Podcasts about Sundance Institute

In this episode, Hilliard and guest co-host writer/producer Deonte Staats sit down for a two hour, nothing but game conversation with Showrunner/Co-Creator of the new MAX hit series DUSTER!Highlights: LaToya's time in the Warner Bros Writers Workshop, the Overall Deal and how it works, the John Wells system, creating the show Duster, casting, staffing the room, the importance of what's on the page and we later open it up for a super fun Q&A with a group of Emerging Writers who were in the building!About LaToya: Born and raised in Los Angeles, writer-producer LaToya Morgan is known for her work on Shameless, Parenthood, Turn: Washington's Spies, Into the Badlands and The Walking Dead.Recently, she joined forces with J.J. Abrams to co-create, showrun and executive produce the HBO MAX series Duster under her shingle TinkerToy Productions alongside Bad Robot for Warner Brothers Television which had its international premiere at Canne series, the Cannes International Series Festival in France in the Spring of 2025. The show premiered May 15th, 2025 is currently airing on the streamer weekly on Thursday nights through July.On the feature side, Morgan has projects at Universal, Paramount, and was tapped by Amazon/MGM and horror grandmaster George Romero's family to write a new sequel to the iconic film Night of the Living Dead.Morgan is an advisor and mentor for the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, and Outfest Episodic Labs and the WGA's Inclusion and Equity committee. She wrote, produced and directed the award winning short film Team Marilyn which was distributed on STARZ and is expanding into a feature film. In addition to writing for DC Comics, Morgan's best-selling genre-bending sci-fi comic book series Dark Blood was recently published by BOOM! Studios. She was enlisted by the company once again – this time along with Creed star Michael B. Jordan and his company Outlier Society – to write Creed: The Next Round, the first ever comic book tie-in for the franchise.Morgan holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory, is a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee, and a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.Subscribe, like, follow, share & 5-star review!Our Motto: “Keep it GAME all day!"WWW.SCREENWRITERSRANTROOM.COMFor information, Merch (NEW T-SHIRTS/HOODIES), and all things Rant Room!https://screenwriters-rant-room.printify.me/productsEMAIL: ScreenwritersRantRoom@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@Hilliard Guess on all social media@Hilliardguess.bsky.socialIG: @ScreenwritersRantRoomGuests:@Morganicink@CheckmystaatsWE ARE NOW OPEN TO SPONSORSHIPS AND BRANDING OPPORTUNITIES⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ :Screenwritersrantroom@gmail.com

On the cusp of the greatest wealth transfer in history—with $124 trillion moving between generations in the next 20 years—we explore how philanthropy can be transformative, and transformed. Nationally recognized philanthropic leader Dimple Abichandani has crafted a blueprint for how wealth can be transformed into a more just and sustainable future in times of rapid change and crisis. Can philanthropy be an anti-racist, feminist, relational, and joyful expression of solidarity? In A New Era of Philanthropy, Dimple argues that yes, philanthropy can be these things—and for the future we seek, and for the sector to achieve its greatest impact, it must be. With fresh answers to the question of how philanthropy can meet this high-stakes moment—from reimagining governance to aligning investments to crisis funding and beyond—she explains how paradigm shifts can move us forward, beyond critique into real transformation, with relatable stories about funders who are forging a new era of philanthropy. About the Speakers Dimple Abichandani is a nationally recognized philanthropic leader, lawyer, and author of A New Era of Philanthropy: Ten Practices to Transform Wealth Into a More Just and Sustainable Future, a book that reimagines how philanthropy can meet this moment. For two decades, she has worked to reshape philanthropy's purpose and practice while leading innovative funding institutions. As executive director of the General Service Foundation (2015–2022), she aligned the foundation's grantmaking, investments, and governance with justice values.  A National Center for Family Philanthropy Fellow, Abichandani's leadership has been recognized with a Scrivener Award for Creative Grantmaking. She serves on the Board of Directors of Solidaire Network and has served on the boards/steering committees of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, Northern California Grantmakers, and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she advises donors and foundations on transforming wealth into a just and sustainable future. Tegan Acton founded Wildcard Giving, a family of philanthropic entities created following the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014. Acton serves as the principal at each of the sister entities, which work together to further civic values, collective responsibility and our common humanity. Prior to establishing Wildcard Giving, Acton served as the director of communications and strategic initiatives for the vice provost of undergraduate education at Stanford University. She additionally held positions at Yahoo! and the Sundance Institute, and graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a BA in English and Political Science. Acton's personal commitments include serving on the Executive Committee for the Collaborative for Gender and Reproductive Equity, chairing the Board of Trustees of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and investing in independent films through her production company Good Gravy Films. The Commonwealth Club of California is a nonprofit public forum; we welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our programming. A Social Impact Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs. OrganizerVirginia Cheung  This program contains EXPLICIT language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Media in the Mix, the only podcast produced and hosted by the School of Communication at American University. Join us as we create a safe space to explore topics and communication at the intersection of social justice, tech, innovation & pop culture. This week on Media in the Mix, we're joined by none other than, Jamie Sisley! Jamie Sisley is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who recently wrote and directed "Stay Awake," a narrative feature film that premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the AG Kino Gilde Auteur Award and was Honorable Mention for the Crystal Bear. Starring Chrissy Metz ("This Is Us"), Wyatt Oleff (“IT," Netflix's “I Am Not Okay With This," Apple's “City on Fire”), and Fin Argus (Max's “Queer As Folk,” “The Other Two”), "Stay Awake" is a personal exploration of the roller coaster ride that families go on while trying to help their loved ones battle addiction. The feature is based off a short film of the same name that Jamie also wrote and directed. The short film premiered at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, won both the National Board of Review Film Prize and Slamdance Grand Jury Prize, and played over 120 film festivals around the world.In addition, Jamie received an Emmy Nomination for his feature documentary, "Farewell Ferris Wheel." Shot over the course of six years, "Farewell Ferris Wheel" explores how the U.S. Carnival industry fights to keep itself alive by legally employing Mexican migrant workers with the controversial H-2B guestworker visa. The film won the Creative Promise Award from the Tribeca Film Institute, received an Imagen Award Nomination for the positive portrayal of Latinos in entertainment, and was nationally broadcast on PBS and Netflix.Jamie's work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, SFFILM, Tribeca Film Institute, Film Independent, ITVS, and The Smithsonian Institute. Prior to film, Jamie was an artist manager in the music industry at Red Light Management.Learn more about SOC in the links below. Graduate Admissions:http://www.american.edu/soc/admissions/index.cfmUndergraduate Admission:https://www.american.edu/admissions/ Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ausoc/Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/au_socFollow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ausoc/?hl=en

We are joined by Director of Photography and first-time Academy Award® nominee Jarin Blaschke, as well as Director Robert Eggers, to discuss the stunning cinematography of “Nosferatu.” Together, the frequent collaborators delivered a gothic masterpiece, blending German romanticism and chilling horror into stunning, painterly visuals. In this conversation, Eggers and Blaschke discuss the meticulous development of the film's look, the challenges of shooting with practical lighting, and their shared love for highly composed one-take shots. From the fog-drenched crossroads to the eerie interiors of Orlok's castle, the pair reveal the painstaking care and simple, practical ingenuity that brought this cinematic fever dream to life.“I'm just trying to curate life… What kind of optics just feel right? The little flare around the windows. What is the lens that just feels nice? Let's just look at a bunch of those. Let's have lenses made. We're very privileged in that we can do that now and see what that looks like.”—Jarin Blaschke, Director of Photography, “Nosferatu”This conversation was a live webinar as part of Dolby Creator Lab's partnership with Sundance Collab, the digital platform from the Sundance Institute designed for filmmakers, with exclusive webinars, curated resources, and free educational videos.Be sure to check out “Nosferatu” in Dolby Vision® and Dolby Atmos®, in select theaters.Please subscribe to Dolby Creator Talks wherever you get your podcasts.You can also check out the video for this episode.Our previous episode with Robert Eggers and Sound Designer Damian Volpe, discussing the sound of "Nosferatu,” is now on YouTube. Learn more about the Dolby Creator Lab and check out Dolby.com. Connect with Dolby on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Hosted by Jane Pauley. CBS News chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa takes a look at President Trum's first week back in office. Also: Tracy Smith talks with Tony Award-winning superstar Idina Menzel about her new musical "Redwood"; Lee Cowan talked with actor Robert Redford, founder of the non-profit Sundance Institute, about the history of the Sundance Film Festival; Seth Doane sits down with Sir Paul Smith to discuss his unexpected career in fashion; and comedian and actress Susie Essman takes "Sunday Morning" viewers on a tour of the Bronx. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week I speak with my friend Stephanie Lepp (Website | LinkedIn), two-time Webby Award-winning producer and storyteller devoted to leaving “no insight left behind” with playful and provocative media experiments that challenge our limitations of perspective. Stephanie is the former Executive Director at the Institute for Cultural Evolution and former Executive Producer at the Center for Humane Technology. Her work has been covered by NPR and the MIT Technology Review, supported by the Mozilla Foundation and Sundance Institute, and featured on Future Fossils Podcast twice — first in episode 154 for her project Deep Reckonings and then in episode 205 with Greg Thomas on Jazz Leadership and Antagonistic Cooperation.Her latest project, Faces of X, pits actors against themselves in scripted trialogues between the politically liberal and conversative positions on major social issues, with a third role swooping in to observe what each side gets right and what they have in common. I support this work wholeheartedly. In my endless efforts to distill the key themes of Humans On The Loop, one of them is surely how our increasing connectivity can — if used wisely — help each of us identify our blind spots, find new respect and compassion for others, and discover new things about our ever-evolving selves (at every scale, from within the human body to the Big We of the biosphere and beyond).Thanks for listening and enjoy this conversation!Project LinksLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:00:48 – Intro0:06:33 – The Black, White, and Gray of Agency0:10:54 – Stephanie's Initiation into Multiperspectivalism0:15:57 – Hegelian Synthesis with Faces of X0:23:53 – Reconciling Culture & Geography0:29:02 – Improvising Faces of X for AI0:46:34 – Do Artifacts Have Politics?0:50:04 – Playing in An Orchestra of Perspectives0:55:10 – Increasing Agency in Policy & Voting1:05:55 – Self-Determination in The Family1:08:39 – Thanks & OutroOther Mentions• Damien Walter on Andor vs. The Acolyte• William Irwin Thompson• John Perry Barlow's “A Declaration for The Independence of Cyberspace”• Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell's “Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster”• Liv Boeree• Allen Ginsberg• Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch• Singularity University• Android Jones + Anson Phong's Chimera• Basecamp• Grimes• Langdon Winner's “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”• Ibram X. Kendi• Coleman Hughes• Jim Rutt This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Would you like a closer look at how some of your favorite TV shows and films are made? Join us for a conversation with two editors Jon Higgins and Daysha Broadway!

November 22, 2024, Park City, UT — The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced details for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival's gala fundraiser, Celebrating Sundance Institute Presented by Google TV, which will take place on Friday, January 24, 2025 at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley in Utah. The event will be an evening in celebration of Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Artist Programs at Sundance Institute, for her longstanding commitment to nurturing artists and cultivating independent film through the Sundance Labs, where visionary artists convene to develop groundbreaking projects through an in-depth creative process, for the past four decades. The annual Vanguard Awards Presented by Acura will be awarded during the evening to Sean Wang, writer and director of Dìdi (弟弟), and Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, co-directors of Sugarcane, who premiered their films at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The annual gala enables the nonprofit to raise funds to support independent artists year-round through labs, grants, and public programming that nurture artists from all over the world. The 2025 event is made possible with the generous support of Google TV. The Festival will take place from January 23–February 2, 2025, in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, with a selection of titles available online from January 30–February 2, 2025 for audiences across the country to discover bold independent storytelling. Starting in 1981, Michelle Satter worked alongside Robert Redford who founded the Sundance Institute. Together with a committed team of leaders and collaborators, they developed impactful ways of mentoring emerging independent storytellers in a creative, rigorous, and safe space which launched with the annual June Filmmakers Lab. Satter has acted as an influential mentor to generations of award-winning filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, Chloé Zhao, Dee Rees, John Cameron Mitchell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Ryan Coogler, Miranda July, Kimberly Peirce, Darren Aronofsky, Sterlin Harjo, Taika Waititi, and many more. Over the years, Satter has built the Episodic Program, Producers Program, the Institute's global initiatives and oversees the Indigenous, Catalyst, and Documentary Film Programs. She also founded Sundance Collab — a global digital platform for storytelling, learning, and community, open to creators everywhere. Over the years, Satter's contributions to film and advocacy have been recognized with numerous awards including the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an Oscar presented at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science's 2024 Governors Awards, the Women in Film Business Leadership Award, and the ACLU Bill of Rights Award. Stay connected with me at: https://www.chonacas.com/links/ Read more on David's Guide: https://davidsguide.com/michelle-satter-to-be-honored-at-2025-sundance-film-festival-gala-celebrating-sundance-institute-presented-by-google-tv/    

Filmmaker Brett Story and labour organizer Chris Smalls join us this week on Below the Radar. Brett is the co-director of UNION, a documentary film that follows the efforts of the Amazon Labor Union and their campaign to unionize the first Amazon warehouse in American history. The movement was spearheaded by Chris, a former Amazon warehouse supervisor who was fired in 2020 after organizing a protest against Amazon's lack of COVID-19 safety protocols. Brett and Chris chat about the process of making the film, the state of organizing in the contemporary moment, and the international reception of UNION. Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/255-brett-story-chris-smalls.html Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/255-brett-story-chris-smalls.html Resources: Brett Story: https://brettstory.ca/ Chris Smalls: https://www.instagram.com/chris.smalls_/?hl=en Amazon Labor Union: https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/ UNION: https://www.unionthefilm.com/ DOXA Documentary Film Festival: https://www.doxafestival.ca/ Bio: Bretty Story: Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Toronto. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at CPH-DOX, SXSW, True/False, and Sheffield Doc/Fest. She is the director of the award-winning films The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. The Hottest August was a New York Times Critics' Pick and was called one of the ten best documentary films of 2019 by over a dozen publications, including Variety, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Brett has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Institute, and was named one of Variety's 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch. In 2020 she was nominated for a Cinema Eye Award for Best Director. She holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor of Media Praxis at the University of Toronto. Her most recent film, UNION, co-directed with Stephen Maing, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024. Chris Smalls: Christian Smalls is the founder of the Amazon Labor Union, an independent, democratic, worker-led labor union at Amazon in Staten Island. He is also the founder of The Congress of Essential Workers (TCOEW), a nationwide collective of essential workers and allies fighting for better working conditions, better wages, and a better world. Smalls was formerly an Amazon warehouse supervisor, helping open three major warehouses in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut during his five years with the company, but he was fired in 2020 after organizing a protest against the company's unsafe pandemic conditions. Smalls has been profiled by media outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CBC Radio, Salon, and Jacobin. He lives in Hackensack, New Jersey. Cite this episode: Chicago Style Johal, Am. “ Union Power — with Brett Story and Chris Smalls.” Below the Radar, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, November 5, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/255-brett-story-chris-smalls.html.

