Full Cast And Crew

'Caddyshack', it turns out, is kind of a miracle of last-minute producer-led stitching together and salvaging, resulting in one of the more quotable films in comedy history.  

Hard to believe that at the time, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Rodney Dangerfield were not yet the massive film stars they'd become as a result of this movie.  

This episode delves into the coke-fueled nonstop party that was this film's production, a product...

An episode in memoriam of Val Kilmer, who died this week.

Mentioned in this episode:

'Val', the excellent, moving, insightful, thoughtful documentary compiled from decades of Val Kilmer's home movies.

'Tombstone' is many people's favorite Kilmer film.

'Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's The Island of Dr. Moreau' is a fantastic making-of-a-trainwreck documentary about one of the most hilariously troubled film sets in...

Don Simpson was one-half of one of the most successful production partnerships in Hollywood history. His reality-distortion-field helped bring about films like Flashdance, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, The Rock, Crimson Tide, and Days of Thunder, films that collectively grossed more than $3 billion dollars.

Don Simpson's life is a cautionary tale with an ignominious ending forever ensconced in Hollywood history. His appetite for drug...

George Roy Hill's 1973 masterpiece 'The Sting' (released December 1974) grossed in 1974 what would be over 900 million dollars today.

It's a deceptively simple, stealthily subversive and counter-cultural film wrapped in the meticulous trappings of a 1930's Warner Bros gangster picture, and re-teaming Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid with that film's director.

In this episode: How Peter Boyle, Jack Nicholson, Richard Boone, and Warr...

In Hollywood, the story beats of werewolf movies were codified in 1941 by a German-Jewish emigrant to Hollywood via London named Curt Siodmak, who wrote the seminal film 'The Wolf Man', starring Lon Chaney, Jr.

40 years later, John Landis made the most important and enduring and influential werewolf film ever made in 'An American Werewolf in London'. It was his follow-up to the one-two punch of 'Animal House' and 'The Blues Brother...

Sparse. Laconic. Expansive. Languid. Wry.

The Coen Brother's 2007 Neo-Noir Western 'No Country For Old Men' moves to the fatefully ticking beat of it's own Grandfather Clock. 

It's a film that rewards close viewing and is astoundingly faithful to Cormac McCarthy's novel while also being so completely a "Coen Brothers film" even as it's their (only?) adaptation of an existing book.

Featuring an iconic performance by Javier Bardem as...

'Liquid Sky' was a $500,000 largely experimental film by the Russian expat director Slava Tsukerman that sprung from a group of friends and colleagues surrounding School of Visual Arts acting teacher Bob Brady.  What's it about?  Heroin, Cocaine, Aliens, Art, Fashion, Dancing, Nightclubs, Science, Sex, Lesbian Knife Fights, Androgyny, Shrimp, Berlin...and that's just the first 45 minutes.  Much more than just a so-bad-it's-good b-m...

'Raising Arizona' was the 2nd film written and directed by The Coen Brothers, and it's one of my most foundational movies; a movie that spoke to who I was at 18, when I first saw it in 1987 and continues to be one of my favorites today.

In this episode I revisit the film, tell some anecdotes about the making-of, and revel in the wonderful, nuanced performances, Carter Burwell's brilliantly distinctive and pitch-perfect score, and m...

The Full Cast and Crew MartyVerse run continues with the first of Scorcese's unofficial trilogy of gangster films, 'Mean Streets'.

In this episode: Marty's Little Italy, Family, High School, NYU, Los Angeles, and early directorial experiences and how they influence and inspired 'Mean Streets'.

How 'Mean Streets' was very nearly a blaxploitation film funded by Roger Corman. 

John Cassavetes seeing 'Boxcar Bertha', an exploitation fi...

In part 3 of my three-episode take on Martin Scorcese and Nicholas Pileggi's masterpiece 'Goodfellas', we pick the film up just after the halfway point, which is Tommy's killing of Spider.  Test audiences and studio executives were completely discombobulated by the loss they felt of the breezy, funny, enjoyable glamorization of the gangster life that the first half of the film represents.  And the descent into depraved, violent mad...