Podcast appearances and mentions of Tom Conti

This week, we dig into DEBT OF LIES, featuring the great Tom Conti! Someone is murdering people connected to a police retirement community. Can Barnaby and Winter find the killer or will they be hit in the face with a wet sponge? The answer is both! We're talking a more serious episode, the history of the Great Train Robbery, and when Barnaby gets too judgy. Created, produced, and hosted by Eileen Becker and Eric BuscherSend us email! We love it and crave validation! Write to us at welcometomidsomer@gmail.comLinksWebsite - www.welcometomidsomer.comFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/welcometomidsomerInstagram - welcometomidsomerThreads - welcometomidsomerWe are now on YOUTUBE - https://www.youtube.com/@WelcomeToMidsomerLogo and Podcast art - Smeedrai Theme Music - The Infamous Space

#A little side note. I now pronounce Cannes without the S. Hey, I'm a working class northern lad raised on Catchphrase and 'say what you see'. You should hear me pronounce baguette! Anyway, moving on...Join us on an enchanting journey with Emmy-nominated animator and director Richard Bazley, as he shares the remarkable story of his path from the idyllic Devon countryside to the bustling world of animation in Los Angeles. Richard's dream, sparked by a Disney book from his mother, led him through uncharted waters, serendipitously landing his first industry role on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." His experiences paint a vivid picture of resilience and creativity, offering valuable insights into the relentless pursuit of one's dreams.In this episode, we also celebrate the magic of cinema. We reminisce about working with iconic actor Tom Conti and reflect on influential films that have shaped our love for the medium, such as "Star Wars," "Spartacus," and "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad." Richard shares how these cinematic marvels inspired his childhood creativity with Lego and clay, before diving into the emotional depth of films like "Crash" and "The Sixth Sense." Let us know where we're going wrong....or, like, right...maybe.Support the showFollow the adventure, support the show, listen with both ears - https://linktr.ee/DesertIslandGamer

Siskoid Cinema presents... Fade In, the show that looks at famous actors and directors' first feature film, looking for that spark of future stardom. This episode, Ridley Scott's career fades in with The Duellists. Did one the director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator arrive fully formed? Siskoid and Dr. Anj discuss! Listen to the episode below, or subscribe to FW Team-Up on Apple or Spotify! This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK! Visit our WEBSITE: https://fireandwaterpodcast.com/ Follow us on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our FACEBOOK page: https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Subscribe via Apple Podcasts as part of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK. Credits: Bonus clips: "The Duellists" by Ridley Scott, starring Harvey Keitel, Keith Carradine, Liz Smith, Tom Conti, Diana Quick, and Alun Armstrong; and The Duellists score by Howard Blake. Thanks for leaving a comment!

Welcome back to Morgan Hasn't Seen with Jeannine Brice & Morgan Robinson!! A series of self-fulfilment, new paths and finding yourself begins on this week's show as Jeannine has curated a series for Morgan centred around BRAVE NEW WOMEN, starting with a delightfully dry and creatively fourth-wall breaking British gem, and 2x Oscar nominee, in which a bored housewife takes a much needed holiday to Greece. They start with SHIRLEY VALENTINE (1989) starring Pauline Collins, Tom Conti, Alison Steadman & Bernard Hill! Our YouTube Channel for Monday Madness on video, Watchalongs, Live Discussions & more: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvACMX8jX1qQ5ClrGW53vow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Donate: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ItsAWonderful1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join our Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/ItsAWonderful1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ IT'S A WONDERFUL PODCAST STORE:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://its-a-wonderful-podcast.creator-spring.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sub to the feed and download now on Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Amazon Music & more and be sure to rate, review and SHARE AROUND!! Keep up with us on Twitter: Podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/ItsAWonderful1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Morgan: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Th3PurpleDon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Jeannine: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/JeannineDaBean_⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Keep being wonderful!! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/itsawonderfulpodcast/support

On this episode of I Am The Wiz, Wiz reviews the 1983 war film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, starring David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kitano, directed by Nagisa Oshima.

Joining Jackie this week is Tom Conti, the Paisley-born actor best known for his roles on stage and screen, including 1978's Whose Life Is It Anyway and 2023's Oppenheimer. The recipient of Tony and Olivier award, Tom was also named the 2024 Great Scot by the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA earlier this year. In his conversation with Jackie, Tom reflects on his hugely successful career and his love of Scotland. Whether in smaller appearances in cult classics, such as Friends and Miranda, or leading roles in Broadway smashes, Tom reveals what it's really like to lead a life in the arts. Plus, he discusses his performance of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the late 1980s, where he filmed in the National Trust for Scotland's Hill House and Mackintosh at the Willow. For more on Hill House, click here. For more on Mackintosh at the Willow, click here. Love Scotland will return later this year with a brand new series of episode. Subscribe or follow now to make sure you don't miss any new releases. 

It's TV movie week as we look into the 1987 2-parter BASEMENTS, Altman's adapted version of two Harold Pinter works.   We get into John Travolta's British accent, Tom Conti's voice, Linda Hunt's voice, it's a voice heavy episode! We talk Harold Pinter and have a fun time dissecting these two strange but interesting stories. Check this one out sometime! It's a fascinating watch and available on the Internet Archive

The guys get festive this week with the ostensibly Christmas-themed movie about a Japanese prison camp - Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Does it give this movie a wholly different, unique perspective with a Japanese director behind the camera? Is this the most homoerotic film ever made to feature no gay sex? What's the story behind Beat Takeshi? All this and a very unfortunate new sponsor in this week's episode!   Next week: one more Xmas movie before year's end. Questions? Comments? Suggestions? You can always shoot us an e-mail at forscreenandcountry@gmail.com   Full List: https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/war-movies/the-100-greatest-war-movies-of-all-time Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forscreenandcountry Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/fsacpod Our logo was designed by the wonderful Mariah Lirette (https://instagram.com/its.mariah.xo) Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence stars David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jack Thompson, Alistair Browning and Takeshi Kitano; directed by Nagisa Ōshima. Is It Streaming? USA: Criterion Channel. Canada: Criterion Channel. UK: Mubi, Arrow, NOW TV and available to rent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jim Kouf is a writer, director, producer & showrunner.  He recently wrapped up the series GRIMM for NBC which had a successful six year run, where he served as the co-show runner & producer as well as writer and even directed a few episodes himself. His first feature films, co-written with David Greenwalt, were “CLASS”, “AMERICAN DREAMER”, and “SECRET ADMIRER”. He also wrote “THE HIDDEN” under the pseudonym Bob Hunt. Jim made his directorial debut with “MIRACLES” starring Tom Conti, Teri Garr and Christopher Lloyd. In 1985, he moved to the Disney lot where he began a partnership with Lynn Bigelow to form Kouf/Bigelow Productions. During that time, Jim wrote and produced “STAKEOUT” and “ANOTHER STAKEOUT”. He also wrote and directed “DISORGANIZED CRIME” and co-wrote “OPERATION DUMBO DROP”. Kouf/Bigelow Productions executive produced “KALIFORNIA” starring Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis, SILENT FALL starring Richard Dreyfuss and Liv Tyler as well as CONAIR starring Nicolas Cage. Jim also wrote and directed “GANG RELATED” starring Jim Belushi, Tupac Shakur, Dennis Quaid, Lela Rochon and James Earl Jones and co-wrote “RUSH HOUR” starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, SNOW DOGS starring Cuba Gooding and James Coburn and TAXI starring Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon. He has also worked in television, producing and writing with David Greenwalt, for ANGEL and writing and producing on THE HANDLER. His last Disney release was NATIONAL TREASURE starring Nicolas Cage. NATIONAL TREASURE 2 & National Treasure: Edge of History which is based on his characters created, was released in 2007 and 2022 respectively. In 2007 Jim co-wrote and directed the independent film, A FORK IN THE ROAD, starring Jamie King, Sylas Wier Mitchell and Josh Cooke. Jim has also Executive Produced and written for the series GHOST WHISPERER, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. In 2016, MONEY MONSTER was released, which he co-wrote, starring George Clooney and Julie Roberts.   We chat about Life changing poker games, Grimm & the fan base, collaborating with creatives and his wife (Lynn Bigelow) + what makes it a success, his ranch, writing screenplays that hold up, breaking into the industry, picking your battles, moving forward and bad ideas. The video footage of this entire chat is now out as well (one day after release)! So check them out on YouTube under Michael Kahan Check Jim out on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/koufjim/ Website: https://www.jimkouf.com/ ------------------------------------------- Follow @Funny in Failure on Instagram and Facebook https://www.instagram.com/funnyinfailure/ https://www.facebook.com/funnyinfailure/ and @Michael_Kahan on Insta & Twitter to keep up to date with the latest info. https://www.instagram.com/michael_kahan/ https://twitter.com/Michael_Kahan  

Join us as we break down one of the summer's biggest blockbusters, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Let us know your thoughts in our live chat! #Oppenheimer #WatchersBasement Oppenheimer (2023) is a biographical thriller starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Tom Conti, David Dastmalchian, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, Josh Peck and Gary Oldman. Subscribe, rate and review! Follow The Watchers in the Basement on social media! Use #WatchersBasement to comment about the show! facebook.com/watchersbasement twitter.com/WatchBasement instagram.com/watchersbasement threads.net/@watchersbasement anchor.fm/watchersbasement

Does Oppenheimer use CGI? On this SPECIAL EDITION of The Movie Podcast, Daniel, Shahbaz & Anthony are joined by Oscar-Winning VFX Supervisor Andrew Jackson of DNEG for a conversation on recreating the atomic bomb, AI, making Christopher Nolan's vision for Oppenheimer a reality. Oppenheimer is an IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. It is now playing exclusively in theatres by Universal Pictures. DNEG was built on feature film visual effects (VFX) work and opened their first studio in London in 1998. They are a long-time collaborators with visionary director Christopher Nolan and serve as the sole VFX partner on Oppenheimer.Watch and listen to The Movie Podcast now on all podcast feeds, YouTube, and TheMoviePodcast.caGet a whole month of great cinema FREE on MUBI: mubi.com/themoviepodcastContact: hello@themoviepodcast.caTHE MOVIE PODCAST ON ET CANADA!THE MOVIE PODCAST MERCHANDISE NOW AVAILABLE!FOLLOW USDaniel on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdShahbaz on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdAnthony on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdThe Movie Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and YouTube

It's finally here. The double feature of the century. Barbie and Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer de Christopher Nolan avec Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Alden Ehrenreich, Tom Conti et Gary Oldman

Analisamos o filme de Christopher Nolan que narra a história por trás da criação da bomba atômica a partir do ponto de vista do cientista que a criou. - Visite a página do podcast no site e confira material extra sobre o tema do episódio - Junte-se ao Cineclube Cinematório e tenha acesso a conteúdo exclusivo de cinema Nesta edição do podcast cinematório café, nós analisamos "Oppenheimer" (2023), filme dirigido por Christopher Nolan que narra a história por trás da criação da bomba atômica a partir do ponto de vista do cientista J. Robert Oppenheimer, interpretado por Cillian Murphy. Baseado no livro "American Prometheus", escrito por Kai Bird e Martin J. Sherwin, "Oppenheimer" mostra a participação do físico teórico americano no Projeto Manhattan, criado pelo governo dos Estados Unidos para produzir as primeiras armas atômicas durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Ao mesmo tempo, o filme mostra a investigação sobre o suposto envolvimento de Oppenheimer com um caso de espionagem e o envolvimento dele com o Partido Comunista. O elenco de "Oppenheimer" também conta com Emily Blunt, Tom Conti, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. e Florence Pugh, além de participações de Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, Dane DeHaan, Kenneth Branagh e Gary Oldman. Sentam-se à mesa conosco neste episódio para discutir "Barbie", Ana Lúcia Andrade, professora de Cinema da Escola de Belas Artes da UFMG, e Renné França, professor, crítico e cineasta, diretor do filme “Terra e Luz”. O cinematório café é produzido e apresentado por Renato Silveira e Kel Gomes. A cada episódio, nós propomos um debate em torno de filmes recém-lançados e temas relacionados ao cinema, sempre em um clima de descontração e buscando refletir sobre imagens presentes no nosso dia a dia. Quer mandar um e-mail? Escreva para contato@cinematorio.com.br. A sua mensagem pode ser lida no podcast!

This week on The Movie Podcast, Daniel, Shahbaz, & Anthony discuss the HISTORIC Box Office of Barbie and Oppenheimer that are making movies like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning and Haunted Mansion struggle, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, Kraven and more get delayed due to WGA/SAG strikes, and more IMAX screens are coming to Canada. They also discuss new trailers for GEN V, The Exorcist: Believer, Saw X, and what they're watching including Righteous Gemstones, Conspiracy, and Oppenheimer in IMAX 70mm.Watch and listen to The Movie Podcast  now on all podcast feeds, YouTube, and TheMoviePodcast.caGet a whole month of great cinema FREE on MUBI: mubi.com/themoviepodcastContact: hello@themoviepodcast.caTHE MOVIE PODCAST ON ET CANADA!THE MOVIE PODCAST MERCHANDISE NOW AVAILABLE!FOLLOW USDaniel on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdShahbaz on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdAnthony on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdThe Movie Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and YouTube

Greetings programs!  This week we're getting caught up in the fascination that is gripping the nation.  That's right, it's the Barbenheimer episode! Both Oppenheimer and Barbie are being hailed as being some of the best filmmaking of the year.  Do we agree?  Yes, yes we do, and listen in to find out why!STRIKE NOTE:            This episode was produced during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the films being discussed here wouldn't exist.BONUS CONTENT:     This weeks bonus chat -which is available to all of our Patreon supporters- starts with Canadian comedy, and then Simon asks what Star Trek's winning formula is, and Matt asks what's holding Star Wars back from being great lately.  Support starts at just $2 CAD/month, which is a bargain, and you can start with a seven day trial.  Join us!Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/july-30th-2023-86930526SUPPORT:             Patreon    Ko-Fi EPISODE HOMEPAGE:     This episode's homepage features JustWatch-powered streaming links to both films we cover, as well as all of our other content and star ratings. Link: https://awesomefriday.ca/2023/07/podcast-oppenheimer-barbie/CONNECT WITH US:        Awesome Friday: https://awesomefriday.ca        Matthew: https://stretched.ca/ Simon: https://temporarypen.com/ SHOW LINKS: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/awesome-friday/id480100293 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/18daf305-2c59-4718-bd5c-0dc393173353 Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/en/show/2775782 Goodpods: https://goodpods.app.link/ulvugeHonjb Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hd2Vzb21lZnJpZGF5LnBvZG9tYXRpYy5jb20vcnNzMi54bWw IHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/85390621/ Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes480100293/the-awesome-friday-movie-podcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4kwPQGeBvVFVtewkCbrbA9 Meanwhile, relax and enjoy your flight. 

