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Mike & I take a deep dive into the WWII submarine supernatural thriller Below screened at The Forbidden Worlds Film Festival 2025! Join us as we discuss meta conversations, ghostly effects & unfortunately The Weinsteins... #PreapreForPrattle For all your Forbidden Worlds information past, present and future do a deep dive on their website... https://www.forbiddenworldsfilmfestival.co.uk/And watch the video introductions from the people involved in the films who couldn't be there this year in person... https://www.youtube.com/@FWFilmFestivalBe sure to subscribe to Mike's channel as we'll be alternating our videos and podcasts on the festival between our two channels for the event... https://www.youtube.com/@GenuineChitChat https://episodes.fm/1280472886Where to find the Spider-Dan & The Secret Bores Podcast…Follow this link to find your preferred podcast catcher of choice pod.link/danboresFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/secretboresThreads:https://www.threads.net/@spiderdansecretboresTiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dan_boresInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/spiderdansecretbores/?hl=enDiscord: https://discord.com/invite/CeVrdqdpjkIMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22023774/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/spiderdan_2006/Like, share, comment, subscribe etc. and don't forget to use the #PrepareForPrattle when you interact with us.Please subscribe to The Pop Culture Collective newsletter to find out what myself, Comics In Motion and all the other related podcasts are up to week by week https://pccnewsletter.com/I'd like to thank my patrons on #Patreon for their continuing donations it is very much appreciated and helps PrattleWorld keep turning and if you ever find yourself in a position to help the podcast please consider it. https://www.patreon.com/spiderdanandthesecretboresIf you would like to make a one off donation head over to https://ko-fi.com/spiderdanandthesecretboresIf you want to #JoinThePrattalion and to be briefed in full on the #SecretBores head over to #PrattleWorld https://www.spiderdanandthesecretbores.com/
Spray on some insect repellant and don your hazmat suit, because Del Toro Club has re-formed to discuss a gigantic layer cake of infinite bugs, 1997’s “Mimic.” Parts of it are very Del Toro indeed, while other parts leave us scratching our heads about why something that had a whole lot of potential ended up playing as a pretty good B (not bee!) Movie instead. Are the Weinsteins to blame? (Yes.) Jason Snell with Moisés Chiullán, Steve Lutz and Tony Sindelar.
Spray on some insect repellant and don your hazmat suit, because Del Toro Club has re-formed to discuss a gigantic layer cake of infinite bugs, 1997’s “Mimic.” Parts of it are very Del Toro indeed, while other parts leave us scratching our heads about why something that had a whole lot of potential ended up playing as a pretty good B (not bee!) Movie instead. Are the Weinsteins to blame? (Yes.) Jason Snell with Moisés Chiullán, Steve Lutz and Tony Sindelar.
Originally titled Shelter and produced independently in 2010 with Swedish filmmakers Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein co-directing, the Julianne Moore starring Six Souls, written by Identity's Michael Cooney, was eventually purchased by the Weinstein Company under their Radius banner. But the Weinsteins were in the midst of serious financial woes in 2010 after the failure of Nine and many of their acquisitions ended up in distribution turnaround. Six Souls would eventually come out in 2013 as a day and date VOD and theatrical release. It got very little attention and seemed a strange detour on Moore's otherwise stellar career path. Dan and Vicky discuss the forgotten supernatural thriller along with some recently seen gems like Heart Eyes, My Dead Friend Zoe, Love Hurts, Anora, Emilia Perez, Love Me, and Peacock's Traitors. Also hear about Vicky's apartment woes and Dan's road trip to Florida! Our socials: hotdatepod.com FB: Hot Date Podcast Twitter: @HotDate726 Insta: hotdatepod
In which co-hosts Kenny and Sam discuss the history of adaptation rights to Tolkien's work.Sources:The Tolkien Trust and their financesThe Times - Tolkien sold film rights to Lord of the rings to avoid taxmanJohn Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg - Screenplay for The Lord of the Rings (1970)The Guardian - The saddest story in rock (The Zaentz/Fogerty scandal)Dan Olson [VIDEO] - An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the RingsOpen Culture - The 1985 Soviet TV Adaptation of The Hobbit: Cheap and Yet Strangely CharmingCharlie Rose (ew) [VIDEO] - 2002 Interview w/ Peter JacksonThe Guardian - Tolkien estate sues Hobbit producers over video and gambling gamesJonathan Stempel (Reuters) - Weinstein brothers sue Time Warner over Hobbit filmsThe Hollywood Reporter - Warner Bros prevails over Weinsteins in Hobbit profit fightArs Technica - Amazon will run a multi-season Lord of the Rings prequel TV series Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We're trimming the tree of terror with Glen Morgan, as he spills his guts about the making of the BLACK CHRISTMAS remake. Hear how his yuletide vision turned into a chilling battle against the Weinsteins, and the price he paid to bring this holiday horror to life. With stories about on-set shivers, his wife's scream-worthy scenes, and the fallout of fan fury, this is one sinister stocking stuffer you'll want to open right away. Deck the halls with guts and folly, it's about to get Spooky!
31 Days of Halloween 2024 continues with a sordid tale of Werewolves, Weinsteins, and Wes Craven in 2005's Cursed. ENDING MUSIC: Li'l Red Riding Hood by Bowling for Soup Support TWoRP Contact Us talkwithoutrhythm@gmail.com
Gäster: Sebastian Mattsson, Viktor Engberg, Viktor Elsnitz, Jonathan Tengwall För 90SEK/mån får du 5 avsnitt i veckan: 4 Vanliga AMK MORGON + AMK FREDAG med Isak Wahlberg Önska Karakou till Gröna Lund 2025: https://faq.gronalund.com/support/tickets/new Relevanta länkar: …One Direction https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSOmDwMYlY9I_3Ph5eM_Dl6cUmLy3rW_QgFKrVC8qJLqDc1rsT6 …isbadaren på Twitch https://www.threads.net/@vlanee/post/DBb8H11Ijgp …David Blaine https://davidblaine.com/frozen-in-time/ …World of Tanks-streamaren https://wydaily.com/story/2017/05/15/news-ocme-virginia-beach-man-who-died-during-video-game-marathon-overdosed-on-fentanyl/ …Pervitin https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/preview-world-war-speed/4337/ …Stephen King https://www.cracked.com/article_33860_reminder-stephen-king-loved-cocaine.html …Dreamcatcher https://www.akademibokhandeln.se/bok/dreamcatcher/9781444707847?srsltid=AfmBOopxyXK_RJ-2gs6twckHYiGKpE3BE6uNKIxNWVcBedmsPkpEPbff https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285531/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep9r02xiP98 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285531/mediaviewer/rm3628043264/ …Langoljärerna https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112040/ …The Stand https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1831804/ …Weinsteins cancer https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/xm5RJV/harvey-weinstein-har-fatt-cancer …Tom Hardys Rider https://www.gp.se/kultur/tom-hardys-rider-har-lackt-vad-vill-han-ha-i-logen.38eeb0e2-564d-49d6-a3e5-228277f75669 https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/1g9u455/den_m%C3%B6rka_knekten/ …Sagan om Ringen-översättarna https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96vers%C3%A4ttning_av_Sagan_om_ringen_till_svenska …Wolfs på Apple TV+ https://tv.apple.com/se/movie/wolfs/umc.cmc.c3xhu25rw4jxxxzq4oio6snu?l=sv …framtiden 1987 https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8xK5mjhNyu/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1OCERSjuCmijMDmdTppEWBFJwDTwMs9ZRUxVnBmSdHVqKTATbNA4T7o4w_aem_d30bPLZXGgMyCSPD00DuOw …Göran Persson https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ran_Persson …Lil Wayne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Wayne Låtarna som spelades var: BAYRAKTAR is Life - Taras Borovko Robots - Flight of the Concords Runnin' Down A Dream - Tom Petty Alla låtar finns i AMK Morgons spellista här: https://open.spotify.com/user/amk.morgon/playlist/6V9bgWnHJMh9c4iVHncF9j?si=so0WKn7sSpyufjg3olHYmg Stötta oss gärna på Swish, varje litet bidrag uppskattas enormt! 123 646 2006
