Podcast appearances and mentions of vincent canby

This bonus episode for our retrospective 20th season looks back to the awesome movie year of 1967 with Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai. Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Caty Rosier and Jacques Leroy, Le Samourai was the one movie that Josh, Jason and producer David Rosen all had as a possible pick in our movie draft for the season.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/13/archives/the-godson-no-relation-to-godfather-opens.html), Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1972/07/15/idiot), and Kenneth Turan in The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1977/09/29/samourai-an-austere-poem-of-crime/e032d06a-8b30-40c3-8899-3a78880050e3/).Check out more info and the entire archive of past episodes at https://www.awesomemovieyear.com and visit us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear You can find Jason on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/goforjason/You can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/, on Bluesky at signalbleed.bsky.social and on Letterboxd at

This special bonus episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider. Directed and co-written by Dennis Hopper and starring Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Luke Askew, Easy Rider is a key touchstone of 1960s counterculture.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/easy-rider-1969), Gene Moskowitz in Variety (https://variety.com/1969/film/reviews/easy-rider-1117790631/), and Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/15/archives/easy-rider-a-statement-on-film.html).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing

Learn how Herb Allen Jr built his fortune and created Allen & Co to be Hollywood's premier merchant bank. Sources Books: "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life" by Alice Schroeder "Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video" by Eric Hoyt "Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood" by Bernard F. Dick "Steven Spielberg: A Biography" by Joseph McBride Articles: "Inside The Private World of Allen & Co." by Carol J. Loomis "All Those Allens Back a Broadway Hit" by Robert J. Col "Has Allen got a deal for you!" by Cary Reich "Herbert Allen and his merry dealsters" by Dyan Machan "Herbert A. Allen Institutional Investor Profile 1987" "When Herb Allen Talks, Star Makers Listen" by Alan Citron "Allen Puts No Stock in Wall Street Sages" by Charles Paikert "Allen & Co. Connects Hollywood with Wall Street" by Randall Smith "Inside The Annual Summer Camp For Billionaires in Sun Valley, Idaho" by Jim Dobson "Show About Mother-In-Law Making Stark a Millionaire" by Hal Boyle "Funny Girl Premieres As Movie" by Vincent Canby "Who is Running The Columbia Pictures Show?" by Jack Egan "Media-Mogul Madness" by Richard Turner "Happy Ending" by Dan Dorfman "Columbia Puts Puttnam in His Place" by Peg Tyre and Jeannette Walls "In Hollywood she walks the other way" by John Hallowell "How Are Things in Panicsville?" by Budd Schulberg "Behind the Silence at Columbia Pictures- No Moguls, No Minions, Just Profits" by Chris Welles "Stars Fell on Mismaloya" by Richard Oulahan "My Battles with Barbra and Jon" by Frank Pierson "Hollywood's Wall Street Connection" by Lucian K. Truscott IV "Financial Gossip" by Jesse Bogue "Sun Valley Daze" by Nikki Finks "A Look at Future of Show Biz" by Charles Schreger "Ray Stark—Hollywood's Deft Deal-Maker" by Philip K. Scheuer "Investigating the Gulf of Streisand Incident" by Joyce Haber "Paul Gallico's Best Seller Headed for Stage and Screen" by Louella Parsons "Movie Discs Get a Big New Boost" by Dick Williams "The Man Who Scored in Coca-Columbia" by Shawn Tully "Entertainment: New Gold in the Hollywood Hills" - Time Magazine (1966) "Show Business: Boston to Hollywood" - Time Magazine (1956) "Orchestrating Columbia's Forward March" by Joyce Haber "Tinsel returns to Columbia Studio" - Los Angeles AP (1975) "Alan J. Hirschfield Story of a Movie Mogul" by Shirley Dodson Cobb "Kerkorian to Seek 20% of Columbia" by Robert J. Cole "Coke Expected to Acquire Columbia Pictures" by Thomas C. Hayes "Schmoozing All the way to the Bank" by Leah Nathans Spiro "State of the Arb" by Jason Zweig "King of the Sports Deal" by David Whitford "A Major Studio Player" by Michael Cieply "Meeting of Moguls, if Not of Minds" by David D. Kirkpatrick "Cashing In on Old Friends in High Places" by Barry Rehfeld "Media Executives Lose their Edge" by Mark Landler

The sixth episode of our special retrospective 20th season looks back to the awesome movie year of 1975 with the second of Josh's three picks, Dario Argento's Deep Red. Directed and co-written by Dario Argento and starring David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia and Macha Méril, Deep Red is considered a landmark of the giallo subgenre.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Linda Gross in The Los Angeles Times, Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/10/archives/the-screendeep-red-is-a-bucket-of-axmurder-cliches.html), and Ann Guarino in the New York Daily News.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to...

The finale of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features our audience choice poll winner, Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity. Directed by Bob Fosse (based on the Broadway production) and starring Shirley MacLaine, John McMartin, Chita Rivera, Ricardo Montalban and Paula Kelly, Sweet Charity defeated two other major Hollywood musicals in our audience choice poll.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/04/02/archives/screen-a-blowup-of-sweet-charity.html), Penelope Houston in The Spectator (https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/28th-february-1969/20/cinema), and Variety (https://variety.com/1968/film/reviews/sweet-charity-2-1200421841/).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this...

The twelfth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features our cult classic pick, Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room. Directed by Richard Lester from a screenplay by John Antrobus and starring Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern and Arthur Lowe, The Bed Sitting Room is adapted from the play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/09/29/archives/screen-lesters-surrealistic-farce-the-bed-sitting-room-is-at-little.html), Penelope Houston in The Spectator (https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/4th-april-1970/19/arts-long-knives-at-dunsinane), and Bernard Drew in the Gannnett News Service.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our producer David Rosen's pick, David Lowell Rich's Eye of the Cat.

The eleventh episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features the Academy Awards Best Picture winner, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Directed by John Schlesinger from a screenplay by Waldo Salt (based on the James Leo Herlihy novel) and starring Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvia Miles and Brenda Vaccaro, Midnight Cowboy was the first and only X-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/midnight-cowboy-1969), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/cowboy-re.html), and Robert J. Landry in Variety (https://variety.com/1969/film/reviews/midnight-cowboy-review-1200421996/).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our future cult classic pick, Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room.

The tenth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features one of the Venice International Film Festival's major award winners, Federico Fellini's Fellini Satyricon. Directed and co-written by Federico Fellini and starring Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born and Salvo Randone, Fellini Satyricon won the Pasinetti Award for Best Italian Film at the 1969 festival and was nominated for an Oscar.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fellini-satyricon-1970), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/15/archives/fellinis-magical-mystery-tour-fellinis-magical-mystery-tour.html), and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring the Academy Awards Best Picture winner, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy.

The ninth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features Jason's personal pick, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Directed and co-written by Sam Peckinpah and starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien and Jaime Sánchez, The Wild Bunch was nominated for two Oscars.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/06/26/archives/violence-and-beauty-mesh-in-wild-bunch.html), Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, and Judith Crist in New York Magazine.Please like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring a Venice Film Festival award winner, Federico Fellini's Fellini Satyricon.

The eighth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features our animation pick, Peanuts adaptation A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Directed by Bill Melendez from a screenplay by Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and starring the voices of Peter Robbins, Pamelyn Ferdin, Glenn Gilger and Andy Pforsich, A Boy Named Charlie Brown was the first theatrical feature film based on the Peanuts characters.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/12/05/archives/screen-good-old-charlie-brown-finds-a-home.html), Time magazine, and Molly Haskell in The Village Voice.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring Jason's personal pick, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

The sixth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features Josh's personal pick, Ronald Neame's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Directed by Ronald Neame from a screenplay by Jay Presson Allen (based on the Muriel Spark novel) and starring Maggie Smith, Pamela Franklin, Robert Stephens, Gordon Jackson and Jane Carr, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was nominated for two Oscars and won one.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/11/specials/spark-brodiefilm.html), Variety, and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our foreign film pick, Costa-Gavras' Z.

The fifth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features our documentary pick, the Maysles brothers' Salesman. Directed by Albert and David Maysles with Charlotte Zwerin, Salesman is a key film in the direct cinema movement.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/04/18/archives/screen-salesman-a-slice-of-america.html), Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/03/27/wild-raspberries/), and Joe Morgenstern in Newsweek. Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring Josh's personal pick, Ronald Neame's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The fourth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1969 features the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Lindsay Anderson's If….. Directed by Lindsay Anderson from a screenplay by David Sherwin and starring Malcolm McDowell, Robert Swann, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan and David Wood, If…. is the first of three films Anderson directed featuring McDowell's character Mick Travis.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1969/03/10/archives/screen-if-begins-runtale-of-school-revolt-opens-at-the-plaza.html), Paul Schrader in the Los Angeles Free Press (https://paulschrader.org/articles/pdf/1969-If.pdf), and Penelope Houston in The Spectator (https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/20th-december-1968/20/much-virtue-in-if-arts).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1969 installment, featuring our documentary pick, the Maysles brothers' Salesman.

Meg recounts how Yankee owner George Steinbrenner got ejected from the game. Jessica marvels at Russian defector Mikhail Baryshnikov and the ballet boom he helped inspire.Please check out our website, follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, and...WRITE US A REVIEW HEREWe'd LOVE to hear from you! Let us know if you have any ideas for stories HEREThank you for listening!Love,Meg and Jessica

This special bonus episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1987 features James L. Brooks' Best Picture nominee Broadcast News. Written and directed by James L. Brooks and starring Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, William Hurt and Robert Prosky, Broadcast News was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/broadcast-news-1987), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/16/movies/film-broadcast-news-comedy.html), and Hal Hinson in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/broadcastnewsrhinson_a0c913.htm).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for future episodes.

NOTE: This episode was a timed exclusive over on our producer David Rosen's Patreon. Sign up to one of the tiers for access to bonus episodes and more great content from us, Piecing It Together and David Rosen. https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenThis special bonus episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features the movie most requested by listeners on our social media pages, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Written and directed by Stanley Kubrick (from the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray) and starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger and Michael Hordern, Barry Lyndon was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and won four.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/barry-lyndon-1974), Vincent Canby in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/19/archives/screen-kubricks-barry-lyndon-is-brilliant-in-its-images.html), and Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at

NOTE: This episode was a timed exclusive over on our producer David Rosen's Patreon. Sign up to one of the tiers for access to bonus episodes and more great content from us, Piecing It Together and David Rosen. https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenThis special bonus episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features Robert Altman's Best Picture nominee Nashville. Directed by Robert Altman from a screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury and starring Ronee Blakley, Henry Gibson, Ned Beatty, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Lily Tomlin and many more, Nashville was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/nashville-1975), Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, and Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/12/archives/nashville-lively-film-of-many-parts.html).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for future episodes.

The twelfth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1987 features our future cult classic pick, Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I. Written and directed by Bruce Robinson and starring Paul McGann, Richard E. Grant, Richard Griffiths and Ralph Brown, Withnail and I was inspired by Robinson's own experiences as a young man in the 1960s.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/19/movies/film-withnail-and-i-a-british-60-s-comedy.html), Joel Siegel in the Chicago Reader (https://chicagoreader.com/film/two-english-guys/), and Hilary Mantel in The Spectator (http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/27th-february-1988/37/cinema).Thanks to our guest Jon Towlson, author of 40 Cult Movies: From Alice, Sweet Alice to Zombies of Mora Tau. Check out Jon on Twitter at @systemshocks and purchase his book on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/40-Cult-Movies-Alice-Zombies/dp/B0CKLR41KW).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at

The ninth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1987 features a Sundance Film Festival award winner, Lizzie Borden's Working Girls. Directed and co-written by Lizzie Borden and starring Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda Goodwin and Marusia Zach, Working Girls premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival and won Special Jury Recognition at Sundance in 1987.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode comes from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/working-girls-1987), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/27/movies/film-working-girls.html), and Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-27-ca-291-story.html).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1987 installment, featuring a special Halloween selection, Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys.

The fifth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1987 features our documentary pick, Ross McElwee's Sherman's March. Directed by and featuring Ross McElwee, Sherman's March won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/05/movies/film-a-documentary-sherman-s-march.html), Paul Attanasio in The Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/shermansmarchnrattanasio_a0ad8a.htm), and Jay Carr in The Boston Globe.Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1987 installment, featuring Josh's personal pick, Norman Jewison's Moonstruck.