Christopher Nolan brings us, for his latest film, “Oppenheimer”, the true story of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer and takes on an infamous, iconic figure in all the history of the world. The film goes over his adult life leading up to his leadership on the civilian side of the Manhattan Project, the testing of the atomic bomb, the bombings of Japan and the government attacks he faced afterwards. He co-stars with Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Conti, Gary Oldman, Jack Quaid, Tony Goldwyn, Jason Clarke, Alden Ehrenreich, David Krumholtz, Matthew Modine, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Olivia Thirlby, Casey Affleck, Dane DeHaan, James Remar and many others. Nolan typically makes movies that stick with you long after the end credits roll. Is this film any different? Check out this spoiler-free review to find out!Support the showFeel free to reach out to me via:@MoviesMerica on Twitter @moviesmerica on InstagramMovies Merica on Facebook

Christopher Nolan returns to the big screen with Oppenheimer, a biopic about the creation of the atomic bomb featuring a star-studded cast led by Cillian Murphy. Join Ashley, Dylan and Radio Watsons's Buddy Watson as they share their thoughts on the films, discuss how Nolan chose to tell this story and speculate how he shot that explosion.OPPENHEIMER (2023)Directed by: Christopher NolanScreenplay by: Christopher NolanBased on American Prometheus by: Kai Bird, Martin J. SherwinStarring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dylan Arnold, Gustaf Skarsgård, David Krumholtz, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Dane Dehaan, Danny Deferrari, Alden Ehrenreich, Jefferson Hall, Jason Clarke, James D'arcy, Tony GoldwynHosts:Ashley Hobley: https://twitter.com/ashleyhobleyDylan Blight: https://twitter.com/vivaladilGuest:Buddy Watson - Radio WatsonFollow our Trakt:Ashley - https://trakt.tv/users/ashleyhobleyDylan - https://trakt.tv/users/vivaladilAll Episodes:https://explosionnetwork.com/what-do-you-wanna-watchSupport Us:https://explosionnetwork.com/supportus

Daniel, Shahbaz, & Anthony review Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER, based on the biography American Prometheus. Oppenheimer is an IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. The film stars an ensemble cast including Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Rami Malek, Ben Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Kenneth Branagh, David Dastmalchian, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, and many more. Oppenheimer releases exclusively in theatres July 21, 2023 by Universal Pictures.Watch and listen to The Movie Podcast review now on all podcast feeds, YouTube, and TheMoviePodcast.caGet a whole month of great cinema FREE on MUBI: mubi.com/themoviepodcastContact: hello@themoviepodcast.caLINKS TO COOL STUFFFOLLOW USDaniel on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdShahbaz on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdAnthony on Twitter, Instagram, and LetterboxdThe Movie Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and YouTube

On this very spooky episode of Not A Bomb, the guys fulfill a promise to a loyal listener and discuss 1977's supernatural horror film - The Haunting of Julia, also known as Fill Circle. This little-known horror film had a troubled release schedule and would finally be released in the US, three years later, in 1981. Brad and Troy do their best to dance around spoilers and decide the best course of action is to copy the Watch/Skip+ podcast. Listen as our hosts discuss the history of the Heimlich Maneuver, creepy wind-up clown toys, and turtle murder. Does the striking imagery, gothic atmosphere, and Mia Farrow's performance make this film a ghostly classic? Download and find out!*** Spoiler Warning *** if you want to skip the spoiler talk, be sure to check the timestampsTimestamps: Intro - (1:47), Release Information - (7:00), People Involved - (13:02), Production and Development - (24:24), Why did it bomb? - (27:19), Commerical Break - (31:04), The Haunting of Julia spoiler-free discussion - (34:05), Is it a Bomb? - (55:40), Spoiler talk - (59:48), End of Spoilers - (78:51), and Outro - (87:50)The Haunting of Julia is directed by Richard Loncraine and stars Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea, Tom Conti, Robin Gammell, Jill Bennett, and Cathleen Nesbitt.If you want to leave feedback or suggest a movie bomb, please drop us a line at NotABombPod@gmail.com or Contact Us - here. Also, if you like what you hear, leave a review on Apple Podcast.Cast: Brad, Troy

0:11:00 - Box Office and upcoming releases. 0:18:10 *** What's Streaming  *** AMAZON THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, Dir. Troy Duffy – Willem Dafoe, Norman Reedus, Sean Patrick Flannery. 2000 CLOVERFIELD, Dir. Matt Reeves – Mike Vogel, Jessica Lucas, Lizzy Caplan, T.J. Miller. 2008 TRAIN TO BUSAN, Dir. Sang-ho Yeon – Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-Mi, Ma Dong-seok, Su-an Kim. 2016 0:40:30 - Trailers:   OPPENHEIMER (Trailer 2) – Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downy Jr, Florence Pugh, Gary Oldman, Jack Quaid, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich, Rami Malek, Gustaf Skarsgard, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Benny Safdie, Casey Affleck, Michael Arangano, Alex Wolf, David Krumholtz, Scott Grimes, Matthew Modine, James Remar, James D'Arcy, Josh Peck, Jason Clark, Josh Zuckerman, Tom Conti. Feature THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH – Jason Statham, Sienna Guillory, Cliff Curtis.  Feature PADRE PIO – Shia LaBeouf. Feature 0:56:00 - GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, Dir. James Gunn. ( Grayson 6.5 / Roger 7 / Chris 6.5 )   Hosted, produced and mixed by Grayson Maxwell and Roger Stillion.  Guest appearance by Christopher Boughan.  Music by Chad Wall. Quality Assurance by Anthony Emmett. Visit the new Youtube channel, "For the Love of Cinema" to follow and support our short video discussions.  Roger wears aviators!  Please give a like and subscribe if you enjoy it.   Follow the show on Twitter @lovecinemapod and check out the Facebook page for updates.  Rate, subscribe and leave a comment or two.  Every Little bit helps.  Send us an email to fortheloveofcinemapodcast@gmail.com

