The 80s Movie Podcast

We pause our retrospective on the 1980s movies of director Susan Seidelman to examine Andrew McCarthy new Hulu documentary about the Brat Pack and how a single article in 1985 may or may not have affect his career and the careers of many of his co-stars and friends.

On this episode, we’re going to start a miniseries on the 1980s films from director Susan Seidelman. Like last year, with Martha Coolidge, I want to highlight at least one female filmmaker each year from the decade that made a significant impact on filmmaking and culture as a whole, and Ms. Seidelman definitely fits that description.

On this episode, we’re going to tackle a movie from the early 1980s that, if made today with the same pedigree, would cause movie geeks and cinephiles to lose their freaking minds over. But because this was made early in their careers, most people are only tangentially aware of its existence, let alone have actually seen it. We’re talking about the 1986 Sam Raimi/Coen Brothers collaboration, Crimewave.

Our first episode returning from paternity leave takes us back to 1983, and one of two sequel bombs Universal made with Jackie Gleason that year, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. ----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’ll be covering one of the oddest Part 3 movies to ever be made.   Smokey and the Bandit 3.   But before we do, I owe you, loyal listener an apology and an explanation.   Originally, this episode was supposed to be about the movies of H.B. “Toby” Halicki, who brought car chase films back to life in the mid-70s with his smash hit Gone in 60 Seconds. Part of the reason I wanted to do this episode was to highlight a filmmaker who doesn’t get much love from film aficionados anymore, and part because this was the movie that literally made me the person I became. My mom was dating Toby during the making of the movie, a spent a number of days on the set as a five year old, and I even got featured in a scene. And I thought it would be fun to get my mom to open up about a part of her life after my parents’ divorce that I don’t remember much of.   And it turned into the discussion that made me question everything I became. Much of which I will cover when I find the courage to revisit that topic, hopefully in time for the 50th anniversary this July.   So, for now, and to kind of stick with the car theme this episode was originally going to be about, we’re going to do a quick take on one of the most bizarre, and most altered, movies to ever come out of Hollywood.   As you may remember, Smokey and the Bandit was a 1977 hit film from stuntman turned director Hal Needham. Needham and Burt Reynolds has become friends in the early 1960s, and Needham would end up living in Reynolds’ pool house for nearly a dozen years in the 60s and 70s. Reynolds would talk director Robert Aldrich into hiring Needham to be the 2nd unit director and stunt coordinator for the car chase scene Aldrich’s 1974 classic The Longest Yard, and Reynolds would hire Needham to be his 2nd Unit Director on his own 1976 directorial debut, Gator. While on the set of Gator, the two men would talk about the movie Needham wanted to make his own directorial debut on, a low-budget B movie about a cat and mouse chase between a bootlegger and a sheriff as they tried to outwit each other across several state lines.   As a friend, Reynolds would ask Needham to read the script. The “script” was a series of hand-written notes on a legal pad. He had come up with the idea during the making of Gator, when the Teamster transportation captain brought some Coors beer to the production team. And, believe it or not, in 1975, it was illegal to sell or transport Coors beer out of states West of the Mississippi River, because the beer was not pasteurized and needed constant refrigeration.   Reynolds would read the “script,” which, according to Reynolds’ 1994 autobiography My Life, was one of the worst things he had ever read. But Reynolds promised his friend that if he could get a studio involved and get a proper budget and script for the film, he would make it.   Needham would hire a series of writers to try and flesh out the notes from the legal pad into a coherent screenplay, and with a verbal commitment from Reynolds to star in it, he would soon get Universal Studios to to agree to make Smokey and the Bandit, to the tune of $5.3m. After all, Reynolds was still one of the biggest box office stars at the time, and $5.3m was small potatoes at the time, especially when Universal was spending $6.7m on the Super Bowl assassin thriller Two-Minute Warning, $9m on a bio-pic of General Douglas MacArthur, and $22m on William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, an English-language version of the 1950 French novel The Wages of Fear.   Reynolds would take the lead as The Bandit, the driver of the chase car meant to distract the authorities from what the truck driver is hauling.    Jerry Reed, a country and western star, would get cast as The Snowman, the truck driver who would be hauling the Coors beer from Texarkana TX to Atlanta. Reed has only co-starred in two movies before, both starring Burt Reynolds, and even if they have almost no scenes together in the final film, their rapport on screen is obvious.   