The 80s Movie Podcast

The first ever remote episode of The 80s Movie Podcast, we remember an old friend, and recount how a long-forgotten Keanu Reeves TV movie, The Brotherhood of Justice, which was filmed at the host's high school weeks after his graduation and moving to Los Angeles to break into the film industry. Expect production anecdotes, personal memories, and a fresh look at a little-known early Keanu role.

Host and film historian Edward Havens revisits the Brat Pack on The 80s Movie Podcast for the group's 40th anniversary. We trace the name's origin, sort who does — and does not — count as a Brat Packer, and argue for the best Brat Pack movie (it’s not The Breakfast Club or The Outsiders). Context and film-history reasoning for 1980s movie fans.

On this episode, we deep dive into Susan Seidelman’s 1987 film Making Mr. Right. We analyze tone, themes, and behind‑the‑scenes context as Seidelman's follow-up to Desperately Seeking Susan, and unpack performances by John Malkovich and Ann Magnuson. Concrete takeaways on the film’s place in Seidelman’s 1980s work and why it matters to fans of 80s cinema and film analysis.

Calico Kids series author Todd Downing shares his five favorite fantasy films of the 1980s, with discussion of why each film matters, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and viewing recommendations. Host Edward Havens digs into themes, synth scores, cult status, and what makes these 80s fantasy movies enduring classics. Ideal for fans of 1980s fantasy films, film history, and retro movie deep dives. Listen for perspective and curated watchlist.

Season 7 Premiere: after a six-month break the host issues an apology for a previous bait-and-switch, explains the delay, and leads a focused discussion of Collision Course — the only movie to feature comedian and talk show host Jay Leno in a leading role. Expect context on the film’s place in 80s movie culture, clear episode notes explaining the gap, and a concise look at what makes this Jay Leno film notable.

A continuation of our series on Susan Seidelman’s 1980s films, this episode examines her biggest hit, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). We analyze Seidelman’s direction, key performances, and the film’s cultural impact within 80s cinema—essential listening for fans of 80s movies and film history.

We pause our Susan Seidelman retrospective to examine Andrew McCarthy’s new Hulu documentary about the Brat Pack. This episode breaks down the doc’s portrayal, the 1985 New York Magazine article which created the Brat Pack name, and whether that piece affected McCarthy and his co-stars’ careers. For fans of 1980s movies and film history: context, key scenes, and concise takeaways.

The first episode of our Susan Seidelman miniseries. We begin a focused deep‑dive into Seidelman’s work with her 1982 directorial debut Smithereens, examining its themes, production context, and cultural impact. Part of our annual spotlight on female filmmakers (following our 2023 Martha Coolidge miniseries), this installment explains why Seidelman matters to 1980s film history and what listeners should watch for on a rewatch.

We examine the 1986 comedy film Crimewave, an early-career Sam Raimi & Coen Brothers collaboration that many film fans overlook. Hear why this film matters today, what to watch for in the directors' early fingerprints, and how it influenced careers. Perfect for 80s movie fans and film-history listeners looking for underrated titles and context.

Edward Havens returns from paternity leave to revisit 1983's Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. We examine Universal Studios' sequel with returning stars Jackie Gleason and Jerry Reed (plus Burt Reynolds, just barely), discussing why it landed so hard amongst that year’s sequel bombs. Perfect for 80s film fans looking for concise history.

Regular listener Lee Thompson of the UK was given the choice to pick any movie from the decade to be examined, and Lee chose the British television drama Threads. We examine its broadcast context and production, and explain why it matters to 80s film & TV fans. A focused, spoiler-aware deep dive for listeners interested in film history and cult TV.

Final episode of 2023: a nostalgic deep dive into the history, impact, and legacy of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We revisit why the film became one of the decade’s most popular movies, explain its live‑action/animation appeal, and highlight what keeps it relevant for film‑history and 80s cinema fans.

Edward Havens examines Tony Garnett’s Deep in the Heart (aka Handgun), a 1984 film reportedly buried by a major American distributor because it resembled an upcoming Clint Eastwood project of theirs. We trace the film’s release history, why it was shelved, and how it’s being rediscovered forty years later. Context and analysis for 80s movie fans and film‑history buffs.

Deep-dive review of the forgotten 1984 summer movie Chattanooga Choo Choo starring Barbara Eden, George Kennedy, Melissa Sue Anderson, Christopher McDonald and Joe Namath. We explain why this title faded from the decade’s highlights, discuss Joe Namath’s 1969 Super Bowl III ring moment, and place the film in the broader 80s movie season for fans of film history and cult curiosities.

We unpack John Binder's UFOria, a rare, well-reviewed obscurity with a disputed release year (1980? 1984? 1985? 1986?). This episode explains the release-history mystery, reviews contemporary critical response, and places the film in 80s cinema context. Ideal for fans of obscure 80s films, cult classics, and movie-history deep dives.

Part 6 of The Orphans: a deep-dive into three obscure 80s films whose theatrical releases were the only ones for their distributors. We examine release histories, distributor context, and behind-the-scenes notes for Mother Lode (1982, Charlton Heston, Agamemnon Films), Heartbreaker (1983, Frank Zuniga; Monarex) and Hells Angels Forever (1983, Leon Gas and and Kevin Keating and Richard Chase, RKR Releasing) Perfect for fans of 80s movies, cult cinema, and film-history deep dives.

Part 6 of The Orphans series: a focused deep-dive into three obscure 1980s films and their single-release distributors. We trace release histories, distributor context, and behind-the-scenes notes for 1983's The Last Fight (Fred Williamson, Best Film and Video), 1987's The Howling III (Phillipe Mora, Square Releasing), and 1981's Cold River (Fred G. Sullivan, Pacific International Enterprises).

Explore Motion Picture Marketing’s repackaging strategy: how this early '80s independent distributor retitled and rebranded 1970s European horror to reach new audiences — and how that success let them shift into producing their own films within a year. Listen for a detailed look at film marketing, retitling, graphics-driven promotion, and the business impact.

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 tot

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988. But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987. I was wrong. While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days. Sorry for the misinformation. 1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win. But before we get to those two movies, there’s a whole bunch of others to talk about first. Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there. Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend’s husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her. Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend’s husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k. A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature. In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week’s Variety touting the film’s success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it. But that ad may have been a bit premature. While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k. March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film. Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D’Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi’s Rigoletto se

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 Br

This week, we continue out look back at the films released by Miramax in the 1980s, focusing on 1987. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It’s the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, concentrating on their releases from 1987, the year Miramax would begin its climb towards the top of the independent distribution mountain. The first film Miramax would release in 1987 was Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls. And yes, Lizzie Borden is her birth name. Sort of. Her name was originally Linda Elizabeth Borden, and at the age of eleven, when she learned about the infamous accused double murderer, she told her parents she wanted to only be addressed as Lizzie. At the age of 18, after graduating high school and heading off to the private women’s liberal arts college Wellesley, she would legally change her name to Lizzie Borden. After graduating with a fine arts degree, Borden would move to New York City, where she held a variety of jobs, including being both a painter and an art critic for the influential Artforum magazine, until she attended a retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard movies, when she was inspired to become a filmmaker herself. Her first film, shot in 1974, was a documentary, Regrouping, about four female artists who were part of a collective that incorporated avant-garde techniques borrowed from performance art, as the collective slowly breaks apart. One of the four artists was a twenty-three year old painter who would later make film history herself as the first female director to win the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow. But Regrouping didn’t get much attention when it was released in 1976, and it would take Borden five years to make her first dramatic narrative, Born in Flames, another movie which would also feature Ms. Bigelow in a supporting role. Borden would not only write, produce and direct this film about two different groups of feminists who operate pirate radio stations in New York City which ends with the bombing of the broadcast antenna atop the World Trade Center, she would also edit the film and act as one of the cinematographers. The film would become one of the first instances of Afrofuturism in film, and would become a cultural touchstone in 2016 when a restored print of the film screened around the world to great critical acclaim, and would tie for 243rd place in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of The Greatest Films Ever Made. Other films that tied with include Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. A Yes, it’s that good, and it would cost only $30k to produce. But while Born in Flames wasn’t recognized as revolutionary in 1983, it would help her raise $300k for her next movie, about the lives of sex workers in New York City. The idea would come to her while working on Born in Flames, as she became intrigued about prostitution after meeting some well-educated women on the film who worked a few shifts a week at a brothel to earn extra money or to pay for their education. Like many, her perception of prostitution were women who worked the streets, when in truth streetwalkers only accounted for about 15% of the business. During the writing of the script, she began visiting brothels in New York City and learned about the rituals involved in the business of selling sex, especially intrigued how many of the sex workers looked out for each other mentally, physically and hygienically. Along with Sandra Kay, who would play one of the ladies of the night in the film, Borden worked up a script that didn’t glamorize or grossly exaggerate the sex industry, avoiding such storytelling tropes as the hooker with a heart of gold or girls forced into prostitution due to extraordinary circumstances. Most of the ladies playing prostitutes were played by unknown actresses working off-Broadway, while the johns were non-actors recruited through word of mouth between Borden’s friends and the occasional ad in one of the city’s sex magazines. Production on Working Girls would begin in March 1985, with many of the sets being built in Borden’s loft in Manhattan, with moveable walls to accommodate whatever needed to be shot on any given day. While $300k would be ten times what she had on Born in Flames, Borden would stretch her budget to the max by still shooting in 16mm, in the hopes that the footage would look good enough should the finished film be purchased by a distributor and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition. After a month of shooting, which involved copious amounts of both male and female nudity, Borden would spend six months editing her film. By early 1986, she had a 91 minute cut ready to go, and she and her producer would submit the film to play at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. While the