On this episode, we talk about the great American filmmaker Robert Altman, and what is arguably the worst movie of his six decade, thirty-five film career: his 1987 atrocity O.C. and Stiggs. ----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're going to talk about one of the strangest movies to come out of the decade, not only for its material, but for who directed it.   Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs.   As always, before we get to the O.C. and Stiggs, we will be going a little further back in time.   Although he is not every cineaste's cup of tea, it is generally acknowledged that Robert Altman was one of the best filmmakers to ever work in cinema. But he wasn't an immediate success when he broke into the industry.   Born in Kansas City in February 1925, Robert Altman would join the US Army Air Force after graduating high school, as many a young man would do in the days of World War II. He would train to be a pilot, and he would fly more than 50 missions during the war as part of the 307th Bomb Group, operating in the Pacific Theatre. They would help liberate prisoners of war held in Japanese POW Camps from Okinawa to Manila after the victory over Japan lead to the end of World War II in that part of the world.   After the war, Altman would move to Los Angeles to break into the movies, and he would even succeed in selling a screenplay to RKO Pictures called Bodyguard, a film noir story shot in 1948 starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane, but on the final film, he would only share a “Story by” credit with his then-writing partner, George W. George. But by 1950, he'd be back in Kansas City, where he would direct more than 65 industrial films over the course of three years, before heading back to Los Angeles with the experience he would need to take another shot.   Altman would spend a few years directing episodes of a drama series called Pulse of the City on the DuMont television network and a syndicated police drama called The Sheriff of Cochise, but he wouldn't get his first feature directing gig until 1957, when a businessman in Kansas City would hire the thirty-two year old to write and direct a movie locally. That film, The Delinquents, cost only $60k to make, and would be purchased for release by United Artists for $150k. The first film to star future Billy Jack writer/director/star Tom Laughlin, The Delinquents would gross more than a million dollars in theatres, a very good sum back in those days, but despite the success of the film, the only work Altman could get outside of television was co-directing The James Dean Story, a documentary set up at Warner Brothers to capitalize on the interest in the actor after dying in a car accident two years earlier.   Throughout the 1960s, Altman would continue to work in television, until he was finally given another chance to direct a feature film. 1967's Countdown was a lower budgeted feature at Warner Brothers featuring James Caan in an early leading role, about the space race between the Americans and Soviets, a good two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The shoot itself was easy, but Altman would be fired from the film shortly after filming was completed, as Jack Warner, the 75 year old head of the studio, was not very happy about the overlapping dialogue, a motif that would become a part of Altman's way of making movies. Although his name appears in the credits as the director of the film, he had no input in its assembly. His ambiguous ending was changed, and the film would be edited to be more family friendly than the director intended.   Altman would follow Countdown with 1969's That Cold Day in the Park, a psychological drama that would be both a critical and financial disappointment.   But his next film would change everything.   Before Altman was hired by Twentieth-Century Fox to direct MASH, more than a dozen major filmmakers would pass on the project. An adaptation of a little known novel by a Korean War veteran who worked as a surgeon at one of the Mobile Auxiliary Surgical Hospitals that give the story its acronymic title, MASH would literally fly under the radar from the executives at the studio, as most of the $3m film would be shot at the studio's ranch lot in Malibu, while the executives were more concerned about their bigger movies of the year in production, like their $12.5m biographical film on World War II general George S. Patton and their $25m World War II drama Tora! Tora! Tora!, one of the first movies to be a Japanese and American co-production since the end of the war.    Altman was going to make MASH his way, no matter what. When the studio refused to allow him to hire a fair amount of extras to populate the MASH camp, Altman would steal individual lines from other characters to give to background actors, in order to get the bustling atmosphere he wanted. In order to give the camp a properly dirty look, he would shoot most of the outdoor scenes with a zoom lens and a fog filter with the camera a reasonably far distance from the actors, so they could act to one another instead of the camera, giving the film a sort of documentary feel. And he would find flexibility when the moment called for it. Sally Kellerman, who was hired to play Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, would work with Altman to expand and improve her character to be more than just eye candy, in large part because Altman liked what she was doing in her scenes.   This kind of flexibility infuriated the two major stars of the film, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, who at one point during the shoot tried to get Altman fired for treating everyone in the cast and crew with the same level of respect and decorum regardless of their position. But unlike at Warners a couple years earlier, the success of movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider bamboozled Hollywood studio executives, who did not understand exactly what the new generation of filmgoers wanted, and would often give filmmakers more leeway than before, in the hopes that lightning could be captured once again.   And Altman would give them exactly that.   MASH, which would also be the first major studio film to be released with The F Word spoken on screen, would not only become a critical hit, but become the third highest grossing movie released in 1970, grossing more than $80m. The movie would win the Palme D'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and it would be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Ms. Kellerman, winning only for Best Adapted Screenplay. An ironic win, since most of the dialogue was improvised on set, but the victory for screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. would effectively destroy the once powerful Hollywood Blacklist that had been in place since the Red Scare of the 1950s.   After MASH, Altman went on one of the greatest runs any filmmaker would ever enjoy.   MASH would be released in January 1970, and Altman's follow up, Brewster McCloud, would be released in December 1970. Bud Cort, the future star of Harold and Maude, plays a recluse who lives in the fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome, who is building a pair of wings in order to achieve his dream of flying. The film would feature a number of actors who already were featured in MASH and would continue to be featured in a number of future Altman movies, including Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, John Schuck and Bert Remson, but another reason to watch Brewster McCloud if you've never seen it is because it is the film debut of Shelley Duvall, one of our greatest and least appreciated actresses, who would go on to appear in six other Altman movies over the ensuing decade.   1971's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for me, is his second best film. A Western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, was a minor hit when it was first released but has seen a reevaluation over the years that found it to be named the 8th Best Western of all time by the American Film Institute, which frankly is too low for me. The film would also bring a little-known Canadian poet and musician to the world, Leonard Cohen, who wrote and performed three songs for the soundtrack. Yeah, you have Robert Altman to thank for Leonard Cohen.   1972's Images was another psychological horror film, this time co-written with English actress Susannah York, who also stars in the film as an author of children's books who starts to have wild hallucinations at her remote vacation home, after learning her husband might be cheating on her. The $800k film was one of the first to be produced by Hemdale Films, a British production company co-founded by Blow Up actor David Hemmings, but the film would be a critical and financial disappointment when it was released Christmas week. But it would get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score. It would be one of two nominations in the category for John Williams, the other being The Poseidon Adventure.   Whatever resentment Elliott Gould may have had with Altman during the shooting of MASH was gone by late 1972, when the actor agreed to star in the director's new movie, a modern adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel The Long Goodbye. Gould would be the eighth actor to play the lead character, Phillip Marlowe, in a movie. The screenplay would be written by Leigh Brackett, who Star Wars nerds know as the first writer on The Empire Strikes Back but had also adapted Chandler's novel The Big Sleep, another Phillip Marlowe story, to the big screen back in 1946.   Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich had both been approached to make the film, and it would be Bogdanovich who would recommend Altman to the President of United Artists. The final film would anger Chandler fans, who did not like Altman's approach to the material, and the $1.7m film would gross less than $1m when it was released in March 1973. But like many of Altman's movies, it was a big hit with critics, and would find favor with film fans in the years to come.   1974 would be another year where Altman would make and release two movies in the same calendar year. The first, Thieves Like Us, was a crime drama most noted as one of the few movies to not have any kind of traditional musical score. What music there is in the film is usually heard off radios seen in individual scenes. Once again, we have a number of Altman regulars in the film, including Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, John Schuck and Tom Skerritt, and would feature Keith Carradine, who had a small co-starring role in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in his first major leading role. And, once again, the film would be a hit with critics but a dud with audiences. Unlike most of Altman's movies of the 1970s, Thieves Like Us has not enjoyed the same kind of reappraisal.   The second film, California Split, was released in August, just six months after Thieves Like Us. Elliott Gould once again stars in a Robert Altman movie, this time alongside George Segal. They play a pair of gamblers who ride what they think is a lucky streak from Los Angeles to Reno, Nevada, would be the only time Gould and Segal would work closely together in a movie, and watching California Split, one wishes there could have been more. The movie would be an innovator seemingly purpose-build for a Robert Altman movie, for it would be the first non-Cinerama movie to be recorded using an eight track stereo sound system. More than any movie before, Altman could control how his overlapping dialogue was placed in a theatre. But while most theatres that played the movie would only play it in mono sound, the film would still be a minor success, bringing in more than $5m in ticket sales.   1975 would bring what many consider to be the quintessential Robert Altman movie to screens.   The two hour and forty minute Nashville would feature no less than 24 different major characters, as a group of people come to Music City to be involved in a gala concert for a political outsider who is running for President on the Replacement Party ticket. The cast is one of the best ever assembled for a movie ever, including Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakely, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, Cristina Raines, Lily Tomlin and Keenan Wynn.   Altman would be nominated for two Academy Awards for the film, Best Picture, as its producer, and Best Director, while both Ronee Blakely and Lily Tomlin would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Keith Carradine would also be nominated for an Oscar, but not as an actor. He would, at the urging of Altman during the production of the film, write and perform a song called I'm Easy, which would win for Best Original Song. The $2.2m film would earn $10m in ticket sales, and would eventually become part of the fourth class of movies to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1991, the first of four Robert Altman films to be given that honor. MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye would also be selected for preservation over the years.   And we're going to stop here for a second and take a look at that list of films again.   MASH Brewster McCloud McCabe and Mrs. Miller Images The Long Goodbye Thieves Like Us California Split Nashville   Eight movies, made over a five year period, that between them earned twelve Academy Award nominations, four of which would be deemed so culturally important that they should be preserved for future generations.   And we're still only in the middle of the 1970s.   But the problem with a director like Robert Altman, like many of our greatest directors, their next film after one of their greatest successes feels like a major disappointment. And his 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, and that is the complete title of the film by the way, did not meet the lofty expectations of film fans not only its director, but of its main stars. Altman would cast two legendary actors he had not yet worked with, Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster, and the combination of those two actors with this director should have been fantastic, but the results were merely okay. In fact,  Altman would, for the first time in his career, re-edit a film after its theatrical release, removing some of the Wild West show acts that he felt were maybe redundant.   His 1977 film 3 Women would bring Altman back to the limelight. The film was based on a dream he had one night while his wife was in the hospital. In the dream, he was directing his regular co-star Shelley Duvall alongside Sissy Spacek, who he had never worked with before, in a story about identity theft that took place in the deserts outside Los Angeles. He woke up in the middle of the dream, jotted down what he could remember, and went back to sleep. In the morning, he didn't have a full movie planned out, but enough of one to get Alan Ladd, Jr., the President of Twentieth-Century Fox, to put up $1.7m for a not fully formed idea. That's how much Robert Altman was trusted at the time. That, and Altman was known for never going over budget. As long as he stayed within his budget, Ladd would let Altman make whatever movie he wanted to make. That, plus Ladd was more concerned about a $10m movie he approved that was going over budget over in England, a science fiction movie directed by the guy who did American Graffiti that had no stars outside of Sir Alec Guinness.   That movie, of course, was Star Wars, which would be released four weeks after 3 Women had its premiere in New York City. While the film didn't make 1/100th the money Star Wars made, it was one of the best reviewed movies of the year. But, strangely, the film would not be seen again outside of sporadic screenings on cable until it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection 27 years later.   I'm not going to try and explain the movie to you. Just trust me that 3 Women is from a master craftsman at the top of his game.   While on the press tour to publicize 3 Women, a reporter asked Altman what was going to be next for him. He jokingly said he was going to shoot a wedding. But then he went home, thought about it some more, and in a few weeks, had a basic idea sketched out for a movie titled A Wedding that would take place over the course of one day, as the daughter of a Southern nouveau riche family marries the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman who may or may not a major figure in The Outfit.   And while the film is quite entertaining, what's most interesting about watching this 1978 movie in 2023 is not only how many great established actors Altman got for the film, including Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Howard Duff, Mia Farrow, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton, and, in her 100th movie, Lillian Gish, but the number of notable actors he was able to get because he shot the film just outside Chicago. Not only will you see Dennis Christopher just before his breakthrough in Breaking Away, and not only will you see Pam Dawber just before she was cast alongside Robin Williams in Mark and Mindy, but you'll also see Dennis Franz, Laurie Metcalfe, Gary Sinese, Tim Thomerson, and George Wendt.   And because Altman was able to keep the budget at a reasonable level, less than $1.75m, the film would be slightly profitable for Twentieth Century-Fox after grossing $3.6m at the box office.   Altman's next film for Fox, 1979's Quintet, would not be as fortunate.   Altman had come up with the story for this post-apocalyptic drama as a vehicle for Walter Hill to write and direct. But Hill would instead make The Warriors, and Altman decided to make the film himself. While developing the screenplay with his co-writers Frank Barhydt and Patricia Resnick, Altman would create a board game, complete with token pieces and a full set of rules, to flesh out the storyline.   Altman would once again work with Paul Newman, who stars as a seal hunter in the early days of a new ice age who finds himself in elaborate game with a group of gamblers where losing in the game means losing your life in the process. Altman would deliberately hire an international cast to star alongside Newman, not only to help improve the film's ability to do well in foreign territories but to not have the storyline tied to any specific country. So we would have Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, Spaniard Fernando Rey, Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, French actress Brigitte Fossey, and Danish actress Nina van Pallandt.    In order to maintain the mystery of the movie, Altman would ask Fox to withhold all pre-release publicity for the film, in order to avoid any conditioning of the audience. Imagine trying to put together a compelling trailer for a movie featuring one of the most beloved actors of all time, but you're not allowed to show potential audiences what they're getting themselves into? Altman would let the studio use five shots from the film, totaling about seven seconds, for the trailer, which mostly comprised of slo-mo shots of a pair of dice bouncing around, while the names of the stars pop up from moment to moment and a narrator tries to create some sense of mystery on the soundtrack.   But audiences would not be intrigued by the mystery, and critics would tear the $6.4m budget film apart. To be fair, the shoot for the film, in the winter of 1977 outside Montreal was a tough time for all, and Altman would lose final cut on the film for going severely over-budget during production, although there seems to be very little documentation about how much the final film might have differed from what Altman would have been working on had he been able to complete the film his way.   But despite all the problems with Quintet, Fox would still back Altman's next movie, A Perfect Couple, which would be shot after Fox pulled Altman off Quintet. Can you imagine that happening today? A director working with the studio that just pulled them off their project. But that's how little ego Altman had. He just wanted to make movies. Tell stories. This simple romantic comedy starred his regular collaborator Paul Dooley as  Alex, a man who follows a band of traveling bohemian musicians because he's falling for one of the singers in the band.   Altman kept the film on its $1.9m budget, but the response from critics was mostly concern that Altman had lost his touch. Maybe it was because this was his 13th film of the decade, but there was a serious concern about the director's ability to tell a story had evaporated.   That worry would continue with his next film, Health.   A satire of the political scene in the United States at the end of the 1970s, Health would follow a health food organization holding a convention at a luxury hotel in St. Petersburg FL. As one would expect from a Robert Altman movie, there's one hell of a cast. Along with Henry Gibson, and Paul Dooley, who co-write the script with Altman and Frank Barhydt, the cast would include Lauren Bacall, Carol Burnett, James Garner and, in one of her earliest screen appearances, Alfre Woodard, as well as Dick Cavett and Dinah Shore as themselves.   But between the shooting of the film in the late winter and early spring of 1979 and the planned Christmas 1979 release, there was a change of management at Fox. Alan Ladd Jr. was out, and after Altman turned in his final cut, new studio head Norman Levy decided to pull the film off the 1979 release calendar. Altman fought to get the film released sometime during the 1980 Presidential Campaign, and was able to get Levy to give the film a platform release starting in Los Angeles and New York City in March 1980, but that date would get cancelled as well. Levy then suggested an April 1980 test run in St. Louis, which Altman was not happy with. Altman countered with test runs in Boston, Houston, Sacramento and San Francisco. The best Altman, who was in Malta shooting his next movie, could get were sneak previews of the film in those four markets, and the response cards from the audience were so bad, the studio decided to effectively put the film on the proverbial shelf.   Back from the Mediterranean Sea, Altman would get permission to take the film to the Montreal World Film Festival in August, and the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals in September. After good responses from film goers at those festivals, Fox would relent, and give the film a “preview” screening at the United Artists Theatre in Westwood, starting on September 12th, 1980. But the studio would give the film the most boring ad campaign possible, a very crude line drawing of an older woman's pearl bracelet-covered arm thrusted upward while holding a carrot. With no trailers in circulation at any theatre, and no television commercials on air, it would be little surprise the film didn't do a whole lot of business. You really had to know the film had been released. But its $14k opening weekend gross wasn't really all that bad. And it's second week gross of $10,500 with even less ad support was decent if unspectacular. But it would be good enough to get the film a four week playdate at the UA Westwood.   And then, nothing, until early March 1981, when a film society at Northwestern University in Evanston IL was able to screen a 16mm print for one show, while a theatre in Baltimore was able to show the film one time at the end of March. But then, nothing again for more than another year, when the film would finally get a belated official release at the Film Forum in New York City on April 7th, 1982. It would only play for a week, and as a non-profit, the Film Forum does not report film grosses, so we have no idea how well the film actually did. Since then, the movie showed once on CBS in August 1983, and has occasionally played on the Fox Movie Channel, but has never been released on VHS or DVD or Blu-Ray.   I mentioned a few moments ago that while he was dealing with all this drama concerning Health, Altman was in the Mediterranean filming a movie. I'm not going to go too much into that movie here, since I already have an episode for the future planned for it, suffice to say that a Robert Altman-directed live-action musical version of the Popeye the Sailor Man cartoon featuring songs by the incomparable Harry Nilsson should have been a smash hit, but it wasn't. It was profitable, to be certain, but not the hit everyone was expecting. We'll talk about the film in much more detail soon.   After the disappointing results for Popeye, Altman decided to stop working in Hollywood for a while and hit the Broadway stages, to direct a show called Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. While the show's run was not very long and the reviews not very good, Altman would fund a movie version himself, thanks in part to the sale of his production company, Lion's Gate, not to be confused with the current studio called Lionsgate, and would cast Karen Black, Cher and Sandy Dennis alongside newcomers Sudie Bond and Kathy Bates, as five female members of The Disciples of James Dean come together on the 20th anniversary of the actor's death to honor his life and times. As the first film released by a new independent distributor called Cinecom, I'll spend more time talking about this movie on our show about that distributor, also coming soon, suffice it to say that Altman was back. Critics were behind the film, and arthouse audiences loved it. This would be the first time Altman adapted a stage play to the screen, and it would set the tone for a number of his works throughout the rest of the decade.   Streamers was Altman's 17th film in thirteen years, and another adaptation of a stage play. One of several works by noted Broadway playwright David Rabe's time in the Army during the Vietnam War, the film followed four young soldiers waiting to be shipped to Vietnam who deal with racial tensions and their own intolerances when one soldier reveals he is gay. The film featured Matthew Modine as the Rabe stand-in, and features a rare dramatic role for comedy legend David Alan Grier. Many critics would note how much more intense the film version was compared to the stage version, as Altman's camera was able to effortlessly breeze around the set, and get up close and personal with the performers in ways that simply cannot happen on the stage. But in 1983, audiences were still not quite ready to deal with the trauma of Vietnam on film, and the film would be fairly ignored by audiences, grossing just $378k.   Which, finally, after half an hour, brings us to our featured movie.   O.C. and Stiggs.   Now, you might be asking yourself why I went into such detail about Robert Altman's career, most of it during the 1970s. Well, I wanted to establish what types of material Altman would chose for his projects, and just how different O.C. and Stiggs  was from any other project he had made to date.   O.C. and Stiggs began their lives in the July 1981 issue of National Lampoon, as written by two of the editors of the magazine, Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. The characters were fun-loving and occasionally destructive teenage pranksters, and their first appearance in the magazine would prove to be so popular with readers, the pair would appear a few more times until Matty Simmons, the publisher and owner of National Lampoon, gave over the entire October 1982 issue to Mann and Carroll for a story called “The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” It's easy to find PDFs of the issues online if you look for it.   So the issue becomes one of the biggest selling issues in the history of National Lampoon, and Matty Simmons has been building the National Lampoon brand name by sponsoring a series of movies, including Animal House, co-written by Lampoon writers Doug Kenney and Chris Miller, and the soon to be released movies Class Reunion, written by Lampoon writer John Hughes… yes, that John Hughes… and Movie Madness, written by five Lampoon writers including Tod Carroll. But for some reason, Simmons was not behind the idea of turning the utterly monstrous mind-roasting adventures of O.C. and Stiggs into a movie. He would, however, allow Mann and Carroll to shop the idea around Hollywood, and wished them the best of luck.   As luck would have it, Mann and Carroll would meet Peter Newman, who had worked as Altman's production executive on Jimmy Dean, and was looking to set up his first film as a producer. And while Newman might not have had the credits, he had the connections. The first person he would take the script to his Oscar-winning director Mike Nichols, whose credits by this time included Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge. Surprisingly, Nichols was not just interested in making the movie, but really wanted to have Eddie Murphy, who was a breakout star on Saturday Night Live but was still a month away from becoming a movie star when 48 Hours was released, play one of the leading characters. But Murphy couldn't get out of his SNL commitments, and Nichols had too many other projects, both on Broadway and in movies, to be able to commit to the film.    A few weeks later, Newman and Altman both attended a party where they would catch up after several months. Newman started to tell Altman about this new project he was setting up, and to Newman's surprise, Altman, drawn to the characters' anti-establishment outlook, expressed interest in making it. And because Altman's name still commanded respect in Hollywood, several studios would start to show their interest in making the movie with them. MGM, who was enjoying a number of successes in 1982 thanks to movies like Shoot the Moon, Diner, Victor/Victoria, Rocky III, Poltergeist, Pink Floyd - The Wall, and My Favorite Year, made a preemptive bid on the film, hoping to beat Paramount Pictures to the deal. Unknown to Altman, what interested MGM was that Sylvester Stallone of all people went nuts for the script when he read it, and mentioned to his buddies at the studio that he might be interested in making it himself.   Despite hating studio executives for doing stuff like buying a script he's attached to  then kicking him off so some Italian Stallion not known for comedy could make it himself, Altman agree to make the movie with MGM once Stallone lost interest, as the studio promised there would be no further notes about the script, that Altman could have final cut on the film, that he could shoot the film in Phoenix without studio interference, and that he could have a budget of $7m.   Since this was a Robert Altman film, the cast would be big and eclectic, filled with a number of his regular cast members, known actors who he had never worked with before, and newcomers who would go on to have success a few years down the road. Because, seriously, outside of a Robert Altman movie, where are you going to find a cast that included Jon Cryer, Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Dennis Hopper, Tina Louise, Martin Mull, Cynthia Nixon, Bob Uecker, Melvin van Peebles, and King Sunny Adé and His African Beats? And then imagine that movie also featuring Matthew Broderick, Jim Carrey, Robert Downey, Jr. and Laura Dern?   The story for the film would both follow the stories that appeared in the pages of National Lampoon fairly closely while also making some major changes. In the film, Oliver Cromwell “O.C.” Oglivie and Mark Stiggs are two ne'er-do-well, middle-class Phoenix, Arizona high school students who are disgusted with what they see as an omnipresent culture of vulgar and vapid suburban consumerism. They spend their days slacking off and committing pranks or outright crimes against their sworn enemies, the Schwab family, especially family head Randall Schwab, a wealthy insurance salesman who was responsible for the involuntary commitment of O.C.'s grandfather into a group home. During the film, O.C. and Stiggs will ruin the wedding of Randall Schwab's daughter Lenore, raft their way down to a Mexican fiesta, ruin a horrible dinner theatre performance directed by their high school's drama teacher being attended by the Schwabs, and turn the Schwab mansion into a homeless shelter while the family is on vacation. The film ends with O.C. and Stiggs getting into a gun fight with Randall Schwab before being rescued by Dennis Hopper and a helicopter, before discovering one of their adventures that summer has made them very wealthy themselves.   The film would begin production in Phoenix on August 22nd, 1983, with two newcomers, Daniel H. Jenkins and Neill Barry, as the titular stars of the film. And almost immediately, Altman's chaotic ways of making a movie would become a problem. Altman would make sure the entire cast and crew were all staying at the same hotel in town, across the street from a greyhound racetrack, so Altman could take off to bet on a few of the races during production downtime, and made sure the bar at the hotel was an open bar for his team while they were shooting. When shooting was done every day, the director and his cast would head to a makeshift screening room at the hotel, where they'd watch the previous day's footage, a process called “dailies” in production parlance. On most films, dailies are only attended by the director and his immediate production crew, but in Phoenix, everyone was encouraged to attend. And according to producer Peter Newman and Dan Jenkins, everyone loved the footage, although both would note that it might have been a combination of the alcohol, the pot, the cocaine and the dehydration caused by shooting all day in the excessive Arizona heat during the middle of summer that helped people enjoy the footage.    But here's the funny thing about dailies.   Unless a film is being shot in sequence, you're only seeing small fragments of scenes, often the same actors doing the same things over and over again, before the camera switches places to catch reactions or have other characters continue the scene. Sometimes, they're long takes of scenes that might be interrupted by an actor flubbing a line or an unexpected camera jitter or some other interruption that requires a restart. But everyone seemed to be having fun, especially when dailies ended and Altman would show one of his other movies like MASH or The Long Goodbye or 3 Women.   After two months of shooting, the film would wrap production, and Altman would get to work on his edit of the film. He would have it done before the end of 1983, and he would turn it in to the studio. Shortly after the new year, there would be a private screening of the film in New York City at the offices of the talent agency William Morris, one of the larger private screening rooms in the city. Altman was there, the New York-based executives at MGM were there, Peter Newman was there, several of the actors were there. And within five minutes of the start of the film, Altman realized what he was watching was not his cut of the film. As he was about to lose his stuff and start yelling at the studio executives, the projector broke. The lights would go up, and Altman would dig into the the executives. “This is your effing cut of the film and not mine!” Altman stormed out of the screening and into the cold New York winter night.   A few weeks later, that same print from New York would be screened for the big executives at the MGM lot in Los Angeles. Newman was there, and, surprisingly, Altman was there too. The film would screen for the entire running length, and Altman would sit there, watching someone else's version of the footage he had shot, scenes put in different places than they were supposed to be, music cues not of his design or consent.   At the end of the screening, the room was silent. Not one person in the room had laughed once during the entire screening. Newman and Altman left after the screening, and hit one of Altman's favorite local watering holes. As they said their goodbyes the next morning, Altman apologized to Newman. “I hope I didn't eff up your movie.”   Maybe the movie wasn't completely effed up, but MGM certainly neither knew what to do with the film or how to sell it, so it would just sit there, just like Health a few years earlier, on that proverbial shelf.   More than a year later, in an issue of Spin Magazine, a review of the latest album by King Sunny Adé would mention the film he performed in, O.C. and Stiggs, would, quote unquote, “finally” be released into theatres later that year.   That didn't happen, in large part because after WarGames in the early summer of 1983, almost every MGM release had been  either an outright bomb or an unexpected financial disappointment. The cash flow problem was so bad that the studio effectively had to sell itself to Atlanta cable mogul Ted Turner in order to save itself. Turner didn't actually want all of MGM. He only wanted the valuable MGM film library, but the owner of MGM at the time was either going to sell it all or nothing at all.   Barely two months after Ted Turner bought MGM, he had sold the famed studio lot in Culver City to Lorimar, a television production company that was looking to become a producer and distributor of motion pictures, and sold rest of the company he never wanted in the first place to the guy he bought it all from, who had a kind of seller's remorse. But that repurchase would saddle the company with massive bills, and movies like O.C. and Stiggs would have to sit and collect dust while everything was sorted out.   How long would O.C. and Stiggs be left in a void?   It would be so long that Robert Altman would have time to make not one, not two, but three other movies that would all be released before O.C. and Stiggs ever saw the light of day.   The first, Secret Honor, released in 1984, featured the great Philip Baker Hall as former President Richard Nixon. It's probably Hall's single best work as an actor, and the film would be amongst the best reviewed films of Altman's career.   In 1985, Altman would film Fool For Love, an adaptation of a play by Sam Shepard. This would be the only time in Shepard's film career where he would star as one of the characters himself had written. The film would also prove once and for all that Kim Basinger was more than just a pretty face but a real actor.   And in February 1987, Altman's film version of Beyond Therapy, a play by absurdist playwright Christopher Durant, would open in theatres. The all-star cast would include Tom Conti, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Guest, Julie Hagerty and Glenda Jackson.   On March 5th, 1987, an article in Daily Variety would note that the “long shelved” film would have a limited theatrical release in May, despite the fact that Frank Yablans, the vice chairman of MGM, being quoted in the article that the film was unreleasable. It would further be noted that despite the film being available to international distributors for three years, not one company was willing to acquire the film for any market. The plan was to release the movie for one or two weeks in three major US markets, depending on its popularity, and then decide a future course of action from there.   But May would come and go, without a hint of the film.   Finally, on Friday, July 10th, the film would open on 18 screens, but none in any major market like Chicago, Los Angeles or New York City. I can't find a single theatre the film played in that weekend, but that week's box office figures would show an abysmal $6,273 worth of tickets were sold during that first weekend.   There would not be a second weekend of reported grosses.   But to MGM's credit, they didn't totally give up on the film.   On Thursday, August 27th, O.C. and Stiggs would open in at least one theatre. And, lucky for me, that theatre happened to be the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz. But despite the fact that the new Robert Altman was opening in town, I could not get a single friend to see it with me. So on a Tuesday night at 8:40pm, I was the only person in all of the region to watch what I would soon discover was the worst Robert Altman movie of all time. Now, I should note that even a bad Robert Altman movie is better than many filmmakers' best movies, but O.C. and Stiggs would have ignobility of feeling very much like a Robert Altman movie, with its wandering camera and overlapping dialogue that weaves in and out of conversations while in progress and not quite over yet, yet not feeling anything like a Robert Altman movie at the same time. It didn't have that magical whimsy-ness that was the hallmark of his movies. The satire didn't have its normal bite. It had a number of Altman's regular troop of actors, but in smaller roles than they'd usually occupy, and not giving the performances one would expect of them in an Altman movie.   I don't know how well the film did at the Nick, suffice it to say the film was gone after a week.   But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film.   On October 9th, the film would open at the AMC Century City 14, one of a handful of movies that would open the newest multiplex in Los Angeles.   MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone from the new multiplex after a week.   But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film.   The studio would give the film one more chance, opening it at the Film Forum in New York City on March 18th, 1988.   MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone after a week. But whether that was because MGM didn't support the film with any kind of newspaper advertising in the largest market in America, or because the movie had been released on home video back in November, remains to be seen.   O.C. and Stiggs would never become anything resembling a cult film. It's been released on DVD, and if one was programming a Robert Altman retrospect at a local arthouse movie theatre, one could actually book a 35mm print of the film from the repertory cinema company Park Circus.   But don't feel bad for Altman, as he would return to cinemas with a vengeance in the 1990s, first with the 1990 biographical drama Vincent and Theo, featuring Tim Roth as the tortured genius 19th century painter that would put the actor on the map for good. Then, in 1992, he became a sensation again with his Hollywood satire The Player, featuring Tim Robbins as a murderous studio executive trying to keep the police off his trail while he navigates the pitfalls of the industry. Altman would receive his first Oscar nomination for Best Director since 1975 with The Player, his third overall, a feat he would repeat the following year with Short Cuts, based on a series of short stories by Raymond Carver. In fact, Altman would be nominated for an Academy Award seven times during his career, five times as a director and twice as a producer, although he would never win a competitive Oscar.   In March 2006, while editing his 35th film, a screen adaptation of the then-popular NPR series A Prairie Home Companion, the Academy would bestow an Honorary Oscar upon Altman. During his acceptance speech, Altman would wonder if perhaps the Academy acted prematurely in honoring him in this fashion. He revealed he had received a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, and felt that, even though he had turned 81 the month before, he could continue for another forty years.   Robert Altman would pass away from leukemia on November 20th, 2006, only eight months after receiving the biggest prize of his career.   Robert Altman had a style so unique onto himself, there's an adjective that exists to describe it. Altmanesque. Displaying traits typical of a film made by Robert Altman, typically highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective and often a subversive twist.   He truly was a one of a kind filmmaker, and there will likely never be anyone like him, no matter how hard Paul Thomas Anderson tries.     Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 106, Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, 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.  

