Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

Director Jeff Balsmeyer was an American film storyboard artist itching to make his writing and directing debut.  His passion project was Danny Deckchair, a romantic comedy based on the real life adventure of California dreamer Larry Walters who tied helium balloons to a lawn chair to lift off into the sky over Long Beach in 1982.  After ten years of shopping the idea around and having recently mar...

Director John Ford hadn't seen the film Red Dust when he agreed to direct its 1953 remake Mogambo but was intrigued by the challenge of bringing his skills with filming the wide open spaces of the American West to the African serengeti.  For his male lead he chose Clark Gable, in desperate need of a hit in his middle age. Ava Gardner, who brought along contentious boyfriend Frank Sinatra to the Af...

With only a few documentaries and short films on his resume, Francesco Barilli embarked on his first narrative feature, Perfume of the Lady in Black in 1973 Italy. The film was inspired by research Barilli had been doing on voodoo rituals and cannibalism and had less in common with the traditional stalk and slash giallos Italy was pumping out at the time.  He enlisted American expat Mimsy Farmer,...

Released in Ireland in 1997 and here in the US a year later, I Went Down was one of the most successful Irish films of the year.  It's story, about low rent Dublin mobsters trading barbs and gunfire, was a departure from the more serious IRA films being produced at the time.  It has a star making turn from Brendan Gleeson, on the verge of breaking big in the worldwide box office with The General,...

For Episode 40, Dan and Vicky pick their favorite scary, shocking, sad, even funny death scenes from non-horror movies.  There are some classics thrown in the mix and some you wouldn't expect so get that Kleenex ready.  Filmmakers as varied as Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Brooks, John Carpenter and Werner Herzog get the spotlight.  Dan and Vicky even provide a few honorable mentions that didn't make...

We talk Odd Man Out, the classic 1947 British thriller from Third Man director Carol Reed.  It stars James Mason as Johnny McQueen, the leader of an Irish revolutionary group who ends up running for his life after a botched robbery attempt.  His love interest is played by Kathleen Ryan and the eccentric artist he runs into on his journey is Robert Newton.  There's Hot Date talk of Irish accents, r...

Just in time for Halloween, Dan and Vicky discuss the 1978 horror thriller based on the Ira Levin novel, The Boys From Brazil.  Notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) has come out of hiding in South America and gathered a group of Nazi colleagues for a nefarious plot that only famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier) can stop.  James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Ros...

The original 2 hour cut of the Sylvester Stallone starrer Cobra was exceedingly violent and bleak, so much so that the MPAA insisted the film be cut to avoid an X rating. Initially resistant, Stallone and director/producer George P. Cosmatos gave in as much to avoid the dreaded rating as to challenge the highly tracking Tom Cruise movie Top Gun at the box office.   Stallone had recent hits Rambo:F...

Dan and Vicky look at the 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon starring Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg and Ray Walston.  To adapt his own Broadway show for the big screen, producer and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner chose writer Paddy Chayefsky and composer Andre Previn.  They changed the source material considerably and scored 10 million dollars from Paramount to bring their nearly three hour version...

On Hot Date 35, Dan and Vicky discuss 1994's White , the middle film in the Three Colors trilogy from late Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski.  Zbigniew Zamachowski plays a man shunned by his spouse (Julie Delpy), adrift in his adopted country of Paris and longing for a return to his Polish homeland.  When a chance encounter leads him back to Poland, he uses the opportunity to exact an insidious...

Star Henry Fonda was looking for a movie project that would give him the rush of a stage performance.  He found it in 12 Angry Men .  A TV version was broadcast on CBS in 1954 and the Reginald Rose penned teleplay would provide juicy film roles for Fonda and a stable of seasoned New York theatre actors.  Unfortunately Rose and Fonda couldn't get any studio interested in a feature property most fel...

Dan and Vicky discuss the hard to find 1980 film Resurrection starring Ellen Burstyn and Eva Le Gallienne in Oscar nominated roles and Sam Shepard, Lois Smith, Richard Farnsworth, Roberts Blossom, and Jeffrey DeMunn in supporting turns.  It tells the story of a woman paralyzed in a violent car accident that kills her husband but somehow grants her the ability to heal.   Along with their thoughts o...