NEWS: - Henry Cavill to star in Amazon/MGM's VOLTRON film - JOKER... tanks at the box office - Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan? Aaron Pierre (REBEL RIDGE) as John Stewart - DOGMA has been sold by the Weinsteins? Kevin Smith talks possible re-release - KAOS canceled at Netflix - ALIEN: ISOLATION getting a sequel after 10yrs OGTW - BECKER: LOTR, WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS movie and show, SALEM'S LOT Max movie - DIAZ: Finished MAL GOES TO WAR by Edward Ashton, reserved THE WHITE BOOK by Han Kang (just won the Nobel Prize in literature), saw MY OLD ASS on Tuesday night MAIN TOPIC: This week Joe and Michael take on the latest episodes of both AGATHA... and THE PENGUIN. And again, it appears that the two are in agreement. Next, the two discuss a recent article about studios consulting with superfans. Is this the direction the industry should be going? Let the team know what you think! Welcome to the Kybercast! #AgathaAllAlong #ThePenguin #Voltron #HenryCavill #JokerFolieADeux #Dogma #Kaos #AlienIsolation #LOTR #WhatWeDoInTheShadows #SalemsLot #MalGoesToWar #TheWhiteBook #HanKang #MyOldAss
In this commentary episode of the Patrick coffin show, Patrick does a review of the players and principles surrounding the bull's eye of the target known as Sean “Diddy” Combs, arrested last month by Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William S. Walker, the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office of Homeland Security Investigations. Diddy was charged with a three-count indictment for racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. But this case is not about celebrity gossip or the downfall of one or two bad apples. It is a revelation of the depth of depravity and denial that has always characterized the entertainment industry. The Diddy indictment alleges that between 2008 and 2024, he abused, threatened, and coerced women and others, and led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, among other crimes. In the Hollyweird orbit of Epsteins and Weinsteins, why would a Combs indictment for similar behavior shock us? There are more questions to be asked. Topics covered in this episode: Why is no one talking about the “family tree” of mentorship and manipulation by the man who discovered Diddy, R&B producer Andre Harrell, and the man who discover Harrell—the creepy self-described bisexual Clive Davis, founder of Arista Records. How did Diddy's career really start? The litany of people connected to Diddy who showed up dead or seriously ill, like ex-girlfriend Kim Porter, JayZ's pregnant mistress Cathy White, singer Aaliyah, and radio host Wendy Williams. Former insiders to follow: R&B singer Jaguar Wright, comedian Katt Williams, and former Diddy bodyguard Gene Deal. Troubled rappers connected to Diddy: JayZ, Drake, Usher, 50 cent, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls (aka the Notorious BIG), R. Kelly Rappers are black proxies for largely non-black owners, who seem always to escape justice Puff Combs' Bay Boy Records (owned by BMG, sold to Sony in 2008, CEO Rob Stringer; Travis Scott's Cactus Jack Records, distributed by Epic Records, owned by Sony Music Entertainment, CEO Rob Stringer; Drake's OVO Sound, an imprint of Warner Records from its formation until 2022, CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck; Tyler, The Creator, Odd Future Records, parent company, Sony Music Entertainmen, CEO Rob Stringer; Legendary DEF JAM records, parent company Universal Music Group, CEO Sir Lucian Grainge; Jay Z's Rock a Fella Records, owned by Universal Music Group, CEO is Sir Lucian Grainge; 50 Cent's G-Unit Records, owned by Universal Music Group, CEO Sir Lucian Grainge; Usher and Justin Bieber's RBMG Island Def Jam Music Group, run by Tunji Balogun, but the parent company is Universal Music Group, CEO Sir Lucian Grainge; Yo Gotti's Collective Music Group CMG, owned by parent company, Universal Music Group, CEO Lucian Grainge; Dr. Dre's Aftermath Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, and distributed through Interscope Records, CEO Sir Sir Lucian Grainge (Dickon Stainer in the UK) The grandaddy of all the non black music executives is Clive Davis, the main puppet master of Diddy, and the man who launched careers dating back to the 60s, from Tony Orlando, the Bay City Rollers, Aretyha Franklin, Whitney Houston and many others up to: Justin Bieber, perhaps the highest profile troubled artist in this toxic space.
Jesse Weber talks to Len Berman and Michael Riedel about the latest in the Harvey Weinstein saga and the new charges brought against Weinstein. What we know about this new case as of right now and how Weinsteins health might affect the trial.
During the production of Scream, producer Cathy Konrad received a late night call with a creepy voice saying, "Do you like scary movies?" Thankfully, it was just the film's director, legendary horror filmmaker Wes Craven, calling to discuss what to do about the Weinsteins being unhappy with the mask and the footage. Despite the studio roadblocks, Scream was finished and was a huge success, redefining the horror genre for a new generation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Get out the bug spray for episode 110 of The Horror Stans Podcast! For this one we are diving into Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro's English language debut Mimic! Listen as we discuss if this is the smartest big bug movie ever, the usual meddling from those terrible Weinsteins, if we can still love a movie with no subplots we enjoy, baby Thanos and is pop star Charlie XCX in this film? We hope you enjoy!
Matilda Rånge och andra på P3 Nyheter förklarar morgonens stora nyheter, alltid tillsammans med programledarna för Morgonpasset i P3: Margret Atladottir och David Druid. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Det blir senaste nytt i turisthat-följetongen. Folk i Venedig protesterar mot att dagsturister kan behöva betala för att besöka staden. Borgmästaren säger att det ska minska massturismen, men många som bor i staden tror att Venedig kommer ses som en nöjespark.Sen pratar vi om att våldtäktsdomen mot den tidigare Hollywoodmogulen Harvey Weinstein har rivits upp av New Yorks högsta domstol. Juryn menar att rättegången inte har gått rätt till, men Weinsteins offer kallar det för ett svek. Och vad väntar nu för Weinstein?
WARNING: This episode is extra filthy. Just warning you. Because it's Kevin Smith's debut, Clerks. What is it about this movie? Much of it has not aged well, yet... maybe we shouldn't change a thing about it? Andy's and Kitt's mom introduced Andy to this movie. Perfect time capsule. Dante is a bad person. No, he's worse than a bad person-- he's a neutral person. Dante died! That soundtrack. Berkerzer!!! Handwaving over the Weinsteins. Andy's Kevin Smith phase. Next up, it's Clerks 2 (featuring Ahsoka Tano). Get Clerkin'! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kissyourfranchisegoodbye/message
Making a holiday slasher flick is hard. Let's talk about how difficult it was to make the 2006 Black Christmas remake, from the Weinsteins forcing excessive reshoots to inserting fake trailer moments. Black Christmas Trailer: http://y2u.be/hyzsjvvKYQw Black Christmas TV Spot: http://y2u.be/XQBHu0mYq4g Get the longer Director's Cut version of this episode on Patreon!