On this episode, we talk about the great American filmmaker Robert Altman, and what is arguably the worst movie of his six decade, thirty-five film career: his 1987 atrocity O.C. and Stiggs. ----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're going to talk about one of the strangest movies to come out of the decade, not only for its material, but for who directed it.   Robert Altman's O.C. and Stiggs.   As always, before we get to the O.C. and Stiggs, we will be going a little further back in time.   Although he is not every cineaste's cup of tea, it is generally acknowledged that Robert Altman was one of the best filmmakers to ever work in cinema. But he wasn't an immediate success when he broke into the industry.   Born in Kansas City in February 1925, Robert Altman would join the US Army Air Force after graduating high school, as many a young man would do in the days of World War II. He would train to be a pilot, and he would fly more than 50 missions during the war as part of the 307th Bomb Group, operating in the Pacific Theatre. They would help liberate prisoners of war held in Japanese POW Camps from Okinawa to Manila after the victory over Japan lead to the end of World War II in that part of the world.   After the war, Altman would move to Los Angeles to break into the movies, and he would even succeed in selling a screenplay to RKO Pictures called Bodyguard, a film noir story shot in 1948 starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane, but on the final film, he would only share a “Story by” credit with his then-writing partner, George W. George. But by 1950, he'd be back in Kansas City, where he would direct more than 65 industrial films over the course of three years, before heading back to Los Angeles with the experience he would need to take another shot.   Altman would spend a few years directing episodes of a drama series called Pulse of the City on the DuMont television network and a syndicated police drama called The Sheriff of Cochise, but he wouldn't get his first feature directing gig until 1957, when a businessman in Kansas City would hire the thirty-two year old to write and direct a movie locally. That film, The Delinquents, cost only $60k to make, and would be purchased for release by United Artists for $150k. The first film to star future Billy Jack writer/director/star Tom Laughlin, The Delinquents would gross more than a million dollars in theatres, a very good sum back in those days, but despite the success of the film, the only work Altman could get outside of television was co-directing The James Dean Story, a documentary set up at Warner Brothers to capitalize on the interest in the actor after dying in a car accident two years earlier.   Throughout the 1960s, Altman would continue to work in television, until he was finally given another chance to direct a feature film. 1967's Countdown was a lower budgeted feature at Warner Brothers featuring James Caan in an early leading role, about the space race between the Americans and Soviets, a good two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The shoot itself was easy, but Altman would be fired from the film shortly after filming was completed, as Jack Warner, the 75 year old head of the studio, was not very happy about the overlapping dialogue, a motif that would become a part of Altman's way of making movies. Although his name appears in the credits as the director of the film, he had no input in its assembly. His ambiguous ending was changed, and the film would be edited to be more family friendly than the director intended.   Altman would follow Countdown with 1969's That Cold Day in the Park, a psychological drama that would be both a critical and financial disappointment.   But his next film would change everything.   Before Altman was hired by Twentieth-Century Fox to direct MASH, more than a dozen major filmmakers would pass on the project. An adaptation of a little known novel by a Korean War veteran who worked as a surgeon at one of the Mobile Auxiliary Surgical Hospitals that give the story its acronymic title, MASH would literally fly under the radar from the executives at the studio, as most of the $3m film would be shot at the studio's ranch lot in Malibu, while the executives were more concerned about their bigger movies of the year in production, like their $12.5m biographical film on World War II general George S. Patton and their $25m World War II drama Tora! Tora! Tora!, one of the first movies to be a Japanese and American co-production since the end of the war.    Altman was going to make MASH his way, no matter what. When the studio refused to allow him to hire a fair amount of extras to populate the MASH camp, Altman would steal individual lines from other characters to give to background actors, in order to get the bustling atmosphere he wanted. In order to give the camp a properly dirty look, he would shoot most of the outdoor scenes with a zoom lens and a fog filter with the camera a reasonably far distance from the actors, so they could act to one another instead of the camera, giving the film a sort of documentary feel. And he would find flexibility when the moment called for it. Sally Kellerman, who was hired to play Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, would work with Altman to expand and improve her character to be more than just eye candy, in large part because Altman liked what she was doing in her scenes.   This kind of flexibility infuriated the two major stars of the film, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, who at one point during the shoot tried to get Altman fired for treating everyone in the cast and crew with the same level of respect and decorum regardless of their position. But unlike at Warners a couple years earlier, the success of movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider bamboozled Hollywood studio executives, who did not understand exactly what the new generation of filmgoers wanted, and would often give filmmakers more leeway than before, in the hopes that lightning could be captured once again.   And Altman would give them exactly that.   MASH, which would also be the first major studio film to be released with The F Word spoken on screen, would not only become a critical hit, but become the third highest grossing movie released in 1970, grossing more than $80m. The movie would win the Palme D'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival, and it would be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Ms. Kellerman, winning only for Best Adapted Screenplay. An ironic win, since most of the dialogue was improvised on set, but the victory for screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. would effectively destroy the once powerful Hollywood Blacklist that had been in place since the Red Scare of the 1950s.   After MASH, Altman went on one of the greatest runs any filmmaker would ever enjoy.   MASH would be released in January 1970, and Altman's follow up, Brewster McCloud, would be released in December 1970. Bud Cort, the future star of Harold and Maude, plays a recluse who lives in the fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome, who is building a pair of wings in order to achieve his dream of flying. The film would feature a number of actors who already were featured in MASH and would continue to be featured in a number of future Altman movies, including Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, John Schuck and Bert Remson, but another reason to watch Brewster McCloud if you've never seen it is because it is the film debut of Shelley Duvall, one of our greatest and least appreciated actresses, who would go on to appear in six other Altman movies over the ensuing decade.   1971's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for me, is his second best film. A Western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, was a minor hit when it was first released but has seen a reevaluation over the years that found it to be named the 8th Best Western of all time by the American Film Institute, which frankly is too low for me. The film would also bring a little-known Canadian poet and musician to the world, Leonard Cohen, who wrote and performed three songs for the soundtrack. Yeah, you have Robert Altman to thank for Leonard Cohen.   1972's Images was another psychological horror film, this time co-written with English actress Susannah York, who also stars in the film as an author of children's books who starts to have wild hallucinations at her remote vacation home, after learning her husband might be cheating on her. The $800k film was one of the first to be produced by Hemdale Films, a British production company co-founded by Blow Up actor David Hemmings, but the film would be a critical and financial disappointment when it was released Christmas week. But it would get nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score. It would be one of two nominations in the category for John Williams, the other being The Poseidon Adventure.   Whatever resentment Elliott Gould may have had with Altman during the shooting of MASH was gone by late 1972, when the actor agreed to star in the director's new movie, a modern adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel The Long Goodbye. Gould would be the eighth actor to play the lead character, Phillip Marlowe, in a movie. The screenplay would be written by Leigh Brackett, who Star Wars nerds know as the first writer on The Empire Strikes Back but had also adapted Chandler's novel The Big Sleep, another Phillip Marlowe story, to the big screen back in 1946.   Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich had both been approached to make the film, and it would be Bogdanovich who would recommend Altman to the President of United Artists. The final film would anger Chandler fans, who did not like Altman's approach to the material, and the $1.7m film would gross less than $1m when it was released in March 1973. But like many of Altman's movies, it was a big hit with critics, and would find favor with film fans in the years to come.   1974 would be another year where Altman would make and release two movies in the same calendar year. The first, Thieves Like Us, was a crime drama most noted as one of the few movies to not have any kind of traditional musical score. What music there is in the film is usually heard off radios seen in individual scenes. Once again, we have a number of Altman regulars in the film, including Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, John Schuck and Tom Skerritt, and would feature Keith Carradine, who had a small co-starring role in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in his first major leading role. And, once again, the film would be a hit with critics but a dud with audiences. Unlike most of Altman's movies of the 1970s, Thieves Like Us has not enjoyed the same kind of reappraisal.   The second film, California Split, was released in August, just six months after Thieves Like Us. Elliott Gould once again stars in a Robert Altman movie, this time alongside George Segal. They play a pair of gamblers who ride what they think is a lucky streak from Los Angeles to Reno, Nevada, would be the only time Gould and Segal would work closely together in a movie, and watching California Split, one wishes there could have been more. The movie would be an innovator seemingly purpose-build for a Robert Altman movie, for it would be the first non-Cinerama movie to be recorded using an eight track stereo sound system. More than any movie before, Altman could control how his overlapping dialogue was placed in a theatre. But while most theatres that played the movie would only play it in mono sound, the film would still be a minor success, bringing in more than $5m in ticket sales.   1975 would bring what many consider to be the quintessential Robert Altman movie to screens.   The two hour and forty minute Nashville would feature no less than 24 different major characters, as a group of people come to Music City to be involved in a gala concert for a political outsider who is running for President on the Replacement Party ticket. The cast is one of the best ever assembled for a movie ever, including Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakely, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, Cristina Raines, Lily Tomlin and Keenan Wynn.   Altman would be nominated for two Academy Awards for the film, Best Picture, as its producer, and Best Director, while both Ronee Blakely and Lily Tomlin would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Keith Carradine would also be nominated for an Oscar, but not as an actor. He would, at the urging of Altman during the production of the film, write and perform a song called I'm Easy, which would win for Best Original Song. The $2.2m film would earn $10m in ticket sales, and would eventually become part of the fourth class of movies to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1991, the first of four Robert Altman films to be given that honor. MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye would also be selected for preservation over the years.   And we're going to stop here for a second and take a look at that list of films again.   MASH Brewster McCloud McCabe and Mrs. Miller Images The Long Goodbye Thieves Like Us California Split Nashville   Eight movies, made over a five year period, that between them earned twelve Academy Award nominations, four of which would be deemed so culturally important that they should be preserved for future generations.   And we're still only in the middle of the 1970s.   But the problem with a director like Robert Altman, like many of our greatest directors, their next film after one of their greatest successes feels like a major disappointment. And his 1976 film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, and that is the complete title of the film by the way, did not meet the lofty expectations of film fans not only its director, but of its main stars. Altman would cast two legendary actors he had not yet worked with, Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster, and the combination of those two actors with this director should have been fantastic, but the results were merely okay. In fact,  Altman would, for the first time in his career, re-edit a film after its theatrical release, removing some of the Wild West show acts that he felt were maybe redundant.   His 1977 film 3 Women would bring Altman back to the limelight. The film was based on a dream he had one night while his wife was in the hospital. In the dream, he was directing his regular co-star Shelley Duvall alongside Sissy Spacek, who he had never worked with before, in a story about identity theft that took place in the deserts outside Los Angeles. He woke up in the middle of the dream, jotted down what he could remember, and went back to sleep. In the morning, he didn't have a full movie planned out, but enough of one to get Alan Ladd, Jr., the President of Twentieth-Century Fox, to put up $1.7m for a not fully formed idea. That's how much Robert Altman was trusted at the time. That, and Altman was known for never going over budget. As long as he stayed within his budget, Ladd would let Altman make whatever movie he wanted to make. That, plus Ladd was more concerned about a $10m movie he approved that was going over budget over in England, a science fiction movie directed by the guy who did American Graffiti that had no stars outside of Sir Alec Guinness.   That movie, of course, was Star Wars, which would be released four weeks after 3 Women had its premiere in New York City. While the film didn't make 1/100th the money Star Wars made, it was one of the best reviewed movies of the year. But, strangely, the film would not be seen again outside of sporadic screenings on cable until it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection 27 years later.   I'm not going to try and explain the movie to you. Just trust me that 3 Women is from a master craftsman at the top of his game.   While on the press tour to publicize 3 Women, a reporter asked Altman what was going to be next for him. He jokingly said he was going to shoot a wedding. But then he went home, thought about it some more, and in a few weeks, had a basic idea sketched out for a movie titled A Wedding that would take place over the course of one day, as the daughter of a Southern nouveau riche family marries the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman who may or may not a major figure in The Outfit.   And while the film is quite entertaining, what's most interesting about watching this 1978 movie in 2023 is not only how many great established actors Altman got for the film, including Carol Burnett, Paul Dooley, Howard Duff, Mia Farrow, Vittorio Gassman, Lauren Hutton, and, in her 100th movie, Lillian Gish, but the number of notable actors he was able to get because he shot the film just outside Chicago. Not only will you see Dennis Christopher just before his breakthrough in Breaking Away, and not only will you see Pam Dawber just before she was cast alongside Robin Williams in Mark and Mindy, but you'll also see Dennis Franz, Laurie Metcalfe, Gary Sinese, Tim Thomerson, and George Wendt.   And because Altman was able to keep the budget at a reasonable level, less than $1.75m, the film would be slightly profitable for Twentieth Century-Fox after grossing $3.6m at the box office.   Altman's next film for Fox, 1979's Quintet, would not be as fortunate.   Altman had come up with the story for this post-apocalyptic drama as a vehicle for Walter Hill to write and direct. But Hill would instead make The Warriors, and Altman decided to make the film himself. While developing the screenplay with his co-writers Frank Barhydt and Patricia Resnick, Altman would create a board game, complete with token pieces and a full set of rules, to flesh out the storyline.   Altman would once again work with Paul Newman, who stars as a seal hunter in the early days of a new ice age who finds himself in elaborate game with a group of gamblers where losing in the game means losing your life in the process. Altman would deliberately hire an international cast to star alongside Newman, not only to help improve the film's ability to do well in foreign territories but to not have the storyline tied to any specific country. So we would have Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, Spaniard Fernando Rey, Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, French actress Brigitte Fossey, and Danish actress Nina van Pallandt.    In order to maintain the mystery of the movie, Altman would ask Fox to withhold all pre-release publicity for the film, in order to avoid any conditioning of the audience. Imagine trying to put together a compelling trailer for a movie featuring one of the most beloved actors of all time, but you're not allowed to show potential audiences what they're getting themselves into? Altman would let the studio use five shots from the film, totaling about seven seconds, for the trailer, which mostly comprised of slo-mo shots of a pair of dice bouncing around, while the names of the stars pop up from moment to moment and a narrator tries to create some sense of mystery on the soundtrack.   But audiences would not be intrigued by the mystery, and critics would tear the $6.4m budget film apart. To be fair, the shoot for the film, in the winter of 1977 outside Montreal was a tough time for all, and Altman would lose final cut on the film for going severely over-budget during production, although there seems to be very little documentation about how much the final film might have differed from what Altman would have been working on had he been able to complete the film his way.   But despite all the problems with Quintet, Fox would still back Altman's next movie, A Perfect Couple, which would be shot after Fox pulled Altman off Quintet. Can you imagine that happening today? A director working with the studio that just pulled them off their project. But that's how little ego Altman had. He just wanted to make movies. Tell stories. This simple romantic comedy starred his regular collaborator Paul Dooley as  Alex, a man who follows a band of traveling bohemian musicians because he's falling for one of the singers in the band.   Altman kept the film on its $1.9m budget, but the response from critics was mostly concern that Altman had lost his touch. Maybe it was because this was his 13th film of the decade, but there was a serious concern about the director's ability to tell a story had evaporated.   That worry would continue with his next film, Health.   A satire of the political scene in the United States at the end of the 1970s, Health would follow a health food organization holding a convention at a luxury hotel in St. Petersburg FL. As one would expect from a Robert Altman movie, there's one hell of a cast. Along with Henry Gibson, and Paul Dooley, who co-write the script with Altman and Frank Barhydt, the cast would include Lauren Bacall, Carol Burnett, James Garner and, in one of her earliest screen appearances, Alfre Woodard, as well as Dick Cavett and Dinah Shore as themselves.   But between the shooting of the film in the late winter and early spring of 1979 and the planned Christmas 1979 release, there was a change of management at Fox. Alan Ladd Jr. was out, and after Altman turned in his final cut, new studio head Norman Levy decided to pull the film off the 1979 release calendar. Altman fought to get the film released sometime during the 1980 Presidential Campaign, and was able to get Levy to give the film a platform release starting in Los Angeles and New York City in March 1980, but that date would get cancelled as well. Levy then suggested an April 1980 test run in St. Louis, which Altman was not happy with. Altman countered with test runs in Boston, Houston, Sacramento and San Francisco. The best Altman, who was in Malta shooting his next movie, could get were sneak previews of the film in those four markets, and the response cards from the audience were so bad, the studio decided to effectively put the film on the proverbial shelf.   Back from the Mediterranean Sea, Altman would get permission to take the film to the Montreal World Film Festival in August, and the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals in September. After good responses from film goers at those festivals, Fox would relent, and give the film a “preview” screening at the United Artists Theatre in Westwood, starting on September 12th, 1980. But the studio would give the film the most boring ad campaign possible, a very crude line drawing of an older woman's pearl bracelet-covered arm thrusted upward while holding a carrot. With no trailers in circulation at any theatre, and no television commercials on air, it would be little surprise the film didn't do a whole lot of business. You really had to know the film had been released. But its $14k opening weekend gross wasn't really all that bad. And it's second week gross of $10,500 with even less ad support was decent if unspectacular. But it would be good enough to get the film a four week playdate at the UA Westwood.   And then, nothing, until early March 1981, when a film society at Northwestern University in Evanston IL was able to screen a 16mm print for one show, while a theatre in Baltimore was able to show the film one time at the end of March. But then, nothing again for more than another year, when the film would finally get a belated official release at the Film Forum in New York City on April 7th, 1982. It would only play for a week, and as a non-profit, the Film Forum does not report film grosses, so we have no idea how well the film actually did. Since then, the movie showed once on CBS in August 1983, and has occasionally played on the Fox Movie Channel, but has never been released on VHS or DVD or Blu-Ray.   I mentioned a few moments ago that while he was dealing with all this drama concerning Health, Altman was in the Mediterranean filming a movie. I'm not going to go too much into that movie here, since I already have an episode for the future planned for it, suffice to say that a Robert Altman-directed live-action musical version of the Popeye the Sailor Man cartoon featuring songs by the incomparable Harry Nilsson should have been a smash hit, but it wasn't. It was profitable, to be certain, but not the hit everyone was expecting. We'll talk about the film in much more detail soon.   After the disappointing results for Popeye, Altman decided to stop working in Hollywood for a while and hit the Broadway stages, to direct a show called Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. While the show's run was not very long and the reviews not very good, Altman would fund a movie version himself, thanks in part to the sale of his production company, Lion's Gate, not to be confused with the current studio called Lionsgate, and would cast Karen Black, Cher and Sandy Dennis alongside newcomers Sudie Bond and Kathy Bates, as five female members of The Disciples of James Dean come together on the 20th anniversary of the actor's death to honor his life and times. As the first film released by a new independent distributor called Cinecom, I'll spend more time talking about this movie on our show about that distributor, also coming soon, suffice it to say that Altman was back. Critics were behind the film, and arthouse audiences loved it. This would be the first time Altman adapted a stage play to the screen, and it would set the tone for a number of his works throughout the rest of the decade.   Streamers was Altman's 17th film in thirteen years, and another adaptation of a stage play. One of several works by noted Broadway playwright David Rabe's time in the Army during the Vietnam War, the film followed four young soldiers waiting to be shipped to Vietnam who deal with racial tensions and their own intolerances when one soldier reveals he is gay. The film featured Matthew Modine as the Rabe stand-in, and features a rare dramatic role for comedy legend David Alan Grier. Many critics would note how much more intense the film version was compared to the stage version, as Altman's camera was able to effortlessly breeze around the set, and get up close and personal with the performers in ways that simply cannot happen on the stage. But in 1983, audiences were still not quite ready to deal with the trauma of Vietnam on film, and the film would be fairly ignored by audiences, grossing just $378k.   Which, finally, after half an hour, brings us to our featured movie.   O.C. and Stiggs.   Now, you might be asking yourself why I went into such detail about Robert Altman's career, most of it during the 1970s. Well, I wanted to establish what types of material Altman would chose for his projects, and just how different O.C. and Stiggs  was from any other project he had made to date.   O.C. and Stiggs began their lives in the July 1981 issue of National Lampoon, as written by two of the editors of the magazine, Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. The characters were fun-loving and occasionally destructive teenage pranksters, and their first appearance in the magazine would prove to be so popular with readers, the pair would appear a few more times until Matty Simmons, the publisher and owner of National Lampoon, gave over the entire October 1982 issue to Mann and Carroll for a story called “The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” It's easy to find PDFs of the issues online if you look for it.   So the issue becomes one of the biggest selling issues in the history of National Lampoon, and Matty Simmons has been building the National Lampoon brand name by sponsoring a series of movies, including Animal House, co-written by Lampoon writers Doug Kenney and Chris Miller, and the soon to be released movies Class Reunion, written by Lampoon writer John Hughes… yes, that John Hughes… and Movie Madness, written by five Lampoon writers including Tod Carroll. But for some reason, Simmons was not behind the idea of turning the utterly monstrous mind-roasting adventures of O.C. and Stiggs into a movie. He would, however, allow Mann and Carroll to shop the idea around Hollywood, and wished them the best of luck.   As luck would have it, Mann and Carroll would meet Peter Newman, who had worked as Altman's production executive on Jimmy Dean, and was looking to set up his first film as a producer. And while Newman might not have had the credits, he had the connections. The first person he would take the script to his Oscar-winning director Mike Nichols, whose credits by this time included Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge. Surprisingly, Nichols was not just interested in making the movie, but really wanted to have Eddie Murphy, who was a breakout star on Saturday Night Live but was still a month away from becoming a movie star when 48 Hours was released, play one of the leading characters. But Murphy couldn't get out of his SNL commitments, and Nichols had too many other projects, both on Broadway and in movies, to be able to commit to the film.    A few weeks later, Newman and Altman both attended a party where they would catch up after several months. Newman started to tell Altman about this new project he was setting up, and to Newman's surprise, Altman, drawn to the characters' anti-establishment outlook, expressed interest in making it. And because Altman's name still commanded respect in Hollywood, several studios would start to show their interest in making the movie with them. MGM, who was enjoying a number of successes in 1982 thanks to movies like Shoot the Moon, Diner, Victor/Victoria, Rocky III, Poltergeist, Pink Floyd - The Wall, and My Favorite Year, made a preemptive bid on the film, hoping to beat Paramount Pictures to the deal. Unknown to Altman, what interested MGM was that Sylvester Stallone of all people went nuts for the script when he read it, and mentioned to his buddies at the studio that he might be interested in making it himself.   Despite hating studio executives for doing stuff like buying a script he's attached to  then kicking him off so some Italian Stallion not known for comedy could make it himself, Altman agree to make the movie with MGM once Stallone lost interest, as the studio promised there would be no further notes about the script, that Altman could have final cut on the film, that he could shoot the film in Phoenix without studio interference, and that he could have a budget of $7m.   Since this was a Robert Altman film, the cast would be big and eclectic, filled with a number of his regular cast members, known actors who he had never worked with before, and newcomers who would go on to have success a few years down the road. Because, seriously, outside of a Robert Altman movie, where are you going to find a cast that included Jon Cryer, Jane Curtin, Paul Dooley, Dennis Hopper, Tina Louise, Martin Mull, Cynthia Nixon, Bob Uecker, Melvin van Peebles, and King Sunny Adé and His African Beats? And then imagine that movie also featuring Matthew Broderick, Jim Carrey, Robert Downey, Jr. and Laura Dern?   The story for the film would both follow the stories that appeared in the pages of National Lampoon fairly closely while also making some major changes. In the film, Oliver Cromwell “O.C.” Oglivie and Mark Stiggs are two ne'er-do-well, middle-class Phoenix, Arizona high school students who are disgusted with what they see as an omnipresent culture of vulgar and vapid suburban consumerism. They spend their days slacking off and committing pranks or outright crimes against their sworn enemies, the Schwab family, especially family head Randall Schwab, a wealthy insurance salesman who was responsible for the involuntary commitment of O.C.'s grandfather into a group home. During the film, O.C. and Stiggs will ruin the wedding of Randall Schwab's daughter Lenore, raft their way down to a Mexican fiesta, ruin a horrible dinner theatre performance directed by their high school's drama teacher being attended by the Schwabs, and turn the Schwab mansion into a homeless shelter while the family is on vacation. The film ends with O.C. and Stiggs getting into a gun fight with Randall Schwab before being rescued by Dennis Hopper and a helicopter, before discovering one of their adventures that summer has made them very wealthy themselves.   The film would begin production in Phoenix on August 22nd, 1983, with two newcomers, Daniel H. Jenkins and Neill Barry, as the titular stars of the film. And almost immediately, Altman's chaotic ways of making a movie would become a problem. Altman would make sure the entire cast and crew were all staying at the same hotel in town, across the street from a greyhound racetrack, so Altman could take off to bet on a few of the races during production downtime, and made sure the bar at the hotel was an open bar for his team while they were shooting. When shooting was done every day, the director and his cast would head to a makeshift screening room at the hotel, where they'd watch the previous day's footage, a process called “dailies” in production parlance. On most films, dailies are only attended by the director and his immediate production crew, but in Phoenix, everyone was encouraged to attend. And according to producer Peter Newman and Dan Jenkins, everyone loved the footage, although both would note that it might have been a combination of the alcohol, the pot, the cocaine and the dehydration caused by shooting all day in the excessive Arizona heat during the middle of summer that helped people enjoy the footage.    But here's the funny thing about dailies.   Unless a film is being shot in sequence, you're only seeing small fragments of scenes, often the same actors doing the same things over and over again, before the camera switches places to catch reactions or have other characters continue the scene. Sometimes, they're long takes of scenes that might be interrupted by an actor flubbing a line or an unexpected camera jitter or some other interruption that requires a restart. But everyone seemed to be having fun, especially when dailies ended and Altman would show one of his other movies like MASH or The Long Goodbye or 3 Women.   After two months of shooting, the film would wrap production, and Altman would get to work on his edit of the film. He would have it done before the end of 1983, and he would turn it in to the studio. Shortly after the new year, there would be a private screening of the film in New York City at the offices of the talent agency William Morris, one of the larger private screening rooms in the city. Altman was there, the New York-based executives at MGM were there, Peter Newman was there, several of the actors were there. And within five minutes of the start of the film, Altman realized what he was watching was not his cut of the film. As he was about to lose his stuff and start yelling at the studio executives, the projector broke. The lights would go up, and Altman would dig into the the executives. “This is your effing cut of the film and not mine!” Altman stormed out of the screening and into the cold New York winter night.   A few weeks later, that same print from New York would be screened for the big executives at the MGM lot in Los Angeles. Newman was there, and, surprisingly, Altman was there too. The film would screen for the entire running length, and Altman would sit there, watching someone else's version of the footage he had shot, scenes put in different places than they were supposed to be, music cues not of his design or consent.   At the end of the screening, the room was silent. Not one person in the room had laughed once during the entire screening. Newman and Altman left after the screening, and hit one of Altman's favorite local watering holes. As they said their goodbyes the next morning, Altman apologized to Newman. “I hope I didn't eff up your movie.”   Maybe the movie wasn't completely effed up, but MGM certainly neither knew what to do with the film or how to sell it, so it would just sit there, just like Health a few years earlier, on that proverbial shelf.   More than a year later, in an issue of Spin Magazine, a review of the latest album by King Sunny Adé would mention the film he performed in, O.C. and Stiggs, would, quote unquote, “finally” be released into theatres later that year.   That didn't happen, in large part because after WarGames in the early summer of 1983, almost every MGM release had been  either an outright bomb or an unexpected financial disappointment. The cash flow problem was so bad that the studio effectively had to sell itself to Atlanta cable mogul Ted Turner in order to save itself. Turner didn't actually want all of MGM. He only wanted the valuable MGM film library, but the owner of MGM at the time was either going to sell it all or nothing at all.   Barely two months after Ted Turner bought MGM, he had sold the famed studio lot in Culver City to Lorimar, a television production company that was looking to become a producer and distributor of motion pictures, and sold rest of the company he never wanted in the first place to the guy he bought it all from, who had a kind of seller's remorse. But that repurchase would saddle the company with massive bills, and movies like O.C. and Stiggs would have to sit and collect dust while everything was sorted out.   How long would O.C. and Stiggs be left in a void?   It would be so long that Robert Altman would have time to make not one, not two, but three other movies that would all be released before O.C. and Stiggs ever saw the light of day.   The first, Secret Honor, released in 1984, featured the great Philip Baker Hall as former President Richard Nixon. It's probably Hall's single best work as an actor, and the film would be amongst the best reviewed films of Altman's career.   In 1985, Altman would film Fool For Love, an adaptation of a play by Sam Shepard. This would be the only time in Shepard's film career where he would star as one of the characters himself had written. The film would also prove once and for all that Kim Basinger was more than just a pretty face but a real actor.   And in February 1987, Altman's film version of Beyond Therapy, a play by absurdist playwright Christopher Durant, would open in theatres. The all-star cast would include Tom Conti, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Guest, Julie Hagerty and Glenda Jackson.   On March 5th, 1987, an article in Daily Variety would note that the “long shelved” film would have a limited theatrical release in May, despite the fact that Frank Yablans, the vice chairman of MGM, being quoted in the article that the film was unreleasable. It would further be noted that despite the film being available to international distributors for three years, not one company was willing to acquire the film for any market. The plan was to release the movie for one or two weeks in three major US markets, depending on its popularity, and then decide a future course of action from there.   But May would come and go, without a hint of the film.   Finally, on Friday, July 10th, the film would open on 18 screens, but none in any major market like Chicago, Los Angeles or New York City. I can't find a single theatre the film played in that weekend, but that week's box office figures would show an abysmal $6,273 worth of tickets were sold during that first weekend.   There would not be a second weekend of reported grosses.   But to MGM's credit, they didn't totally give up on the film.   On Thursday, August 27th, O.C. and Stiggs would open in at least one theatre. And, lucky for me, that theatre happened to be the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz. But despite the fact that the new Robert Altman was opening in town, I could not get a single friend to see it with me. So on a Tuesday night at 8:40pm, I was the only person in all of the region to watch what I would soon discover was the worst Robert Altman movie of all time. Now, I should note that even a bad Robert Altman movie is better than many filmmakers' best movies, but O.C. and Stiggs would have ignobility of feeling very much like a Robert Altman movie, with its wandering camera and overlapping dialogue that weaves in and out of conversations while in progress and not quite over yet, yet not feeling anything like a Robert Altman movie at the same time. It didn't have that magical whimsy-ness that was the hallmark of his movies. The satire didn't have its normal bite. It had a number of Altman's regular troop of actors, but in smaller roles than they'd usually occupy, and not giving the performances one would expect of them in an Altman movie.   I don't know how well the film did at the Nick, suffice it to say the film was gone after a week.   But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film.   On October 9th, the film would open at the AMC Century City 14, one of a handful of movies that would open the newest multiplex in Los Angeles.   MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone from the new multiplex after a week.   But to MGM's credit, they still didn't give up on the film.   The studio would give the film one more chance, opening it at the Film Forum in New York City on March 18th, 1988.   MGM did not report grosses, and the film was gone after a week. But whether that was because MGM didn't support the film with any kind of newspaper advertising in the largest market in America, or because the movie had been released on home video back in November, remains to be seen.   O.C. and Stiggs would never become anything resembling a cult film. It's been released on DVD, and if one was programming a Robert Altman retrospect at a local arthouse movie theatre, one could actually book a 35mm print of the film from the repertory cinema company Park Circus.   But don't feel bad for Altman, as he would return to cinemas with a vengeance in the 1990s, first with the 1990 biographical drama Vincent and Theo, featuring Tim Roth as the tortured genius 19th century painter that would put the actor on the map for good. Then, in 1992, he became a sensation again with his Hollywood satire The Player, featuring Tim Robbins as a murderous studio executive trying to keep the police off his trail while he navigates the pitfalls of the industry. Altman would receive his first Oscar nomination for Best Director since 1975 with The Player, his third overall, a feat he would repeat the following year with Short Cuts, based on a series of short stories by Raymond Carver. In fact, Altman would be nominated for an Academy Award seven times during his career, five times as a director and twice as a producer, although he would never win a competitive Oscar.   In March 2006, while editing his 35th film, a screen adaptation of the then-popular NPR series A Prairie Home Companion, the Academy would bestow an Honorary Oscar upon Altman. During his acceptance speech, Altman would wonder if perhaps the Academy acted prematurely in honoring him in this fashion. He revealed he had received a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, and felt that, even though he had turned 81 the month before, he could continue for another forty years.   Robert Altman would pass away from leukemia on November 20th, 2006, only eight months after receiving the biggest prize of his career.   Robert Altman had a style so unique onto himself, there's an adjective that exists to describe it. Altmanesque. Displaying traits typical of a film made by Robert Altman, typically highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective and often a subversive twist.   He truly was a one of a kind filmmaker, and there will likely never be anyone like him, no matter how hard Paul Thomas Anderson tries.     Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 106, Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy, 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.  