On this episode, your intrepid host falls down a rabbit hole while doing research for one thing, and ends up discovering something "new" that must be investigated further, the 1987 action/comedy Oklahoma Smugglers. ----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. You were probably expecting the third part of the Miramax Films in the 1980s series, and we will get to that one the next episode. But as often happens while I’m researching, I’ll fall down a rabbit hole that piques my interest, and this time, it was not only discovering a film I had never heard of, but it fits within a larger discussion about disappearing media. But before we get started, I need to send out a thank you to Matthew Martin, who contacted me via email after our previous episode. I had mentioned I couldn’t find any American playdates for the Brian Trenchard-Smith movie The Quest around the time of its supposed release date of May 1st, 1986. Matthew sent me an ad from the local Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review dated July 18th, 1986, which shows the movie playing on two screens in Spokane, including a drive-in where it shared a screen with “co-hit” Young Sherlock Holmes. With that help, I was also able to find The Quest playing on five screens in the Seattle/Tacoma area and two in Spokane on July 11th, where it grossed a not very impressive $14,200. In its second week in the region, it would drop down to just three screens, and the gross would fall to just $2800, before disappearing at the end of that second week. Thank you to Matthew for that find, which gave me an idea. On a lark, I tried searching for the movie again, this time using the director’s last name and any day in 1986, and ended up finding 35 playdates for The Quest in Los Angeles, matinees only on Saturday, October 25th and Sunday, October 26th, one to three shows each day on just those two days. Miramax did not report grosses. And this is probably the most anyone has talked about The Quest and its lack of American box office. And with that, we’re done with it. For now. On this episode, we’re going to talk about one of the many movies from the 1980s that has literally disappeared from the landscape. What I mean by that is that it was an independently made film that was given a Southern regional release in the South in 1987, has never been released on video since its sole VHS release in 1988, and isn’t available on any currently widely used video platform, physical or streaming. I’ll try to talk about this movie, Oklahoma Smugglers, as much as I can in a moment, but this problem of disappearing movies has been a problem for nearly a century. I highlight this as there has been a number of announcements recently about streaming-only shows and movies being removed from their exclusive streaming platform, some just seven weeks after their premieres. This is a problem. Let me throw some statistics at you. Film Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990 that is dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, has estimated that half of all the films ever made before 1950 no longer exist in any form, and that only 10% of the films produced before the dawn of the sound era of films are gone forever. The Deutsche Kinemathek, a major film archive founded in Berlin in 1963, also estimates that 80-90% of all silent films ever have been lost, a number that’s a bit higher than the US Library of Congress’s estimation that 75% of all silent film are gone. That includes more than 300 of Georges Méliès’ 500 movies, a 1926 film, The Mountain Eagle, that was the second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and London After Midnight, considered by many film historians to be “the holy grail” of lost films. A number of films from directors like Michael Curtiz, Allan Dwan, and Leo McCarey are gone. And The Betrayal, the final film from pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, is no longer with us. There are a number of reasons why many of these early movies are gone. Until the early 1950s, movies were often shot and printed on nitrate film, a highly flammable substance that can continue to burn even if completely submersed in water. During the earlier years of Hollywood, there were a number of fires on studio lots and in film vaults were original negatives of films were stored. Sometimes, studios would purposely incinerate old prints of films to salvage the silver particles within the nitrate film. Occasionally, a studio would destroy an older film when they remade that film with a new cast and director. And sometimes films, like Orson Welles’ original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, would be dumped into the ocean off the Southern California coast, when studios no longer wanted to pay to store these elements. Except Oklahoma Smugglers does not fit into any of those scenarios. It’s less than fo

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 wo

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. Twent

Our miniseries on the 1980s movies of director Martha Coolidge ends with a look back at her 1988 film Plain Clothes. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we’re going to complete our miniseries on the 1980s films of director Martha Coolidge with her little seen 1988 movie Plain Clothes. When we last left Ms. Coolidge, she had just seen her 1985 film Real Genius get lost in the mix between a number of similarly themed movies, although it would eventually find its audience through home video and repeated cable airings throughout the rest of the decade. Shortly after the release of Real Genius, she would pick out her next project, a comedy mystery called Glory Days. Written by Dan Vining, Glory Days was one of a number of television and movie scripts floating around Hollywood that featured a supposedly young looking cop who goes undercover as a student at a high school. Whatever Coolidge saw in it, she would quickly get to work making it her own, hiring a young writer working at Paramount Studios named A. Scott Frank to help her rewrite the script. Coolidge had been impressed by one of his screenplays, a Neo-noir romantic mystery thriller called Dead Again, and felt Frank was the right person to help her add some extra mystery to the Glory Days screenplay. While Frank and Coolidge would keep some elements of the original Glory Days script, including having the undercover cop’s high school identity, Nick Springsteen, be a distant relative of the famous rock star from whose song the script had taken its title. But Coolidge would have Frank add a younger brother for the cop, and add a murdered teacher, who the younger brother is accused of killing, to give the film something extra to work towards. For the cast, Coolidge would go with a mix of newcomers in the main roles, with some industry veterans to fill out the supporting cast. When casting began in early 1987, Coolidge looked at dozens of actors for the lead role of Nick Dunbar, but she was particularly struck by thirty-two year old Arliss Howard, whose film work had been limited to supporting roles in two movies, but was expected to become a star once his role in Stanley Kubrick’s next project, Full Metal Jacket, opened later in the summer. Twenty-five year old Suzy Amis, a former model who, like Arlisss, had limited film work in supporting roles, would be cast as Robin, a teacher at the school who Nick develops a crush on while undercover. The supporting cast would include George Wendt from Cheers, Laura Dern’s mother Diane Ladd, an Oscar nominee for her role as Flo in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, veteran character actor Seymour Cassel, an Oscar nominee himself for John Cassavetes’ Faces, Robert Stack, the original Elliot Ness who was yet another former Oscar nominee, Harry Shearer, and the great Abe Vigoda. The $7.5m film would begin production in the Seattle metro area on May 6th, 1987 and would last for seven weeks, ending on June 30th. Plain Clothes would open in 193 theatres on April 15th, 1988, including 59 theatres in New York City and eight in Seattle. The reviews would be vicious on the film, with many critics pointing out how ludicrous the plot was, and how distracting it was the filmmakers were trying to pass a thirty two year old actor off as a twenty four year old police officer going undercover as an eighteen year old high school student. Audiences would stay away in droves, with only about 57k people buying a ticket to see the film during the opening three days. A performance so bad, Paramount would end up pulling the film from theatres after seven days at a $289k ticket gross, replacing every screen with another high school-set movie, the similarly-titled Permanent Record, featuring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Rubin and Kathy Baker, which would also be the final film for Martha Coolidge’s regular co-star Michelle Meyrink, who would quit acting the following year and develop an affinity in Zen Buddhism. She would eventually open her own acting studio in her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. Not so coincidentally, Martha Coolidge is one of advisory board members of the school. There would be one more movie for Martha Coolidge in the 1980s, a made for television mystery called Trenchcoat in Paradise, featuring Dirk Benedict from Battlestar Galactica and The A-Team, Catherine Oxenberg from Dynasty, and Bruce Dern, but it’s not very good and not really work talking about. As the 80s moved into the 90s, Coolidge would continue to work both in television and in motion pictures. In 1991, she would direct her Plain Clothes co-star Diane Ladd alongside Ladd’s daughter, Laura Dern, in the Depression-era drama Rambling Rose. But despite unanimous critical consent and Oscar nominations for both Ladd and Dern, the first and only mother-daughter duo to be nominated for th

On this episode, we continue our informal miniseries on the 1980s movies of director Martha Coolidge with a look back at her 1985 under appreciated classic, Real Genius. ----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. Before we hop in to today’s episode, I want to thank every person listening, from whatever part of the planet you’re at. Over the nearly four years I’ve been doing this podcast, we’ve had listeners from 171 of the 197 countries, and occasionally it’s very surreal for this California kid who didn’t amount to much of anything growing to think there are people in Myanmar and the Ukraine and other countries dealing with war within their borders who still find time to listen to new episodes of a podcast about 33 plus year old mostly American movies when they’re released. I don’t take your listenership lightly, and I just want you to know that I truly appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, with that, I would like to welcome you all to Part Three of our informal miniseries on the 1980s movies of director Martha Coolidge. When we left Ms. Coolidge on our previous episode, her movie Joy of Sex had bombed, miserably. But, lucky for her, she had already been hired to work on Real Genius before Joy of Sex had been released. The script for Real Genius, co-written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft, the writers of Bachelor Party, had been floating around Hollywood for a few years. It would tell the story of a highly intelligent high school kid named Mitch who would be recruited to attend a prestigious CalTech-like college called Pacific Tech, where he would be teamed with another genius, Chris, to build a special laser with their professor, not knowing the laser is to be used as a weapon to take out enemy combatants from a drone-like plane 30,000 feet above the Earth. ABC Motion Pictures, a theatrical subsidy of the American television network geared towards creating movies that could be successful in theatres before playing on television, would acquire the screenplay in the early 1980s, but after the relative failure of a number of their initial projects, including National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and Young Doctors in Love, would sell the project off to Columbia Pictures, who would make the film one of the first slate of films to be produced by their sister company Tri-Star Pictures, a joint venture between Columbia, the cable network Home Box Office, and, ironically, the CBS television network, which was also created towards creating movies that could be successful in theatres before playing on television. Tri-Star would assign Brian Grazer, a television producer at Paramount who had segued to movies after meeting with Ron Howard during the actor’s last years on Happy Days, producing Howard’s 1982 film Night Shift and 1984 film Splash, to develop the film. One of Grazer’s first moves would be to hire Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, writers on Happy Days who helped to create Laverne and Shirley and Joanie Loves Chachi, to rewrite the script to attract a director. Ganz and Mandel had also written Night Shift and rewrote the script for Splash, and Grazer considered them his lucky charm. After trying to convince Ron Howard to board the project instead of Cocoon, Grazer would create a list of up and coming filmmakers he would want to work with. And toward the top of that list was Martha Coolidge. Coolidge would naturally gravitate towards Real Genius, and she would have an advantage that no other filmmaker on Grazer’s list would have: her fiancee, Michael Backes, was himself an egghead, a genius in physics and biochemistry who in the years to come would become good friends with the writer and filmmaker Michael Crichton, working as a graphics supervisor on the movie version of Chricton’s book Jurassic Park, a co-writer of the screenplay based on Chricton’s book Rising Sun, and an associate producer on the movie version of Chricton’s book Congo. Once Coolidge was signed on to direct Real Genius in the spring of 1984, she and Backes would work with former SCTV writer and performer PJ Torokvei as they would spend time talking to dozens of science students at CalTech and USC, researching laser technology, and the policies of the CIA. They would shape the project to something closer to what Grazer said he loved most about its possibility, the possibility of genius. "To me,” Grazer would tell an interviewer around the time of the film’s release, “a genius is someone who can do something magical, like solve a complex problem in his head while I'm still trying to figure out the question. I don't pretend to understand it, but the results are everywhere around us. We work, travel, amuse ourselves and enhance the quality of life through technology, all of which traces back to what was once an abstract idea in the mind of some genius.” When their revised screenplay got the green light from the studio

