Podcasts about Steel Dawn

The same year where he was having the time of his life keeping people from putting baby in the corner, he was also wandering the wasteland as a not-Mad Max character in "Steel Dawn". The Crew discuss just how much this film rips off from Mad Max and other films and many head scratching moments. It is a spirited conversation you do not want to miss.Make sure to check out Ian's podcast: https://www.kickseat.com

Jess Ray and Andrew chat Game Play: KING BABY!Feedback from Suliore, Lee, Vanessa and Pip-Boy SteveFallout Top 5 from Wasteland Wil: Excuses to the Vault-Tec Sales RepTasty Iguana Bits: Will Shen interview, Fixin' Snakey, Developer Direct, Top 50 All Time Video GamesTerminal Velocity from Fort Defiance, part 1 w/ SulioreLate SHOUTS!Join our Discord:https://discord.gg/cVSN65jJoin in the Roundtable Fun with our Character Generators!Fallout 76: https://tinyurl.com/F76GeneratorFallout 4: https://tinyurl.com/Fallout4GeneratorFallout New Vegas: https://tinyurl.com/NewVegasGeneratorFallout 3: https://tinyurl.com/F3GeneratorDONATE:  https://fightcf.cff.org/site/TR/?fr_id=7889&pg=team&team_id=90760Shop:  optimistic.threadless.com/Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/asapodcastingEmail: thefalloutfeed@gmail.comWeb: http://www.asapodcasting.com/#/the-fallout-feed/Insta: https://www.instagram.com/asapodcastingTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheFalloutFeedFB: facebook.com/groups/askyrimaddictpodcastSupport the show

Wil SHINES in the New Year, bringing games and introducing his "Fallout-Top-5 List" project!Join our Discord:https://discord.gg/cVSN65jJoin in the Roundtable Fun with our Character Generators!Fallout 76: https://tinyurl.com/F76GeneratorFallout 4: https://tinyurl.com/Fallout4GeneratorFallout New Vegas: https://tinyurl.com/NewVegasGeneratorFallout 3: https://tinyurl.com/F3GeneratorDONATE:  https://fightcf.cff.org/site/TR/?fr_id=7889&pg=team&team_id=90760Shop:  optimistic.threadless.com/Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/asapodcastingEmail: thefalloutfeed@gmail.comWeb: http://www.asapodcasting.com/#/the-fallout-feed/Insta: https://www.instagram.com/asapodcastingTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheFalloutFeedFB: facebook.com/groups/askyrimaddictpodcastSupport the show

Community feedback from Suliore, Vanessa, Wil, Lee and Pip-Boy SteveJoin our Discord:https://discord.gg/cVSN65jJoin in the Roundtable Fun with our Character Generators!Fallout 76: https://tinyurl.com/F76GeneratorFallout 4: https://tinyurl.com/Fallout4GeneratorFallout New Vegas: https://tinyurl.com/NewVegasGeneratorFallout 3: https://tinyurl.com/F3GeneratorDONATE:  https://fightcf.cff.org/site/TR/?fr_id=7889&pg=team&team_id=90760Shop:  optimistic.threadless.com/Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/asapodcastingEmail: thefalloutfeed@gmail.comWeb: http://www.asapodcasting.com/#/the-fallout-feed/Insta: https://www.instagram.com/asapodcastingTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheFalloutFeedFB: facebook.com/groups/askyrimaddictpodcastSupport the show

Ray is searching for Boone at the Novac Dino Truck Stop.  Jess and Andrew attempt to behave while the adult has left the room. Roundtable Season 16: Steel Dawn, Quests 6. Property Rights & 7. Supplying DemandJoin our Discord:https://discord.gg/cVSN65jJoin in the Roundtable Fun with our Character Generators!Fallout 76: https://tinyurl.com/F76GeneratorFallout 4: https://tinyurl.com/Fallout4GeneratorFallout New Vegas: https://tinyurl.com/NewVegasGeneratorFallout 3: https://tinyurl.com/F3GeneratorDONATE:  https://fightcf.cff.org/site/TR/?fr_id=7889&pg=team&team_id=90760Shop:  optimistic.threadless.com/Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/asapodcastingEmail: thefalloutfeed@gmail.comWeb: http://www.asapodcasting.com/#/the-fallout-feed/Insta: https://www.instagram.com/asapodcastingTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheFalloutFeedFB: facebook.com/groups/askyrimaddictpodcastSupport the show

Special Guest Dirk Marshall of the VH US podcast joins us as we stand on our heads for two post-apocalyptic westerns featuring Brion James. First up is STEEL DAWN (1987) starring Patrick Swayze in a Shane-influenced search for water. Then we switch gears to STEEL FRONTIER (1995) as mysterious gunslinger Johnny Yuma battles the Death Riders. VH US website: https://www.vh-us.com Marshall's Haute Sauce: https://marshallshautesauce.com

We close out Swayze September with some of his lesser-celebrated roles. First up, pure water becomes scarce after World War III, and only one man can protect the only source of pure water left in STEEL DAWN. Then things get brain achy as Swayze plays a child predator in DONNIE DARKO.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3412630/advertisement

We close out Swayze September with some of his lesser-celebrated roles. First up, pure water becomes scarce after World War III, and only one man can protect the only source of pure water left in STEEL DAWN. Then things get brain achy as Swayze plays a child predator in DONNIE DARKO.

The class had so much fun talking about things that weren't STEEL DAWN that they needed their own episode. Such wide ranging topics as: the false scarcity of the Disney Vault, Lawrence of Arabia puns, and imagining the beauty of Paul W.S. Anderson's Murder on the Orient Express. ⁠INSTAGRAM⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠TIKTOK⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠FACEBOOK⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠TWITTER

It's a mad mad mad max world in the post-apocalyptic western STEEL DAWN (1987). In this dystopian rip-off of the western classic SHANE, a dirty but non-dancing Patrick Swayze saunters out of the wasteland and into the arms of his real life wife, Lisa Niemi. But will a water robber baron, a knife-kneeing assassin, and the cries of a young boy to come back stop our unnamed hero? Not even a little. Now that's what I call wind racing! ⁠INSTAGRAM⁠ | ⁠TIKTOK⁠ | ⁠FACEBOOK⁠ | ⁠TWITTER

It's a mad mad mad max world in the post-apocalyptic western STEEL DAWN (1987). In this dystopian rip-off of the western classic SHANE, a dirty but non-dancing Patrick Swayze saunters out of the wasteland and into the arms of his real life wife, Lisa Niemi. But will a water robber baron, a knife-kneeing assassin, and the cries of a young boy to come back stop our unnamed hero? Not even a little. Now that's what I call wind racing!

This week the guys cover another Post Apocalyptic movie called 'Steel Dawn', starring the always graceful yet completely badass Patrick Swayze. But its not just Patrick having to be a heroic Nomad this episode because Charlie found himself standing alone in his love of this 80's Sword and Sandal adventure. Nate and Pete unfortunately sided with the ever evil Hordes and tried to rip Charlies nostalgia to shreds just like how Danmil and Sho tried to destroy everything Nomad chose to defend....but they were unsuccessful in their treacherous plans as Charlie stood strong, unwavering in his resolve that Steel Dawn deserves to be counted among the action classics. So grab a cold glass of water, charge up your solar wind rider and enjoy this weeks discussion of another 80s VHS classic!   

