Vintage Sand

Vintage Sand listeners this month will get something of a twofer, a BOGO episode. Since we really have not had the chance to do a full necrology since July, Michael takes the time to relate the accomplishments of some very bright lights in the film business that have gone out over the past four months. These include artists who leave behind a great legacy and holes that can never really be filled, including people like Dame Maggie Smith, James Earl Jones and Alain Delon. Before we get to that point, though, we begin with a very different kind of eulogy: our reflections on Francis Ford Coppola’s summa, the egregious "Megalopolis". We felt, as we did for Scorsese in our episodes on both "The Irishman" and "Killers of the Flower Moon", that a sprawling work by one of our greatest filmmakers, in this case a film that had a gestation period of nearly fifty years, deserved to be examined both in its own right as a work of art and in context as part of its creator’s career. In hindsight, it’s risible to think that

Elegant. That was the adjective used by Team Vintage Sand’s own Michael Edmund to describe why the films of Joseph Losey are so important to him, and why he has been such a huge fan of Losey’s for nearly all of his film-going life. Losey’s was a name that seemed to keep popping up in a wide variety of contexts over the course of the podcast, so, after many delays, we are proud to present Episode 54—Director’s Cut: Joseph Losey. Losey’s is a unique career in the sense that it really was two distinct careers. After growing up in a life of privilege in Wisconsin (where he was a high school classmate of another pretty good director, Nicholas Ray) and an education at Harvard and Dartmouth, Losey made his way to Hollywood and directed a couple of interesting, low-budget films. Among these were the stilted but prescient "The Boy with Green Hair" (1948), and the rather senseless remake of Lang’s "M" (1951), the latter replete with awful soundtrack music and LA sunshine. One possible reason that Losey might have gotte

For the fourth time in the history of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand returns to one of its most popular formats, the Hidden Gems episode. As we did previously in episodes 11, 30, and 40, Michael, John and I each choose one film to discuss that we feel has been unjustly neglected and overlooked by the huddled masses yearning to see anything besides a prequel, sequel, spinoff or reboot. So please enjoy Episode 53, which features three films that could not be more different from one another. Michael takes us back to the 70’s and to a John Cassavetes film that was ignored and even despised upon its (very limited) initial release but has only gained in reputation and influence across the years. I focus on a very imperfect genre film, Neill Blomkamp’s second feature, 2013’s "Elysium" that, perhaps even more powerfully and viscerally than acknowledged masterworks like "The Social Network" and "Her", predicted a desperate future that we appear to be headed for much sooner than the filmmaker anticipated. Finally, John

The end of 1974 saw the implosion of the Director’s Company, founded just a year earlier by three of Hollywood’s hottest directors: Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin. Funded by Paramount, the idea was that within a certain budget, these directors would make whatever they wanted, have final cut on their work, and split the profits on each other’s films. Its rapid collapse, amid artistic failure and hubris and egged on by corporate intrigue, signaled the beginning of the end of what later came to be known as the Hollywood New Wave. A year later, the phenomenon that was "Jaws" recentered the narrative so that blockbuster weekend box office was everyone’s sole and explicit goal. This in turn led to the return of the money people to power, and they have barely relinquished any of that power in the ensuing half-century. It's not a coincidence that 1974 also saw "Hearts and Minds", one of the great antiwar films ever made in this country, win the Oscar for Best Feature-Length Documentary. The

Our Alternate Oscars episodes, based on Danny Peary’s fantastic 1992 book of the same name, have always been among our most popular. Over the course of the podcast, we’ve covered the 1930’s, 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and the 2000’s. Comparing what films actually won Best Picture to what we believe should have won is always a fun challenge, and it has given us a chance over the years to open or reopen some doors for our listeners to movies that are overlooked and forgotten. When we came to the 1950’s episode, in an (eerily prophetic) split decision, we chose to include only English-language works, since the sheer volume of brilliant films from around the world in that decade would overwhelm both us and you, dear listeners. As we approached the 1960’s for this episode, however, we reasoned that the relative lack of great American films from the decade suggested that this time around, we should open our tent to the entire world. We could not stand idly by, for instance while "A Man for All Seasons", lovely