This week, we continue with the Martha Coolidge lovefest with her one truly awful movie, Joy of Sex. ----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. Last week, we talked about Martha Coolidge and her 1983 comedy Valley Girl, which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its release this past Saturday. Today, we’re going to continue talking about Martha Coolidge’s 1980s movies with her follow up effort, Joy of Sex. And, as always, before we get to the main story, there’s some back story to the story we need to visit first. In 1972, British scientist Alex Comfort published the titillatingly titled The Joy of Sex. If you know the book, you know it’s just a bunch of artful drawings of a man and a woman performing various sexual acts, a “how to” manual for the curious and adventurous. Set up to mimic cooking books like Joy of Cooking, Joy of Sex covered the gamut of sexual acts, and would spend more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list, including three months at the top of the list. It wasn’t the kind of book anyone could possibly conceive a major Hollywood studio might ever be interested in making into a movie. And you’d be right. Sort of. When a producer named Tom Moore bought the movie rights to the book in 1975, for $100,000 and 20% of the film’s profit, Moore really only wanted the title, because he thought a movie called “Joy of Sex” would be a highly commercial prospect to the millions of people who had purchased the book over the years, especially since porn chic was still kind of “in” at the time. In 1976, Moore would team with Paramount Pictures to further develop the project. They would hire British comedian, actor and writer Dudley Moore to structure the movie as a series of short vignettes not unlike Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We’re Afraid to Ask. Moore was more interested in writing a single story, about someone not unlike himself in his early 40s coming to grips with being sexually hung up during the era of free love. Moore and the studio could not come to an agreement over the direction of the story, and Moore would, maybe not so ironically, sign on the play a character not unlike himself, in his early 40s, coming to grips with being sexually hung up during the era of free love, in Blake Edwards’ 10. Still wanting to pursue the idea of the movie as a series of short vignettes not unlike Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We’re Afraid to Ask, Paramount next approached the British comedy troupe Monty Python to work on it, since that’s basically what they did for 45 episodes of their BBC show between 1969 and 1974. But since they had just found success with their first movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they decided to concentrate their efforts on their next movie project. In 1978, Paramount hired actor and comedian Charles Grodin to write the script, telling him it could literally be about anything. Grodin, one of the stealthiest funny people to ever walk the Earth, had written a movie before, an adaptation of the Gerald A. Browne novel 11 Harrowhouse, but he found himself unable to think of anything, finding the ability to write anything he wanted as long as it could somehow be tied to the title to be an albatross around his neck. When Grodin finally turned in a script a few months later, Paramount was horrified to discover he had written a movie about a screenwriter who was having trouble writing a Hollywood movie based on a sex manual. The studio passed and released Grodin from his contract. In 1985, Grodin was able to get that screenplay made into a movie called Movers and Shakers, but despite having a cast that included Grodin, Walter Matthew, Gilda Radner, Bill Macy, and Vincent Gardenia, as well as cameos from Steve Martin and Penny Marshall, the film bombed badly. After the success of The Blues Brothers, John Belushi was hired to star in Joy of Sex, to be directed by Penny Marshall in what was supposed to be her directing debut, produced by Matty Simmons, the publisher of National Lampoon who was looking for another potential hit film to put its name on after their success with Animal House, from a script written by National Lampoon writer John Hughes, which would have been his first produced screenplay. Hughes’ screenplay still would be structured as a series of short vignettes not unlike Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We’re Afraid to Ask, but Belushi would pass away before filming could begin. Penny Marshall would make her directing debut four years later with the Whoopi Goldberg movie Jumpin’ Jack Flash, while Hughes’ first produced screenplay, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, would actually begin production four weeks before Belushi died. Belushi kept getting the production start date for Joy of Sex pushed back because of he was working on a screenplay fo

This week, we take a look back at a movie celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its theatrical release this coming Saturday, a movie that made a star of its unconventional lead actor, and helped make its director one of a number of exciting female filmmakers to break through in the early part of the decade. The movie Martha Coolidge's 1983 comedy Valley Girl, starring Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we’re going to be looking back at a movie that will be celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its original theatrical release. A movie that would turn one of its leads into a star, and thrust its director into the mainstream, at least for a short time. We’re talking about the 1983 Martha Coolidge film Valley Girl, which is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its release this Saturday, with a special screening tonight, Thursday, April 27th 2023, at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood with its director, doing a Q&A session after the show. But, as always, before we get to Valley Girl, we head back in time. A whole eleven months, in fact. To May 1982. That month, the avant-garde musical genius known as Frank Zappa released his 35th album, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. Released on Zappa’s own Barking Pumpkin record label, Drowning Witch would feature a song he co-wrote with his fourteen year old daughter Moon Unit Zappa. Frank would regularly hear his daughter make fun of the young female mallrats she would encounter throughout her days, and one night, Frank would be noodling around in his home recording studio when inspiration struck. He would head up to Moon’s room, wake her up and bring her down to the studio, asking her to just repeat in that silly Valspeak voice she did all the crazy things she heard being said at parties, bar mitzvahs and the Sherman Oaks Galleria shopping center, which would become famous just a couple months later as the mall where many of the kids from Ridgemont High worked in Amy Heckerling’s breakthrough movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. For about an hour, Frank would record Moon spouting off typical valley girl phrases, before he sent her back up to her room to go back to sleep. In a couple days, Frank Zappa would bring his band, which at the time included guitar virtuoso Steve Vai in his first major musical gig, into the home studio to lay down the music to this weird little song he wrote around his daughter’s vocals. “Valley Girl” wold not be a celebration of the San Fernando Valley, an area Zappa described as “a most depressing place,” or the way these young ladies presented themselves. Zappa in general hated boring generic repetitive music, but “Valley Girl” would be one of the few songs Zappa would ever write or record that followed a traditional 4/4 time signature. In the spring of 1982, the influential Los Angeles radio station KROQ would obtain an acetate disc of the song, several weeks before Drowning Witch was to be released on an unsuspecting public. Zappa himself thought it was a hoot the station that had broken such bands as The Cars, Duran Duran, The Police, Talking Heads and U2 was even considering playing his song, but KROQ was his daughter’s favorite radio station, and she was able to persuade the station to play the song during an on-air interview with her. The kids at home went nuts for the song, demanding the station play it again. And again. And again. Other radio stations across the country started to get calls from their listeners, wanting to hear this song that hadn’t been officially released yet, and Zappa’s record label would rush to get copies out to any radio station that asked for it. The song would prove to be very popular, become the only single of the forty plus he released during his recording career to become a Top 40 radio hit, peaking at number 32. Ironically, the song would popularize the very cadence it was mocking with teenagers around the country, and the next time Zappa and his band The Mothers of Invention would tour, he would apologize to the Zappa faithful for having created a hit record. "The sad truth,” he would say before going into the song, “is that if one continues to make music year after year, eventually something will be popular. I spent my career fighting against creating marketable art, but this one slipped through the cracks. I promise to do my best never to have this happen again." As the song was becoming popular in Los Angeles, actor Wayne Crawford and producer Andrew Lane had been working on a screenplay about star-crossed lovers that was meant to be a cheap quickie exploitation film not unlike Zapped! or Porky’s. But after hearing Zappa’s song, the pair would quickly rewrite the lead character, Julie, into a valley girl, and retitle their screenplay, Bad Boyz… yes, Boyz, with a Z… as Valley Girl. Atlantic E

On this episode, we do our first deep dive into the John Landis filmography, to talk about one of his lesser celebrated film, the 1985 Jeff Goldblum/Michelle Pfeiffer morbid comedy Into the Night. ----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. Long time listeners to this show know that I am not the biggest fan of John Landis, the person. I’ve spoken about Landis, and especially about his irresponsibility and seeming callousness when it comes to the helicopter accident on the set of his segment for the 1983 film The Twilight Zone which took the lives of actors Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, enough where I don’t wish to rehash it once again. But when one does a podcast that celebrates the movies of the 1980s, every once in a while, one is going to have to talk about John Landis and his movies. He did direct eight movies, one documentary and a segment in an anthology film during the decade, and several of them, both before and after the 1982 helicopter accident, are actually pretty good films. For this episode, we’re going to talk about one of his lesser known and celebrated films from the decade, despite its stacked cast. We’re talking about 1985’s Into the Night. But, as always, before we get to Into the Night, some backstory. John David Landis was born in Chicago in 1950, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was four months old. While he grew up in the City of Angels, he still considers himself a Chicagoan, which is an important factoid to point out a little later in his life. After graduating from high school in 1968, Landis got his first job in the film industry the way many a young man and woman did in those days: through the mail room at a major studio, his being Twentieth Century-Fox. He wasn’t all that fond of the mail room. Even since he had seen The 7th Voyage of Sinbad at the age of eight, he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker, and you’re not going to become a filmmaker in the mail room. By chance, he would get a job as a production assistant on the Clint Eastwood/Telly Savalas World War II comedy/drama Kelly’s Heroes, despite the fact that the film would be shooting in Yugoslavia. During the shoot, he would become friendly with the film’s co-stars Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland. When the assistant director on the film got sick and had to go back to the United States, Landis positioned himself to be the logical, and readily available, replacement. Once Kelly’s Heroes finished shooting, Landis would spend his time working on other films that were shooting in Italy and the United Kingdom. It is said he was a stuntman on Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but I’m going to call shenanigans on that one, as the film was made in 1966, when Landis was only sixteen years old and not yet working in the film industry. I’m also going to call shenanigans on his working as a stunt performer on Leone’s 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, and Tony Richardson’s 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Peter Collinson’s 1969 film The Italian Job, which also were all filmed and released into theatres before Landis made his way to Europe the first time around. In 1971, Landis would write and direct his first film, a low-budget horror comedy called Schlock, which would star Landis as the title character, in an ape suit designed by master makeup creator Rick Baker. The $60k film was Landis’s homage to the monster movies he grew up watching, and his crew would spend 12 days in production, stealing shots wherever they could because they could not afford filming permits. For more than a year, Landis would show the completed film to any distributor that would give him the time of day, but no one was interested in a very quirky comedy featuring a guy in a gorilla suit playing it very very straight. Somehow, Johnny Carson was able to screen a print of the film sometime in the fall of 1972, and the powerful talk show host loved it. On November 2nd, 1972, Carson would have Landis on The Tonight Show to talk about his movie. Landis was only 22 at the time, and the exposure on Carson would drive great interest in the film from a number of smaller independent distributors would wouldn’t take his calls even a week earlier. Jack H. Harris Enterprises would be the victor, and they would first release Schlock on twenty screens in Los Angeles on December 12th, 1973, the top of a double bill alongside the truly schlocky Son of The Blob. The film would get a very good reception from the local press, including positive reviews from the notoriously prickly Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas, and an unnamed critic in the pages of the industry trade publication Daily Variety. The film would move from market to market every few weeks, and the film would make a tidy little profit for everyone involved. But it would be four more years until Landis would make