Halloween is Canceled is a limited audio series unpacking and dissecting five troubled or unmade Halloween sequels. Presented by the DREAD Podcast Network's very own Development Hell, this podcast celebrates the strange, fascinating, and often outrageous history of unmade Michael Myers features.PART FIVE - HALLOWEEN: HOMECOMINGOctober may be over, but Halloween never dies. In this final chapter of our Halloween is Canceled limited series, we are joined by former Dangertainment (AKA Dimension Films) executive Louis Spiegler, who gives us a first-hand account of what it was like creating Halloween: Ressurection. Learn all about what it was like working directly for the infamous Weinsteins, discover behind-the-scenes tensions between rights holders and the studio, and follow the road back to Haddonfield to uncover what it took to create what was once titled Halloween: The Homecoming.Let the Dangertainment begin! You can listen to all five parts of Halloween is Canceled right here on the DREAD Podcast Network.Follow him on Instagram and see what's next for producer Louis Spiegler.Follow Development Hell:Twitter - @DevelHellPodInstagram - @DevelopmentHellPodFacebook - DevelopmentHellPodTheme music by Drew PidgeonSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Making the origins of fairy tales is hard. Let's talk about how difficult it was to make The Brothers Grimm, from Director Terry Gilliam not wanting to make it, to the year long battle with the Weinsteins over the edit. Support us on Patreon! (Which includes the longer Director's Cut version of this episode!) Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, and subscribe to our YouTube channel! In the entertainment world, there are millions of dollars on the line and troubled productions are bound to happen. Whether it's big egos, bigger budgets, or just plain bad luck, we are going behind-the-scenes on these disastrous, never ending, and sometimes dangerous productions. From the creators of WTF Happened To This Movie?, It Was A Sh*t Show is a video essay/documentary/podcast series looking at some of your favorite films and tv shows, and why they were such a nightmare to make. Podcast Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 05:39 - The Brothers Grimm (2005) 01:12:51 - Follow Ups! Sources: AWN: https://bit.ly/3LzoLk5 Empire: https://bit.ly/44RrhJj Entertainment Weekly: https://bit.ly/48jHqKA Guardian: https://bit.ly/3EFJnDJ IGN: https://bit.ly/3rqmjFS IGN: https://bit.ly/46ippdZ New York Times: https://bit.ly/3EIJ1Ml Senses of Cinema: https://bit.ly/3t7qoz2 Time: https://bit.ly/3ZsAt64 Variety: https://bit.ly/3RpvyRm Variety: https://bit.ly/3sXEQty Variety: https://bit.ly/3EIKgve Variety: https://bit.ly/3Ln0Jcg Variety: https://bit.ly/3r7UIJC Music: Ryan Hudson - Sh*t Show Theme #itwasashtshow #thebrothersgrimm #terrygilliam
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.
On this week's episode, we remember William Friedkin, who passed away this past Tuesday, looking back at one of his lesser known directing efforts, Rampage. ----more---- 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. Originally, this week was supposed to be the fourth episode of our continuing miniseries on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films. I was fully committed to making it so, but then the world learned that Academy Award-winning filmmaker William Friedkin passed away on Tuesday. I had already done an episode on his best movie from the decade, 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A., so I decided I would cover another film Friedkin made in the 80s that isn’t as talked about or as well known as The French Connection or The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A. Rampage. Now, some of you who do know the film might try and point that the film was released in 1992, by Miramax Films of all companies, and you’d be correct. However, I did say I was going to cover another film of his MADE in the 80s, which is also true when it comes to Rampage. So let’s get to the story, shall we? Born in Chicago in 1935, William Friedkin was inspired to become a filmmaker after seeing Citizen Kane as a young man, and by 1962, he was already directing television movies. He’d make his feature directing debut with Good Times in 1967, a fluffy Sonny and Cher comedy which finds Sonny Bono having only ten days to rewrite the screenplay for their first movie, because the script to the movie they agreed to was an absolute stinker. Which, ironically, is a fairly good assessment of the final film. The film, which was essentially a bigger budget version of their weekly variety television series shot mostly on location at an African-themed amusement park in Northern California and the couple’s home in Encino, was not well received by either critics or audiences. But by the time Good Times came out, Friedkin was already working on his next movie, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. A comedy co-written by future television legend Norman Lear, Minsky’s featured Swedish actress Britt Ekland, better known at the time as the wife of Peter Sellers, as a naive young Amish woman who leaves the farm in Pennsylvania looking to become an actress in religious stage plays in New York City. Instead, she becomes a dancer in a burlesque show and essentially ends up inventing the strip tease. The all-star cast included Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman, Elliott Gould, Jack Burns, Bert Lahr, and Jason Robards, Jr., who was a late replacement for Alan Alda, who himself was a replacement for Tony Curtis. Friedkin was dreaming big for this movie, and was able to convince New York City mayor John V. Lindsay to delay the demolition of an entire period authentic block of 26th Street between First and Second Avenue for two months for the production to use as a major shooting location. There would be one non-production related tragedy during the filming of the movie. The seventy-two year old Lahr, best known as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, would pass away in early December 1967, two weeks before production was completed, and with several scenes still left to shoot with him. Lear, who was also a producer on the film, would tell a reporter for the New York Times that they would still be able to shoot the rest of the film so that performance would remain virtually intact, and with the help of some pre-production test footage and a body double, along with a sound-alike to dub the lines they couldn’t get on set, Lahr’s performance would be one of the highlights of the final film. Friedkin and editor Ralph Rosenblum would spend three months working on their first cut, as Friedkin was due to England in late March to begin production on his next film, The Birthday Party. Shortly after Friedkin was on the plane to fly overseas, Rosenblum would represent the film for a screening with the executives at United Artists, who would be distributing the film. The screening was a disaster, and Rosenblum would be given carte blanche by the studio heads to save the film by any means necessary, since Friedkin was not available to supervise. Rosenblum would completely restructure the film, including creating a prologue for the story that would be retimed and printed on black and white film stock. The next screening would go over much better with the suits, and a mid-December 1968 release date was set up. The Birthday Party was an adaptation of a Harold Pinter play, and featured Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee. Friedkin had seen the play in San Francisco in 1962, and was able to get the film produced in part because he would only need six actors and a handful of locations to shoot, keeping the budget low. Although the mystery/thriller was a uniquely British story, Harold Pinter liked how Friedkin wanted to tell the story, and although Pinter had written a number of plays that had been adapted into movies and had adapted a number of books into screenplay, this would be the first time Pinter would adapt one of his own stories to the silver screen. To keep the budget lower still, Friedkin, Pinter and lead actor Robert Shaw agreed to take the minimum possible payments for their positions in exchange for part ownership in the film. The release of Minsky’s was so delayed because of the prolonged editing process that The Birthday Party would actually in theatres nine days before Minsky’s, which would put Friedkin in the rare position of having two movies released in such a short time frame. And while Minsky’s performed better at the box office than Birthday Party, the latter film would set the director up financially with enough in the bank where he could concentrate working on projects he felt passionate about. That first film after The Birthday Party would make William Friedkin a name director. His second one would make him an Oscar winner. The third, a legend. And the fourth would break him. The first film, The Boys in the Band, was an adaptation of a controversial off-Broadway play about a straight man who accidentally shows up to a party for gay men. Matt Crowley, the author of the play, would adapt it to the screen, produce the film himself with author Dominick Dunne, and select Friedkin, who Crowley felt best understood the material, to direct. Crowley would only make one demand on his director, that all of the actors from the original off-Broadway production be cast in the movie in the same roles. Friedkin had no problem with that. When the film was released in March 1970, Friedkin would get almost universally excellent notices from film critics, except for Pauline Kael in the New York Times, who had already built up a dislike of the director after just three films. But March 1970 was a different time, and a film not only about gay men but a relatively positive movie about gay men who had the same confusions and conflicts as straight