The Next Reel Film Podcast

"What are you waiting for? You’re 15 years old!” Cameron Crowe already had success as a writer when he went undercover and posed as a high school student to write his book “Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story.” Of course, he was high school age so it made perfect sense. Perhaps that’s why the film adapted from his book feels so authentic of the time and of these youths portrayed. And perhap...

"As I was going up the stair,I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.”Identity was James Mangold’s first opportunity to direct a film based on a script he didn’t write. The screenplay, written by Michael Cooney, was inspired by Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” but adds some twists to the story that take it in a new direction. Mangold was...

"You can’t trust a man’s life to your little notes and pictures.”Christopher Nolan’s second film, Memento from 2001, caught a lot of attention on its release because of the clever screenplay structure where the story unfolds both forward and backward in time, in a way creating an experience much like our protagonist Leonard Shelby (wonderfully played by Guy Pearce), a man suffering from anterior g...

“This is definitely how people die.” With Sword of Trust , writer/director Lynn Shelton continued her exploration of low budget, independent comedies while stepping a bit outside her comfort zone by filming a story in Alabama instead of the Pacific Northwest. It gave her another opportunity to work with her partner at the time Marc Maron. In the film, she skewers conspiracy theorists and clearly i...

“How could you possibly know that it’s me that you want?” Outside In comes after a big box office failure from writer/director Lynn Shelton with her film Laggies . That film never found its audience and lost a lot of money, so it makes sense that Shelton returned to her ‘even more indie’ roots, teaming up with Mark and Jay Duplass again to make this film with a lower, indie-sized budget. Outside I...

Laggies was Lynn Shelton’s chance to step up and make a film for a bit more money than she’s had before. She’s not working with the Duplass brothers. She’s directing an original script that she didn’t write. So how does it fare compared to her earlier work? Join us – Pete Wright and Andy Nelson – as we hit the midpoint of our Lynn Shelton series with her 2014 film Laggies , starring Keira Knightle...

"You have great taste in life and terrible taste in men.” Once Lynn Shelton and her producers had locked in plans to make Your Sister’s Sister , they cast Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rachel Weisz in the three lead roles. They worked on the script and concepts over eight months and then they had to push the production back. When they did this, they lost Weisz due to scheduling conflicts she had w...

“I guess that the way I like to think of myself and the way I actually am are, um, maybe more different than I’d like them to be.” Lynn Shelton sadly passed away about a year ago at the age of 54, but left a mark on the independent film scene with the personal stories she created. Her third theatrical feature film, Humpday , got a lot of attention when it premiered at Sundance, and that gave Shelt...

"What the hell were those tentacles even attached to?” Frank Darabont wanted to adapt Stephen King’s novella “The Mist” as his directorial debut, but obviously that didn’t happen. It took him 13 years and three feature films, not to mention all the TV writing he was involved in, before he’d finally get around to adapting the story and making the film. What’s great about it is that he went dark wit...

"I’m tired of people being ugly to each other.” When Stephen King published “The Green Mile,” it was quite a novelty as he chose to release it in six serialized segments, each releasing a month apart. It was inevitable that it would get adapted as a film, as so many other of King’s works, but perhaps because of its popularity, its subject matter, and because of Frank Darabont’s connection to King...

"Put your trust in the Lord. Your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank!” Frank Darabont may not have been Stephen King’s first Dollar Baby, but he certainly was one of the earliest. And according to King himself, Darabont’s short film The Woman in the Room is his favorite of the bunch. The story Darabont really wanted to adapt of King’s, however, was “Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption.”...

"God gave me the talent to pose for pictures.” For Mary Harron’s third feature film, she went back to the biopic well. For this film, she focused on the rise of pornographic images told through the lens of the life of Bettie Page, one of the top pin-up models of the time. Having a woman direct the film helps ensure the male gaze won’t dominate in a film about this subject, but that doesn’t mean th...

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.” Bret Easton Ellis’ book “American Psycho” was published in 1991 under much controversy....

