary's Baby (1968 trailer) Morning after baby nightRosemary's pain endsRuth Gordon wins the Academy AwardRosemary meets her sonMia Farrow sings the closing music by Krzysztof Komeda.Book Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page to help support the show! https://www.patreon.com/bookversusmovie Book Vs. Movie podcast https://www.facebook.com/bookversusmovie/Twitter @bookversusmovie www.bookversusmovie.comEmail us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. @BrooklynFitChik www.brooklynfitchick.com brooklynfitchick@gmail.comMargo P. @ShesNachoMama https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine
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