men, was probably never going to be well-received by a nation that still couldn’t talk openly about non-hetero relationships. But the film would still do about $7m worth of ticket sales, not enough to become profitable for its distributor, but enough for the director to be in the conversation for bigger movies. His next film was an adaptation of a 1969 book about two narcotics detectives in the New York City Police Department who went after a wealthy French businessman who was helping bring heroin into the States. William Friedkin and his cinematographer Owen Roizman would shoot The French Connection as if it were a documentary, giving the film a gritty realism rarely seen in movies even in the New Hollywood era. The film would be named the Best Picture of 1971 by the Academy, and Friedkin and lead actor Gene Hackman would also win Oscars in their respective categories. And the impact of The French Connection on cinema as a whole can never be understated. Akira Kurosawa would cite the film as one of his favorites, as would David Fincher and Brad Pitt, who bonded over the making of Seven because of Fincher’s conscious choice to use the film as a template for the making of his own film. Steven Spielberg said during the promotion of his 2005 film Munich that he studied The French Connection to prepare for his film. And, of course, after The French Connection came The Exorcist, which would, at the time of its release in December 1973, become Warner Brothers’ highest grossing film ever, legitimize the horror genre to audiences worldwide, and score Friedkin his second straight Oscar nomination for Best Director, although this time he and the film would lose to George Roy Hill and The Sting. In 1977, Sorcerer, Friedkin’s American remake of the 1953 French movie The Wages of Fear, was expected to be the big hit film of the summer. The film originally started as a little $2.5m budgeted film Friedkin would make while waiting for script revisions on his next major movie, called The Devil’s Triangle, were being completed. By the time he finished filming Sorcerer, which reteamed Friedkin with his French Connection star Roy Scheider, now hot thanks to his starring role in Jaws, this little film became one of the most expensive movies of the decade, with a final budget over $22m. And it would have the unfortunate timing of being released one week after a movie released by Twentieth Century-Fox, Star Wars, sucked all the air out of the theatrical exhibition season. It would take decades for audiences to discover Sorcerer, and for Friedkin, who had gone some kind of mad during the making of the film, to accept it to be the taut and exciting thriller it was. William Friedkin was a broken man, and his next film, The Brinks Job, showed it. A comedy about the infamous 1950 Brinks heist in Boston, the film was originally supposed to be directed by John Frankenheimer, with Friedkin coming in to replace the iconic filmmaker only a few months before production was set to begin. Despite a cast that included Peter Boyle, Peter Falk, Allen Garfield, Warren Oates, Gena Rowlands and Paul Sorvino, the film just didn’t work as well as it should have. Friedkin’s first movie of the 1980s, Cruising, might have been better received in a later era, but an Al Pacino cop drama about his trying to find a killer of homosexual men in the New York City gay fetish underground dance club scene was, like The Boys in the Band a decade earlier, too early to cinemas. Like Sorcerer, audiences would finally find Cruising in a more forgiving era. In 1983, Friedkin made what is easily his worst movie, Deal of the Century, an alleged comedy featuring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines and Sigourney Weaver that attempted to satirize the military industrial complex in the age of Ronald Reagan, but somehow completely missed its very large and hard to miss target. 1985 would see a comeback for William Friedkin, with the release of To Live and Die in LA, in which two Secret Service agents played by William L. Petersen and John Pankow try to uncover a counterfeit money operation led by Willem Dafoe. Friedkin was drawn to the source material, a book by former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich, because the agency was almost never portrayed on film, and even less as the good guys. Friedkin would adapt the book into a screenplay with Petievich, who would also serve as a technical consultant to ensure authenticity in how Petersen and Pankow acted. It would be only the second time Friedkin was credited as a screenwriter, but it would be a nine-minute chase sequence through the aqueducts of Los Angeles and a little used freeway in Wilmington that would be the most exciting chase sequence committed to film since the original Gone in 60 Seconds, The French Connection, or the San Francisco chase sequence in the 1967 Steve McQueen movie Bullitt. The sequence is impressive on Blu-ray, but on a big screen in a movie theatre in 1985, it was absolutely thrilling. Which, at long last, brings us to Rampage. Less than two months after To Live and Die in LA opened to critical raves and moderate box office in November 1985, Friedkin made a deal with Italian mega-producer Dino DeLaurentiis to direct Rampage, a crime drama based on a novel by William P. Wood. DeLaurentiis had hired Friedkin for The Brinks Job several years earlier, and the two liked working for each other. DeLaurentiis had just started his own distribution company, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, which we’ll shorten to DEG for the remainder of this episode, and needed some big movies to fill his pipeline. We did an episode on DEG back in 2020, and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you should after you finish this episode. At this time, DEG was still months away from releasing its first group of films, which would include Maximum Overdrive, the first film directed by horror author Stephen King, and Blue Velvet, the latest from David Lynch, both of which would shoot at the same time at DEG’s newly built studio facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina. But Friedkin was writing the screenplay adaptation himself, and would need several months to get the script into production shape, so the film would not be able to begin production until late 1986. The novel Rampage was based on the real life story of serial killer Richard Chase, dubbed The Vampire Killer by the press when he went on a four day killing spree in January 1978. Chase murdered six people, including a pregnant woman and a 22 month old child, and drank their blood as part of some kind of ritual. Wood would change some aspects of Chase’s story for his book, naming his killer Charles Reece, changing some of the ages and sexes of the murder victims, and how the murderer died. But most of the book was about Reece’s trial, with a specific focus on Reece’s prosecutor, Anthony Fraser, who had once been against capital punishment, but would be seeking the death penalty in this case after meeting one of the victims’ grieving family members. William L. Petersen, Friedkin’s lead star in To Live and Die in LA, was initially announced to star as Fraser, but as the production got closer to its start date, Petersen had to drop out of the project, due to a conflict with another project that would be shooting at the same time. Michael Biehn, the star of James Cameron’s The Terminator and the then recently released Aliens, would sign on as the prosecutor. Alex McArthur, best known at the time as Madonna’s baby daddy in her Papa Don’t Preach music video, would score his first major starring role as the serial killer Reece. The cast would also include a number of recognizable character actors, recognizable if not by name but by face once they appeared on screen, including Nicholas Campbell, Deborah Van Valkenberg, Art LaFleur, Billy Greenbush and Grace Zabriskie. Friedkin would shoot the $7.5m completely on location in Stockton, CA from late October 1986 to just before Christmas, and Friedkin would begin post-production on the film after the first of the new year. In early May 1987, DEG announced a number of upcoming releases for their films, including a September 11th release for Rampage. But by August 1987, many of their first fifteen releases over their first twelve months being outright bombs, quietly pulled Rampage off their release calendar. When asked by one press reporter about the delay, a representative from DEG would claim the film would need to be delayed because Italian composer Ennio Morricone had not delivered his score yet, which infuriated Friedkin, as he had turned in his final cut of the film, complete with Morricone’s score, more than a month earlier. The DEG rep was forced to issue a mea culpa, acknowledging the previous answer had been quote unquote incorrect, and stated they were looking at release dates between November 1987 and February 1988. The first public screening of Rampage outside of an unofficial premiere in Stockton in August 1987 happened on September 11th, 1987, at the Boston Film Festival, but just a couple days after that screening, DEG would be forced into bankruptcy by one of his creditors in, of all places, Boston, and the film would be stuck in limbo for several years. During DEG’s bankruptcy, some European companies would be allowed to buy individual country rights for the film, to help pay back some of the creditors, but the American rights to the film would not be sold until Miramax Films purchased the film, and the 300 already created 35mm prints of the film in March 1992, with a planned national release of the film the following month. But that release had to be scrapped, along with the original 300 prints of the film, when Friedkin, who kept revising the film over the ensuing five years, turned in to the Weinsteins a new edit of the film, ten minutes shorter than the version