The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro)   TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago?   For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt.   That was the logo of the disc's distributor.   Vestron Video.   A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it.   But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time.   The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company.   But what to call the company?   It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point.   At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future.   Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling.   The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet.   Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great.   Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night.    For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron.   They were doing pretty good.   And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever.   When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video.   It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars.   Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with.   In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made.   Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies.   Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build.   But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company.   Lots of money.   Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day.   It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution.   Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure.   Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000.   Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside.   And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year.   Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2.   The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner.   The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again.   In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco.   Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross.   Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week.   It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for.   Dirty Dancing.   Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname.   Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle.   But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it.   They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise.   To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special.   Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget.   For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials.   Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny.   Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role.   Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming.   Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released.   After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th.   Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance.   But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set.   The music.   Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film.   Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording.    The writer nailed all ten.   But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle.   The closing song.   While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.”   Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version.   The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there.   While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals.   With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably.   RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts.   When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts.   The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds.   But then a funny thing happened…   Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack.   Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place.   In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales.   Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better.   When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago.   On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong.   The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988.   Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets.   Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then.   Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola.   The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role.   New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.”   Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck.   But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales.   Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves.   Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo.   The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales.   And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting.   Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot.   One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either.   John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6.   The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres.   Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label.   The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film.   The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them.   After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run.   While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school.   People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years.   Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was.   Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right?   We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro)   TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago?   For this week's episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don't follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn't the kick in the butt.   That was the logo of the disc's distributor.   Vestron Video.   A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell's Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill's Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures' movies. I guarantee it.   But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time.   The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn't quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn't find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company.   But what to call the company?   It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point.   At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst's long-term vision for the future.   Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron's initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They'd also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling.   The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea that they could sell a videotape for, say, $99.99, and then see someone else make a major profit by renting that tape out fifty or a hundred times at $4 or $5 per night. Of course, they would eventually see the light, but in 1982, they weren't there yet.   Now, let me sidetrack for a moment, as I am wont to do, to talk about mom and pop video stores in the early 1980s. If you're younger than, say, forty, you probably only know Blockbuster and/or Hollywood Video as your local video rental store, but in the early 80s, there were no national video store chains yet. The first Blockbuster wouldn't open until October 1985, in Dallas, and your neighborhood likely didn't get one until the late 1980s or early 1990s. The first video store I ever encountered, Telford Home Video in Belmont Shores, Long Beach in 1981, was operated by Bob Telford, an actor best known for playing the Station Master in both the original 1974 version of Where the Red Fern Grows and its 2003 remake. Bob was really cool, and I don't think it was just because the space for the video store was just below my dad's office in the real estate company that had built and operated the building. He genuinely took interest in this weird thirteen year old kid who had an encyclopedic knowledge of films and wanted to learn more. I wanted to watch every movie he had in the store that I hadn't seen yet, but there was one problem: we had a VHS machine, and most of Bob's inventory was RCA SelectaVision, a disc-based playback system using a special stylus and a groove-covered disc much like an LP record. After school each day, I'd hightail it over to Telford Home Video, and Bob and I would watch a movie while we waited for customers to come rent something. It was with Bob that I would watch Ordinary People and The Magnificent Seven, The Elephant Man and The Last Waltz, Bus Stop and Rebel Without a Cause and The French Connection and The Man Who Fell to Earth and a bunch of other movies that weren't yet available on VHS, and it was great.   Like many teenagers in the early 1980s, I spent some time working at a mom and pop video store, Seacliff Home Video in Aptos, CA. I worked on the weekends, it was a third of a mile walk from home, and even though I was only 16 years old at the time, my bosses would, every week, solicit my opinion about which upcoming videos we should acquire. Because, like Telford Home Video and Village Home Video, where my friends Dick and Michelle worked about two miles away, and most every video store at the time, space was extremely limited and there was only space for so many titles. Telford Home Video was about 500 square feet and had maybe 500 titles. Seacliff was about 750 square feet and around 800 titles, including about 50 in the tiny, curtained off room created to hold the porn. And the first location for Village Home Video had only 300 square feet of space and only 250 titles. The owner, Leone Keller, confirmed to me that until they moved into a larger location across from the original store, they were able to rent out every movie in the store every night.    For many, a store owner had to be very careful about what they ordered and what they replaced. But Vestron Home Video always seemed to have some of the better movies. Because of a spat between Warner Brothers and Orion Pictures, Vestron would end up with most of Orion's 1983 through 1985 theatrical releases, including Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money, the Nick Nolte political thriller Under Fire, the William Hurt mystery Gorky Park, and Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red. They'd also make a deal with Roger Corman's old American Independent Pictures outfit, which would reap an unexpected bounty when George Miller's second Mad Max movie, The Road Warrior, became a surprise hit in 1982, and Vestron was holding the video rights to the first Mad Max movie. And they'd also find themselves with the laserdisc rights to several Brian DePalma movies including Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. And after Polygram Films decided to leave the movie business in 1984, they would sell the home video rights to An American Werewolf in London and Endless Love to Vestron.   They were doing pretty good.   And in 1984, Vestron ended up changing the home video industry forever.   When Michael Jackson and John Landis had trouble with Jackson's record company, Epic, getting their idea for a 14 minute short film built around the title song to Jackson's monster album Thriller financed, Vestron would put up a good portion of the nearly million dollar budget in order to release the movie on home video, after it played for a few weeks on MTV. In February 1984, Vestron would release a one-hour tape, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, that included the mini-movie and a 45 minute Making of featurette. At $29.99, it would be one of the first sell-through titles released on home video.   It would become the second home videotape to sell a million copies, after Star Wars.   Suddenly, Vestron was flush with more cash than it knew what to do with.   In 1985, they would decide to expand their entertainment footprint by opening Vestron Pictures, which would finance a number of movies that could be exploited across a number of platforms, including theatrical, home video, cable and syndicated TV. In early January 1986, Vestron would announce they were pursuing projects with three producers, Steve Tisch, Larry Turman, and Gene Kirkwood, but no details on any specific titles or even a timeframe when any of those movies would be made.   Tisch, the son of Loews Entertainment co-owner Bob Tisch, had started producing films in 1977 with the Peter Fonda music drama Outlaw Blues, and had a big hit in 1983 with Risky Business. Turman, the Oscar-nominated producer of Mike Nichols' The Graduate, and Kirkwood, the producer of The Keep and The Pope of Greenwich Village, had seen better days as producers by 1986 but their names still carried a certain cache in Hollywood, and the announcement would certainly let the industry know Vestron was serious about making quality movies.   Well, maybe not all quality movies. They would also launch a sub-label for Vestron Pictures called Lightning Pictures, which would be utilized on B-movies and schlock that maybe wouldn't fit in the Vestron Pictures brand name they were trying to build.   But it costs money to build a movie production and theatrical distribution company.   Lots of money.   Thanks to the ever-growing roster of video titles and the success of releases like Thriller, Vestron would go public in the spring of 1985, selling enough shares on the first day of trading to bring in $440m to the company, $140m than they thought they would sell that day.   It would take them a while, but in 1986, they would start production on their first slate of films, as well as acquire several foreign titles for American distribution.   Vestron Pictures officially entered the theatrical distribution game on July 18th, 1986, when they released the Australian comedy Malcolm at the Cinema 2 on the Upper East Side of New York City. A modern attempt to create the Aussie version of a Jacques Tati-like absurdist comedy about modern life and our dependance on gadgetry, Malcolm follows, as one character describes him a 100 percent not there individual who is tricked into using some of his remote control inventions to pull of a bank robbery. While the film would be a minor hit in Australia, winning all eight of the Australian Film Institute Awards it was nominated for including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and three acting awards, the film would only play for five weeks in New York, grossing less than $35,000, and would not open in Los Angeles until November 5th, where in its first week at the Cineplex Beverly Center and Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, it would gross a combined $37,000. Go figure.   Malcolm would open in a few more major markets, but Vestron would close the film at the end of the year with a gross under $200,000.   Their next film, Slaughter High, was a rather odd bird. A co-production between American and British-based production companies, the film followed a group of adults responsible for a prank gone wrong on April Fool's Day who are invited to a reunion at their defunct high school where a masked killer awaits inside.   And although the movie takes place in America, the film was shot in London and nearby Virginia Water, Surrey, in late 1984, under the title April Fool's Day. But even with Caroline Munro, the British sex symbol who had become a cult favorite with her appearances in a series of sci-fi and Hammer horror films with Peter Cushing and/or Christopher Lee, as well as her work in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, April Fool's Day would sit on the proverbial shelf for nearly two years, until Vestron picked it up and changed its title, since Paramount Pictures had released their own horror film called April Fools Day earlier in the year.   Vestron would open Slaughter High on nine screens in Detroit on November 14th, 1986, but Vestron would not report grosses. Then they would open it on six screen in St. Louis on February 13th, 1987. At least this time they reported a gross. $12,400. Variety would simply call that number “grim.” They'd give the film one final rush on April 24th, sending it out to 38 screens in in New York City, where it would gross $90,000. There'd be no second week, as practically every theatre would replace it with Creepshow 2.   The third and final Vestron Pictures release for 1986 was Billy Galvin, a little remembered family drama featuring Karl Malden and Lenny von Dohlen, originally produced for the PBS anthology series American Playhouse but bumped up to a feature film as part of coordinated effort to promote the show by occasionally releasing feature films bearing the American Playhouse banner.   The film would open at the Cineplex Beverly Center on December 31st, not only the last day of the calendar year but the last day a film can be released into theatres in Los Angeles to have been considered for Academy Awards. The film would not get any major awards, from the Academy or anyone else, nor much attention from audiences, grossing just $4,000 in its first five days. They'd give the film a chance in New York on February 20th, at the 23rd Street West Triplex, but a $2,000 opening weekend gross would doom the film from ever opening in another theatre again.   In early 1987, Vestron announced eighteen films they would release during the year, and a partnership with AMC Theatres and General Cinema to have their films featured in those two companies' pilot specialized film programs in major markets like Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston and San Francisco.   Alpine Fire would be the first of those films, arriving at the Cinema Studio 1 in New York City on February 20th. A Swiss drama about a young deaf and mentally challenged teenager who gets his older sister pregnant, was that country's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. While the film would win the Golden Leopard Award at the 1985 Locarno Film Festival, the Academy would not select the film for a nomination, and the film would quickly disappear from theatres after a $2,000 opening weekend gross.   Personal Services, the first film to be directed by Terry Jones outside of his services with Monty Python, would arrive in American theatres on May 15th. The only Jones-directed film to not feature any other Python in the cast, Personal Services was a thinly-disguised telling of a 1970s—era London waitress who was running a brothel in her flat in order to make ends meet, and featured a standout performance by Julie Walters as the waitress turned madame. In England, Personal Services would be the second highest-grossing film of the year, behind The Living Daylights, the first Bond film featuring new 007 Timothy Dalton. In America, the film wouldn't be quite as successful, grossing $1.75m after 33 weeks in theatres, despite never playing on more than 31 screens in any given week.   It would be another three months before Vestron would release their second movie of the year, but it would be the one they'd become famous for.   Dirty Dancing.   Based in large part on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood, the screenplay would be written after the producers of the 1980 Michael Douglas/Jill Clayburgh dramedy It's My Turn asked the writer to remove a scene from the screenplay that involved an erotic dance sequence. She would take that scene and use it as a jumping off point for a new story about a Jewish teenager in the early 1960s who participated in secret “Dirty Dancing” competitions while she vacationed with her doctor father and stay-at-home mother while they vacationed in the Catskill Mountains. Baby, the young woman at the center of the story, would not only resemble the screenwriter as a character but share her childhood nickname.   Bergstein would pitch the story to every studio in Hollywood in 1984, and only get a nibble from MGM Pictures, whose name was synonymous with big-budget musicals decades before. They would option the screenplay and assign producer Linda Gottlieb, a veteran television producer making her first major foray into feature films, to the project. With Gottlieb, Bergstein would head back to the Catskills for the first time in two decades, as research for the script. It was while on this trip that the pair would meet Michael Terrace, a former Broadway dancer who had spent summers in the early 1960s teaching tourists how to mambo in the Catskills. Terrace and Bergstein didn't remember each other if they had met way back when, but his stories would help inform the lead male character of Johnny Castle.   But, as regularly happens in Hollywood, there was a regime change at MGM in late 1985, and one of the projects the new bosses cut loose was Dirty Dancing. Once again, the script would make the rounds in Hollywood, but nobody was biting… until Vestron Pictures got their chance to read it.   They loved it, and were ready to make it their first in-house production… but they would make the movie if the budget could be cut from $10m to $4.5m. That would mean some sacrifices. They wouldn't be able to hire a major director, nor bigger name actors, but that would end up being a blessing in disguise.   To direct, Gottlieb and Bergstein looked at a lot of up and coming feature directors, but the one person they had the best feeling about was Emile Ardolino, a former actor off-Broadway in the 1960s who began his filmmaking career as a documentarian for PBS in the 1970s. In 1983, Ardolino's documentary about National Dance Institute founder Jacques d'Amboise, He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', would win both the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Entertainment Special.   Although Ardolino had never directed a movie, he would read the script twice in a week while serving on jury duty, and came back to Gottlieb and Bergstein with a number of ideas to help make the movie shine, even at half the budget.   For a movie about dancing, with a lot of dancing in it, they would need a creative choreographer to help train the actors and design the sequences. The filmmakers would chose Kenny Ortega, who in addition to choreographing the dance scenes in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, had worked with Gene Kelly on the 1980 musical Xanadu. Well, more specifically, was molded by Gene Kelly to become the lead choreographer for the film. That's some good credentials.   Unlike movies like Flashdance, where the filmmakers would hire Jennifer Beals to play Alex and Marine Jahan to perform Alex's dance scenes, Emile Ardolino was insistent that the actors playing the dancers were actors who also dance. Having stand-ins would take extra time to set-up, and would suck up a portion of an already tight budget. Yet the first people he would meet for the lead role of Johnny were non-dancers Benecio del Toro, Val Kilmer, and Billy Zane. Zane would go so far as to do a screen test with one of the actresses being considered for the role of Baby, Jennifer Grey, but after screening the test, they realized Grey was right for Baby but Zane was not right for Johnny.   Someone suggested Patrick Swayze, a former dancer for the prestigious Joffrey Ballet who was making his way up the ranks of stardom thanks to his roles in The Outsiders and Grandview U.S.A. But Swayze had suffered a knee injury years before that put his dance career on hold, and there were concerns he would re-aggravate his injury, and there were concerns from Jennifer Grey because she and Swayze had not gotten along very well while working on Red Dawn. But that had been three years earlier, and when they screen tested together here, everyone was convinced this was the pairing that would bring magic to the role.   