Interviewed by Peter Jonathan Robertson in London in 1989 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have on the show returning champion film finance expert Franco Sama. His first episode is one of the most downloaded episodes in the history of the show (Listen to that episode here). Franco and I joke that his last episode turned him into a celebrity at film markets and festivals around the world. I mean he can barely walk the halls of AFM without getting recognized.Franco is a wealth of knowledge in the film finance space and I have learned tons from him over the years. We discuss the effect the Coronavirus is and will have on not only raising money for a film but also selling that movie to an ever-changing marketplace. Nobody knows what will happen to the industry after this virus passes. We also discuss which studios are more vulnerable than others and the dos and don ts when raising money for an indie film into today's marketplace.Here's a bit about today's guest.Independent feature film producer Franco Sama boasts a remarkable and extensive history in public speaking, public relations, and nearly two decades of independent film development, production and financing experience.Sama has Executive Produced and/or produced an impressive array of over twenty (20) successful independent feature films including most notably, “Guns, Girls and Gambling” starring Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, and Dane Cook which is now a cult favorite; this film was released into theatres and acquired a worldwide distribution deal from Universal Pictures.Other films Sama has produced include; “Black Limousine” starring David Arquette and Vivica Fox, “Tooth and Nail” starring Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, and “Paid” starring Corbin Bernsen and Tom Conti.  Sama also serves as Executive Producer on the film festival darling “Petunia” starring Thora Birch, Brittany Snow and Academy Award winner Christine Lahti.His shingle “Samaco Films, LLC”, headquartered on the lot at the prestigious, privately owned and operated, independent film studio, Los Angeles Center Studios in Downtown Los Angeles, is currently financing and producing a slate of several independent feature films, including, “Vodun”, “Alexis Colette” and recently wrapped production on the $1M thriller, “The Inheritance”.In addition, Sama is also a highly sought after public guest speaker having launched his hugely popular film financing and distribution forum program “Finance Indie Road Map”, otherwise known as “The F.I.R.M.” which is designed specifically to educate and assist first and second-time filmmakers in their quest to develop, fund, produce and release their first feature film(s).This EPIC episode is by far one of the most important shows you could listen to. Please share it with all your filmmaking and screenwriting friends. If you want the latest information on what it is like to raise money in today's crazy world get ready to take notes. Enjoy my conversation with Franco Sama.