shown in Stockton and Boston in 1987. He had completely eliminated a subplot involving the failing marriage of the prosecutor, since it had nothing to do with the core idea of the story, and reversed the ending, which originally had Reece committing suicide in his cell not unlike Richard Chase. Now, the ending had Reece, several years into the future, alive and about to be considered for parole. Rampage would finally be released into 172 theatres on October 30th, 1992, including 57 theatres in Los Angeles, and four in New York City. Most reviews for the film were mixed, finding the film unnecessarily gruesome at times, but also praising how Friedkin took the time for audiences to learn more about the victims from the friends and family left behind. But the lack of pre-release advertising on television or through trailers in theatres would cause the film to perform quite poorly in its opening weekend, grossing just $322,500 in its first three days. After a second and third weekend where both the grosses and the number of theatres playing the film would fall more than 50%, Miramax would stop tracking the film, with a final reported gross of just less than $800k. Between the release of his thriller The Guardian in 1990 and the release of Rampage in 1992, William Friedkin would marry fellow Chicago native Sherry Lansing, who at the time had been a successful producer at Paramount Pictures, having made such films as The Accused, which won Jodie Foster her first Academy Award, and Fatal Attraction. Shortly after they married, Lansing would be named the Chairman of Paramount Pictures, where she would green light such films as Forrest Gump, Braveheart and Titanic. She would also hire her husband to make four films for the studio between 1994 and 2003, including the basketball drama Blue Chips and the thriller Jade. Friedkin’s directing career would slow down after 2003’s The Hunted, making only two films over the next two decades. 2006’s Bug was a psychological thriller with Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd, and 2012’s Killer Joe, a mixture of black comedy and psychological thriller featuring Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch, was one of few movies to be theatrically released with an NC-17 rating. Neither were financially successful, but were highly regarded by critics. But there was still one more movie in him. In January 2023, Friedkin would direct his own adaptation of the Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for the Paramount+ streaming service. Updating the setting from the book’s World War II timeline to the more modern Persian Gulf conflict, this new film starred Keifer Sutherland as Lieutenant Commander Queeg, alongside Jason Clark, Jake Lacy, Jay Duplass, Dale Dye, and in his final role before his death in March, Lance Reddick. That film will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in Italy next month, although Paramount+ has not announced a premiere date on their service. William Friedkin had been married four times in his life, including a two year marriage to legendary French actress Jean Moreau in the late 70s and a two year marriage to British actress Lesley-Anne Downe in the early 80s. But Friedkin and Lansing would remain married for thirty-two years until his death from heart failure and pneumonia this past Tuesday. I remember when Rampage was supposed to come out in 1987. My theatre in Santa Cruz was sent a poster for it about a month before it was supposed to be released. A pixelated image of Reece ran down one side of the poster, while the movie’s tagline and credits down the other. I thought the poster looked amazing, and after the release was cancelled, I took the poster home and hung it on one of the walls in my place at the time. The 1992 poster from Miramax was far blander, basically either a entirely white or an entirely red background, with a teared center revealing the eyes of Reece, which really doesn’t tell you anything about the movie. Like with many of his box office failures, Friedkin would initially be flippant about the film, although in the years preceding his death, he would acknowledge the film was decent enough despite all of its post-production problems. I’d love to be able to suggest to you to watch Rampage as soon as you can, but as of August 2023, one can only rent or buy the film from Amazon, $5.89 for a two day rental or $14.99 to purchase. It is not available on any other streaming service as of the writing and recording of this episode. Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon, when I expect to release the fourth part of the Miramax miniseries, unless something unexpected happens in the near future. Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Rampage and the career of William Friedkin. The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.
Join us as we discuss the underappreciated classic The Burning, summer camp movies, and the general awfulness of the Weinsteins.
Bad Summer People – Emma Rosenblum None of them would claim to be a good person, but who among them is capable of murder? The families on the island have been vacationing here for years; the Weinsteins, the Metzners, the Grobels - and unlucky in love Rachel Woolf. Outsiders aren't welcome. That is except for Robert, the handsome new tennis coach, who some people are going out of their way to make very welcome... But the problem when everyone knows everyone is that secrets can't stay secret forever. And when a body is found face-down beneath the boardwalk, they realise that maybe one of them is worse than they thought... Wavewalker – Suzanne Heywood Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her family on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing, a survival story of a child in dire circumstances deprived of safety, friendships, schooling, occasionally drinking water… At eighteen, through resolve and resilience, Suzanne earned a place at Oxford university and returned to the UK. From the bestselling author of What Does Jeremy Think?, Wavewalker is the incredible true story of how the adventure of a lifetime became one child's worst nightmare – and how determination helped her escape. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----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're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax. But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him. During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people. Harvey himself. Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have. And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm. I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened. And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table. Twenty feet from stardom, indeed. I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity. As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did. Okay, enough with the proselytizing. I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now. Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979. Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins. Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre. But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide. As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini. Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings. Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out. Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK. Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen. Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film. Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who. The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company. One slight problem, though. The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie. It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm. But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide. The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax. But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could. When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres. So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor. Right? You'd think. Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982. So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January. Right? You'd think. In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film. Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert. So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short. Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 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.
Penelope Spheeris is a film director, producer and screenwriter. She directed all 3 of "The Decline of Western Civilization" with a 4th one on the way. She also directed Suburbia, Black Sheep and Wayne's World. This was one of the most fun interviews I've done this year, maybe ever. Lots of great stories about Hollywood, working with Chris Farley, her unreleased movie about Ozzfest, UFO abductions and so much more! Check it out! 00:00 - Intro 00:35 - The Decline of Western Civilization 3 04:01 - Childhood & Background 06:00 - Movies & TV Shows & Creative Outlet 11:00 - Hollywood Business 12:25 - Lorne Michaels & Early Days 14:30 - Misunderstanding Punk Rock 16:50 - Frustration With Movie Choices 20:50 - Black Sheep & Chris Farley 24:15 - John Candy 25:34 - Happiness, Meditation & Film Industry 30:00 - Ozzy & Sharon Osbourne & Oz Fest Movie 36:17 - UFO Abductions 39:30 - Autobiography Coming Soon 40:28 - Rockstar With Mark Wahlberg 42:13 - Working with the Weinsteins 44:00 - Crispin Glover 45:20 - Flea from RHCP 46:15- Establishment, Homeless Crisis & Mental Health 52:10 - Rescues Rock 53:15 - Outro Penelope Spheeris website: https://penelopespheeris.com/ Rescues Rock website: https://www.rescuesrock.com/ Chuck Shute website: https://chuckshute.com/Support the showThanks for Listening & Shute for the Moon!