Baby's parents would be played by two Broadway veterans: Jerry Orbach, who is best known today as Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, and Kelly Bishop, who is best known today as Emily Gilmore from Gilmore Girls but had actually started out as a dancer, singer and actor, winning a Tony Award for her role in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line. Although Bishop had originally been cast in a different role for the movie, another guest at the Catskills resort with the Housemans, but she would be bumped up when the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, would fall ill during the first week of filming.   Filming on Dirty Dancing would begin in North Carolina on September 5th, 1986, at a former Boy Scout camp that had been converted to a private residential community. This is where many of the iconic scenes from the film would be shot, including Baby carrying the watermelon and practicing her dance steps on the stairs, all the interior dance scenes, the log scene, and the golf course scene where Baby would ask her father for $250. It's also where Patrick Swayze almost ended his role in the film, when he would indeed re-injure his knee during the balancing scene on the log. He would be rushed to the hospital to have fluid drained from the swelling. Thankfully, there would be no lingering effects once he was released.   After filming in North Carolina was completed, the team would move to Virginia for two more weeks of filming, including the water lift scene, exteriors at Kellerman's Hotel and the Houseman family's cabin, before the film wrapped on October 27th.   Ardolino's first cut of the film would be completed in February 1987, and Vestron would begin the process of running a series of test screenings. At the first test screening, nearly 40% of the audience didn't realize there was an abortion subplot in the movie, even after completing the movie. A few weeks later, Vestron executives would screen the film for producer Aaron Russo, who had produced such movies as The Rose and Trading Places. His reaction to the film was to tell the executives to burn the negative and collect the insurance.   But, to be fair, one important element of the film was still not set.   The music.   Eleanor Bergstein had written into her script a number of songs that were popular in the early 1960s, when the movie was set, that she felt the final film needed. Except a number of the songs were a bit more expensive to license than Vestron would have preferred. The company was testing the film with different versions of those songs, other artists' renditions. The writer, with the support of her producer and director, fought back. She made a deal with the Vestron executives. They would play her the master tracks to ten of the songs she wanted, as well as the copycat versions. If she could identify six of the masters, she could have all ten songs in the film.   Vestron would spend another half a million dollars licensing the original recording.    The writer nailed all ten.   But even then, there was still one missing piece of the puzzle.   The closing song.   While Bergstein wanted another song to close the film, the team at Vestron were insistent on a new song that could be used to anchor a soundtrack album. The writer, producer, director and various members of the production team listened to dozens of submissions from songwriters, but none of them were right, until they got to literally the last submission left, written by Franke Previte, who had written another song that would appear on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, “Hungry Eyes.”   Everybody loved the song, called “I've Had the Time of My Life,” and it would take some time to convince Previte that Dirty Dancing was not a porno. They showed him the film and he agreed to give them the song, but the production team and Vestron wanted to get a pair of more famous singers to record the final version.   The filmmakers originally approached disco queen Donna Summer and Joe Esposito, whose song “You're the Best” appeared on the Karate Kid soundtrack, but Summer would decline, not liking the title of the movie. They would then approach Daryl Hall from Hall and Oates and Kim Carnes, but they'd both decline, citing concerns about the title of the movie. Then they approached Bill Medley, one-half of The Righteous Brothers, who had enjoyed yet another career resurgence when You Lost That Lovin' Feeling became a hit in 1986 thanks to Top Gun, but at first, he would also decline. Not that he had any concerns about the title of the film, although he did have concerns about the title, but that his wife was about to give birth to their daughter, and he had promised he would be there.   While trying to figure who to get to sing the male part of the song, the music supervisor for the film approached Jennifer Warnes, who had sung the duet “Up Where We Belong” from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, which had won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song, and sang the song “It Goes Like It Goes” from the Norma Rae soundtrack, which had won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Warnes wasn't thrilled with the song, but she would be persuaded to record the song for the right price… and if Bill Medley would sing the other part. Medley, flattered that Warnes asked specifically to record with him, said he would do so, after his daughter was born, and if the song was recorded in his studio in Los Angeles. A few weeks later, Medley and Warnes would have their portion of the song completed in only one hour, including additional harmonies and flourishes decided on after finishing with the main vocals.   With all the songs added to the movie, audience test scores improved considerably.   RCA Records, who had been contracted to handle the release of the soundtrack, would set a July 17th release date for the album, to coincide with the release of the movie on the same day, with the lead single, I've Had the Time of My Life, released one week earlier. But then, Vestron moved the movie back from July 17th to August 21st… and forgot to tell RCA Records about the move. No big deal. The song would quickly rise up the charts, eventually hitting #1 on the Billboard charts.   When the movie finally did open in 975 theatres in August 21st, the film would open to fourth place with $3.9m in ticket sales, behind Can't Buy Me Love in third place and in its second week of release, the Cheech Marin comedy Born in East L.A., which opened in second place, and Stakeout, which was enjoying its third week atop the charts.   The reviews were okay, but not special. Gene Siskel would give the film a begrudging Thumbs Up, citing Jennifer Grey's performance and her character's arc as the thing that tipped the scale into the positive, while Roger Ebert would give the film a Thumbs Down, due to its idiot plot and tired and relentlessly predictable story of love between kids from different backgrounds.   But then a funny thing happened…   Instead of appealing to the teenagers they thought would see the film, the majority of the audience ended up becoming adults. Not just twenty and thirty somethings, but people who were teenagers themselves during the movie's timeframe. They would be drawn in to the film through the newfound sense of boomer nostalgia that helped make Stand By Me an unexpected hit the year before, both as a movie and as a soundtrack.   Its second week in theatre would only see the gross drop 6%, and the film would finish in third place.   In week three, the four day Labor Day weekend, it would gross nearly $5m, and move up to second place. And it would continue to play and continue to bring audiences in, only dropping out of the top ten once in early November for one weekend, from August to December. Even with all the new movies entering the marketplace for Christmas, Dirty Dancing would be retained by most of the theatres that were playing it. In the first weekend of 1988, Dirty Dancing was still playing in 855 theaters, only 120 fewer than who opened it five months earlier. Once it did started leaving first run theatres, dollar houses were eager to pick it up, and Dirty Dancing would make another $6m in ticket sales as it continued to play until Christmas 1988 at some theatres, finishing its incredible run with $63.5m in ticket sales.   Yet, despite its ubiquitousness in American pop culture, despite the soundtrack selling more than ten million copies in its first year, despite the uptick in attendance at dance schools from coast to coast, Dirty Dancing never once was the #1 film in America on any weekend it was in theatres. There would always be at least one other movie that would do just a bit better.   When awards season came around, the movie was practically ignored by critics groups. It would pick up an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and both the movie and Jennifer Grey would be nominated for Golden Globes, but it would be that song, I've Had the Time of My Life, that would be the driver for awards love. It would win the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. The song would anchor a soundtrack that would also include two other hit songs, Eric Carmen's “Hungry Eyes,” and “She's Like the Wind,” recorded for the movie by Patrick Swayze, making him the proto-Hugh Jackman of the 80s. I've seen Hugh Jackman do his one-man show at the Hollywood Bowl, and now I'm wishing Patrick Swayze could have had something like that thirty years ago.   On September 25th, they would release Abel Ferrera's Neo-noir romantic thriller China Girl. A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet written by regular Ferrera writer Nicholas St. John, the setting would be New York City's Lower East Side, when Tony, a teenager from Little Italy, falls for Tye, a teenager from Chinatown, as their older brothers vie for turf in a vicious gang war. While the stars of the film, Richard Panebianco and Sari Chang, would never become known actors, the supporting cast is as good as you'd expect from a post-Ms. .45 Ferrera film, including James Russo, Russell Wong, David Caruso and James Hong.   The $3.5m movie would open on 110 screens, including 70 in New York ti-state region and 18 in Los Angeles, grossing $531k. After a second weekend, where the gross dropped to $225k, Vestron would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just $1.26m coming from a stockholder's report in early 1988.   Ironically, China Girl would open against another movie that Vestron had a hand in financing, but would not release in America: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. While the film would do okay in America, grossing $30m against its $15m, it wouldn't translate so easily to foreign markets.   Anna, from first time Polish filmmaker Yurek Bogayevicz, was an oddball little film from the start. The story, co-written with the legendary Polish writer/director Agnieszka Holland, was based on the real-life friendship of Polish actresses Joanna (Yo-ahn-nuh) Pacuła (Pa-tsu-wa) and Elżbieta (Elz-be-et-ah) Czyżewska (Chuh-zef-ska), and would find Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova making her feature acting debut as Krystyna, an aspiring actress from Czechoslovakia who goes to New York City to find her idol, Anna, who had been imprisoned and then deported for speaking out against the new regime after the 1968 Communist invasion. Nearly twenty years later, the middle-aged Anna struggles to land any acting parts, in films, on television, or on the stage, who relishes the attention of this beautiful young waif who reminds her of herself back then.   Sally Kirkland, an American actress who got her start as part of Andy Warhol's Factory in the early 60s but could never break out of playing supporting roles in movies like The Way We Were, The Sting, A Star is Born, and Private Benjamin, would be cast as the faded Czech star whose life seemed to unintentionally mirror the actress's. Future Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis would be featured in a small supporting role, as would the then sixteen year old Sofia Coppola.   The $1m movie would shoot on location in New York City during the winter of late 1986 and early 1987, and would make its world premiere at the 1987 New York Film Festival in September, before opening at the 68th Street Playhouse on the Upper East Side on October 30th. Critics such as Bruce Williamson of Playboy, Molly Haskell of Vogue and Jami Bernard of the New York Post would sing the praises of the movie, and of Paulina Porizkova, but it would be Sally Kirkland whom practically every critic would gush over. “A performance of depth and clarity and power, easily one of the strongest female roles of the year,” wrote Mike McGrady of Newsday. Janet Maslim wasn't as impressed with the film as most critics, but she would note Ms. Kirkland's immensely dignified presence in the title role.   New York audiences responded well to the critical acclaim, buying more than $22,000 worth of tickets, often playing to sell out crowds for the afternoon and evening shows. In its second week, the film would see its gross increase 12%, and another 3% increase in its third week. Meanwhile, on November 13th, the film would open in Los Angeles at the AMC Century City 14, where it would bring in an additional $10,000, thanks in part to Sheila Benson's rave in the Los Angeles Times, calling the film “the best kind of surprise — a small, frequently funny, fine-boned film set in the worlds of the theater and movies which unexpectedly becomes a consummate study of love, alienation and loss,” while praising Kirkland's performance as a “blazing comet.”   Kirkland would make the rounds on the awards circuit, winning Best Actress awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Golden Globes, and the Independent Spirit Awards, culminating in an Academy Award nomination, although she would lose to Cher in Moonstruck.   But despite all these rave reviews and the early support for the film in New York and Los Angeles, the film got little traction outside these two major cities. Despite playing in theatres for nearly six months, Anna could only round up about $1.2m in ticket sales.   Vestron's penultimate new film of 1987 would be a movie that when it was shot in Namibia in late 1986 was titled Peacekeeper, then was changed to Desert Warrior when it was acquired by Jerry Weintraub's eponymously named distribution company, then saw it renamed again to Steel Dawn when Vestron overpaid to acquire the film from Weintraub, because they wanted the next film starring Patrick Swayze for themselves.   Swayze plays, and stop me if you've heard this one before, a warrior wandering through a post-apocalyptic desert who comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by the leader of a murderous gang who's after the water they control. Lisa Niemi, also known as Mrs. Patrick Swayze, would be his romantic interest in the film, which would also star AnthonY Zerbe, Brian James, and, in one of his very first acting roles, future Mummy co-star Arnold Vosloo.   The film would open to horrible reviews, and gross just $312k in 290 theatres. For comparison's sake, Dirty Dancing was in its eleventh week of release, was still playing 878 theatres, and would gross $1.7m. In its second week, Steel Dawn had lost nearly two thirds of its theatres, grossing only $60k from 107 theatres. After its third weekend, Vestron stopped reporting grosses. The film had only earned $562k in ticket sales.   And their final release for 1987 would be one of the most prestigious titles they'd ever be involved with. The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, would be the 37th and final film to be directed by John Huston. His son Tony would adapt the screenplay, while his daughter Anjelica, whom he had directed to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar two years earlier for Prizzi's Honor, would star as the matriarch of an Irish family circa 1904 whose husband discovers memoirs of a deceased lover of his wife's, an affair that preceded their meeting.   Originally scheduled to shoot in Dublin, Ireland, The Dead would end up being shot on soundstages in Valencia, CA, just north of Los Angeles, as the eighty year old filmmaker was in ill health. Huston, who was suffering from severe emphysema due to decades of smoking, would use video playback for the first and only time in his career in order to call the action, whirling around from set to set in a motorized wheelchair with an oxygen tank attached to it. In fact, the company insuring the film required the producers to have a backup director on set, just in case Huston was unable to continue to make the film. That stand-in was Czech-born British filmmaker Karel Reisz, who never once had to stand-in during the entire shoot.   One Huston who didn't work on the film was Danny Huston, who was supposed to shoot some second unit footage for the film in Dublin for his father, who could not make any trips overseas, as well as a documentary about the making of the film, but for whatever reason, Danny Huston would end up not doing either.   John Huston would turn in his final cut of the film to Vestron in July 1987, and would pass away in late August, a good four months before the film's scheduled release. He would live to see some of the best reviews of his entire career when the film was released on December 18th. At six theatres in Los Angeles and New York City, The Dead would earn $69k in its first three days during what was an amazing opening weekend for a number of movies. The Dead would open against exclusive runs of Broadcast News, Ironweed, Moonstruck and the newest Woody Allen film, September, as well as wide releases of Eddie Murphy: Raw, Batteries Not Included, Overboard, and the infamous Bill Cosby stinker Leonard Part 6.   The film would win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture of the year, John Huston would win the Spirit Award and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, Anjelica Huston would win a Spirit Award as well, for Best Supporting Actress, and Tony Huston would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. But the little $3.5m film would only see modest returns at the box office, grossing just $4.4m after a four month run in theatres.   Vestron would also release two movies in 1987 through their genre Lightning Pictures label.   The first, Blood Diner, from writer/director Jackie Kong, was meant to be both a tribute and an indirect sequel to the infamous 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie Blood Feast, often considered to be the first splatter slasher film. Released on four screens in Baltimore on July 10th, the film would gross just $6,400 in its one tracked week. The film would get a second chance at life when it opened at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 4th, but after a $5,000 opening week gross there, the film would have to wait until it was released on home video to become a cult film.   The other Lightning Pictures release for 1987, Street Trash, would become one of the most infamous horror comedy films of the year. An expansion of a short student film by then nineteen year old Jim Muro, Street Trash told the twin stories of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn shop owner who sell a case of cheap, long-expired hooch to local hobos, who hideously melt away shortly after drinking it, while two homeless brothers try to deal with their situation as best they can while all this weirdness is going on about them.   After playing several weeks of midnight shows at the Waverly Theatre near Washington Square, Street Trash would open for a regular run at the 8th Street Playhouse on September 18th, one week after Blood Diner left the same theatre. However, Street Trash would not replace Blood Diner, which was kicked to the curb after one week, but another long forgotten movie, the Christopher Walken-starrer Deadline. Street Trash would do a bit better than Blood Diner, $9,000 in its first three days, enough to get the film a full two week run at the Playhouse. But its second week gross of $5,000 would not be enough to give it a longer playdate, or get another New York theatre to pick it up. The film would get other playdates, including one in my secondary hometown of Santa Cruz starting, ironically, on Thanksgiving Day, but the film would barely make $100k in its theatrical run.   While this would be the only film Jim Muro would direct, he would become an in demand cinematographer and Steadicam operator, working on such films as Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, the first Fast and Furious movie, and on The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic for James Cameron. And should you ever watch the film and sit through the credits, yes, it's that Bryan Singer who worked as a grip and production assistant on the film. It would be his very first film credit, which he worked on during a break from going to USC film school.   People who know me know I am not the biggest fan of horror films. I may have mentioned it once or twice on this podcast. But I have a soft spot for Troma Films and Troma-like films, and Street Trash is probably the best Troma movie not made or released by Troma. There's a reason why Lloyd Kaufman is not a fan of the movie. A number of people who have seen the movie think it is a Troma movie, not helped by the fact that a number of people who did work on The Toxic Avenger went to work on Street Trash afterwards, and some even tell Lloyd at conventions that Street Trash is their favorite Troma movie. It's looks like a Troma movie. It feels like a Troma movie. And to be honest, at least to me, that's one hell of a compliment. It's one of the reasons I even went to see Street Trash, the favorable comparison to Troma. And while I, for lack of a better word, enjoyed Street Trash when I saw it, as much as one can say they enjoyed a movie where a bunch of bums playing hot potato with a man's severed Johnson is a major set piece, but I've never really felt the need to watch it again over the past thirty-five years.   Like several of the movies on this episode, Street Trash is not available for streaming on any service in the United States. And outside of Dirty Dancing, the ones you can stream, China Girl, Personal Services, Slaughter High and Steel Dawn, are mostly available for free with ads on Tubi, which made a huge splash last week with a confounding Super Bowl commercial that sent millions of people to figure what a Tubi was.   Now, if you were counting, that was only nine films released in 1987, and not the eighteen they had promised at the start of the year. Despite the fact they had a smash hit in Dirty Dancing, they decided to push most of their planned 1987 movies to 1988. Not necessarily by choice, though. Many of the films just weren't ready in time for a 1987 release, and then the unexpected long term success of Dirty Dancing kept them occupied for most of the rest of the year. But that only meant that 1988 would be a stellar year for them, right?   We'll find out next episode, when we continue the Vestron Pictures story.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Do you remember Steel Dawn starring legend Patrick Swayze? This movie is set in a post-apocalyptic future where people have forgotten or don't know how to use guns and instead use swords. This future also decided to keep hairstyles from 80s metal hair bands in style and they also decided not to preserve any type of gas-running vehicle and opted for a new type of futuristic go-kart. This all sounds good on paper but we're starting to have doubts. Like serious doubts.Do You Remember Liking This Movie?