Now let's get into today's AMAZING guest. We have on the show returning champion film finance expert Franco Sama. His first episode is one of the most downloaded episodes in the history of the show (Listen to that episode here). Franco and I joke that his last episode turned him into a celebrity at film markets and festivals around the world. I mean he can barely walk the halls of AFM without getting recognized.Franco is a well of knowledge in the film finance space and I have learned tons from him over the years. We discuss the effect the Coronavirus is and will have on not only raising money for a film but also selling that movie to an ever-changing marketplace. Nobody knows what will happen to the industry after this virus passes. We also discuss which studios are more vulnerable than others and the dos and don ts when raising money for an indie film into today's marketplace.Here's a bit about today's guest.Independent feature film producer Franco Sama boasts a remarkable and extensive history in public speaking, public relations, and nearly two decades of independent film development, production and financing experience.Sama has Executive Produced and/or produced an impressive array of over twenty (20) successful independent feature films including most notably, “Guns, Girls and Gambling” starring Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, and Dane Cook which is now a cult favorite; this film was released into theatres and acquired a worldwide distribution deal from Universal Pictures.Other films Sama has produced include; “Black Limousine” starring David Arquette and Vivica Fox, “Tooth and Nail” starring Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, and "Paid" starring Corbin Bernsen and Tom Conti.  Sama also serves as Executive Producer on the film festival darling “Petunia” starring Thora Birch, Brittany Snow and Academy Award winner Christine Lahti.His shingle “Samaco Films, LLC”, headquartered on the lot at the prestigious, privately owned and operated, independent film studio, Los Angeles Center Studios in Downtown Los Angeles, is currently financing and producing a slate of several independent feature films, including, “Vodun”, “Alexis Colette” and recently wrapped production on the $1M thriller, “The Inheritance”.In addition, Sama is also a highly sought after public guest speaker having launched his hugely popular film financing and distribution forum program “Finance Indie Road Map”, otherwise known as “The F.I.R.M.” which is designed specifically to educate and assist first and second-time filmmakers in their quest to develop, fund, produce and release their first feature film(s).This EPIC episode is by far one of the most important shows you could listen to. Please share it with all your filmmaking and screenwriting friends. If you want the latest information on what it is like to raise money in today's crazy world get ready to take notes. Enjoy my conversation with Franco Sama.

John Dowie is a British comedian, musician and writer who was a pioneer of alternative comedy and is credited with establishing observational humour as part of the new movement. He's often called 'Britain's first alternative comedian'. He toured with and influenced another alternative pioneer, Victoria Wood. As well as writing songs and sketches with her, he is credited with helping her to develop her future trademark patter between songs. Dowie was among the inaugural acts on Tony Wilson's Factory Records label. In 1978 he contributed three comedic songs to the first Factory music release, A Factory Sample, along with Joy Division. As a director, he's directed shows by, among others, Neil Innes, Arthur Smith, Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden and Simon Munnery and he wrote Jesus – My Boy which was performed in London's West End by Tom Conti and around the world. He has written many books including The Freewheeling John Dowie, Dogman and Hard To Swallow. John Dowie is guest number 232 on My Time Capsule and chats to Michael Fenton Stevens about the five things he'd like to put in a time capsule; four he'd like to preserve and one he'd like to bury and never have to think about again .Follow John Dowie on Twitter: @dowiejohn .Follow My Time Capsule on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook: @MyTCpod .Follow Michael Fenton Stevens on Twitter: @fentonstevens and Instagram @mikefentonstevens .Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .Music by Pass The Peas Music .Artwork by matthewboxall.com .This podcast is proud to be associated with the charity Viva! Providing theatrical opportunities for hundreds of young people. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Film Finance & How to Raise REAL Money for Your Indie Film with Franco SamaFilm Finance is a mystery to most filmmakers. How many of you need money for your next film or series? I'll wait...yeah me too. Today's guest is film producer Franco Sama from Samaco Films. Franco is an Executive Producer and an expert in finding money for independent films. Here's a bit on Franco.Independent feature film producer Franco Sama boasts a remarkable and extensive history in public speaking, public relations and a decade of independent film development, production and financing.Sama has Executive Produced an impressive array of over twenty (20) independent feature films including most recently, “Guns, Girls and Gambling” starring Gary Oldman, Christian Slater and Dane Cook which is quickly becoming a cult favorite; this film was released into theatres on December of 2012 and, in January 2013, acquired a worldwide distribution deal from Universal Pictures.Other films Sama has produced include; “Black Limousine” starring David Arquette and Vivica Fox, “Tooth and Nail” starring Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, “Paid,” starring Corbin Bernsen and Tom Conti and “The Penitent Man,” starring “The Terminator's” Lance Henriksen andSama also serves as Executive Producer on the recent film festival darling “Petunia” starring Thora Birch, Brittany Snow and Academy Award winner Christine Lahti.His shingle “Samaco Films” is currently producing a slate of several independent feature films, including “Bless Me Father” starring John Turturro, Michael Rapaport and Michael Rispoli as well as a moving military drama titled “Through my Daughter's Eyes being directed by Dallas Burgess, starring ingénue Avi Lake as well as “Jarhead” and “The Island” veteran actor Martin Papazian.Samaco Films released two films in 2015, the first, “The Livingston Gardner” stars James Kyson the beloved “Ando” from the NBC television hit series “HEROS” and the second, “3 Days in Havana” starring Ally McBeal alum, Gil Bellows; both of which have been released through Samaco Films' sister company, Synergetic Distribution and have been released via all digital and Video on Demand (VOD) platforms worldwide.And the company's latest film “Game of Aces” directed by Aussie Director Damien Lay and starring heartthrob and former “American Pie” star Chris Klein alongside “Transformers” Victoria Summer (Transformers: Age of Distinction”) and Werner Daehn (“Valkyrie”, xXx) is scheduled to hit theaters early this summer.Please share this episode with every filmmaker, screenwriting and content creator you can. Franco basically gave a free masterclass on how to raise and find money for indie films. Get ready to take a lot of notes. Enjoy my conversation with Franco Sama.

