Altmania

Bonjour, folks - it's a new episode of ALTMANIA coming at you. We're talking about a documentary that Jonathan Demme made for the PBS, a portrait of a nation in constant renewal and on the brink of their first elections — it's HAITI: DREAMS OF DEMOCRACY. We talk about Jonathan Demme falling in love with this place and its people, how he learned more about Haiti through artists and music, what set...

We've sat down at our little tables, taken out our Ronald McDonald notebooks, and prepared a fantastic spoken word piece (aka podcast) for all of you. Joined by returning friend Jane Altoids from Pacino Pod, we get into Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme's masterpiece, SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA. We talk about Gray's modern conversational nature, go over his life and it's tragic end, his frank way of spea...

Nobody move, nobody get hurt, just sit down and listen to a new episode of ALTMANIA. Joined by writer and a regular on the show, Peter Raleigh, we dive into one of Jonathan Demme's MOST "Jonathan Demme" movies ever, SOMETHING WILD. We talked scary Ray Liotta, how he landed this role, all of the production and improvisation that shaped the film into what it is and helped it find it's central idea,...

It's our 100th episode of the show, we've got on some big suits, we're flopping around on the ground, and we're screaming nonsense about James Brown. We talk about Jonathan Demme's documentary debut (sort of his first film, if you think about it) STOP MAKING SENSE, the live performance film from Talking Heads. We draw some oblique strategy cards, get into the band's history, Chris Frantz' bizarre...

Well, isn't that something...here we promised a 100th episode celebration on STOP MAKING SENSE, and we come out with an entirely different episode?? Well, we ended up having to cover this one FIRST - so the 100th episode is on hold for now, we're going George Lucas style and doing the episodes out of order. It's SWING SHIFT. A film that has not one, not two, but THREE different cuts that you can w...

We're Walken into this episode, Saranded by our listeners to talk about a little TV movie from Jonathan Demme, adapted from a 1961 Kurt Vonnegut short story... it's WHO AM I THIS TIME? A little story about a little community, our identities, showing emotion through performance, lonely individuals joining the community through collaboration and sympathy. Led by the incredible duo of Christopher Wal...

We've finally reached a milestone for the Demme series, this one is a huge one for him and we pulled no stops in talking all about it. Rolling into 1980, it's the great MELVIN AND HOWARD, a film we found to be funny, pensive, endlessly spontaneous, ever-moving, and just plain beautiful. We get into the real men Howard Hughes and Melvin Dummar, before getting into Jonathan Demme's life at the time,...

It's our last embrace with the dang Demme 1970s this week as we take a look at a Hitchcockian thriller starring Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin, based on the Murray Teigh Bloom novel THE 13TH MAN... it's LAST EMBRACE. This week's guest is a familiar friend, but a first time guest - Evan from the Left of the Projector podcast joins us as we get talk about this stage of Demme's career, meeting guys...

We've mentioned his name many times already in our Demme series, but we finally got a chance to sit down with David M. Stewart to talk about his upcoming book THERE'S NO GOING BACK: THE LIFE AND WORK OF JONATHAN DEMME. We get into his relationship to Demme's work, what drove him to write this book, his researching process, Demme's signatures as a filmmaker, his political motivations, documentaries...

Oh, just one more thing... it's a new ALTMANIA coming down the chubes for you all, this week we're joined by our dear friend Chris Woodward to talk about Jonathan Demme's episode of COLUMBO. Made in a down period of his career, hot off the flop of CITIZEN'S BAND; a fortuitous phonecall comes in the form of Peter Falk, who happened to be part of the handful of people to see that movie. He hires Dem...

Breaker breaker, calling all cars, it's a big 10-4 on a new Altmania. We're talkin about Jonathan Demme's third or fourth "first movie" at this point - but this time it's his first film outside of the Corman wing. We talk about CB Radio fever of the 70s, other frequent fevers of the nose in the 70s, the writer of Citizens Band getting kicked off set, Freddie Fields and Tony Curtis tinkering with t...

Following the rushed production of Crazy Mama, Jonathan Demme was finally able to put together a passion project. After putting together the pieces of different revenge films of the era, combined with real life influence ripped from the headlines, and a little help from Roger Corman; he brings his first big production... FIGHTING MAD. We look at Demme's final project of the Corman Film School, rea...