This episode looks at the 1984 debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and its 1987 film adaptation. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we're going to talk about 80s author Bret Easton Ellis and his 1985 novel Less Than Zero, the literal polar opposite of last week's subjects, Jay McInerney and his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. As I mentioned last week, McInerney was twenty-nine when he published Bright Lights, Big City. What I forgot to mention was that he was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, halfway between Boston and New York City, and he would a part of that elite East Coast community that befits the upper class child of a corporate executive. Bret Easton Ellis was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father was a property developer, and his parents would divorce when he was 18. He would attend high school at The Buckley School, a college prep school in nearby Sherman Oaks, whose other famous alumni include a who's who of modern pop culture history, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Tucker Carlson, Laura Dern, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, Matthew Perry, and Nicole Richie. So they both grew up fairly well off. And they both would attend tony colleges in New England.  Ellis would attend Bennington College in Vermont, a private liberal arts college whose alumni include fellow writers Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt, who would both graduate from Bennington the same year as Ellis, 1986. While still attending The Buckley School, the then sixteen year old Ellis would start writing the book he would call Less Than Zero, after the Elvis Costello song. The story would follow a protagonist not unlike Bret Easton Ellis and his adventures through a high school not unlike Buckley. Unlike the final product, Ellis's first draft of Less Than Zero wore its heart on its sleeve, and was written in the third person.  Ellis would do a couple of rewrites of the novel during his final years at Buckley and his first years at Bennington, until his creative writing professor, true crime novelist Joe McGinness, suggested to the young writer that he revert his story back to the first person, which Ellis was at first hesitant to do. But once he did start to rewrite the story as a traditional novel, everything seemed to click. Ellis would have his book finished by the end of the year, and McGinniss was so impressed with the final product that he would submit it to his own agent to send out to publishers. Bret Easton Ellis was only a second year student at the time. And because timing is everything in life, Less Than Zero was being submitted to publishers just as Bright Lights, Big City was tearing up the best seller charts, and the publisher Simon and Schuster would purchase the rights to the book for $5,000. When the book was published in June 1985, Ellis just finished his third year at Bennington.  He was only twenty-one years and three months old. Oh… also… before the book was published, the film producer Marvin Worth, whose credits included Bob Fosse's 1974 doc-drama about Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman, 1979's musical drama The Rose, Bette Midler's breakthrough film as an actress, and the 1983 Dudley Moore comedy Unfaithfully Yours, would purchase the rights to make the novel into a movie, for $7,500. The film would be produced at Twentieth Century-Fox, under the supervision of the studio's then vice president of production, Scott Rudin. The book would become a success upon its release, with young readers gravitating towards Clay and his aimless, meandering tour of the rich and decadent young adults in Los Angeles circa Christmas 1984, bouncing through parties and conversations and sex and drugs and shopping malls. One of those readers who became obsessed with the book was a then-seventeen year old Los Angeles native who had just returned to the city after three years of high school in Northern California. Me. I read Less Than Zero easily three times that summer, enraptured not only with Ellis's minimalist prose but with Clay specifically. Although I was neither bisexual nor a user of drugs, Clay was the closest thing I had ever seen to myself in a book before. I had kept in touch with my school friends from junior high while I lived in Santa Cruz, and I found myself to have drifted far away from them during my time away from them. And then when I went back to Santa Cruz shortly after Christmas in 1985, I had a similar feeling of isolation from a number of my friends there, not six months after leaving high school. I also loved how Ellis threw in a number of then-current Los Angeles-specific references, including two mentions of KROQ DJ Richard Blade, who was the coolest guy in radio on the planet. And thanks to Sirius XM and its First Wave channel, I can still listen to Richard Blade almost daily, but now from wherever I might be in the world. But I digress. My bond with Less Than Zero only deepened the next time I read it in early 1986. One of the things I used to do as a young would-be screenwriter living in Los Angeles was to try and write adaptation of novels when I wasn't going to school, going to movies, or working as a file clerk at a law firm. But one book I couldn't adapt for the life of me was Less Than Zero. Sure, there was a story there, but its episodic nature made it difficult to create a coherent storyline. Fox felt the same way, so they would hire Michael Cristofer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, to do the first draft of the script. Cristofer had just finished writing the adaptation of John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick that Mad Max director George Miller was about to direct, and he would do a literal adaptation of Ellis's book, with all the drugs and sex and violence, except for a slight rehabilitation of the lead character's sexuality. Although it was still the 1980s, with one part of the nation dramatically shifting its perspective on many types of sexuality, it was still Ronald Reagan's 1980s America, and maybe it wasn't a good idea to have the lead character be openly bisexual in a major studio motion picture. Cristofer would complete his first draft of the script in just one month, and producer Marvin Worth really loved it. Problem was, the Fox executives hated it. In a November 18th, 1987, New York Times article about the adaptation, Worth would tell writer Allen Harmetz that he thought Cristofer's script was highly commercial, because “it had something gripping to say about the dilemma of a generation to whom nothing matters.” Which, as someone who had just turned twenty years old eight days after the movie's release and four days before this article came out, I absolutely disagree with. My generation cared about a great many things. We cared about human rights. We cared about ending apartheid. We cared about ending AIDS and what was happening politically and economically. Yeah, we also cared about puffy jean jackets and neon colored clothes and other non-sensical things to take our minds off all the other junk we were dealing with, but it would be typical of a forty something screenwriter and a fiftysomething producer to thing we didn't give a damn about anything. But again, I digress. Worth and the studio would agree on one thing. It wasn't really a drug film, but about young people being destroyed by the privilege of having everything you ever wanted available to you. But the studio would want the movie version of the book to be a bit more sanitized for mainstream consumption. Goodbye, Marvin Worth. Hello, Jon Avnet. In 1986, Jon Avnet was mostly a producer of low-budget films for television, with titles like Between Two Women and Calendar Girl Murders, but he had struck gold in 1983 with a lower-budgeted studio movie with a first-time director and a little known lead actor. That movie was Risky Business, and it made that little known lead actor, Tom Cruise, a bona-fide star. Avnet, wanting to make the move out of television and onto the big screen, would hire Harley Peyton, a former script reader for former Columbia Pictures and MGM/UA head David Begelman, who you might remember from several of our previous episodes, and six-time Oscar nominated producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Peyton would spend weeks in Avnet's office, pouring over every page of the book, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and what to change. Two of the first things to go were the screening of a “snuff” film on the beach, and a scene where a twelve year old girl is tied to a bedpost and raped by one of the main characters. Julian would still hustle himself out to men for money to buy drugs, but Clay would a committed heterosexual. Casting on the film would see many of Hollywood's leading younger male actors looked at for Clay, including a twenty-three year old recent transplant from Oklahoma looking not only for his first leading role, but his first speaking role on screen. Brad Pitt. The producers would instead go with twenty-four year old Andrew McCarthy, an amiable-enough actor who had already made a name for himself with such films as St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink, and who would have another hit film in Mannequin between being cast as Clay and the start of production. For Blair, they would cast Jami Gertz, who had spent years on the cusp of stardom, between her co-starring role as Muffy Tepperman on the iconic 1982 CBS series Square Pegs, to movies such as Quicksilver and Crossroads that were expected to be bigger than they ended up being. The ace up her sleeve was the upcoming vampire horror/comedy film The Lost Boys, which Warner Brothers was so certain was going to be a huge hit, they would actually move it away from its original Spring 1987 release date to a prime mid-July release. The third point in the triangle, Julian, would see Robert Downey Jr. get cast. Today, it's hard to understand just how not famous Downey was at the time. He had been featured in movies like Weird Science and Tuff Turf, and spent a year as a Not Ready For Prime Time Player on what most people agree was the single worst season of Saturday Night Live, but his star was starting to rise.  What the producers did not know, and Downey did not elaborate on, was that, like Julian, Downey was falling down a spiral of drug use, which would make his performance more method-like than anyone could have guessed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were hot in the Los Angeles music scene but were still a couple years from the release of their breakout album, 1989's Mothers Milk, were cast to play a band in one of the party scenes, and additional cast members would include James Spader and Lisanne Falk, who would become semi-famous two years later as one of the Heathers. Impressed with a 1984 British historical drama called Another Country featuring Colin Firth, Cary Elwes and Rupert Everett, Avnet would hire that film's 35 year old director, Marek Kanievska, to make his American directing debut. But Kanievska would be in for a major culture shock when he learned just how different the American studio system was to the British production system. Shooting on the film was set to begin in Los Angeles on May 6th, 1987, and the film was already scheduled to open in theatres barely six months later. One major element that would help keep the movie moving along was cinematographer Ed Lachman. Lachman had been working as a cinematographer for nearly 15 years, and had shot movies like Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace, Susan Sideman's Desperately Seeking Susan, and David Byrne's True Stories.  Lachman knew how to keep things on track for lower budgeted movies, and at only $8m, Less Than Zero was the second lowest budgeted film for Twentieth Century-Fox for the entire year. Not that having a lower budget was going to stop Kanievska and Lachman from trying make the best film they could. They would stage the film in the garish neon lighting the 80s would be best known for, with cool flairs like lighting a poolside discussion between Clay and Julian where the ripples of the water and the underwater lights create an effect on the characters' faces that highlight Julian's literal drowning in his problems. There's also one very awesome shot where Clay's convertible, parked in the middle of a street with its top down, as we see Clay and Blair making out while scores of motorcycles loudly pass by them on either side. And there's a Steadicam shot during the party scene featuring the Chili Peppers which is supposed to be out of this world, but it's likely we'll never see it. Once the film was finished shooting and Kanievska turned in his assembly cut, the studio was not happy with the film. It was edgier than they wanted, and they had a problem with the party scene with the Peppers. Specifically, that the band was jumping around on screen, extremely sweaty, without their shirts on. It also didn't help that Larry Gordon, the President of Fox who had approved the purchase of the book, had been let go before production on the film began, and his replacement, Alan Horn, who did give the final go-ahead on the film, had also been summarily dismissed. His replacement, Leonard Goldberg, really hated the material, thought it was distasteful, but Barry Diller, the chairman of the studio, was still a supporter of the project. During all this infighting, the director, Kanievska, had been released from the film.  Before any test screenings. Test screenings had really become a part of the studio modus operandi in the 1980s, and Fox would often hold their test screenings on the Fox Studio Lot in Century City. There are several screenings rooms on the Fox lot, from the 53 seat William Fox Theatre, to the 476 seat Darryl Zanuck Theatre. Most of the Less Than Zero test screenings would be held in the 120 seat Little Theatre, so that audience reactions would be easier to gauge, and should they want to keep some of the audience over for a post-screening Q&A, it would be easier to recruit eight or ten audience members. That first test screening did not go over well. Even though the screening room was filled with young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and many of them were recruited from nearby malls like the Century City Mall and the Beverly Center based off a stated liking of Andrew McCarthy, they really didn't like Jami Hertz's character, and they really hated Robert Downey Jr's. Several of the harder scenes of drug use with their characters would be toned down, either through judicious editing, or new scenes were shot, such as when Blair is seen dumping her cocaine into a bathroom sink, which was filmed without a director by the cinematographer, Ed Lachman. They'd also shoot a flashback scene to the trio's high school graduation, meant to show them in happier times. The film would be completed three weeks before its November 6th release date, and Fox would book the film into 871 theatres., going up against no less than seven other new movies, including a Shelley Long comedy, Hello Again, the fourth entry in the Death Wish series, yet another Jon Cryer high school movie, Hiding Out, a weird Patrick Swayze sci-fi movie called Steel Dawn, a relatively tame fantasy romance film from Alan Rudolph called Made in Heaven, and a movie called Ruskies which starred a very young Joaquin Phoenix when he was still known as Leaf Phoenix, while also contending with movies like Fatal Attraction, Baby Boom and Dirty Dancing, which were all still doing very well two to four months in theatres. The reviews for the film were mostly bad. If there was any saving grace critically, it would be the praise heaped upon Downey for his raw performance as a drug addict, but of course, no one knew he actually was a drug addict at that time. The film would open in fourth place with $3.01m in ticket sales, less than half of what Fatal Attraction grossed that weekend, in its eighth week of release. And the following weeks' drops would be swift and merciless. Down 36% in its second week, another 41% in its third, and had one of the worst drops in its fourth week, the four day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when many movies were up in ticket sales. By early December, the film was mostly playing in dollar houses, and by the first of the year, Fox had already stopped tracking it, with slightly less than $12.4m in tickets sold. As of the writing of this episode, at the end of November 2022, you cannot find Less Than Zero streaming anywhere, although if you do want to see it online, it's not that hard to find. But it has been available for streaming in the past on sites like Amazon Prime and The Roku Channel, so hopefully it will find its way back to streaming in the future. Or you can find a copy of the 21 year old DVD on Amazon. Thank you for listening. We'll talk again real soon, when our final episode of 2022, Episode 96, on Michael Jackson's Thriller, is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Less Than Zero the movie and the novel, and its author, Bret Easton Ellis. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.