In this episode, we explore the compelling artistry of Olivia Peace, a Student Academy Award-winning director and visual artist originally from Detroit, now residing in Los Angeles. Olivia's work is deeply informed by artistic experimentation, dreamspaces, and a profound respect for the ecosystems that shaped them. Their unique perspective merges will influence from hip hop, B-movies, and personal experiences with mental health, creating a distinctive narrative style that resonates with audiences.Olivia's journey in filmmaking began at Northwestern University, where they studied animation and interactive art. Their senior film, *Pangaea*, utilized a blend of live action and animation to examine the effects of ecological displacement on young children, particularly those from New Orleans. This innovative piece earned Olivia a fellowship with the Sundance Institute, as part of the year-long Sundance Ignite x Adobe 1324 Fellowship, providing them with invaluable mentorship and resources to further their craft.Continuing their education, Olivia obtained a master's degree in Interactive Media and Games from the University of Southern California, specializing in Worldbuilding. Their thesis project, *Against Reality*, an interactive experience built with AI neural networks, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the prestigious Student Academy Award. Simultaneously, Olivia's debut feature film, 'Tahara', premiered at the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival, receiving critical acclaim and later becoming a New York Times Critic's Pick upon its theatrical release in June 2022.As Olivia works on their next feature film, set in Detroit, they remain committed to exploring themes of critical imagination and taking bold creative risks in the face of loss and change. Their artistic journey invites audiences to look inward and reflect on their own narratives. If you're inspired by Olivia's work and want to support their future projects, don't hesitate to reach out. Join us as we delve into their unique approach to storytelling and the importance of community in the creative process.Olivia Peace's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliviajpeace/?hl=enOlivia Peace's Website: http://www.olivia-peace.com/Olivia Peace's ImDB: https://m.imdb.com/name/nm6499573/Olivia Peace's Twitter: https://twitter.com/oliviajpeace?lang=enSupport the showVisual Intonation Website: https://www.visualintonations.com/Visual Intonation Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/visualintonation/Vante Gregory's Website: vantegregory.comVante Gregory's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/directedbyvante/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): patreon.com/visualintonations Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@visualintonation Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@directedbyvante

About the Guest:Meet Bill Kramer, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Bill carries a deep appreciation for art, but despite his mother being an artist, he didn't see it as a viable career path. So, he earned a BA in actuarial sciences and went to work supporting creatives behind the scenes. After stints at Columbia University and the Sundance Institute, he joined the Academy and has helped to take it to new heights ever since, starting with coordinating the building of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Bill knows a lot about leadership and how to inspire a team with a greater purpose. Listen in to hear more about Bill's journey to being a leader.What You Will Learn:How to balance the competing needs and desires of employees and clientsWhy “everyone's role should feel purpose-driven and connected to a greater vision”How to enter with humility, especially when there are more aspects of the job to learnWhy you have to be intentional about nurturing yourself outside the officeBill drops some major knowledge in this episode—so it's not to be missed. You'll discover more about the Academy and its mission, see how Bill is helping fulfill that mission by being a good leader, and absorb new leadership tips for your own work. Press play and be ready to be transported into a masterclass of leadership. Please rate and review this Episode!We'd love to hear from you! Leaving a review helps us ensure we deliver content that resonates with you. Your feedback can inspire others to join our Take Command: A Dale Carnegie Podcast community & benefit from the leadership insights we share.

Mark Farid, a visionary artist and researcher, discusses his provocative projects on digital privacy and surveillance. He shares his experience of giving away all his passwords for six months, aiming to live without a phone or computer, which led to social and financial isolation. Farid also describes "Poisonous Antidote," where he broadcasted all his online activities, revealing personal habits and validating his behavior. His latest project, "Invisible Voice," funded by the European Commission, aims to empower individuals by providing information on companies' environmental impacts, corporate accountability, and more, promoting collective action and influencing external narratives.   In this episode, you will hear: Identity, performance, perception, and the self. The relationship between anonymity, privacy, and agency. Living life as a 23-year-old without a phone or computer. Data privacy and protection, and where the weak points are for you. The cultural changes happening day-to-day and how our technology usage keeps us connected. Solitude, loneliness, and being alone. Being known intimately and continually. The big and small ways to have accountability in our lives. The power of collective action.     Mark Farid is an Artist, Researcher, and Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He specializes in the intersection of the virtual and physical world, and the effect new technologies have on the individual and their sense of self. Farid's work embodies hacker ethics, such as a focus on privacy policies, use of surveillance technologies, and campaigning for data privacy and protection. His work forms a critique of social, legal, and political models.   Farid graduated from Kingston University, London, with a First Class (Hons) degree in Fine Art (2014), and has since given talks and participated in group and solo exhibitions in England, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, UAE, and Japan. He gave a TEDx talk in 2017 about his first two projects, “Data Shadow” (2015) and “Poisonous Antidote” (2016). Farid was selected for the Sundance Institute's 'New Frontier' Fellowship in Utah, USA (2016), for his ongoing VR project, “Seeing I”. "Seeing I" was piloted as a solo exhibition at Ars Electronica Digital Arts Festival (2019), and was selected for the European Media Artist Residency Exchange, as part of the Creative Cultures Programme of the European Union (2020/21). In 2022, Farid received European Commission Horizon 2020 research and innovation funding to develop his browser extension, "Invisible Voice”, which was later presented at the Pompidou Centre, FR (2022). In 2023-24, Farid received European Commission ST+ARTS funding to further develop "Invisible Voice" into a mobile phone app, a cross-device platform, and an interactive artwork. This will be exhibited at Ars Electronica Digital Arts Festival, AT (2024).   Farid's projects have been covered by media outlets worldwide. He frequently engages in art and technology conversations appearing on Fox News, Sky News, France24, Arte, BBC Radio 4, BBC 5Live, Times Radio, The Telegraph, The Guardian. In 2021, Farid featured as the contemporary “Surrealist Artist” on “Great British Railway Journeys” on BBC2.   Connect with Mark Farid: Website: markfarid.com Twitter: x.com/MorkForid TedxWarwick:  Data Privacy: Good or Bad? | Mark Farid: youtube.com/watch?v=pKD5rxMonBI   Connect with R Blank and Stephanie Warner: For more Healthier Tech Podcast episodes, and to download our Healthier Tech Quick Start Guide, visit HealthierTech.co and follow instagram.com/healthiertech Additional Links: EMF Superstore: https://ShieldYourBody.com (save 15% with code “pod”) Digital Wellbeing with a Human Soul: https://Bagby.co (save 15% with code “pod”) Youtube: https://youtube.com/shieldyourbody Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bagbybrand/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bagby.co Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shieldyourbody

Bio: Henry Alexander Kelly is a venti-caramel (cause he's chubby and brown), Afro-Latino comedic writer and director with San Francisco Bay Area and Nicaraguan roots. Recently he was selected to be a Circle Member for Dan Lin's 2024 Rideback Rise Fellowship. He was an Artist Development Consult for the Sundance Institute's 2022 Uprise Grant Program as well as a recipient of the Uprise Grant in 2021. He was a 2022 Film Independent Project Involve Writing Fellow, 2022 Sundance BIPOC Mentorship Recipient and in 2020 graduated from the National Hispanic Media Coalition's Series Scriptwriters Program sponsored by ABC and NBC. His half-hour adult-animated, mockumentary, comedy, NOW-WHAT?! (NAHUATL), about the Nicarao-Aztecs in the 1400s dealing with an ever-changing world is optioned by Campanario Entertainment. He creates zany, larger-than-life, genre-blending worlds exploring the intersection of cultural identity, interpersonal struggles, and the absurdity of society.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/creator-to-creators-with-meosha-bean--4460322/support.

The Sundance Institute finally released a shortlist of cities that could host the Sundance Film Festival beginning in 2027. News of the fest taking bids to leave Utah caused a stir — but has the writing been on the wall for years? Host and former Sundance staffer Ali Vallarta talks producer Ivana Martinez through the institution's existential threats and opportunities. And, whether Salt Lake City could convince the festival to stick around. This episode originally aired on May 8, 2024. Consider becoming a founding member of City Cast Salt Lake today! It's the best way to support our work and help make sure we're around for years to come. Get all the details and sign up at membership.citycast.fm. Subscribe to our daily morning newsletter. You can also find us on Instagram @CityCastSLC. Looking to advertise on City Cast Salt Lake? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads. Learn more about the sponsors of this episode:  Utah Department of Health and Human Services The Shop  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dave Hondel sat down with Award Winning Writer, George Perez, whose work has garnered praise and honors from the likes of The Sundance Institute, Film Independent and Humanitas for his work on projects highlighting social justice and issues facing the Latin community. This interview discusses topics related to human trafficking. Listener discretion is advised.

After over 4 years, Mayanna Berrin returns to the podcast for a third time! This time, we have a lot to catch up on and share with you. Mayanna and I talk about her many accomplishments and projects out in Los Angeles. We talk about her Improv work in the comedy scene, being named in 2022 as one of the comedic writing fellows by Kevin Hart's Hartbeat and the Sundance Institute, and in 2023 getting a writing fellowship with Nickelodeon Studios. Plus, being a producer for Polly Pocket Adventure Studios, and as a voice actor for Fire Emblem Heroes. Mayanna also details how she and her writing partner get the ideas onto the page, and how pitching ideas works out in LA. If that's not enough, Mayanna talks about her experience playing Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game as a character on actual play series, New York by Night. We also talk about how she's now into Dungeons and Dragons, how she creates her characters, how many games she's in, and her upcoming work with TTRPG's and the actual play space. Then we circle back to one of our mainstays, video games. Mayanna talks games like Final Fantasy 7, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Baldur's Gate 3. You can find Mayanna at: https://www.instagram.com/mayannaberrin/ https://twitter.com/Bemayanna You can find The Wandering Path at: https://www.wanderingpathpod.com/ https://www.instagram.com/wanderingpathpod You can find StoryQuest at: https://storyquest.tv/ https://www.instagram.com/storyquestshow/ You can listen to Mayanna's first two episodes at: https://talesfromthefandom.libsyn.com/episode-171-mayanna-berrin-returns http://talesfromthefandom.libsyn.com/episode-47-mayanna-berrin

On this episode, I spoke to editors Joshua Raymond Lee and David O. Rogers about their work on Ripley.  David O. Rogers has worked in film and television post production for over 25 years, learning the business as an assistant editor on projects large and small - Men In Black, Chinese Coffee, Garden State, The Stepford Wives, The Night Of.  After writing and directing (and editing) some successful short films, including the award-winning The Light of Eons, he has stepped into the editor's role in films and episodic shows, including Halston (as additional editor), the indie feature No Name Restaurant, and Ripley. Born in Los Angeles, Joshua Raymond Lee began his career in film as the Editorial PA on the vampire romance Twilight. Over the last fifteen years he's worked in post-production on numerous Hollywood films and independent productions including Steve Jobs, Molly's Game and most recently the David Simon series, We Own This City, for HBO. In 2019 he was a fellow at the Sundance Institute's Editing Residency. He is currently based in New York City.

Avril Z. Speaks Producer/Director https://www.instagram.com/azuspeak/ Avril Speaks has been carving out her path as a bold, innovative storyteller for years, not only as a Producer and Director but also as a film educator through Film Independent, the Sundance Institute, and Distribution Advocates, and formerly as a professor at Howard University. Avril has produced several award-winning films including Jinn, which premiered at SXSW and won Special Jury Recognition for Writing, and the South African film African America, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and four African Movie Academy Awards. She also produced the documentary Black America Is..., which premiered at the Afrikana Film Festival and won Best Feature Documentary at various film festivals. As a director and showrunner, Avril has worked with companies such as Now This and Vox Media Studios on docu-series such as Uprooted: The Untold Keith Warren Story, Keep This Between Us, and Files of the Unexplained, which recently debuted as the #1 show on Netflix. Avril is a recipient of the inaugural Dear Producer Award, the Sundance Momentum Fellowship, and is a recent recipient of the Film Independent Amplifier Fellowship. She is one of the founding members of Distribution Advocates, where she hosts the podcast Distribution advocates Presents, and is a board member for the Black TV and Film Collective. Hosted by actor/filmmaker Tony Gapastione --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bravemaker/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bravemaker/support

For the last two weeks, our on-the-Croisette crew of Film Comment contributors has been reporting from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival with a series of thoughtful dispatches, interviews, and podcasts. Before the festival officially drew to a close last Saturday, Film Comment Editor Devika Girish moderated a panel about documentary ethics in the Cannes Docs section of the Marché du Film. Curated by the Documentary Association of Europe and presented with American Documentary, the live event featured a stellar lineup of speakers, including Kiyoko McCrae from Chicken and Egg Pictures; Adam Piron from the Sundance Institute's Indigenous Program; Alemberg Ang, a Philippines-based producer and filmmaker; and Viv Li, a Chinese filmmaker based in Berlin. Titled “Towards a Universal Values System in Documentary,” the panel explored a number of fascinating questions, such as what equitable collaboration looks like in nonfiction filmmaking, what it means to gain the consent of your subjects, and who gets to tell which stories.