Sally Field, a television star who needed a big movie on her resume, would take the role of Carrie, the runaway bride who joins the Bandit in his chase car. Field had just completed Sybil, the dramatic television movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder, which would break Field out of the sitcom world she had been stuck in for the past decade.   Richard Boone, the star of the long-time television Western Have Gun - Will Travel, would be considered as the sheriff, Buford T. Justice, in pursuit of the Bandit throughout the movie, but Reynolds wanted some who was a bit more crazy, a bit more dangerous, and a heck of a lot funnier. And who wouldn’t think of comedy legend Jackie Gleason?   Shooting on the film would begin in Georgia on August 30th, 1976, but not before some pencil pusher from Universal Studios showed up two days before the start of production to inform Needham and Reynolds that they needed to cut $1m from the budget by any means necessary. And the guys did exactly that, reducing the number of shooting locations and speaking roles.   The film would finish shooting eights weeks later, on schedule and on budget… well, on reduced budget, and when it was released in May 1977, just six days before the initial release of Star Wars, it bombed.   For some reason, Universal Studios decided the best way to open a movie about a bunch of good old boys in the South was to give it a big push at the world famous Radio City Music Hall in the heart of Manhattan, along with an hour long Rockets stage spectacular between shows.   The Radio City Music Hall could accommodate 6,000 people per show. Tickets for the whole shebang, movie and stage show, were $5, when the average ticket price in Manhattan at the time was $3.50. And in its first six days, Smokey and the Bandit grossed $125,000, which sounds amazing, until your told the cost of running Radio City Music Hall for a week, stage show and all, was $186,000. And in its second week, the gross would fall to $102,000, and to $90,000 in week three. And Universal would be locked in to Radio City for several more weeks.   But it wouldn’t all bad news.   Universal quickly realized its error in opening in New York first, and rushed to book the film into 381 theatres in the South, including 70 in the Charlotte region, 78 in and around Jacksonville, 97 theatres between Oklahoma City and Dallas, another 57 between Memphis and New Orleans, and 79 in Atlanta, near many of the locations the film was shot. And in its first seven days in just those five regions, the film would gross a cool $3.8m. Along with the $102k from Radio City, the film’s $3.9m gross would be the second highest in the nation, behind Star Wars. And despite bigger weekends from new openers like The Deep, The Exorcist II and A Bridge Too Far, Smokey and the Bandit would keep going and going and going, sticking around in theatres for more than two years in some areas, grossing more than $126m.   Naturally, there would be a sequel. But here’s the funny part. Smokey and the Bandit II, a Universal movie, would be shot back to back with Cannonball Run, produced by the Hong Kong film company Golden Harvest as a vehicle to break their star Jackie Chan into the American market, which would also star Burt Reynolds and be directed by Hal Needham.    Filming on Smokey and the Bandit II was supposed to start in August 1979, but would be delayed until January 1980, because the film Reynolds was working on in the late summer of 1979, Rough Cut, went way over schedule.   While the budget for the sequel would be $10m, more than double the cost of the original film, the overall production was not a very pleasant experience for most involved. Needham was feeling the pressure of trying to finish the film ahead of schedule so he’d have some kind of break before starting on Cannonball Run in May 1980, because several of the other actors, including Roger Moore, were already locked into other movies after shooting completed on that film.   Burt Reynolds and Sally Field had started dating during the making of Smokey and the Bandit in 1976, and both of them signed their contracts to appear in the sequel in 1979, but by the time shooting started in 1980, the pair had broken up, and they were forced to pretend to be in love and be side by side in the Bandit’s Trans Am for a couple months.   One of the few things that would go right on the film was a complex chase scene that could only be shot one time, for the end of the sequence would be the destruction of a 64 year old rollercoaster in suburban Atlanta.   They got the shot.   Needham would get a few weeks between the end of shooting Smokey and the Bandit II and the start of Cannonball Run, but the production on the latter film would be put on hold a couple times for a few days each, as Needham would have to go back to Los Angeles to supervise the editing of the former film.   Smokey and the Bandit II would make its planned August 15th, 1980 release, and would have a spectacular opening weekend, $10.8m from 1196 theatres, but would soon drop off, barely grossing half of the first film’s box office take. That would still be profitable, but Needham, Reynolds and Field all nixed the idea of teaming up for a third film. Reynolds had been wanting to distance himself from his good old boy 1970s persona, Field was now an Oscar winning dramatic actress, and Needham wanted to try something different. We’ll talk about that movie, Megaforce, another time.   But despite losing the interest of the main principles of the first two movies, Universal was still keen on making a third film. The first men