This episode looks at the 1984 debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and its 1987 film adaptation. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we're going to talk about 80s author Bret Easton Ellis and his 1985 novel Less Than Zero, the literal polar opposite of last week's subjects, Jay McInerney and his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. As I mentioned last week, McInerney was twenty-nine when he published Bright Lights, Big City. What I forgot to mention was that he was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, halfway between Boston and New York City, and he would a part of that elite East Coast community that befits the upper class child of a corporate executive. Bret Easton Ellis was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father was a property developer, and his parents would divorce when he was 18. He would attend high school at The Buckley School, a college prep school in nearby Sherman Oaks, whose other famous alumni include a who's who of modern pop culture history, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Tucker Carlson, Laura Dern, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, Matthew Perry, and Nicole Richie. So they both grew up fairly well off. And they both would attend tony colleges in New England.  Ellis would attend Bennington College in Vermont, a private liberal arts college whose alumni include fellow writers Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt, who would both graduate from Bennington the same year as Ellis, 1986. While still attending The Buckley School, the then sixteen year old Ellis would start writing the book he would call Less Than Zero, after the Elvis Costello song. The story would follow a protagonist not unlike Bret Easton Ellis and his adventures through a high school not unlike Buckley. Unlike the final product, Ellis's first draft of Less Than Zero wore its heart on its sleeve, and was written in the third person.  Ellis would do a couple of rewrites of the novel during his final years at Buckley and his first years at Bennington, until his creative writing professor, true crime novelist Joe McGinness, suggested to the young writer that he revert his story back to the first person, which Ellis was at first hesitant to do. But once he did start to rewrite the story as a traditional novel, everything seemed to click. Ellis would have his book finished by the end of the year, and McGinniss was so impressed with the final product that he would submit it to his own agent to send out to publishers. Bret Easton Ellis was only a second year student at the time. And because timing is everything in life, Less Than Zero was being submitted to publishers just as Bright Lights, Big City was tearing up the best seller charts, and the publisher Simon and Schuster would purchase the rights to the book for $5,000. When the book was published in June 1985, Ellis just finished his third year at Bennington.  He was only twenty-one years and three months old. Oh… also… before the book was published, the film producer Marvin Worth, whose credits included Bob Fosse's 1974 doc-drama about Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman, 1979's musical drama The Rose, Bette Midler's breakthrough film as an actress, and the 1983 Dudley Moore comedy Unfaithfully Yours, would purchase the rights to make the novel into a movie, for $7,500. The film would be produced at Twentieth Century-Fox, under the supervision of the studio's then vice president of production, Scott Rudin. The book would become a success upon its release, with young readers gravitating towards Clay and his aimless, meandering tour of the rich and decadent young adults in Los Angeles circa Christmas 1984, bouncing through parties and conversations and sex and drugs and shopping malls. One of those readers who became obsessed with the book was a then-seventeen year old Los Angeles native who had just returned to the city after three years of high school in Northern California. Me. I read Less Than Zero easily three times that summer, enraptured not only with Ellis's minimalist prose but with Clay specifically. Although I was neither bisexual nor a user of drugs, Clay was the closest thing I had ever seen to myself in a book before. I had kept in touch with my school friends from junior high while I lived in Santa Cruz, and I found myself to have drifted far away from them during my time away from them. And then when I went back to Santa Cruz shortly after Christmas in 1985, I had a similar feeling of isolation from a number of my friends there, not six months after leaving high school. I also loved how Ellis threw in a number of then-current Los Angeles-specific references, including two mentions of KROQ DJ Richard Blade, who was the coolest guy in radio on the planet. And thanks to Sirius XM and its First Wave channel, I can still listen to Richard Blade almost daily, but now from wherever I might be in the world. But I digress. My bond with Less Than Zero only deepened the next time I read it in early 1986. One of the things I used to do as a young would-be screenwriter living in Los Angeles was to try and write adaptation of novels when I wasn't going to school, going to movies, or working as a file clerk at a law firm. But one book I couldn't adapt for the life of me was Less Than Zero. Sure, there was a story there, but its episodic nature made it difficult to create a coherent storyline. Fox felt the same way, so they would hire Michael Cristofer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, to do the first draft of the script. Cristofer had just finished writing the adaptation of John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick that Mad Max director George Miller was about to direct, and he would do a literal adaptation of Ellis's book, with all the drugs and sex and violence, except for a slight rehabilitation of the lead character's sexuality. Although it was still the 1980s, with one part of the nation dramatically shifting its perspective on many types of sexuality, it was still Ronald Reagan's 1980s America, and maybe it wasn't a good idea to have the lead character be openly bisexual in a major studio motion picture. Cristofer would complete his first draft of the script in just one month, and producer Marvin Worth really loved it. Problem was, the Fox executives hated it. In a November 18th, 1987, New York Times article about the adaptation, Worth would tell writer Allen Harmetz that he thought Cristofer's script was highly commercial, because “it had something gripping to say about the dilemma of a generation to whom nothing matters.” Which, as someone who had just turned twenty years old eight days after the movie's release and four days before this article came out, I absolutely disagree with. My generation cared about a great many things. We cared about human rights. We cared about ending apartheid. We cared about ending AIDS and what was happening politically and economically. Yeah, we also cared about puffy jean jackets and neon colored clothes and other non-sensical things to take our minds off all the other junk we were dealing with, but it would be typical of a forty something screenwriter and a fiftysomething producer to thing we didn't give a damn about anything. But again, I digress. Worth and the studio would agree on one thing. It wasn't really a drug film, but about young people being destroyed by the privilege of having everything you ever wanted available to you. But the studio would want the movie version of the book to be a bit more sanitized for mainstream consumption. Goodbye, Marvin Worth. Hello, Jon Avnet. In 1986, Jon Avnet was mostly a producer of low-budget films for television, with titles like Between Two Women and Calendar Girl Murders, but he had struck gold in 1983 with a lower-budgeted studio movie with a first-time director and a little known lead actor. That movie was Risky Business, and it made that little known lead actor, Tom Cruise, a bona-fide star. Avnet, wanting to make the move out of television and onto the big screen, would hire Harley Peyton, a former script reader for former Columbia Pictures and MGM/UA head David Begelman, who you might remember from several of our previous episodes, and six-time Oscar nominated producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Peyton would spend weeks in Avnet's office, pouring over every page of the book, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and what to change. Two of the first things to go were the screening of a “snuff” film on the beach, and a scene where a twelve year old girl is tied to a bedpost and raped by one of the main characters. Julian would still hustle himself out to men for money to buy drugs, but Clay would a committed heterosexual. Casting on the film would see many of Hollywood's leading younger male actors looked at for Clay, including a twenty-three year old recent transplant from Oklahoma looking not only for his first leading role, but his first speaking role on screen. Brad Pitt. The producers would instead go with twenty-four year old Andrew McCarthy, an amiable-enough actor who had already made a name for himself with such films as St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink, and who would have another hit film in Mannequin between being cast as Clay and the start of production. For Blair, they would cast Jami Gertz, who had spent years on the cusp of stardom, between her co-starring role as Muffy Tepperman on the iconic 1982 CBS series Square Pegs, to movies such as Quicksilver and Crossroads that were expected to be bigger than they ended up being. The ace up her sleeve was the upcoming vampire horror/comedy film The Lost Boys, which Warner Brothers was so certain was going to be a huge hit, they would actually move it away from its original Spring 1987 release date to a prime mid-July release. The third point in the triangle, Julian, would see Robert Downey Jr. get cast. Today, it's hard to understand just how not famous Downey was at the time. He had been featured in movies like Weird Science and Tuff Turf, and spent a year as a Not Ready For Prime Time Player on what most people agree was the single worst season of Saturday Night Live, but his star was starting to rise.  What the producers did not know, and Downey did not elaborate on, was that, like Julian, Downey was falling down a spiral of drug use, which would make his performance more method-like than anyone could have guessed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were hot in the Los Angeles music scene but were still a couple years from the release of their breakout album, 1989's Mothers Milk, were cast to play a band in one of the party scenes, and additional cast members would include James Spader and Lisanne Falk, who would become semi-famous two years later as one of the Heathers. Impressed with a 1984 British historical drama called Another Country featuring Colin Firth, Cary Elwes and Rupert Everett, Avnet would hire that film's 35 year old director, Marek Kanievska, to make his American directing debut. But Kanievska would be in for a major culture shock when he learned just how different the American studio system was to the British production system. Shooting on the film was set to begin in Los Angeles on May 6th, 1987, and the film was already scheduled to open in theatres barely six months later. One major element that would help keep the movie moving along was cinematographer Ed Lachman. Lachman had been working as a cinematographer for nearly 15 years, and had shot movies like Jonathan Demme's Last Embrace, Susan Sideman's Desperately Seeking Susan, and David Byrne's True Stories.  Lachman knew how to keep things on track for lower budgeted movies, and at only $8m, Less Than Zero was the second lowest budgeted film for Twentieth Century-Fox for the entire year. Not that having a lower budget was going to stop Kanievska and Lachman from trying make the best film they could. They would stage the film in the garish neon lighting the 80s would be best known for, with cool flairs like lighting a poolside discussion between Clay and Julian where the ripples of the water and the underwater lights create an effect on the characters' faces that highlight Julian's literal drowning in his problems. There's also one very awesome shot where Clay's convertible, parked in the middle of a street with its top down, as we see Clay and Blair making out while scores of motorcycles loudly pass by them on either side. And there's a Steadicam shot during the party scene featuring the Chili Peppers which is supposed to be out of this world, but it's likely we'll never see it. Once the film was finished shooting and Kanievska turned in his assembly cut, the studio was not happy with the film. It was edgier than they wanted, and they had a problem with the party scene with the Peppers. Specifically, that the band was jumping around on screen, extremely sweaty, without their shirts on. It also didn't help that Larry Gordon, the President of Fox who had approved the purchase of the book, had been let go before production on the film began, and his replacement, Alan Horn, who did give the final go-ahead on the film, had also been summarily dismissed. His replacement, Leonard Goldberg, really hated the material, thought it was distasteful, but Barry Diller, the chairman of the studio, was still a supporter of the project. During all this infighting, the director, Kanievska, had been released from the film.  Before any test screenings. Test screenings had really become a part of the studio modus operandi in the 1980s, and Fox would often hold their test screenings on the Fox Studio Lot in Century City. There are several screenings rooms on the Fox lot, from the 53 seat William Fox Theatre, to the 476 seat Darryl Zanuck Theatre. Most of the Less Than Zero test screenings would be held in the 120 seat Little Theatre, so that audience reactions would be easier to gauge, and should they want to keep some of the audience over for a post-screening Q&A, it would be easier to recruit eight or ten audience members. That first test screening did not go over well. Even though the screening room was filled with young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and many of them were recruited from nearby malls like the Century City Mall and the Beverly Center based off a stated liking of Andrew McCarthy, they really didn't like Jami Hertz's character, and they really hated Robert Downey Jr's. Several of the harder scenes of drug use with their characters would be toned down, either through judicious editing, or new scenes were shot, such as when Blair is seen dumping her cocaine into a bathroom sink, which was filmed without a director by the cinematographer, Ed Lachman. They'd also shoot a flashback scene to the trio's high school graduation, meant to show them in happier times. The film would be completed three weeks before its November 6th release date, and Fox would book the film into 871 theatres., going up against no less than seven other new movies, including a Shelley Long comedy, Hello Again, the fourth entry in the Death Wish series, yet another Jon Cryer high school movie, Hiding Out, a weird Patrick Swayze sci-fi movie called Steel Dawn, a relatively tame fantasy romance film from Alan Rudolph called Made in Heaven, and a movie called Ruskies which starred a very young Joaquin Phoenix when he was still known as Leaf Phoenix, while also contending with movies like Fatal Attraction, Baby Boom and Dirty Dancing, which were all still doing very well two to four months in theatres. The reviews for the film were mostly bad. If there was any saving grace critically, it would be the praise heaped upon Downey for his raw performance as a drug addict, but of course, no one knew he actually was a drug addict at that time. The film would open in fourth place with $3.01m in ticket sales, less than half of what Fatal Attraction grossed that weekend, in its eighth week of release. And the following weeks' drops would be swift and merciless. Down 36% in its second week, another 41% in its third, and had one of the worst drops in its fourth week, the four day Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when many movies were up in ticket sales. By early December, the film was mostly playing in dollar houses, and by the first of the year, Fox had already stopped tracking it, with slightly less than $12.4m in tickets sold. As of the writing of this episode, at the end of November 2022, you cannot find Less Than Zero streaming anywhere, although if you do want to see it online, it's not that hard to find. But it has been available for streaming in the past on sites like Amazon Prime and The Roku Channel, so hopefully it will find its way back to streaming in the future. Or you can find a copy of the 21 year old DVD on Amazon. Thank you for listening. We'll talk again real soon, when our final episode of 2022, Episode 96, on Michael Jackson's Thriller, is released. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Less Than Zero the movie and the novel, and its author, Bret Easton Ellis. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.

