The Pink Smoke podcast

Host Martin Kessler welcomes Felicia Maroni, host of the Seeing Faces in Movies podcast, to talk about a movie. Very appropriate, since the movie they're talking about is Hector Babenco's 1985 adaptation of the Miguel Puig book Kiss of the Spider Woman: a movie about talking about movies. The story of a two men trapped together in a Buenos Aires jail cell, its harsh narrative digresses into the me...

Left burned and cleaned out after the events of The Jugger, Parker is forced to start fresh with a group of six other professional heisters targeting the cash receipts from a big weekend football game. The score itself goes off without a hitch, but a meddling amateur manages to make off with the entire boodle, including Parker's seventh of a cut! One of the legit best books of the entire series, T...

After struggling to write a novel about the last days of Billy the Kid, travel writer and Mark Twain scholar Charles Neider found his inspiration by heading to the Monterey coast and creating his own version of the "the greatest gunman alive at the time of his death." Published in 1956, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is a fictionalized take on the mythologized outlaw, relocating the mesas of...

After bursting onto the late 60's cinema scene with the independent underground hit David Holtzman's Diary and entering the 70's with the post-apocalyptic counter-cultural romance Glen and Randa, Jim McBride began work on two very different screenplays. The first was Gone Beaver, the genre-bending tale of a brawny mountain man and his adventures in the wilderness, and the second is My Girlfriend's...

The Pink Smoke is back on track, picking up with the sixth entry of Donald E. Westlake's Parker series. A true outlier, The Jugger doesn't feature an epic heist or a ragtag mix of reliable and backstabbing criminals. In this one Parker's all alone, dropped into a situation he's not sure about, forced to make decisions that will have giant ramifications on his life and the series moving forward. We...

Star Trek episodes, the title credits of Alien, the architecture of Star Wars and Blade Runner, the work of Joseph Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker and Alejandro Jodorowsky. You'd be surprised how many iconic artworks have been influenced by transformative themes traced back to Mesoamerican mythology and Ancient Maya theology. On this episode, host Martin Kessler is joined by Mesoamerican oc...

In this super-sized episode of our ongoing series where we discuss the exploits of career criminal Parker from the books by Richard Stark a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake, we're tackling three big Parker-based works. We start by jumping ahead in our chronological reviews to discuss The Handle, the eighth book in the Parker series, in which our professional thief is enlisted by a former enemy syndicate to...

With the fifth entry of the Parker series, The Score, Richard Stark aka Donald E. Westlake puts his career criminal anti-hero in charge of his most ambitious heist yet: the 12-man robbery of a North Dakota mining town. This allows the author to expand the violent world of Parker by introducing a slew of fresh characters, including thespian-thief Alan Grofield, who would go on to star in four solo...

If you're a fan of Larry Cohen, the maverick filmmaker behind such mind-bending genre pictures as It's Alive, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff, you owe it to yourself to check out his newly published memoir: I Killed Bette Davis and Other Confessions of Heinous Crimes Committed in the Name of Moviemaking. The legendary director recounts all the great anecdotes you've already hea...

“I went to a different planet where the spacemen drink coffee and don't cheat on their wives.” Cryptozoologist Christopher Funderburg and parapsychologist Martin Kessler meet in an undisclosed location to perform a secret autopsy on Visitors from Lanulos, "a history book about something that never happened." Ostensibly the chronicle of Woodrow Derenberger, a West Virginian contactee who reported e...

What if every single print of every single film by 5 esteemed filmmakers were housed in a burning warehouse and there was only time to save 5 of them? This is the hypothetical hot seat into which guests are placed on the recurring Five from the Fire series, tasked to choose a handful of movies to rescue from oblivion! We entrust the hosts of Director's Take: A Sony Pictures Podcast, Becky D'Anna a...

For this year's Halloween theme, the Pink Smoke sets its sights on the mid-80's to early 90's trend of "mischievous little monsters" horror movies modeled after a certain masterpiece by a certain Joe Dante. Is there anything of quality to be found in such creature feature cash grabs? Do any cinematic critters, ghoulies, munchies or hobgoblins break the mold of the Gremlins template and discover th...

