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Thirty years ago, Francois Truffaut's Day for Night took the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It was hardly the last film that spun the camera back on the moviemaking process itself. But in the years since, it's hard to find a movie that casts such an adoring eye on its own business. Slowly but surely, it seems, power, greed, and mental illness have infected the plot lines of this self-reflective cinematic genre. WNYC's Sara Fishko surveys the history of movies about movies.
Many have had the experience of going to see a movie that doesn't live up to the trailer created to sell it. By condensing a film so extremely and setting its highlights to music, trailers exaggerate a movie's drama, humor, and overall quality. But a recent contest invited editors to go a step further, and create a trailer that actually misrepresents a classic film. Bob talks to Kevin Halleran, who submitted the winning entry - a trailer that spins The Sound of Music as a horror film.
Six years ago, fresh from yet another disappointing visit to his local Blockbuster, Bob decided to take matters into his own hands. Armed with little more than an original treatment for a serious film set in the former Yugoslavia, Bob flew west. Here is the story of his mission to save the soul of Hollywood.
In late December, one of India's top filmmakers premiered his latest offering - "Line of Control." The four-and-a-half hour saga focuses on a 1999 conflict that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, and gives the events a decidedly pro-Indian spin. But as deep-rooted tensions between the two countries are replaced with peace talks, it appears that the timing of the biggest Bollywood war film ever could not have been worse. OTM's Miranda Kennedy reports.
Nineteen years after Robert Redford first staged his independent film festival in the mountains of Utah, the Sundance Festival is now a household name. The event has ushered many independent movies into theaters nationwide, and catapulted their makers to fame and fortune. But has Sundance's glitzy success obscured the event's original goals? Bob talks with Peter Biskind, author of "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film."
For those of us who don't make it out to Park City every January, the Sundance Festival is represented by the most popular films that emerge from its screens. But in the time between the lights coming up and going back down again, the attendees themselves get down to the real business of pitching scripts, making deals, and attending parties. Last year, our friend Cami Delavigne headed out to Sundance with a script in one hand, and a tape recorder in the other.
Before the talkies, there was Charlie. And despite the enormous technical innovations in cinema over the past century, Chaplin is hardly forgotten. This summer, fans were able to get their hands on digitally re-mastered versions of several Chaplin favorites, and more re-releases are just around the corner. The resurgence of interest in Chaplin led WNYC's Sara Fishko to ponder the peculiar timing of the original release of what is possibly the greatest Chaplin film, "Modern Times."
If you grew up in small-town America during the forties or fifties, there's a good chance that your first exposure to cinematic taboo came in the guise of the sex-hygiene film. And most exploitation aficionados will agree that "Mom & Dad" was the king of the genre. Exploitation historian Joe Bob Briggs describes the show as "part biology lesson, part sideshow, part morality play, part medical shock footage." He describes the phenomenon to Brooke.