Our Alternate Oscars episodes, based on Danny Peary’s fantastic 1992 book of the same name, have always been among our most popular. Over the course of the podcast, we’ve covered the 1930’s, 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and the 2000’s. Comparing what films actually won Best Picture to what we believe should have won is always a fun challenge, and it has given us a chance over the years to open or reopen some doors for our listeners to movies that are overlooked and forgotten. When we came to the 1950’s episode, in an (eerily prophetic) split decision, we chose to include only English-language works, since the sheer volume of brilliant films from around the world in that decade would overwhelm both us and you, dear listeners. As we approached the 1960’s for this episode, however, we reasoned that the relative lack of great American films from the decade suggested that this time around, we should open our tent to the entire world. We could not stand idly by, for instance while A Man for All Seasons, lovely t

It began six years ago, in the before time, with three film nerds who have been friends for four decades. Through the years, whenever we hung out together, we would inevitably end up talking for hours about film. So, we wondered aloud, why not make it official? Thus was born, in the spring of 2018, Vintage Sand, your film history podcast. One pandemic, one insurrection, a few erasures and rewritings of the film business and several hundred loyal listeners later, we thought it might be appropriate to commemorate our 50th episode by inviting friends and recording said episode live at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan. As you will hear, around 30 people came to support us, to hurl the occasional metaphorical tomato, and to remind us why we love doing this so much, as we recorded our roundup of 2023 in film in an episode we call “Of Bombs and Bombshells”. As with the last few years, this one was difficult to read. We applied our usual measure, wondering which of this year’s films, beyond “Barbie”, “Oppenheimer” a

When a director of Martin Scorsese’s stature releases a new movie, it’s time to drop everything else and discuss. When last we did this, with "The irishman", our thoughts on that film were mixed; it was a summation of some of the themes and ideas that have characterized Scorsese’s work, and it also contained certain thematic elements of his “spiritual” trilogy of "Last Temptation of Christ", "Kundun" and "Silence". Michael summed it up best when he characterized "The Irishman", and not in a disparaging way, as the film of an old man, an elegy for a passing time. And here we are, once again, with the director in his early 80’s, releasing a very different kind of 3 ½ hour epic that, in our view, not only feels like it could have been made by someone in his 30’s, but encompasses an ambition (both emotional and temporal/spatial) that Scorsese has never attempted before. So we present Episode 49, "Killers of the Flower Moon: It’s Just the Way This Is Going.” As we did with our study of "The Irishman", we di

As of our taping of this episode, Hollywood is still under the shadow of the labor problems which have arisen periodically since the beginnings of the industry. After all, remember that the formation of the Academy and the establishment of the Oscars were in many ways the studio moguls’ attempts to crush the burgeoning union movements. Periodically, since the unions were established, they have engaged in strikes, most memorably in 1960 when both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA struck to create a fair distribution of revenue from the then relatively-new medium of television. And every time in the ensuing years when the modes of distribution changed, from syndication to video tapes to DVD’s, these issues of equity have led to labor tensions across the board. With the double whammy of streaming and the technological possibilities of AI upon us, both the writers and the actors went on strike again earlier this year. The writers have settled, but the actors are still on the picket lines, and seem far away from a settlement.

Combine the fact that we are preparing for the run of episodes in the fall that will culminate in our 50th episode in November and that summer has kept the old gang apart for a couple of months, we could not in good conscience let go the passing of some figures both major and minor figures in the history of film whom we have lost since last we convened in May. Therefore, as kind of a bridge to what is to come, Episode 47 will function as an extended necrology, though we do begin with a detour into some of our favorite film moments of the summer. And an interesting summer it was! Let’s put it this way--it was more than Kenough. We will explore the lives of towering figures like Glenda Jackson and Alan Arkin, controversial figures like William Friedkin, and the less well-known as well. Come catch up with us, and for goodness’ sake, at least see "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" on a big screen before the summer is over…