 The Queen is now a King:  Are you obsessed with the monarchy?  Let's discuss.  Then, which EV are you rolling around in?  Don't have one yet? Too scaaaaaared?  Don't worry, we will quelle some of your fears and talk about the good and bad.With No Due Respect S04 E12 (On Her Majesty's Secret EV?)SHOW NOTES:Queen Elizabeth II"God Save the Queen"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm7CZvvsC64King Charles IIIBalmoral CastleQueen Elizabeth II shakes the hand of Martin McGuinness (Former IRA Commander)The Blue BlazerOwen HartPrince WilliamPrince Harry & Megan Markle"Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom" Maharaja (Raj Singh)People Magazine "Stallone""I Come in Peace""Steel Dawn""Best of the Best"Nisan LeafWoody Allen"Revenge of the Nerds"Tesla Model 3Hyundai Ioniq 5Ford F150 LighteningTesla CybertruckBhad BhabieBlack China

 This episode, Dutch and Del chat about recent films and shows.  Which make the cut?!?.  Then we discuss the religion of Trump and the difference between being "brave and outspoken" vs "toxic".With No Due Respect S04E10 (Mascot Revealed)SHOW NOTES:Thor: Love and ThunderPrey    She-HulkSarah Connor T1 vs T2ApacolyptoSteel DawnThe Gray ManDay ShiftMinions: The Rise of GruBullet TrainNopeSuper PetsEverything Everywhere All At OnceLord of The Rings: The Rings of PowerHouse of The DragonTokyo ViceWe Own This CityJohn Barron a.k.a. OrangutrumpPurple Hair I don't Care: Megan RapinoeTHE MASCOT REVEALED

It's Mad Max! No...wait... Episode edited by Linnea. Intro remixed by Linnea. Starcrashed logo designed by Ebba. Music: New Horizons - Futuremono.

An 80's SCIFI retelling of Shane

Lethal Mullet Podcast Episode 149: Steel Dawn The Mullet returns... On tonight's episode The Mullet goes to the post apocalyptic future where water is scarce and warriors fight over it. In a film that is both western in the classic style of Shane and with a Mad Max futuristic fallout Patrick Swayze plays the mysterious Nomad.  ▪️Dojo: the Mullet has a new blade, the Kukri ▪️News: Covering all the latest, releases and pickups ▪️Lethal Pub: a full look at Steel Dawn Give Lethal Mullet a listen: Website https://bit.ly/3j9mvlG IHeartRadio https://ihr.fm/3lSxwJU Spotify https://spoti.fi/3BRg260 Amazon https://amzn.to/3phcsi7 #steeldawn #patrickswayze #anthonyzerbe #lisaniemi #action #lethalmulletpodcast

Part of an ongoing series – the Needless Things Irregulars gather in the Phantom Zone to provide their own unique commentary on classic genre films! It's Swayzuary again and this year the crew are watching the post-apocalyptic action flick – and possible Red Dawn sequel - Steel Dawn! Be sure to join the Needless Things Podcast Facebook Group and get in on the conversation for this week's episode! Let us know what you think! “Procrastibate” by LeSexoflex.com  You can follow Needless Things on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for all the latest on pop culture!

Expect the Unexpected.  Take it Outside.  Be Nice.  No, these are not pearls of wisdom from your grandma – they are the 3 Dictums of DALTON!  Yes, TMI is crazy with Swayze this week, as we first visit the riotous Roadhouse, then the mulleted madness of Steel Dawn!  Pain DO hurt.  #roadhouse #steeldawn #patrickswayze

Patrick Swayze and his bad wig star in Steel Dawn, released November 6th in '87. It's a sci-fi western about a lone desert warrior who helps villages with a water problem. There's a lot of fighting, awkward hair, questionable outfits, and some very cool (and slow) wind racers. Join the Bad Porridge Club on Patreon for TWO bonus episodes each month! https://www.patreon.com/oldiebutagoodiepod Follow the show! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oldiebutagoodiepod/  Facebook: https://fb.me/oldiebutagoodiepod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjfdXHxK_rIUsOEoFSx-hGA  Podcast Platforms: https://linktr.ee/oldiebutagoodiepod  Got feedback? Send us an email at oldiebutagoodiepod@gmail.com Follow the hosts! Sandro Falce - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandrofalce/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/sandrofalce - Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/SandroFalce/ - Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/kegelandgregmusic  - Nerd-Out Podcast: https://anchor.fm/nerd-out-podcast  Zach Adams - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zach4dams/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZackoCaveWizard Donations: https://paypal.me/oldiebutagoodiepod Please do not feel like you have to contribute anything but any donations are greatly appreciated! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Swayze and his real-life wife get busy in the African desert while battling the threats of the subterranean sand-people and post-apolcalyptic warlords. We focus on logistics and Brion.

This week the Brothers are checking out the 1987, Patrick Swayze starring, not-so-classic, Steel Dawn!! Please don't forget to Follow us on Spotify and YouTube!

The 3 main individuals in the Steel Dawn story of Fallout 76 represent the 3 main sides of the Brotherhood of Steel. Here's what I mean... Sponsors: Patreon:Become a patron! https://patreon.com/falloutlorecast Audiobooks.com- Get 3 FREE Audiobooks! https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-11099382?sid=flore Gamefly - Want 2 months of rentals for the price of 1 at Gamefly? https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-10495782?sid=flore Loot Crate- 15% off Loot Crate. Click the link and use coupon code: ROBOTSRADIO https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-13902093?sid=flore GreenMan Gaming- Get awesome discounts on games. https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-13764551?sid=flore NordVPN- Stay Safe on the Internet and get 68% off. https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-12814552?sid=flore Buy cool stuff and support the show! Fallout 76: https://amzn.to/3h99B3U Fallout Cookbook: https://amzn.to/3aGjeod Fallout Boardgame: https://amzn.to/2EgmBq3 The Art of Fallout 4: https://amzn.to/3gfQST3 Get a REAL Nuca-Cola Quantum! https://amzn.to/322O3zG Fallout Funco Pop Figures: https://amzn.to/3gcYsOc Links: Live Shows every Monday Night and game streams: twitch.tv/robotsradio Fallout Hub Podcast w/ Tom & others: https://anchor.fm/the-fallout-hub Talk Fallout and join the Robots Radio fam: Discord: discord.gg/JXKfVhM Stay plugged in on Twitter: twitter.com/falloutlorecast Robots Radio Youtube: youtube.com/c/r0b0ts Send me a note! Email: falloutlorecast@gmail.com www.robotsradio.net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Its a straight-up western, but because its from 1987 it has to be set in a post-apocalyptic world and instead of cowboy hats, we get hair-spray helmets. Despite everything there might be a good movie buried in the sands. So its Shane, Once upon in the West, Star Wars and Fallout 4. Ok, maybe Fallout 4 is Steel Dawn. Clearly, Fallout 76 is Steel Dawn. Anyways, this is a hot mess.  The music doesn't fit. The world doesn't make any damn sense. The plot doesn't make much sense. The hair makes no sense. The action is ludicrous. The Stranger's one-liners are silly. It's just a pile of not doing a good job and yet...somehow it feels like there's something good here. The tone of the whole movie is a fairly conventional western theme. A lone wanderer with a dark past shuffles into town, where he meets a widow and her son along with their jealous and lonely foreman, and has to defend the farm from a rival who wants their resources. That's about as western (or Japanese samurai, of which most spaghetti westerns are imitations of) as a movie gets. Atop of that is solid camera work that highlights this tone and story. It seems like there's a good movie buried here. Yet because its a PA film, you've got a bunch of nonsense; like sand-people, cool looking but useless weapons, crappy and dirty sets and future cars that mostly suck. You've got characters who don't make sense and motivations that are dubious at best. Sprinkle in some scenes that are bonkers like the romance in the dirt, the party crashers at "the gathering", inept henchmen and why they live in the wasteland in the first place makes this an absolute must do and likely a favorite for many a viewer.