This week's episode takes a look back at the career of trailblazing independent filmmaker Robert Downey, father of Robert Downey, Jr., and his single foray into the world of Hollywood filmmaking, Mad Magazine Presents Up the Academy. ----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 follow up on a movie based on a series of articles from a humor magazine that was trying to build their brand name by slapping their name on movies with a movie that was sponsored by a humor magazine trying to build their brand name by slapping their name on movies not unlike the other humor magazine had been doing but ended up removing their name from the movie, and boy is brain already fried and we’re not even a minute into the episode. We’re talking about Robert Downey’s 1980 comedy Up the Academy. But, as always, before we get to Up the Academy, let’s hit the backstory. If you know the name Robert Downey, it’s likely because you know his son. Robert Downey, Jr. You know, Iron Man. Yes, Robert Downey, Jr. is a repo baby. Maybe you’ve seen the documentary he made about his dad, Sr., that was released by Netflix last year. But it’s more than likely you’ve never heard of Robert Downey, Sr., who, ironically, was a junior himself like his son. Robert Downey was born Robert John Elias, Jr. in New York City in 1936, the son of a model and a manager of hotels and restaurants. His parents would divorce when he was young, and his mom would remarry while Robert was still in school. Robert Elias, Jr. would take the last name of his stepfather when he enlisted in the Army, in part because was wanted to get away from home but he was technically too young to actually join the Army. He would invent a whole new persona for himself, and he would, by his own estimate, spend the vast majority of his military career in the stockade, where he wrote his first novel, which still has never been published. After leaving the Army, Downey would spend some time playing semi-pro baseball, not quite good enough to go pro, spending his time away from the game writing plays he hoped to take, if not to Broadway, at least off-Broadway. But he would not make his mark in the arts until 1961, when Downey started to write and direct low-budget counterculture short films, starting with Ball’s Bluff, about a Civil War soldier who wakes up in New York City’s Central Park a century later. In 1969, he would write and direct a satirical film about the only black executive at a Madison Avenue advertising firm who is, through a strange circumstance, becomes the head of the firm when its chairman unexpectedly passes away. Featuring a cameo by Mel Brooks Putney Swope was the perfect anti-establishment film for the end of that decade, and the $120k film would gross more than $2.75m during its successful year and a half run in theatres. 1970’s Pound, based on one of Downey’s early plays, would be his first movie to be distributed by a major distributor, although it was independently produced outside the Hollywood system. Several dogs, played by humans, are at a pound, waiting to be euthanized. Oh, did I forget to mention it was a comedy? The film would be somewhat of a success at the time, but today, it’s best known as being the acting debut of the director’s five year old son, Robert Downey, Jr., although the young boy would be credited as Bob Downey. 1972’s Greaser Palace was part of an early 1970s trend of trippy “acid Westerns,” like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie. Character actor Allan Arbus plays Jesse, a man with amnesia who heals the sick, resurrects the dead and tap dances on water on the American frontier. It would be the first movie Downey would make with a million dollar budget. The critical consensus of the film at the time was not positive, although Jay Cocks, a critic for Time Magazine who would go on to be a regular screenwriter for Martin Scorsese in the 1980s, would proclaim the film to be “the most adventurous movie of the year.” The film was not a hit, and it would be decades before it would be discovered and appreciated by the next generation of cineastes. After another disappointing film, 1975’s Moment to Moment, which would later be retitled Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight in order to not be confused with the 1978 movie of the same name starring John Travolta and Lily Tomlin that really, truly stunk, Downey would take some time off from filmmaking to deal with his divorce from his first wife and to spend more time with his son Robert and daughter Allyson. By 1978, Robert Downey was ready to get back to work. He would get a job quickly helping Chuck Barris write a movie version of Barris’ cult television show, The Gong Show, but that wasn’t going to pay the bills with two teenagers at home. What would, though, is the one thing he hadn’t done yet in movies… Direc

On this episode, we talk about the great American filmmaker Robert Altman, and what is arguably the worst movie of his six decade, thirty-five film career: his 1987 atrocity O.C. and Stiggs. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we’re going to talk about one of the strangest movies to come out of the decade, not only for its material, but for who directed it. Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs. As always, before we get to the O.C. and Stiggs, we will be going a little further back in time. Although he is not every cineaste’s cup of tea, it is generally acknowledged that Robert Altman was one of the best filmmakers to ever work in cinema. But he wasn’t an immediate success when he broke into the industry. Born in Kansas City in February 1925, Robert Altman would join the US Army Air Force after graduating high school, as many a young man would do in the days of World War II. He would train to be a pilot, and he would fly more than 50 missions during the war as part of the 307th Bomb Group, operating in the Pacific Theatre. They would help liberate prisoners of war held in Japanese POW Camps from Okinawa to Manila after the victory over Japan lead to the end of World War II in that part of the world. After the war, Altman would move to Los Angeles to break into the movies, and he would even succeed in selling a screenplay to RKO Pictures called Bodyguard, a film noir story shot in 1948 starring Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lane, but on the final film, he would only share a “Story by” credit with his then-writing partner, George W. George. But by 1950, he’d be back in Kansas City, where he would direct more than 65 industrial films over the course of three years, before heading back to Los Angeles with the experience he would need to take another shot. Altman would spend a few years directing episodes of a drama series called Pulse of the City on the DuMont television network and a syndicated police drama called The Sheriff of Cochise, but he wouldn’t get his first feature directing gig until 1957, when a businessman in Kansas City would hire the thirty-two year old to write and direct a movie locally. That film, The Delinquents, cost only $60k to make, and would be purchased for release by United Artists for $150k. The first film to star future Billy Jack writer/director/star Tom Laughlin, The Delinquents would gross more than a million dollars in theatres, a very good sum back in those days, but despite the success of the film, the only work Altman could get outside of television was co-directing The James Dean Story, a documentary set up at Warner Brothers to capitalize on the interest in the actor after dying in a car accident two years earlier. Throughout the 1960s, Altman would continue to work in television, until he was finally given another chance to direct a feature film. 1967’s Countdown was a lower budgeted feature at Warner Brothers featuring James Caan in an early leading role, about the space race between the Americans and Soviets, a good two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The shoot itself was easy, but Altman would be fired from the film shortly after filming was completed, as Jack Warner, the 75 year old head of the studio, was not very happy about the overlapping dialogue, a motif that would become a part of Altman’s way of making movies. Although his name appears in the credits as the director of the film, he had no input in its assembly. His ambiguous ending was changed, and the film would be edited to be more family friendly than the director intended. Altman would follow Countdown with 1969’s That Cold Day in the Park, a psychological drama that would be both a critical and financial disappointment. But his next film would change everything. Before Altman was hired by Twentieth-Century Fox to direct MASH, more than a dozen major filmmakers would pass on the project. An adaptation of a little known novel by a Korean War veteran who worked as a surgeon at one of the Mobile Auxiliary Surgical Hospitals that give the story its acronymic title, MASH would literally fly under the radar from the executives at the studio, as most of the $3m film would be shot at the studio’s ranch lot in Malibu, while the executives were more concerned about their bigger movies of the year in production, like their $12.5m biographical film on World War II general George S. Patton and their $25m World War II drama Tora! Tora! Tora!, one of the first movies to be a Japanese and American co-production since the end of the war. Altman was going to make MASH his way, no matter what. When the studio refused to allow him to hire a fair amount of extras to populate the MASH camp, Altman would steal individual lines from other characters to give to background actors, in order to get the bustling atmosphere he wanted. In order to