For her feature film directorial debut, actress/producer Helen Hunt chose this adaptation of the Elinor Lipman novel, Then She Found Me .  It took 10 years to get it to the screen and only wound up getting funded when Hunt agreed to star in the lead role and bring her friends Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler and Colin Firth in to play the other leads. The supporting cast is peppered with great New...

Dan and Vicky tackle noir again with the classic Otto Preminger film Angel Face .  The film was a very troubled production and our hosts give us a little background, with an assist from noir historian Eddie Muller's DVD commentary, on all the infighting, the jealousy and the on set violence that plagued the Jean Simmons, Robert Mitchum vehicle.  Beyond the juicy back stage stuff, they show a lot o...

Another ten Hot Date episodes down can only mean it's time once again for Dan and Vicky to make a top ten list.  This time our hosts decide to pick their favorite performances by an actress.  Every genre and era is represented and there will definitely be some surprises and head scratchers along the way.  There are a couple of Australians, a French woman, a Spaniard, even a Scientologist or two.  ...

Dan and Vicky tackle their first bona fide B movie with the Roger Corman produced Alien rip-off Forbidden World from 1982.  The movie began life under the title Mutant  but was quickly re-edited and re-titled by Corman to take out most of director Allan Holzman's nods at humor and give the film a title he thought wouldn't stump viewers.  Also tacked on was a pre-credit battle in space scene Corman...

After a dispute over royalties for his two previous Edgar Allen Poe film adaptations, producer/director Roger Corman and American International Pictures decided to part ways. Corman approached Pathe Film to finance and release his next feature, another Poe page-to-screen effort, The Premature Burial .  He cast Ray Milland because his first choice, Vincent Price, was under contract with AIP.  Littl...

Semi-retired and living in the Caribbean, actor Peter Finch initially resisted starring in Network and director Sidney Lumet was equally hesitant to have a Brit play the pivotal part of American TV newscaster turned prophet Howard Beales.  But an audition tape where Finch did a spot-on American accent convinced Lumet that he'd found his man.  Tragically, Finch died soon after the film was complete...

It took British director Peter Yates and Yugoslavian screenwriter Steve Tesich, born Stojan Tešić, to tell the quintessential American coming of age story Breaking Away from 1979.  The film was set and shot in Bloomington, Indiana where Tesich's family emigrated to when he was a teenager and tells a story based on a bicyclist Tesich befriended during his time racing for Indiana University.  For hi...

On Hot Date 25, Dan and Vicky cover as much ground as the protagonists do in the 2012 film The Loneliest Planet.  In addition to their thoughts on the film, which stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as a couple hiking through the mountains of the former Soviet state of Georgia, your hosts discuss recent celebrity deaths, their love of over pumped stars Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, and...

A year after making his acclaimed directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino saw the very first script he every wrote make it to the big screen in a major Hollywood way.  Jam-packed with big stars and directed by hot shot Tony Scott, 1993's True Romance seemed destined for greatness but ultimately fell short at the box office.  Audiences were more in the mood, it seems, for the repre...

Coming off the successes of The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, director Mike Nichols could have done anything he wanted.  He chose to reunite with Graduate screenwriter Buck Henry to adapt the ambitious and satirical Joseph Heller war novel Catch-22.  When that film was met with critical and commercial indifference (it's since become a cult favorite), Nichols then turned his sights...

The summer of 1983 was poised to be the season that SNL alum Dan Aykroyd broke out as a movie star with no less than three movies coming out in as many months.  He found success co-starring with Eddie Murphy in the hit Trading Places and made a brief appearance in the tragedy plagued but profitable Twilight Zone: The Movie.  But the third film, released before the other two and positioned as a sta...

For his first attempt at a Technicolor film and his first collaboration with James Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock chose to adapt the British stage play Rope's End as a series of 10 minute long takes. Loosely based on real life child murderers Leopold and Loeb, Farley Granger and John Dall murder a school chum in their apartment, hide his body in a chest of books and cooly host a party around him, arous...

Keeping with tradition, Dan and Vicky pull together a top ten movie list to commemorate ten episodes completed.  Episode 20 is out of this world - literally - as our Hot Date podcasters discuss their choices for favorite space/alien films.  Suggested by loyal listener Kenneth Cooperman, Dan and Vicky pick a few science fiction classics you may have seen but also some stealth additions that may cre...