Lyvie Scott joins us for Wong Kat Wai's only out in the 2010s in The Grandmaster and how he expertly injects his own vision into the action genre and perfecting it. Together we get into the philosophy in the heart of the film, our relationship with these epics and what the Weinsteins did the film in 2013 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/exitingthroughthe2010s/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/exitingthroughthe2010s/support
"Stories from the Violins of Hope" is a new stage play which brings to life the powerful true stories of violins played during the Holocaust, in ghettos, forests and concentration camps. The moving and pertinent true stories track the many violins which were saved during and after World War II by the Weinsteins, a family of luthiers (makers and repairers of stringed instruments) Sydney violinist Ben Adler will perform the voice of the violins live on stage.(See photo) We spoke to the Director of the play, Moira Blumenthal
Stay tuned to the end of this one, because you won't want to miss the announcement we have for you! We find ourselves in a Freaky Friday situation as Jack takes over the 2nd Unit to share a decade-and-a-half long obsession of his: Richard Williams' animated passion project, The Thief and The Cobbler! Never truly finished by Williams and released in a variety of cuts from different companies, this is a must-listen story for anyone even remotely interested in animation (and a heartbreakingly cathartic story for anyone with creative anxiety). Join us for the tale of arguably the longest production cycle in history (sorry, Mad God), the ways people like the Weinsteins absolutely ruin films, and the heights of achievement and acclaim you can reach (and what they can cost). Then, stick around for our thoughts about how this journey makes us think about our own creativity and goals for the podcast and beyond. CW: Spousal neglect, mention of the Weinsteins again, tyrannical working conditions Podcast plugged in this episode: The Geeky Dad Podcast (@geekydadpodcast on Twitter) Stuff Mentioned In This Episode: Vincent Price, Sean Connery, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zimeckis, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Miramax, Warner Bros, Wile E. Coyote, "Bumping The Lamp," Disney, Aladdin, Arabian Knight, Space Jam, Tom and Jerry, Bob Hoskins, The Pink Panther, Christopher Lloyd, Se7en, David Fincher, Stanley Kubrick, The Shining, Phil Tippett, Fred Calvert, Terry Gilliam, The Princess and the Cobbler, Don Bluth, Matthew Broderick, Toni Collette, Eddie Carrol, Jonathan Winters, Froot Loops, Hey Arnold!, Nickelodeon, The Persistence of Vision, The Animator's Survival Kit, The Venture Bros, Jackson Publick, Doc Hammer, Mike Lazzo, Dethklok: Metalocalypse, Lysistrata, Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, Salvador Dali, Destino, Wes Anderson, Garret Gilchrist, The Emoji Movie, Bugs Bunny, Loony Tunes, Alice In Wonderland --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/derazzled/support
The year is 1997. The category is Best Picture. Who will win? Well, as is unsurprising at this period in history, it's the film pushed by the Weinsteins. But perhaps it ought not to have? We discuss the movies from 1996 that might should have been considered the Best Picture when the awards season rolled around in the first part of 1997. SPOILERS AHOY! No timestamps because Bob was in a hurry, but if you're a regular listener you have the advantage of knowing which movie Bob chose for his personal Best Picture.Note: Oscar® and Academy Awards® are the trademarks and service marks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This podcast is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Music:Intro and Outro music excerpted without alteration other than length and volume from AcidJazz by Kevin McLeod under a Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode
Today, on a very soundtrack-heavy discussion, I'm joined by the former editor of Gamespot and Giant Bomb--and current podcaster with the Nextlander Podcast and the Nextlander Watchcast--Alex Navarro (@alex_navarro), and we're talking about the American release of SUPERCOP. Dimension Films bought the rights to it, and the Weinsteins gave it a new edit with a completely incongruous soundtrack. In this episode we talk about the film itself, the incredible final act, Michelle Yeoh being the best, what a force of nature Jackie Chan was in his heydey, whether The Fresh Prince was responsible for Tom Jones 90s revival, how funny it is to see Hong Kong drug lords having a conversation in a car while listening to Warren G, how bad the Black Grape song is, and more. Listen to Nextlander here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nextlander-podcast/id1570737028Listen to the Watchcast here (including their episode on SUPERCOP): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nextlander-watchcast/id1633712013Support the show on Patreon! It's the one thing that's gonna help keep the show going: www.patreon.com/soundtracker
Riding Out the Media Storm: Claire Lehmann General: Claire's writing for Quillette: https://quillette.com/author/clairelehmann/ And for The Australian: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/author/claire-lehmann Follow: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clairelehmann/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/clairequillette/ References: Eoin Lenihan on Antifa: https://quillette.com/2019/05/29/its-not-your-imagination-the-journalists-writing-about-antifa-are-often-their-cheerleaders/ On the Weinsteins and Ivermectin: https://quillette.com/2022/03/22/on-darkhorse-ivermectin-and-vaccine-hesitancy/ Iona's Substack: https://drionaitalia.substack.com/ Information on contributing to Quillette: https://quillette.com/contribute/ Timestamps: 1:20 Introductions. Claire's background studying forensic psychology and why she left academic life and founded Quillette. 5:12 The psychology of political views. 10:10 Quillette's place in the political landscape. The publication's most controversial pieces; Antifa, Ivermectin, the heritability of intelligence. 21:35 What happened to the Intellectual Dark Web? 30.28 The capture of the heterodox sphere by American culture and politics. How and why Australia, the UK and Canada differ from the US. 41:35 Claire's pushback against the use of Australia's covid policies as a political football in the American culture war. 47:22 Quillette's controversial reporting on the role of genetics and intelligence. 53:52 Claire's admiration of Paglia and critiques of post-structuralism. 57.12 The positives and negatives of Substack. 1:02:00 Claire's decision to leave Twitter and how that has benefited her. 1:05:22 Summing up and outro. Sound engineering by Justin Ward. Shownotes by Nicola Muir.
Uncle Ben and Hollywood Steve review the werewolf flick Cursed. We find out where we fit in the wolf pack hierarchy, discuss this film's very troubled production, and crap on the Weinsteins. It's a real fun time! If you want to help decide which movies we cover in the future, go become a $5 patron! Patreon.com/deadandlovely Preview Palace begins at 00:22:48 Movie discussion begins at 00:36:22 Music by intergalactic rock star Ben Eller!
Getting out of the topic and into the age of action... "It's just more... like I use the thing, like, you know Weinstein's? These are all Weinsteins. I can't have it. What if one of these people were my daughter?" - Kevin Withane (Want to read a full written for reading transcript version of this episode? Download it here.) Who is Kevin Withane? Meet Kevin, the Founder and Managing Partner of Diversity X. Diversity X is a community and venture capital firm that supports underestimated founders who are solving real-world problems and making a positive impact in their communities and the world. He has worked around the world over the last two decades, including at private practice law firms, quasi-governmental organisations, SMEs, and most recently at a FTSE 250 company. Kevin is a passionate advocate for building a sustainable world and for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listen to this fascinating conversation in which I, Sope, learn more about Kevin's journey and the work that Diversity X is doing to support underestimated founders in the tech industry. What is 'Diversity X'? Diversity X is a community and venture capital firm that aims to support underrepresented founders and start ups. The firm focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion and is committed to investing in companies that are working on solving real-world problems and making a positive impact in their communities and the world. Under Kevin's leadership, 'Diversity X' believes in the power of diverse teams to drive innovation and create sustainable solutions. They provide not only financial support but also mentorship, resources, and connections to help these founders succeed. They also actively engage with the community and create a space for conversations around diversity and inclusion in the start-up ecosystem. This episode features another lawyer inspired by "LA Law"! "I used to be found sneaking down the stairs to watch it while my parents were watching it. It looked glamorous. It looked cool!" Listen to learn of the other iconic TV lawyers that Kevin wanted to follow in the footsteps of when he was a younger man! Key leadership learning moments (timestamps) 01m43s: Young Kevin and his fortune with friends. 06m00s: Kevin's entrepreneurial origins with shampoo and penny sweets. 11m16s: Kevin Withane's inspiration for getting into law. 19m48s: Life and work after corporate. 34m06s: The idea behind 'Diversity X' 39m52s: Walking the talk and being intentional. 45m56s: Challenges of building the community 54m50s: The importance of family? 57m52s: How Kevin Withane defines leadership? Kevin's links: Twitter LinkedIn Substack newsletter Follow the podcast If you've just stumbled across this podcast episode by chance, please do click here to follow it so you never miss a future episode. If you want to learn more about this podcast, and myself, Sope Agbelusi, you can do so using any of the below links. Connect with Me Website Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Email: hello@mindsetshift.co.uk I am always keen to hear your thoughts and connect with the community of listeners. If you have any comments, feedback or thoughts, please drop me an email at https://mindsetshift.co.uk/#ask-me-anything
