Phi Phenomenon

It’s obviously not just the film industry that’s having trouble during the pandemic; the music industry’s working bands have found their main revenue stream of touring currently not an option for this last year. On this episode is Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury of the Austin, TX band Sun June, who, between their dreamy “regret pop” and self-directed videos, have a foot in both industries. Here we discuss:

- these two Bay Area concert docs of the late ’60s;
- Janis Joplin and Otis Redding’s iconic performances in the former;
- the snuff film aspects of the latter;
- the forced-mythologized bookending of both;
- their cameramen directors D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Bros;
- and other contributors such as Shelter’s co-director and -editor Charlotte Zwerin.

Also:

- How Sun June literally started out in an editing room;
- what their working band entails now with members across multiple cities;
- rock critic Robert Christgau’s clear-eyed essay “Anatomy of a Love Festival”;
- what Albert Maysles told me when I interviewed him in 2000;
- how wildly different the industry was financially between now and 1967;
- and what techniques these docs can have for a modern band making their own videos and controlling their own image.

Colwell, along with being lead singer and keyboard player for Sun June, works in the film industry and has edited features and docs, including Also Starring Austin, about the city’s history on film. Salisbury, Sun June’s guitarist, also worked in the film industry on films such as Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and the doc Becoming Leslie. He is currently in the graduate program studying microbiology at the University of North Carolina. They both also write songs for the band.

Sun June’s sophomore album, Somewhere, was just released via Run For Cover and Keeled Scales. You can find out more at the band’s website, such as where to stream live performances and, when bands can do so again, tour dates. Checking out their videos page is also highly recommended, too.

Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter are both, respectively, streaming on HBO Max and both, respectively, physically on the Criterion Collection.

Crossover episode! Joining this episode are AJ Gonzalez and Bryan Connolly, hosts of The Directors’ Wall podcast, currently going through the filmography of Francis Ford Coppola, to discuss the second half of the filmmaker’s Oklahoma-shot S.E. Hinton adaptations. On this episode we talk:

- this “art-house film for teenagers” (that teenagers sadly rejected);
- its dream-like black-and-white images;
- its young man’s inventive energy;
- why French filmmaker Chris Marker didn’t even last a week as the film’s 2nd Unit Director;
- the influence of Koyaanisqatsi on the film;
- and how it’s a film about time in the past, present, and future.

Also:

- Nicolas Cage’s speaking-part film debut;
- Mickey Rourke’s whispering Camus-influenced performance;
- the film’s musically balletic gang fight set piece;
- its Touch of Evil vibe;
- the push-pull in Coppola’s career between bombastic epics and intimate character studies;
- and his commitment to be experimental in both modes.

Along with co-hosting The Directors’ Wall podcast, Gonzalez writes about film, alongside his wife (and past guest-host) Lani, on their blog Cinema Then and Now.

Connolly, along with co-hosting The Directors’ Wall podcast, also co-hosts The World is Wrong podcast, which positively celebrates movies the world is wrong about, with Andras Jones. A filmmaker, painter and author living in Austin, TX, Connolly also co-wrote Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks On Film and numerous shows for Adult Swim.

Rumble Fish is available to rent VOD and on Blu-ray from Criterion.

Filmmaker Kyle Smith is back, along with first-time guest co-host and old friend of the show (and me), writer and performer Dustin Levell, to pick and talk one of Saturday Night Live’s founding filmmakers, Tom Schiller, his lone feature film, and its bizarre underground relegation. On this episode, we also discuss:

- Schiller’s self-description as a “foreign” director;
- how out of place this style is from SNL’s current formatted format;
- why SNL films are less about format than characters;
- and how truly amazing it is that a movie with these stars and filmmakers was shelved at the height of the comedy boom that SNL helped create.

Also:

- If this is or isn’t Lorne Michaels first produced narrative feature;
- is or isn’t the first “SNL movie”;
- what its failure to even secure a release might have done to Michaels other produced films;
- the relationship between him and Schiller;
- the filmmakers from Adam McKay to Christopher Guest that have sprung from SNL ranks;
- and outsiders who’ve made short films for the show such as Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Breast, and Jim Jarmusch.

Kyle Smith is writer/director of the films Blue Highway and Turkey Bowl, which debuted at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. Currently in development on his third feature, you can find Kyle and his film thoughts on Letterboxd.