Yo Gameaholics! Colin and Luke are back to discuss Fallout 76! They breakdown all the gameplay to the story from the Wastelanders and Steel Dawn updates! Finally they touch on their universal rating of the game (45:17)

This game's initial release had its own kind of fallout. What's the half-life of those issues? Is it better now? Xbox Game Pass has selected an online action role-playing game for this episode. Seizing the opportunity, we did something a bit different and played our hour cooperatively. Will this impact our decision to keep playing this Bethesda Game Studios title? Listen and find out! What do you think? Let us know! Hit us up on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tc1h1d Drop us an email at tc.1h1d(at)outlook[dot]com Thanks for taking this ride with us :-) --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/1-hour-1-decision/message

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Your hosts KDB and Suliore meet over the medium of Skype to discuss Steel Dawn, the latest update to Fallout 76! LINKS! Find us on social media, and also here we have other links we recommend you check out! Tapes Twitter: https://twitter.com/TFTWpod Tapes Insta: @tapesfromthewastes KDB Twitter: https://twitter.com/K_D_B_ Suliore Twitter: https://twitter.com/engold08 Nintenfo Podcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/NintenfoP Tamrielic Adventures Twitter: https://twitter.com/TamrielicP Please do subscribe to get episodes straight to your podcast feeds, and do leave a rating / review - it helps us out so much!

Cette semaine, plusieurs nouvelles et nos impressions de Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Informations complémentaires : Arcade Québec à CKRL (89.1) : https://www.ckrl.qc.ca/show/arcade-quebec/ Assassin's Creed Valhalla : https://www.ubisoft.com/en-ca/game/assassins-creed/valhalla TAG E-Karting & Amusement : https://www.tagekarting.com/en/home.html Fallout 76: Steel Dawn : https://youtu.be/9CCEwogSTZE Avec : Stéphane Goulet (@pinponey) Guillaume Duplain (@gyom999) Jeff Dion (@JF_dion) Suivez-nous : arcadequebec.com facebook.com/arcadequebec twitter : @arcadeqc twitch.tv/arcadeqc Merci!

Steel Dawn is upon us and tonight is all about the Brotherhood of the traveling power armor. In the news is of course the early drop of Steel Dawn, don't worry, no spoilers. Also the latest bargains in the atomic shop. Then we chat about the OG Bro Ho, the Appalachian faction led by Taggerdy in our lore segment. Enjoy!

In deze aflevering van de podcast bespreken we onder andere Immortals: Fenyx Rising. De game van de Assassin's Creed Odyssey ontwikkelaars valt goed in de smaak. Daarnaast praten we over Steel Dawn, de Fallout 76 update die plots online is gekomen. Verder bespreken we het Fortnite event met Galactus, Daredevil die terug is bij Marvel, games die beter blijken te presteren op PS5 en moeten we het even spoilervrij hebben over The Mandalorian.

This week in the news we discuss next-gen upgrades for Metro Exodus, the next Metro game, the multiplayer potential of Metro, 4A games new IP, Read Dead Online standalone release, Fallout 76 Steel Dawn early release, Fornite Crew subscription value proposition, Watch Dogs Legion multiplayer delay, Rainbow 6 Siege 120 FPS update, Minecraft Dungeons Season Pass 2, Cuphead DLC delay, Control December Game Pass tease, and December Games with Gold. We also discuss games we’ve been playing including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, Mars Horizon, Crusader Kings 3, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

This week Wes and Charlie talk more about Red Dead Redemption 2, Dead by Daylight, and Watch Dogs: Legion. Their Zen 3 5800X should arrive next week. Football Manager 2021 and Fallout 76 Steel Dawn were released last week. Last of Us 2, Fall Guys, and Hades all received significant recognition during the Golden Joystick Awards this year. The Steam Autumn sale is underway and Doom Eternal is at the deepest discount seen yet. Cyber Monday begins tomorrow, but it probably makes sense to look at historical pricing for products before you pull the trigger on any deep discounts, to be sure. Immortals Fenyx Rising releases next week and it appears you may be able to pre-load Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam as early as 9 December. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Screen Peakers!   Today's Daily Peak into the Video Game News! - Watch Dogs: Legion Online multiplayer mode delayed to early 2021! - Fallout 76 new expansion "Steel Dawn" accidentally releases early! - Marvel's Avengers has yet to recoup its production costs for Square Enix!   SUBSCRIBE TO THE SCREEN PEAKERS YOUTUBE CHANNEL! - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN7Vx413UwnjpMoasXZvQrA?sub_confirmation=1   The Screen Peakers Video Game Podcast is a place for best friends to talk games, share their opinions and peak together!   Please subscribe to stay up to date with all the latest Screen Peakers episodes! And if you enjoyed us, give us a 5 star rating!   Follow the Screen Peakers on Twitch for LIVE PEAKING! - Screen Peakers Live! - twitch.tv/screenpeakerslive   Support the Screen Peakers! Buy a shirt! - The Peak Store - peakstore.bigcartel.com   Follow the Peakers on Instagram @screenpeakers!   Follow Tony on Twitter and Instagram!  Twitter - @iamtonyreavis Instagram - @iamtonyreavis   Join the conversation by joining the official Screen Peakers Podcast Discord! - https://discord.gg/wCShfxM

Join Scott and Dave as they discuss Steel Dawn.  Patrick Swayze month continues on OAMRFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/OAMR-112273023906982 Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSy8gSmDzYPYwZldPkNQmuQ/ Email: oamoviereviews@gmail.comTwitter:https://twitter.com/OA_MovieReviews 

Welcome to Episode 041 of The RPG After Years! This week, Scott, Jay, and Rich discuss the PS5 now that some of us have our hands on it! What have the boys been up to? Scott and Rich: a lot of next-gen stuff. Jay: His phone broke leading to a Final Fantasy V. The Patreon is still going strong. You can get early access to episodes, ad-free episodes, lots of bonus episodes, live recording access, and access to the video version of the show; amongst many other benefits! patreon.com/rpgafteryear The RPG After Years is hosting an RPG Club! Think of it like a book club, but for RPGs. For those participating, you have until November 22nd to complete the "9S Captured" mission in NieR: Automata! In the news: Nioh 2: The Complete EdItion Coming to PS4, PS5, and Steam on February 5th; final DLC out on December 17th In the news: Fallout 76’s Steel Dawn update launches on December 1 In the news: Falcom is making another new Trails title set for release in Japan by September 2021 We cover the Sony Playstation 5 release and our thoughts and feelings on it now that we have our hands on it. What do we look forward to in the future? How do we feel about the launch titles we've played so far? How is Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Godfall, and the like? Next week: a surprise interview with one of our listeners and guests! We'll kick it and chill with GenericFighter! Please support the show at patreon.com/rpgafteryears Join us on our Discord server! discord.gg/3WPBgur Watch the show live on Twitch! We typically stream the main episodes at 9am EST on Sundays. Keep an eye out on Twitter and Discord for extra bonus recordings or time changes. It's all at twitch.tv/rpgafteryears Send a Carrier Pigeon or Whatever: Twitter: @RPGYEARSEmail: rpgafteryears@gmail.com Check out our merch store at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RPGAfterYears/explore We Can Make This Work Probably Network: This podcast is a production of the We Can Make This Work (Probably) Network follow us below to keep up with this show and discover our many other podcasts! The place for those with questionable taste! ProbablyWork.com,Twitter, Facebook, Instagram @ProbablyWorkEmail: ProbablyWorkPod@gmail.com Master list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13CgtJfptz1S3Da2HUsJDK86SfAIPMGA-Rmi4YZUpTGw/edit?usp=sharing Album art is by Mrs. Dizzy. Find her on Instagram here. Don't forget: Patrons get access to an exclusive podcast RSS feed that allows the ad-free version of the show and all other bonus content to be delivered straight to your favorite podcast app!

The two year anniversary of Fallout 76! What an amazing two year's it has been! We cover bonus challenges, Mamma Merg Merg's mystery pick sale and the launch of Next Generation consoles! We also talk about Steel Dawn and have one really silly Reddit rant to share. Audiobooks.com - Get 3 FREE audiobooks (2 VIP!) https://www.jdoqocy.com/click-100173810-11099382?sid=fhub Get 15% off Lootcrate! Use the link: https://www.tkqlhce.com/click-100173810-13902093?sid=fhub And the code: ROBOTSRADIO ABOUT THE FALLOUT HUB: Twitter: https://twitter.com/thefallouthub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefallouthubpodcast/ Website: https://robotsradio.net/ Email: thefallouthubpodcast@gmail.com FOLLOW MR ROBOTS: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRtCSeN1UrmgTvZiRkMPeHw Twitter: https://twitter.com/robots_radio Fallout Lorecast: https://anchor.fm/fallout-lorecast FOLLOW KENNETH VIGUE: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4NZlzYR8taNHr_WCaxUyCA Twitter: https://twitter.com/fchadfallout76 Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/chadfallout76podcast CHAD: A Fallout 76 Story Podcast: https://anchor.fm/fallout76podcast FOLLOW DAVE CHAFINZ: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa7VnQCroPQ-A54gjwFokRg Twitter: https://twitter.com/MysteryTimeLive Mystery Time Live: https://anchor.fm/mystery-time-live/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-fallout-hub/message Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Holly puts her killin' days behind her but finds its all she's really good at in the wasteland of Steel Dawn (1987), a forgotten Patrick Swazye vehicle that's a cross between Mad Max and Shane. A retired swordslinger befriends a frontier woman and her son and finds himself pushed back into a life of murderin' when an evil baddie sets his sights on their land. Listen as we discover one of the most hilarious hairdos in cinema history among the walrusmen of the post-apocalyptic futureworld on this week's exciting episode! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'll be covering some obscure and forgotten B movies that told us about the coming mad max scenario.  Instead of the obvious ones like Road Warrior, I'll be covering the worstbest.  We will look at The Taking of Beverly Hills, Warrior of the Lost World (MST3K version), Freejack, Battletruck, Steel Dawn, Fortress and Class of 1984. Jamie joins me.

we’re back to watching crap

Happy Mother's Day from FANTASM. Or mom's were crazy about Patrick Swayze and we are super fans. Join us and stream along using the Tubi app and relive this highly underrated cult classic post-apocalyptic fantasy action epic, Steel Dawn!

Hello i vårsolen! Vi hoppas alla mår fint i coronatider och håller sig friska med lite film och tv-serier. Det har vi i alla fall. Vi har bland annat sett Rian Johnsons stjärnspäckade who dunnit film Knives Out med Daniel Craig i högform i spetsen. Mathias har kollat på den dystra men vacka The Nightingale som får en att fundera på om människans existens berättigande. Tom har spanat in Patrick Swayze när han rockar 80-talet och svärd i Mad Max-doftande Steel Dawn. I nya belgiska Netflix-serien Into the Night är man skraj för solljuset. Tom har sett andra säsongen av Ricky Gervais After Life, men saknar den bittra och vassa tonen från första säsongen. Tom Cruise vill till rymden. Nic Cage ska bli tigerkung och hur i helvete använder man snäckskalen i Demolition man från 1993? Många frågor! Men finns det några svar? IN och lyssna för bövelen!

Welcome to another episode of the "Shh, The Movie Is Starting" podcast! Today hosts Jeremiah & Chris are joined by returning guest Archangelo Crelencia to watch Patrick Swayze's infamous post-"Dirty Dancing" post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" rip-off "Steel Dawn". That's a lot of quotes, BROTHER!