Jenny Seagrove is an actress of stage and screen. She starred alongside Rupert Everett in the Academy Award-winning short film A Shocking Accident and other film roles include Nate and Hayes opposite Tommy Lee Jones, Bullseye! with Michael Caine and Roger Moore, A Chorus of Disapproval with Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Irons and Appointment with Death With Peter Ustinov, Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher and John Gielgud. She played Jo Mills in the BBC drama series Judge John Deed and her stage work includes multiple runs in the West End including The Exorcist, Noël Coward's Fallen Angels, Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular, Present Laughter at the Globe Theatre with Tom Conti and Hamlet with Ian McKellen. She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2003 and her partner is the theatrical producer and chairman of Everton F.C., Bill Kenwright. Jenny founded and helps to run Mane Chance Sanctuary, a charity that aims to "provide sanctuary and relief from suffering for horses, while promoting humane behaviour to all animals and mutually beneficial relationships with people who need them". Jenny Seagrove is guest number 190 on My Time Capsule and chats to Michael Fenton Stevens about the five things she'd like to put in a time capsule; four she'd like to preserve and one she'd like to bury and never have to think about again .For more information on Jenny's charity Mane Chance, visit: manechancesanctuary.orgFollow Jenny Seagrove on Twitter: @springmeisterFollow My Time Capsule on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook: @MyTCpod .Follow Michael Fenton Stevens on Twitter: @fentonstevens and Instagram @mikefentonstevens .Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .Music by Pass The Peas Music .Artwork by matthewboxall.com .This podcast is proud to be associated with the charity Viva! Providing theatrical opportunities for hundreds of young people. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's guest for Spinning Plates is the wonderful comedian ventriloquist Nina Conti. I'm a huge fan of Nina, having seen her live a few times, so it's particularly special for me that she agreed to chat. We spoke about her childhood memories of watching her actor father Tom Conti on broadway, the joy of bringing your real personality out on stage, how puppets and the conversations you have with them are good therapy and the relationship her two boys have with Nina's main comedy companion - Monkey (a very sweary and funny puppet) kumon.co.uk/trial kumon.ie/trial See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jenny discusses a ghostly forgotten gem: 1977’s The Haunting of Julia (released in the UK as Full Circle). The film was based on the 1975 novel Julia by Peter Straub, and stars Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea, and Tom Conti. Find this movie and more at the 13 O’Clock Amazon Storefront! Audio version: Video version: Please support … Continue reading Flickers Of Fear – Jenny’s Horror Movie Reviews: The Haunting of Julia (aka Full Circle) (1977)

John goes back to 2006 for an interview with movie, TV and stage actor TOM CONTI, most famous for the hit movie Shirley Valentine.

aka TOW Ross Ruins His Own Wedding S04 E24 - TOW Ross’s Wedding (Part Two) Signature Beverage: Interlude http://handbagmarinara.com/blog/interlude-champagne-and-cointreau 00:04:40 — Apparently, this episode wasn’t very well received in the UK; they saw it as mocking British culture 00:08:40 — Dame June Whitfield, our first guest star of the episode! 00:10:50 — Which Interlude is the right Interlude?? Either way, the one that’s still open offers a 14- and 18-course menu! 00:13:15 — Jennifer Saunders and Tom Conti, our next two British guest stars! 00:19:15 — Jane Carr, our fourth British guest star, does a phenomenal job as the ticket agent at the airport 00:28:20 — Elizabeth HATEs pranks and April Fools Day! 00:31:05 — Our fifth guest star — Olivia Williams 00:37:15 — The BIGGEST news (aside from Ross’s flub at the altar — MONICA AND CHANDLER SLEPT TOGETHER!! 00:39:35 — Hugh Laurie is here, and our sixth British guest actor! 00:52:00 — The saga of Emily’s Ever-Changing Empire-Waist Wedding Gown 00:59:05 — We break down Emily and Ross’s wedding song **Donate to our NAMI fundraiser! https://donate.nami.org/fundraiser/2700356 **And if you need mental health support, head to https://nami.org/Home or text “NAMI” to 741741 if you’re crisis**

The “Cinephile Cuties” are ready to have a fainting spell due to horniness. That’s because they’re chatting about Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Casey reveals how he got the “sex talk” and found out Santa Claus wasn’t real on the same day. And Patrick shares his Christmas plans. Plus, they put Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence through their proprietary “Fartsy Test.” Patrick recommends a drink pairing. And they give each other notes to improve the show. Listen in to see if it’s working!  If you like this show, tell a friend! And if you want to send us some beer money for the show, Venmo @Patrick-MallonFollow Farthouse on Twitter and InstagramFollow Patrick and Casey and on TwitterAnd follow Patrick and Casey on Letterboxd.

Marie Wallace started her career in the Off-Broadway production of Sophocles’ Electra and Terence Rattigan’s Harlequinade directed by Philip Burton. From there, she went immediately into the chorus of Ethel Merman’s Gypsy. Marie was featured in seven Broadway productions after that, directed by some of the great directors of that time – Gene Saks, Noel Willman, Morton DaCosta, Tom Conti and Bob Fosse. She was featured alongside Bert Lahr, Larry Hagman, Alice Ghostly, Robert Preston, Alexis Smith and Gwen Verdon among many others. In-between, Marie starred in ABC’s classic gothic drama, Dark Shadows for two years, getting a chance to play three diverse roles – first, Eve “the most evil lady who ever lived”, “Crazy” Jenny Collins, and then Megan Todd who finally was smitten/bitten by the 175-year-old-vampire Barnabas. At that point, she was a vampire and finally had a knife put through her heart by Crazy Willie. It is now over fifty years since the first day of production, and the fan following of the original cast is as big as ever. https://youtu.be/yuMfb78hC4g https://www.facebook.com/ActressMarieWallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Wallace https://www.amazon.com/Marie-Wallace/e/B00ATSWQQE https://www.facebook.com/groups/159471470328/

Born on this Day: is a daily podcast hosted by Bil Antoniou, Amanda Barker & Marco Timpano. Celebrating the famous and sometimes infamous born on this day. Check out their other podcasts: Bad Gay Movies, Bitchy Gay Men Eat & Drink Every Place is the Same My Criterions The Insomnia Project Marco's book: 25 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My Podcast NOVEMBER 22 Teachers' Day Andrzej Zulawski , Scarlett Johansson, Jamie Lee Curtis , Mads Mikkelsen, Michael Kenneth Williams, Mark Ruffalo, Alden Ehrenreich , Jamie Campbell Bower , Terry Gilliam , Richard Kind , Adèle Exarchopoulos, Robert Vaughn , Mariel Hemingway , Jacob Cohen, Rodney Dangerfield, Geraldine Page , Tom Conti , Allen Garfield , Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle . --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/born-on-this-day-podcast/message

As horror fans, the arrival of Shudder in 2015 came as a blessing to us all. It's made for us, the fans, by fans of the genre and we love it here. (We haven't been paid to say that either) With that in mind, onto EPISODE 123 then... This week, we are absolutely delighted to be joined by the Director of Programming at SHUDDER... It's SAM ZIMMERMAN! The film? THE HAUNTING OF JULIA!  Based on the novel Julia by Peter Straub and also known as FULL CIRCLE, The Haunting of Julia, while by no means a bad film is certainly one that is under-seen and in need of a little love and new eyes upon it.  Directed by Richard Loncraine and starring Rosemary's Baby's Mia Farrow, 2001: A Space Odyssey's Keir Dullea and national treasure Tom Conti, this is an effective and surprisingly dark little chiller. It's not the easiest film to find, certainly in the UK, but there are various versions flying around on YouTube.  The synopsis is as follows:  Magnus (Keir Dullea) and Julia Lofting (Mia Farrow) have a happy marriage until one morning when their daughter Kate (Sophie Ward) begins choking. Unsure what to do, Julia attempts a tracheotomy, inadvertently causing Kate's death. Julia heads to a sanitarium to recover, and when Magnus asks that she come home, she prefers to buy a new house in London and live alone there. Magnus frets over Julia's sanity, while Julia becomes convinced that her house is haunted by the spirit of a little girl.   Please note that this podcast may contain strong language and even stronger Scottish accents.  Also, why not pop over and take a look at our Patreon page? Remember, you can keep up to date with our news by following us via the usual social media outlets:  Facebook (including our group THE CHUD LOCKER!) Twitter Instagram Plus you can drop us an email to stronglanguageviolentscenes@gmail.com OR check out our WEBSITE!  Strong Language & Violent Scenes Spoopy theme by Mitch Bain & The Sunshine Orchestra Edits & Artwork by Andy Stewart

Greetings Cagers and Travoltettes! This week on the podcast, Nathan’s Postal co-author Brock Wilbur (get your copy today) joins us to begin our inevitable descent into the mid to late ‘80s, where both Travolta and Cage started making curious career choices that would bury them in obscurity until they could claw themselves out. Here, we see both our heroes tackling those rarest of Travolta and Cage roles — the non-American. In Robert Altman’s stuffy, inscrutable TV special Basements, Travolta plays a Cockney hitman opposite a wearied Tom Conti in a filmed staging of the Harold Pinter play “The Dumb Waiter,” and it’s just as confusing and baffling as you’d expect. But where Travolta commits wholeheartedly to his over-the-top Cockney accent (“POPPYCOCK!” his Fanatic character would call it), Cage pulls a Boy in Blue for the Italian war drama Time to Kill, in which he plays the world’s most Californian Italian during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s. CW: discussion of sexual assault in this segment. Take a listen to our discussion of these two deathly obscure works, as well as a chat about Postal! Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage Email us questions at travoltacagepod@gmail.com Podcast theme by Jon Biegen Podcast logo by Felipe Sobreiro

Now let's get into today's AMAZING guest. We have on the show returning champion film finance expert Franco Sama. His first episode is one of the most downloaded episodes in the history of the show (Listen to that episode here). Franco and I joke that his last episode turned him into a celebrity at film markets and festivals around the world. I mean he can barely walk the halls of AFM without getting recognized.Franco is a well of knowledge in the film finance space and I have learned tons from him over the years. We discuss the effect the Coronavirus is and will have on not only raising money for a film but also selling that movie to an ever-changing marketplace. Nobody knows what will happen to the industry after this virus passes. We also discuss which studios are more vulnerable than others and the dos and don ts when raising money for an indie film into today's marketplace.Here's a bit about today's guest.Independent feature film producer Franco Sama boasts a remarkable and extensive history in public speaking, public relations, and nearly two decades of independent film development, production and financing experience.Sama has Executive Produced and/or produced an impressive array of over twenty (20) successful independent feature films including most notably, “Guns, Girls and Gambling” starring Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, and Dane Cook which is now a cult favorite; this film was released into theatres and acquired a worldwide distribution deal from Universal Pictures.Other films Sama has produced include; “Black Limousine” starring David Arquette and Vivica Fox, “Tooth and Nail” starring Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, and "Paid" starring Corbin Bernsen and Tom Conti.  Sama also serves as Executive Producer on the film festival darling “Petunia” starring Thora Birch, Brittany Snow and Academy Award winner Christine Lahti.His shingle “Samaco Films, LLC”, headquartered on the lot at the prestigious, privately owned and operated, independent film studio, Los Angeles Center Studios in Downtown Los Angeles, is currently financing and producing a slate of several independent feature films, including, “Vodun”, “Alexis Colette” and recently wrapped production on the $1M thriller, “The Inheritance”.In addition, Sama is also a highly sought after public guest speaker having launched his hugely popular film financing and distribution forum program “Finance Indie Road Map”, otherwise known as “The F.I.R.M.” which is designed specifically to educate and assist first and second-time filmmakers in their quest to develop, fund, produce and release their first feature film(s).This EPIC episode is by far one of the most important shows you could listen to. Please share it with all your filmmaking and screenwriting friends. If you want the latest information on what it is like to raise money in today's crazy world get ready to take notes. Enjoy my conversation with Franco Sama.

We have on the show film finance expert Franco Sama. His first episode on the Indie Film Hustle Podcast is one of the most downloaded episodes in the history of that show (Listen to that episode here). Franco and I joke that his last episode turned him into a celebrity at film markets and festivals around the world. I mean he can barely walk the halls of AFM without getting recognized. LOL!Franco is a wealth of knowledge in the film finance space and I have learned tons from him over the years. We discuss the effect the Coronavirus is and will have on not only raising money for a film but also selling that movie to an ever-changing marketplace. Nobody knows what will happen to the industry after this virus passes. We also discuss which studios are more vulnerable than others and the dos and don ts when raising money for an indie film into today's marketplace.Here's a bit about today's guest.Independent feature film producer Franco Sama boasts a remarkable and extensive history in public speaking, public relations, and nearly two decades of independent film development, production and financing experience.Sama has Executive Produced and/or produced an impressive array of over twenty (20) successful independent feature films including most notably, “Guns, Girls and Gambling” starring Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, and Dane Cook which is now a cult favorite; this film was released into theatres and acquired a worldwide distribution deal from Universal Pictures.Other films Sama has produced include; “Black Limousine” starring David Arquette and Vivica Fox, “Tooth and Nail” starring Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, and "Paid" starring Corbin Bernsen and Tom Conti.  Sama also serves as Executive Producer on the film festival darling “Petunia” starring Thora Birch, Brittany Snow and Academy Award winner Christine Lahti.His shingle “Samaco Films, LLC”, headquartered on the lot at the prestigious, privately owned and operated, independent film studio, Los Angeles Center Studios in Downtown Los Angeles, is currently financing and producing a slate of several independent feature films, including, “Vodun”, “Alexis Colette” and recently wrapped production on the $1M thriller, “The Inheritance”.In addition, Sama is also a highly sought after public guest speaker having launched his hugely popular film financing and distribution forum program “Finance Indie Road Map”, otherwise known as “The F.I.R.M.” which is designed specifically to educate and assist first and second-time filmmakers in their quest to develop, fund, produce and release their first feature film(s).This EPIC episode is by far one of the most important shows you could listen to. Please share it with all your filmmaking and screenwriting friends. If you want the latest information on what it is like to raise money in today's crazy world get ready to take notes. Enjoy my conversation with Franco Sama.

