Hot Date with Dan and Vicky

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...

It was a battle-ax royale at the box office in early 1964.  The Joan Crawford film Strait- Jacket had come out exactly a month before but it was this Bette Davis vehicle, Dead Ringer , that came out on top.   Dead Ringer was the number one film in the country two weekends in a row and continued the recent trend of Grand Dame Guignol films -- grotesque horror/thriller movies starring once popular H...

Part of then 31 year old Ethan Hawke's audition for Training Day was a series of casting sessions with star Denzel Washington.  It was after one of those reads that Hawke left fuming, upset that Washington had taken an improv too far, insulting and cursing him.  But director Antoine Fuqua saw exactly the relationship he needed for the characters in the film and offered Hawke the role of rookie Jak...

Is it a 2010 or a 2009 release?  Things get confusing on Dan and Vicky's 17th Hot Date. They chose a random date in January of 2010, usually a deadly month for movies, and came up with the fairly classy Michael Hoffman film, The Last Station starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.  The film was dropped in a few theaters for an Oscar qualifying run in late 2009, but actually went wide in Jan...

Director Darren Aronofsky ( Black Swan , Requiem for a Dream ) came up with a unique strategy for funding and staffing his debut feature  Pi .  He approached family, friends and everyone in between with the promise that if the film was a failure, he'd give them $50 on top of their initial investment of $100.  The cast and crew had a different incentive -- he asked them to work for a deferred salar...

Steve McQueen, David Soul and Sam Elliott were all attached to the car chase classic Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry when it was to be a direct adaptation of the novel The Chase and had no female protagonist.  But after years of fits and starts, B movie producer James Nicholson acquired the property, brought friend and frequent collaborator Peter Fonda on board, had the script changed to make the leads a...

It seems incongruous that producers would have originally wanted Vanessa Redgrave for the title role in 1966's Georgy Girl because sister Lynn seemed an absolute perfect fit and, indeed, ended up making it her breakthrough role.   The film co-starred James Mason, Alan Bates, Charlotte Rampling and, in a small role, Redgrave's mother, Rachel Kempson.  It was a huge hit in the UK but an even bigger...