It is one of the great wonders of American business that the same handful of companies have run the movies in Hollywood, almost since the beginning. After all, how many American industries of 2023 feature a power structure that would be familiar to someone from the late 1920’s? Yes, there were mergers then, like the ones that created MGM, Universal and Fox, and today there are yet more mergers, the challenges of adjusting to a streaming culture, and globalization. And yes, there is Dreamworks, but there’s still Paramount, and Columbia, and Universal, and Fox, and iterations of both MGM and UA, and of course the looming shadow of Disney. And while Warner Brothers is now part of Time Warner, which is part of Discovery (SO complicated), it’s still very much the powerful and influential studio that the eponymous brothers opened on April 4, 1923. After wars, depressions and recessions and other complete erasures and redrawings, those familiar logos that we and our grandparents saw as children remain. Therefore, s

2022 was definitely the everything bagel of movie years. No less an authority than Stephen Spielberg anointed Tom Cruise as the savior of movies this summer, which made sense given the success of "Top Gun: Maverick". Then came the fall, and excellent movies were released…and no one showed up. And even when they did, as with the $2.2 billion dollar gross accumulated by James Cameron’s "Dances with Smurfs Part Deux", the movies barely seemed to make a dent in the cultural landscape. It didn’t help that so many of our beloved directors released crappy movies: Aronofsky with the odious "The Whale", Russell with his how-could-it possibly-go-wrong-with-that-cast disaster "Amsterdam", Alex Garland with the puzzling (and not in an interesting way) "Men", Iñarritú inadvertently reminding us how brilliant both "Roma" and "8 ½" are with "Bardo", and the literal crapfest (elephant, in this case) that was "Babylon". Sometimes, it felt like 2022 was a living, breathing argument against the auteur theory. Yet there were

“Asa Nisi Masa:” 8 ½ at Sixty It is an intriguing coincidence that perhaps the two greatest films ever made about the creative breakthroughs and heartbreaks involved in making a film are both celebrating major anniversaries in 2023. First, Federico Fellini’s raucous, post-modern celebration of his own creative process, "8 ½" turns sixty. It’s important to note, though, that while we see no filmmaking in that film, the actual portrayal of the logistical and emotional vicissitudes of film creation are very much at the heart of François Truffaut’s much-beloved "Day for Night", which itself turns fifty this year. We will focus most of our time in this episode on Fellini’s film, taking our intrepid listeners on a tour that begins with an opening that stands as the most brilliant metaphor for creative blockage ever put on film, all the way through the end with the circus band playing Nino Rota’s indelible march as every character we’ve seen from the director’s past and present joins hands and dances in perhaps the

It is indeed the episode a decade in the making! Here, in Episode 43, Team Vintage Sand puts in its collective two cents on the newly released Sight and Sound decennial poll of the greatest films of all time. It is a list referred to by no less an authority than Roger Ebert as “the best damned film list of them all.” But this time, was it a “woke” poll, reflecting more our need for political correctness than a genuine and deep understanding of film history, as old-timers like Paul Schrader proclaimed? Or was it about damn time that the old white men gave up at least some of the strangle hold they’ve had on the poll since its inception in 1952, as many younger critics proclaimed? Does this new list signify that the battle lines have been drawn irrevocably between older and younger film people? As always, the truth is never that simple. Team Vintage Sand tries to approach the poll by avoiding either extreme, oversimplified position, reaching, as ever, for the complex and embracing the gray. Does Akerman’s "Jea

In Episode 42, Team Vintage Sand returns yet again to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternative Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture Academy Awards from the 1930’s, the 1950’s, the 1970’s, the 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we hop in the Way-Back Machine and travel to one of the most interesting periods in film history: the 1990’s. As best described in Peter Biskind’s must-read book "Down and Dirty Pictures", that decade began with the promise of an honest-to-goodness revival of independent films emerging from smaller companies, most notably Miramax. It was also marked by the rise of the Sundance Festival, a time long before that event became the completely corporatized show it is now. That period, from roughly 1989-1995, witnessed the arrival of such new voices as Steven Soderbergh, Richard, Linklater, Todd Haynes, Kevin Smith, Carl Franklin, John Dall and most notably Quentin Tarantino. But that fe