No vigésimo episódio discutimos um filme de guerra pouco convencional, que junta os músicos David Bowie e Ryuichi Sakamoto a um elenco de luxo. Tom Conti e Takeshi Kitano também brilham nesta história realizada por Nagisa Oshima.

No vigésimo episódio discutimos um filme de guerra pouco convencional, que junta os músicos David Bowie e Ryuichi Sakamoto a um elenco de luxo. Tom Conti e Takeshi Kitano também brilham nesta história realizada por Nagisa Oshima.

JoBeth Williams stars as suburban Ohio housewife and mother Cathy Palmer, who escapes her joyless marriage in her spare time by reading her favorite romantic thriller novels, all starring a Modesty Blaise-like globe-hopping female private detective, Rebecca Ryan. She loves them so much, she enters a Rebecca Ryan fan fiction writing contest in which the winner of the would-be authors scores an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris, including seeing all the famous sights, as well as meeting the author of the novels herself, Margaret McMann.  When her selfish hubby tells her he has no time for it, and she should just not go at all, Cathy decides she's going to Paris alone if she must, leaving him and their two boys behind for the week. A curious thing happens on the trip, as Cathy ends up taking a blow to the head after getting hit by a car while pursuing some purse thieves, and when she awakens in the hospital, she not only forgets she's Cathy, but she thinks she's the heroine of her novels, Rebecca Ryan herself. She begins her make-over to glamour and adventure, all the while imagining everyone and everything around her is part of a plot of one of the novels, including the leader of the French opposition party, whom she suspects is part of her mission to help protect.  Meanwhile, she mistakes Englishman Alan McMann, Margaret's son (played by Scottish actor, Tom Conti), as her partner-in-crime-solving, Dmitri, and the two get themselves into a heap of real trouble as she dives head-first into snooping around where she doesn't belong without the skills or expertise to truly know what she's doing.

:17 - A middle schooler in Barberton brought two unloaded guns to class and was quickly apprehended. Tim Dimoff, president and CEO of SACS Security and Consulting, talked about the importance of “If You See Something, Say Something.” 6:35 - Outfielder AJ Pollock signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, which could mean two things: LA may be out on Bryce Harper, and Corey Kluber trade talks may heat up. So how cold is the Indians’ hot stove? 12:33 - Our movie guy Scott Wynn stopped by and, well, there’s not much happening at the theaters. 15:04 - A new study shows that eating fried chicken too often could be harmful to one’s health. In other breaking news, water is wet. 21:00 - Earlier this week, Tony interviewed Tom Conti from Boston Mills/Brandywine Ski Areas to talk about the ski slopes, skiing conditions, and snow tubing.

The endlessly fascinating Jennifer Engstrom graces us in the Booth today. Jen is a long-time ensemble member of A Red Orchid Theatre (as is our last guest, playwright Brett Neveu). She has appeared in over a dozen productions there and at many other great Chicago theaters (as well as in productions in London and New York). She grew up on a farm outside of Huxley, Iowa and made her way to the big city via the College of DuPage theatre program, where she soon became active in the speech department. And who coached and encouraged her in a career in the performing arts? None other than our own Frank Tourangeau! Frank was a professor and head of the speech department during Jennifer's time there and served as her mentor and teacher. Frank relates how he cast her in the play Whose Life is it Anyway? as the lead made famous on Broadway and the West End by Tom Conti, and revived some years later with Mary Tyler Moore in the starring role. By all accounts, Jen was luminous in the part. BTW, when Gary was working in Emanuel Azenberg's office, he was a stand-in for Tom Conti for several rehearsals on the Broadway production. In addition to her numerous acting roles, Jennifer has had an interesting career as an understudy around Chicago. We discuss her going on as Blanche DuBois at the last minute in a Writers Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by David Cromer. Though she knew the blocking and the lines well, her costumes had not been finished and there was a mad scramble to devise a proper wardrobe track for that performance (which Gary and producer Betsy were privileged to see!). She also stepped in for Amy Morton in the Steppenwolf Theatre production of Taylor Mac's HIR when Ms. Morton turned her ankle on stage prior to the first preview. Jennifer had learned all the lines and after a rushed blocking rehearsal, kept the curtain up for the first preview audience in stellar fashion. To quote the wonderful stage manager, Laura Glenn, "She was a total professional and I was so grateful she was there." Among Jennifer's favorite playwrights are Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and newcomer Jen Silverman, whose play Witch will get a world premiere production at Writers Theatre in the fall. Two items of show biz interest - The Play That Goes Wrong is closing on Broadway in August. One of the most hilarious shows that Gary and Frank have ever seen, a national tour is scheduled so don't miss this gem of a show if it comes to your town. And the five-and-a-half hour adaptation of Roberto Bolano's mammoth novel 2066 can be seen on streaming video soon. In an unusual arrangement, a filmed version of the Goodman Theatre's production will be available free, unlimited streaming for at least two years. Frank was a big fan of this production. You may have to watch in installments given it's extraordinary length, but you're unlikely to see another production of it anywhere any time soon. Jennifer has created and performs a one-woman show called Excuse My Dust, A Dorothy Parker Portfolio, in which she embodies the writer and humorist in an evening of theatrical monologues from Parker's writings. Dorothy Parker was an original member of the Algonquin Round Table and a unique coiner of the cutting remark. Gary and Betsy are going to the Red Orchid spring fundraiser at which Jennifer is performing selections from Excuse My Dust. More to report on our next episode. We play a little Chat Pack with Jennifer and find that she would like to be a rock star for a month, a la Beyonce. And people often ask her how she learns all those lines! Kiss of Death: Anne V. Coates, Admired Editor of Acclaimed Movies One of the most celebrated film editors of her era, Ms. Coates won an Oscar for her work on Lawrence of Arabia directed by David Lean and starring Peter O'Toole. The film editor's craft is often called "the invisible art," but is one of the most vital ingredients in the alchemy of filmmaking.

Film Finance & How to Raise REAL Money for Your Indie Film with Franco SamaFilm Finance is a mystery to most filmmakers. How many of you need money for your next film or series? I'll wait...yeah me too. Today's guest is film producer Franco Sama from Samaco Films. Franco is an Executive Producer and an expert in finding money for independent films. Here's a bit on Franco.Independent feature film producer Franco Sama boasts a remarkable and extensive history in public speaking, public relations and a decade of independent film development, production and financing.Sama has Executive Produced an impressive array of over twenty (20) independent feature films including most recently, “Guns, Girls and Gambling” starring Gary Oldman, Christian Slater and Dane Cook which is quickly becoming a cult favorite; this film was released into theatres on December of 2012 and, in January 2013, acquired a worldwide distribution deal from Universal Pictures.Other films Sama has produced include; “Black Limousine” starring David Arquette and Vivica Fox, “Tooth and Nail” starring Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, “Paid,” starring Corbin Bernsen and Tom Conti and “The Penitent Man,” starring “The Terminator’s” Lance Henriksen andSama also serves as Executive Producer on the recent film festival darling “Petunia” starring Thora Birch, Brittany Snow and Academy Award winner Christine Lahti.His shingle “Samaco Films” is currently producing a slate of several independent feature films, including “Bless Me Father” starring John Turturro, Michael Rapaport and Michael Rispoli as well as a moving military drama titled “Through my Daughter’s Eyes being directed by Dallas Burgess, starring ingénue Avi Lake as well as “Jarhead” and “The Island” veteran actor Martin Papazian.Samaco Films released two films in 2015, the first, “The Livingston Gardner” stars James Kyson the beloved “Ando” from the NBC television hit series “HEROS” and the second, “3 Days in Havana” starring Ally McBeal alum, Gil Bellows; both of which have been released through Samaco Films’ sister company, Synergetic Distribution and have been released via all digital and Video on Demand (VOD) platforms worldwide.And the company’s latest film “Game of Aces” directed by Aussie Director Damien Lay and starring heartthrob and former “American Pie” star Chris Klein alongside “Transformers” Victoria Summer (Transformers: Age of Distinction”) and Werner Daehn (“Valkyrie”, xXx) is scheduled to hit theaters early this summer.Please share this episode with every filmmaker, screenwriting and content creator you can. Franco basically gave a free masterclass on how to raise and find money for indie films. Get ready to take a lot of notes. Enjoy my conversation with Franco Sama.

Rob's guest this week is the actor, Tom Conti.

The Quick and the Dead is a 1987 television movie, based on the 1973 novel by Louis L'Amour, directed by Robert Day and starring Sam Elliott, Tom Conti, Kate Capshaw, Kenny Morrison and Matt Clark.A mysterious stranger rides into a homesteading family's life when they are attacked by a ruthless gang.Louis L'Amour's The Quick And the Dead (1987).mp4

Dame Zandra Rhodes is one of Britain's best-known fashion designers, putting London at the forefront of the international fashion scene in the 1970s. Her extensive list of clients has included Princess Diana and Freddie Mercury. Rhodes now lives with her partner, the 94 year old film producer Salah Hassanein and former head of Warner Bros. In 2003 Zandra founded The Fashion and Textile Museum, the only museum in the UK solely dedicated to showcasing developments in contemporary fashion, as well as providing inspiration, support and training for those working in the industry. Since 2000 Zandra's career has diversified into designing sets and costumes for the opera. She first worked for San Diego Opera, who invited her to do costumes for The Magic Flute. After The Magic Flute, she was asked to design both sets and costumes for Pittsburgh Bizet's Pearl Fishers in 2004. Still the woman with the pink hair, Zandra joins Aasmah Mir and Richard Coles in the studio. Also in the studio is Chilly Gonzales, a classically trained pianist from Montreal, Canada. He's a composer, and self-proclaimed musical genius who has co-authored musicals; pursued an alternative rock career; set a Guinness records for longest-ever solo piano performance; tried his hand at rapping, soft rock, and electronic music as a solo artist; and collaborated with Daft Punk, Bjork and rapper Drake. He has made a career out of bridging the gap between classical and pop music. He lives in Cologne, Germany and has just released his new album, Chambers. From music to mullets. Hairdresser extraordinaire Jon-Paul Holt gave Kevin Keegan his curly perm, helped launch what became Europe's biggest chain of hairdressing salons and even sang in a band that played at The Cavern in the '60s. After leaving Liverpool for Canada where he set up two salons, he was awarded North American Hairdresser of the year in 1996. He set up his Avant Garde Hair Studio, where he has looked after the hair of film stars such as Meg Ryan and rock star friends like Vancouver's own Bryan Adams. Mark Cockram is a book binder and has bound books for seven Man-Booker prize award ceremonies. He was elected Fellow of Designer Bookbinders in 2001 and Brother of the Art Workers Guild in 2008. Member of the Society of Bookbinders and the Tokyo Bookbinding Club. After studying art and design at Lincolnshire College of Art, Mark worked as a free lance artist and designer. He discovered his passion for bookbinding and book arts whilst working in Paris restoring Art Deco loos. Sharing his Inheritance Tracks this week is Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee, Tom Conti. He inherits the Scarlatti Sonata in G major played by Yuja Wang and is passing on Piangerò la sorte mia sung by coloratura soprano Simone Kermes (from Handel's Giulio Cesare) Tom Conti is currently reprising his role in acclaimed courtroom play Twelve Angry Men and is on tour from Monday 13th April beginning in York. Producer: Maire Devine Editor: Karen Dalziel.

Actor Tom Conti chose the Scarlatti Sonata in G major played by Yuja Wang and Piangerò La Sorte Mia from Handel's Giulio Cesare sung by coloratura soprano Simone Kermes.

There’s A Playwright In My Soup! Nick Randell joins multi-award winning playwright, author, script writer and actor, Terence Frisby, at his home in West London, to chew the fat and talk about his successful career to date. There’s A Girl In My Soup, his long-running comedy that opened in 1966 at the Gielgud Theatre (formerly The Globe), ran for over 1,000 performances, before becoming a worldwide smash hit with long runs on Broadway, Paris (with Gérard Depardieu), Berlin, Stockholm, Sydney, Rome (starring the Italian singer-songwriter-actor, Domenico Modugno) and more. His script of the successful 1970 film (which starred Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn)won the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain Award in 1970 for Best British Comedy Screenplay. But was Terence ultimately happy with what ended up on screen? A charming and candid interview, covering… Television - Adam Adamant/Lucky Fella/That’s Love (the last of which won the Gold Award for Comedy at the 1991 Houston International Film Festival). Theatre - There’s A Girl In My Soup/Kisses On A Postcard (a musical - telling of his experiences as an evacuee as a 7-year-old from London to Cornwall during World War Two), Rough Justice (gripping courtroom drama starring Tom Conti about the fall-out from the death of a brain-damaged baby). Radio - It’s Not Fair And Don’t Be Late (from which Kisses On A Postcard derives - won The Giles Cooper Award for BBC Radio Four and was broadcast no less than ten times in a few months on both BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service). Print - Kisses On A Postcard/Outrageous Fortune (*an autobiographical story about his fifteen years as a litigant-in-person in the High Court following his spectacularly awful divorce and custody battle). Frisby has also worked extensively for 40 years as actor, director and producer. SNS Online continues to offer an eclectic range of quality programming - free to download - to all like-minded people out there in cyber-space. These shows are independent podcasts produced to the highest professional standards and are non-profit making. So please enjoy, download and share these shows on all your lovely social media - as essentially that is our advertising! And please, please, please...offer feedback on the 'SNS Online' FB page or Twitter(ScratchNTweet). Big kiss, ScratchNSniffers! - Nick Randell X *A donation has been made to Families Need Fathers EXTRAORDINARY LIVES. ONLINE.

Toby Hadoke set out in 2013 to record an anecdote or account from every one of the televised Doctor Who stories in the show's first 50 years. You can hear whether he succeeded or not in Podcast #100 from last Christmas Day, but we continue to present this wealth of interview material with those who've made Doctor Who all that it is and has been...

With John Wilson Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is reviewed, actor Tom Conti on finding a voice for an Abraham Lincoln statue, Andy Bell and Vince Clarke from Erasure on their new album, and unscripted TV crime drama with a new series of Suspects starring Fay Ripley. Produced by Ella-mai Robey.

Recent creative writing poetry graduates Aiko Harman and Dave Coates (who also moonlights as the SPL's occasional receptionist) talk with the ever effervescent Ryan about poetry, the challenges of getting into the poetry scene and what it means to be "a Poet". We're also very happy to include the track "Two Inches Tall" from Sheila K Cameron featuring the voice of Scottish acting legend Tom Conti. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Follow us on Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Mail us: splpodcast@gmail.com

It's an all-British line-up of guests this Sunday: the composer John Rutter brings us up to date on his latest projects, and the actor Tom Conti also joins The Guest List to talk about his new movie ‘Dangerous Parking…Plus –Andrew Lloyd Webber, who Annie caught up with backstage at this week's Classical BRIT Awards, shares his thoughts on the honour of receiving the Outstanding Achievement in Music Award.

Roy Plomley's castaway is actor Tom Conti.Favourite track: Dies Irae by Giuseppe Verdi Book: Summerhill by A S Neill Luxury: Piano

Roy Plomley's castaway is actor Tom Conti. Favourite track: Dies Irae by Giuseppe Verdi Book: Summerhill by A S Neill Luxury: Piano