Welcome to the first episode of our sixth season, the first of three episodes to begin the new year before our two month hiatus. This episode, we do our first ever Listener Freebie, letting Lee Thompson, one of our biggest supporters in the United Kingdom, pick the movie we cover this episode. Lee chose the 1984 British television drama Threads, and we are proud to talk about this hidden gem.

For our final episode of 2023, the podcast takes a look back at the history of one of the best and most popular films of the decade, 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

On this week's episode, we talk about a movie that was buried by one of the major American distributors back in 1984, due to its similarity to a Clint Eastwood movie they were making at the time, and how it's finally going to get a second chance with viewers forty years later. Tony Garnett's Deep in the Heart.  

This week, we go back to the 1984 summer movie season, with one of the most forgotten movies of the decade, for good reason: Chattanooga Choo Choo, starring Barbara Eden, George Kennedy, Melissa Sue Anderson, Christopher McDonald, Joe Namath, and Joe Namath's 1969 Super Bowl III championship ring.

On this week's episode, we talk about a rarity amongst 80s movies, one that is an oldie, a goodie, an obscurity, and one of the best reviewed movies of all the years it was released. John Binder's 1980 debut, UFOria. Or is it 1984? Or 1985? 1986? Listen in and find out.

This week, we look back at another three films for whom their releases would be the only theatrical release for their respective distributors. It's Part 6 of our ongoing series, The Orphans. Would you like to know more? ----more---- This week's films are: Heartbreaker (1983, Frank Zuniga, from Monarex) Hells Angels Forever (1983, Leon Gast and and Kevin Keating and Richard Chase, RKR Releasing) Mother Lode (1982, Charlton Heston, Agamemnon Films)

On this episode, we’re going to do something we haven’t done in nearly a year and a half. Dedicate a show to films for whom their release was the only release ever done by a particular distributor. The Orphans. Since it’s very hard to do a full show on a distributor that only ever released one movie, I collect these orphans like a crazy cat person collects felines, and every so often unleash them grouped together so they can have their moment in the spotlight. Would you like to know more? ----more----  

This week, we spend a bit of our time on Motion Picture Marketing, the oddly named early 80s independent distributor who made their name repackaging European horror films from the 1970s with new titles and new graphics to make them feel new. This policy was so successful, so quickly for them, they could jump right into producing their own films within a year of their founding. Would you like to know more?

We finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we complete our look back at the 1980s theatrical releases for Miramax Films. And, for the final time, a reminder that we are not celebrating Bob and Harvey Weinstein, but reminiscing about the movies they had no involvement in making. We cannot talk about cinema in the 1980s without talking about Miramax, and I really wanted to get it out of the way, once and for all.   As we left Part 4, Miramax was on its way to winning its first Academy Award, Billie August’s Pelle the Conquerer, the Scandinavian film that would be second film in a row from Denmark that would win for Best Foreign Language Film.   In fact, the first two films Miramax would release in 1989, the Australian film Warm Night on a Slow Moving Train and the Anthony Perkins slasher film Edge of Sanity, would not arrive in theatres until the Friday after the Academy Awards ceremony that year, which was being held on the last Wednesday in March.   Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train stars Wendy Hughes, the talented Australian actress who, sadly, is best remembered today as Lt. Commander Nella Daren, one of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s few love interests, on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as Jenny, a prostitute working a weekend train to Sydney, who is seduced by a man on the train, unaware that he plans on tricking her to kill someone for him. Colin Friels, another great Aussie actor who unfortunately is best known for playing the corrupt head of Strack Industries in Sam Raimi’s Darkman, plays the unnamed man who will do anything to get what he wants.   Director Bob Ellis and his co-screenwriter Denny Lawrence came up with the idea for the film while they themselves were traveling on a weekend train to Sydney, with the idea that each client the call girl met on the train would represent some part of the Australian male.   Funding the $2.5m film was really simple… provided they cast Hughes in the lead role. Ellis and Lawrence weren’t against Hughes as an actress. Any film would be lucky to have her in the lead. They just felt she she didn’t have the right kind of sex appeal for this specific character.   Miramax would open the film in six theatres, including the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles and the Fashion Village 8 in Orlando, on March 31st. There were two versions of the movie prepared, one that ran 130 minutes and the other just 91. Miramax would go with the 91 minute version of the film for the American release, and most of the critics would note how clunky and confusing the film felt, although one critic for the Village Voice would have some kind words for Ms. Hughes’ performance.   Whether it was because moviegoers were too busy seeing the winners of the just announced Academy Awards, including Best Picture winner Rain Man, or because this weekend was also the opening weekend of the new Major League Baseball season, or just turned off by the reviews, attendance at the theatres playing Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train was as empty as a train dining car at three in the morning. The Beverly Center alone would account for a third of the movie’s opening weekend gross of $19,268. After a second weekend at the same six theatres pocketing just $14,382, this train stalled out, never to arrive at another station.   Their other March 31st release, Edge of Sanity, is notable for two things and only two things: it would be the first film Miramax would release under their genre specialty label, Millimeter Films, which would eventually evolve into Dimension Films in the next decade, and it would be the final feature film to star Anthony Perkins before his passing in 1992.   The film is yet another retelling of the classic 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, with the bonus story twist that Hyde was actually Jack the Ripper. As Jekyll, Perkins looks exactly as you’d expect a mid-fifties Norman Bates to look. As Hyde, Perkins is made to look like he’s a backup keyboardist for the first Nine Inch Nails tour. Head Like a Hole would have been an appropriate song for the end credits, had the song or Pretty Hate Machine been released by that time, with its lyrics about bowing down before the one you serve and getting what you deserve.   Edge of Sanity would open in Atlanta and Indianapolis on March 31st. And like so many other Miramax releases in the 1980s, they did not initially announce any grosses for the film. That is, until its fourth weekend of release, when the film’s theatre count had fallen to just six, down from the previous week’s previously unannounced 35, grossing just $9,832. Miramax would not release grosses for the film again, with a final total of just $102,219.   Now when I started this series, I said that none of the films Miramax released in the 1980s were made by Miramax, but this next film would become the closest they would get during the decade.   In July 1961, John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in the conservative government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when the married Profumo began a sexual relationship with a nineteen-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was very short-lived, either ending, depending on the source, in August 1961 or December 1961. Unbeknownst to Profumo, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior naval attache at the Soviet Embassy at the same time.   No one was the wiser on any of this until December 1962, when a shooting incident involving two other men Keeler had been involved with led the press to start looking into Keeler’s life. While it was never proven that his affair with Keeler was responsible for any breaches of national security, John Profumo was forced to resign from his position in June 1963, and the scandal would take down most of the Torie government with him. Prime Minister Macmillan would resign due to “health reasons” in October 1963, and the Labour Party would take control of the British government when the next elections were held in October 1964.   Scandal was originally planned in the mid-1980s as a three-part, five-hour miniseries by Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas and American music producer turned movie producer Joe Boyd. The BBC would commit to finance a two-part, three-hour miniseries,  until someone at the network found an old memo from the time of the Profumo scandal that forbade them from making any productions about it. Channel 4, which had been producing quality shows and movies for several years since their start in 1982, was approached, but rejected the series on the grounds of taste.   Palace Pictures, a British production company who had already produced three films for Neil Jordan including Mona Lisa, was willing to finance the script, provided it could be whittled down to a two hour movie. Originally budgeted at 3.2m British pounds, the costs would rise as they started the casting process.  John Hurt, twice Oscar-nominated for his roles in Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, would sign on to play Stephen Ward, a British osteopath who acted as Christine Keeler’s… well… pimp, for lack of a better word. Ian McKellen, a respected actor on British stages and screens but still years away from finding mainstream global success in the X-Men movies, would sign on to play John Profumo. Joanne Whaley, who had filmed the yet to be released at that time Willow with her soon to be husband Val Kilmer, would get her first starring role as Keeler, and Bridget Fonda, who was quickly making a name for herself in the film world after being featured in Aria, would play Mandy Rice-Davies, the best friend and co-worker of Keeler’s.   To save money, Palace Pictures would sign thirty-year-old Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones to direct, after seeing a short film he had made called The Riveter. But even with the neophyte feature filmmaker, Palace still needed about $2.35m to be able to fully finance the film. And they knew exactly who to go to.   Stephen Woolley, the co-founder of Palace Pictures and the main producer on the film, would fly from London to New York City to personally pitch Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Woolley felt that of all the independent distributors in America, they would be the ones most attracted to the sexual and controversial nature of the story. A day later, Woolley was back on a plane to London. The Weinsteins had agreed to purchase the American distribution rights to Scandal for $2.35m.   The film would spend two months shooting in the London area through the summer of 1988. Christine Keeler had no interest in the film, and refused to meet the now Joanne Whaley-Kilmer to talk about the affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies was more than happy to Bridget Fonda about her life, although the meetings between the two women were so secret, they would not come out until Woolley eulogized Rice-Davies after her 2014 death.   Although Harvey and Bob would be given co-executive producers on the film, Miramax was not a production company on the film. This, however, did not stop Harvey from flying to London multiple times, usually when he was made aware of some sexy scene that was going to shoot the following day, and try to insinuate himself into the film’s making. At one point, Woolley decided to take a weekend off from the production, and actually did put Harvey in charge. That weekend’s shoot would include a skinny-dipping scene featuring the Christine Keeler character, but when Whaley-Kilmer learned Harvey was going to be there, she told the director that she could not do the nudity in the scene. Her new husband was objecting to it, she told them. Harvey, not skipping a beat, found a lookalike for