We're hitting the road with our good friend and three-timer guest Girl (@summeroffilm), to check out Jonathan Demme's 1975 film CRAZY MAMA. We see Demme find himself in a bit of an Alan Rudolph situation, wanting to get FIGHTING MAD made - but he has to do ol' Roger Corman a favor - direct a movie with a bad script that the cast hates, and he's gotta do it quickly. With the help of Cloris Leachman...

We're finally here, Demme's big moment to direct his first film - and he comes out of the gate swinging. We're talking about 1974's CAGED HEAT! We discuss this film's place in exploitation cinema, within the genre of "women in prison" films, their history as a genre, and in the context of the American Prison Complex both in the 1970s and today. We touch on current issues in US prisons, how they se...

If you're thinking about my MAMA, it don't matter if she's black or white, ooh! In this case, we get the best of both worlds when Altmania returns to close out our final Demme / Viola screenplay collaboration, and one final another production from the Philippines. This time around, Jonathan Demme gets a story by credit, and his buddy Joe uses a pseudonym for the screenwriter. Originally called WOM...

A fresh, piping hot episode of Altmania straight out of the Hot Box. We're looking at another Jonathan Demme-penned, Joe Viola-directed film from New World Pictures -  1972's THE HOT BOX. We discuss Corman's core (no pun intended) mission for filmmaking: boobs and action. The ways he allowed filmmakers to imbue exploitation films with serious, real-life stuff while attempting to gel it with that e...

We're soooo back, folks - it's time to kick off the Demme deep-dive! We re-introduce ourselves and talk about one cool thing we've both been up to, before officially kicking off our new series on the life, times, and art of one JONATHAN DEMME. We talk about his early upbringing in Long Island, NY - his immediate love for cinema and writing, his father's work as a writer, his mother's encouragement...

We're very happy to have gotten to sit down with cinematographer and son of Robert Altman -- Robert Reed "Bobby" Altman. He shares with us stories of joining his dad on the production of Nashville, his early life travelling the world with his family, joining the camera department and working on everything from the Popeye set in Malta, to working on the art department for Quintet and 3 Women, OC an...

We're taking a short break to prepare for our Jonathan Demme series, for now, enjoy this unlocked episode from our Patreon feed . If you like what you hear, consider subscribing with our discount code DEMME to get 25% off your first month!  ---------------------------------------- We're checking out Alan Rudolph's first and only documentary feature, following the Los Angeles stop of the Timothy Le...

We always hate to say goodbye... but we must close this chapter of the podcast and officially send off our Alan Rudolph series out to the beautiful blue ocean. We honor the man himself talking about what we learned looking at all of these movies he made, what he and Altman showed us about American filmmaking, read some choice quotes from the man himself, his top 10 favorite movies. AND... we annou...

Alan Rudolph returns from his 15-year hiatus from filmmaking with a paintbrush in his hand a copy of premiere pro to bring us RAY MEETS HELEN. Joining us are two Clint Eastwood experts, Jake and Ian from Sōd Casty for Me, to help us talk about what would end up being Sondra Locke's final film, green screen, digital filmmaking, and the growing list of the things that baffled us about this movie. If...

Whatever happened to toothpaste flavored toothpaste... this week we're hanging out with the ghost of Denis Leary in Alan Rudolph's THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS. A movie about a guy that is so scared of being a cuckold that he runs away from his wife to mow the lawn. We get into what drew Rudolph to this script, how we miss his signature curveball to help what is otherwise a simple midlife crisis m...

Get out your pipes and magnifying glasses, Sherlock HOLES is on the case. This week we're joined by our good friend Detective Gigi to look into these matters on Alan Rudolph's INVESTIGATING SEX, aka INTIMATE AFFAIRS. We get into the film's setting, its depiction of real surrealist artists and intellectuals, Andre Breton, post-WWI artists and philosophers, their bankrolling by the upper class, the...

Altmania, the only show hosted by TWO private defectives. We get into the new trailer for PTA's One Battle After Another, before we jump over to the critical fallout from Breakfast of Champions, Rudolph vs Disney (and critics), Y2K, Alan Rudolph's election-inspired script for Trixie, liars and truthers, cheeked up Dermot Mulroney (not Dylan McDermott), Mancow Nathan Lane, and so much more... only...

In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut releases his much awaited follow up to Slaughterhouse-Five. Just one year later, off the tails of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Robert Altman tasks Alan Rudolph with writing him a script based on this book, Breakfast of Champions. His one direction being, "don't follow the book", advice that would be echoed by Kurt Vonnegut himself. The project slowly fizzles away into the d...