Dustin Levell is a Chicago-based comedy writer, performer, and stage director.

Nothing Lasts Forever made its television premiere on Turner Classic Movies, which means it will hopefully air again in the future. Bootlegs are also available for purchase.

How does one follow-up creating, showrunning, and sticking the landing to The Sopranos, the cultural phenomenon, often thought to be the greatest television show ever, and arguably the spark for our current era of Peak TV? By writing and directing a first feature, an autobiographical coming of age story about a ‘60s band that never made it, and then watching the movie largely… fade away (sorry, had to do it). Ted is back this week to discuss David Chase’s 2012 film:

- why it’s been largely ignored by critics;
- whether its rich period detail is evocative or a nostalgic indulgence;
- and Chase’s sensibility that mixes auteurist precision with a Raymond Carver-like sense of poetic digression.

Also:

- How Chase shares that sensibility with former Sopranos writer and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner;
- how Weiner’s Mad Men follow-up first feature Are You Here is the out-of-character misfire that many assume Not Fade Away is;
- why the film has more empathy than the entirety of The Sopranos;
- Ted’s favorite Beatles song;
- and, in a world where you’re either a Beatles or Stones person, how two Beatles people can want a movie clearly made by a Stones guy to have its day in the sun.

Not Fade Away is not available to stream, but is available to rent on VOD.

Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page.

As movie theaters across the country are about to go through another metamorphosis point after having been largely empty this last year, now seems as good a time as any to revisit the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama about three workers at a single-screen movie theater in New England. On this episode I’m joined by journalist and former guest, Tyler Coates, and actor Eric Gilde, to talk about:

- the play;
- Baker’s career;
- her collaboration with director Sam Gold;
- and her creative usages of prosceniums, pauses, and Georges Delurue music.

Also:

How the French New Wave and her Criterion top 10 list informs the play;
- her only produced film/television work on one episode of Amazon’s I Love Dick;
- speculation about what a film she writes and directs might be like;
- and how much the play nails about working in a movie theater during the film to digital transition.

Tyler Coates is currently writing for the Hollywood Reporter, while past work has appeared in The Awl, Brooklyn Magazine, Esquire, GOOD, Gothamist, Nylon, Out, Town & Country, and the Village Voice. He interviewed Baker in 2013 about The Flick for BlackBook Magazine and also reviewed her play John for Slate.

Eric Gilde is a New York-based actor, playwright, and podcaster. He co-hosts the Take Me In to the Ballgame podcast with his wife, actor and baseball commentator Ellen Adair.

The Flick is available to read or perform from Samuel French, Inc.

After Tom Shone convinced Christopher Nolan to participate for the first time in a book about the filmmaker’s career, the writer/director warned Shone that he is “the most visible reclusive director in America.” The result of their collaboration is subtitled The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan, a book that is one part biography, filmography analysis, interview, digressive essay on influences, and, now, the definitive book on the filmmaker’s career. On today’s episode we talk:

- how the book shaped itself around an exploration of Nolan’s influences from Jorge Luis Borges or Raymond Chandler;
- Nolan’s conceptually effective musical usage of theories like the Shepard Tone;
- his experimental sound mixes;
- and their punk rock embrace and dismissal of left-brain concepts like plot-based dialogue.

Also:

- How Shone realized his book was going to encompass Nolan’s latest despite the filmmaker’s secrecy;
- the tenuousness of many studio filmmakers’ commercial/critical streak, their downfalls;
- how Nolan has maintained a consistency by proving concepts;
- and if his recent film Tenet, on that basis, is indeed the filmmaker apotheosis — or his Waterloo.

Shone is film critic for The Sunday Times and author of five books, including Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer and Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, The Economist, and Vogue.

The Nolan Variations is published by Penguin Random House and is available at online and brick-and-mortar booksellers.

It’s been a year-end tradition that me, Aaron Smith, and Ted Haycraft usually meet sometime after Christmas but before New Years at an IHOP or Denny’s, recap the year among friends, and eventually get into an argument as to whether Richard Lester is the father of the music video. It happens. Every year. This year, we’ve migrated away from in-person dining to the podcast episode, where the three of us talk the incompleteness of a 2020 top ten list, the general foolishness of making one in a small market before the following year’s Oscar ceremony, and whether or not any Covid cases have been traced to American movies theaters. Also: 2020’s mediocre movies with recommendable elements like The Photograph or Let Him Go, 2020 critical punching bags that might get reassessed like Wild Mountain Thyme or Hillbilly Elegy, and what debased movies we’re putting on our private theater rental double-features after the Christmas films.