The collaboration between director and cinematographer is arguably the most important dynamic on any film shoot. Here to discuss that are Director Kobi Libii and Director of Photography Doug Emmett, with their satirical comedy, “The American Society of Magical Negroes.” “To me, the best versions of most collaborative things are the things you get to and you're like, ‘wait, was that your idea or was that my idea? I can't remember.' And there's a million like this… where I'm like, ‘oh, I really thought you pitched that to me.' And he's like, ‘no, no, I thought you pitched that to me!' Because it's not my idea or Doug's idea. Or my process or my vision or Doug's vision. It's a thing that gets made in the space between us, that is of the story, and of the characters, and of what this thing that we're building between us is.”—Kobi Libii, Director and Writer, “The American Society of Magical Negroes”This conversation was a live webinar as part of the Dolby Institute's partnership with Sundance Collab, the digital platform from the Sundance Institute designed for filmmakers, with exclusive webinars, curated resources, and free educational videos.“The American Society of Magical Negroes” was a winner of the Dolby Institute Fellowship, which grants independent films with the funds to finish in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, and we were very proud to finally watch the completed film when it premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival before it was released in theaters by Focus Features.Be sure to check out the film, now available to rent in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos on video streaming services.Please subscribe to Dolby Creator Talks wherever you get your podcasts.You can also check out the video for this episode.Learn more about the Dolby Institute and check out Dolby.com. Connect with Dolby on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

In this bonus episode, meet SFFILM Executive Director Anne Lai. Learn all about Anne's upbringing, what drew her to California, her stint with the Sundance Institute, and her arrival in 2020 in San Francisco at the famed San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). Anne will walk listeners through the history of this 67-year-old festival, the oldest such event in North America. Then she touches on some highlights of this year's festival (April 24–28), including the Opening Night screening of Didi, the feature-length debut of Bay Area filmmaker Sean Wang. Please visit sffilm.org for more info, including showtimes and tickets. We recorded this podcast on Zoom in April 2024.

The Sundance Institute is seeking proposals for a new future location to host the Sundance Film Festival starting in 2027. KSL 5 TV's Carole Mikita joins Dave and Debbie to discuss.

This week I have the wonderful opportunity to talk with my friend, playwright and TV writer, Franky D. Gonzalez. Follow Franky on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/phattheddproductions/ Franky D. Gonzalez is a playwright and TV writer of Colombian descent splitting time between Dallas and Los Angeles. Nationally, his work has appeared with The Lark, the Sundance Institute, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor, the NNPN National Showcase of New Plays, the Latinx Playwrights Circle, the Texas State University's Black and Latino Playwrights Celebration, The Sol Project (SolFest 2022), Urbanite Theatre, Visión Latino Theatre Company, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the Goodman Theatre (Live @ Five Series), Launch Pad at UC Santa Barbara, The New Harmony Project, Bishop Arts Theatre Center, Repertorio Español, LAByrinth Theater Company, Ars Nova (ANT Fest 2021), Dallas Theater Center, the William Inge Theatre Festival, Austin Latinx New Play Festival, Stages Repertory Theatre's Sin Muros Latinx Theatre Festival, the Latino Theatre Company's RE:Encuentro 2021: National Virtual Latina/o/x Theatre Festival, the Latinx Theatre Commons 2022 Comedy Carnaval, Seven Devils New Play Foundry, the HBMG Foundation National Winter Playwrights Retreat, Tofte Lake Center, Ignition Arts, Play4Keeps Podcast, the Antaeus Playwrights Lab, Clamour Theatre Company, Ammunition Theater Company, Greenway Court Theatre, the Cloud Factory, The Mid-America Theatre Conference, The Midwest Dramatists Conference, and the One-Minute Play Festival. Franky was a recipient of the Charles Rowan Beye New Play Commission, an MTC/Sloan Commission, the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Prize, co-recipient of the MetLife Nuestras Voces Latino Playwriting Award, won the Crossroads Project Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative Award, the Judith Royer Award for Excellence in Playwriting, the Short+Sweet Theatre Festival Manila Best Overall Production Prize, and was a staff writer for the fourth season of 13 Reasons Why. The 2023 Chicago Production of his play That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven garnered two Non-Equity Jeff Awards (for Short Run Production and Director). Previously Franky was named the 4 Seasons Resident Playwright, a Sony Pictures Television Diverse Writers Program Fellow, and a Core Writer with the Playwrights Center. Currently Franky serves as the Bishop Arts Theatre Center Playwright-in-Residence, is writing on a Sony/Amazon show, and is developing a series with Sony Pictures Television. He is proudly represented by Valor Entertainment, the Gersh Agency, and the law firm Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein Lezcano Bonn & Dang.  Full Play Reading of Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes By Franky D. Gonzalez  -  https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qHu05Z8Wzw6lkAVoR6KmE?si=_yyuEjKCRzeD3zNcPQ2AEw Andy's Past Interview with Franky on the Ashland New Plays Festival Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2M9TDqe7B2hCh9DCBZN81c?si=Ul5g2-g_QSmND2Hxa1U0MQ Music is licensed from Musicbed.com.   Subscribe to my YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠www.youtube.com/@andyfilmsandhikes⁠⁠⁠ Follow Host Andy Neal on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.instagram.com/andyfilmsandhikes⁠⁠⁠⁠  Check out my TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠www.tiktok.com/@andyfilmsandhikes ⁠⁠ Buy Andy a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/andyfilmsandhikes  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/adventureisoutthere/message

Segment 1: Tom Gimbel, founder and CEO of LaSalle Network, joins John to talk about how the rise in remote work is causing the demise of building friendships at work. Segment 2: Jason Lesniewicz, Director of Cultural Tourism, Choose Chicago, tells John about the upcoming Sundance Institute x Chicago 2024 event that will feature artists programs, film screenings […]

Rachel Elizabeth Seed is a Los Angeles-based nonfiction storyteller working in film, photography and writing. She is a 2022 Jewish Film Institute fellow, a 2021 California Film Institute fellow and Jewish Story Partners grantee, a 2020 Sundance Institute, Chicken + Egg Pictures, NYFA New York Women's Film Fund fellow, and a 2019 Sundance Edit & Story Lab fellow and Sundance Documentary Fund recipient for her feature documentary, A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY. Rachel's work has also been supported by Field of Vision, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, the Maine Media Workshops, the Roy W. Dean grant, and IFP.  Formerly a photo editor at New York Magazine, her photography was included in the International Center of Photography's exhibit on Hurricane Sandy, Rising Waters, and she was a cameraperson on several award-winning feature documentaries including SACRED by Academy-Award-winning filmmaker Thomas Lennon. Rachel's writing has been published by No Film School, the Sundance Institute, and Talkhouse and she is Executive Director / Co-founder of the Brooklyn Documentary Club, a thriving NYC-based filmmaker collective with 250+ members. Rachel directed a film A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY A daughter attempts to piece together a portrait of her mother, an avant-garde journalist and a woman she never knew. Uncovering the vast archive Sheila Turner-Seed produced, including lost interviews with iconic photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, and Lisette Model, the film explores memory, legacy and stories left untold. https://www.rachelseed.com/#/apm/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/matt-brown57/support

Dive into the vibrant world of queer and trans filmmaking with Brit Fryer, a visionary director and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. Through Forest Ave Films, Brit explores themes of gender, queerness, and identity with a unique and participatory approach to nonfiction storytelling.Born in Chicago and raised in the suburbs, Brit's connection to his hometown influences his work, despite his current East Coast base. Graduating from Carleton College's Cinema and Media Studies Program, Brit has honed his craft to create impactful and thought-provoking films.From the award-winning "Caro Comes Out" to the Vimeo Staff Pick "Across, Beyond, and Over," Brit's filmography showcases his dedication to amplifying marginalized voices. His recent film, "The Script," co-directed with Noah Schamus, delves into the complexities of language within the trans and nonbinary communities.As a producer, Brit has contributed to acclaimed projects like Crystal Kayiza's "Rest Stop," which received the Short Film Jury Award for US Fiction at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Collaborating with filmmakers like Lydia Cornett and Noah Schamus, Brit continues to push boundaries in the realm of nonfiction filmmaking.Supported by prestigious institutions like The Sundance Institute, PBS, POV, and HBO Documentary Films, Brit's work has been recognized at festivals worldwide, including CPH: DOX, Indie Grits, NewFest, and BFI Flare.Join us as we explore Brit Fryer's journey as a filmmaker, his commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices, and his exciting upcoming projects. Brit Fryer's Website: https://www.britfryer.com/  Brit Fryer's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/britfry/?hl=en  Brit Fryer's Twitter: https://twitter.com/britfryer?lang=en   Brit Fryer's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/britfryer Visual Intonation Website: https://www.visualintonations.com/Visual Intonation Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/visualintonation/Vante Gregory's Website: vantegregory.comVante Gregory's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/directedbyvante/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): patreon.com/visualintonations Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@visualintonation Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@directedbyvante

Check out this new podcast episode featuring Writer/Filmmaker: KRISTINE GEROLAGA!Kristine Gerolaga is a Filipina American filmmaker and actor. Her work has been featured on ATTN:, Amazon Fire TV, ALTER, Shudder, Fangoria, Rappler, and Vulture. Her short films were finalists for the TIFFxInstagram Shorts Fest and Justin Lin's Interpretations 2.0 Asian American Filmmaker Initiative. She is a 2023 grant recipient of The Future of Film is Female's Short Film Fund. She is also a Sundance Institute supported artist: She was a 2022 Uprise Grantee, a 2023 TAAF Collab Scholar, and most recently, a 2024 January Screenwriters Lab Fellow and recipient of the Horror Fellowship in support of her feature film LAMOK. Her latest short film MOSQUITO LADY, the proof of concept for LAMOK, premiered at the 2023 Beyond Fest and is on the festival circuit now.#filipina #writer #filmmaker #sundance

Hello and welcome to Season 13! This season is different because ½ of the 8 episodes are going to be focused on AI. However, there are a few episodes that aren't focused on AI including today's. While understanding AI is important, we also need the EQ that occurs in between skilling up and one of those huge skills is navigating difficult conversations. As Jennifer says, contact and context before content! This episode is the pep talk you perhaps didn't even know you needed. Jennifer empowers us to tackle our challenges head on, eliminate negative self talk,  and take care of ourselves throughout the process. We go through three real life examples and Jennifer talks through how she would handle them. These examples were submitted by real life listeners with their real life challenges. Jennifer Zaslow is an Executive Coach who believes that harnessing your full potential begins with finding your voice. She began her professional life in New York as an aspiring opera singer, an experience that led to a twenty year career as a leader and senior fundraiser in the non-profit sector.  Today, as Partner at Clear Path Executive Coaching, Jennifer's signature mix of intuition, directness and humor enables her to work successfully with clients ranging from CEO's to young leaders, helping individuals to reach their full potential, and organizations to achieve their strategic goals.   Jennifer has worked with leaders and teams from a wide variety of sectors, including higher ed (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania), arts and culture (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, BAM, The High Line), sports/media/entertainment (The NFL, Sundance Institute, BuzzFeed, WNYC, KCRW) and tech/startups (Google, CHIEF, Angi, and TodayTix).   Prior to coaching, Jennifer held the chief development officer role at three New York City cultural institutions: Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City Opera, and The New York Public Library.  There, she successfully completed a $500 million capital campaign during the 2008 recession and grew the Library's endowment to over $1 billion.    Jennifer holds a B.A. cum laude from Wesleyan University and a CPCC coaching certification from CTI. She is certified in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, is a Gallup Clifton Strengths Coach and is a recipient of Harvard Law School's PON certificate in Mediation and Conflict Resolution. She is also Director of the Floria Lasky Institute for Arts Leadership, sponsored by The Jerome Robbins Foundation.  She lives and practices in New York City. Resources: 1. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury 2. Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen 3. Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory 4. How to Work with Anyone (even difficult people) by Amy Gallo --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/devdebrief/support

The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories that Inform, Influence, and Inspire by Karen Eber ABOUT THE BOOK: Learn how to take any story and make it perfect—from storytelling expert Karen Eber, whose popular TED Talk on the subject continues to be a source of inspiration for millions. What makes a story perfect? How do you tell the perfect story for any occasion? We live in a story world. Stories are a memorable and engaging way to differentiate yourself, build connection and trust, create new thinking, bring meaning to data, and even influence decision-making. But how do you turn a good story into a great story that informs, influences, and inspires? In The Perfect Story, Karen Eber—leadership consultant, professional keynote storyteller, and TED speaker—shares the science of storytelling to teach you to: Leverage the Five Factory Settings of the Brain to hack the art of storytelling Build a toolkit of endless story ideas Define the audience for your story Apply a memorable story structure Engage senses and emotions Tell stories with data Avoid common storytelling mistakes Use your body to tell dynamic stories Ensure your story doesn't manipulate Navigate and embrace the vulnerability of storytelling Without relying on complicated models or one-size-fits-all prescriptions, this book makes storytelling accessible with practical and impactful steps for anyone to tell the perfect story for any occasion. Through interview vignettes, The Perfect Story also shares approaches from different storytellers, including the Sundance Institute cofounder, an executive producer of The Moth, the former creative director at Pixar, the TED Radio Hour podcast host, and many more. Whether you are leading a team, giving a presentation, hosting a podcast, selling a product or service, interviewing for a job, or giving a toast at a wedding, The Perfect Story will help you take your stories and make them perfect. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Karen Eber is a bestselling author, international consultant, and keynote speaker. Her TED Talk: 'How Your Brain Responds To Stories – And Why They're Crucial For Leaders,' continues to be a source of inspiration for millions.  Karen was previously a Head of Culture, Chief Learning Officer, and Head of Leadership Development at General Electric and Deloitte.  As the CEO and Chief Storyteller of Eber Leadership Group, Karen helps companies build leaders, teams, and culture one story at a time, working with Fortune 500 companies like General Electric, Microsoft, Kraft Heinz, Facebook, and the Big 4 Consulting Companies.  She guest lectures at universities including the London School of Business, Stanford, and MIT, and is a frequent contributor to publications like Fast Company, Business Insider, TED, Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur. And, interesting fact – she has one brown eye and one green eye! Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/perfect-story-karen-eber

Today on the show is Rebecca Windsor, the Vice-President of the Warner Bros. Television Workshop, the premier writing and directing program for professionals looking to start and/or further their careers in television.As an extension of her role developing new talent, Rebecca was recruited to help launch Warner Bros. new digital content brand Stage13, overseeing the critically acclaimed short-form digital series Snatchers, which premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and is available on Verizon's go90 platform.Previously, she was the Creative Producing Initiative Manager of Sundance Institute's Feature Film Program, playing a key role in coordinating the Creative Producing Lab and Summit, Screenwriters and Directors Labs, and Episodic Story Lab.Prior to Sundance, Windsor was Manager of Development at Samuel L. Jackson's television company, UppiTV, and at Mandeville Films. She started her career as an assistant at the Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann Agency and ICM. A San Diego native, she attended Northwestern University, where she received a BS in Theatre.Enjoy my conversation with Rebecca Windsor.