We journey out to Montana Territory in the latter half of the 19th century to break biscuits with John "Liver-Eating" Johnson, subject of the books Crow Killer by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker and Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher, both of which were subsequently adapted by John Milius for the Sydney Pollack film Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford. All three detail Johnson's life as a hunte...

We watched Arthur. A New York love story. Pure lightning in a bottle. The little movie that went on to become the #4 biggest hit of 1981. And we watched Arthur 2: On the Rocks. A critical punching bag. An outcast. Something considered a travesty of elegance and taste, when it's considered at all. More to the point, what is Arthur in 2025? It's weird that it was so successful back in the day, and e...

We continue our series on the Parker books by Donald E. Westlake, published under the nom de guerre Richard Stark, which follow the various criminal activities of hard-boiled heister Parker and the shady characters surrounding him looking to screw up the score. Coming after the 'Outfit Trilogy' that kicked off the series, 1964's The Mourner is one of the weirder entries, focusing specifically on t...

Ever since Dogfight was released in 1991 to middling reviews and invisible box office, it's slowly developed a following among viewers who appreciate Nancy Savoca's empathetic story of two young people making a meaningful connection at a pivotal point of the early 60's. Two such viewers are host Martin Kessler and his guest, film writer and programmer Vanya Garraway. They explore this very human f...

Last year, the Pink Smoke Podcast created a series called 1974: 50 Years Later, each episode featuring a different guest who chose a 1974 movie to talk about, ranging from giant blockbusters to minor cult curios and everything else in between. But since all our guests are cool outsiders with eccentric tastes, most of them stayed away from the most iconic movies of that fabled cinematic year, esche...

Host Martin Kessler finds himself in the middle of an angelic civil war, complete with soul-sucking seraphims, ritual exorcism, apocalyptic implications and an intervention from Lucifer himself, as he opens the ancient book (or should it be a scroll?) on Gregory Widen's 1995 theological thriller The Prophecy. Luckily, he's able to enlist first-time Pink Smoke guest Matthias van der Roest and fan f...

Host John Cribbs is joined on the latest episode of The Pink Smoke podcast by Martin Kessler of Flixwise: Outpost Canada to discuss Mike Leigh's latest film, Peterloo. A historical drama looking at the semi-forgotten massacre at St. Peter's field in 1819, the film sees Manchester-ite Leigh returning to his home turf and somewhat unfamiliar artistic territory. With Vera Drake, Topsy-Turvy and Mr. T...

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss the legendary documentarian Errol Morris' latest film AMERICAN DHARMA, an extended interview with Steve Bannon (the architect of Donald Trump's successful 2016 presidential campaign). It's another typical Morris study of self-deception, specious reasoning & the strange intersections of pop cultural & real life. The podcast discussion also addresse...

For Clint Eastwood’s 90th birthday, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs have each selected one of the actor/director’s films to discuss. This Eastwood Double Feature looks at Don Siegel’s The Beguiled and Eastwood’s own Unforgiven, a pair of films that illustrate why the star-auteur achieved his iconic status while remaining hard to pin down as an artist. The intense hothouse sexual polit...

The myth of Wyatt Earp ignited at the ascent of cinema, his alleged Old West exploits embellished on celluloid during the Silent Era so that he was a full-fledged American legend come the golden age of Hollywood. Earp westerns were such an established staple that Law and Order, the first movie to star a surrogate Wyatt, was already out in 1932. All the familiar elements were there - Tombstone, Doc...

Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, two of the most recognized directors of their day, were each in their mid-30's when they embarked on their third feature film: an epic studio movie to be shot in Mexico (headquartered at Estudio Churubusco). In both cases, the resulting film was a commercial disappointment and a critical disaster. What went wrong? Who...

Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke 1974 was a landmark year for film, a convergence of exciting international cinema and the original voices of New Hollywood that still resonates 50 years later. In our new series we invite a different guest for each episode to choose a 1974 movie to talk about, ranging from giant blockbusters to minor cult curios and everything else in between. The...

Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke Who better to spend the holidays with than rebellious hair hopper Dawn Davenport, who goes from pinning her screaming mother under a Christmas tree for failing to provide the desired gift of Cha Cha heels to becoming the brightest star to light up the electric chair. Kate Wilkiinson returns to talk about the *most* John Waters movie ever made, his...