Smith is the lead manager at Showplace Cinemas East in Evansville, IN.

Haycraft is film critic for WFIE-14 and co-hosts Cinema Chat on its Midday show. He can also be found on Cinema Chat’s Facebook page.

Is this 1999 film ripe for a fresh debate, much like Die Hard, on its merits as a Christmas movie? Not really, but filmmaker Kyle Smith is back this week, joined by film editor Rehman Nizar Ali to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s final film. On today’s episode we discuss how the movie changes in viewings throughout the years based on the maturity of ones own romantic relationships, what early iterative casting ideas like Steve Martin or Woody Allen would have been like, if the cinemageography of the production design leaves the film open to a Room 237 interpretation, and Shane’s obsessive love/hate for screenwriter Frederic Raphael’s memoir of writing the film, Eyes Wide Open. Also: Whether Kubrick had a specific body-type for model/extras, how the real-world analogues of Terry Southern’s novel Blue Movie relate, speculation on what the co-writer/director might have cut from the film had he survived until its theatrical release, and whether or not the Illuminati covertly murdered Kubrick for revealing the real-world secrets of their sex orgies on film.

Smith is writer/director of the films Blue Highway and Turkey Bowl, which debuted at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. Currently in development on his third feature, you can find Kyle and his film thoughts on Letterboxd.

Ali is co-editor of recent films for Terrence Malick including A Hidden Life, Song to Song, and Voyage of Time. Other works include commercials for Facebook, Google, Guerlain, and the recent concert film, All in Washington: A Concert for COVID-19 Relief. You can also find him at his website.

Eyes Wide Shut is currently streaming on Hulu.

It’s rare for a band’s tour documentary to appeal beyond its fanbase. But with Grant Gee’s documentary Meeting People is Easy, it’s even more of a miracle to come near the artistic breadth of Radiohead’s OK Computer, an album which has been periodically voted the greatest of all time since its release in 1997. On today’s episode we talk how Gee managed to sustain the heightened style of a music video through the feature’s length, using overlapping images, an emphasis on lyricism, non-sync sound, all trying to mimic not just the band’s sound, but also the visual style of Thom Yorke and designer Stanley Donwood. Also: how Gee originally was called in for the original idea to make a video for each of OK Computer’s songs, the thought process of putting then-unreleased songs snippets into the cut, the “amazing” unused Kid A footage he shot that was just “wrong,” writer Patricia Lockwood’s thoughtful description a moment in the film, and matching the album’s particular innovation of mixing digital and analogue with his own multiple visual formats like Super 8mm, 16mm Bolex, and B&W digital video.

Along with Meeting People is Easy, Gee has also directed the documentary Joy Division, music videos for Radiohead, Blur, Spooky, and worked with acts ranging from Coldplay, Nick Cave, and Scott Walker. He’s currently at work on the documentary The Gold Machine about Welsh writer Iain Sinclair, the third in his trilogy of feature cityscapes about writers.

Meeting People is Easy is streaming for free online at Radiohead’s Public Library and is also available on PAL VHS from the W.A.S.T.E. HQ.

Filmmaker Kyle Smith joins this week to discuss Mike Leigh, the playwright-turned-Palme d’Or-winning writer/director, his 1999 film about Gilbert, Sullivan, and the first production of The Mikado. On this episode we discuss the movie Roger Ebert called “One of the best films ever made about life in the theater,” Leigh’s lengthy rehearsal and improvisation process to write the films, how that gives the light effortless feel of “life happening,” and that influence on Smith’s filmmaking. Also: How a plotless near-three-hour movie can be so rewatchable, Leigh’s early work of filmed plays for the BBC, and how this film in conjunction with Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns gives a macro view of Gilbert & Sullivan’s legacy in human storytelling.

Kyle Smith is writer/director of the films Blue Highway and Turkey Bowl, which debuted at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. Currently in development on his third feature, you can find Kyle and his film thoughts on Letterboxd.

Topsy-Turvy is available in physical media from the Criterion Collection and also to digitally borrow on Hoopla.