Emmy award winner Jeff Melvoin has been a writer-producer on over a dozen dramatic series, serving as showrunner on eight of them. In all, he's helped produce over 470 hours of primetime television, most recently as an Executive Producer on season three of the BBC America series, Killing Eve. Other Exec Producer credits include Designated Survivor, Army Wives, Alias, Early Edition, and Picket Fences. He was Supervising Producer of the CBS series Northern Exposure, for which he won an Emmy and two Golden Globe Awards. Other writer-producer credits include the NBC series Hill Street Blues and Remington Steele. Melvoin is also founder and chair of the Writers Guild of America's celebrated Showrunner Training Program, now entering its nineteenth year. In February, 2015, he received the Morgan Cox Award, the WGA's highest recognition for Guild service. In making the announcement, Guild President Chris Keyser said, “If this is a Golden Age of television, the program Jeff so lovingly shepherds deserves its fair share of credit. Thanks to him, as an art form and as a business, we are better at what we do.” Melvoin has taught at USC School of Cinematic Arts, UCLA, Harvard, and the Sundance Institute, and is a frequent guest instructor on college campuses throughout the United States and at media conferences around the world. He is a past board member of the Mystery Writers of America (Southern California Chapter) and the Writers Guild of America, West. Before entering television, Melvoin was a Time magazine correspondent. He is married to Martha Hartnett Melvoin and has two sons, Nick and Charlie. www.jeffmelvoin.com Connect with your host Kaia Alexander: https://entertainmentbusinessleague.com/ https://twitter.com/thisiskaia  Produced by Stuart W. Volkow P.G.A. Get career training and a free ebook “How to Pitch Anything in 1Min.” at www.EntertainmentBusinessLeague.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EPA Superfund site Bradford Island clean-up 'slow, but steady' Iditarod kicks off Friday night in AK as Reddington defends title Apple announces grants for Sundance Institute, NMAI recipients

Live from Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival, Matt is joined by Joana Vicente, a former producer and the current CEO of the Sundance Institute. Matt and Joana discuss the state of independent film, the perils of the indie film to streaming pipeline, the possibility of the festival leaving Park City in the near future, Scott Stuber's exit from Netflix, and more. Matt finishes the show with a prediction about the 2024 Academy Awards. For a 20 percent discount on Matt's Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I'm Hearing ...,' click here. Email us your thoughts! thetown@spotify.com Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Joana Vicente Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skye Fitzgerald founded Spin Film to bear witness to unfolding crises with the intent to deepen empathy and understanding. He recently completed a trilogy of films on the global refugee crisis. The first, 50 Feet from Syria, focused on doctors working on the Syrian border and was voted onto the Oscar® shortlist. The second, Lifeboat, documents search and rescue operations off the coast of Libya and was nominated for an Academy Award® and national Emmy®.The third, Hunger Ward, explores the impact of the war and famine in Yemen on children, families, and healthcare workers and was nominated for an Academy Award®.I've seen Lifeboat and Hunger Ward and can tell you they are both powerful and insightful explorations of people working to prevail under the most challenging and harrowing of circumstances. I highly recommend Skye's excellent work to you.As a Fulbright Research Scholar, Skye directed the film Bombhunters and has worked with organizations as varied as the Sundance Institute, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Mountainfilm.  He's an honorary member of SAMS (the Syrian American Medical Society) for his work with Syrian refugees. And he's a Distinguished Alumnus at his alma mater Eastern Oregon University for documentary work. Skye also happens to be a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Before filmmaking, Skye cut fire-lines as a member of a HotShot wildland fire crew. 

The founding director of the Sundance Institute, who since 1981 has presided over the "labs" that help rising filmmakers to realize their visions, reflects on how she came to work for Robert Redford, what filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao and Darren Aronofsky got out of their time at the labs and becoming just the 43rd person — and only the 10th woman — ever honored with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rory Uphold is an actress, producer, writer, and comedienne. She is the host of Crimes of the Heart, a love and dating podcast with a true crime twist. Part storytelling and part advice column, Crimes of the Heart helps you navigate dating in the digital age and make you feel less alone in the process. Rory has over 14M+ views on digital shows she's created and starred in. She has written songs that have played everywhere from Superbowl commercials to critically acclaimed shows like Girls. Rory was one of the inaugural fellows in the Sundance Institute's Episodic Labs and has sold television shows to many of your favorite networks. Rory has given tons of advice on her podcast Crimes of the Heart, and in this episode, we discuss how the plethora of questions she receives and all her interviews have impacted her own dating and love life. We delve into the landscape of dating, the different dating apps, and these apps are like slot machines. We talk about what gets in the way of us having the relationship we desire, and how to rewire the story we are playing in our heads. We delve into how dating and Sex are not the same thing. We chat about how to put yourself out there, how much time you need to invest, and how being a woman over a certain age is not a barrier to meeting someone. Rory truly believes that love is out there for anyone and everyone.You can find Rory at @icouldbeblonder. You can find her show Crimes of the Heart here.You can find Amy at @amymarcs.You can find the show at @sexafterpodcast.Sex After is produced by @thechrisderosa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Director Carlos López Estrada (Raya and the Last Dragon) returns to The Dolby Institute Podcast for another panel discussion, this time with members of Sundance. More than just a film festival, The Sundance Institute offers a myriad of resources for emerging and independent filmmakers, but navigating them all can be overwhelming. So this very special podcast episode is designed to answer this essential question, from Carlos:“What advice can [you offer] for someone who's just starting to make their own work — whether it's shorts, documentaries, pilot scripts — and are trying to create from a truthful place, [while] also trying to find their voice, and wanting to be noticed by people like yourselves, knowing that many times resources and time is limited for someone who's just starting?”—Carlos López Estrada, Director, "Blindspotting,” “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Summertime”Today's panel includes:Ilyse McKimmie - Deputy Director of the Feature Film Program at Sundance InstitutePaola Mottura - Film Fund Director at Sundance InstituteJandiz Estrada Cardoso - Director of the Sundance Institute Episodic ProgramAna Souza - Manager of the Programming Department and Programmer at Sundance InstituteAdam Piron - Director of Sundance Institute's Indigenous ProgramOnce again, this discussion was streamed live as part of Antigravity Academy's Satellite Sessions — “monthly conversations with incredibly exciting figures from the film and TV universe” — co-presented by CAPE USA (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment). Follow @antigravityacademy and @capeusa for more information on even more upcoming panels.Antigravity AcademyCAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment)For more inspiring Satellite Sessions just like this one, be sure you are subscribed to The Dolby Institute Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.You can also check out the video for this episode.Learn more about the Dolby Institute and check out Dolby.com. Connect with Dolby on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Support the Preacher Boys Podcast:https://www.patreon.com/preacherboysPurchase a Preacher Boys shirt, mask, sticker, or other merch to rep the show! https://www.teepublic.com/user/preacher-boys-podcast✖️✖️✖️Sharon Liese is an Emmy® winning filmmaker who is known for having her finger on the Zeitgeist. Her documentary projects have aired on premium networks and streamers and screened at many prestigious film festivals.Sharon is the director of Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals, a docuseries exposing the predatory and insidious behavior within Independent Fundamental Baptist Churches, and the struggles of survivors to find justice.Premiering on Disney+ in 2022, Liese's short documentary, The Flagmakers, was Oscar® shortlisted, nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award, and nominated for an Emmy. The film also won Best Documentary Short at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, an Audience Award at the Denver International Film Festival, and has been optioned for a Broadway musical produced by Mark Gordon.In January 2023, her short film, Parker, had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.Liese's award-winning feature documentary, Transhood, premiered on HBO in 2020 and was featured on The Ellen Show and GMA. The film won several awards, including Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at AFI Docs. Liese also created and executive produced Pink Collar Crimes, a true crime series for CBS.Liese created and directed the award-winning documentary series High School Confidential, filmed over four years, which broke ratings records on WEtv. She also directed and produced The Gnomist (CNN Films), which had its World Premiere at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to win 15 festival awards, including the Jury Award for Best Short Documentary at LA Shorts Fest, qualifying it for Oscar consideration before being acquired by CNN Films.Liese's film, Selfie, created in collaboration with Dove and The Sundance Institute, premiered during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival before being the focus of a special multi-episode series on Good Morning America.In addition to producing and directing documentary programming for Disney+, HBO, CNN, MTV, FOX, Lifetime, WEtv, OWN, DiscoveryID, and PBS, Sharon Liese is the founder and owner of Herizon Productions.✖️✖️✖️CONNECT WITH THE SHOW:- preacherboyspodcast.com- https://www.facebook.com/preacherboysdoc/- https://twitter.com/preacherboysdoc- https://www.instagram.com/preacherboysdoc/To connect with a community that shares the Preacher Boys Podcast's mission to expose abuse in the IFB, join the OFFICIAL Preacher Boys Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1403898676438188/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/preacher-boys-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Brendan Shields-Shimizu is the Chief Innovation Officer at Crispin Porter + Bogusky a role he took on when CPB announced an expansion of services and integrated new capabilities under the agency banner. Prior to this role, Brendan served as CEO at Observatory by Crispin, one of Fast Company's “World's Most Innovative Companies” for three years in a row in 2020, 2021 and 2022.   He had been with Observatory and its predecessor, CAA Marketing, since 2011, leading a 4x Emmy, 4x Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Lions Grand Prix and Sundance Institute-winning agency for the content era – a global full-service creative ad agency with deep roots in entertainment. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dylanconroy/support

Campaigning with Corruption - Winning at Our CostsWebsite: http://www.battle4freedom.comNetwork: https://www.mojo50.comStreaming: https://www.rumble.com/Battle4Freedomhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12808991/Denmark-battles-surge-pneumonia-sparking-fears-China.htmlNow DENMARK battles surge in same type of 'white lung syndrome' pneumonia sparking fears in China - after Netherlands warned of alarming spike in casesDanish health experts said they had were expecting this 'epidemic' for some timehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12806969/rfk-cheryl-hines-jonathan-macht-stalker-secret-service-security.htmlMan who broke into RFK Jr's home TWICE and sent him 430 'harassing emails' agrees to five-year restraining order - as Biden refuses Secret Service protection for the presidential hopefulCalifornia realtor Jonathan Macht had warned Kennedy about getting a 'bullet in the brain' He broke into Kennedy's California home twice in one day while the couple were there Kennedy has now struck a deal with the 28-year-old to stay at least 100 yards apart after the Biden White House refused to provide Federal Protectionhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12807589/trump-kinky-political-fantasies-maga-dominatrix-doms-subs.html'Vote Republican for daddy Trump': BDSM business is booming for 'MAGA doms' and 'liberal subs' with one dominatrix earning a six-figure salary to fulfill political fantasiesPolitical polarization is fueling a boom in unlikely bedroom fantasies Sites including 'hot conservative girls who make liberals cry' are catering to the growing fetishAnd politicians themselves are increasingly figuring in fantasies with Marjorie Taylor Greene and even Bill Clinton among the favoriteshttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/college-football/article-12807769/College-football-player-Reed-Ryan-22-tragically-dies-suffering-cardiac-arrest-following-team-workout-family-say-defensive-end-passed-away-doing-loved.htmlCollege football player Reed Ryan, 22, tragically dies after suffering a cardiac arrest following a team workout... as family say defensive end passed away 'doing what he loved'Reed collapsed following a team workout in a weight room on November 21After school officials regained his pulse, he sadly passed away seven days laterhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12806485/michael-latt-murder-michelle-satter-son.htmlMichael Latt, social justice charity founder who worked with rapper Common, is shot dead by homeless woman who broke into his LA homeLatt, 33, who created Lead with Love in Los Angeles, was shot Monday eveningJameelah Elena Michl, 36, has been charged with his murderLatt is the son of the founder and director of the Sundance Institute https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12806175/Republicans-accuse-Biden-having-no-shame-cancels-student-debt-813-000-people-election-ploy-force-taxpayers-saddle-billions-dollars-extra.htmlRepublicans accuse Biden of having 'no shame' as he cancels student debt for 813,000 people in 're-election ploy' that will force taxpayers to saddle billions of dollars extraRepublican Sen. Bill Cassidy was among those condemning debt forgivenessHe highlighted that beneficiaries will receive an email from Biden himself'No shame,' he said as he accused the president of buying his 2024 reelectionhttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-12805979/americans-quality-life-cities-hit-worst-inflation.htmlAmericans need an extra $11,400 a year to afford the same quality of life they enjoyed in 2021 - here are the states hit worst by inflationColorado residents must fork out an extra $14,995 to afford the same quality of life as two years agoArkansas has the lowest extra expenditures needed - but households will still need an extra $8,528 a yearThe data compares the prices of everyday essentials including food, housing, energy and transportation in October this year and January 2021 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-12806053/companies-ax-college-bachelors-degree-requirements-walmart.htmlHow the college degree lost its value: Nearly half of US companies plan to ax Bachelor's degree requirements - after Walmart, Accenture and IBM led the chargeSome 45% of companies plan to eliminate bachelor's degree requirementsAnd 55% said they'd already eliminated bachelor's degree requirements in 2023Walmart , IBM , Accenture and Google are among those to have led the charge