"That’s that man hater. I don’t know what Andy sees in her.” Mary Harron started as a music journalist before moving into PBS documentaries. When she first learned about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, she thought the subject would make an interesting documentary. Unfortunately, the lack of footage and disinterest in being interviewed from people who knew her led Mary and her prod...

“Thou shalt not kill, Mom. Thou shalt not kill women and children!” It was originally Al Pacino and his producing partner Martin Bregman who optioned Ron Kovic’s autobiographical book “Born on the Fourth of July” in 1977 so Pacino could play the role. They hired a young Oliver Stone to adapt it but after a few years of not getting anywhere, they dropped it. Stone told Kovic that if he made it, he’...

Oliver Stone had been planning on starting Born on the Fourth of July after finishing Wall Street but had to wait for Tom Cruise to finish making Rain Man . While doing so, his producer Ed Pressman introduced him to a new play he’d optioned called “Talk Radio.” Stone agreed to help adapt the script with Eric Bogosian, one of the original writers and performer, and in the process took to the projec...

Platoon was Oliver Stone’s autobiographical movie, but Wall Street was a bit of a biographical story as well as his father had been a stock broker and Stone grew up a bit in that world. That being said, the movie doesn’t really reflect Stone’s father (unless you look at Hal Holbrook’s character). What Stone and co-writer Stanley Weiser did is attack the Reagan era growth of greed and used the insi...

"There’s the way it ought to be and there’s the way it is.” Oliver Stone had written his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam shortly after his return to the US but he wouldn’t get a chance to direct it for nearly 20 years. In that time, he wrote other scripts and started his directing career. When Platoon was finally made and released in 1986, it became the first film about the Vietnam War made by...

Hal Ashby was behind several seminal films from the 60s and 70s, but by the time the 80s rolled around, his addictions made him unreliable. For his last feature film, he tackled novelist Lawrence Block’s famous character Matthew Scudder, and initially it sounded like it could be promising. Oliver Stone adapted the novel, and he’d proven he had a gritty edge to his work as a writer through the firs...

"Nobody just disappears in El Salvador.” News of the civil war in El Salvador certainly was prevalent in the early 80s when Oliver Stone returned to the director’s chair. For his return, he joined forces with photojournalist Richard Boyle to tell Boyle’s own stories of his time in El Salvador during the US’s transition from Carter to Reagan and how US aid to the military junta running the country...

As a writer-director, Oliver Stone can maintain a clear vision and deliver the story he wants. When he’s working as a writer for hire, it’s often difficult to clearly get his story across. This certainly was the case when he worked on Year of the Dragon with director Michael Cimino, who wanted to add a Vietnam vet element to the story that wasn’t in the original source material. Stone did that and...

When Oliver Stone was hired to write the adaptation of Howard Hawks’ 1932 film Scarface , Sidney Lumet was on board to direct the film. Lumet wanted to update the story with a modern angle using colorful Miami in the early 80s as its backdrop focusing on the Cuban refugees coming in on the Mariel boatlift, specifically the criminal element. Stone loved the idea and took the job for that reason alo...

Oliver Stone had written his draft for the script of Conan the Barbarian before John Milius was on board, but even then everyone knew it was too grand and extravagant. With an estimated $40 million budget, they knew they had to thin it down quite a bit. Milius tossed quite a bit of Stone’s work though the two men clearly had similar masculine sensibilities so Milius’ tone still feels very much lik...

Oliver Stone had already made an indie feature film in 1973 and had written the adapted screenplay for Midnight Express which garnered him an Oscar. These elements put him in the position to write and direct his first feature film, albeit one still relatively under studio control. He found the book “The Lizard’s Tail” by Marc Brandell and really enjoyed the psychological angle of the story. He dec...

Looking at films that explore Soviet society and culture in the 70s through 80s allows for interesting glimpses into reactions to and critiques of changes happening through communism, perestroika and glasnost. The third film in our current series was made in 1988 and explores reactions to glasnost and changes leading up to the breakdown of the USSR. It’s not really science fiction, but is an absur...