Team Vintage Sand returns to the airwaves with our October episode, a neat bookend to Episode 31 wherein we explored our favorite final films by great directors. Here we present Episode 41--Gala Premieres: Our Favorite First Films by Great Directors. To begin, we decided to establish some parameters to spare you, our tenacious audience, any pointless discussion.. The first is that we tried to avoid directors about whom we have already discoursed at great length in these pages. The second, what we termed the Julie Dash Rule, is that we would only focus on first films by directors who went on to long and predominantly successful careers in feature films. That’s why you won’t find movies like "Boys Don’t Cry"(Kim Pierce), "One False Move" (Carl Franklin), "Beasts of the Southern Wild" (Benh Zeitlin) or one-hit-wonders like Laughton’s "Night of the Hunter" or Loden’s "Wanda" here. Plus, we already did a full episode on one-hit wonders—that would be Episode 10. (The fact that the brilliant Dash has only been able

Don’t call it a comeback! After a long (for us)summer break estivating in all the world’s glamour spots, Team Vintage Sand returns with Episode 40, the third in our Hidden Gems series. Those of you playing along at home will recall that in Episodes 11 and 30, we each chose one film to discuss that we thought had been unjustly overlooked by time and the madding crowd. We promised/threatened to go down this path yet again and take you, loyal listeners, into some more dark and obscure corners of film history. So enjoy Episode 40, Hidden Gems Volume III, where John, Michael and Josh take a closer look at three very different films: a broad screwball heist film from the early 70's that should have been a huge hit; a quietly powerful and engrossing tale of a year in the life of a group of middle-aged friends, created by the man who is perhaps the greatest living director of actors; and a one-of-a kind, zero-budget film created by blacklisted creatives at the height of McCarthyism that is not only the greatest film

Episode 39 finds your intrepid Team Vintage Sand doing a deep dive into the work of one of our most promising young filmmakers, 2020 Best Director Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao. Although she has only done four feature films to this point, she has already established a distinctive painterly and brilliant visual style, and, as no less an authority than Frances McDormand put it, has shown herself able to successfully walk the line between sentiment and sentimentality. We take an auteurist approach to Zhao’s work by dividing her young career into two distinct parts. She began with two very low-budget films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, using non-actors essentially playing themselves. Notably, both were set in the unique and wonderful landscape of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a location that is becoming to Zhao what Monument Valley was to John Ford. Her Oscar winner, Nomadland, was a transitional work, featuring old pros McDormand and David Strathairn mixed in with non-ac

In a “New York Times” article published last month, Ross Douthat expounded on the provocative idea that the movies, as in studio films produced in Hollywood, were “over.” He was not arguing that Hollywood would ever stop producing movies for the big screen, nor that the notion of seeing a movie in a dark theater with strangers all around would ever completely disappear. Instead, he was saying that The Movies, the heart of American popular culture for over a century, has now become just another source of content in a world of seemingly endless content. He attributes this to the rise of streaming and the improved quality of what we can see on our screens at home, to a globalized market that rewards the exploitation of familiar properties over anything that might be truly innovative, and, to be fair, the expense and sheer unpleasantness of taking one’s family to see a movie in an actual theater. And since most of what was on offer in the big theaters was Marvel/DC multiverse epics, other tentpole/franchise films

In a first for the ever-intrepid Team Vintage Sand, we devote an entire episode to the exploration of the history of a single genre. Thus we present Episode 37: A Pocket History of the Hollywood Musical. From its clunky beginnings at the dawn of sound through the unexpected brilliance of Spielberg’s "West Side Story" remake last year, we take a deep dive into this most deliberately artificial (and therefore most polarizing) of all film genres. Rather than going decade by decade, we divided this history into six “movements” that provide a lens to view the rise, steep decline and startling rebirth of the musical over the last century. After a brief mention of such important early works as the Best Picture-winning "Broadway Melody of 1929" and King Vidor’s first foray into sound, the daring and dazzling (if problematic for contemporary audiences) "Hallelujah!"(1929), the movements we lay out are as follows: I. The Warner Brothers musicals of the pre-Code 1930’s, which confronted head-on the difficulties of life