Sydney Skybetter and producer Kamal Sinclair chat about the intersection of the cultural sector, emerging technologies, and the vintage hardware that shaped their childhoods. Are we all complicit in these complex cultural systems? Oh, and also, can we please bring back the Filofax? About Kamal: Kamal Sinclair supports artists, institutions, and communities working at the convergence of art, media, culture, and technology. Currently, she serves as the Senior Director of Digital Innovation at The Music Center in Los Angeles, which is home to TMC Arts, Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Master Chorale, LA Opera, and LA Phil. Additionally, she serves as an advisor or board member to  Peabody Awards interactive Board, For Freedoms, NEW INC.'s  ONX Studio, Civic Signals, For Freedoms, MIT's Center for Advanced Virtuality, Starfish Accelerator, Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation, and Eyebeam. Previously, she was the Director of Sundance Institute's New Frontier Labs Program, External Advisor to Ford Foundation's JustFilms and MacArthur Foundation's Journalism & Media Program, Adjunct Professor at USC's Media Arts + Practice program, and Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects. She is the co-author of Making a New Reality. Sinclair got her start in emerging media as an artist and producer on Question Bridge: Black Males, where she and her collaborators launched a project with an interactive website and curriculum; published a book; exhibited in over sixty museums/festivals. Read the transcript, and find more resources in our archive: https://www.are.na/choreographicinterfaces/dwr-ep-4-fierce-on-the-palm-pilot-a-conversation-with-kamal-sinclair Like, subscribe, and review here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dances-with-robots/id1715669152  What We Discuss with Kamal (Timestamps): 0:00:00: Introduction to Kamal Sinclair 0:01:32: Discussion on the influence of Minority Report on technology and body interfaces. 0:04:56: Personal experiences with early mobile devices and anticipation of smartphones. 0:07:10: Exploring the cyclical nature of technology and imagining the future. 0:08:10: The role of a curator in identifying and bridging new forms of art and technology. 0:09:18: The importance of following the artist and supporting their vision. 0:10:38: Balancing the promise and ethics of technology in art. 0:12:29: Exciting emerging art in storytelling, aesthetics, and movement. 0:15:18: The power of imagination and action in shaping the future. 0:17:43: The relationship between bodies and technologies. 0:18:53: The influence of disability and otherly abled experiences on technology. 0:19:41: Dance historical perspectives on the bodies of the future. 0:21:26: The need to consider nature and relationships in future designs. 0:23:25: The negative impact of militarized surveillance technologies on marginalized groups 0:25:39: Discussion on the immersive VR experience of Birdly 0:27:02: Healing and altered states through immersive experiences 0:28:30: Managing complicity and the future of work for artists 0:30:41: Closing with the acknowledgement of not knowing 0:31:19: Show credits & thanks The Dances with Robots Team Host: Sydney Skybetter Co-Host & Executive Producer: Ariane Michaud Archivist and Web Designer: Kate Gow Podcasting Consultant: Megan Hall Accessibility Consultant: Laurel Lawson Music: Kamala Sankaram Audio Production Consultant: Jim Moses Assistant Editor: Andrew Zukoski Student Associate: Rishika Kartik About CRCI The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) explores the braid of choreography, computation and surveillance through an interdisciplinary lens. Find out more at www.choreographicinterfaces.org Brown University's Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies' Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces thanks the Marshall Woods Lectureships Foundation of Fine Arts, the Brown Arts Institute, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their generous support of this project. The Brown Arts Institute and the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies are part of the Perelman Arts District.  

Nobody likes to be told “no” — which is why content producer Josh Shelton prefers to tell creatives “yes, and…” For Josh, solving problems within certain limitations is creatively liberating and has led to some of his best work. In this episode of the podcast (our very first with a producer!), Josh shares his experiences working on big movie sets with Steven Spielberg to filming cheese rolling down hill for Netflix's We Are the Champions. He discusses his strategy for “synthesizing” conversations and human connection into the creative energy and inspiration needed to bring stories to life. And above all else, Josh reminds us that we're all just here to have fun.Key Takeaways:We chat about the rise of quick consumption video and how channels like YouTube and TikTok have changed the media landscape and producer role.Ever wonder what it's like to work with big creative personalities like Will Smith and Adam Sandler? Josh gives us the inside scoop.We dive into what it takes to identify and communicate a brand's core values throughout the production process.Josh shares why he thinks everyone should be a “good cop” and how he saves his “no's” for when he really needs them.Guest Bio: Josh Shelton is a multi-hyphenate producer/content creator working with the world's leading brands and production companies to bridge the gap between brand identity, creative storytelling, and video production logistics. Shelton was nominated for a Sports Emmy as a producer on Netflix's We Are The Champions and has overseen series for ESPN, MTV, PopTV, and Participant Media. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of the digital landscape as a YouTube Award and Telly Award Winner, working as a trusted producer/showrunner for SoulPancake on a range of socially conscious branded campaigns. During the pandemic he was tapped by the Global Events and Marketing team at Twitter (1.0) to showrun/direct their marquee virtual events including NewFronts 2021. His original content for @BirdExplores has 1M+ video views on Instagram featuring original songs and videos to inspire parent-child connection. He is currently the lead Content Producer for Sundance Institute & Film Festival.

Bishop Arts Theatre Center (BATC) is kicking off their 30th Anniversary season with the world premiere performance of Franky D. Gonzalez's new play, The Tragedy of Othello. This entertaining and thought-provoking production is a 120-minute show which will begin October 19th and run for three consecutive weekends through November 5th, 2023.Franky Gonzalez stops by to talk about how his adaptation will retain the original plot but employ a modern aesthetic and language and set in Dallas in current times. The play centers on Imani Othello who encounters racism, sexism and ageism after being named the first Black woman head coach of a football team. The incredible Denise Lee will breathe life into the indomitable spirit of Othello. Franky D. Gonzalez is a Latino playwright based in Dallas and L.A. His work has appeared with The Lark, Sundance Institute, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, NNPN, LTC Carnaval, Latinx Playwrights Circle, Urbanite Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Goodman Theatre, The New Harmony Project, The Workshop Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company, Ars Nova, and Dallas Theater Center among others. He is the Bishop Arts Theatre Center Playwright-in-Residence.Also, hear a rather robust conversation between the guys about spiders and frogs and skunks. (oh my!)The Tragedy of Othello begins October 19 – November 5, 2023, for three consecutive weekends at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center at 215 S Tyler Street, Dallas, TX 75208. Tickets for The Tragedy of Othello can be purchased online at www.bishopartstheatre.org or by calling the box office at 214.948.0716 Monday through Friday 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

 Show NotesSalty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary WomenCreative non-fiction and “essays” as a genre“I guess what I was trying to do was come up with ways into the lives of these women who I find interesting. That would also be compelling to someone who had never heard of them.”Dinner partyHannah Arendt and her cocktail partiesA subversive feast among friendsArguing in order to find out what you thinkThinking as a conversation with the selfLove in the specificity of relationshipAmor mundi—love of the world“Loving the world means working on two specific tasks. The first is to doggedly, insist on seeing the world just as it is with its disappointments and horrors and committing to it all the same. The second is to encounter people in the world and embrace their alterity, or difference.”Arendt's “banality of evil”The importance of letter-writing for sharing the self and inhabiting a years-long friendshipEdna Lewis, Freetown, Virginia, and “The Taste of Southern Cooking”Farm-to-table cooking used to be out of economic necessity, not a hip or high fine dining experienceEdna Lewis's Southern identity: "Lewis defines Southern as the experience of an emancipated people and their descendants, a cultural and culinary heritage to be proud of a distinctly American culture. And as she offers definitions, readers are reminded, she's refusing to be defined by anyone but herself.”“What Is Southern?” Gourmet Magazine—reclaiming Southern cooking for Black SouthernersThe Los Padres National Forest Supper ClubBabette's Feast (1987)The menu from Babette's FeastThe place of joy and pleasure in a flourishing spiritual lifeRobert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the LambFood and recognition“Learning how to taste”“Every dinner party is an act of hope.”About Alissa WilkinsonAlissa Wilkinson is a Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and author. She is a senior correspondent and critic at Vox.com, writing about film, TV, and culture. She is currently writing We Tell Ourselves Stories, a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, which will be published by Liveright.She's contributed essays, features, and criticism to a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, Vulture, Bon Appetit, Eater, RogerEbert.com, Pacific Standard, The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Books & Culture, Christianity Today, and others. I'm a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Writers Guild of America, East, and was an inaugural writing fellow with the Sundance Institute's Art of Nonfiction initiative. She's served on juries at the Sundance Film Festival, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and others, and selection committees for groups including the Gotham Awards and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.In June 2022, her book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women was published by Broadleaf Books. In 2016, her book How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, and Politics at the End of the World was released, co-written with Robert Joustra.I frequently pop up as a commentator and guest host on radio, TV, and podcasts. Some recent appearances include CBS News; PBS Newshour; CNN International Newsroom; BBC America's Talking Movies; NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, On Point, and 1A; HBO's Allen v. Farrow; AMC's James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction; WNYC's The Takeaway; ABC's Religion & Ethics and The Drum; CBC Eyeopener, Vox's Today, Explained and The Gray Area; and many more. For 14 years, until the college ceased offering classes in 2023, she was also an associate professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City, and taught courses in criticism, cinema studies, literature, and cultural theory. She earned an M.F.A in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University, an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University, and a B.S. in information technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.You can read my most up-to-date work on my Vox author page, or subscribe to my mostly-weekly newsletter. Production NotesThis podcast featured Alissa WilkinsonEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Liz Vukovic, Macie Bridge, and Kaylen YunA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give 

We finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we complete our look back at the 1980s theatrical releases for Miramax Films. And, for the final time, a reminder that we are not celebrating Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but reminiscing about the movies they had no involvement in making. We cannot talk about cinema in the 1980s without talking about Miramax, and I really wanted to get it out of the way, once and for all.   As we left Part 4, Miramax was on its way to winning its first Academy Award, Billie August's Pelle the Conquerer, the Scandinavian film that would be second film in a row from Denmark that would win for Best Foreign Language Film.   In fact, the first two films Miramax would release in 1989, the Australian film Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train and the Anthony Perkins slasher film Edge of Sanity, would not arrive in theatres until the Friday after the Academy Awards ceremony that year, which was being held on the last Wednesday in March.   Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train stars Wendy Hughes, the talented Australian actress who, sadly, is best remembered today as Lt. Commander Nella Daren, one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's few love interests, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Jenny, a prostitute working a weekend train to Sydney, who is seduced by a man on the train, unaware that he plans on tricking her to kill someone for him. Colin Friels, another great Aussie actor who unfortunately is best known for playing the corrupt head of Strack Industries in Sam Raimi's Darkman, plays the unnamed man who will do anything to get what he wants.   Director Bob Ellis and his co-screenwriter Denny Lawrence came up with the idea for the film while they themselves were traveling on a weekend train to Sydney, with the idea that each client the call girl met on the train would represent some part of the Australian male.   Funding the $2.5m film was really simple… provided they cast Hughes in the lead role. Ellis and Lawrence weren't against Hughes as an actress. Any film would be lucky to have her in the lead. They just felt she she didn't have the right kind of sex appeal for this specific character.   Miramax would open the film in six theatres, including the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles and the Fashion Village 8 in Orlando, on March 31st. There were two versions of the movie prepared, one that ran 130 minutes and the other just 91. Miramax would go with the 91 minute version of the film for the American release, and most of the critics would note how clunky and confusing the film felt, although one critic for the Village Voice would have some kind words for Ms. Hughes' performance.   Whether it was because moviegoers were too busy seeing the winners of the just announced Academy Awards, including Best Picture winner Rain Man, or because this weekend was also the opening weekend of the new Major League Baseball season, or just turned off by the reviews, attendance at the theatres playing Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train was as empty as a train dining car at three in the morning. The Beverly Center alone would account for a third of the movie's opening weekend gross of $19,268. After a second weekend at the same six theatres pocketing just $14,382, this train stalled out, never to arrive at another station.   Their other March 31st release, Edge of Sanity, is notable for two things and only two things: it would be the first film Miramax would release under their genre specialty label, Millimeter Films, which would eventually evolve into Dimension Films in the next decade, and it would be the final feature film to star Anthony Perkins before his passing in 1992.   The film is yet another retelling of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, with the bonus story twist that Hyde was actually Jack the Ripper. As Jekyll, Perkins looks exactly as you'd expect a mid-fifties Norman Bates to look. As Hyde, Perkins is made to look like he's a backup keyboardist for the first Nine Inch Nails tour. Head Like a Hole would have been an appropriate song for the end credits, had the song or Pretty Hate Machine been released by that time, with its lyrics about bowing down before the one you serve and getting what you deserve.   Edge of Sanity would open in Atlanta and Indianapolis on March 31st. And like so many other Miramax releases in the 1980s, they did not initially announce any grosses for the film. That is, until its fourth weekend of release, when the film's theatre count had fallen to just six, down from the previous week's previously unannounced 35, grossing just $9,832. Miramax would not release grosses for the film again, with a final total of just $102,219.   Now when I started this series, I said that none of the films Miramax released in the 1980s were made by Miramax, but this next film would become the closest they would get during the decade.   In July 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when the married Profumo began a sexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was very short-lived, either ending, depending on the source, in August 1961 or December 1961. Unbeknownst to Profumo, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy at the same time.   No one was the wiser on any of this until December 1962, when a shooting incident involving two other men Keeler had been involved with led the press to start looking into Keeler's life. While it was never proven that his affair with Keeler was responsible for any breaches of national security, John Profumo was forced to resign from his position in June 1963, and the scandal would take down most of the Torie government with him. Prime Minister Macmillan would resign due to “health reasons” in October 1963, and the Labour Party would take control of the British government when the next elections were held in October 1964.   Scandal was originally planned in the mid-1980s as a three-part, five-hour miniseries by Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas and American music producer turned movie producer Joe Boyd. The BBC would commit to finance a two-part, three-hour miniseries,  until someone at the network found an old memo from the time of the Profumo scandal that forbade them from making any productions about it. Channel 4, which had been producing quality shows and movies for several years since their start in 1982, was approached, but rejected the series on the grounds of taste.   Palace Pictures, a British production company who had already produced three films for Neil Jordan including Mona Lisa, was willing to finance the script, provided it could be whittled down to a two hour movie. Originally budgeted at 3.2m British pounds, the costs would rise as they started the casting process.  John Hurt, twice Oscar-nominated for his roles in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, would sign on to play Stephen Ward, a British osteopath who acted as Christine Keeler's… well… pimp, for lack of a better word. Ian McKellen, a respected actor on British stages and screens but still years away from finding mainstream global success in the X-Men movies, would sign on to play John Profumo. Joanne Whaley, who had filmed the yet to be released at that time Willow with her soon to be husband Val Kilmer, would get her first starring role as Keeler, and Bridget Fonda, who was quickly making a name for herself in the film world after being featured in Aria, would play Mandy Rice-Davies, the best friend and co-worker of Keeler's.   To save money, Palace Pictures would sign thirty-year-old Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones to direct, after seeing a short film he had made called The Riveter. But even with the neophyte feature filmmaker, Palace still needed about $2.35m to be able to fully finance the film. And they knew exactly who to go to.   Stephen Woolley, the co-founder of Palace Pictures and the main producer on the film, would fly from London to New York City to personally pitch Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Woolley felt that of all the independent distributors in America, they would be the ones most attracted to the sexual and controversial nature of the story. A day later, Woolley was back on a plane to London. The Weinsteins had agreed to purchase the American distribution rights to Scandal for $2.35m.   The film would spend two months shooting in the London area through the summer of 1988. Christine Keeler had no interest in the film, and refused to meet the now Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to talk about the affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies was more than happy to Bridget Fonda about her life, although the meetings between the two women were so secret, they would not come out until Woolley eulogized Rice-Davies after her 2014 death.   Although Harvey and Bob would be given co-executive producers on the film, Miramax was not a production company on the film. This, however, did not stop Harvey from flying to London multiple times, usually when he was made aware of some sexy scene that was going to shoot the following day, and try to insinuate himself into the film's making. At one point, Woolley decided to take a weekend off from the production, and actually did put Harvey in charge. That weekend's shoot would include a skinny-dipping scene featuring the Christine Keeler character, but when Whaley-Kilmer learned Harvey was going to be there, she told the director that she could not do the nudity in the scene. Her new husband was objecting to it, she told them. Harvey, not skipping a beat, found a lookalike for the actress who would be willing to bare all as a body double, and the scene would begin shooting a few hours later. Whaley-Kilmer watched the shoot from just behind the camera, and stopped the shoot a few minutes later. She was not happy that the body double's posterior was notably larger than her own, and didn't want audiences to think she had that much junk in her trunk. The body double was paid for her day, and Whaley-Kilmer finished the rest of the scene herself.   Caton-Jones and his editing team worked on shaping the film through the fall, and would screen his first edit of the film for Palace Pictures and the Weinsteins in November 1988. And while Harvey was very happy with the cut, he still asked the production team for a different edit for American audiences, noting that most Americans had no idea who Profumo or Keeler or Rice-Davies were, and that Americans would need to understand the story more right out of the first frame. Caton-Jones didn't want to cut a single frame, but he would work with Harvey to build an American-friendly cut.   While he was in London in November 1988, he would meet with the producers of another British film that was in pre-production at the time that would become another important film to the growth of the company, but we're not quite at that part of the story yet. We'll circle around to that film soon.   One of the things Harvey was most looking forward to going in to 1989 was the expected battle with the MPAA ratings board over Scandal. Ever since he had seen the brouhaha over Angel Heart's X rating two years earlier, he had been looking for a similar battle. He thought he had it with Aria in 1988, but he knew he definitely had it now.   And he'd be right.   In early March, just a few weeks before the film's planned April 21st opening day, the MPAA slapped an X rating on Scandal. The MPAA usually does not tell filmmakers or distributors what needs to be cut, in order to avoid accusations of actual censorship, but according to Harvey, they told him exactly what needed to be cut to get an R: a two second shot during an orgy scene, where it appears two background characters are having unsimulated sex.   So what did Harvey do?   He spent weeks complaining to the press about MPAA censorship, generating millions in free publicity for the film, all the while already having a close-up shot of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer's Christine Keeler watching the orgy but not participating in it, ready to replace the objectionable shot.   A few weeks later, Miramax screened the “edited” film to the MPAA and secured the R rating, and the film would open on 94 screens, including 28 each in the New York City and Los Angeles metro regions, on April 28th.   And while the reviews for the film were mostly great, audiences were drawn to the film for the Miramax-manufactured controversy as well as the key art for the film, a picture of a potentially naked Joanne Whaley-Kilmer sitting backwards in a chair, a mimic of a very famous photo Christine Keeler herself took to promote a movie about the Profumo affair she appeared in a few years after the events. I'll have a picture of both the Scandal poster and the Christine Keeler photo on this episode's page at The80sMoviePodcast.com   Five other movies would open that weekend, including the James Belushi comedy K-9 and the Kevin Bacon drama Criminal Law, and Scandal, with $658k worth of ticket sales, would have the second best per screen average of the five new openers, just a few hundred dollars below the new Holly Hunter movie Miss Firecracker, which only opened on six screens.   In its second weekend, Scandal would expand its run to 214 playdates, and make its debut in the national top ten, coming in tenth place with $981k. That would be more than the second week of the Patrick Dempsey rom-com Loverboy, even though Loverboy was playing on 5x as many screens.   In weekend number three, Scandal would have its best overall gross and top ten placement, coming in seventh with $1.22m from 346 screens. Scandal would start to slowly fade after that, falling back out of the top ten in its sixth week, but Miramax would wisely keep the screen count under 375, because Scandal wasn't going to play well in all areas of the country. After nearly five months in theatres, Miramax would have its biggest film to date. Scandal would gross $8.8m.   The second release from Millimeter Films was The Return of the Swamp Thing. And if you needed a reason why the 1980s was not a good time for comic book movies, here you are. The Return of the Swamp Thing took most of what made the character interesting in his comic series, and most of what was good from the 1982 Wes Craven adaptation, and decided “Hey, you know what would bring the kids in? Camp! Camp unseen in a comic book adaptation since the 1960s Batman series. They loved it then, they'll love it now!”   They did not love it now.   Heather Locklear, between her stints on T.J. Hooker and Melrose Place, plays the step-daughter of Louis Jourdan's evil Dr. Arcane from the first film, who heads down to the Florida swaps to confront dear old once presumed dead stepdad. He in turns kidnaps his stepdaughter and decides to do some of his genetic experiments on her, until she is rescued by Swamp Thing, one of Dr. Arcane's former co-workers who got turned into the gooey anti-hero in the first movie.   The film co-stars Sarah Douglas from Superman 1 and 2 as Dr. Arcane's assistant, Dick Durock reprising his role as Swamp Thing from the first film, and 1980s B-movie goddess Monique Gabrielle as Miss Poinsettia.   For director Jim Wynorski, this was his sixth movie as a director, and at $3m, one of the highest budgeted movies he would ever make. He's directed 107 movies since 1984, most of them low budget direct to video movies with titles like The Bare Wench Project and Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, although he does have one genuine horror classic under his belt, the 1986 sci-fi tinged Chopping Maul with Kelli Maroney and Barbara Crampton.   Wynorski suggested in a late 1990s DVD commentary for the film that he didn't particularly enjoy making the film, and had a difficult time directing Louis Jourdan, to the point that outside of calling “action” and “cut,” the two didn't speak to each other by the end of the shoot.   The Return of Swamp Thing would open in 123 theatres in the United States on May 12th, including 28 in the New York City metro region, 26 in the Los Angeles area, 15 in Detroit, and a handful of theatres in Phoenix, San Francisco. And, strangely, the newspaper ads would include an actual positive quote from none other than Roger Ebert, who said on Siskel & Ebert that he enjoyed himself, and that it was good to have Swamp Thing back. Siskel would not reciprocate his balcony partner's thumb up. But Siskel was about the only person who was positive on the return of Swamp Thing, and that box office would suffer. In its first three days, the film would gross just $119,200. After a couple more dismal weeks in theatres, The Return of Swamp Thing would be pulled from distribution, with a final gross of just $275k.   Fun fact: The Return of Swamp Thing was produced by Michael E. Uslan, whose next production, another adaptation of a DC Comics character, would arrive in theatres not six weeks later and become the biggest film of the summer. In fact, Uslan has been a producer or executive producer on every Batman-related movie and television show since 1989, from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan to Zack Snyder to Matt Reeves, and from LEGO movies to Joker. He also, because of his ownership of the movie rights to Swamp Thing, got the movie screen rights, but not the television screen rights, to John Constantine.   Miramax didn't have too much time to worry about The Return of Swamp Thing's release, as it was happening while the Brothers Weinstein were at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. They had two primary goals at Cannes that year:   To buy American distribution rights to any movie that would increase their standing in the cinematic worldview, which they would achieve by picking up an Italian dramedy called, at the time, New Paradise Cinema, which was competing for the Palme D'Or with a Miramax pickup from Sundance back in January. Promote that very film, which did end up winning the Palme D'Or.   Ever since he was a kid, Steven Soderbergh wanted to be a filmmaker. Growing up in Baton Rouge, LA in the late 1970s, he would enroll in the LSU film animation class, even though he was only 15 and not yet a high school graduate. After graduating high school, he decided to move to Hollywood to break into the film industry, renting an above-garage room from Stephen Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker best known as the father of Jake and Maggie, but after a few freelance editing jobs, Soderbergh packed up his things and headed home to Baton Rouge.   Someone at Atco Records saw one of Soderbergh's short films, and hired him to direct a concert movie for one of their biggest bands at the time, Yes, who was enjoying a major comeback thanks to their 1983 triple platinum selling album, 90125. The concert film, called 9012Live, would premiere on MTV in late 1985, and it would be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video.   Soderbergh would use the money he earned from that project, $7,500, to make Winston, a 12 minute black and white short about sexual deception that he would, over the course of an eight day driving trip from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles, expand to a full length screen that he would call sex, lies and videotape. In later years, Soderbergh would admit that part of the story is autobiographical, but not the part you might think. Instead of the lead, Graham, an impotent but still sexually perverse late twentysomething who likes to tape women talking about their sexual fantasies for his own pleasure later, Soderbergh based the husband John, the unsophisticated lawyer who cheats on his wife with her sister, on himself, although there would be a bit of Graham that borrows from the filmmaker. Like his lead character, Soderbergh did sell off most of his possessions and hit the road to live a different life.   When he finished the script, he sent it out into the wilds of Hollywood. Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and husband of Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle, would read it and sign on as an executive producer. Soderbergh had wanted to shoot the film in black and white, like he had with the Winston short that lead to the creation of this screenplay, but he and Mason had trouble getting anyone to commit to the project, even with only a projected budget of $200,000. For a hot moment, it looked like Universal might sign on to make the film, but they would eventually pass.   Robert Newmyer, who had left his job as a vice president of production and acquisitions at Columbia Pictures to start his own production company, signed on as a producer, and helped to convince Soderbergh to shoot the film in color, and cast some name actors in the leading roles. Once he acquiesced, Richard Branson's Virgin Vision agreed to put up $540k of the newly budgeted $1.2m film, while RCA/Columbia Home Video would put up the remaining $660k.   Soderbergh and his casting director, Deborah Aquila, would begin their casting search in New York, where they would meet with, amongst others, Andie MacDowell, who had already starred in two major Hollywood pictures, 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and 1985's St. Elmo's Fire, but was still considered more of a top model than an actress, and Laura San Giacomo, who had recently graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh and would be making her feature debut. Moving on to Los Angeles, Soderbergh and Aquila would cast James Spader, who had made a name for himself as a mostly bad guy in 80s teen movies like Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero, but had never been the lead in a drama like this. At Spader's suggestion, the pair met with Peter Gallagher, who was supposed to become a star nearly a decade earlier from his starring role in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker, but had mostly been playing supporting roles in television shows and movies for most of the decade.   In order to keep the budget down, Soderbergh, the producers, cinematographer Walt Lloyd and the four main cast members agreed to get paid their guild minimums in exchange for a 50/50 profit participation split with RCA/Columbia once the film recouped its costs.   The production would spend a week in rehearsals in Baton Rouge, before the thirty day shoot began on August 1st, 1988. On most days, the shoot was unbearable for many, as temperatures would reach as high as 110 degrees outside, but there were a couple days lost to what cinematographer Lloyd said was “biblical rains.” But the shoot completed as scheduled, and Soderbergh got to the task of editing right away. He knew he only had about eight weeks to get a cut ready if the film was going to be submitted to the 1989 U.S. Film Festival, now better known as Sundance. He did get a temporary cut of the film ready for submission, with a not quite final sound mix, and the film was accepted to the festival. It would make its world premiere on January 25th, 1989, in Park City UT, and as soon as the first screening was completed, the bids from distributors came rolling in. Larry Estes, the head of RCA/Columbia Home Video, would field more than a dozen submissions before the end of the night, but only one distributor was ready to make a deal right then and there.   Bob Weinstein wasn't totally sold on the film, but he loved the ending, and he loved that the word “sex” not only was in the title but lead the title. He knew that title alone would sell the movie. Harvey, who was still in New York the next morning, called Estes to make an appointment to meet in 24 hours. When he and Estes met, he brought with him three poster mockups the marketing department had prepared, and told Estes he wasn't going to go back to New York until he had a contract signed, and vowed to beat any other deal offered by $100,000. Island Pictures, who had made their name releasing movies like Stop Making Sense, Kiss of the Spider-Woman, The Trip to Bountiful and She's Gotta Have It, offered $1m for the distribution rights, plus a 30% distribution fee and a guaranteed $1m prints and advertising budget. Estes called Harvey up and told him what it would take to make the deal. $1.1m for the distribution rights, which needed to paid up front, a $1m P&A budget, to be put in escrow upon the signing of the contract until the film was released, a 30% distribution fee, no cutting of the film whatsoever once Soderbergh turns in his final cut, they would need to provide financial information for the films costs and returns once a month because of the profit participation contracts, and the Weinsteins would have to hire Ira Deutchman, who had spent nearly 15 years in the independent film world, doing marketing for Cinema 5, co-founding United Artists Classics, and co-founding Cinecom Pictures before opening his own company to act as a producers rep and marketer. And the Weinsteins would not only have to do exactly what Deutchman wanted, they'd have to pay for his services too.   The contract was signed a few weeks later.   The first move Miramax would make was to get Soderbergh's final cut of the film entered into the Cannes Film Festival, where it would be accepted to compete in the main competition. Which you kind of already know what happened, because that's what I lead with. The film would win the Palme D'Or, and Spader would be awarded the festival's award for Best Actor. It was very rare at the time, and really still is, for any film to be awarded more than one prize, so winning two was really a coup for the film and for Miramax, especially when many critics attending the festival felt Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was the better film.   In March, Miramax expected the film to make around $5-10m, which would net the company a small profit on the film. After Cannes, they were hopeful for a $15m gross.   They never expected what would happen next.   On August 4th, sex, lies, and videotape would open on four screens, at the Cinema Studio in New York City, and at the AMC Century 14, the Cineplex Beverly Center 13 and the Mann Westwood 4 in Los Angeles. Three prime theatres and the best they could do in one of the then most competitive zones in all America. Remember, it's still the Summer 1989 movie season, filled with hits like Batman, Dead Poets Society, Ghostbusters 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Lethal Weapon 2, Parenthood, Turner & Hooch, and When Harry Met Sally. An independent distributor even getting one screen at the least attractive theatre in Westwood was a major get. And despite the fact that this movie wasn't really a summertime movie per se, the film would gross an incredible $156k in its first weekend from just these four theatres. Its nearly $40k per screen average would be 5x higher than the next closest film, Parenthood.   In its second weekend, the film would expand to 28 theatres, and would bring in over $600k in ticket sales, its per screen average of $21,527 nearly triple its closest competitor, Parenthood again. The company would keep spending small, as it slowly expanded the film each successive week. Forty theatres in its third week, and 101 in its fourth. The numbers held strong, and in its fifth week, Labor Day weekend, the film would have its first big expansion, playing in 347 theatres. The film would enter the top ten for the first time, despite playing in 500 to 1500 fewer theatres than the other films in the top ten. In its ninth weekend, the film would expand to its biggest screen count, 534, before slowly drawing down as the other major Oscar contenders started their theatrical runs. The film would continue to play through the Oscar season of 1989, and when it finally left theatres in May 1989, its final gross would be an astounding $24.7m.   Now, remember a few moments ago when I said that Miramax needed to provide financial statements every month for the profit participation contracts of Soderbergh, the producers, the cinematographer and the four lead actors? The film was so profitable for everyone so quickly that RCA/Columbia made its first profit participation payouts on October 17th, barely ten weeks after the film's opening.   That same week, Soderbergh also made what was at the time the largest deal with a book publisher for the writer/director's annotated version of the screenplay, which would also include his notes created during the creation of the film. That $75,000 deal would be more than he got paid to make the movie as the writer and the director and the editor, not counting the profit participation checks.   During the awards season, sex, lies, and videotape was considered to be one of the Oscars front runners for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and at least two acting nominations. The film would be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress by the Golden Globes, and it would win the Spirit Awards for Best Picture, Soderbergh for Best Director, McDowell for Best Actress, and San Giacomo for Best Supporting Actress. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, the film would only receive one nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. The same total and category as Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which many people also felt had a chance for a Best Picture and Best Director nomination. Both films would lose out to Tom Shulman's screenplay for Dead Poet's Society.   The success of sex, lies, and videotape would launch Steven Soderbergh into one of the quirkiest Hollywood careers ever seen, including becoming the first and only director ever to be nominated twice for Best Director in the same year by the Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America, in 2001 for directing Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He would win the Oscar for directing Traffic.   Lost in the excitement of sex, lies, and videotape was The Little Thief, a French movie that had an unfortunate start as the screenplay François Truffaut was working on when he passed away in 1984 at the age of just 52.   Directed by Claude Miller, whose principal mentor was Truffaut, The Little Thief starred seventeen year old Charlotte Gainsbourg as Janine, a young woman in post-World War II France who commits a series of larcenies to support her dreams of becoming wealthy.   The film was a modest success in France when it opened in December 1988, but its American release date of August 25th, 1989, was set months in advance. So when it was obvious sex, lies, and videotape was going to be a bigger hit than they originally anticipated, it was too late for Miramax to pause the release of The Little Thief.   Opening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City, and buoyed by favorable reviews from every major critic in town, The Little Thief would see $39,931 worth of ticket sales in its first seven days, setting a new house record at the theatre for the year. In its second week, the gross would only drop $47. For the entire week. And when it opened at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles, its opening week gross of $30,654 would also set a new house record for the year.   The film would expand slowly but surely over the next several weeks, often in single screen playdates in major markets, but it would never play on more than twenty-four screens in any given week. And after four months in theatres, The Little Thief, the last movie created one of the greatest film writers the world had ever seen, would only gross $1.056m in the United States.   The next three releases from Miramax were all sent out under the Millimeter Films banner.   The first, a supernatural erotic drama called The Girl in a Swing, was about an English antiques dealer who travels to Copenhagen where he meets and falls in love with a mysterious German-born secretary, whom he marries, only to discover a darker side to his new bride. Rupert Frazer, who played Christian Bale's dad in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, plays the antique dealer, while Meg Tilly the mysterious new bride.   Filmed over a five week schedule in London and Copenhagen during May and June 1988, some online sources say the film first opened somewhere in California in December 1988, but I cannot find a single theatre not only in California but anywhere in the United States that played the film before its September 29th, 1989 opening date.   Roger Ebert didn't like the film, and wished Meg Tilly's “genuinely original performance” was in a better movie. Opening in 26 theatres, including six theatres each in New York City and Los Angeles, and spurred on by an intriguing key art for the film that featured a presumed naked Tilly on a swing looking seductively at the camera while a notice underneath her warns that No One Under 18 Will Be Admitted To The Theatre, The Girl in a Swing would gross $102k, good enough for 35th place nationally that week. And that's about the best it would do. The film would limp along, moving from market to market over the course of the next three months, and when its theatrical run was complete, it could only manage about $747k in ticket sales.   We'll quickly burn through the next two Millimeter Films releases, which came out a week apart from each other and didn't amount to much.   Animal Behavior was a rather unfunny comedy featuring some very good actors who probably signed on for a very different movie than the one that came to be. Karen Allen, Miss Marion Ravenwood herself, stars as Alex, a biologist who, like Dr. Jane Goodall, develops a “new” way to communicate with chimpanzees via sign language. Armand Assante plays a cellist who pursues the good doctor, and Holly Hunter plays the cellist's neighbor, who Alex mistakes for his wife.   Animal Behavior was filmed in 1984, and 1985, and 1987, and 1988. The initial production was directed by Jenny Bowen with the assistance of Robert Redford and The Sundance Institute, thanks to her debut film, 1981's Street Music featuring Elizabeth Daily. It's unknown why Bowen and her cinematographer husband Richard Bowen left the project, but when filming resumed again and again and again, those scenes were directed by the film's producer, Kjehl Rasmussen.   Because Bowen was not a member of the DGA at the time, she was not able to petition the guild for the use of the Alan Smithee pseudonym, a process that is automatically triggered whenever a director is let go of a project and filming continues with its producer taking the reigns as director. But she was able to get the production to use a pseudonym anyway for the director's credit, H. Anne Riley, while also giving Richard Bowen a pseudonym of his own for his work on the film, David Spellvin.   Opening on 24 screens on October 27th, Animal Behavior would come in 50th place in its opening weekend, grossing just $20,361. The New York film critics ripped the film apart, and there wouldn't be a second weekend for the film.   The following Friday, November 3rd, saw the release of The Stepfather II, a rushed together sequel to 1987's The Stepfather, which itself wasn't a big hit in theatres but found a very quick and receptive audience on cable.   Despite dying at the end of the first film, Terry O'Quinn's Jerry is somehow still alive, and institutionalized in Northern Washington state. He escapes and heads down to Los Angeles, where he assumes the identity of a recently deceased publisher, Gene Clifford, but instead passes himself off as a psychiatrist. Jerry, now Gene, begins to court his neighbor Carol, and the whole crazy story plays out again. Meg Foster plays the neighbor Carol, and Jonathan Brandis is her son.    Director Jeff Burr had made a name for himself with his 1987 horror anthology film From a Whisper to a Scream, featuring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager and Terry Kiser, and from all accounts, had a very smooth shooting process with this film. The trouble began when he turned in his cut to the producers. The producers were happy with the film, but when they sent it to Miramax, the American distributors, they were rather unhappy with the almost bloodless slasher film. They demanded reshoots, which Burr and O'Quinn refused to participate in. They brought in a new director, Doug Campbell, to handle the reshoots, which are easy to spot in the final film because they look and feel completely different from the scenes they're spliced into.   When it opened, The Stepfather II actually grossed slightly more than the first film did, earning $279k from 100 screens, compared to $260k for The Stepfather from 105 screens. But unlike the first film, which had some decent reviews when it opened, the sequel was a complete mess. To this day, it's still one of the few films to have a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Stepfather II would limp its way through theatres during the Christmas holiday season, ending its run with a $1.5m gross.   But it would be their final film of the decade that would dictate their course for at least the first part of the 1990s.   Remember when I said earlier in the episode that Harvey Weinstein meant with the producers of another British film while in London for Scandal? We're at that film now, a film you probably know.   My Left Foot.   By November 1988, actor Daniel Day-Lewis had starred in several movies including James Ivory's A Room With a View and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He had even been the lead in a major Hollywood studio film, Pat O'Connor's Stars and Bars, a very good film that unfortunately got caught up in the brouhaha over the exit of the studio head who greenlit the film, David Puttnam.   The film's director, Jim Sheridan, had never directed a movie before. He had become involved in stage production during his time at the University College in Dublin in the late 1960s, where he worked with future filmmaker Neil Jordan, and had spent nearly a decade after graduation doing stage work in Ireland and Canada, before settling in New York City in the early 1980s. Sheridan would go to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where one of his classmates was Spike Lee, and return to Ireland after graduating. He was nearly forty, married with two pre-teen daughters, and he needed to make a statement with his first film.   He would find that story in the autobiography of Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, whose spirit and creativity could not be contained by his severe cerebral palsy. Along with Irish actor and writer Shane Connaughton, Sheridan wrote a screenplay that could be a powerhouse film made on a very tight budget of less than a million dollars.   Daniel Day-Lewis was sent a copy of the script, in the hopes he would be intrigued enough to take almost no money to play a physically demanding role. He read the opening pages, which had the adult Christy Brown putting a record on a record player and dropping the needle on to the record with his left foot, and thought to himself it would be impossible to film. That intrigued him, and he signed on. But during filming in January and February of 1989, most of the scenes were shot using mirrors, as Day-Lewis couldn't do the scenes with his left foot. He could do them with his right foot, hence the mirrors.   As a method actor, Day-Lewis remained in character as Christy Brown for the entire two month shoot. From costume fittings and makeup in the morning, to getting the actor on set, to moving him around between shots, there were crew members assigned to assist the actor as if they were Christy Brown's caretakers themselves, including feeding him during breaks in shooting. A rumor debunked by the actor years later said Day-Lewis had broken two ribs during production because of how hunched down he needed to be in his crude prop wheelchair to properly play the character.   The actor had done a lot of prep work to play the role, including spending time at the Sandymount School Clinic where the young Christy Brown got his education, and much of his performance was molded on those young people.   While Miramax had acquired the American distribution rights to the film before it went into production, and those funds went into the production of the film, the film was not produced by Miramax, nor were the Weinsteins given any kind of executive producer credit, as they were able to get themselves on Scandal.   My Left Foot would make its world premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival on September 4th, 1989, followed soon thereafter by screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th and the New York Film Festival on September 23rd. Across the board, critics and audiences were in love with the movie, and with Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. Jim Sheridan would receive a special prize at the Montreal World Film Festival for his direction, and Day-Lewis would win the festival's award for Best Actor. However, as the film played the festival circuit, another name would start to pop up. Brenda Fricker, a little known Irish actress who played Christy Brown's supportive but long-suffering mother Bridget, would pile up as many positive notices and awards as Day-Lewis. Although there was no Best Supporting Actress Award at the Montreal Film Festival, the judges felt her performance was deserving of some kind of attention, so they would create a Special Mention of the Jury Award to honor her.   Now, some sources online will tell you the film made its world premiere in Dublin on February 24th, 1989, based on a passage in a biography about Daniel Day-Lewis, but that would be impossible as the film would still be in production for two more days, and wasn't fully edited or scored by then.   I'm not sure when it first opened in the United Kingdom other than sometime in early 1990, but My Left Foot would have its commercial theatre debut in America on November 10th, when opened at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City and the Century City 14 in Los Angeles. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would, in the very opening paragraph of her review, note that one shouldn't see My Left Foot for some kind of moral uplift or spiritual merit badge, but because of your pure love of great moviemaking. Vincent Canby's review in the New York Times spends most of his words praising Day-Lewis and Sheridan for making a film that is polite and non-judgmental.    Interestingly, Miramax went with an ad campaign that completely excluded any explanation of who Christy Brown was or why the film is titled the way it is. 70% of the ad space is taken from pull quotes from many of the top critics of the day, 20% with the title of the film, and 10% with a picture of Daniel Day-Lewis, clean shaven and full tooth smile, which I don't recall happening once in the movie, next to an obviously added-in picture of one of his co-stars that is more camera-friendly than Brenda Fricker or Fiona Shaw.   Whatever reasons people went to see the film, they flocked to the two theatres playing the film that weekend. It's $20,582 per screen average would be second only to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, which had opened two days earlier, earning slightly more than $1,000 per screen than My Left Foot.   In week two, My Left Foot would gross another $35,133 from those two theatres, and it would overtake Henry V for the highest per screen average. In week three, Thanksgiving weekend, both Henry V and My Left Foot saw a a double digit increase in grosses despite not adding any theatres, and the latter film would hold on to the highest per screen average again, although the difference would only be $302. And this would continue for weeks. In the film's sixth week of release, it would get a boost in attention by being awarded Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle. Daniel Day-Lewis would be named Best Actor that week by both the New York critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while Fricker would win the Best Supporting Actress award from the latter group.   But even then, Miramax refused to budge on expanding the film until its seventh week of release, Christmas weekend, when My Left Foot finally moved into cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Its $135k gross that weekend was good, but it was starting to lose ground to other Oscar hopefuls like Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, Enemies: A Love Story, and Glory.   And even though the film continued to rack up award win after award win, nomination after nomination, from the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild and the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, Miramax still held firm on not expanding the film into more than 100 theatres nationwide until its 16th week in theatres, February 16th, 1990, two days after the announcement of the nominees for the 62nd Annual Academy Awards. While Daniel Day-Lewis's nomination for Best Actor was virtually assured and Brenda Fricker was practically a given, the film would pick up three other nominations, including surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Jim Sheridan and co-writer Shane Connaughton would also get picked for Best Adapted Screenplay.   Miramax also picked up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape, and a Best Foreign Language Film nod for the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso, which, thanks to the specific rules for that category, a film could get a nomination before actually opening in theatres in America, which Miramax would rush to do with Paradiso the week after its nomination was announced.   The 62nd Academy Awards ceremony would be best remembered today as being the first Oscar show to be hosted by Billy Crystal, and for being considerably better than the previous year's ceremony, a mess of a show best remembered as being the one with a 12 minute opening musical segment that included Rob Lowe singing Proud Mary to an actress playing Snow White and another nine minute musical segment featuring a slew of expected future Oscar winners that, to date, feature exact zero Oscar nominees, both which rank as amongst the worst things to ever happen to the Oscars awards show.   The ceremony, held on March 26th, would see My Left Foot win two awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, as well as Cinema Paradiso for Best Foreign Film. The following weekend, March 30th, would see Miramax expand My Left Foot to 510 theatres, its widest point of release, and see the film made the national top ten and earn more than a million dollars for its one and only time during its eight month run.   The film would lose steam pretty quickly after its post-win bump, but it would eek out a modest run that ended with $14.75m in ticket sales just in the United States. Not bad for a little Irish movie with no major stars that cost less than a million dollars to make.   Of course, the early 90s would see Miramax fly to unimagined heights. In all of the 80s, Miramax would release 39 movies. They would release 30 films alone in 1991. They would release the first movies from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. They'd release some of the best films from some of the best filmmakers in the world, including Woody Allen, Pedro Almadovar, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Atom Egoyan, Steven Frears, Peter Greenaway, Peter Jackson, Neil Jordan, Chen Kaige, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von Trier, and Zhang Yimou. In 1993, the Mexican dramedy Like Water for Chocolate would become the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America, and it would play in some theatres, including my theatre, the NuWilshire in Santa Monica, continuously for more than a year.   If you've listened to the whole series on the 1980s movies of Miramax Films, there are two things I hope you take away. First, I hope you discovered at least one film you hadn't heard of before and you might be interested in searching out. The second is the reminder that neither Bob nor Harvey Weinstein will profit in any way if you give any of the movies talked about in this series a chance. They sold Miramax to Disney in June 1993. They left Miramax in September 2005. Many of the contracts for the movies the company released in the 80s and 90s expired decades ago, with the rights reverting back to their original producers, none of whom made any deals with the Weinsteins once they got their rights back.   Harvey Weinstein is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence in upstate New York after being found guilty in 2020 of two sexual assaults. Once he completes that sentence, he'll be spending another 16 years in prison in California, after he was convicted of three sexual assaults that happened in Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013. And if the 71 year old makes it to 107 years old, he may have to serve time in England for two sexual assaults that happened in August 1996. That case is still working its way through the British legal system.   Bob Weinstein has kept a low profile since his brother's proclivities first became public knowledge in October 2017, although he would also be accused of sexual harassment by a show runner for the brothers' Spike TV-aired adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Mist, several days after the bombshell articles came out about his brother. However, Bob's lawyer, the powerful attorney to the stars Bert Fields, deny the allegations, and it appears nothing has occurred legally since the accusations were made.   A few weeks after the start of the MeToo movement that sparked up in the aftermath of the accusations of his brother's actions, Bob Weinstein denied having any knowledge of the nearly thirty years of documented sexual abuse at the hands of his brother, but did allow to an interviewer for The Hollywood Reporter that he had barely spoken to Harvey over the previous five years, saying he could no longer take Harvey's cheating, lying and general attitude towards everyone.   And with that, we conclude our journey with Miramax Films. While I am sure Bob and Harvey will likely pop up again in future episodes, they'll be minor characters at best, and we'll never have to focus on anything they did ever again.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 119 is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Nijla Mu'min is a writer and filmmaker from the East Bay Area. Her work is informed by poetry, photography, fiction, and dance. Named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2017, she tells stories about Black girls and women who find themselves between worlds and identities.  Her short films have screened at festivals across the country. Her filmmaking and screenwriting have been supported by the Sundance Institute, IFP, Film Independent, Women In Film LA, and the Princess Grace Foundation. In 2011, she worked as a Production Assistant on Ava DuVernay's film, Middle of Nowhere. In 2014, she was selected for the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive, and she was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the 2014 Urbanworld Film Festival, for her script Noor. Nijla attended the 2017 Sundance Institute Sound and Music Design Lab for Jinn. Her short film Dream was acquired by Issa Rae Productions for online streaming in 2017.  Her debut feature film, Jinn, starring Zoe Renee, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and Simone Missick, premiered at the 2018 South By Southwest Film Festival, where she won the Special Jury Recognition Award for Screenwriting. In 2018, she directed an episode of Ava DuVernay's critically-acclaimed series "Queen Sugar.” Jinn, a New York Times Critic's pick, was released in November 2018 by Orion Classics, and is currently streaming on Amazon. In 2021, she directed an episode of “Wu-Tang: An American Saga” for Hulu. She is currently developing her second feature film, Mosswood Park. She is a 2013 graduate of CalArts MFA Film Directing and Creative Writing Programs, and a 2007 graduate of UC Berkeley, where studied in June Jordan's Poetry for the People Program.  