Lenin drops in to help us review 'The Invisible Man', we watch Patrick Swayze nightmare 'Steel Dawn' and discuss the invention of the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell. SHOW NOTES Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. The Invisible Man is a 2020 science fiction horror film written and directed by Leigh Whannell. A contemporary adaptation and reimagining of the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells and a reboot of The Invisible Man film series of the 1930s, it follows a woman who, after the apparent suicide of her abusive and wealthy boyfriend, believes she is being stalked by him. Steel Dawn is a 1987 American post-apocalyptic science fiction action film directed by Lance Hool and starring Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi. The working title of the film, which mixes the genres of science fiction and western, was Desert Warrior. Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a warrior wandering through the desert comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by a murderous gang that is after the water they control.

Doug Lefler joins me on the podcast today to discuss his extensive Hollywood career as well as his thoughts on what makes a great story. Doug is a storyboard artist, a writer, a director, and a second unit director. His film and TV credits span from The Black Cauldron to Denver: The Last Dinosaur to Steel Dawn to Army of Darkness to Hercules: The Legendary Journeys to Xena: Warrior Princess to Deadpool 2 to Dragonheart: A New Beginning, and more. Enjoy the show!

DopeRamblings was born out of a mutual love and respect of film by Reece and Chris.​​They both admire all of the aspects that go in to the movie industry. Be it Cinematography, Film Photography, Directing, Acting etc etc. They bonded over Chris' lack of major film knowledge, never seeing most of the 'big 50', and decided to go on a quest to watch their 6 featured films from the worlds biggest Actors and Actresses, focusing on a different one each season.   This week we watch Steel Dawn, as part of a collab with BadRadMoviePodcast. We are joined this week by Reece's fiance Kiera! Listen as we watch this 1987 classic 'Steel Dawn' before we head down to friend of the podcast Dickie 'Baby boy' Jones' wedding.

On this Episode, Richard, along with Chris and Reece (Dope Ramblings Podcast).  Talk about this 1987 Film Starring Patrick Swayze! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/badradmovies/support

DopeRamblings was born out of a mutual love and respect of film by Reece and Chris.​​They both admire all of the aspects that go in to the movie industry. Be it Cinematography, Film Photography, Directing, Acting etc etc. They bonded over Chris' lack of major film knowledge, never seeing most of the 'big 50', and decided to go on a quest to watch their 6 featured films from the worlds biggest Actors and Actresses, focusing on a different one each season.   This week we watch Steel Dawn, as part of a collab with BadRadMoviePodcast. We are joined this week by Reece's fiance Kiera! Listen as we watch this 1987 classic 'Steel Dawn' before we head down to friend of the podcast Dickie 'Baby boy' Jones' wedding.

Doktor Faux returns to Hypercube just in-time after returning his ten-year overdue copy of Steel Dawn to the Blockbuster Quick Drop. Reverand peas is super-excited that robo-peas will be replacing him on the show, and Caller 23 recites the fist 1,438 digits of Pi when some rambunctious asshole shows up and decides they should be on the show.

DopeRamblings was born out of a mutual love and respect of film by Reece and Chris.​​They both admire all of the aspects that go in to the movie industry. Be it Cinematography, Film Photography, Directing, Acting etc etc. They bonded over Chris' lack of major film knowledge, never seeing most of the 'big 50', and decided to go on a quest to watch their 6 featured films from the worlds biggest Actors and Actresses, focusing on a different one each season.   This week we watch Steel Dawn, as part of a collab with BadRadMoviePodcast. We are joined this week by Reece's fiance Kiera! Listen as we watch this 1987 classic 'Steel Dawn' before we head down to friend of the podcast Dickie 'Baby boy' Jones' wedding. In this trailer reaction we talk about stalkers, Reece's over sized feet and why EDM musicians have to be 5ft tall.    ENJOY!!   Follow us on Instagram for more updates: @DopeRamblings   Sponsor us on Patreon www.patreon.com/DopeRamblings

http://www.searchforschlock.com/media/podcasts/sfs-157-SteelDawn.mp3 Download MP3 Steel Dawn, an early vehicle for Skatetown, USA star Patrick Swayze, is described by Wikipedia as "not to be confused with Dawn Steel." It's so much more than that, though. Swayze plays a wandering swordsman named, of course, Nomad, who finds himself in the plot of Shane, but after the apocalypse. Sure, Nomad would prefer to just do headstands in the desert and meditate, but that peace is taken from him when his mentor is murdered by what appears to be the frontman for an 80s hair metal band. To get his revenge, he'll have to befriend a terrible child actor. We liked the movie at the time...although I have to admit, writing about it now, it's not ringing any bells.Original post located at searchforschlock.com.

Wych Vs. The Doomsday Clock: Week #68, 7 Hours 15 Minutes to Doomsday – Full Metal Wolverine On this episode Wych watches the sunrise and embraces his inner point break This week: Hair Metal Assassins, Farmers and Swayze MOVIE TITLE: Steel Dawn (1987) (1:40 Run time)IMDB DESCRIPTION:In a post-apocalyptic world, a warrior wandering through the desert comes upon a group of settlers who are being menaced by a murderous gang that is after the water they control.Director: Lance Hool Known For: Being the writer on the Chuck Norris vehicle: Missing in Action & Directing Missing in Action 2Stars: Patrick Swayze … Nomad Best known for 1989’s Road House, 1991’s Point Break and 1984’s Red Dawn (Wolverines!) Lisa Niemi … Kasha Best known for appearing as Carla Frost in Super Force the TV Movie and the Series (apparently) Anthony Zerbe … Damnil Best known for the evil Matthias in 1971’s Omega Man, Councillor Hamann in the Matrix series and being a random dirty villain on american tv for more than 40 years Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WychVsTheDoomsdayClock/iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/wych-vs.-the-doomsday-clock/id1198996032?mt=2Legion Podcasts: http://www.legionpodcasts.com/wych-vs-the-doomsday-clock/Twitter: @TheWychSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/77nXqRIDFOzh0C4bY9IL2PStitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/bind-on-equip/wych-vs-the-doomsday-clock?refid=stprTuneIn: http://tunein.com/program/?ProgramId=954080SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/wychvsthedoomsdayclock/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wychvsthedoomsdayclockpodcast/Android users just search for Wych in your favourite app Remember to check out all of the other [...] The post Wych Vs. The Doomsday Clock: Week #68, 7 Hours 15 Minutes to Doomsday – Steel Dawn (1987) appeared first on Legion.

The MFF podcast is back, and this week we’re talking about the 1987 post-apocalyptic movie Steel Dawn. It is a really weird little thing that surrounds Patrick Swayze with lots of sands, aluminum swords and very slow moving vehicles. Steel Dawn is basically a ripoff of Mad Max, Shane and every other movie that might be somewhat similar (and we love that fact). It is an unpretentious flick that was released by Vestron Video (remember them!?) and is meant to be nothing more than a cheeky exercise in low budget film making. In this podcast, you will hear us talk about Hulk Hogan lookalikes, weird sand creatures and Patrick Swayze doing everything with a sword except for actually sword fighting. You will love it!

As promised, we return with the "classic" Patrick Swayze movie Steel Dawn. Brad has a Smooth Ambler bourbon and Brian creates: The Dirty Swayze: Vodka infused with fresh rosemary, thyme, and sage over Beef Stock ice cubes with a splash of lemon juice garnish with a rosemary sprig.Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/bambthepod/)

Hosts Dave and Nate begin by tackling the topic of Church. It's starts with wondering why there are no Christian Glam Rock Bands and ends with them discussing if an afterlife is worth wanting. A mystery jogger with a serious case of the runs assaulted an alley in New Mexico and Selling Out has the scoop. Nate has discovered an herb called Kratom. A natural remedy that may have the ability to help many people. What does it do and how long will we have access to it? Dave makes a plea to 80's star Phoebe Cates, requesting her return to the public eye but gets side swiped by the Patrick Swayze flick Steel Dawn. Nate reviews the Punk in Drublic Draft Beer and Music Festival headlined by NOFX. MAIN TOPIC/CHURCH 2:30 Bowie would make me read the bible 8:20 Superstitions 9:44 Religious Weaponry 11:45 My Dad's Cult 15:00 Community 17:00 Not to Worship, Atheist vs Agnostic 20:30 The Afterlife OTHER TOPICS 26:03 The Jogger 32:06 Kratom 43:09 Plea for Phoebe 53:07 Punk in Drublic Review

In this Throwback Theater episode, Curtiss, Jason, Jon and Joseph re-visit Steel Dawn.

On this episode we taste Oreo flavored candy canes. We review Meltdown, Steel Dawn, and TMNT: The Secret of the Ooze for Blast from the Past. We discuss the Jurassic World 2 trailer, the latest Destiny 2 update, and the DC/CW crossover Crisis on Earth X for current events. For our main talking point we chat about the possibility of Disney buying 20th Century Fox.

Steel Dawn v Metamorphosis on the roulette, the fourth and final round of our favorite movie per year of our lifetime, and we chat Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Rogue One, Black Demons, Zombie 4: After Death, Red vs Blue: Seasons 1-13, Deep Rising, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and much more!

Tillsammans med en expert så ser vi Dirty Dancing, diskuterar Road House och försöker hitta meriter med Steel Dawn.

Special Guest Appearance by Eric Knapp! He is Deadly! He is Unforgiving! He has his own Theme Song! He inspired most of the fighting video games you played in the 90s! He is the one and only Master of the Flying Guillotine! This Week's Topic: Intro To Martial Arts Movies 101 Other Movies Mentioned: The One Armed Boxer/ Crippled Masters/ Highlander/ The Avengers/ Batman Begins/ Kill Bill Vol. I/ Godzilla (Japanese Franchise)/ The Creature from the Black Lagoon/ Man of Steel/ Dawn of the Dead (1978)/ The Shining/ 300/ Pacific Rim/ Reservoir Dogs/ Pulp Fiction/ Inglorious Basterds See the Master in actiion right HERE! Next Week: Ong-Bak!

Welcome to the 44th episode of See You Next Wednesday, where we sit down and bask in the post-Christmas haze to talk about... dick jokes! Plus Steel Dawn, Jack Reacher, Big Black, U2 -- and a very special Hero Swap Battle Royale! Happy Holidays! Don't forget -- you can find us on  Twitter, Facebook, 

Yes, it IS possible to have a post-apocalypse without zombies, and this is the first monthly episode of MOZ's Post-Apocalyptic Summer.  Brother D reviews the movie Steel Dawn (dir. Lance Hool) and he's joined by Miss Bren to talk about the movies The War Game (dir. Peter Watkins) and Panic in Year Zero! (dir. Ray Milland).  We have a question for the PAQ, or Post-Apocalyptic Quiz, post-apocalyptic news, post-apocalyptic movie trailers . . . and the Feedback Discussion (and even the briefest of mentions of post-apocalyptic porn).Email us at MailOrderZombie@gmail.com or call us at 206-202-2505!Palavr.com Forums - http://palavr.com/forum.php/Phase 7 at Bloody-Disgusting.com - http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/selects/releases/phase7/Day of the Dead Convention - http://www.daysofthedead.net/Cinema Fromage - http://www.cinemafromage.com/Disney, Indiana - http://www.disneyindiana.comThe BoneBat Show - http://bonehand.com/BoneBat.htmlThe Wasteland Radio Podcast - http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wasteland-Radio-Podcast/228370393844694The Revenant presented by Midnight Movie Central's Shocking Saturday Nights  - http://tinyurl.com/mozrevenantPseudopod 233: Association - http://pseudopod.org/2011/06/10/pseudopod-233-association/Oren Peli's untitled post-apocalyptic film? - http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2011/06/22/Oren-Pelis-got-a-postapocalyptic-horror-flick-in-the-worksApocalyptic strangers descend on French village - http://af.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idAFTRE75Q1AO20110627Trent Reznor's Year Zero finds writer - http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/fight-club-writer-pen-trent- 205500Rage videogame coming soon - http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=13947197Rage comic book - http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2011/06/rage-comic-book-based-on-id-softwares-video-game-hits-stores/1Rage - http://www.rage.com/ Rage comic page progress - http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/455/rage-page-process(Various production music produced by Kevin MacLeod.)