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

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

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----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 finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there's a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend's husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend's husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week's Variety touting the film's success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D'Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi's Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there's almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that's not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn't intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival's main prize, the Palme D'Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones's classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It's easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn't. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we're here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn't show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn't completely hate the film. But audiences didn't care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Canadian terrorists who must go on the run in the Canadian tundra after a deal goes down bad?   Kara Glover would play Helen, the arms dealer, and John Savage as Jeff, a British intelligence agent who helps Helen.   Caribe would first open in Detroit on May 20th, 1988. Can you guess what I'm going to say next?   Yep.   No reported grosses, no theatres playing the film tracked by Variety.   The following week, Caribe opens in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the 300 seat United Artists Theatre in San Francisco, and three theatres in the South Bay. While Miramax once again did not report grosses, the combined gross for the four theatres, according to Variety, was a weak $3,700. Compare that to Aria, which was playing at the Opera Plaza Cinemas in its third week in San Francisco, in an auditorium 40% smaller than the United Artist, grossing $5,300 on its own.   On June 3rd, Caribe would open at the AMC Fountain Square 14 in Nashville. One show only on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm. Miramax did not report grosses. Probably because people we going to see Willie Tyler and Lester at Zanie's down the street.   And again, it kept cycling around the country, one or two new playdates in each city it played in. Philadelphia in mid-June. Indianapolis in mid-July. Jersey City in late August. Always for one week, grosses never reported.   Miramax's first Swedish release of the year was called Mio, but this was truly an international production. The $4m film was co-produced by Swedish, Norwegian and Russian production companies, directed by a Russian, adapted from a Swedish book by an American screenwriter, scored by one of the members of ABBA, and starring actors from England, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.   Mio tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression. What makes this movie memorable today is that Mio's best friend is played by none other than Christian Bale, in his very first film.   The movie was shot in Moscow, Stockholm, the Crimea, Scotland, and outside Pripyat in the Northern part of what is now Ukraine, between March and July 1986. In fact, the cast and crew were shooting outside Pripyat on April 26th, when they got the call they needed to evacuate the area. It would be hours later when they would discover there had been a reactor core meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They would have to scramble to shoot in other locations away from Ukraine for a month, and when they were finally allowed to return, the area they were shooting in deemed to have not been adversely affected by the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history,, Geiger counters would be placed all over the sets, and every meal served by craft services would need to be read to make sure it wasn't contaminated.   After premiering at the Moscow Film Festival in July 1987 and the Norwegian Film Festival in August, Mio would open in Sweden on October 16th, 1987. The local critics would tear the film apart. They hated that the filmmakers had Anglicized the movie with British actors like Christopher Lee, Susannah York, Christian Bale and Nicholas Pickard, an eleven year old boy also making his film debut. They also hated how the filmmakers adapted the novel by the legendary Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking novels made her and her works world famous. Overall, they hated pretty much everything about it outside of Christopher Lee's performance and the production's design in the fantasy world.   Miramax most likely picked it up trying to emulate the success of The Neverending Story, which had opened to great success in most of the world in 1984. So it might seem kinda odd that when they would open the now titled The Land of Faraway in theatres, they wouldn't go wide but instead open it on one screen in Atlanta GA on June 10th, 1988. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety did not track Atlanta theatres that week. Two weeks later, they would open the film in Miami. How many theatres? Can't tell you. Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety was not tracking any of the theatres in Miami playing the film. But hey, Bull Durham did pretty good in Miami that week.   The film would next open in theatres in Los Angeles. This time, Miramax bought a quarter page ad in the Los Angeles Times on opening day to let people know the film existed. So we know it was playing on 18 screens that weekend. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses for the film. But on the two screens it played on that Variety was tracking, the combined gross was just $2,500.   There'd be other playdates. Kansas City and Minneapolis in mid-September. Vancouver, BC in early October. Palm Beach FL in mid October. Calgary AB and Fort Lauderdale in late October. Phoenix in mid November. And never once did Miramax report any grosses for it.   One week after Mio, Miramax would release a comedy called Going Undercover.   Now, if you listened to our March 2021 episode on Some Kind of Wonderful, you may remember be mentioning Lea Thompson taking the role of Amanda Jones in that film, a role she had turned down twice before, the week after Howard the Duck opened, because she was afraid she'd never get cast in a movie again. And while Some Kind of Wonderful wasn't as big a film as you'd expect from a John Hughes production, Thompson did indeed continue to work, and is still working to this day.   So if you were looking at a newspaper ad in several cities in June 1988 and saw her latest movie and wonder why she went back to making weird little movies.   She hadn't.   This was a movie she had made just before Back to the Future, in August and September 1984.   Originally titled Yellow Pages, the film starred film legend Jean Simmons as Maxine, a rich woman who has hired Chris Lemmon's private investigator Henry Brilliant to protect her stepdaughter Marigold during her trip to Copenhagen.   The director, James Clarke, had written the script specifically for Lemmon, tailoring his role to mimic various roles played by his famous father, Jack Lemmon, over the decades, and for Simmons. But Thompson was just one of a number of young actresses they looked at before making their casting choice.   Half of the $6m budget would come from a first-time British film producer, while the other half from a group of Danish investors wanting to lure more Hollywood productions to their area.   The shoot would be plagued by a number of problems. The shoot in Los Angeles coincided with the final days of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which would cut out using some of the best and most regularly used locations in the city, and a long-lasting heat wave that would make outdoor shoots unbearable for cast and crew. When they arrived in Copenhagen at the end of August, Denmark was going through an unusually heavy storm front that hung around for weeks.   Clarke would spend several months editing the film, longer than usual for a smaller production like this, but he in part was waiting to see how Back to the Future would do at the box office. If the film was a hit, and his leading actress was a major part of that, it could make it easier to sell his film to a distributor.   Or that was line of thinking.   Of course, Back to the Future was a hit, and Thompson received much praise for her comedic work on the film.   But that didn't make it any easier to sell his film.   The producer would set the first screenings for the film at the February 1986 American Film Market in Santa Monica, which caters not only to foreign distributors looking to acquire American movies for their markets, but helps independent filmmakers get their movies seen by American distributors.   As these screenings were for buyers by invitation only, there would be no reviews from the screenings, but one could guess that no one would hear about the film again until Miramax bought the American distribution rights to it in March 1988 tells us that maybe those screenings didn't go so well.   The film would get retitled Going Undercover, and would open in single screen playdates in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis and Tampa on June 17th. And as I've said too many times already, no reported grosses from Miramax, and only one theatre playing the film was being tracked by Variety, with Going Undercover earning $3,000 during its one week at the Century City 14 in Los Angeles.   In the June 22nd, 1988 issue of Variety, there was an article about Miramax securing a $25m line of credit in order to start producing their own films. Going Undercover is mentioned in the article about being one of Miramax's releases, without noting it had just been released that week or how well it did or did not do.   The Thin Blue Line would be Miramax's first non-music based documentary, and one that would truly change how documentaries were made.   Errol Morris had already made two bizarre but entertaining documentaries in the late 70s and early 80s. Gates of Heaven was shot in 1977, about a man who operated a failing pet cemetery in Northern California's Napa Valley. When Morris told his famous German filmmaking supporter Werner Herzog about the film, Herzog vowed to eat one of the shoes he was wearing that day if Morris could actually complete the film and have it shown in a public theatre. In April 1979, just before the documentary had its world premiere at UC Theatre in Berkeley, where Morris had studied philosophy, Herzog would spend the morning at Chez Pannise, the creators of the California Cuisine cooking style, boiling his shoes for five hours in garlic, herbs and stock. This event itself would be commemorated in a documentary short called, naturally, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank, which is a must watch on its own.   Because of the success of Gates of Heaven, Morris was able to quickly find financing for his next film, Nub City, which was originally supposed to be about the number of Vernon, Florida's citizens who have “accidentally” cut off their limbs, in order to collect the insurance money. But after several of those citizens threatened to kill Morris, and one of them tried to run down his cinematographer with their truck, Morris would rework the documentary, dropping the limb angle, no pun intended, and focus on the numerous eccentric people in the town. It would premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, and become a hit, for a documentary, when it was released in theatres in 1982.   But it would take Morris another six years after completing Vernon, Florida, to make another film. Part of it was having trouble lining up full funding to work on his next proposed movie, about James Grigson, a Texas forensic psychiatrist whose was nicknamed Doctor Death for being an expert witness for the prosecution in death penalty cases in Texas. Morris had gotten seed money for the documentary from PBS and the Endowment for Public Arts, but there was little else coming in while he worked on the film. In fact, Morris would get a PI license in New York and work cases for two years, using every penny he earned that wasn't going towards living expenses to keep the film afloat.   One of Morris's major problems for the film was that Grigson would not sit on camera for an interview, but would meet with Morris face to face to talk about the cases. During that meeting, the good doctor suggested to the filmmaker that he should research the killers he helped put away. And during that research, Morris would come across the case of one Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of killing Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976, even though another man, David Harris, was the police's initial suspect. For two years, Morris would fly back and forth between New York City and Texas, talking to and filming interviews with Adams and more than two hundred other people connected to the shooting and the trial. Morris had become convinced Adams was indeed innocent, and dropped the idea about Dr. Grigson to solely focus on the Robert Wood murder.   After showing the producers of PBS's American Playhouse some of the footage he had put together of the new direction of the film, they kicked in more funds so that Morris could shoot some re-enactment sequences outside New York City, as well as commission composer Phillip Glass to create a score for the film once it was completed. Documentaries at that time did not regularly use re-enactments, but Morris felt it was important to show how different personal accounts of the same moment can be misinterpreted or misremembered or outright manipulated to suppress the truth.   After the film completed its post-production in March 1988, The Thin Blue Line would have its world premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on March 18th, and word quickly spread Morris had something truly unique and special on his hands. The critic for Variety would note in the very first paragraph of his write up that the film employed “strikingly original formal devices to pull together diverse interviews, film clips, photo collages, and” and this is where it broke ground, “recreations of the crime from many points of view.”   Miramax would put together a full court press in order to get the rights to the film, which was announced during the opening days of the 1988 Cannes Film Festival in early May. An early hint on how the company was going to sell the film was by calling it a “non-fiction feature” instead of a documentary.   Miramax would send Morris out on a cross-country press tour in the weeks leading up to the film's August 26th opening date, but Morris, like many documentary filmmakers, was not used to being in the spotlight themselves, and was not as articulate about talking up his movies as the more seasoned directors and actors who've been on the promotion circuit for a while. After one interview, Harvey Weinstein would send Errol Morris a note.   “Heard your NPR interview and you were boring.”   Harvey would offer up several suggestions to help the filmmaker, including hyping the movie up as a real life mystery thriller rather than a documentary, and using shorter and clearer sentences when answering a question.   It was a clear gamble to release The Thin Blue Line in the final week of summer, and the film would need a lot of good will to stand out.   And it would get it.   The New York Times was so enthralled with the film, it would not only run a review from Janet Maslin, who would heap great praise on the film, but would also run a lengthy interview with Errol Morris right next to the review. The quarter page ad in the New York Times, several pages back, would tout positive quotes from Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, who had left The Village Voice for the then-new Premiere Magazine, Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine instead of Rolling Stone, and critics from the San Francisco Chronicle and, interestingly enough, the Dallas Morning News. The top of the ad was tagged with an intriguing tease: solving this mystery is going to be murder, with a second tag line underneath the key art and title, which called the film “a new kind of movie mystery.” Of the 15 New York area-based film critics for local newspapers, television and national magazines, 14 of them gave favorable reviews, while 1, Stephen Schiff of Vanity Fair, was ambivalent about it. Not one critic gave it a bad review.   New York audiences were hooked.   Opening in the 240 seat main house at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the movie grossed $30,945 its first three days. In its second weekend, the gross at the Lincoln Plaza would jump to $31k, and adding another $27,500 from its two theatre opening in Los Angeles and $15,800 from a single DC theatre that week. Third week in New York was a still good $21k, but the second week in Los Angeles fell to $10,500 and DC to $10k. And that's how it rolled out for several months, mostly single screen bookings in major cities not called Los Angeles or New York City, racking up some of the best reviews Miramax would receive to date, but never breaking out much outside the major cities. When it looked like Santa Cruz wasn't going to play the film, I drove to San Francisco to see it, just as my friends and I had for the opening day of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in mid-August. That's 75 miles each way, plus parking in San Francisco, just to see a movie. That's when you know you no longer just like movies but have developed a serious case of cinephilea. So when The Nickelodeon did open the film in late November, I did something I had never done with any documentary before.   I went and saw it again.   Second time around, I was still pissed off at the outrageous injustice heaped upon Randall Dale Adams for nothing more than being with and trusting the wrong person at the wrong time. But, thankfully, things would turn around for Adams in the coming weeks. On December 1st, it was reported that David Harris had recanted his testimony at Adams' trial, admitting he was alone when Officer Wood stopped his car. And on March 1st, 1989, after more than 15,000 people had signed the film's petition to revisit the decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams's conviction “based largely” on facts presented in the film.   The film would also find itself in several more controversies.   Despite being named The Best Documentary of the Year by a number of critics groups, the Documentary Branch of the  Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would not nominate the film, due in large part to the numerous reenactments presented throughout the film. Filmmaker Michael Apted, a member of the Directors Branch of the Academy, noted that the failure to acknowledge The Thin Blue Line was “one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the Academy,” while Roger Ebert added the slight was “the worst non-nomination of the year.” Despite the lack of a nomination, Errol Morris would attend the Oscars ceremony in March 1989, as a protest for his film being snubbed.   Morris would also, several months after Adams' release, find himself being sued by Adams, but not because of how he was portrayed in the film. During the making of the film, Morris had Adams sign a contract giving Morris the exclusive right to tell Adams's story, and Adams wanted, essentially, the right to tell his own story now that he was a free man. Morris and Adams would settle out of court, and Adams would regain his life rights.   Once the movie was played out in theatres, it had grossed $1.2m, which on the surface sounds like not a whole lot of money. Adjusted for inflation, that would only be $3.08m. But even unadjusted for inflation, it's still one of the 100 highest grossing documentaries of the past forty years. And it is one of just a handful of documentaries to become a part of the National Film Registry, for being a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film.”   Adams would live a quiet life after his release, working as an anti-death penalty advocate and marrying the sister of one of the death row inmates he was helping to exonerate. He would pass away from a brain tumor in October 2010 at a courthouse in Ohio not half an hour from where he was born and still lived, but he would so disappear from the spotlight after the movie was released that his passing wasn't even reported until June 2011.   Errol Morris would become one of the most celebrated documentarians of his generation, finally getting nominated for, and winning, an Oscar in 2003, for The Fog of War, about the life and times of Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War era. The Fog of War would also be added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Morris would become only the third documentarian, after D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, to have two films on the Registry.   In 1973, the senseless killings of five members of the Alday family in Donalsonville GA made international headlines. Four years later, Canadian documentarian Tex Fuller made an award-winning documentary about the case, called Murder One. For years, Fuller shopped around a screenplay telling the same story, but it would take nearly a decade for it to finally be sold, in part because Fuller was insistent that he also be the director. A small Canadian production company would fund the $1m CAD production, which would star Henry Thomas of E.T. fame as the fifteen year old narrator of the story, Billy Isaacs.   The shoot began in early October 1987 outside Toronto, but after a week of shooting, Fuller was fired, and was replaced by Graeme Campbell, a young and energetic filmmaker for whom Murder One would be his fourth movie directing gig of the year. Details are sketchy as to why Fuller was fired, but Thomas and his mother Carolyn would voice concerns with the producers about the new direction the film was taking under its new director.   The film would premiere in Canada in May 1988. When the film did well up North, Miramax took notice and purchased the American distribution rights.   Murder One would first open in America on two screens in Los Angeles on September 9th, 1988. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times noted that while the film itself wasn't very good, that it still sprung from the disturbing insight about the crazy reasons people cross of what should be impassable moral lines.   “No movie studio could have invented it!,” screamed the tagline on the poster and newspaper key art. “No writer could have imagined it! Because what happened that night became the most controversial in American history.”   That would draw limited interest from filmgoers in Tinseltown. The two theatres would gross a combined $7k in its first three days. Not great but far better than several other recent Miramax releases in the area.   Two weeks later, on September 23rd, Miramax would book Murder One into 20 theatres in the New York City metro region, as well as in Akron, Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianpolis, Nashville, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In New York, the film would actually get some good reviews from the Times and the Post as well as Peter Travers of People Magazine, but once again, Miramax would not report grosses for the film. Variety would note the combined gross for the film in New York City was only $25k.   In early October, the film would fall out of Variety's internal list of the 50 Top Grossing Films within the twenty markets they regularly tracked, with a final gross of just $87k. One market that Miramax deliberately did not book the film was anywhere near southwest Georgia, where the murders took place. The closest theatre that did play the film was more than 200 miles away.   Miramax would finish 1988 with two releases.   The first was Dakota, which would mark star Lou Diamond Phillips first time as a producer. He would star as a troubled teenager who takes a job on a Texas horse ranch to help pay of his debts, who becomes a sorta big brother to the ranch owner's young son, who has recently lost a leg to cancer, as he also falls for the rancher's daughter.   When the $1.1m budgeted film began production in Texas in June 1987, Phillips had already made La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, but neither had yet to be released into theatres. By the time filming ended five weeks later, La Bamba had just opened, and Phillips was on his way to becoming a star.   The main producers wanted director Fred Holmes to get the film through post-production as quickly as possible, to get it into theatres in the early part of 1988 to capitalize on the newfound success of their young star.    But that wouldn't happen.   Holmes wouldn't have the film ready until the end of February 1988, which was deemed acceptable because of the impending release of Stand and Deliver. In fact, the producers would schedule their first distributor screening of the film on March 14th, the Monday after Stand and Delivered opened, in the hopes that good box office for the film and good notices for Phillips would translate to higher distributor interest in their film, which sorta worked. None of the major studios would show for the screening, but a number of Indies would, including Miramax. Phillips would not attend the screening, as he was on location in New Mexico shooting Young Guns.   I can't find any reason why Miramax waited nearly nine months after they acquired Dakota to get it into theatres. It certainly wasn't Oscar bait, and screen availability would be scarce during the busy holiday movie season, which would see a number of popular, high profile releases like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Ernest Saves Christmas, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Scrooged, Tequila Sunrise, Twins and Working Girl. Which might explain why, when Miramax released the film into 18 theatres in the New York City area on December 2nd, they could only get three screens in all of Manhattan, the best being the nice but hardly first-rate Embassy 4 at Broadway and 47th. Or of the 22 screens in Los Angeles opening the film the same day, the best would be the tiny Westwood 4 next to UCLA or the Paramount in Hollywood, whose best days were back in the Eisenhower administration.   And, yet again, Miramax did not report grosses, and none of the theatres playing the film was tracked by Variety that week. The film would be gone after just one week. The Paramount, which would open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the 14th, opted to instead play a double feature of Clara's Heart, with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and the River Phoenix drama Running on Empty, even though neither film had been much of a hit.   Miramax's last film of the year would be the one that changed everything for them.   Pelle the Conquerer.   Adapted from a 1910 Danish book and directed by Billie August, whose previous film Twist and Shout had been released by Miramax in 1986, Pelle the Conquerer would be the first Danish or Swedish movie to star Max von Sydow in almost 15 years, having spent most of the 70s and 80s in Hollywood and London starring in a number of major movies including The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor, Flash Gordon,Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, and David Lynch's Dune. But because von Sydow would be making his return to his native cinema, August was able to secure $4.5m to make the film, one of the highest budgeted Scandinavian films to be made to date.   In the late 1850s, an elderly emigrant Lasse and his son Pelle leave their home in Sweden after the death of the boy's mother, wanting to build a new life on the Danish island of Bornholm. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his age and his son's youth. The pair are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers for being foreigners. The father falls into depression and alcoholism, the young boy befriends one of the bastard children of the farm owner as well as another Swedish farm worker, who dreams of conquering the world.   For the title character of Pelle, Billie August saw more than 3,000 Swedish boys before deciding to cast 11 year old Pelle Hvenegaard, who, like many boys in Sweden, had been named for the character he was now going to play on screen.   After six months of filming in the summer and fall of 1986, Billie August would finish editing Pelle the Conquerer in time for it to make its intended Christmas Day 1987 release date in Denmark and Sweden, where the film would be one of the biggest releases in either country for the entire decade. It would make its debut outside Scandinavia at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, where it had been invited to compete for the Palme D'Or. It would compete against a number of talented filmmakers who had come with some of the best films they would ever make, including Clint Eastwood with Bird, Claire Denis' Chocolat, István Szabó's Hanussen, Vincent Ward's The Navigator, and A Short Film About Killing, an expanded movie version of the fifth episode in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful miniseries Dekalog. Pelle would conquer them all, taking home the top prize from one of cinema's most revered film festivals.   Reviews for the film out of Cannes were almost universally excellent. Vincent Canby, the lead film critic for the New York Times for nearly twenty years by this point, wouldn't file his review until the end of the festival, in which he pointed out that a number of people at the festival were scandalized von Sydow had not also won the award for Best Actor.   Having previously worked with the company on his previous film's American release, August felt that Miramax would have what it took to make the film a success in the States.   Their first moves would be to schedule the film for a late December release, while securing a slot at that September's New York Film Festival. And once again, the critical consensus was highly positive, with only a small sampling of distractors.   The film would open first on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, December 21st, following by exclusive engagements in nine other cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, on the 23rd. But the opening week numbers weren't very good, just $46k from ten screens. And you can't really blame the film's two hour and forty-five minute running time. Little Dorrit, the two-part, four hour adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, had been out nine weeks at this point and was still making nearly 50% more per screen.   But after the new year, when more and more awards were hurled the film's way, including the National Board of Review naming it one of the best foreign films of the year and the Golden Globes awarding it their Best Foreign Language trophy, ticket sales would pick up.   Well, for a foreign film.   The week after the Motion Picture Academy awarded Pelle their award for Best Foreign Language Film, business for the film would pick up 35%, and a third of its $2m American gross would come after that win.   One of the things that surprised me while doing the research for this episode was learning that Max von Sydow had never been nominated for an Oscar until he was nominated for Best Actor for Pelle the Conquerer. You look at his credits over the years, and it's just mind blowing. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. The Virgin Spring. The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Emigrants. The Exorcist. The Three Days of the Condor. Surely there was one performance amongst those that deserved recognition.   I hate to keep going back to A24, but there's something about a company's first Oscar win that sends that company into the next level. A24 didn't really become A24 until 2016, when three of their movies won Oscars, including Brie Larson for Best Actress in Room. And Miramax didn't really become the Miramax we knew and once loved until its win for Pelle.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 117, the fifth and final part of our miniseries on Miramax Films, 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.