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we finally continue with the next part of our look back at the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, specifically looking at 1988.   But before we get there, I must issue another mea culpa. In our episode on the 1987 movies from Miramax, I mentioned that a Kiefer Sutherland movie called Crazy Moon never played in another theatre after its disastrous one week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in December 1987.   I was wrong.   While doing research on this episode, I found one New York City playdate for the film, in early February 1988. It grossed a very dismal $3200 at the 545 seat Festival Theatre during its first weekend, and would be gone after seven days.   Sorry for the misinformation.   1988 would be a watershed year for the company, as one of the movies they acquired for distribution would change the course of documentary filmmaking as we knew it, and another would give a much beloved actor his first Academy Award nomination while giving the company its first Oscar win.   But before we get to those two movies, there’s a whole bunch of others to talk about first.   Of the twelve movies Miramax would release in 1988, only four were from America. The rest would be a from a mixture of mostly Anglo-Saxon countries like the UK, Canada, France and Sweden, although there would be one Spanish film in there.   Their first release of the new year, Le Grand Chemin, told the story of a timid nine-year-old boy from Paris who spends one summer vacation in a small town in Brittany. His mother has lodged the boy with her friend and her friend’s husband while Mom has another baby. The boy makes friends with a slightly older girl next door, and learns about life from her.   Richard Bohringer, who plays the friend’s husband, and Anémone, who plays the pregnant mother, both won Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, in their respective lead categories, and the film would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1987 by the National Board of Review. Miramax, who had picked up the film at Cannes several months earlier, waited until January 22nd, 1988, to release it in America, first at the Paris Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where it would gross a very impressive $41k in its first three days. In its second week, it would drop less than 25% of its opening weekend audience, bringing in another $31k. But shortly after that, the expected Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film did not come, and business on the film slowed to a trickle. But it kept chugging on, and by the time the film finished its run in early June, it had grossed $541k.   A week later, on January 29th, Miramax would open another French film, Light Years. An animated science fiction film written and directed by René Laloux, best known for directing the 1973 animated head trip film Fantastic Planet, Light Years was the story of an evil force from a thousand years in the future who begins to destroy an idyllic paradise where the citizens are in perfect harmony with nature.   In its first three days at two screens in Los Angeles and five screens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Light Years would gross a decent $48,665. Miramax would print a self-congratulating ad in that week’s Variety touting the film’s success, and thanking Isaac Asimov, who helped to write the English translation, and many of the actors who lent their vocal talents to the new dub, including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Grey, Christopher Plummer, and Penn and Teller. Yes, Teller speaks. The ad was a message to both the theatre operators and the major players in the industry. Miramax was here. Get used to it.   But that ad may have been a bit premature.   While the film would do well in major markets during its initial week in theatres, audience interest would drop outside of its opening week in big cities, and be practically non-existent in college towns and other smaller cities. Its final box office total would be just over $370k.   March 18th saw the release of a truly unique film.    Imagine a film directed by Robert Altman and Bruce Beresford and Jean-Luc Godard and Derek Jarman and Franc Roddam and Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell and Charles Sturridge and Julien Temple. Imagine a film that starred Beverly D’Angelo, Bridget Fonda in her first movie, Julie Hagerty, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Hurley and John Hurt and Theresa Russell and Tilda Swinton. Imagine a film that brought together ten of the most eclectic filmmakers in the world doing four to fourteen minute short films featuring the arias of some of the most famous and beloved operas ever written, often taken out of their original context and placed into strange new places. Like, for example, the aria for Verdi’s Rigoletto set at the kitschy Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, where a movie producer is cheating on his wife while she is in a nearby room with a hunky man who is not her husband. Imagine that there’s almost no dialogue in the film. Just the arias to set the moments.   That is Aria.   If you are unfamiliar with opera in general, and these arias specifically, that’s not a problem. When I saw the film at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Santa Cruz in June 1988, I knew some Wagner, some Puccini, and some Verdi, through other movies that used the music as punctuation for a scene. I think the first time I had heard Nessun Dorma was in The Killing Fields. Vesti La Giubba in The Untouchables. But this would be the first time I would hear these arias as they were meant to be performed, even if they were out of context within their original stories. Certainly, Wagner didn’t intend the aria from Tristan und Isolde to be used to highlight a suicide pact between a young couple killing themselves in a Las Vegas hotel bathroom.   Aria definitely split critics when it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, when it competed for the festival’s main prize, the Palme D’Or. Roger Ebert would call it the first MTV opera and felt the filmmakers were poking fun at their own styles, while Leonard Maltin felt most of the endeavor was a waste of time. In the review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin would also make a reference to MTV but not in a positive way, and would note the two best parts of the film were the photo montage that is seen over the end credits, and the clever licensing of Chuck Jones’s classic Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc, to play with the film, at least during its New York run. In the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper chose one of its music critics to review the film. They too would compare the film to MTV, but also to Fantasia, neither reference meant to be positive.   It’s easy to see what might have attracted Harvey Weinstein to acquire the film.   Nudity.   And lots of it.   Including from a 21 year old Hurley, and a 22 year old Fonda.   Open at the 420 seat Ridgemont Theatre in Seattle on March 18th, 1988, Aria would gross a respectable $10,600. It would be the second highest grossing theatre in the city, only behind The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which grossed $16,600 in its fifth week at the 850 seat Cinerama Theatre, which was and still is the single best theatre in Seattle. It would continue to do well in Seattle, but it would not open until April 15th in Los Angeles and May 20th in New York City.   But despite some decent notices and the presence of some big name directors, Aria would stiff at the box office, grossing just $1.03m after seven months in theatres.   As we discussed on our previous episode, there was a Dennis Hopper movie called Riders on the Storm that supposedly opened in November 1987, but didn’t. It did open in theatres in May of 1988, and now we’re here to talk about it.   Riders on the Storm would open in eleven theatres in the New York City area on May 7th, including three theatres in Manhattan. Since Miramax did not screen the film for critics before release, never a good sign, the first reviews wouldn’t show up until the following day, since the critics would actually have to go see the film with a regular audience. Vincent Canby’s review for the New York Times would arrive first, and surprisingly, he didn’t completely hate the film. But audiences didn’t care. In its first weekend in New York City, Riders on the Storm would gross an anemic $25k. The following Friday, Miramax would open the film at two theatres in Baltimore, four theatres in Fort Worth TX (but surprisingly none in Dallas), one theatre in Los Angeles and one theatre in Springfield OH, while continuing on only one screen in New York. No reported grosses from Fort Worth, LA or Springfield, but the New York theatre reported ticket sales of $3k for the weekend, a 57% drop from its previous week, while the two in Baltimore combined for $5k.   There would be more single playdates for a few months. Tampa the same week as New York. Atlanta, Charlotte, Des Moines and Memphis in late May. Cincinnati in late June. Boston, Calgary, Ottawa and Philadelphia in early July. Greenville SC in late August. Evansville IL, Ithaca NY and San Francisco in early September. Chicago in late September. It just kept popping up in random places for months, always a one week playdate before heading off to the next location. And in all that time, Miramax never reported grosses. What little numbers we do have is from the theatres that Variety was tracking, and those numbers totaled up to less than $30k.   Another mostly lost and forgotten Miramax release from 1988 is Caribe, a Canadian production that shot in Belize about an amateur illegal arms trader to Central American terrorists who must go on the run after a deal goes down bad, because who wants to see a Canadian movie about an amateur illegal arms trader to Ca

On this week's episode, we remember William Friedkin, who passed away this past Tuesday, looking back at one of his lesser known directing efforts, Rampage. ----more---- From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   Originally, this week was supposed to be the fourth episode of our continuing miniseries on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films. I was fully committed to making it so, but then the world learned that Academy Award-winning filmmaker William Friedkin passed away on Tuesday. I had already done an episode on his best movie from the decade, 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A., so I decided I would cover another film Friedkin made in the 80s that isn’t as talked about or as well known as The French Connection or The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A.   Rampage.   Now, some of you who do know the film might try and point that the film was released in 1992, by Miramax Films of all companies, and you’d be correct. However, I did say I was going to cover another film of his MADE in the 80s, which is also true when it comes to Rampage.   So let’s get to the story, shall we?   Born in Chicago in 1935, William Friedkin was inspired to become a filmmaker after seeing Citizen Kane as a young man, and by 1962, he was already directing television movies. He’d make his feature directing debut with Good Times in 1967, a fluffy Sonny and Cher comedy which finds Sonny Bono having only ten days to rewrite the screenplay for their first movie, because the script to the movie they agreed to was an absolute stinker. Which, ironically, is a fairly good assessment of the final film. The film, which was essentially a bigger budget version of their weekly variety television series shot mostly on location at an African-themed amusement park in Northern California and the couple’s home in Encino, was not well received by either critics or audiences.   But by the time Good Times came out, Friedkin was already working on his next movie, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. A comedy co-written by future television legend Norman Lear, Minsky’s featured Swedish actress Britt Ekland, better known at the time as the wife of Peter Sellers, as a naive young Amish woman who leaves the farm in Pennsylvania looking to become an actress in religious stage plays in New York City. Instead, she becomes a dancer in a burlesque show and essentially ends up inventing the strip tease. The all-star cast included Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman, Elliott Gould, Jack Burns, Bert Lahr, and Jason Robards, Jr., who was a late replacement for Alan Alda, who himself was a replacement for Tony Curtis.   Friedkin was dreaming big for this movie, and was able to convince New York City mayor John V. Lindsay to delay the demolition of an entire period authentic block of 26th Street between First and Second Avenue for two months for the production to use as a major shooting location. There would be one non-production related tragedy during the filming of the movie. The seventy-two year old Lahr, best known as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, would pass away in early December 1967, two weeks before production was completed, and with several scenes still left to shoot with him. Lear, who was also a producer on the film, would tell a reporter for the New York Times that they would still be able to shoot the rest of the film so that performance would remain virtually intact, and with the help of some pre-production test footage and a body double, along with a sound-alike to dub the lines they couldn’t get on set, Lahr’s performance would be one of the highlights of the final film.   Friedkin and editor Ralph Rosenblum would spend three months working on their first cut, as Friedkin was due to England in late March to begin production on his next film, The Birthday Party. Shortly after Friedkin was on the plane to fly overseas, Rosenblum would represent the film for a screening with the executives at United Artists, who would be distributing the film. The screening was a disaster, and Rosenblum would be given carte blanche by the studio heads to save the film by any means necessary, since Friedkin was not available to supervise. Rosenblum would completely restructure the film, including creating a prologue for the story that would be retimed and printed on black and white film stock. The next screening would go over much better with the suits, and a mid-December 1968 release date was set up.   The Birthday Party was an adaptation of a Harold Pinter play, and featured Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee. Friedkin had seen the play in San Francisco in 1962, and was able to get the film produced in part because he would only need six actors and a handful of locations to shoot, keeping the budget low. Although the mystery/thriller was a uniquely British story, Harold Pinter liked how Friedkin wanted to tell the story, and although Pinter had written a number of plays that had been adapted into movies and had adapted a number of books into screenplay, this would be the first time Pinter would adapt one of his own stories to the silver screen. To keep the budget lower still, Friedkin, Pinter and lead actor Robert Shaw agreed to take the minimum possible payments for their positions in exchange for part ownership in the film.   The release of Minsky’s was so delayed because of the prolonged editing process that The Birthday Party would actually in theatres nine days before Minsky’s, which would put Friedkin in the rare position of having two movies released in such a short time frame. And while Minsky’s performed better at the box office than Birthday Party, the latter film would set the director up financially with enough in the bank where he could concentrate working on projects he felt passionate about.   That first film after The Birthday Party would make William Friedkin a name director. His second one would make him an Oscar winner. The third, a legend. And the fourth would break him.   The first film, The Boys in the Band, was an adaptation of a controversial off-Broadway play about a straight man who accidentally shows up to a party for gay men. Matt Crowley, the author of the play, would adapt it to the screen, produce the film himself with author Dominick Dunne, and select Friedkin, who Crowley felt best understood the material, to direct. Crowley would only make one demand on his director, that all of the actors from the original off-Broadway production be cast in the movie in the same roles. Friedkin had no problem with that.   When the film was released in March 1970, Friedkin would get almost universally excellent notices from film critics, except for Pauline Kael in the New York Times, who had already built up a dislike of the director after just three films. But March 1970 was a different time, and a film not only about gay men but a relatively positive movie about gay men who had the same confusions and conflicts as straight men, was probably never going to be well-received by a nation that still couldn’t talk openly about non-hetero relationships. But the film would still do about $7m worth of ticket sales, not enough to become profitable for its distributor, but enough for the director to be in the conversation for bigger movies.   His next film was an adaptation of a 1969 book about two narcotics detectives in the New York City Police Department who went after a wealthy French businessman who was helping bring heroin into the States. William Friedkin and his cinematographer Owen Roizman would shoot The French Connection as if it were a documentary, giving the film a gritty realism rarely seen in movies even in the New Hollywood era. The film would be named the Best Picture of 1971 by the Academy, and Friedkin and lead actor Gene Hackman would also win Oscars in their respective categories. And the impact of The French Connection on cinema as a whole can never be understated. Akira Kurosawa would cite the film as one of his favorites, as would David Fincher and Brad Pitt, who bonded over the making of Seven because of Fincher’s conscious choice to use the film as a template for the making of his own film. Steven Spielberg said during the promotion of his 2005 film Munich that he studied The French Connection to prepare for his film.   And, of course, after The French Connection came The Exorcist, which would, at the time of its release in December 1973, become Warner Brothers’ highest grossing film ever, legitimize the horror genre to audiences worldwide, and score Friedkin his second straight Oscar nomination for Best Director, although this time he and the film would lose to George Roy Hill and The Sting.   In 1977, Sorcerer, Friedkin’s American remake of the 1953 French movie The Wages of Fear, was expected to be the big hit film of the summer. The film originally started as a little $2.5m budgeted film Friedkin would make while waiting for script revisions on his next major movie, called The Devil’s Triangle, were being completed. By the time he finished filming Sorcerer, which reteamed Friedkin with his French Connection star Roy Scheider, now hot thanks to his starring role in Jaws, this little film became one of the most expensive movies of the decade, with a final budget over $22m. And it would have the unfortunate timing of being released one week after a movie released by Twentieth Century-Fox, Star Wars, sucked all the air out of the theatrical exhibition season. It would take decades for audiences to discover Sorcerer, and for Friedkin, who had gone some kind of mad during the making of the film, to accept it to be the taut and exciting thriller it was.   William Friedkin was a broken man, and his next film, The Brinks Job, showed it. A comedy about the infamous 1950 Brinks heist in Boston, the film was originally supposed to be directed by John Frankenheimer, with Friedkin coming in to replace the iconic filmmaker only a few month