The Margos are ready to hit the beach with this episode devoted to surfing in Hawaii. In 1998 Susan Orlean penned Life’s Swell in Outside magazine talked about a group of Maui girls who loved to surf and dealt with poverty and sexism to enjoy their passion.  That’s pretty much the whole story and in the early 2000s, dozens of magazine articles were turned into movies which is what happened here.

If memory serves, this is the first movie the Margos are covering that stars action star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This time we are visiting Mars and it is nothing like David Bowie would have enjoyed. 1990’s Total Recall (directed by Paul Verhoeven) is based on the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by prolific writer Philip K. Dick.

The Margos are heading back to NYC in the gritty 1970s talking about the New York magazine article The Return of Superfly by Mark Jacobson which appeared in their August 14, 2000 issue and was immediately bought as a film property for Imagine Entertainment/Universal Pictures. It took seven years and went through many different hands before Ridley Scott filmed the 2007 movie starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.

The Margos are ready to rock out in cowboy boots after reading the Aaron Latham Esquire magazine article “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America’s Search for True Grit” from 1978. He also wrote the “Perfect” article from Rolling Stone which became another John Travolta film. (Travolta is our movie lead here.)

The Margos are ready to talk about “magical realism” in Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel (that later became the 1992 movie of the same name) Like Water for Chocolate. This may sound familiar to long time fans but we originally recorded this topic five years ago and the quality of that show--left much to be desired.

The Margos are heading back to the 50s (well, really the 20s if you want to be technical about it!) Gentleman Prefer Blondes was first published in 1925 by Anita Loos in Harper’s Bazaar magazine as a serial. The movie was directed by Howard Hawkes and stars Jane Russell as Dorothy and Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei.

The Margos are suffering from a case of “Night Fever” and the only sure is taking a deep dive into one of the most successful films of the 1970s--Saturday Night Fever. The film was directed by John Badham and stars John Travolta in his first Academy-Award nominated performance as an actor. 

The idea for the film comes from an article from New York magazine in 1976 “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night” by reporter Nik Cohn.

We are heading back to the Film Noir well with writer James M. Cain and the classic novella & later movie Double Indemnity.  The Margos talk about the life of Mr. Cain (who also wrote Mildred Pierce) and find out the true story behind his fictional account of two lovers trying to get away with the perfect murder.

The Margos attempt to decipher one of the most lauded (and examined) films of the 20th century--2001: A Space Odyssey that is the combined effort of two geniuses--Arthur C. Clarke and Stanely Kubrick. The film released in 1968 and the 1951 short story (titled The Sentinel) have been a subject of thousands of thesis papers and movie nerd YouTube tutorials, but what does it all mean?

Who wants to live forever? Is it better to have an average lifespan filled with love or an eternity of new adventures? The 1975 children’s book Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt and features the Tuck family who drinks the spring water from rural Treegap and now lives a life that will never end.