Getting out of the topic and into the age of action... "It's just more... like I use the thing, like, you know Weinstein's? These are all Weinsteins. I can't have it. What if one of these people were my daughter?" - Kevin Withane (Want to read a full written for reading transcript version of this episode? Download it here.) Who is Kevin Withane? Meet Kevin, the Founder and Managing Partner of Diversity X. Diversity X is a community and venture capital firm that supports underestimated founders who are solving real-world problems and making a positive impact in their communities and the world. He has worked around the world over the last two decades, including at private practice law firms, quasi-governmental organisations, SMEs, and most recently at a FTSE 250 company. Kevin is a passionate advocate for building a sustainable world and for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listen to this fascinating conversation in which I, Sope, learn more about Kevin's journey and the work that Diversity X is doing to support underestimated founders in the tech industry. What is 'Diversity X'? Diversity X is a community and venture capital firm that aims to support underrepresented founders and start ups. The firm focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion and is committed to investing in companies that are working on solving real-world problems and making a positive impact in their communities and the world. Under Kevin's leadership, 'Diversity X' believes in the power of diverse teams to drive innovation and create sustainable solutions. They provide not only financial support but also mentorship, resources, and connections to help these founders succeed. They also actively engage with the community and create a space for conversations around diversity and inclusion in the start-up ecosystem. This episode features another lawyer inspired by "LA Law"! "I used to be found sneaking down the stairs to watch it while my parents were watching it. It looked glamorous. It looked cool!" Listen to learn of the other iconic TV lawyers that Kevin wanted to follow in the footsteps of when he was a younger man! Key leadership learning moments (timestamps) 01m43s: Young Kevin and his fortune with friends. 06m00s: Kevin's entrepreneurial origins with shampoo and penny sweets. 11m16s: Kevin Withane's inspiration for getting into law. 19m48s: Life and work after corporate. 34m06s: The idea behind 'Diversity X' 39m52s: Walking the talk and being intentional. 45m56s: Challenges of building the community 54m50s: The importance of family? 57m52s: How Kevin Withane defines leadership? Kevin's links: Twitter LinkedIn Substack newsletter Follow the podcast If you've just stumbled across this podcast episode by chance, please do click here to follow it so you never miss a future episode. If you want to learn more about this podcast, and myself, Sope Agbelusi, you can do so using any of the below links. Connect with Me Website Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Email: hello@mindsetshift.co.uk I am always keen to hear your thoughts and connect with the community of listeners. If you have any comments, feedback or thoughts, please drop me an email at https://mindsetshift.co.uk/#ask-me-anything
Getting out of the topic and into the age of action... "It's just more... like I use the thing, like, you know Weinstein's? These are all Weinsteins. I can't have it. What if one of these people were my daughter?" - Kevin Withane (Want to read a full written for reading transcript version of this episode? Download it here.) Who is Kevin Withane? Meet Kevin, the Founder and Managing Partner of Diversity X. Diversity X is a community and venture capital firm that supports underestimated founders who are solving real-world problems and making a positive impact in their communities and the world. He has worked around the world over the last two decades, including at private practice law firms, quasi-governmental organisations, SMEs, and most recently at a FTSE 250 company. Kevin is a passionate advocate for building a sustainable world and for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listen to this fascinating conversation in which I, Sope, learn more about Kevin's journey and the work that Diversity X is doing to support underestimated founders in the tech industry. What is 'Diversity X'? Diversity X is a community and venture capital firm that aims to support underrepresented founders and start ups. The firm focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion and is committed to investing in companies that are working on solving real-world problems and making a positive impact in their communities and the world. Under Kevin's leadership, 'Diversity X' believes in the power of diverse teams to drive innovation and create sustainable solutions. They provide not only financial support but also mentorship, resources, and connections to help these founders succeed. They also actively engage with the community and create a space for conversations around diversity and inclusion in the start-up ecosystem. This episode features another lawyer inspired by "LA Law"! "I used to be found sneaking down the stairs to watch it while my parents were watching it. It looked glamorous. It looked cool!" Listen to learn of the other iconic TV lawyers that Kevin wanted to follow in the footsteps of when he was a younger man! Key leadership learning moments (timestamps) 01m43s: Young Kevin and his fortune with friends. 06m00s: Kevin's entrepreneurial origins with shampoo and penny sweets. 11m16s: Kevin Withane's inspiration for getting into law. 19m48s: Life and work after corporate. 34m06s: The idea behind 'Diversity X' 39m52s: Walking the talk and being intentional. 45m56s: Challenges of building the community 54m50s: The importance of family? 57m52s: How Kevin Withane defines leadership? Kevin's links: Twitter LinkedIn Substack newsletter Follow the podcast If you've just stumbled across this podcast episode by chance, please do click here to follow it so you never miss a future episode. If you want to learn more about this podcast, and myself, Sope Agbelusi, you can do so using any of the below links. Connect with Me Website Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Email: hello@mindsetshift.co.uk I am always keen to hear your thoughts and connect with the community of listeners. If you have any comments, feedback or thoughts, please drop me an email at https://mindsetshift.co.uk/#ask-me-anything
Celebrate Christmas with Happy Horror Time as we chat with Glen Morgan about his extensive career in writing, directing, and producing horror films. Tune in to hear all about his entries in the “Final Destination” series, working with tons of rats (and of course, Crispin Glover) in “Willard,” and everything from consulting original Director, Bob Clark, to battling the Weinsteins when filming the “Black Christmas” remake.Scary Christmas to all, and to all a good fright!
This holiday season, we're doing the podcast a little differently. For the rest of the year, our hosts will each take turns going deep on what we learned from the midterms. There are so many victories to celebrate and so many lessons to learn! This week, Amanda Weinstein is joined by her husband Casey! Casey is a state rep in Ohio and was just re-elected in last month's midterms. He and Amanda chat about what it's like to run for office… and what it's like to have a family member run for office. Tune in to hear what one thing Amanda requested when Casey told her that he was considering running for office, what it was like to meet one of his trolls, the anti-semitism he's unfortunately had to deal with, and why Amanda thinks that suburban women in particular have supported his campaign.For a transcript of this episode, please email theswppod@redwine.blue.
(episode also on my youtube channel, like and subscribe lololol! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn_xTpd4lFbYzEU3jzKNyOQ)New a guy in his room #133! I talk about the Fishman Harvey Weinstein and his greenish penis-fish, look up when hipsters started and died out, talk about the show Dark, and wonder who the music industry version of Weinstein is! Yay! Sike and Lubscribe now!Topics:Don't even give a eff,Pre Thanksgiving week,Diet not working,Holiday diet tips!New years revolution,Harvey Weinstein fish penis,Gavin newsom/Weinstein,Weinsteins horror penis,Corrupt Hollywood/entertainment system,Woody Allen guilty?Dark on Netflix confusing,Time travel too confusing?Wanting to be into bands phase gone,Hipsters we're just know it all types,Hipsters changed to woke??When did hipsters start?Hipsters used to be into actually good things,We need the recession worse to get rid of hipsters,New hoovervilles!Jazz hipsters and hippies,Tattoos were never that cool,Vice and hipster stuff is kinda dead,Pitchfork top albums vs rolling stone,Who is the Weinstein of music??Harvey fishman Weinstein next Batman
After going through the entire Batman retrospective, the boys were looking for a different kind of retro for a follow-up. With no Scorsese and only a few DiCaprio films in their resume from the Aftertaste years, it was decided that their next venture would be the film team-ups of Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese. Much like the boys were at the end of last year, the careers of Scorsese and DiCaprio were at a crossroads in the early 2000s. The veteran director was in dire need of a hit, and the superstar actor was trying hard to shed the sheen of Titanic and move on with his career. So, Scorsese dusted off a script he had been working on called Gangs of New York, and the Weinsteins were happy to finance it, as long as DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz were cast. But were those the only compromises the director needed to make? Join Garrett, Matt, and the returning (Jeopardy contestant) Michael Guarnieri as they start their look at the five films in this retrospective, and answer the question of whether Gangs of New York was worth Scorsese's nearly 30 year wait to get it made.
During the production of Scream, producer Cathy Konrad received a late night call with a creepy voice saying, "Do you like scary movies?" Thankfully, it was just the film's director, legendary horror filmmaker Wes Craven, calling to discuss what to do about the Weinsteins being unhappy with the mask and the footage. Despite the studio roadblocks, Scream was finished and was a huge success, redefining the horror genre for a new generation.
Pam and Carly reflect on time spent with family during the Jewish holidays. Plus, they breakdown the key to their perfect outfit and how they've embraced certain trends. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/carly-weinstein/support
After the mammoth success of THE CROW in 1994; of course a sequel was bound to happen. THE CROW CITY OF ANGELS (1996) looked promising at first (the book The Crow - City of Angels : A Diary of the Film promised a much better picture). The original intent was to create a very different kind of film when compared to the original, out of respect for the late Brandon Lee. Alas the Weinsteins (aka Harvey and Bob Weinstein aka meddling producers) got in there (again) and went scissor happy in the edit, structuring it to look more like a pale copy of the original instead of a film that stands on its own. Director Tim Pope and screenwriter David S. Goyer, eventually disowned the movie, as the final product did not represent their intended vision. Follow us behind the scenes as we get a taste of the sequel that could have been and figure out WTF Happened to this Horror Movie?!