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----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 finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there's a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend's husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend's husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week's Variety touting the film's success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D'Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi's Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there's almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that's not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn't intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival's main prize, the Palme D'Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones's classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It's easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn't. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we're here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn't show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn't completely hate the film. But audiences didn't care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Canadian terrorists who must go on the run in the Canadian tundra after a deal goes down bad?   Kara Glover would play Helen, the arms dealer, and John Savage as Jeff, a British intelligence agent who helps Helen.   Caribe would first open in Detroit on May 20th, 1988. Can you guess what I'm going to say next?   Yep.   No reported grosses, no theatres playing the film tracked by Variety.   The following week, Caribe opens in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the 300 seat United Artists Theatre in San Francisco, and three theatres in the South Bay. While Miramax once again did not report grosses, the combined gross for the four theatres, according to Variety, was a weak $3,700. Compare that to Aria, which was playing at the Opera Plaza Cinemas in its third week in San Francisco, in an auditorium 40% smaller than the United Artist, grossing $5,300 on its own.   On June 3rd, Caribe would open at the AMC Fountain Square 14 in Nashville. One show only on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm. Miramax did not report grosses. Probably because people we going to see Willie Tyler and Lester at Zanie's down the street.   And again, it kept cycling around the country, one or two new playdates in each city it played in. Philadelphia in mid-June. Indianapolis in mid-July. Jersey City in late August. Always for one week, grosses never reported.   Miramax's first Swedish release of the year was called Mio, but this was truly an international production. The $4m film was co-produced by Swedish, Norwegian and Russian production companies, directed by a Russian, adapted from a Swedish book by an American screenwriter, scored by one of the members of ABBA, and starring actors from England, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States.   Mio tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression. What makes this movie memorable today is that Mio's best friend is played by none other than Christian Bale, in his very first film.   The movie was shot in Moscow, Stockholm, the Crimea, Scotland, and outside Pripyat in the Northern part of what is now Ukraine, between March and July 1986. In fact, the cast and crew were shooting outside Pripyat on April 26th, when they got the call they needed to evacuate the area. It would be hours later when they would discover there had been a reactor core meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They would have to scramble to shoot in other locations away from Ukraine for a month, and when they were finally allowed to return, the area they were shooting in deemed to have not been adversely affected by the worst nuclear power plant accident in human history,, Geiger counters would be placed all over the sets, and every meal served by craft services would need to be read to make sure it wasn't contaminated.   After premiering at the Moscow Film Festival in July 1987 and the Norwegian Film Festival in August, Mio would open in Sweden on October 16th, 1987. The local critics would tear the film apart. They hated that the filmmakers had Anglicized the movie with British actors like Christopher Lee, Susannah York, Christian Bale and Nicholas Pickard, an eleven year old boy also making his film debut. They also hated how the filmmakers adapted the novel by the legendary Astrid Lindgren, whose Pippi Longstocking novels made her and her works world famous. Overall, they hated pretty much everything about it outside of Christopher Lee's performance and the production's design in the fantasy world.   Miramax most likely picked it up trying to emulate the success of The Neverending Story, which had opened to great success in most of the world in 1984. So it might seem kinda odd that when they would open the now titled The Land of Faraway in theatres, they wouldn't go wide but instead open it on one screen in Atlanta GA on June 10th, 1988. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety did not track Atlanta theatres that week. Two weeks later, they would open the film in Miami. How many theatres? Can't tell you. Miramax did not report grosses, and Variety was not tracking any of the theatres in Miami playing the film. But hey, Bull Durham did pretty good in Miami that week.   The film would next open in theatres in Los Angeles. This time, Miramax bought a quarter page ad in the Los Angeles Times on opening day to let people know the film existed. So we know it was playing on 18 screens that weekend. And, once again, Miramax did not report grosses for the film. But on the two screens it played on that Variety was tracking, the combined gross was just $2,500.   There'd be other playdates. Kansas City and Minneapolis in mid-September. Vancouver, BC in early October. Palm Beach FL in mid October. Calgary AB and Fort Lauderdale in late October. Phoenix in mid November. And never once did Miramax report any grosses for it.   One week after Mio, Miramax would release a comedy called Going Undercover.   Now, if you listened to our March 2021 episode on Some Kind of Wonderful, you may remember be mentioning Lea Thompson taking the role of Amanda Jones in that film, a role she had turned down twice before, the week after Howard the Duck opened, because she was afraid she'd never get cast in a movie again. And while Some Kind of Wonderful wasn't as big a film as you'd expect from a John Hughes production, Thompson did indeed continue to work, and is still working to this day.   So if you were looking at a newspaper ad in several cities in June 1988 and saw her latest movie and wonder why she went back to making weird little movies.   She hadn't.   This was a movie she had made just before Back to the Future, in August and September 1984.   Originally titled Yellow Pages, the film starred film legend Jean Simmons as Maxine, a rich woman who has hired Chris Lemmon's private investigator Henry Brilliant to protect her stepdaughter Marigold during her trip to Copenhagen.   The director, James Clarke, had written the script specifically for Lemmon, tailoring his role to mimic various roles played by his famous father, Jack Lemmon, over the decades, and for Simmons. But Thompson was just one of a number of young actresses they looked at before making their casting choice.   Half of the $6m budget would come from a first-time British film producer, while the other half from a group of Danish investors wanting to lure more Hollywood productions to their area.   The shoot would be plagued by a number of problems. The shoot in Los Angeles coincided with the final days of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which would cut out using some of the best and most regularly used locations in the city, and a long-lasting heat wave that would make outdoor shoots unbearable for cast and crew. When they arrived in Copenhagen at the end of August, Denmark was going through an unusually heavy storm front that hung around for weeks.   Clarke would spend several months editing the film, longer than usual for a smaller production like this, but he in part was waiting to see how Back to the Future would do at the box office. If the film was a hit, and his leading actress was a major part of that, it could make it easier to sell his film to a distributor.   Or that was line of thinking.   Of course, Back to the Future was a hit, and Thompson received much praise for her comedic work on the film.   But that didn't make it any easier to sell his film.   The producer would set the first screenings for the film at the February 1986 American Film Market in Santa Monica, which caters not only to foreign distributors looking to acquire American movies for their markets, but helps independent filmmakers get their movies seen by American distributors.   As these screenings were for buyers by invitation only, there would be no reviews from the screenings, but one could guess that no one would hear about the film again until Miramax bought the American distribution rights to it in March 1988 tells us that maybe those screenings didn't go so well.   The film would get retitled Going Undercover, and would open in single screen playdates in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, St. Louis and Tampa on June 17th. And as I've said too many times already, no reported grosses from Miramax, and only one theatre playing the film was being tracked by Variety, with Going Undercover earning $3,000 during its one week at the Century City 14 in Los Angeles.   In the June 22nd, 1988 issue of Variety, there was an article about Miramax securing a $25m line of credit in order to start producing their own films. Going Undercover is mentioned in the article about being one of Miramax's releases, without noting it had just been released that week or how well it did or did not do.   The Thin Blue Line would be Miramax's first non-music based documentary, and one that would truly change how documentaries were made.   Errol Morris had already made two bizarre but entertaining documentaries in the late 70s and early 80s. Gates of Heaven was shot in 1977, about a man who operated a failing pet cemetery in Northern California's Napa Valley. When Morris told his famous German filmmaking supporter Werner Herzog about the film, Herzog vowed to eat one of the shoes he was wearing that day if Morris could actually complete the film and have it shown in a public theatre. In April 1979, just before the documentary had its world premiere at UC Theatre in Berkeley, where Morris had studied philosophy, Herzog would spend the morning at Chez Pannise, the creators of the California Cuisine cooking style, boiling his shoes for five hours in garlic, herbs and stock. This event itself would be commemorated in a documentary short called, naturally, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, by Les Blank, which is a must watch on its own.   Because of the success of Gates of Heaven, Morris was able to quickly find financing for his next film, Nub City, which was originally supposed to be about the number of Vernon, Florida's citizens who have “accidentally” cut off their limbs, in order to collect the insurance money. But after several of those citizens threatened to kill Morris, and one of them tried to run down his cinematographer with their truck, Morris would rework the documentary, dropping the limb angle, no pun intended, and focus on the numerous eccentric people in the town. It would premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, and become a hit, for a documentary, when it was released in theatres in 1982.   But it would take Morris another six years after completing Vernon, Florida, to make another film. Part of it was having trouble lining up full funding to work on his next proposed movie, about James Grigson, a Texas forensic psychiatrist whose was nicknamed Doctor Death for being an expert witness for the prosecution in death penalty cases in Texas. Morris had gotten seed money for the documentary from PBS and the Endowment for Public Arts, but there was little else coming in while he worked on the film. In fact, Morris would get a PI license in New York and work cases for two years, using every penny he earned that wasn't going towards living expenses to keep the film afloat.   One of Morris's major problems for the film was that Grigson would not sit on camera for an interview, but would meet with Morris face to face to talk about the cases. During that meeting, the good doctor suggested to the filmmaker that he should research the killers he helped put away. And during that research, Morris would come across the case of one Randall Dale Adams, who was convicted of killing Dallas police officer Robert Wood in 1976, even though another man, David Harris, was the police's initial suspect. For two years, Morris would fly back and forth between New York City and Texas, talking to and filming interviews with Adams and more than two hundred other people connected to the shooting and the trial. Morris had become convinced Adams was indeed innocent, and dropped the idea about Dr. Grigson to solely focus on the Robert Wood murder.   After showing the producers of PBS's American Playhouse some of the footage he had put together of the new direction of the film, they kicked in more funds so that Morris could shoot some re-enactment sequences outside New York City, as well as commission composer Phillip Glass to create a score for the film once it was completed. Documentaries at that time did not regularly use re-enactments, but Morris felt it was important to show how different personal accounts of the same moment can be misinterpreted or misremembered or outright manipulated to suppress the truth.   After the film completed its post-production in March 1988, The Thin Blue Line would have its world premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on March 18th, and word quickly spread Morris had something truly unique and special on his hands. The critic for Variety would note in the very first paragraph of his write up that the film employed “strikingly original formal devices to pull together diverse interviews, film clips, photo collages, and” and this is where it broke ground, “recreations of the crime from many points of view.”   Miramax would put together a full court press in order to get the rights to the film, which was announced during the opening days of the 1988 Cannes Film Festival in early May. An early hint on how the company was going to sell the film was by calling it a “non-fiction feature” instead of a documentary.   Miramax would send Morris out on a cross-country press tour in the weeks leading up to the film's August 26th opening date, but Morris, like many documentary filmmakers, was not used to being in the spotlight themselves, and was not as articulate about talking up his movies as the more seasoned directors and actors who've been on the promotion circuit for a while. After one interview, Harvey Weinstein would send Errol Morris a note.   “Heard your NPR interview and you were boring.”   Harvey would offer up several suggestions to help the filmmaker, including hyping the movie up as a real life mystery thriller rather than a documentary, and using shorter and clearer sentences when answering a question.   It was a clear gamble to release The Thin Blue Line in the final week of summer, and the film would need a lot of good will to stand out.   And it would get it.   The New York Times was so enthralled with the film, it would not only run a review from Janet Maslin, who would heap great praise on the film, but would also run a lengthy interview with Errol Morris right next to the review. The quarter page ad in the New York Times, several pages back, would tout positive quotes from Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, who had left The Village Voice for the then-new Premiere Magazine, Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine instead of Rolling Stone, and critics from the San Francisco Chronicle and, interestingly enough, the Dallas Morning News. The top of the ad was tagged with an intriguing tease: solving this mystery is going to be murder, with a second tag line underneath the key art and title, which called the film “a new kind of movie mystery.” Of the 15 New York area-based film critics for local newspapers, television and national magazines, 14 of them gave favorable reviews, while 1, Stephen Schiff of Vanity Fair, was ambivalent about it. Not one critic gave it a bad review.   New York audiences were hooked.   Opening in the 240 seat main house at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the movie grossed $30,945 its first three days. In its second weekend, the gross at the Lincoln Plaza would jump to $31k, and adding another $27,500 from its two theatre opening in Los Angeles and $15,800 from a single DC theatre that week. Third week in New York was a still good $21k, but the second week in Los Angeles fell to $10,500 and DC to $10k. And that's how it rolled out for several months, mostly single screen bookings in major cities not called Los Angeles or New York City, racking up some of the best reviews Miramax would receive to date, but never breaking out much outside the major cities. When it looked like Santa Cruz wasn't going to play the film, I drove to San Francisco to see it, just as my friends and I had for the opening day of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in mid-August. That's 75 miles each way, plus parking in San Francisco, just to see a movie. That's when you know you no longer just like movies but have developed a serious case of cinephilea. So when The Nickelodeon did open the film in late November, I did something I had never done with any documentary before.   I went and saw it again.   Second time around, I was still pissed off at the outrageous injustice heaped upon Randall Dale Adams for nothing more than being with and trusting the wrong person at the wrong time. But, thankfully, things would turn around for Adams in the coming weeks. On December 1st, it was reported that David Harris had recanted his testimony at Adams' trial, admitting he was alone when Officer Wood stopped his car. And on March 1st, 1989, after more than 15,000 people had signed the film's petition to revisit the decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams's conviction “based largely” on facts presented in the film.   The film would also find itself in several more controversies.   Despite being named The Best Documentary of the Year by a number of critics groups, the Documentary Branch of the  Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would not nominate the film, due in large part to the numerous reenactments presented throughout the film. Filmmaker Michael Apted, a member of the Directors Branch of the Academy, noted that the failure to acknowledge The Thin Blue Line was “one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the Academy,” while Roger Ebert added the slight was “the worst non-nomination of the year.” Despite the lack of a nomination, Errol Morris would attend the Oscars ceremony in March 1989, as a protest for his film being snubbed.   Morris would also, several months after Adams' release, find himself being sued by Adams, but not because of how he was portrayed in the film. During the making of the film, Morris had Adams sign a contract giving Morris the exclusive right to tell Adams's story, and Adams wanted, essentially, the right to tell his own story now that he was a free man. Morris and Adams would settle out of court, and Adams would regain his life rights.   Once the movie was played out in theatres, it had grossed $1.2m, which on the surface sounds like not a whole lot of money. Adjusted for inflation, that would only be $3.08m. But even unadjusted for inflation, it's still one of the 100 highest grossing documentaries of the past forty years. And it is one of just a handful of documentaries to become a part of the National Film Registry, for being a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film.”   Adams would live a quiet life after his release, working as an anti-death penalty advocate and marrying the sister of one of the death row inmates he was helping to exonerate. He would pass away from a brain tumor in October 2010 at a courthouse in Ohio not half an hour from where he was born and still lived, but he would so disappear from the spotlight after the movie was released that his passing wasn't even reported until June 2011.   Errol Morris would become one of the most celebrated documentarians of his generation, finally getting nominated for, and winning, an Oscar in 2003, for The Fog of War, about the life and times of Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War era. The Fog of War would also be added to the National Film Registry in 2019. Morris would become only the third documentarian, after D.A. Pennebaker and Les Blank, to have two films on the Registry.   In 1973, the senseless killings of five members of the Alday family in Donalsonville GA made international headlines. Four years later, Canadian documentarian Tex Fuller made an award-winning documentary about the case, called Murder One. For years, Fuller shopped around a screenplay telling the same story, but it would take nearly a decade for it to finally be sold, in part because Fuller was insistent that he also be the director. A small Canadian production company would fund the $1m CAD production, which would star Henry Thomas of E.T. fame as the fifteen year old narrator of the story, Billy Isaacs.   The shoot began in early October 1987 outside Toronto, but after a week of shooting, Fuller was fired, and was replaced by Graeme Campbell, a young and energetic filmmaker for whom Murder One would be his fourth movie directing gig of the year. Details are sketchy as to why Fuller was fired, but Thomas and his mother Carolyn would voice concerns with the producers about the new direction the film was taking under its new director.   The film would premiere in Canada in May 1988. When the film did well up North, Miramax took notice and purchased the American distribution rights.   Murder One would first open in America on two screens in Los Angeles on September 9th, 1988. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times noted that while the film itself wasn't very good, that it still sprung from the disturbing insight about the crazy reasons people cross of what should be impassable moral lines.   “No movie studio could have invented it!,” screamed the tagline on the poster and newspaper key art. “No writer could have imagined it! Because what happened that night became the most controversial in American history.”   That would draw limited interest from filmgoers in Tinseltown. The two theatres would gross a combined $7k in its first three days. Not great but far better than several other recent Miramax releases in the area.   Two weeks later, on September 23rd, Miramax would book Murder One into 20 theatres in the New York City metro region, as well as in Akron, Atlanta, Charlotte, Indianpolis, Nashville, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In New York, the film would actually get some good reviews from the Times and the Post as well as Peter Travers of People Magazine, but once again, Miramax would not report grosses for the film. Variety would note the combined gross for the film in New York City was only $25k.   In early October, the film would fall out of Variety's internal list of the 50 Top Grossing Films within the twenty markets they regularly tracked, with a final gross of just $87k. One market that Miramax deliberately did not book the film was anywhere near southwest Georgia, where the murders took place. The closest theatre that did play the film was more than 200 miles away.   Miramax would finish 1988 with two releases.   The first was Dakota, which would mark star Lou Diamond Phillips first time as a producer. He would star as a troubled teenager who takes a job on a Texas horse ranch to help pay of his debts, who becomes a sorta big brother to the ranch owner's young son, who has recently lost a leg to cancer, as he also falls for the rancher's daughter.   When the $1.1m budgeted film began production in Texas in June 1987, Phillips had already made La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, but neither had yet to be released into theatres. By the time filming ended five weeks later, La Bamba had just opened, and Phillips was on his way to becoming a star.   The main producers wanted director Fred Holmes to get the film through post-production as quickly as possible, to get it into theatres in the early part of 1988 to capitalize on the newfound success of their young star.    But that wouldn't happen.   Holmes wouldn't have the film ready until the end of February 1988, which was deemed acceptable because of the impending release of Stand and Deliver. In fact, the producers would schedule their first distributor screening of the film on March 14th, the Monday after Stand and Delivered opened, in the hopes that good box office for the film and good notices for Phillips would translate to higher distributor interest in their film, which sorta worked. None of the major studios would show for the screening, but a number of Indies would, including Miramax. Phillips would not attend the screening, as he was on location in New Mexico shooting Young Guns.   I can't find any reason why Miramax waited nearly nine months after they acquired Dakota to get it into theatres. It certainly wasn't Oscar bait, and screen availability would be scarce during the busy holiday movie season, which would see a number of popular, high profile releases like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Ernest Saves Christmas, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Scrooged, Tequila Sunrise, Twins and Working Girl. Which might explain why, when Miramax released the film into 18 theatres in the New York City area on December 2nd, they could only get three screens in all of Manhattan, the best being the nice but hardly first-rate Embassy 4 at Broadway and 47th. Or of the 22 screens in Los Angeles opening the film the same day, the best would be the tiny Westwood 4 next to UCLA or the Paramount in Hollywood, whose best days were back in the Eisenhower administration.   And, yet again, Miramax did not report grosses, and none of the theatres playing the film was tracked by Variety that week. The film would be gone after just one week. The Paramount, which would open Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the 14th, opted to instead play a double feature of Clara's Heart, with Whoopi Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris, and the River Phoenix drama Running on Empty, even though neither film had been much of a hit.   Miramax's last film of the year would be the one that changed everything for them.   Pelle the Conquerer.   Adapted from a 1910 Danish book and directed by Billie August, whose previous film Twist and Shout had been released by Miramax in 1986, Pelle the Conquerer would be the first Danish or Swedish movie to star Max von Sydow in almost 15 years, having spent most of the 70s and 80s in Hollywood and London starring in a number of major movies including The Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor, Flash Gordon,Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, and David Lynch's Dune. But because von Sydow would be making his return to his native cinema, August was able to secure $4.5m to make the film, one of the highest budgeted Scandinavian films to be made to date.   In the late 1850s, an elderly emigrant Lasse and his son Pelle leave their home in Sweden after the death of the boy's mother, wanting to build a new life on the Danish island of Bornholm. Lasse finds it difficult to find work, given his age and his son's youth. The pair are forced to work at a large farm, where they are generally mistreated by the managers for being foreigners. The father falls into depression and alcoholism, the young boy befriends one of the bastard children of the farm owner as well as another Swedish farm worker, who dreams of conquering the world.   For the title character of Pelle, Billie August saw more than 3,000 Swedish boys before deciding to cast 11 year old Pelle Hvenegaard, who, like many boys in Sweden, had been named for the character he was now going to play on screen.   After six months of filming in the summer and fall of 1986, Billie August would finish editing Pelle the Conquerer in time for it to make its intended Christmas Day 1987 release date in Denmark and Sweden, where the film would be one of the biggest releases in either country for the entire decade. It would make its debut outside Scandinavia at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, where it had been invited to compete for the Palme D'Or. It would compete against a number of talented filmmakers who had come with some of the best films they would ever make, including Clint Eastwood with Bird, Claire Denis' Chocolat, István Szabó's Hanussen, Vincent Ward's The Navigator, and A Short Film About Killing, an expanded movie version of the fifth episode in Krzysztof Kieślowski's masterful miniseries Dekalog. Pelle would conquer them all, taking home the top prize from one of cinema's most revered film festivals.   Reviews for the film out of Cannes were almost universally excellent. Vincent Canby, the lead film critic for the New York Times for nearly twenty years by this point, wouldn't file his review until the end of the festival, in which he pointed out that a number of people at the festival were scandalized von Sydow had not also won the award for Best Actor.   Having previously worked with the company on his previous film's American release, August felt that Miramax would have what it took to make the film a success in the States.   Their first moves would be to schedule the film for a late December release, while securing a slot at that September's New York Film Festival. And once again, the critical consensus was highly positive, with only a small sampling of distractors.   The film would open first on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, December 21st, following by exclusive engagements in nine other cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, on the 23rd. But the opening week numbers weren't very good, just $46k from ten screens. And you can't really blame the film's two hour and forty-five minute running time. Little Dorrit, the two-part, four hour adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, had been out nine weeks at this point and was still making nearly 50% more per screen.   But after the new year, when more and more awards were hurled the film's way, including the National Board of Review naming it one of the best foreign films of the year and the Golden Globes awarding it their Best Foreign Language trophy, ticket sales would pick up.   Well, for a foreign film.   The week after the Motion Picture Academy awarded Pelle their award for Best Foreign Language Film, business for the film would pick up 35%, and a third of its $2m American gross would come after that win.   One of the things that surprised me while doing the research for this episode was learning that Max von Sydow had never been nominated for an Oscar until he was nominated for Best Actor for Pelle the Conquerer. You look at his credits over the years, and it's just mind blowing. The Seventh Seal. Wild Strawberries. The Virgin Spring. The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Emigrants. The Exorcist. The Three Days of the Condor. Surely there was one performance amongst those that deserved recognition.   I hate to keep going back to A24, but there's something about a company's first Oscar win that sends that company into the next level. A24 didn't really become A24 until 2016, when three of their movies won Oscars, including Brie Larson for Best Actress in Room. And Miramax didn't really become the Miramax we knew and once loved until its win for Pelle.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 117, the fifth and final part of our miniseries on Miramax Films, 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.