This week, we finish our three part episode on the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures. ----more---- The movies discussed on this week's episode are: The Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm (1990, Stan Winston) Big Man on Campus (1989, Jeremy Paul Kagan) Dream a Little Dream (1989, Marc Rocco) Earth Girls Are Easy (1989, Julien Temple) Far From Home (1989, Meiert Avis) Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose) Parents (1989, Bob Balaban) The Rainbow (1989, Ken Russell) Wonderland (1989, Philip Saville) 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. At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was starting to experience the turbulence a number of independent distributors faced when they had a successful film too soon out of the gate, and the direction of the company seemingly changes to go chasing more waterfalls instead of sticking to the rivers and the lakes they were used to. Welcome to Part Three of our miniseries. As we enter 1989, Vestron is seriously in trouble. More money has gone out then has come back in. It seems that they needed one more hit to keep going for a while longer. But if you were to look at their release schedule for the year, which included a pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, there wasn’t really anything that felt like it could be a Dirty Dancing-like break out, except for maybe the pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group. But we’ll get there in a moment. Their first film from 1989 is a certifiable cult film if there ever was one, but the problem with this label is that the film tagged as so was not a success upon its initial theatrical release. Bob Balaban, the beloved character actor who had been regularly seen on screen since his memorable debut in Midnight Cowboy twenty years earlier, would make his directorial debut with the black comedy horror film Parents. Bryan Madorsky stars as Michael Laemle, a ten year old boy living in the California suburbs in the 1950s, who starts to suspect mom and dad, played by Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid, might be cannibals. It’s a strange but fun little movie, and even Ken Russell would compare it favorably over David Lynch’s Blue Velvet during one contemporary interview, but sadly, it would take far more time for the film to find its audience than Vestron could afford. Opening in 94 theatres on January 27th, the $3m Parents could not overcome a series of negative reviews from critics, and it would only gross $278k in its first three days. Vestron would not strike any additional prints of the film, and would cycle the ones they did have around the country for several months, but after four months, the film could only attract $870k in box office receipts. But it would become something of a cult hit on video later in the year. In 1992, British filmmaker Bernard Rose would make his American directing debut with an all-time banger, Candyman. But he wouldn’t gotten Candyman if it wasn’t for his 1989 film Paperhouse, an inventive story about a young girl whose drawings seem to manifest into reality. British actor Ben Cross from Chariots of Fire and American actress Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels plays the young girl’s parents. Outside of Gene Siskel, who would give the film a thumbs down on his movie review show with Roger Ebert despite acknowledging Rose’s talent as a filmmaker and being fascinated by the first two-thirds of the movie, the critical consensus was extraordinary. But it appears Siskel may have never actually written a review of the film for the Chicago Tribune, as the film still has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the film would only earn $6,700 from its single screen playdate at the Carnegie Hall Cinemas when it opened on February 17th, and the film would get little support from Vestron after that. More single playdates in major cities that added up to a $241k box office tally after fourteen weeks in release. Marc Rocco’s Dream a Little Dream would be the third film in The Two Coreys Cinematic Universe. Corey Feldman plays a high school student who, through one of the strangest plot twists in the whole body switching genre, finds himself switching places with two time Academy Award-winner Jason Robards, playing a professor who is looking for immortality through entering a meditative alpha state. Meredith Salinger and Piper Laurie also find themselves switching bodies as well, while Corey Haim plays the goofball best friend with not a whole lot to do. The supporting cast also includes veteran character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Alex Rocco, the latter who agreed to do the film because it was directed by his son. When the film opened on March 3rd, it would be Vestron’s second widest release, opening on more than 1,000 theatres. But just like the previous year’s License to Drive, the pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman did

We continue our look back at the movies released by independent distributor Vestron Pictures, focusing on their 1988 releases. ----more---- The movies discussed on this episode, all released by Vestron Pictures in 1988 unless otherwise noted, include: Amsterdamned (Dick Maas) And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim) The Beat (Paul Mones) Burning Secret (Andrew Birkin) Call Me (Sollace Mitchell) The Family (Ettore Scola) Gothic (Ken Russell, 1987) The Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell) Midnight Crossing (Roger Holzberg) Paramedics (Stuart Margolin) The Pointsman (Jos Stelling) Salome's Last Dance (Ken Russell) Promised Land (Michael Hoffman) The Unholy (Camilo Vila) Waxwork (Anthony Hickox) 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. At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was celebrating the best year of its two year history. Dirty Dancing had become one of the most beloved movies of the year, and Anna was becoming a major awards contender, thanks to a powerhouse performance by veteran actress Sally Kirkland. And at the 60th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the films of 1987, Dirty Dancing would win the Oscar for Best Original Song, while Anna would be nominated for Best Actress, and The Dead for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costumes. Surely, things could only go up from there, right? Welcome to Part Two of our miniseries. But before we get started, I’m issuing a rare mea culpa. I need to add another Vestron movie which I completely missed on the previous episode, because it factors in to today’s episode. Which, of course, starts before our story begins. In the 1970s, there were very few filmmakers like the flamboyant Ken Russell. So unique a visual storyteller was Russell, it’s nigh impossible to accurately describe him in a verbal or textual manner. Those who have seen The Devils, Tommy or Altered States know just how special Russell was as a filmmaker. By the late 1980s, the hits had dried up, and Russell was in a different kind of artistic stage, wanting to make somewhat faithful adaptations of late 19th and early 20th century UK authors. Vestron was looking to work with some prestigious filmmakers, to help build their cache in the filmmaking community, and Russell saw the opportunity to hopefully find a new home with this new distributor not unlike the one he had with Warner Brothers in the early 70s that brought forth several of his strongest movies. In June 1986, Russell began production on a gothic horror film entitled, appropriately enough, Gothic, which depicted a fictionalized version of a real life meeting between Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairemont at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, hosted by Lord Byron, from which historians believe both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre were inspired. And you want to talk about a movie with a great cast. Gabriel Byrne plays Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Percy Shelley, Natasha Richardson, in her first ever movie, as Mary Shelley, Timothy Spall as John William Polidori, and Dexter Fletcher. Although the film was produced through MGM, and distributed by the company in Europe, they would not release the film in America, fearing American audiences wouldn’t get it. So Vestron would swoop in and acquire the American theatrical rights. Incidentally, the film did not do very well in American theatres. Opening at the Cinema 1 in midtown Manhattan on April 10th, 1987, the film would sell $45,000 worth of tickets in its first three days, one of the best grosses of any single screen in the city. But the film would end up grossing only $916k after three months in theatres. BUT… The movie would do quite well for Vestron on home video, enough so that Vestron would sign on to produce Russell’s next three movies. The first of those will be coming up very soon. Vestron’s 1988 release schedule began on January 22nd with the release of two films. The first was Michael Hoffman’s Promised Land. In 1982, Hoffman’s first film, Privileged, was the first film to made through the Oxford Film Foundation, and was notable for being the first screen appearances for Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs, the first film scored by future Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman, and was shepherded into production by none other than John Schlesinger, the Oscar winning director of 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy. Hoffman’s second film, the Scottish comedy Restless Natives, was part of the 1980s Scottish New Wave film movement that also included Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero, and was the only film to be scored by the Scottish rock band Big Country. Promised Land was one of the first films to be developed by the Sundance Institute, in 1984, and when it was finally produced in 1986, would include Robert Redford as one of its executive producers. The film would follow two recent loca

The first of a two-part series on the short-lived 80s American distribution company responsible for Dirty Dancing. ----more---- The movies covered on this episode: Alpine (1987, Fredi M. Murer) Anna (1987, Yurek Bogayevicz) Billy Galvin (1986, John Grey) Blood Diner (1987, Jackie Kong) China Girl (1987, Abel Ferrera) The Dead (1987, John Huston) Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino) Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tess) Personal Services (1987, Terry Jones) Slaughter High (1986, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten and George Dugdale) Steel Dawn (1987, Lance Hook) Street Trash (1987, Jim Muro) TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Have you ever thought “I should do this thing” but then you never get around to it, until something completely random happens that reminds you that you were going to do this thing a long time ago? For this week’s episode, that kick in the keister was a post on Twitter from someone I don’t follow being retweeted by the great film critic and essayist Walter Chaw, someone I do follow, that showed a Blu-ray cover of the 1987 Walter Hill film Extreme Prejudice. You see, Walter Chaw has recently released a book about the life and career of Walter Hill, and this other person was showing off their new purchase. That in and of itself wasn’t the kick in the butt. That was the logo of the disc’s distributor. Vestron Video. A company that went out of business more than thirty years before, that unbeknownst to me had been resurrected by the current owner of the trademark, Lionsgate Films, as a specialty label for a certain kind of film like Ken Russell’s Gothic, Beyond Re-Animator, CHUD 2, and, for some reason, Walter Hill’s Neo-Western featuring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe and Rip Torn. For those of you from the 80s, you remember at least one of Vestron Pictures’ movies. I guarantee it. But before we get there, we, as always, must go back a little further back in time. The year is 1981. Time Magazine is amongst the most popular magazines in the world, while their sister publication, Life, was renowned for their stunning photographs printed on glossy color paper of a larger size than most magazines. In the late 1970s, Time-Life added a video production and distribution company to ever-growing media empire that also included television stations, cable channels, book clubs, and compilation record box sets. But Time Life Home Video didn’t quite take off the way the company had expected, and they decided to concentrate its lucrative cable businesses like HBO. The company would move Austin Furst, an executive from HBO, over to dismantle the assets of Time-Life Films. And while Furst would sell off the production and distribution parts of the company to Fox, and the television department to Columbia Pictures, he couldn’t find a party interested in the home video department. Recognizing that home video was an emerging market that would need a visionary like himself willing to take big risks for the chance to have big rewards, Furst purchased the home video rights to the film and video library for himself, starting up his home entertainment company. But what to call the company? It would be his daughter that would come up with Vestron, a portmanteau of combining the name of the Roman goddess of the heart, Vesta, with Tron, the Greek word for instrument. Remember, the movie Tron would not be released for another year at this point. At first, there were only two employees at Vestron: Furst himself, and Jon Pesinger, a fellow executive at Time-Life who, not unlike Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire, was the only person who saw Furst’s long-term vision for the future. Outside of the titles they brought with them from Time-Life, Vestron’s initial release of home video titles comprised of two mid-range movie hits where they were able to snag the home video rights instead of the companies that released the movies in theatres, either because those companies did not have a home video operation yet, or did not negotiate for home video rights when making the movie deal with the producers. Fort Apache, The Bronx, a crime drama with Paul Newman and Ed Asner, and Loving Couples, a Shirley MacLaine/James Coburn romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor comedic, were Time-Life productions, while the Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise comedy The Cannonball Run, was a pickup from the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which financed the comedy to help break their local star, Jackie Chan, into the American market. They’d also make a deal with several Canadian production companies to get the American home video rights to titles like the Jack Lemmon drama Tribute and the George C. Scott horror film The Changeling. The advantage that Vestron had over the major studios was their outlook on the mom and pop rental stores that were popping up in every city and town in the United States. The major studios hated the idea

This week, we talk about the 1980s Marvel Cinematic Universe that could have been, and eventually was. ----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. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the undisputed king of intellectual property in the entertainment industry. As of February 9th, 2023, the day I record this episode, there have been thirty full length motion pictures part of the MCU in the past fifteen years, with a combined global ticket sales of $28 billion, as well as twenty television shows that have been seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is a entertainment juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon. This comes as a total shock to many of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, who were witness of cheaply produced television shows featuring hokey special effects and a roster of has-beens and never weres in the cast. Superman was the king of superheroes at the movies, in large part because, believe it or not, there hadn’t even been a movie based on a Marvel Comics character released into theatres until the summer of 1986. But not for lack of trying. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. A brief history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 1980s. But first, as always, some backstory. Now, I am not approaching this as a comic fan. When I was growing up in the 80s, I collected comics, but my collection was limited to Marvel’s Star Wars series, Marvel’s ROM The SpaceKnight, and Marvel’s two-issue Blade Runner comic adaptation in 1982. So I apologize to Marvel comics fans if I relay some of this information incorrectly. I have tried to do my due diligence when it comes to my research. Marvel Comics got its start as Timely Comics back in 1939. On August 31, 1939, Timely would release its first comic, titled Marvel Comics, which would feature a number of short stories featuring versions of characters that would become long-running staples of the eventual publishing house that would bear the comic’s name, including The Angel, a version of The Human Torch who was actually an android hero, and Namor the Submariner, who was originally created for a unpublished comic that was supposed to be given to kids when they attended their local movie theatre during a Saturday matinee. That comic issue would quickly sell out its initial 80,000 print run, as well as its second run, which would put another 800,000 copies out to the marketplace. The Vision would be another character introduced on the pages of Marvel Comics, in November 1940. In December 1940, Timely would introduce their next big character, Captain America, who would find instant success thanks to its front cover depicting Cap punching Adolph Hitler square in the jaw, proving that Americans have loved seeing Nazis get punched in the face even a year before our country entered the World War II conflict. But there would be other popular characters created during this timeframe, including Black Widow, The Falcon, and The Invisible Man. In 1941, Timely Comics would lose two of its best collaborators, artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, to rival company Detective Comics, and Timely owner Martin Goodman would promote one of his cousins, by marriage to his wife Jean no less, to become the interim editor of Timely Comics. A nineteen year old kid named Stanley Lieber, who would shorten his name to Stan Lee. In 1951, Timely Comics would be rebranded at Atlas Comics, and would expand past superhero titles to include tales of crime, drama, espionage, horror, science fiction, war, western, and even romance comics. Eventually, in 1961, Atlas Comics would rebrand once again as Marvel Comics, and would find great success by changing the focus of their stories from being aimed towards younger readers and towards a more sophisticated audience. It would be November 1961 when Marvel would introduce their first superhero team, The Fantastic Four, as well as a number of their most beloved characters including Black Panther, Carol Danvers, Iron Man, The Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Thor, as well as Professor X and many of the X-Men. And as would be expected, Hollywood would come knocking. Warner Brothers would be in the best position to make comic book movies, as both they and DC Comics were owned by the same company beginning in 1969. But for Marvel, they would not be able to enjoy that kind of symbiotic relationship. Regularly strapped for cash, Stan Lee would often sell movie and television rights to a variety of Marvel characters to whomever came calling. First, Marvel would team with a variety of producers to create a series of animated television shows, starting with The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966, two different series based on The Fantastic Four, and both Spider-Man and Spider-Woman series. But movies were a different matter. The rights to make a Spider-Man television show, for example, was sold

On this, our 100th episode, we eschew any silly self-congratulatory show to get right into one of James Cameron's most under appreciated films, his 1989 anti-nuke allegory The Abyss. ----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. We're finally here. Episode 100. In the word of the immortal Owen Wilson, wow. But rather than throw myself a celebratory show basking in my own modesty, we’re just going to get right into another episode. And this week’s featured film is one of my favorites of the decade. A film that should have been a hit, that still informs the work of its director more than thirty years later. But, as always, a little backstory. As I quite regularly say on this show, I often do not know what I’m going to be talking about on the next episode as I put the finishing touches on the last one. And once again, this was the case when I completed the show last week, on Escape to Victory, although for a change, I finished the episode a day earlier than I usually do, so that would give me more time to think about what would be next. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. All gone. Still have no clue what I’m going to write about. Sunday arrives, and my wife and I decide to go see Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D at our local IMAX theatre. I was hesitant to see the film, because the first one literally broke my brain in 2009, and I’m still not 100% sure I fully recovered. It didn’t break my brain because it was some kind of staggering work of heartbreaking genius, but because the friend who thought he was being kind by buying me a ticket to see it at a different local IMAX theatre misread the seating chart for the theatre and got me a ticket in the very front row of the theatre. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie in IMAX 3D, but that first row is not the most advantageous place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D. But because the theatre was otherwise sold out, I sat there, watching Avatar in 3D from the worst possible seat in the house, and I could not think straight for a week. I actually called off work for a few days, which was easy to do considering I was the boss at my theatre, but I have definitely seen a cognitive decline since I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D in the worst possible conditions. I’ve never felt the need to see it again, and I was fine not seeing the new one. But my wife wanted to see it, and we had discount tickets to the theatre, so off we went. Thankfully, this time, I chose the seats for myself, and got us some very good seats in a not very crowded theatre, nearly in the spot that would be the ideal viewing position for that specific theatre. And I actually enjoyed the movie. There are very few filmmakers who can tell a story like James Cameron, and there are even fewer who could get away with pushing a pro-conservation, pro-liberal, pro-environment agenda on an unsuspecting populace who would otherwise never go for such a thing. But as I was watching it, two things hit me. One, I hate high frame rate movies. Especially when the overall look of the movie was changing between obviously shot on video and mimicking the feel of film so much, it felt like a three year old got ahold of the TV remote and was constantly pushing the button that turned motion smoothing off and on and off and on and off and on, over and over and over again, for three and a half hours. Two, I couldn’t also help but notice how many moments and motifs Cameron was seemingly borrowing from his under-appreciated 1989 movie The Abyss. And there it was. The topic for our 100th episode. The Abyss. And, as always, before we get to the movie itself, some more background. James Francis Cameron was born in 1954 in small town in the middle eastern part of the Ontario province of Canada, about a nine hour drive north of Toronto, a town so small that it wouldn’t even get its first television station until 1971, the year his family would to Brea, California. After he graduated from high school in 1973, Cameron would attend Fullerton College in Orange County, where would initially study physics before switching to English a year later. He’d leave school in 1974 and work various jobs including as a truck driver and a janitor, while writing screenplays in his spare time, when he wasn’t in a library learning about movie special effects. Like many, many people in 1977, including myself, Star Wars would change his life. After seeing the movie, Cameron quit his job as a truck driver and decided he was going to break into the film industry by any means necessary. If you’ve ever followed James Cameron’s career, you’ve no doubt heard him say on more than one occasion that if you want to be a filmmaker, to just do it. Pick up a camera and start shooting something. And that’s exactly what he did, not a year later. In 1978, he would co-write, co-produce, co-direct and do the production design for a 12 minute sci-fi shor

For our second episode of 2023, we look back, as we did with Neil Diamond's only starring role last week, at the one and only acting role the late, great football star Pelé would ever make: Escape to Victory, a football-themed World War II drama that would also feature Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Max von Sydow. ----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 December 29th, while this show was on hiatus, the football world lost Edson Arantes de Nascimento, the legend known around the world by his single word nickname, Pelé. Even if you weren’t a particular fan of football in the 1960s and 1970s, you more than likely knew who Pelé was. The International Olympic Committee named him the Athlete of the Century in 1999. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the Twentieth Century. In the Brazilian city of Santos, where a fifteen year old Pelé got his professional start in 1956, a museum dedicated to all things Pelé opened in 2014, with more than 2400 items devoted to his life and careers. After he retired from football in 1977, in an exhibition game between the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, where Pelé had been playing for three years, and Santos, his former club of nineteen years, Pelé would become a global ambassador for the sport, and record an album of music alongside fellow Brazilian Sergio Mendes to accompany a documentary about his life. And because this is a podcast about 80s movies, he would, of course, attempt a career in motion pictures. And those who were going to be responsible for making Pelé a movie star were not going to take any chances. Because Pelé was the most famous footballer on the planet, the movie was going to somehow be about football. American film producer Freddie Fields and his partner on the film, future Carolco Films co-owner Mario Kassar, would find their story for Escape to Victory in a Hungarian movie from 1961 called Two Halves in Hell. The film was based on a tale of a 1942 football match between German soldiers and their Ukrainian prisoners of war during World War II, known as the Death Match. That film, directed by Zoltán Fábri, would win several awards at film festivals worldwide, and was ripe for the American remake treatment. However, there would need to be some changes to the story. The action would be moved from Soviet Russia to France, and the character being built for Pelé, Corporal Luis Fernandez, would be identified as being from Trinidad, as Brazil would not enter the European theatre of war until July of 1944. While the script was being written, Fields and Kassar would get busy putting the film together. In July 1979, it was announced that Brian Hutton, who had directed two other World War II-set movies, 1968’s Where Eagles Dare and 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, would helm this new movie, and that Lloyd Bridges was being considered for a role. A writer for Daily Variety reporting on Hutton’s hire speculated that Clint Eastwood, who had starred in both Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes, would also star in the film, but that never happened. In mid-September 1979, it was announced that legendary French actor Alain Delon would star in the film, and that Hutton had already left the project. Two weeks later, it was announced that two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Huston would direct the project, which would now star Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone. Amongst the locations Huston scouted to shoot the film at included Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and Ireland, but in the end, they would shoot in and around Budapest, Hungary, because they could shoot the film in the then-communist country for around $12m, versus $30m to $35m it would have cost to shoot in a more democratic country. On a side note, Stallone ended up coming on to the film in a most unusual way. The actor was looking to buy a beach house in Malibu, and one of the houses he looked at was owned by Freddie Fields. After touring the house, Stallone found Fields sitting on the sundeck, and the actor informed the producer that the house was not quite big enough for himself, his wife and two sons. The two men got to talking, and Fields started to tell Stallone about this sports-based World War II movie he was about to make with John Huston as director. Although Stallone knew almost nothing about football, he was intrigued by the idea of getting to work with a director of Huston’s stature. And wouldn’t you know it, Fields just happened to have a copy of the script right here. Stallone took the script home, and agreed to be in the film three days later. Not only would Pelé star in the film alongside Caine and Stallone, he would also work with Huston and the crew to design the football action in the film. Nearly two dozen professional football players, including Bobby Moore, the captain of the World Cup-winning

Welcome to our first episode of the new year, which is also our first episode of Season 5. Thank you for continuing to join us on this amazing journey. On today's episode, we head back to Christmas of 1980, when pop music superstar Neil Diamond would be making his feature acting debut in a new version of The Jazz Singer. ----more---- EPISODE TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, this is The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. It’s 2023, which means we are starting our fifth season. And for our first episode of this new season, we’re going back to the end of 1980, to take a look back at what was supposed to be the launch of a new phase in the career of one of music’s biggest stars. That musical star was Neil Diamond, and this would end up becoming his one and only attempt to act in a motion picture. We’re talking about The Jazz Singer. As I have said time and time again, I don’t really have a plan for this show. I talk about the movies and subjects I talk about often on a whim. I’ll hear about something and I’ll be reminded of something, and a few days later, I’ve got an episode researched, written, recorded, edited and out there in the world. As I was working on the previous episode, about The War of the Roses just before my trip to Thailand, I saw a video of Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline on opening night of A Beautiful Noise, a new Broadway musical about the life and music of Mr. Diamond. I hadn’t noticed Diamond had stopped performing live five years earlier due to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and it was very touching to watch a thousand people joyously singing along with the man. But as I was watching that video, I was reminded of The Jazz Singer, a movie we previously covered very lightly three years ago as part of our episode on the distribution company Associated Film Distribution. I was reminded that I haven’t seen the movie in over forty years, even though I remember rather enjoying it when it opened in theatres in December 1980. I think I saw it four or five times over the course of a month, and I even went out and bought the soundtrack album, which I easily listened to a hundred times before the start of summer. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves yet again. The Jazz Singer began its life in 1917, when Samson Raphaelson, a twenty-three year old undergraduate at the University of Illinois, attended a performance of Robinson Crusoe, Jr., in Champaign, IL. The star of that show was thirty-year-old Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jew who had been a popular performer on Broadway stages for fifteen years by this point, regularly performing in blackface. After graduation, Raphaelson would become an advertising executive in New York City, but on the side, he would write stories. One short story, called “The Day of Atonement,” would be a thinly fictionalized account of Al Jolson’s life. It would be published in Everybody’s Magazine in January 1922. At the encouragement of his secretary at the advertising firm, Raphaelson would adapted his story into a play, which would be produced on Broadway in September 1925 with a new title… The Jazz Singer. Ironically, for a Broadway show based on the early life of Al Jolson, Jolson was not a part of the production. The part of Jake Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who finds success on Broadway with the Anglicized named Jack Robin, would be played by George Jessel. The play would be a minor hit, running for 303 performances on Broadway before closing in June 1926, and Warner Brothers would buy the movie rights the same week the show closed. George Jessel would be signed to play his stage role in the movie version. The film was scheduled to go into production in May 1927. There are a number of reasons why Jessel would not end up making the movie. After the success of two Warner movies in 1926 using Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc system that could play music synchronized to a motion picture, Warner Brothers reconcieved The Jazz Singer as a sound movie, but not just a movie with music synchronized to the images on screen, but a “talkie,” where, for the first time for a motion picture, actual dialogue and vocal songs would be synchronized to the pictures on screen. When he learned about this development, Jessel demanded more money. The Warner Brothers refused. Then Jessel had some concerns about the solvency of the studio. These would be valid concerns, as Harry Warner, the eldest of the four eponymous brothers who ran the studio, had sold nearly $4m worth of his personal stock to keep the company afloat just a few months earlier. But what ended up driving Jessel away was a major change screenwriter Alfred A. Cohen made when adapting the original story and the play into the screenplay. Instead of leaving the theatre and becoming a cantor like his father, as it was written for the stage, the movie would end with Jack Robin performing on Broadway in blackface while his mom cheers him on from

On this actual final episode of 2022, we take a look back at our favorite Christmas movie of the decade, Danny DeVito's 1989 film The War of the Roses. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. Before we get started, yes, I said our previous episode, on Michael Jackson’s Thriller, was going to be our last episode of 2022. When I wrote that, and when I said that, I meant it. But then, after publishing that episode, I got to thinking about Christmas, and some of my favorite Christmas movies, and it reminded me I have considering doing an episode about my favorite Christmas movie from the 1980s, and decided to make myself an unintentional liar by coming back one more time. So, for the final time in 2022, this time for real, I present this new episode of The 80s Movie Podcast. This time, we’ll be talking about Danny DeVito’s best film as a director, The War of the Roses. The genesis of War of the Roses was a novel by American author and playwright Warren Adler. After graduating from NYU with a degree in English literature, in a class that included Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, and William Styron, who won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, Adler paved an interesting road before becoming a novelist. He worked as a journalist at the New York Daily News, before becoming the editor of the Queens Post, an independent weekly newspaper devoted to all things happening in that New York City borough. He would buy four radio stations and a television station in New York City, before opening his own advertising and public relations firm in Washington D.C. Adler would create ads for politicians, businesses and communities all across the nation. In fact, it was Warren Adler who would create the name of the DC complex whose name is now synonymous with high crimes: Watergate. In 1974, he would sell the firm, and the stations, after the publication of his first novel, Undertow. The War of the Roses would be Adler’s seventh novel to be published in as many years, and the first of four to be published in 1981 alone. The novel follows Jonathan and Barbara Rose, who, initially, seem to be the perfect couple. He has a thriving career as a lawyer, she is an up-an-coming entrepreneur with an exceptional pâté recipe. Their extravagant home holds a collection of antiquities purchased over the years, and they enjoy their life with their children Evie and Josh. One day, Jonathan suffers what seems to be a heart attack, to which Barbara responds by asking for a divorce. Very quickly, their mutual love turns to a destructive hatred, especially after Jonathan, trying to save his marriage despite his wife’s de facto declaration of lost love for her husband, decides to invoke an old state law that allows a husband to remain in his house while in the process of divorce. The novel became an immediate sensation, but Hollywood had already come knocking on Mr. Adler’s door seven months before the book’s publication. Richard D. Zanuck, the son of legendary Fox studio head Daryl Zanuck, and his producing partner David Brown, would purchase the movie rights to the book in September 1980 through their production deal at Fox. The producers, whose credits included The Sting and Jaws, would hire Adler to write the screenplay adaptation of his novel, but they seemingly would let the film rights lapse after two years. James L. Brooks, the television writer and producer who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, was transitioning to movies, and purchased the movie rights to the book, which he would produce for Polly Platt, the former wife of filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich who had made a name for herself as an art director, costume designer, screenwriter and producer, including as the production designer and on-set sounding board for Brooks on Terms of Endearment. At the time, Brooks was working at Paramount Pictures, but in 1986, he would end his association with that studio when Fox would offer Brooks the opportunity to create his own production company at the studio, Gracie Films. When the transfer of Brooks’ properties from Paramount to Fox was being worked on, it was discovered that Brooks didn’t actually own the movie rights to War of the Roses after all. In fact, Arnon Milchan, an Israeli businessman who had been making a splash in the film industry financing movies like Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Ridley Scott’s Legend and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, had actually purchased the movie rights to the novel before the Zanuck/Brown option seemingly lapsed, which would require Brooks to enter into a new round of negotiations to secure the rights once and for all. Milchan would sell them to Gracie Films for $300k and a producer credit on the final film. Once the rights were finally and properly secured, Brooks would hire Michael Neeson, a writer Brooks had worked with on The Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda and Taxi,

On our final episode of 2022, we look back at the music video/mini-movie for Michael Jackson's Thriller, on the fortieth anniversary on the release of the album which bore its name. ----more---- Transcript: Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. If you’re listening to this episode as I release it, on November 30th, 2022, today is the fortieth anniversary of the release of the biggest album ever released, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Over the course of those forty years, it has sold more than seventy million copies. It won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards. A performance of one of its signature songs, Billie Jean, for a televised concert celebrating the 25th anniversary of Motown Records would introduce The Moonwalk to an astonished audience, first in the auditorium and then on TV screens around the world. The album was so big, even MTV couldn’t ignore it. Michael Jackson would become the first black artist to be put into regular rotation on the two year old cable channel. So what does all this have to do with movies, you ask. That’s a good question. Because out of this album came one of the most iconic moments in the entertainment industry. Not just for MTV or the music industry, but for the emerging home video industry that needed that one thing to become mainstream. The music video for the album’s title song, Thriller. Thriller was the sixth solo album by Michael Jackson, even though he was still a member of The Jacksons band alongside his brothers Jackie, Jermaine, Marlon, Randy and Tito. Although The Jacksons were still selling millions of albums with each release, Michael’s 1979 solo album Off the Wall made him a solo star, selling more than ten million copies worldwide in its first year of release, almost as much as all of the previous Jacksons albums combined. After the completion of The Jackson’s 1980 album Triumph, Jackson would re-team with his Off the Wall producer, the legendary Quincy Jones, to try and craft a new album that would blow Off the Wall out of the water. Jackson wanted every song on the album to be a killer. Every song a hit. Over the course of 1981 and 1982, Jackson and Jones would work on no less than thirty songs that could be included on the final album, and assembled some of the biggest names in the music industry to play on it, including David Foster, James Ingram, Paul McCartney, Rob Temperton, Eddie Van Halen, and the members of the band Toto, who were having a great 1982 already with the release of their fourth album, which featured such seminal hits at Africa and Rosanna. Recording on the album would begin in April 1982 with the Jackson-penned The Girl is Mine, a duet with Paul McCartney that Jackson hoped would become even bigger than Ebony and Ivory, the former Beatle’s duet with Stevie Wonder which had been released a few weeks earlier and was be the number one song in a number of countries at that moment. There would be three other songs on the final album written by Jackson, Beat It, Billie Jean, and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, which Jackson would co-produce with Jones. The other five songs, Baby Be Mine, Human Nature, The Lady in My Life, P.Y.T. and the title track, would be written by other artists like James Ingram, Steve Pocaro of Toto, and Rob Temperton, who were also working on the album as backup singers and/or musicians. The final mixing of the album would continue up until three weeks before its expected November 30th, 1982 release, even though The Girl Is Mine had already been released as a single to radio stations and record stores on October 18th. While the song wouldn’t exactly set the world on fire or presage the massive success of the album it had come from, the single would sell more than a million copies, and hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. When the album was released, it sold well, but it wouldn’t be until Billie Jean, the second single from the album, was released on January 2nd, 1983, that things really started to take off. Within three weeks, the song would already hit #1 on the Billboard R&B charts. But it would still a few more weeks for white America to take notice. In early 1983, the music world was dominated by the cable channel MTV, which in less than two years had gone from being a small cable channel launched in only portions of New Jersey to making global stars of such musical acts as Duran Duran, Eurythmics, U2 and even Weird Al Yankovich. But they just were not playing black artists. The lack of black music on MTV was so noticeable that, in an interview with MTV VJ Mark Goodman timed to the release of his comeback album Let’s Dance, David Bowie would admonish the VJ and the channel for not doing its part to promote black artists. MTV’s excuse, for lack of a better word, was that the network’s executives saw the channel as being rock centered, and Billie Jean was not “rock” enough for the channel. The president of Jackson’s record label, CBS, was

This episode looks at the 1984 debut novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and its 1987 film adaptation. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we’re going to talk about 80s author Bret Easton Ellis and his 1985 novel Less Than Zero, the literal polar opposite of last week’s subjects, Jay McInerney and his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. As I mentioned last week, McInerney was twenty-nine when he published Bright Lights, Big City. What I forgot to mention was that he was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, halfway between Boston and New York City, and he would a part of that elite East Coast community that befits the upper class child of a corporate executive. Bret Easton Ellis was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father was a property developer, and his parents would divorce when he was 18. He would attend high school at The Buckley School, a college prep school in nearby Sherman Oaks, whose other famous alumni include a who’s who of modern pop culture history, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Tucker Carlson, Laura Dern, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Alyssa Milano, Matthew Perry, and Nicole Richie. So they both grew up fairly well off. And they both would attend tony colleges in New England. Ellis would attend Bennington College in Vermont, a private liberal arts college whose alumni include fellow writers Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt, who would both graduate from Bennington the same year as Ellis, 1986. While still attending The Buckley School, the then sixteen year old Ellis would start writing the book he would call Less Than Zero, after the Elvis Costello song. The story would follow a protagonist not unlike Bret Easton Ellis and his adventures through a high school not unlike Buckley. Unlike the final product, Ellis’s first draft of Less Than Zero wore its heart on its sleeve, and was written in the third person. Ellis would do a couple of rewrites of the novel during his final years at Buckley and his first years at Bennington, until his creative writing professor, true crime novelist Joe McGinness, suggested to the young writer that he revert his story back to the first person, which Ellis was at first hesitant to do. But once he did start to rewrite the story as a traditional novel, everything seemed to click. Ellis would have his book finished by the end of the year, and McGinniss was so impressed with the final product that he would submit it to his own agent to send out to publishers. Bret Easton Ellis was only a second year student at the time. And because timing is everything in life, Less Than Zero was being submitted to publishers just as Bright Lights, Big City was tearing up the best seller charts, and the publisher Simon and Schuster would purchase the rights to the book for $5,000. When the book was published in June 1985, Ellis just finished his third year at Bennington. He was only twenty-one years and three months old. Oh… also… before the book was published, the film producer Marvin Worth, whose credits included Bob Fosse’s 1974 doc-drama about Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman, 1979’s musical drama The Rose, Bette Midler’s breakthrough film as an actress, and the 1983 Dudley Moore comedy Unfaithfully Yours, would purchase the rights to make the novel into a movie, for $7,500. The film would be produced at Twentieth Century-Fox, under the supervision of the studio’s then vice president of production, Scott Rudin. The book would become a success upon its release, with young readers gravitating towards Clay and his aimless, meandering tour of the rich and decadent young adults in Los Angeles circa Christmas 1984, bouncing through parties and conversations and sex and drugs and shopping malls. One of those readers who became obsessed with the book was a then-seventeen year old Los Angeles native who had just returned to the city after three years of high school in Northern California. Me. I read Less Than Zero easily three times that summer, enraptured not only with Ellis’s minimalist prose but with Clay specifically. Although I was neither bisexual nor a user of drugs, Clay was the closest thing I had ever seen to myself in a book before. I had kept in touch with my school friends from junior high while I lived in Santa Cruz, and I found myself to have drifted far away from them during my time away from them. And then when I went back to Santa Cruz shortly after Christmas in 1985, I had a similar feeling of isolation from a number of my friends there, not six months after leaving high school. I also loved how Ellis threw in a number of then-current Los Angeles-specific references, including two mentions of KROQ DJ Richard Blade, who was the coolest guy in radio on the planet. And thanks to Sirius XM and its First Wave channel, I can still listen to Richard Blade almost daily, but now from wherever I might be in the world. But I digress. My bond with Less Than Zero only deepened the

On this episode, we travel back to 1984, and the days when a "young adult" novel included lots of drugs and partying and absolutely no sparkly vampires or dystopian warrior girls. We're talking about Jay McInerney's groundbreaking novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and its 1988 film version starring Michael J. Fox and Keifer Sutherland. ----more---- Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. The original 1984 front cover for Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City If you were a young adult in the late 1980s, there’s a very good chance that you started reading more adult-y books thanks to an imprint called Vintage Contemporaries. Quality books at an affordable paperback price point, with their uniform and intrinsically 80s designed covers, bold cover and spine fonts, and mix of first-time writers and cult authors who never quite broke through to the mainstream, the Vintage Contemporary series would be an immediate hit when it was first launched in September 1984. The first set of releases would include such novels as Raymond Carver’s Cathedral and Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano, but the one that would set the bar for the entire series was the first novel by a twenty-nine year old former fact checker at the New Yorker magazine. The writer was Jay McInerney, and his novel was Bright Lights, Big City. The original 1984 front cover for Raymond Carver's Cathedral Bright Lights, Big City would set a template for twenty something writers in the 1980s. A protagonist not unlike the writer themselves, with a not-so-secret drug addiction, and often written in the second person, You, which was not a usual literary choice at the time. The nameless protagonist, You, is a divorced twenty-four year old wannabe writer who works as fact-checker at a major upscale magazine in New York City, for which he once dreamed of writing for. You is recently divorced from Amanda, an aspiring model he had met while going to school in Kansas City. You would move to New York City earlier in the year with her when her modeling career was starting to talk off. While in Paris for Fashion Week, Amanda called You to inform him their marriage was over, and that she was leaving him for another man. You continues to hope Amanda will return to him, and when it’s clear she won’t, he not only becomes obsessed with everything about her that left in their apartment, he begins to slide into reckless abandon at the clubs they used to frequent, and becoming heavily addicted to cocaine, which then affects his performance at work. A chance encounter with Amanda at an event in the city leads You to a public humiliation, which makes him starts to realize that his behavior is not because his wife left him, but a manifestation of the grief he still feels over his mother’s passing the previous year. You had gotten married to a woman he hardly knew because he wanted to make his mother happy before she died, and he was still unconsciously grieving when his wife’s leaving him triggered his downward spiral. Bright Lights, Big City was an immediate hit, one of the few paperback-only books to ever hit the New York Times best-seller chart. Within two years, the novel had sold more than 300,000 copies, and spawned a tidal wave of like-minded twentysomething writers becoming published. Bret Easton Ellis might have been able to get his first novel Less Than Zero published somewhere down the line, but it was McInerney’s success that would cause Simon and Schuster to try and duplicate Vintage’s success, which they would. Same with Tana Janowitz, whose 1986 novel Slaves of New York was picked up by Crown Publishers looking to replicate the success of McInerney and Ellis, despite her previous novel, 1981’s American Dad, being completely ignored by the book buying public at that time. While the book took moments from his life, it wasn’t necessarily autobiographical. For example, McInerney had been married to a fashion model in the early 1980s, but they would meet while he attended Syracuse University in the late 1970s. And yes, McInerney would do a lot of blow during his divorce from his wife, and yes, he would get fired from The New Yorker because of the effects of his drug addiction. Yes, he was partying pretty hard during the times that preceded the writing of his first novel. And yes, he would meet a young woman who would kinda rescue him and get him on the right path. But there were a number of details about McInerney’s life that were not used for the book. Like how the author studied writing with none other than Raymond Carver while studying creative writing at Syracuse, or how his family connections would allow him to submit blind stories to someone like George Plimpton at the Paris Review, and not only get the story read but published. And, naturally, any literary success was going to become a movie at some point. For Bright Lights, it would happen almost as soon as the novel was published. Robert Law

Today's show takes a look at the classic 1986 French drama about jazz, Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight.

This episode, we cover a movie from 1987 which was distributed by a major studio in 1987 but is all but unknown today, Andy Anderson's Positive I.D.

Your humble host and podcasting guru Jeff Townsend talk about the Nightmare on Elm Street series from their different generational points of view. ----more---- On this episode, we are going to complete our miniseries on the Nightmare on Elm Street series with a discussion between myself and Jeff Townsend, the Podcast Father, about the movies. I know how most people of my generation, Gen X, feel about these movies. I was there to see it firsthand, first as a film goer, then as a theatre manager. What I wanted to get was an opinion from the generation after mine, and Jeff fits that bill. He wouldn’t be born until after the third movie in the series, The Dream Warriors, was released into theatres, placing him squarely in the Millennial generation.

As required by Section 107-14-8 of the Podcast Code, every movie podcast must do a horror-themed show during the month of October. We thus fulfill our requirement by offering this first part of a two-part series on the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. ----more---- The films discussed on this episode include: Deadly Blessing (Wes Craven, 1981) Freddy vs. Jason (2003, Ronny Yu) Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991, Rachel Talalay) The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) A Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010) A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987) A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989) Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994)

On this episode, we talk about one of the most influential yet lesser known figures of the 1970s and 1980s independent cinema movement, and how he needs our help today. Please allow me to introduce you to Amos Poe, and explain to you why he needs our help today. If you feel like helping Amos Poe after you listen to the episode, you can make a donation through the GoFundMe page set up by his friends.