Efter et par venlige tip fra gode lyttere tog vi fat i Harvey Weinstein rigtige sygdom.Forniers Gangrene - og vi vil ikke anbefale dig at google det, medmindre du er hardcore!Læge Marco Hansen har forsket i netop denne sygdom, som deformerede Weinsteins penis til det ukendelige. Det var barske løjer, der kom frem!Og så er der kæmpe ballade på Langeland. tranekær Slotskro er under fødevarermyndighedernes lup, og Mariah der ejer kroen nægtede mandag at lukke kontrollanterne ind - og 16 gæster der stod med kufferter og skulle holde fødselsdag og fest.I panelet sad journalist på ugebaldet Her & Nu, Nikolaj Vraa, royal korrespondent, Jacob Heinel Jensen og Twerk Queen, Louise Kjølsen.Alex Brøndbjerg produceredeDitte Okman var værtSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
En ny bog om Harvey Weinstein er på trapperne. Detaljer om hans deforme penis, hans lugt af lort og sorte hudorme overalt på ryggen er en del af indholdet. Vi taler med Lars Lund, professor på Odense Universitetshospital, og hører om producerens lidelser - og hvad det er, han sprøjtede i sit lem, inden han voldtog Jessica Mann. Mai Manniche går på OnlyFans. Det er efter hendes overbevisning et medie for modefolk, fitnessinstruktører og musikere. Sex og porno er mest noget for OnlyFans i Danmark, og Mai skal gå internationalt.Men passer det, helt? Christian Worre Mogensen forklarer sitet - og hvad Mais chancer er for et internationalt gennembrud, hvis hun beholder tøjet på.I panelet sad royal reporter, Jacob Heinel Jensen og radiovært, Anne Kirstine Cramon. Lulu Roos produceredeDitte Okman var værtSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
But out the cheap booze and neon colored sunglasses, it's time to take a trip back to the distant time of 2010 and party! SPRING BREAK, BABY! This movie is truly sleazy, and not just because the Weinsteins produced it. A real killer cast, a ton of nudity, and a ton of gore. What's not to love? Well...listen and find out. Also we talk UNCOMFORTABLE VIEWING EXPERIENCES! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/killstreakpod/message
Sam and Emma host Tony Delorio, Secretary-Treasurer of the Teamsters Local 665, to discuss the recent organizing efforts at Amy's Kitchen in Los Angeles. Then Sam and Emma are joined by India Walton, former mayoral candidate in Buffalo and Senior Strategic Organizer at Roots Action, to discuss the push to cancel student debt in the U.S. Tony, Sam, and Emma dive right into the Teamsters Local 665's work with food processing workers at Amy's Kitchen, famed frozen food provider, after responding to calls from workers and being met with some of the harshest working conditions that they'd seen, with a near 50% rise in production with no additional workers, and “benefits” that were frankly driving workers deeper in debt. Central to this, as Tony explores, was the relationship to medical benefits, as the factory had a working relationship with a nearby medical center that sent workers right back to work before, in the wake of the first unionization attempts, Amy's granted workers a generous $2/hr wage, only for medical premiums to go up by $400, thus the “raise” meant workers were losing up to $80 per month. Next, Tony, Emma, and Sam dive into how this abuse came to be from a company that espouses an organic, community-based, family working culture, telling a story that is all too similar with a slow-but-steady development of Amy's Kitchen into a large-scale corporation, with the founding family stepping to the side in favor of the executive board, and looking away as working conditions dwindled. Tony then gets into the work between the Teamsters and workers, as the initial unionization attempts were quickly followed by a realization that what was really needed was a large-scale media push, which came alongside a worker-supported boycott by coops across the US, filing B Corp complaints, and drawing attention to the union-busting attempts going on. They wrap up the interview by looking deeper into the state of labor in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Biden's NLRB actually stepping up for workers as massive corporations like Starbucks and Amazon crackdown on dissident workers. Then, Sam and Emma are joined by India Walton as they cover her perspective on the Biden Administration's internal student debt relief, from quantity to means testing, and why she holds hope for a full 50k in relief, before diving deeper into how the student debt crisis came to be, how it impacts everyday folks, and why this policy would be a massive win for Democrats. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma dive into the issue with many economists' self-presentation as non-ideological scientists, rather than social scientists, Susan Collins is attacked by chalk, no word yet on policy regarding Maine hopscotch courts, and Big Al from Long Beach calls in to explore sports talk radio, College Athletes' rights over their own identities, and the importance of personal connection in bridging ideology. Nick from (slightly south of) Long Beach discusses being arrested for chalking a neighborhood sidewalk, Ryan from northern VA discusses family planning in the wake of the Roe decision, and the crew dives into Israel's murder of a Palestinian-American journalist. Gal from Israel expands on the common genocidal feelings amongst conservative Israelis, Dinesh D'Souza dives into Tucker blue balling him, I mean shadowbanned, Sam and Emma cover the Police's role in cracking down on trans kids who are shut out of school for apparent “truancy,” and the Weinsteins discuss Muskicide, plus, your calls and IMs! Purchase tickets for the live show in Boston on May 15th HERE: https://majorityreportradio.com/live-show-schedule Check out what's going at Amy's Kitchen here and BOYCOTT their products-it hurts the brand, not the workers!: https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/A... Check out Roots Action here: https://rootsaction.org/ Call the White House to demand student loan forgiveness! 202-456-1414 & 202-456-1111 Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://madmimi.com/signups/170390/join Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Check out today's sponsors: Magic Spoon: Magic Spoon is a new cereal company that's discovered a way to recreate your favorite childhood cereals with 0 sugar, 12 grams of protein, and only 3 net grams of carbs in each serving. Go to to https://magicspoon.com/pages/partner?partner=majorityreport&utm_source=majorityreport&utm_medium=Podcast for your custom bundle of cereal and try it today! Be sure to use our promo code MAJORITYREPORT at checkout to save five dollars off your order. Support the St. Vincent Nurses today! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/literaryhangover Check out The Nomiki Show on YouTube. https://www.patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Check out Jamie's podcast, The Antifada. https://www.patreon.com/theantifada, on iTunes, or at https://www.twitch.tv/theantifada (streaming every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm ET!) Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere. https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
The boys talk David Arquette's short-lived wrestling career, Scooby Doo, and the wacky Weinsteins. #5CREAM
ok wait wait, before you scroll past: this is somehow still a fun episode.i know, that sounds bad, and it might actually be bad, but it's true lmao ANTSY PRODUCTS: https://antsyproducts.com/Use code "BIGBOY" for 10% off your purchase! Aya Lehman: https://twitter.com/ayalhmnKevin Cookman: https://twitter.com/KevinCookmanContact/Mailbag: ayavsthebigboys@gmail.com A Merry-Go-Round Magazine Podcast: https://merrygoroundmagazine.com/Support Merry-Go-Round Magazine!: https://www.patreon.com/mgrm
Our colleagues at "Here's the Thing" produced a great episode this week that we think you'll enjoy: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are the New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. For five months -- perpetually in danger of losing the scoop -- they cultivated and cajoled sources ranging from the Weinsteins' accountant to Ashley Judd. The article that emerged on October 5th, 2017, was a level-headed and impeccably sourced exposé, whose effects continue to be felt around the world. Their conversation with Alec Baldwin covers their reporting process, and moves on to a joint wrestling with Alec's own early knowledge of one of the Weinstein allegations, and his ongoing friendship with accused harasser James Toback. The guests ask Alec questions about the movie industry's ethics about sex and “the casting couch.” Over a respectful and surprising half-hour, host and guests together talk through the many dilemmas posed by the #MeToo movement that Kantor and Twohey did so much to unleash. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.
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