In this episode of the Musicbed Podcast, Rayka Zehtabchi and Sam Davis take us back to their kismet encounter in film school, why the story should always top the script, and what it's really like to win an Oscar. Talking Points: The excitement (and anxiety) of winning an Oscar Exploring the changing landscape of short film Sharpening your skills with short films Why documentary filmmaking demands discomfort Prioritizing good storytelling over a solid script Navigating narrative with a documentary approach Show Notes: University of Southern California Cinematic Arts — https://cinema.usc.edu/ Period. End of Sentence. (2018) — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6939026/ Sundance Institute — https://www.sundance.org/ SXSW Film Festival — https://www.sxsw.com/festivals/film/ Tribeca Festival — https://tribecafilm.com/festival Cleveland International Film Festival — https://www.clevelandfilm.org/ AFI Fest — https://fest.afi.com/ Moiz Tarwadi — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10533814/ The Pad Project — https://thepadproject.org/ Christian Bale — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000288/ Rami Malek — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1785339/ Frances McDormand — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000531/ Are You Still There? (2021) — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13281862/ Brought to you by Musicbed, the filmmaking industry's music licensing platform of choice. Learn more: ⁠musicbed.com⁠. About Musicbed:Musicbed is the leading sync licensing platform for authentic music from relevant artists. We're a one-stop licensing agency representing a curated roster of authentic artists, bands, and composers for film, TV, and advertising. From leading composers to tour-tested bands, and rising singer/songwriters, we believe music brings emotion and has the power to amplify your story.