This week, we continue out look back at the films released by Miramax in the 1980s, focusing on 1987. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, concentrating on their releases from 1987, the year Miramax would begin its climb towards the top of the independent distribution mountain.   The first film Miramax would release in 1987 was Lizzie Borden's Working Girls.   And yes, Lizzie Borden is her birth name. Sort of. Her name was originally Linda Elizabeth Borden, and at the age of eleven, when she learned about the infamous accused double murderer, she told her parents she wanted to only be addressed as Lizzie. At the age of 18, after graduating high school and heading off to the private women's liberal arts college Wellesley, she would legally change her name to Lizzie Borden.   After graduating with a fine arts degree, Borden would move to New York City, where she held a variety of jobs, including being both a painter and an art critic for the influential Artforum magazine, until she attended a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard movies, when she was inspired to become a filmmaker herself.   Her first film, shot in 1974, was a documentary, Regrouping, about four female artists who were part of a collective that incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, as the collective slowly breaks apart. One of the four artists was a twenty-three year old painter who would later make film history herself as the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.    But Regrouping didn't get much attention when it was released in 1976, and it would take Borden five years to make her first dramatic narrative, Born in Flames, another movie which would also feature Ms. Bigelow in a supporting role. Borden would not only write, produce and direct this film about two different groups of feminists who operate pirate radio stations in New York City which ends with the bombing of the broadcast antenna atop the World Trade Center, she would also edit the film and act as one of the cinematographers. The film would become one of the first instances of Afrofuturism in film, and would become a cultural touchstone in 2016 when a restored print of the film screened around the world to great critical acclaim, and would tie for 243rd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films Ever Made. Other films that tied with include Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. A   Yes, it's that good, and it would cost only $30k to produce.   But while Born in Flames wasn't recognized as revolutionary in 1983, it would help her raise $300k for her next movie, about the lives of sex workers in New York City. The idea would come to her while working on Born in Flames, as she became intrigued about prostitution after meeting some well-educated women on the film who worked a few shifts a week at a brothel to earn extra money or to pay for their education. Like many, her perception of prostitution were women who worked the streets, when in truth streetwalkers only accounted for about 15% of the business. During the writing of the script, she began visiting brothels in New York City and learned about the rituals involved in the business of selling sex, especially intrigued how many of the sex workers looked out for each other mentally, physically and hygienically.   Along with Sandra Kay, who would play one of the ladies of the night in the film, Borden worked up a script that didn't glamorize or grossly exaggerate the sex industry, avoiding such storytelling tropes as the hooker with a heart of gold or girls forced into prostitution due to extraordinary circumstances. Most of the ladies playing prostitutes were played by unknown actresses working off-Broadway, while the johns were non-actors recruited through word of mouth between Borden's friends and the occasional ad in one of the city's sex magazines.   Production on Working Girls would begin in March 1985, with many of the sets being built in Borden's loft in Manhattan, with moveable walls to accommodate whatever needed to be shot on any given day. While $300k would be ten times what she had on Born in Flames, Borden would stretch her budget to the max by still shooting in 16mm, in the hopes that the footage would look good enough should the finished film be purchased by a distributor and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition.   After a month of shooting, which involved copious amounts of both male and female nudity, Borden would spend six months editing her film. By early 1986, she had a 91 minute cut ready to go, and she and her producer would submit the film to play at that year's Cannes Film Festival. While the film would not be selected to compete for the coveted Palme D'Or, it would be selected for the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel program that would also include Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, and Chantel Akerman's Golden Eighties.   The film would get into some trouble when it was invited to screen at the Toronto Film Festival a few months later. The movie would have to be approved by the Ontario Film and Video Review Board before being allowed to show at the festival. However, the board would not approve the film without two cuts, including one scene which depicted the quote unquote graphic manipulation of a man's genitalia by a woman. The festival, which had a long standing policy of not showing any movie that had been cut for censorship, would appeal the decision on behalf of the filmmakers. The Review Board denied the appeal, and the festival left the decision of whether to cut the two offending scenes to Borden. Of all the things I've researched about the film, one of the few things I could not find was whether or not Borden made the trims, but the film would play at the festival as scheduled.   After Toronto, Borden would field some offers from some of the smaller art house distributors, but none of the bigger independents or studio-affiliated “classics” divisions. For many, it was too sexual to be a straight art house film, while it wasn't graphic enough to be porn. The one person who did seem to best understand what Borden was going for was, no surprise in hindsight, Harvey Weinstein. Miramax would pick the film up for distribution in late 1986, and planned a February 1987 release.   What might be surprising to most who know about Harvey Weinstein, who would pick up the derisive nickname Harvey Scissorhands in a few years for his constant meddling in already completed films, actually suggested Borden add back in a few minutes of footage to balance out the sex with some lighter non-sex scenes. She would, along with making some last minute dialogue changes, before the film opened on February 5th, not in New York City or Los Angeles, the traditional launching pads for art house films, but at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, where the film would do a decent $8k in its first three days.   Three weeks after opening at the Opera Plaza, Miramax would open the film at the 57th Street Playhouse in midtown Manhattan. Buoyed by some amazing reviews from the likes of Siskel and Ebert, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, Working Girls would gross an astounding $42k during its opening weekend. Two weeks later, it would open at the Samuel Goldwyn Westside Pavilion Cinemas, where it would bring in $17k its first weekend. It would continue to perform well in its major market exclusive runs. An ad in the April 8th, 1987 issue of Variety shows a new house record of $13,492 in its first week at the Ellis Cinema in Atlanta. $140k after five weeks in New York. $40k after three weeks at the Nickelodeon in Boston. $30k after three weeks at the Fine Arts in Chicago. $10k in its first week at the Guild in San Diego. $11k in just three days at the TLA in Philly.   Now, there's different numbers floating around about how much Working Girls made during its total theatrical run. Box Office Mojo says $1.77m, which is really good for a low budget independent film with no stars and featuring a subject still taboo to many in American today, let alone 37 years ago, but a late June 1987 issue of Billboard Magazine about some of the early film successes of the year, puts the gross for Working Girls at $3m.   If you want to check out Working Girls, the Criterion Collection put out an exceptional DVD and Blu-ray release in 2021, which includes a brand new 4K transfer of the film, and a commentary track featuring Borden, cinematographer Judy Irola, and actress Amanda Goodwin, amongst many bonus features. Highly recommended.   I've already spoken some about their next film, Ghost Fever, on our episode last year about the fake movie director Alan Smithee and all of his bad movies. For those who haven't listened to that episode yet and are unaware of who Alan Smithee wasn't, Alan Smithee was a pseudonym created by the Directors Guild in the late 1960s who could be assigned the directing credit of a movie whose real director felt the final cut of the film did not represent his or her vision. By the time Ghost Fever came around in 1987, it would be the 12th movie to be credited to Alan Smithee.   If you have listened to the Alan Smithee episode, you can go ahead and skip forward a couple minutes, but be forewarned, I am going to be offering up a different elaboration on the film than I did on that episode.   And away we go…   Those of us born in the 1960s and before remember a show called All in the Family, and we remember Archie Bunker's neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson, who were eventually spun off onto their own hit show, The Jeffersons. Sherman Hemsley played George Jefferson on All in the Family and The Jeffersons for 12 years, but despite the show being a hit for a number of years, placing as high as #3 during the 1981-1982 television season, roles for Hemsley and his co-star Isabel Sanford outside the show were few and far between. During the eleven seasons The Jeffersons ran on television, from 1975 to 1985, Sherman Hemsley would only make one movie, 1979's Love at First Bite, where he played a small role as a reverend. He appeared on the poster, but his name was not listed amongst the other actors on the poster.   So when the producers of the then-titled Benny and Beaufor approached Hemsley in the spring of 1984 to play one of the title roles, he was more than happy to accept. The Jeffersons was about to start its summer hiatus, and here was the chance to not only make a movie but to be the number one listed actor on the call sheet. He might not ever get that chance again.   The film, by now titled Benny and Buford Meet the Bigoted Ghost, would shoot in Mexico City at Estudios America in the summer of 1984, before Hemsley was due back in Los Angeles to shoot the eleventh and what would be the final season of his show. But it would not be a normal shoot. In fact, there would be two different versions of the movie shot back to back. One, in English, would be directed by Lee Madden, which would hinge its comedy on the bumbling antics of its Black police officer, Buford, and his Hispanic partner, Benny. The other version would be shot in Spanish by Mexican director Miguel Rico, where the comedy would satirize class and social differences rather than racial differences. Hemsley would speak his lines in English, and would be dubbed by a Spanish-speaking actor in post production. Luis Ávalos, best known as Doctor Doolots on the PBS children's show The Electric Company, would play Benny. The only other name in the cast was boxing legend Smokin' Joe Frazier, who was making his proper acting debut on the film as, not too surprisingly, a boxer.   The film would have a four week shooting schedule, and Hemsley was back to work on The Jeffersons on time. Madden would get the film edited together rather quick, and the producers would have a screening for potential distributors in early October.   The screening did not go well.   Madden would be fired from the production, the script rewritten, and a new director named Herbert Strock would be hired to shoot more footage once Hemsley was done with his commitments to The Jeffersons in the spring of 1985. This is when Madden contacted the Directors Guild to request the Smithee pseudonym. But since the film was still in production, the DGA could not issue a judgment until the producers provided the Guild with a completed copy of the film.   That would happen in the late fall of 1985, and Madden was able to successfully show that he had directly a majority of the completed film but it did not represent his vision.   The film was not good, but Miramax still needed product to fill their distribution pipeline. They announced in mid-March of 1987 that they had acquired the film for distribution, and that the film would be opening in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg FL the following week.    Miramax did not release how many theatres the film was playing in in those markets, and the only market Variety did track of those that week was St. Louis, where the film did $7k from the four theatres they were tracking that week. Best as I can tell from limited newspaper archives of the day, Ghost Fever played on nine screens in Atlanta, 4 in Dallas/Fort Worth, 25 screens in Miami, and 12 in Tampa-St. Pete on top of the four I can find in St. Louis. By the following week, every theatre that was playing Ghost Fever had dropped it.   The film would not open in any other markets until it opened on 16 screens in the greater Los Angeles metro region on September 11th. No theatres in Hollywood. No theatres in Westwood. No theatres in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or any major theatre around, outside of the Palace Theatre downtown, a once stately theatre that had fallen into disrepair over the previous three decades. Once again, Miramax didn't release grosses for the run, none of the theatres playing the film were tracked by Variety that week, and all the playdates were gone after one week.   Today, you can find two slightly different copies of the film on a very popular video sharing website, one the theatrical cut, the other the home video cut. The home video cut is preceded by a quick history of the film, including a tidbit that Hemsley bankrolled $3m of the production himself, and that the film's failure almost made him bankrupt. I could not find any source to verify this, but there is possibly specious evidence to back up this claim. The producers of the film were able to make back the budget selling the film to home video company and cable movie channels around the world, and Hemsley would sue them in December 1987 for $3m claiming he was owed this amount from the profits and interest. It would take nine years to work its way through the court system, but a jury in March 1996 would award Hemsley $2.8m. The producers appealed, and an appellate court would uphold the verdict in April 1998.   One of the biggest indie film success stories of 1987 was Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.   In the early 1980s, Rozema was working as an assistant producer on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs television show called The Journal. Although she enjoyed her work, she, like many of us, wanted to be a filmmaker. While working on The Journal, she started to write screenplays while taking a classes at a Toronto Polytechnic Institute on 16mm film production.   Now, one of the nicer things about the Canadian film industry is that there are a number of government-funded arts councils that help young independent Canadian filmmakers get their low budget films financed. But Rozema was having trouble getting her earliest ideas funded. Finally, in 1984, she was able to secure funding for Passion, a short film she had written about a documentary filmmaker who writes an extremely intimate letter to an unknown lover. Linda Griffiths, the star of John Sayles' 1983 film Lianna, plays the filmmaker, and Passion would go on to be nominated for Gold Hugo for Best Short Film at the 1985 Chicago Film Festival.   However, a negative review of the short film in The Globe and Mail, often called Canada's Newspaper of Record, would anger Rozema, and she would use that anger to write a new script, Polly, which would be a polemic against the Toronto elitist high art milieu and its merciless negative judgements towards newer artists. Polly, the lead character and narrator of the film, lives alone, has no friends, rides her bike around Toronto to take photographs of whatever strikes her fancy, and regularly indulges herself in whimsical fantasies. An employee for a temporary secretarial agency, Polly gets placed in a private art gallery. The gallery owner is having an off-again, on-again relationship with one her clients, a painter who has misgivings she is too young for the gallery owner and the owner too old for her.    Inspired by the young painter, Polly anonymously submits some of her photographs to the gallery, in the hopes of getting featured, but becomes depressed when the gallery owner, who does not know who took the photos, dismisses them in front of Polly, calling them “simple minded.” Polly quits the gallery and retreats to her apartment. When the painter sees the photographs, she presents herself as the photographer of them, and the pair start to pass them off as the younger artist's work, even after the gallery owner learns they are not of the painter's work. When Polly finds out about the fraud, she confronts the gallery owner, eventually throwing a cup of tea at the owner.   Soon thereafter, the gallery owner and the painter go to check up on Polly at her flat, where they discover more photos undeniable beauty, and the story ends with the three women in one of Polly's fantasies.   Rozema would work on the screenplay for Polly while she was working as a third assistant director on David Cronenberg's The Fly. During the writing process, which took about a year, Rozema would change the title from Polly to Polly's Progress to Polly's Interior Mind. When she would submit the script in June 1986 to the various Canadian arts foundations for funding, it would sent out with yet another new title, Oh, The Things I've Seen.   The first agency to come aboard the film was the Ontario Film Development Corporation, and soon thereafter, the National Film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council would also join the funding operation, but the one council they desperately needed to fund the gap was Telefilm Canada, the Canadian government's principal instrument for supporting Canada's audiovisual industry. Telefilm Canada, at the time, had a reputation for being philosophically averse to low-budget, auteur-driven films, a point driven home directly by the administrator of the group at the time, who reportedly stomped out of a meeting concerning the making of this very film, purportedly declaring that Telefilm should not be financing these kind of minimalist, student films. Telefilm would reverse course when Rozema and her producer, Alexandra Raffé, agreed to bring on Don Haig, called “The Godfather of Canadian Cinema,” as an executive producer.   Side note: several months after the film completed shooting, Haig would win an Academy Award for producing a documentary about musician Artie Shaw.   Once they had their $350k budget, Rozema and Raffé got to work on pre-production. Money was tight on such an ambitious first feature. They had only $500 to help their casting agent identify potential actors for the film, although most of the cast would come from Rozema's friendships with them. They would cast thirty-year-old Sheila McCarthy, a first time film actress with only one television credit to her name, as Polly.   Shooting would begin in Toronto on September 24th, 1986 and go for four weeks, shooting completely in 16mm because they could not afford to shoot on 35mm. Once filming was completed, the National Film Board of Canada allowed Rozema use of their editing studio for free. When Rozema struggled with editing the film, the Film Board offered to pay for the consulting services of Ron Sanders, who had edited five of David Cronenberg's movies, including Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly, which Rozema gladly accepted.   After New Years 1987, Rozema has a rough cut of the film ready to show the various funding agencies. That edit of the film was only 65 minutes long, but went over very well with the viewers. So much so that the President of Cinephile Films, the Canadian movie distributor who also helped to fund the film, suggested that Rozema not only add another 15mins or so to the film wherever she could, but submit the film to the be entered in the Directors' Fortnight program at the Cannes Film Festival. Rozema still needed to add that requested footage in, and finish the sound mix, but she agreed as long as she was able to complete the film by the time the Cannes programmers met in mid-March. She wouldn't quite make her self-imposed deadline, but the film would get selected for Cannes anyway. This time, she had an absolute deadline. The film had to be completed in time for Cannes.   Which would include needing to make a 35mm blow up of the 16mm print, and the production didn't have the money. Rozema and Raffé asked Telefilm Canada if they could have $40k for the print, but they were turned down.   Twice.   Someone suggested they speak with the foreign sales agent who acquired the rights to sell the film at Cannes. The sales agent not only agreed to the fund the cost from sales of the film to various territories that would be returned to the the various arts councils, but he would also create a press kit, translate the English-language script into French, make sure the print showing at Cannes would have French subtitles, and create the key art for the posters and other ads. Rozema would actually help to create the key art, a picture of Sheila McCarthy's head floating over a body of water, an image that approximately 80% of all buyers would use for their own posters and ads around the world.   By the time the film premiered in Cannes on May 10th, 1987, Rozema had changed the title once again, to I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. The title would be taken from a line in the T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which she felt best represented the film.   But whatever it was titled, the two thousand people inside the theatre were mesmerized, and gave the film a six minute standing ovation. The festival quickly added four more screenings of the film, all of which sold out.   While a number of territories around the world had purchased the film before the premiere, the filmmakers bet big on themselves by waiting until after the world premiere to entertain offers from American distributors. Following the premiere, a number of companies made offers for the film. Miramax would be the highest, at $100,000, but the filmmakers said “no.” They kept the bidding going, until they got Miramax up to $350k, the full budget for the film. By the time the festival was done, the sales agent had booked more than $1.1m worth of sales. The film had earned back more than triple its cost before it ever opened on a single commercial screen.   Oh, and it also won Rozema the Prix de la Jeunesse (Pree do la Jza-naise), the Prize of the Youth, from the Directors Fortnight judges.   Miramax would schedule I've Heard the Mermaids Singing to open at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 11th, after screening at the Toronto Film Festival, then called The Festival of Festivals, the night before, and at the Telluride Film Festival the previous week. Miramax was so keen on the potential success of the film that they would buy their first ever full page newspaper, in the Sunday, September 6th New York Times Arts and Leisure section, which cost them $25k.   The critical and audience reactions in Toronto and Telluride matched the enthusiasm on the Croisette, which would translate to big box office its opening weekend. $40k, the best single screen gross in all Manhattan. While it would lose that crown to My Life as a Dog the following week, its $32k second weekend gross was still one of the best in the city. After three weekends in New York City, the film would have already grossed $100k. That weekend, the film would open at the Samuel Goldwyn West Pavilion Cinemas, where a $9,500 opening weekend gross was considered nice. Good word of mouth kept the grosses respectable for months, and after eight months in theatres, never playing in more than 27 theatres in any given week, the film would gross $1.4m in American theatres.   Ironically, the film did not go over as well in Rozema's home country, where it grossed a little less than half a million Canadian dollars, and didn't even play in the director's hometown due to a lack of theatres that were willing to play a “queer” movie, but once all was said and done, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing would end up with a worldwide gross of more than CAD$10m, a nearly 2500% return on the initial investment. Not only would part of those profits go back to the arts councils that helped fund the film, those profits would help fund the next group of independent Canadian filmmakers. And the film would become one of a growing number of films with LGBTQ lead characters whose success would break down the barriers some exhibitors had about playing non-straight movies.   The impact of this film on queer cinema and on Canadian cinema cannot be understated. In 1993, author Michael Posner spent the first twenty pages of his 250 plus page book Canadian Dreams discussing the history of the film, under the subtitle “The Little Film That Did.” And in 2014, author Julia Mendenhall wrote a 160 page book about the movie, with the subtitle “A Queer Film Classic.” You can find copies of both books on a popular web archive website, if you want to learn more.   Amazingly, for a company that would regularly take up to fourteen months between releases, Miramax would end 1987 with not one, not two, but three new titles in just the last six weeks of the year. Well, one that I can definitely place in theatres.   And here is where you just can't always trust the IMDb or Wikipedia by themselves.   The first alleged release of the three according to both sources, Riders on the Storm, was a wacky comedy featuring Dennis Hopper and Michael J. Polland, and supposedly opened in theatres on November 13th. Except it didn't. It did open in new York City on May 7th, 1988, in Los Angeles the following Friday. But we'll talk more about that movie on our next episode.   The second film of the alleged trifecta was Crazy Moon, a romantic comedy/drama from Canada that featured Keifer Sutherland as Brooks, a young man who finds love with Anne, a deaf girl working at a clothing store where Brooks and his brother are trying to steal a mannequin. Like I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Crazy Moon would benefit from the support of several Canadian arts foundations including Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board of Canada.   In an unusual move, Miramax would release Crazy Moon on 18 screens in Los Angeles on December 11th, as part of an Oscar qualifying run. I say “unusual” because although in the 1980s, a movie that wanted to qualify for awards consideration had to play in at least one commercial movie theatre in Los Angeles for seven consecutive days before the end of the year, most distributors did just that: one movie theatre. They normally didn't do 18 screens including cities like Long Beach, Irvine and Upland.   It would, however, definitely be a one week run.   Despite a number of decent reviews, Los Angeles audiences were too busy doing plenty of other things to see Crazy Moon. Miramax, once again, didn't report grosses, but six of the eighteen theatres playing the film were being tracked by Variety, and the combined gross for those six theatres was $2,500.   It would not get any award nominations, and it would never open at another movie theatre.   The third film allegedly released by Miramax during the 1987 holiday season, The Magic Snowman, has a reported theatrical release date of December 22, 1987, according to the IMDb, which is also the date listed on the Wikipedia page for the list of movies Miramax released in the 1980s. I suspect this is a direct to video release for several reasons, the two most important ones being that December 22nd was a Tuesday, and back in the 1980s, most home video titles came out on Tuesdays, and that I cannot find a single playdate anywhere in the country around this date, even in the Weinstein's home town of Buffalo. In fact, the only mention of the words “magic snowman” together I can find for all of 1987 is a live performance of a show called The Magic Snowman in Peterborough, England in November 1987.   So now we are eight years into the history of Miramax, and they are starting to pick up some steam. Granted, Working Girls and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing wasn't going to get the company a major line of credit to start making films of their own, but it would help them with visibility amongst the independent and global film communities. These guys can open your films in America.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1988.   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.

This week, we continue out look back at the films released by Miramax in the 1980s, focusing on 1987. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, concentrating on their releases from 1987, the year Miramax would begin its climb towards the top of the independent distribution mountain.   The first film Miramax would release in 1987 was Lizzie Borden's Working Girls.   And yes, Lizzie Borden is her birth name. Sort of. Her name was originally Linda Elizabeth Borden, and at the age of eleven, when she learned about the infamous accused double murderer, she told her parents she wanted to only be addressed as Lizzie. At the age of 18, after graduating high school and heading off to the private women's liberal arts college Wellesley, she would legally change her name to Lizzie Borden.   After graduating with a fine arts degree, Borden would move to New York City, where she held a variety of jobs, including being both a painter and an art critic for the influential Artforum magazine, until she attended a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard movies, when she was inspired to become a filmmaker herself.   Her first film, shot in 1974, was a documentary, Regrouping, about four female artists who were part of a collective that incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, as the collective slowly breaks apart. One of the four artists was a twenty-three year old painter who would later make film history herself as the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.    But Regrouping didn't get much attention when it was released in 1976, and it would take Borden five years to make her first dramatic narrative, Born in Flames, another movie which would also feature Ms. Bigelow in a supporting role. Borden would not only write, produce and direct this film about two different groups of feminists who operate pirate radio stations in New York City which ends with the bombing of the broadcast antenna atop the World Trade Center, she would also edit the film and act as one of the cinematographers. The film would become one of the first instances of Afrofuturism in film, and would become a cultural touchstone in 2016 when a restored print of the film screened around the world to great critical acclaim, and would tie for 243rd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films Ever Made. Other films that tied with include Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. A   Yes, it's that good, and it would cost only $30k to produce.   But while Born in Flames wasn't recognized as revolutionary in 1983, it would help her raise $300k for her next movie, about the lives of sex workers in New York City. The idea would come to her while working on Born in Flames, as she became intrigued about prostitution after meeting some well-educated women on the film who worked a few shifts a week at a brothel to earn extra money or to pay for their education. Like many, her perception of prostitution were women who worked the streets, when in truth streetwalkers only accounted for about 15% of the business. During the writing of the script, she began visiting brothels in New York City and learned about the rituals involved in the business of selling sex, especially intrigued how many of the sex workers looked out for each other mentally, physically and hygienically.   Along with Sandra Kay, who would play one of the ladies of the night in the film, Borden worked up a script that didn't glamorize or grossly exaggerate the sex industry, avoiding such storytelling tropes as the hooker with a heart of gold or girls forced into prostitution due to extraordinary circumstances. Most of the ladies playing prostitutes were played by unknown actresses working off-Broadway, while the johns were non-actors recruited through word of mouth between Borden's friends and the occasional ad in one of the city's sex magazines.   Production on Working Girls would begin in March 1985, with many of the sets being built in Borden's loft in Manhattan, with moveable walls to accommodate whatever needed to be shot on any given day. While $300k would be ten times what she had on Born in Flames, Borden would stretch her budget to the max by still shooting in 16mm, in the hopes that the footage would look good enough should the finished film be purchased by a distributor and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition.   After a month of shooting, which involved copious amounts of both male and female nudity, Borden would spend six months editing her film. By early 1986, she had a 91 minute cut ready to go, and she and her producer would submit the film to play at that year's Cannes Film Festival. While the film would not be selected to compete for the coveted Palme D'Or, it would be selected for the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel program that would also include Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, and Chantel Akerman's Golden Eighties.   The film would get into some trouble when it was invited to screen at the Toronto Film Festival a few months later. The movie would have to be approved by the Ontario Film and Video Review Board before being allowed to show at the festival. However, the board would not approve the film without two cuts, including one scene which depicted the quote unquote graphic manipulation of a man's genitalia by a woman. The festival, which had a long standing policy of not showing any movie that had been cut for censorship, would appeal the decision on behalf of the filmmakers. The Review Board denied the appeal, and the festival left the decision of whether to cut the two offending scenes to Borden. Of all the things I've researched about the film, one of the few things I could not find was whether or not Borden made the trims, but the film would play at the festival as scheduled.   After Toronto, Borden would field some offers from some of the smaller art house distributors, but none of the bigger independents or studio-affiliated “classics” divisions. For many, it was too sexual to be a straight art house film, while it wasn't graphic enough to be porn. The one person who did seem to best understand what Borden was going for was, no surprise in hindsight, Harvey Weinstein. Miramax would pick the film up for distribution in late 1986, and planned a February 1987 release.   What might be surprising to most who know about Harvey Weinstein, who would pick up the derisive nickname Harvey Scissorhands in a few years for his constant meddling in already completed films, actually suggested Borden add back in a few minutes of footage to balance out the sex with some lighter non-sex scenes. She would, along with making some last minute dialogue changes, before the film opened on February 5th, not in New York City or Los Angeles, the traditional launching pads for art house films, but at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, where the film would do a decent $8k in its first three days.   Three weeks after opening at the Opera Plaza, Miramax would open the film at the 57th Street Playhouse in midtown Manhattan. Buoyed by some amazing reviews from the likes of Siskel and Ebert, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, and J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, Working Girls would gross an astounding $42k during its opening weekend. Two weeks later, it would open at the Samuel Goldwyn Westside Pavilion Cinemas, where it would bring in $17k its first weekend. It would continue to perform well in its major market exclusive runs. An ad in the April 8th, 1987 issue of Variety shows a new house record of $13,492 in its first week at the Ellis Cinema in Atlanta. $140k after five weeks in New York. $40k after three weeks at the Nickelodeon in Boston. $30k after three weeks at the Fine Arts in Chicago. $10k in its first week at the Guild in San Diego. $11k in just three days at the TLA in Philly.   Now, there's different numbers floating around about how much Working Girls made during its total theatrical run. Box Office Mojo says $1.77m, which is really good for a low budget independent film with no stars and featuring a subject still taboo to many in American today, let alone 37 years ago, but a late June 1987 issue of Billboard Magazine about some of the early film successes of the year, puts the gross for Working Girls at $3m.   If you want to check out Working Girls, the Criterion Collection put out an exceptional DVD and Blu-ray release in 2021, which includes a brand new 4K transfer of the film, and a commentary track featuring Borden, cinematographer Judy Irola, and actress Amanda Goodwin, amongst many bonus features. Highly recommended.   I've already spoken some about their next film, Ghost Fever, on our episode last year about the fake movie director Alan Smithee and all of his bad movies. For those who haven't listened to that episode yet and are unaware of who Alan Smithee wasn't, Alan Smithee was a pseudonym created by the Directors Guild in the late 1960s who could be assigned the directing credit of a movie whose real director felt the final cut of the film did not represent his or her vision. By the time Ghost Fever came around in 1987, it would be the 12th movie to be credited to Alan Smithee.   If you have listened to the Alan Smithee episode, you can go ahead and skip forward a couple minutes, but be forewarned, I am going to be offering up a different elaboration on the film than I did on that episode.   And away we go…   Those of us born in the 1960s and before remember a show called All in the Family, and we remember Archie Bunker's neighbors, George and Louise Jefferson, who were eventually spun off onto their own hit show, The Jeffersons. Sherman Hemsley played George Jefferson on All in the Family and The Jeffersons for 12 years, but despite the show being a hit for a number of years, placing as high as #3 during the 1981-1982 television season, roles for Hemsley and his co-star Isabel Sanford outside the show were few and far between. During the eleven seasons The Jeffersons ran on television, from 1975 to 1985, Sherman Hemsley would only make one movie, 1979's Love at First Bite, where he played a small role as a reverend. He appeared on the poster, but his name was not listed amongst the other actors on the poster.   So when the producers of the then-titled Benny and Beaufor approached Hemsley in the spring of 1984 to play one of the title roles, he was more than happy to accept. The Jeffersons was about to start its summer hiatus, and here was the chance to not only make a movie but to be the number one listed actor on the call sheet. He might not ever get that chance again.   The film, by now titled Benny and Buford Meet the Bigoted Ghost, would shoot in Mexico City at Estudios America in the summer of 1984, before Hemsley was due back in Los Angeles to shoot the eleventh and what would be the final season of his show. But it would not be a normal shoot. In fact, there would be two different versions of the movie shot back to back. One, in English, would be directed by Lee Madden, which would hinge its comedy on the bumbling antics of its Black police officer, Buford, and his Hispanic partner, Benny. The other version would be shot in Spanish by Mexican director Miguel Rico, where the comedy would satirize class and social differences rather than racial differences. Hemsley would speak his lines in English, and would be dubbed by a Spanish-speaking actor in post production. Luis Ávalos, best known as Doctor Doolots on the PBS children's show The Electric Company, would play Benny. The only other name in the cast was boxing legend Smokin' Joe Frazier, who was making his proper acting debut on the film as, not too surprisingly, a boxer.   The film would have a four week shooting schedule, and Hemsley was back to work on The Jeffersons on time. Madden would get the film edited together rather quick, and the producers would have a screening for potential distributors in early October.   The screening did not go well.   Madden would be fired from the production, the script rewritten, and a new director named Herbert Strock would be hired to shoot more footage once Hemsley was done with his commitments to The Jeffersons in the spring of 1985. This is when Madden contacted the Directors Guild to request the Smithee pseudonym. But since the film was still in production, the DGA could not issue a judgment until the producers provided the Guild with a completed copy of the film.   That would happen in the late fall of 1985, and Madden was able to successfully show that he had directly a majority of the completed film but it did not represent his vision.   The film was not good, but Miramax still needed product to fill their distribution pipeline. They announced in mid-March of 1987 that they had acquired the film for distribution, and that the film would be opening in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg FL the following week.    Miramax did not release how many theatres the film was playing in in those markets, and the only market Variety did track of those that week was St. Louis, where the film did $7k from the four theatres they were tracking that week. Best as I can tell from limited newspaper archives of the day, Ghost Fever played on nine screens in Atlanta, 4 in Dallas/Fort Worth, 25 screens in Miami, and 12 in Tampa-St. Pete on top of the four I can find in St. Louis. By the following week, every theatre that was playing Ghost Fever had dropped it.   The film would not open in any other markets until it opened on 16 screens in the greater Los Angeles metro region on September 11th. No theatres in Hollywood. No theatres in Westwood. No theatres in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or any major theatre around, outside of the Palace Theatre downtown, a once stately theatre that had fallen into disrepair over the previous three decades. Once again, Miramax didn't release grosses for the run, none of the theatres playing the film were tracked by Variety that week, and all the playdates were gone after one week.   Today, you can find two slightly different copies of the film on a very popular video sharing website, one the theatrical cut, the other the home video cut. The home video cut is preceded by a quick history of the film, including a tidbit that Hemsley bankrolled $3m of the production himself, and that the film's failure almost made him bankrupt. I could not find any source to verify this, but there is possibly specious evidence to back up this claim. The producers of the film were able to make back the budget selling the film to home video company and cable movie channels around the world, and Hemsley would sue them in December 1987 for $3m claiming he was owed this amount from the profits and interest. It would take nine years to work its way through the court system, but a jury in March 1996 would award Hemsley $2.8m. The producers appealed, and an appellate court would uphold the verdict in April 1998.   One of the biggest indie film success stories of 1987 was Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing.   In the early 1980s, Rozema was working as an assistant producer on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs television show called The Journal. Although she enjoyed her work, she, like many of us, wanted to be a filmmaker. While working on The Journal, she started to write screenplays while taking a classes at a Toronto Polytechnic Institute on 16mm film production.   Now, one of the nicer things about the Canadian film industry is that there are a number of government-funded arts councils that help young independent Canadian filmmakers get their low budget films financed. But Rozema was having trouble getting her earliest ideas funded. Finally, in 1984, she was able to secure funding for Passion, a short film she had written about a documentary filmmaker who writes an extremely intimate letter to an unknown lover. Linda Griffiths, the star of John Sayles' 1983 film Lianna, plays the filmmaker, and Passion would go on to be nominated for Gold Hugo for Best Short Film at the 1985 Chicago Film Festival.   However, a negative review of the short film in The Globe and Mail, often called Canada's Newspaper of Record, would anger Rozema, and she would use that anger to write a new script, Polly, which would be a polemic against the Toronto elitist high art milieu and its merciless negative judgements towards newer artists. Polly, the lead character and narrator of the film, lives alone, has no friends, rides her bike around Toronto to take photographs of whatever strikes her fancy, and regularly indulges herself in whimsical fantasies. An employee for a temporary secretarial agency, Polly gets placed in a private art gallery. The gallery owner is having an off-again, on-again relationship with one her clients, a painter who has misgivings she is too young for the gallery owner and the owner too old for her.    Inspired by the young painter, Polly anonymously submits some of her photographs to the gallery, in the hopes of getting featured, but becomes depressed when the gallery owner, who does not know who took the photos, dismisses them in front of Polly, calling them “simple minded.” Polly quits the gallery and retreats to her apartment. When the painter sees the photographs, she presents herself as the photographer of them, and the pair start to pass them off as the younger artist's work, even after the gallery owner learns they are not of the painter's work. When Polly finds out about the fraud, she confronts the gallery owner, eventually throwing a cup of tea at the owner.   Soon thereafter, the gallery owner and the painter go to check up on Polly at her flat, where they discover more photos undeniable beauty, and the story ends with the three women in one of Polly's fantasies.   Rozema would work on the screenplay for Polly while she was working as a third assistant director on David Cronenberg's The Fly. During the writing process, which took about a year, Rozema would change the title from Polly to Polly's Progress to Polly's Interior Mind. When she would submit the script in June 1986 to the various Canadian arts foundations for funding, it would sent out with yet another new title, Oh, The Things I've Seen.   The first agency to come aboard the film was the Ontario Film Development Corporation, and soon thereafter, the National Film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council would also join the funding operation, but the one council they desperately needed to fund the gap was Telefilm Canada, the Canadian government's principal instrument for supporting Canada's audiovisual industry. Telefilm Canada, at the time, had a reputation for being philosophically averse to low-budget, auteur-driven films, a point driven home directly by the administrator of the group at the time, who reportedly stomped out of a meeting concerning the making of this very film, purportedly declaring that Telefilm should not be financing these kind of minimalist, student films. Telefilm would reverse course when Rozema and her producer, Alexandra Raffé, agreed to bring on Don Haig, called “The Godfather of Canadian Cinema,” as an executive producer.   Side note: several months after the film completed shooting, Haig would win an Academy Award for producing a documentary about musician Artie Shaw.   Once they had their $350k budget, Rozema and Raffé got to work on pre-production. Money was tight on such an ambitious first feature. They had only $500 to help their casting agent identify potential actors for the film, although most of the cast would come from Rozema's friendships with them. They would cast thirty-year-old Sheila McCarthy, a first time film actress with only one television credit to her name, as Polly.   Shooting would begin in Toronto on September 24th, 1986 and go for four weeks, shooting completely in 16mm because they could not afford to shoot on 35mm. Once filming was completed, the National Film Board of Canada allowed Rozema use of their editing studio for free. When Rozema struggled with editing the film, the Film Board offered to pay for the consulting services of Ron Sanders, who had edited five of David Cronenberg's movies, including Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly, which Rozema gladly accepted.   After New Years 1987, Rozema has a rough cut of the film ready to show the various funding agencies. That edit of the film was only 65 minutes long, but went over very well with the viewers. So much so that the President of Cinephile Films, the Canadian movie distributor who also helped to fund the film, suggested that Rozema not only add another 15mins or so to the film wherever she could, but submit the film to the be entered in the Directors' Fortnight program at the Cannes Film Festival. Rozema still needed to add that requested footage in, and finish the sound mix, but she agreed as long as she was able to complete the film by the time the Cannes programmers met in mid-March. She wouldn't quite make her self-imposed deadline, but the film would get selected for Cannes anyway. This time, she had an absolute deadline. The film had to be completed in time for Cannes.   Which would include needing to make a 35mm blow up of the 16mm print, and the production didn't have the money. Rozema and Raffé asked Telefilm Canada if they could have $40k for the print, but they were turned down.   Twice.   Someone suggested they speak with the foreign sales agent who acquired the rights to sell the film at Cannes. The sales agent not only agreed to the fund the cost from sales of the film to various territories that would be returned to the the various arts councils, but he would also create a press kit, translate the English-language script into French, make sure the print showing at Cannes would have French subtitles, and create the key art for the posters and other ads. Rozema would actually help to create the key art, a picture of Sheila McCarthy's head floating over a body of water, an image that approximately 80% of all buyers would use for their own posters and ads around the world.   By the time the film premiered in Cannes on May 10th, 1987, Rozema had changed the title once again, to I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. The title would be taken from a line in the T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which she felt best represented the film.   But whatever it was titled, the two thousand people inside the theatre were mesmerized, and gave the film a six minute standing ovation. The festival quickly added four more screenings of the film, all of which sold out.   While a number of territories around the world had purchased the film before the premiere, the filmmakers bet big on themselves by waiting until after the world premiere to entertain offers from American distributors. Following the premiere, a number of companies made offers for the film. Miramax would be the highest, at $100,000, but the filmmakers said “no.” They kept the bidding going, until they got Miramax up to $350k, the full budget for the film. By the time the festival was done, the sales agent had booked more than $1.1m worth of sales. The film had earned back more than triple its cost before it ever opened on a single commercial screen.   Oh, and it also won Rozema the Prix de la Jeunesse (Pree do la Jza-naise), the Prize of the Youth, from the Directors Fortnight judges.   Miramax would schedule I've Heard the Mermaids Singing to open at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City on September 11th, after screening at the Toronto Film Festival, then called The Festival of Festivals, the night before, and at the Telluride Film Festival the previous week. Miramax was so keen on the potential success of the film that they would buy their first ever full page newspaper, in the Sunday, September 6th New York Times Arts and Leisure section, which cost them $25k.   The critical and audience reactions in Toronto and Telluride matched the enthusiasm on the Croisette, which would translate to big box office its opening weekend. $40k, the best single screen gross in all Manhattan. While it would lose that crown to My Life as a Dog the following week, its $32k second weekend gross was still one of the best in the city. After three weekends in New York City, the film would have already grossed $100k. That weekend, the film would open at the Samuel Goldwyn West Pavilion Cinemas, where a $9,500 opening weekend gross was considered nice. Good word of mouth kept the grosses respectable for months, and after eight months in theatres, never playing in more than 27 theatres in any given week, the film would gross $1.4m in American theatres.   Ironically, the film did not go over as well in Rozema's home country, where it grossed a little less than half a million Canadian dollars, and didn't even play in the director's hometown due to a lack of theatres that were willing to play a “queer” movie, but once all was said and done, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing would end up with a worldwide gross of more than CAD$10m, a nearly 2500% return on the initial investment. Not only would part of those profits go back to the arts councils that helped fund the film, those profits would help fund the next group of independent Canadian filmmakers. And the film would become one of a growing number of films with LGBTQ lead characters whose success would break down the barriers some exhibitors had about playing non-straight movies.   The impact of this film on queer cinema and on Canadian cinema cannot be understated. In 1993, author Michael Posner spent the first twenty pages of his 250 plus page book Canadian Dreams discussing the history of the film, under the subtitle “The Little Film That Did.” And in 2014, author Julia Mendenhall wrote a 160 page book about the movie, with the subtitle “A Queer Film Classic.” You can find copies of both books on a popular web archive website, if you want to learn more.   Amazingly, for a company that would regularly take up to fourteen months between releases, Miramax would end 1987 with not one, not two, but three new titles in just the last six weeks of the year. Well, one that I can definitely place in theatres.   And here is where you just can't always trust the IMDb or Wikipedia by themselves.   The first alleged release of the three according to both sources, Riders on the Storm, was a wacky comedy featuring Dennis Hopper and Michael J. Polland, and supposedly opened in theatres on November 13th. Except it didn't. It did open in new York City on May 7th, 1988, in Los Angeles the following Friday. But we'll talk more about that movie on our next episode.   The second film of the alleged trifecta was Crazy Moon, a romantic comedy/drama from Canada that featured Keifer Sutherland as Brooks, a young man who finds love with Anne, a deaf girl working at a clothing store where Brooks and his brother are trying to steal a mannequin. Like I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Crazy Moon would benefit from the support of several Canadian arts foundations including Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board of Canada.   In an unusual move, Miramax would release Crazy Moon on 18 screens in Los Angeles on December 11th, as part of an Oscar qualifying run. I say “unusual” because although in the 1980s, a movie that wanted to qualify for awards consideration had to play in at least one commercial movie theatre in Los Angeles for seven consecutive days before the end of the year, most distributors did just that: one movie theatre. They normally didn't do 18 screens including cities like Long Beach, Irvine and Upland.   It would, however, definitely be a one week run.   Despite a number of decent reviews, Los Angeles audiences were too busy doing plenty of other things to see Crazy Moon. Miramax, once again, didn't report grosses, but six of the eighteen theatres playing the film were being tracked by Variety, and the combined gross for those six theatres was $2,500.   It would not get any award nominations, and it would never open at another movie theatre.   The third film allegedly released by Miramax during the 1987 holiday season, The Magic Snowman, has a reported theatrical release date of December 22, 1987, according to the IMDb, which is also the date listed on the Wikipedia page for the list of movies Miramax released in the 1980s. I suspect this is a direct to video release for several reasons, the two most important ones being that December 22nd was a Tuesday, and back in the 1980s, most home video titles came out on Tuesdays, and that I cannot find a single playdate anywhere in the country around this date, even in the Weinstein's home town of Buffalo. In fact, the only mention of the words “magic snowman” together I can find for all of 1987 is a live performance of a show called The Magic Snowman in Peterborough, England in November 1987.   So now we are eight years into the history of Miramax, and they are starting to pick up some steam. Granted, Working Girls and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing wasn't going to get the company a major line of credit to start making films of their own, but it would help them with visibility amongst the independent and global film communities. These guys can open your films in America.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1988.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

The tenth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1975 features the Academy Awards Best Picture winner, Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Directed by Milos Forman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey and starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, William Redfield, Brad Dourif and Sydney Lassick, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was nominated for nine Oscars and won five, including Best Picture.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest-1975), Vincent Canby in The New York Times (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/cuckoo-re.html), and A.D. Murphy in Variety (https://variety.com/1975/film/reviews/one-flew-over-the-cuckoo-s-nest-2-1200423518/).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/piecingpod.You can also follow us all on Letterboxd to keep up with what we've been watching at goforjason, signalbleed and bydavidrosen.Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to exclusive content from Awesome Movie Year, plus fellow podcasts Piecing It Together and All Rice No Beans, and music by David Rosen: https://www.patreon.com/bydavidrosenAll of the music in the episode is by David Rosen. Find more of his music at https://www.bydavidrosen.comPlease like, share, rate and comment on the show and this episode, and tune in for the next 1975 installment, featuring our producer David Rosen's pick, Blaxploitation classic Dolemite.

On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, specifically looking at the films they released between 1984 and 1986. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s.   And, in case you did not listen to Part 1 yet, let me reiterate that the focus here will be on the films and the creatives, not the Weinsteins. The Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and that Miramax logo and the names associated with it should not stop anyone from enjoying some very well made movies because they now have an unfortunate association with two spineless chucklenuts who proclivities would not be known by the outside world for decades to come.   Well, there is one movie this episode where we must talk about the Weinsteins as the creatives, but when talking about that film, “creatives” is a derisive pejorative.    We ended our previous episode at the end of 1983. Miramax had one minor hit film in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, thanks in large part to the film's association with members of the still beloved Monty Python comedy troupe, who hadn't released any material since The Life of Brian in 1979.   1984 would be the start of year five of the company, and they were still in need of something to make their name. Being a truly independent film company in 1984 was not easy. There were fewer than 20,000 movie screens in the entire country back then, compared to nearly 40,000 today. National video store chains like Blockbuster did not exist, and the few cable channels that did exist played mostly Hollywood films. There was no social media for images and clips to go viral.   For comparison's sake, in A24's first five years, from its founding in August 2012 to July 2017, the company would have a number of hit films, including The Bling Ring, The Lobster, Spring Breakers, and The Witch, release movies from some of indie cinema's most respected names, including Andrea Arnold, Robert Eggers, Atom Egoyan, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Lynn Shelton, Trey Edward Shults, Gus Van Sant, and Denis Villeneuve, and released several Academy Award winning movies, including the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, Lenny Abrahamson's Room and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, which would upset front runner La La Land for the Best Picture of 2016.   But instead of leaning into the American independent cinema world the way Cinecom and Island were doing with the likes of Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, Miramax would dip their toes further into the world of international cinema.   Their first release for 1984 would be Ruy Guerra's Eréndira. The screenplay by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez was based on his 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, which itself was based off a screenplay Márquez had written in the early 1960s, which, when he couldn't get it made at the time, he reduced down to a page and a half for a sequence in his 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, Márquez would lose the original draft of Eréndira, and would write a new script based off what he remembered writing twenty years earlier.    In the story, a young woman named Eréndira lives in a near mansion situation in an otherwise empty desert with her grandmother, who had collected a number of paper flowers and assorted tchotchkes over the years. One night, Eréndira forgets to put out some candles used to illuminate the house, and the house and all of its contents burn to the ground. With everything lost, Eréndira's grandmother forces her into a life of prostitution. The young woman quickly becomes the courtesan of choice in the region. With every new journey, an ever growing caravan starts to follow them, until it becomes for all intents and purposes a carnival, with food vendors, snake charmers, musicians and games of chance.   Márquez's writing style, known as “magic realism,” was very cinematic on the page, and it's little wonder that many of his stories have been made into movies and television miniseries around the globe for more than a half century. Yet no movie came as close to capturing that Marquezian prose quite the way Guerra did with Eréndira. Featuring Greek goddess Irene Papas as the Grandmother, Brazilian actress Cláudia Ohana, who happened to be married to Guerra at the time, as the titular character, and former Bond villain Michael Lonsdale in a small but important role as a Senator who tries to help Eréndira get out of her life as a slave, the movie would be Mexico's entry into the 1983 Academy Award race for Best Foreign Language Film.   After acquiring the film for American distribution, Miramax would score a coup by getting the film accepted to that year's New York Film Festival, alongside such films as Robert Altman's Streamers, Jean Lucy Godard's Passion, Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, and Andrzej Wajda's Danton.   But despite some stellar reviews from many of the New York City film critics, Eréndira would not get nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and Miramax would wait until April 27th, 1984, to open the film at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, one of the most important theatres in New York City at the time to launch a foreign film. A quarter page ad in the New York Times included quotes from the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vincent Canby of the Times and Roger Ebert, the movie would gross an impressive $25,500 in its first three days. Word of mouth in the city would be strong, with its second weekend gross actually increasing nearly 20% to $30,500. Its third weekend would fall slightly, but with $27k in the till would still be better than its first weekend.   It wouldn't be until Week 5 that Eréndira would expand into Los Angeles and Chicago, where it would continue to gross nearly $20k per screen for several more weeks. The film would continue to play across the nation for more than half a year, and despite never making more than four prints of the film, Eréndira would gross more than $600k in America, one of the best non-English language releases for all of 1984.   In their quickest turnaround from one film to another to date, Miramax would release Claude Lelouch's Edith and Marcel not five weeks after Eréndira.   If you're not familiar with the name Claude Chabrol, I would highly suggest becoming so. Chabrol was a part of the French New Wave filmmakers alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut who came up as film critics for the influential French magazine Cahiers [ka-yay] du Cinéma in the 1950s, who would go on to change the direction of French Cinema and how film fans appreciated films and filmmakers through the concept of The Auteur Theory, although the theory itself would be given a name by American film critic Andrew Sarris in 1962.   Of these five critics turned filmmakers, Chabrol would be considered the most prolific and commercial. Chabrol would be the first of them to make a film, Le Beau Serge, and between 1957 and his death in 2010, he would make 58 movies. That's more than one new movie every year on average, not counting shorts and television projects he also made on the side.   American audiences knew him best for his 1966 global hit A Man and a Woman, which would sell more than $14m in tickets in the US and would be one of the few foreign language films to earn Academy Award nominations outside of the Best Foreign Language Film race. Lead actress Anouk Aimee would get a nod, and Chabrol would earn two on the film, for Best Director, which he would lose to Fred Zimmerman and A Man for All Seasons, and Best Original Screenplay, which he would win alongside his co-writer Pierre Uytterhoeven.   Edith and Marcel would tell the story of the love affair between the iconic French singer Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan, the French boxer who was the Middleweight Champion of the World during their affair in 1948 and 1949. Both were famous in their own right, but together, they were the Brangelina of post-World War II France. Despite the fact that Cerdan was married with three kids, their affair helped lift the spirits of the French people, until his death in October 1949, while he was flying from Paris to New York to see Piaf.   Fans of Raging Bull are somewhat familiar with Marcel Cerdan already, as Cerdan's last fight before his death would find Cerdan losing his middleweight title to Jake LaMotta.   In a weird twist of fate, Patrick Dewaere, the actor Chabrol cast as Cerdan, committed suicide just after the start of production, and while Chabrol considered shutting down the film in respect, it would be none other than Marcel Cerdan, Jr. who would step in to the role of his own father, despite never having acted before, and being six years older than his father was when he died.   When it was released in France in April 1983, it was an immediate hit, become the second highest French film of the year, and the sixth highest grosser of all films released in the country that year. However, it would not be the film France submitted to that year's Academy Award race. That would be Diane Kurys' Entre Nous, which wasn't as big a hit in France but was considered a stronger contender for the nomination, in part because of Isabelle Hupert's amazing performance but also because Entre Nous, as 110 minutes, was 50 minutes shorter than Edith and Marcel.   Harvey Weinstein would cut twenty minutes out of the film without Chabrol's consent or assistance, and when the film was released at the 57th Street Playhouse in New York City on Sunday, June 3rd, the gushing reviews in the New York Times ad would actually be for Chabrol's original cut, and they would help the film gross $15,300 in its first five days. But once the other New York critics who didn't get to see the original cut of the film saw this new cut, the critical consensus started to fall. Things felt off to them, and they would be, as a number of short trims made by Weinstein would remove important context for the film for the sake of streamlining the film. Audiences would pick up on the changes, and in its first full weekend of release, the film would only gross $12k. After two more weeks of grosses of under $4k each week, the film would close in New York City. Edith and Marcel would never play in another theatre in the United States.   And then there would be another year plus long gap before their next release, but we'll get into the reason why in a few moments.   Many people today know Rubén Blades as Daniel Salazar in Fear the Walking Dead, or from his appearances in The Milagro Beanfield War, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, or Predator 2, amongst his 40 plus acting appearances over the years, but in the early 1980s, he was a salsa and Latin Jazz musician and singer who had yet to break out of the New Yorican market. With an idea for a movie about a singer and musician not unlike himself trying to attempt a crossover success into mainstream music, he would approach his friend, director Leon Icasho, about teaming up to get the idea fleshed out into a real movie. Although Blades was at best a cult music star, and Icasho had only made one movie before, they were able to raise $6m from a series of local investors including Jack Rollins, who produced every Woody Allen movie from 1969's Take the Money and Run to 2015's Irrational Man, to make their movie, which they would start shooting in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City in December 1982.   Despite the luxury of a large budget for an independent Latino production, the shooting schedule was very tight, less than five weeks. There would be a number of large musical segments to show Blades' character Rudy's talents as a musician and singer, with hundreds of extras on hand in each scene. Icasho would stick to his 28 day schedule, and the film would wrap up shortly after the New Year.   Even though the director would have his final cut of the movie ready by the start of summer 1983, it would take nearly a year and a half for any distributor to nibble. It wasn't that the film was tedious. Quite the opposite. Many distributors enjoyed the film, but worried about, ironically, the ability of the film to crossover out of the Latino market into the mainstream. So when Miramax came along with a lower than hoped for offer to release the film, the filmmakers took the deal, because they just wanted the film out there.   Things would start to pick up for the film when Miramax submitted the film to be entered into the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and it would be submitted to run in the prestigious Directors Fortnight program, alongside Mike Newell's breakthrough film, Dance with a Stranger, Victor Nunez's breakthrough film, A Flash of Green, and Wayne Wang's breakthrough film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart. While they were waiting for Cannes to get back to them, they would also learn the film had been selected to be a part of The Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films program, where the film would earn raves from local critics and audiences, especially for Blades, who many felt was a screen natural. After more praise from critics and audiences on the French Riviera, Miramax would open Crossover Dreams at the Cinema Studio theatre in midtown Manhattan on August 23rd, 1985. Originally booked into the smaller 180 seat auditorium, since John Huston's Prizzi's Honor was still doing good business in the 300 seat house in its fourth week, the theatre would swap houses for the films when it became clear early on Crossover Dreams' first day that it would be the more popular title that weekend. And it would. While Prizzi would gross a still solid $10k that weekend, Crossover Dreams would gross $35k. In its second weekend, the film would again gross $35k. And in its third weekend, another $35k. They were basically selling out every seat at every show those first three weeks. Clearly, the film was indeed doing some crossover business.   But, strangely, Miramax would wait seven weeks after opening the film in New York to open it in Los Angeles. With a new ad campaign that de-emphasized Blades and played up the dreamer dreaming big aspect of the film, Miramax would open the movie at two of the more upscale theatres in the area, the Cineplex Beverly Center on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, and the Cineplex Brentwood Twin, on the west side where many of Hollywood's tastemakers called home. Even with a plethora of good reviews from the local press, and playing at two theatres with a capacity of more than double the one theatre playing the film in New York, Crossover Dreams could only manage a neat $13k opening weekend.   Slowly but surely, Miramax would add a few more prints in additional major markets, but never really gave the film the chance to score with Latino audiences who may have been craving a salsa-infused musical/drama, even if it was entirely in English. Looking back, thirty-eight years later, that seems to have been a mistake, but it seems that the film's final gross of just $250k after just ten weeks of release was leaving a lot of money on the table. At awards time, Blades would be nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor, but otherwise, the film would be shut out of any further consideration.   But for all intents and purposes, the film did kinda complete its mission of turning Blades into a star. He continues to be one of the busiest Latino actors in Hollywood over the last forty years, and it would help get one of his co-stars, Elizabeth Peña, a major job in a major Hollywood film the following year, as the live-in maid at Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler's house in Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which would give her a steady career until her passing in 2014. And Icasho himself would have a successful directing career both on movie screens and on television, working on such projects as Miami Vice, Crime Story, The Equalizer, Criminal Minds, and Queen of the South, until his passing this past May.   I'm going to briefly mention a Canadian drama called The Dog Who Stopped the War that Miramax released on three screens in their home town of Buffalo on October 25th, 1985. A children's film about two groups of children in a small town in Quebec during their winter break who get involved in an ever-escalating snowball fight. It would be the highest grossing local film in Canada in 1984, and would become the first in a series of 25 family films under a Tales For All banner made by a company called Party Productions, which will be releasing their newest film in the series later this year. The film may have huge in Canada, but in Buffalo in the late fall, the film would only gross $15k in its first, and only, week in theatres. The film would eventually develop a cult following thanks to repeated cable screenings during the holidays every year.   We'll also give a brief mention to an Australian action movie called Cool Change, directed by George Miller. No, not the George Miller who created the Mad Max series, but the other Australian director named George Miller, who had to start going by George T. Miller to differentiate himself from the other George Miller, even though this George Miller was directing before the other George Miller, and even had a bigger local and global hit in 1982 with The Man From Snowy River than the other George Miller had with Mad Max II, aka The Road Warrior. It would also be the second movie released by Miramax in a year starring a young Australian ingenue named Deborra-Lee Furness, who was also featured in Crossover Dreams. Today, most people know her as Mrs. Hugh Jackman.   The internet and several book sources say the movie opened in America on March 14th, 1986, but damn if I can find any playdate anywhere in the country, period. Not even in the Weinsteins' home territory of Buffalo. A critic from the Sydney Morning Herald would call the film, which opened in Australia four weeks after it allegedly opened in America, a spectacularly simplistic propaganda piece for the cattle farmers of the Victorian high plains,” and in its home country, it would barely gross 2% of its $3.5m budget.   And sticking with brief mentions of Australian movies Miramax allegedly released in American in the spring of 1986, we move over to one of three movies directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith that would be released during that year. In Australia, it was titled Frog Dreaming, but for America, the title was changed to The Quest. The film stars Henry Thomas from E.T. as an American boy who has moved to Australia to be with his guardian after his parents die, who finds himself caught up in the magic of a local Aboriginal myth that might be more real than anyone realizes.   And like Cool Change, I cannot find any American playdates for the film anywhere near its alleged May 1st, 1986 release date. I even contacted Mr. Trenchard-Smith asking him if he remembers anything about the American release of his film, knowing full well it's 37 years later, but while being very polite in his response, he was unable to help.       Finally, we get back to the movies we actually can talk about with some certainty. I know our next movie was actually released in American theatres, because I saw it in America at a cinema.   Twist and Shout tells the story of two best friends, Bjørn and Erik, growing up in suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1963. The music of The Beatles, who are just exploding in Europe, help provide a welcome respite from the harsh realities of their lives.   Directed by Billie August, Twist and Shout would become the first of several August films to be released by Miramax over the next decade, including his follow-up, which would end up become Miramax's first Oscar-winning release, but we'll be talking about that movie on our next episode.   August was often seen as a spiritual successor to Ingmar Bergman within Scandinavian cinema, so much so that Bergman would handpick August to direct a semi-autobiographical screenplay of his, The Best Intentions, in the early 1990s, when it became clear to Bergman that he would not be able to make it himself. Bergman's only stipulation was that August would need to cast one of his actresses from Fanny and Alexander, Pernilla Wallgren, as his stand-in character's mother. August and Wallgren had never met until they started filming. By the end of shooting, Pernilla Wallgren would be Pernilla August, but that's another story for another time.   In a rare twist, Twist and Shout would open in Los Angeles before New York City, at the Cineplex Beverly Center August 22nd, 1986, more than two years after it opened across Denmark. Loaded with accolades including a Best Picture Award from the European Film Festival and positive reviews from the likes of Gene Siskel and Michael Wilmington, the movie would gross, according to Variety, a “crisp” $14k in its first three days. In its second weekend, the Beverly Center would add a second screen for the film, and the gross would increase to $17k. And by week four, one of those prints at the Beverly Center would move to the Laemmle Monica 4, so those on the West Side who didn't want to go east of the 405 could watch it. But the combined $13k gross would not be as good as the previous week's $14k from the two screens at the Beverly Center.   It wouldn't be until Twist and Shout's sixth week of release they would finally add a screen in New York City, the 68th Street Playhouse, where it would gross $25k in its first weekend there. But after nine weeks, never playing in more than five theatres in any given weekend, Twist and Shout was down and out, with only $204k in ticket sales. But it was good enough for Miramax to acquire August's next movie, and actually get it into American theatres within a year of its release in Denmark and Sweden. Join us next episode for that story.   Earlier, I teased about why Miramax took more than a year off from releasing movies in 1984 and 1985. And we've reached that point in the timeline to tell that story.   After writing and producing The Burning in 1981, Bob and Harvey had decided what they really wanted to do was direct. But it would take years for them to come up with an idea and flesh that story out to a full length screenplay. They'd return to their roots as rock show promoters, borrowing heavily from one of Harvey's first forays into that field, when he and a partner, Corky Burger, purchased an aging movie theatre in Buffalo in 1974 and turned it into a rock and roll hall for a few years, until they gutted and demolished the theatre, so they could sell the land, with Harvey's half of the proceeds becoming much of the seed money to start Miramax up.   After graduating high school, three best friends from New York get the opportunity of a lifetime when they inherit an old run down hotel upstate, with dreams of turning it into a rock and roll hotel. But when they get to the hotel, they realize the place is going to need a lot more work than they initially realized, and they realize they are not going to get any help from any of the locals, who don't want them or their silly rock and roll hotel in their quaint and quiet town.   With a budget of only $5m, and a story that would need to be filmed entirely on location, the cast would not include very many well known actors.   For the lead role of Danny, the young man who inherits the hotel, they would cast Daniel Jordano, whose previous acting work had been nameless characters in movies like Death Wish 3 and Streetwalkin'. This would be his first leading role.   Danny's two best friends, Silk and Spikes, would be played by Leon W. Grant and Matthew Penn, respectively. Like Jordano, both Grant and Penn had also worked in small supporting roles, although Grant would actually play characters with actual names like Boo Boo and Chollie. Penn, the son of Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn, would ironically have his first acting role in a 1983 musical called Rock and Roll Hotel, about a young trio of musicians who enter a Battle of the Bands at an old hotel called The Rock and Roll Hotel. This would also be their first leading roles.   Today, there are two reasons to watch Playing For Keeps.   One of them is to see just how truly awful Bob and Harvey Weinstein were as directors. 80% of the movie is master shots without any kind of coverage, 15% is wannabe MTV music video if those videos were directed by space aliens handed video cameras and not told what to do with them, and 5% Jordano mimicking Kevin Bacon in Footloose but with the heaviest New Yawk accent this side of Bensonhurst.   The other reason is to watch a young actress in her first major screen role, who is still mesmerizing and hypnotic despite the crapfest she is surrounded by. Nineteen year old Marisa Tomei wouldn't become a star because of this movie, but it was clear very early on she was going to become one, someday.   Mostly shot in and around the grounds of the Bethany Colony Resort in Bethany PA, the film would spend six weeks in production during June and July of 1984, and they would spend more than a year and a half putting the film together. As music men, they knew a movie about a rock and roll hotel for younger people who need to have a lot of hip, cool, teen-friendly music on the soundtrack. So, naturally, the Weinsteins would recruit such hip, cool, teen-friendly musicians like Pete Townshend of The Who, Phil Collins, Peter Frampton, Sister Sledge, already defunct Duran Duran side project Arcadia, and Hinton Battle, who had originated the role of The Scarecrow in the Broadway production of The Wiz. They would spend nearly $500k to acquire B-sides and tossed away songs that weren't good enough to appear on the artists' regular albums.   Once again light on money, Miramax would sent the completed film out to the major studios to see if they'd be willing to release the movie. A sale would bring some much needed capital back into the company immediately, and creating a working relationship with a major studio could be advantageous in the long run. Universal Pictures would buy the movie from Miramax for an undisclosed sum, and set an October 3rd release.   Playing For Keeps would open on 1148 screens that day, including 56 screens in the greater Los Angeles region and 80 in the New York City metropolitan area. But it wasn't the best week to open this film. Crocodile Dundee had opened the week before and was a surprise hit, spending a second week firmly atop the box office charts with $8.2m in ticket sales. Its nearest competitor, the Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas comedy Tough Guys, would be the week's highest grossing new film, with $4.6m. Number three was Top Gun, earning $2.405m in its 21st week in theatres, and Stand By Me was in fourth in its ninth week with $2.396m. In fifth place, playing in only 215 theatres, would be another new opener, Children of a Lesser God, with $1.9m. And all the way down in sixth place, with only $1.4m in ticket sales, was Playing for Keeps.   The reviews were fairly brutal, and by that, I mean they were fair in their brutality, although you'll have to do some work to find those reviews. No one has ever bothered to link their reviews for Playing For Keeps at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. After a second weekend, where the film would lose a quarter of its screens and 61% of its opening weekend business, Universal would cut its losses and dump the film into dollar houses. The final reported box office gross on the film would be $2.67m.   Bob Weinstein would never write or direct another film, and Harvey Weinstein would only have one other directing credit to his name, an animated movie called The Gnomes' Great Adventure, which wasn't really a directing effort so much as buying the American rights to a 1985 Spanish animated series called The World of David the Gnome, creating new English language dubs with actors like Tom Bosley, Frank Gorshin, Christopher Plummer, and Tony Randall, and selling the new versions to Nickelodeon.   Sadly, we would learn in October 2017 that one of the earliest known episodes of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein happened during the pre-production of Playing for Keeps.   In 1984, a twenty year old college junior Tomi-Ann Roberts was waiting tables in New York City, hoping to start an acting career. Weinstein, who one of her customers at this restaurant, urged Ms. Roberts to audition for a movie that he and his brother were planning to direct. He sent her the script and asked her to meet him where he was staying so they could discuss the film. When she arrived at his hotel room, the door was left slightly ajar, and he called on her to come in and close the door behind her.  She would find Weinstein nude in the bathtub,  where he told her she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable getting naked in front of him too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene. If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film. She was horrified and rushed out of the room, after telling Weinstein that she was too prudish to go along. She felt he had manipulated her by feigning professional interest in her, and doubted she had ever been under serious consideration. That incident would send her life in a different direction. In 2017, Roberts was a psychology professor at Colorado College, researching sexual objectification, an interest she traces back in part to that long-ago encounter.   And on that sad note, we're going to take our leave.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1987.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, specifically looking at the films they released between 1984 and 1986. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s.   And, in case you did not listen to Part 1 yet, let me reiterate that the focus here will be on the films and the creatives, not the Weinsteins. The Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and that Miramax logo and the names associated with it should not stop anyone from enjoying some very well made movies because they now have an unfortunate association with two spineless chucklenuts who proclivities would not be known by the outside world for decades to come.   Well, there is one movie this episode where we must talk about the Weinsteins as the creatives, but when talking about that film, “creatives” is a derisive pejorative.    We ended our previous episode at the end of 1983. Miramax had one minor hit film in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, thanks in large part to the film's association with members of the still beloved Monty Python comedy troupe, who hadn't released any material since The Life of Brian in 1979.   1984 would be the start of year five of the company, and they were still in need of something to make their name. Being a truly independent film company in 1984 was not easy. There were fewer than 20,000 movie screens in the entire country back then, compared to nearly 40,000 today. National video store chains like Blockbuster did not exist, and the few cable channels that did exist played mostly Hollywood films. There was no social media for images and clips to go viral.   For comparison's sake, in A24's first five years, from its founding in August 2012 to July 2017, the company would have a number of hit films, including The Bling Ring, The Lobster, Spring Breakers, and The Witch, release movies from some of indie cinema's most respected names, including Andrea Arnold, Robert Eggers, Atom Egoyan, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Lynn Shelton, Trey Edward Shults, Gus Van Sant, and Denis Villeneuve, and released several Academy Award winning movies, including the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, Alex Garland's Ex Machina, Lenny Abrahamson's Room and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, which would upset front runner La La Land for the Best Picture of 2016.   But instead of leaning into the American independent cinema world the way Cinecom and Island were doing with the likes of Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, Miramax would dip their toes further into the world of international cinema.   Their first release for 1984 would be Ruy Guerra's Eréndira. The screenplay by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez was based on his 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, which itself was based off a screenplay Márquez had written in the early 1960s, which, when he couldn't get it made at the time, he reduced down to a page and a half for a sequence in his 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, Márquez would lose the original draft of Eréndira, and would write a new script based off what he remembered writing twenty years earlier.    In the story, a young woman named Eréndira lives in a near mansion situation in an otherwise empty desert with her grandmother, who had collected a number of paper flowers and assorted tchotchkes over the years. One night, Eréndira forgets to put out some candles used to illuminate the house, and the house and all of its contents burn to the ground. With everything lost, Eréndira's grandmother forces her into a life of prostitution. The young woman quickly becomes the courtesan of choice in the region. With every new journey, an ever growing caravan starts to follow them, until it becomes for all intents and purposes a carnival, with food vendors, snake charmers, musicians and games of chance.   Márquez's writing style, known as “magic realism,” was very cinematic on the page, and it's little wonder that many of his stories have been made into movies and television miniseries around the globe for more than a half century. Yet no movie came as close to capturing that Marquezian prose quite the way Guerra did with Eréndira. Featuring Greek goddess Irene Papas as the Grandmother, Brazilian actress Cláudia Ohana, who happened to be married to Guerra at the time, as the titular character, and former Bond villain Michael Lonsdale in a small but important role as a Senator who tries to help Eréndira get out of her life as a slave, the movie would be Mexico's entry into the 1983 Academy Award race for Best Foreign Language Film.   After acquiring the film for American distribution, Miramax would score a coup by getting the film accepted to that year's New York Film Festival, alongside such films as Robert Altman's Streamers, Jean Lucy Godard's Passion, Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, and Andrzej Wajda's Danton.   But despite some stellar reviews from many of the New York City film critics, Eréndira would not get nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and Miramax would wait until April 27th, 1984, to open the film at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, one of the most important theatres in New York City at the time to launch a foreign film. A quarter page ad in the New York Times included quotes from the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vincent Canby of the Times and Roger Ebert, the movie would gross an impressive $25,500 in its first three days. Word of mouth in the city would be strong, with its second weekend gross actually increasing nearly 20% to $30,500. Its third weekend would fall slightly, but with $27k in the till would still be better than its first weekend.   It wouldn't be until Week 5 that Eréndira would expand into Los Angeles and Chicago, where it would continue to gross nearly $20k per screen for several more weeks. The film would continue to play across the nation for more than half a year, and despite never making more than four prints of the film, Eréndira would gross more than $600k in America, one of the best non-English language releases for all of 1984.   In their quickest turnaround from one film to another to date, Miramax would release Claude Lelouch's Edith and Marcel not five weeks after Eréndira.   If you're not familiar with the name Claude Chabrol, I would highly suggest becoming so. Chabrol was a part of the French New Wave filmmakers alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut who came up as film critics for the influential French magazine Cahiers [ka-yay] du Cinéma in the 1950s, who would go on to change the direction of French Cinema and how film fans appreciated films and filmmakers through the concept of The Auteur Theory, although the theory itself would be given a name by American film critic Andrew Sarris in 1962.   Of these five critics turned filmmakers, Chabrol would be considered the most prolific and commercial. Chabrol would be the first of them to make a film, Le Beau Serge, and between 1957 and his death in 2010, he would make 58 movies. That's more than one new movie every year on average, not counting shorts and television projects he also made on the side.   American audiences knew him best for his 1966 global hit A Man and a Woman, which would sell more than $14m in tickets in the US and would be one of the few foreign language films to earn Academy Award nominations outside of the Best Foreign Language Film race. Lead actress Anouk Aimee would get a nod, and Chabrol would earn two on the film, for Best Director, which he would lose to Fred Zimmerman and A Man for All Seasons, and Best Original Screenplay, which he would win alongside his co-writer Pierre Uytterhoeven.   Edith and Marcel would tell the story of the love affair between the iconic French singer Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan, the French boxer who was the Middleweight Champion of the World during their affair in 1948 and 1949. Both were famous in their own right, but together, they were the Brangelina of post-World War II France. Despite the fact that Cerdan was married with three kids, their affair helped lift the spirits of the French people, until his death in October 1949, while he was flying from Paris to New York to see Piaf.   Fans of Raging Bull are somewhat familiar with Marcel Cerdan already, as Cerdan's last fight before his death would find Cerdan losing his middleweight title to Jake LaMotta.   In a weird twist of fate, Patrick Dewaere, the actor Chabrol cast as Cerdan, committed suicide just after the start of production, and while Chabrol considered shutting down the film in respect, it would be none other than Marcel Cerdan, Jr. who would step in to the role of his own father, despite never having acted before, and being six years older than his father was when he died.   When it was released in France in April 1983, it was an immediate hit, become the second highest French film of the year, and the sixth highest grosser of all films released in the country that year. However, it would not be the film France submitted to that year's Academy Award race. That would be Diane Kurys' Entre Nous, which wasn't as big a hit in France but was considered a stronger contender for the nomination, in part because of Isabelle Hupert's amazing performance but also because Entre Nous, as 110 minutes, was 50 minutes shorter than Edith and Marcel.   Harvey Weinstein would cut twenty minutes out of the film without Chabrol's consent or assistance, and when the film was released at the 57th Street Playhouse in New York City on Sunday, June 3rd, the gushing reviews in the New York Times ad would actually be for Chabrol's original cut, and they would help the film gross $15,300 in its first five days. But once the other New York critics who didn't get to see the original cut of the film saw this new cut, the critical consensus started to fall. Things felt off to them, and they would be, as a number of short trims made by Weinstein would remove important context for the film for the sake of streamlining the film. Audiences would pick up on the changes, and in its first full weekend of release, the film would only gross $12k. After two more weeks of grosses of under $4k each week, the film would close in New York City. Edith and Marcel would never play in another theatre in the United States.   And then there would be another year plus long gap before their next release, but we'll get into the reason why in a few moments.   Many people today know Rubén Blades as Daniel Salazar in Fear the Walking Dead, or from his appearances in The Milagro Beanfield War, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, or Predator 2, amongst his 40 plus acting appearances over the years, but in the early 1980s, he was a salsa and Latin Jazz musician and singer who had yet to break out of the New Yorican market. With an idea for a movie about a singer and musician not unlike himself trying to attempt a crossover success into mainstream music, he would approach his friend, director Leon Icasho, about teaming up to get the idea fleshed out into a real movie. Although Blades was at best a cult music star, and Icasho had only made one movie before, they were able to raise $6m from a series of local investors including Jack Rollins, who produced every Woody Allen movie from 1969's Take the Money and Run to 2015's Irrational Man, to make their movie, which they would start shooting in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City in December 1982.   Despite the luxury of a large budget for an independent Latino production, the shooting schedule was very tight, less than five weeks. There would be a number of large musical segments to show Blades' character Rudy's talents as a musician and singer, with hundreds of extras on hand in each scene. Icasho would stick to his 28 day schedule, and the film would wrap up shortly after the New Year.   Even though the director would have his final cut of the movie ready by the start of summer 1983, it would take nearly a year and a half for any distributor to nibble. It wasn't that the film was tedious. Quite the opposite. Many distributors enjoyed the film, but worried about, ironically, the ability of the film to crossover out of the Latino market into the mainstream. So when Miramax came along with a lower than hoped for offer to release the film, the filmmakers took the deal, because they just wanted the film out there.   Things would start to pick up for the film when Miramax submitted the film to be entered into the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and it would be submitted to run in the prestigious Directors Fortnight program, alongside Mike Newell's breakthrough film, Dance with a Stranger, Victor Nunez's breakthrough film, A Flash of Green, and Wayne Wang's breakthrough film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart. While they were waiting for Cannes to get back to them, they would also learn the film had been selected to be a part of The Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films program, where the film would earn raves from local critics and audiences, especially for Blades, who many felt was a screen natural. After more praise from critics and audiences on the French Riviera, Miramax would open Crossover Dreams at the Cinema Studio theatre in midtown Manhattan on August 23rd, 1985. Originally booked into the smaller 180 seat auditorium, since John Huston's Prizzi's Honor was still doing good business in the 300 seat house in its fourth week, the theatre would swap houses for the films when it became clear early on Crossover Dreams' first day that it would be the more popular title that weekend. And it would. While Prizzi would gross a still solid $10k that weekend, Crossover Dreams would gross $35k. In its second weekend, the film would again gross $35k. And in its third weekend, another $35k. They were basically selling out every seat at every show those first three weeks. Clearly, the film was indeed doing some crossover business.   But, strangely, Miramax would wait seven weeks after opening the film in New York to open it in Los Angeles. With a new ad campaign that de-emphasized Blades and played up the dreamer dreaming big aspect of the film, Miramax would open the movie at two of the more upscale theatres in the area, the Cineplex Beverly Center on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, and the Cineplex Brentwood Twin, on the west side where many of Hollywood's tastemakers called home. Even with a plethora of good reviews from the local press, and playing at two theatres with a capacity of more than double the one theatre playing the film in New York, Crossover Dreams could only manage a neat $13k opening weekend.   Slowly but surely, Miramax would add a few more prints in additional major markets, but never really gave the film the chance to score with Latino audiences who may have been craving a salsa-infused musical/drama, even if it was entirely in English. Looking back, thirty-eight years later, that seems to have been a mistake, but it seems that the film's final gross of just $250k after just ten weeks of release was leaving a lot of money on the table. At awards time, Blades would be nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor, but otherwise, the film would be shut out of any further consideration.   But for all intents and purposes, the film did kinda complete its mission of turning Blades into a star. He continues to be one of the busiest Latino actors in Hollywood over the last forty years, and it would help get one of his co-stars, Elizabeth Peña, a major job in a major Hollywood film the following year, as the live-in maid at Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler's house in Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which would give her a steady career until her passing in 2014. And Icasho himself would have a successful directing career both on movie screens and on television, working on such projects as Miami Vice, Crime Story, The Equalizer, Criminal Minds, and Queen of the South, until his passing this past May.   I'm going to briefly mention a Canadian drama called The Dog Who Stopped the War that Miramax released on three screens in their home town of Buffalo on October 25th, 1985. A children's film about two groups of children in a small town in Quebec during their winter break who get involved in an ever-escalating snowball fight. It would be the highest grossing local film in Canada in 1984, and would become the first in a series of 25 family films under a Tales For All banner made by a company called Party Productions, which will be releasing their newest film in the series later this year. The film may have huge in Canada, but in Buffalo in the late fall, the film would only gross $15k in its first, and only, week in theatres. The film would eventually develop a cult following thanks to repeated cable screenings during the holidays every year.   We'll also give a brief mention to an Australian action movie called Cool Change, directed by George Miller. No, not the George Miller who created the Mad Max series, but the other Australian director named George Miller, who had to start going by George T. Miller to differentiate himself from the other George Miller, even though this George Miller was directing before the other George Miller, and even had a bigger local and global hit in 1982 with The Man From Snowy River than the other George Miller had with Mad Max II, aka The Road Warrior. It would also be the second movie released by Miramax in a year starring a young Australian ingenue named Deborra-Lee Furness, who was also featured in Crossover Dreams. Today, most people know her as Mrs. Hugh Jackman.   The internet and several book sources say the movie opened in America on March 14th, 1986, but damn if I can find any playdate anywhere in the country, period. Not even in the Weinsteins' home territory of Buffalo. A critic from the Sydney Morning Herald would call the film, which opened in Australia four weeks after it allegedly opened in America, a spectacularly simplistic propaganda piece for the cattle farmers of the Victorian high plains,” and in its home country, it would barely gross 2% of its $3.5m budget.   And sticking with brief mentions of Australian movies Miramax allegedly released in American in the spring of 1986, we move over to one of three movies directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith that would be released during that year. In Australia, it was titled Frog Dreaming, but for America, the title was changed to The Quest. The film stars Henry Thomas from E.T. as an American boy who has moved to Australia to be with his guardian after his parents die, who finds himself caught up in the magic of a local Aboriginal myth that might be more real than anyone realizes.   And like Cool Change, I cannot find any American playdates for the film anywhere near its alleged May 1st, 1986 release date. I even contacted Mr. Trenchard-Smith asking him if he remembers anything about the American release of his film, knowing full well it's 37 years later, but while being very polite in his response, he was unable to help.       Finally, we get back to the movies we actually can talk about with some certainty. I know our next movie was actually released in American theatres, because I saw it in America at a cinema.   Twist and Shout tells the story of two best friends, Bjørn and Erik, growing up in suburbs of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1963. The music of The Beatles, who are just exploding in Europe, help provide a welcome respite from the harsh realities of their lives.   Directed by Billie August, Twist and Shout would become the first of several August films to be released by Miramax over the next decade, including his follow-up, which would end up become Miramax's first Oscar-winning release, but we'll be talking about that movie on our next episode.   August was often seen as a spiritual successor to Ingmar Bergman within Scandinavian cinema, so much so that Bergman would handpick August to direct a semi-autobiographical screenplay of his, The Best Intentions, in the early 1990s, when it became clear to Bergman that he would not be able to make it himself. Bergman's only stipulation was that August would need to cast one of his actresses from Fanny and Alexander, Pernilla Wallgren, as his stand-in character's mother. August and Wallgren had never met until they started filming. By the end of shooting, Pernilla Wallgren would be Pernilla August, but that's another story for another time.   In a rare twist, Twist and Shout would open in Los Angeles before New York City, at the Cineplex Beverly Center August 22nd, 1986, more than two years after it opened across Denmark. Loaded with accolades including a Best Picture Award from the European Film Festival and positive reviews from the likes of Gene Siskel and Michael Wilmington, the movie would gross, according to Variety, a “crisp” $14k in its first three days. In its second weekend, the Beverly Center would add a second screen for the film, and the gross would increase to $17k. And by week four, one of those prints at the Beverly Center would move to the Laemmle Monica 4, so those on the West Side who didn't want to go east of the 405 could watch it. But the combined $13k gross would not be as good as the previous week's $14k from the two screens at the Beverly Center.   It wouldn't be until Twist and Shout's sixth week of release they would finally add a screen in New York City, the 68th Street Playhouse, where it would gross $25k in its first weekend there. But after nine weeks, never playing in more than five theatres in any given weekend, Twist and Shout was down and out, with only $204k in ticket sales. But it was good enough for Miramax to acquire August's next movie, and actually get it into American theatres within a year of its release in Denmark and Sweden. Join us next episode for that story.   Earlier, I teased about why Miramax took more than a year off from releasing movies in 1984 and 1985. And we've reached that point in the timeline to tell that story.   After writing and producing The Burning in 1981, Bob and Harvey had decided what they really wanted to do was direct. But it would take years for them to come up with an idea and flesh that story out to a full length screenplay. They'd return to their roots as rock show promoters, borrowing heavily from one of Harvey's first forays into that field, when he and a partner, Corky Burger, purchased an aging movie theatre in Buffalo in 1974 and turned it into a rock and roll hall for a few years, until they gutted and demolished the theatre, so they could sell the land, with Harvey's half of the proceeds becoming much of the seed money to start Miramax up.   After graduating high school, three best friends from New York get the opportunity of a lifetime when they inherit an old run down hotel upstate, with dreams of turning it into a rock and roll hotel. But when they get to the hotel, they realize the place is going to need a lot more work than they initially realized, and they realize they are not going to get any help from any of the locals, who don't want them or their silly rock and roll hotel in their quaint and quiet town.   With a budget of only $5m, and a story that would need to be filmed entirely on location, the cast would not include very many well known actors.   For the lead role of Danny, the young man who inherits the hotel, they would cast Daniel Jordano, whose previous acting work had been nameless characters in movies like Death Wish 3 and Streetwalkin'. This would be his first leading role.   Danny's two best friends, Silk and Spikes, would be played by Leon W. Grant and Matthew Penn, respectively. Like Jordano, both Grant and Penn had also worked in small supporting roles, although Grant would actually play characters with actual names like Boo Boo and Chollie. Penn, the son of Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn, would ironically have his first acting role in a 1983 musical called Rock and Roll Hotel, about a young trio of musicians who enter a Battle of the Bands at an old hotel called The Rock and Roll Hotel. This would also be their first leading roles.   Today, there are two reasons to watch Playing For Keeps.   One of them is to see just how truly awful Bob and Harvey Weinstein were as directors. 80% of the movie is master shots without any kind of coverage, 15% is wannabe MTV music video if those videos were directed by space aliens handed video cameras and not told what to do with them, and 5% Jordano mimicking Kevin Bacon in Footloose but with the heaviest New Yawk accent this side of Bensonhurst.   The other reason is to watch a young actress in her first major screen role, who is still mesmerizing and hypnotic despite the crapfest she is surrounded by. Nineteen year old Marisa Tomei wouldn't become a star because of this movie, but it was clear very early on she was going to become one, someday.   Mostly shot in and around the grounds of the Bethany Colony Resort in Bethany PA, the film would spend six weeks in production during June and July of 1984, and they would spend more than a year and a half putting the film together. As music men, they knew a movie about a rock and roll hotel for younger people who need to have a lot of hip, cool, teen-friendly music on the soundtrack. So, naturally, the Weinsteins would recruit such hip, cool, teen-friendly musicians like Pete Townshend of The Who, Phil Collins, Peter Frampton, Sister Sledge, already defunct Duran Duran side project Arcadia, and Hinton Battle, who had originated the role of The Scarecrow in the Broadway production of The Wiz. They would spend nearly $500k to acquire B-sides and tossed away songs that weren't good enough to appear on the artists' regular albums.   Once again light on money, Miramax would sent the completed film out to the major studios to see if they'd be willing to release the movie. A sale would bring some much needed capital back into the company immediately, and creating a working relationship with a major studio could be advantageous in the long run. Universal Pictures would buy the movie from Miramax for an undisclosed sum, and set an October 3rd release.   Playing For Keeps would open on 1148 screens that day, including 56 screens in the greater Los Angeles region and 80 in the New York City metropolitan area. But it wasn't the best week to open this film. Crocodile Dundee had opened the week before and was a surprise hit, spending a second week firmly atop the box office charts with $8.2m in ticket sales. Its nearest competitor, the Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas comedy Tough Guys, would be the week's highest grossing new film, with $4.6m. Number three was Top Gun, earning $2.405m in its 21st week in theatres, and Stand By Me was in fourth in its ninth week with $2.396m. In fifth place, playing in only 215 theatres, would be another new opener, Children of a Lesser God, with $1.9m. And all the way down in sixth place, with only $1.4m in ticket sales, was Playing for Keeps.   The reviews were fairly brutal, and by that, I mean they were fair in their brutality, although you'll have to do some work to find those reviews. No one has ever bothered to link their reviews for Playing For Keeps at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. After a second weekend, where the film would lose a quarter of its screens and 61% of its opening weekend business, Universal would cut its losses and dump the film into dollar houses. The final reported box office gross on the film would be $2.67m.   Bob Weinstein would never write or direct another film, and Harvey Weinstein would only have one other directing credit to his name, an animated movie called The Gnomes' Great Adventure, which wasn't really a directing effort so much as buying the American rights to a 1985 Spanish animated series called The World of David the Gnome, creating new English language dubs with actors like Tom Bosley, Frank Gorshin, Christopher Plummer, and Tony Randall, and selling the new versions to Nickelodeon.   Sadly, we would learn in October 2017 that one of the earliest known episodes of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein happened during the pre-production of Playing for Keeps.   In 1984, a twenty year old college junior Tomi-Ann Roberts was waiting tables in New York City, hoping to start an acting career. Weinstein, who one of her customers at this restaurant, urged Ms. Roberts to audition for a movie that he and his brother were planning to direct. He sent her the script and asked her to meet him where he was staying so they could discuss the film. When she arrived at his hotel room, the door was left slightly ajar, and he called on her to come in and close the door behind her.  She would find Weinstein nude in the bathtub,  where he told her she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable getting naked in front of him too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene. If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film. She was horrified and rushed out of the room, after telling Weinstein that she was too prudish to go along. She felt he had manipulated her by feigning professional interest in her, and doubted she had ever been under serious consideration. That incident would send her life in a different direction. In 2017, Roberts was a psychology professor at Colorado College, researching sexual objectification, an interest she traces back in part to that long-ago encounter.   And on that sad note, we're going to take our leave.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1987.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.