9/30/2007
Blooper: Casual Gamers
Five bloopers left, including this one. This is from Episode 49.
9/25/2007
All Movie Talk, Episode 52
Show contents, with start times:
- Director Spotlight: Jacques Tati (2:00)
- Trivia Question: Sequential Madness (15:24)
- Film Style Spotlight: Modern Westerns (16:28)
- Series Spotlight: Inspector Clouseau (33:01)
- Top 6: Movies About Theater Or Television (52:46)
- How To: Be the Underdog (76:31)
- Closing: Trivia Answer, Farewell (87:03)
Press the Play button below to listen to the podcast, or the Download link to save it. Here’s how you can download new episodes automatically.
9/25/2007
Top 6: Movies About Theater Or Television
Back in Episode 6, we talked about movies about movies, how the movies see themselves. Here in Episode 52, we construct a similar Top 6 list — Movies About Theater Or Television — for a look at how the movies view their primary competition in the arena of narrative entertainment. Curiously, often movies about theater and television are as revealing about Hollywood as the ostensible subject.
What are your favorites movies about theater or television?
As always, we recommend listening to the episode before reading further.
9/20/2007
Vintage: Ballyhoo, Part 9
In the 1920s, advertising was crazier and less restrained. Nothing was out of the question. Everything was worth a shot. In previous weeks in this series, we’ve examined many real advertising stunts pulled during the 1920s to advertise movies, including going so far as to hire the police to pull people over and hand out movie tickets. Here’s another batch of advertising stunts, collected and printed in The Film Daily Yearbook, an almanac of sorts for theater owners and others in the film industry.
9/18/2007
All Movie Talk, Episode 51
Show contents, with start times:
- Film Style Spotlight: Classic Westerns (2:49)
- Trivia Question: The Terror of Tiny Town (18:42)
- Film Buff’s Dictionary: Cinematographer / Director of Photography (19:14)
- Top 6: Performances By Directors (24:46)
- Director Spotlight: Howard Hawks (49:57)
- Closing: Trivia Answer, Preview of Next Week (66:14)
Press the Play button below to listen to the podcast, or the Download link to save it. Here’s how you can download new episodes automatically.
9/18/2007
Top 6: Performances By Directors
For Episode 51’s Top 6 segment, we’re picking our favorite acting performances by directors. We have a caveat and a caveat to the caveat. We didn’t allow ourselves to pick performances by directors who are also actors (e.g., Robert Redford), unless they were directing themselves. Whether a director is directing his own performance, or he’s not normally an actor anyway, it’s interesting to see a director put himself up there on the screen and work on the other side of the camera.
What are your favorite performances by directors?
As always, we recommend listening to the episode before reading further.
9/14/2007
All Movie Talk, Episode 1: Unspecial Edition
Here’s a special bonus, in lieu of the usual weekend bloopers, in honor of our 50th episode. Before we started recording in earnest, we planned a slate of trial segments for a pilot episode, to see how the recording and editing processes would go. We didn’t know if we’d air them or not. Stephen was thinking we wouldn’t, but I didn’t want to waste all that effort. The problem was that the recording quality was pretty bad, and, worse, the way we recorded it was with both of us on a single audio track, which meant our voices couldn’t be edited independently of each other. We decided we’d air the episode but find a better means of recording ourselves for further shows — and the intro and closing for the pilot, in which we apologized for the audio quality.
But as we continued to record material, the poor audio quality of the pilot kept bothering us, and eventually we decided to rerecord all of the segments. So we did. We reused the intro and closing (except for the parts where we apologized for the sound), but the Episode 1 you know and love has rerecorded segments. We lost some of the spontaneity of the initial recording but gained sound quality.
Well here, for the first time, is the original pilot episode, our very first attempt at recording material for the podcast, and it’s interesting to see what’s changed over 50 episodes. I’ve gotten better at improvising content, I think, and better at sounding like I’m improvising when I’m actually reading.
Show contents, with start times:
- Director Spotlight: Christopher Nolan (1:40)
- Trivia Question: Franchise With Future Stars (15:56)
- Industry Trend: Cliffhangers (17:17)
- Top 6: Romantic Movies That Aren’t Sappy (29:25)
- DVD Preview: October 2006 (43:54)
- Closing: Trivia Answer, Preview of Next Week (54:53)
There are three big content differences between this pilot and the official Episode 1. One, Stephen’s Top 6 list is different. On rerecording the segment, he swapped out one of his original picks for a new one. Two, I made a joke during the Top 6 recap that I forgot to replicate the second time around. Three…yeah, what’s with those bumpers? For a long time, we weren’t sure what kind of sound we should use to separate segments from each other. Eventually, of course, we settled on just running the projector sound for a couple seconds, but originally it was a more laborious affair. I had some music composition software, and I don’t know a thing about music, but I thought it would be fun to throw some percussion sound effects around in a MIDI. I came up with a few different ones, set them to the projector sound, and asked Stephen what he thought. He didn’t like them, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t either. I liked playing around with it, but the end result didn’t really “fit.” So out the percussion went.
Anyway, here we are near the end of our podcast. We hope you enjoy this excursion back to its beginning.
9/13/2007
Vintage: Old Timey Advertising
This week’s Vintage post is a fun one. Here’s a treasure trove of assorted advertising for things that don’t even exist today, outside of museums, antique stores, and attics that haven’t been cleaned in 80 years.
9/11/2007
All Movie Talk, Episode 50
Show contents, with start times:
- Film Buff’s Dictionary: Weird Movie Jobs: Gaffer, Grip, Best Boy, Script Girl (2:05)
- Trivia Question: My Darling Clementine (7:29)
- Fact Or Fiction: The Idiosyncrasies of Fame (8:45)
- Top 6: Movie Trailers (15:31)
- Director Spotlight: Preston Sturges (40:13)
- Closing: Trivia Answer, Preview of Next Week (62:13)
Press the Play button below to listen to the podcast, or the Download link to save it. Here’s how you can download new episodes automatically.