Juneteenth celebrations are underway in Southern California. LA County reaches a settlement in a lawsuit aimed at improving conditions in the jail holding areas. The Sundance Institute receives grant to fund more projects from Indigenous filmmakers. Support The L.A. Report by donating now at LAist.com/join and by visiting https://laist.comSupport the show: https://laist.com

Andria Wilson Mirza is the Director of ReFrame, the screen industry's gender equity coalition founded and led by Sundance Institute and Women In Film. Since joining the organization, she has expanded their mid-career talent accelerator and launched the ReFrame ReSource, an industry-leading initiative to create connections across Hollywood's diversity advocacy sector. Previously, Andria was Executive Director of Inside Out, Canada's largest LGBTQ film festival. There, she established the world's only LGBTQ Feature Film Financing Forum, launched two development funds, co-founded the North American Queer Festival Alliance (NAQFA), and spearheaded a 4-year partnership between Inside Out and Netflix.Andria and her wife Fawzia Mirza co-founded and run Baby Daal Productions, and are currently in post-production on the feature THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS, a Pakistan-Canada co-production. Baby Daal's feature slate also includes Sandra Itäinen's upcoming queer Muslim documentary COMING AROUND and Drew Denny's GIFTED, which centers survivors of intimate partner violence with an all-survivor crew and creative team. Andria serves on the advisory board of Hire Survivors Hollywood, and is a consultant for EFM's Toolbox program to support underrepresented directors in navigating their first international film market. Named ‘one of 15 Canadian women to watch' by the CBC, Andria has been a featured speaker at festivals including TIFF, Sundance, SXSW, AFM, San Diego Comic Con, Berlin's European Film Market, Oslo Fusion, and the Iris Prize Producer's Forum.Twitter: @reframeproject @andriawilsonInstagram: @reframe_project @andriawilsonmirza

Hours before their Sundance premieres, we spoke with the writing fellows of Women Write Now, Hartbeat's annual comedic screenwriting fellowship for Black women in partnership with the Sundance Institute. In addition to having the three writing fellows on, we were also joined by Hartbeat's Head of Film, Candice Wilson-Cherry, who takes us through how the program is designed to directly address the lack of BIPOC women in leadership positions like showrunners and in writers' rooms. We also were joined by Hey Boo director Logan Browning who you might know from The Perfection and Dear White People. And in addition to diving into the art of comedy, we also dig into the art of directing for comedy. All of these shorts are directed by actors — the other two being Tika Sumpter and Nicole Byer. In this episode, we discuss… How the Women Write Now program is filling a void in the writing space  Their process for finding writiers and directors for the program The development process of each of the shorts  Fitting the script into only 10 pages Having to adjust things for the budgets Finding mentors who would guide fellows in nurturing yet realistic ways Doing table reads versus chemistry reads Letting go of control by trusting actors Hitting deadlines so you don't hold up production Memorable Quotes “It's really important that all of our films, tv shows, and formats are all reflective of the world.” [3:28] “That was really nice, sort of discovering a different layer and different element to the story.” [9:56] “They have helped me walk into a door that was closed.” [14:03] “Make sure your actors get to be free and play.” [22:28] “Write, write, write. You only become good, by just doing it.” [34:32] “If you feel like you are a writer to your core, don't be afraid to say it and don't be afraid to tell people.” [41:03] Mentioned: https://womenwritenow.com/ The Real Hartbeat on Instagram Candice Wilson Cherry (Producer of the films) Logan Browning (Hey Boo director) Danielle Solomon (Hey Boo writer) Mayanna Berrin (Power Dynamics writer) Kiana Butler (Night Off writer) Find No Film School everywhere: On the Web https://nofilmschool.com/ Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/nofilmschool Twitter  https://twitter.com/nofilmschool YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/user/nofilmschool Instagram https://www.instagram.com/nofilmschool Get your questions answered on the podcast by emailing editor@nofilmschool.com! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices