Vintage Sand

Brothers and Sisters! Let us tell you the story of Love and Hate. H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and we’ll show you the story of being a movie fan. Old brother left hand Hate’s a-fighting; there are many, many films that most folks...

Forgive us our slight post-Oscar delay, dear listeners, but here we are for our eighth annual year-end review show, which we call 2025: Juke Joints and a Few Small Beers in honor of two of the year’s (and perhaps the decade’s or even the century’s) most unforgettable films. This episode represents an exciting step for us as, for the first time, we welcome a guest: the redoubtable Kerry Cowan, bril...

Happy 2026, Vintage Sand fans! Thank you for taking time away from looking for real estate opportunities in Greenland to join us for Episodes 65 and 66, our first of 2026. Herein, Team Vintage Sand returns one last time to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternate Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture...

Happy 2026, Vintage Sand fans! Thank you for taking time away from looking for real estate opportunities in Greenland to join us for Episodes 65 and 66, our first of 2026. Herein, Team Vintage Sand returns one last time to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternate Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture...

For the fifth time in the history of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand returns to one of its most popular formats: the Hidden Gems episode. As we did in episodes 11, 30, 40, and 53, Michael, John and I each choose one film to discuss that we feel has been underappreciated and overlooked by the madding crowd yearning to see anything besides a prequel, sequel, spinoff, or reboot. And while the episode...

Happiest of Thanksgivings, Vintage Sand fans, and welcome to Episode 63, our tribute to the incomparable and quietly brilliant Robert Redford. Consider this. If all the Sundance Kid had given us was a series of memorable and subtly complex performances as an actor in a career spanning half a century, that would have been enough to make him a critically important figure in Hollywood, particularly i...

And…we’re back! Did you miss us? You can say so—it’s OK. Yes, it’s the return of Vintage Sand, your film history podcast, with our first episode since May. It was a frantic and wonderful summer, but now the leaves are falling and it’s time for us to get back to what we love to do, with a double episode no less than 25 years in the making. That’s right, fellow film fanatics; it’s Vintage Sand’s Top...

And…we’re back! Did you miss us? You can say so—it’s OK. Yes, it’s the return of Vintage Sand, your film history podcast, with our first episode since May. It was a frantic and wonderful summer, but now the leaves are falling and it’s time for us to get back to what we love to do, with a double episode no less than 25 years in the making. That’s right, fellow film fanatics; it’s Vintage Sand’s Top...

I can tell you the exact date and place: October 16, 1986, at the Fine Arts Theater in downtown Chicago. I got to come of age as a moviegoer in the corporate dominated, era of the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was a child of "Jaws", "Star Wars", Indy and "Back to the Future". With occasional exceptions like "Stranger than Paradise" and "Blade Runner", American film in the early and mid 80’s felt cor...

Now that Adrien Brody has finally wrapped up his acceptance speech, we can bring you Episode 59 of Vintage Sand. And since it’s March, and the Oscars just passed, we’re right on time with our annual year-end review, which we call 2024: The Year of the Brutal. As seems to be the case over the last few years, we came away from the year in film with mixed feelings. The interesting thing is that we di...

Please see the description in Episode 57, our previous episode, as a guide for this, the latest in our Alternate Oscars series. This one focused on the films of the 1940's. Only decade left to cover is the 2010's so don't touch that dial!

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all ships at sea, and welcome to Episode 57 of Vintage Sand, our first of 2025. In this episode and the next one we return, for the penultimate time, to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternative Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach every full decade in which the Academy has ha...

No deep insight or analysis here, Vintage Sand fans. Just a list of our favorite Christmas and Christmas-adjacent films as the season approaches. (Not counting blazingly obvious choices like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Christmas Story”). May your days be merry and bright, may your heart grow three sizes that day, as they say in Whoville, and, may your favorite holiday films always be streaming.

Vintage Sand listeners this month will get something of a twofer, a BOGO episode. Since we really have not had the chance to do a full necrology since July, Michael takes the time to relate the accomplishments of some very bright lights in the film business that have gone out over the past four months. These include artists who leave behind a great legacy and holes that can never really be filled,...

Elegant. That was the adjective used by Team Vintage Sand’s own Michael Edmund to describe why the films of Joseph Losey are so important to him, and why he has been such a huge fan of Losey’s for nearly all of his film-going life. Losey’s was a name that seemed to keep popping up in a wide variety of contexts over the course of the podcast, so, after many delays, we are proud to present Episode 5...

For the fourth time in the history of the podcast, Team Vintage Sand returns to one of its most popular formats, the Hidden Gems episode. As we did previously in episodes 11, 30, and 40, Michael, John and I each choose one film to discuss that we feel has been unjustly neglected and overlooked by the huddled masses yearning to see anything besides a prequel, sequel, spinoff or reboot. So please en...

The end of 1974 saw the implosion of the Director’s Company, founded just a year earlier by three of Hollywood’s hottest directors: Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin. Funded by Paramount, the idea was that within a certain budget, these directors would make whatever they wanted, have final cut on their work, and split the profits on each other’s films. Its rapid collapse, am...

Our Alternate Oscars episodes, based on Danny Peary’s fantastic 1992 book of the same name, have always been among our most popular. Over the course of the podcast, we’ve covered the 1930’s, 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and the 2000’s. Comparing what films actually won Best Picture to what we believe should have won is always a fun challenge, and it has given us a chance over the years to open...

Our Alternate Oscars episodes, based on Danny Peary’s fantastic 1992 book of the same name, have always been among our most popular. Over the course of the podcast, we’ve covered the 1930’s, 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and the 2000’s. Comparing what films actually won Best Picture to what we believe should have won is always a fun challenge, and it has given us a chance over the years to open...

It began six years ago, in the before time, with three film nerds who have been friends for four decades. Through the years, whenever we hung out together, we would inevitably end up talking for hours about film. So, we wondered aloud, why not make it official? Thus was born, in the spring of 2018, Vintage Sand, your film history podcast. One pandemic, one insurrection, a few erasures and rewritin...

When a director of Martin Scorsese’s stature releases a new movie, it’s time to drop everything else and discuss. When last we did this, with "The irishman", our thoughts on that film were mixed; it was a summation of some of the themes and ideas that have characterized Scorsese’s work, and it also contained certain thematic elements of his “spiritual” trilogy of "Last Temptation of Christ", "Kund...

As of our taping of this episode, Hollywood is still under the shadow of the labor problems which have arisen periodically since the beginnings of the industry. After all, remember that the formation of the Academy and the establishment of the Oscars were in many ways the studio moguls’ attempts to crush the burgeoning union movements. Periodically, since the unions were established, they have eng...

Combine the fact that we are preparing for the run of episodes in the fall that will culminate in our 50th episode in November and that summer has kept the old gang apart for a couple of months, we could not in good conscience let go the passing of some figures both major and minor figures in the history of film whom we have lost since last we convened in May. Therefore, as kind of a bridge to wha...

It is one of the great wonders of American business that the same handful of companies have run the movies in Hollywood, almost since the beginning. After all, how many American industries of 2023 feature a power structure that would be familiar to someone from the late 1920’s? Yes, there were mergers then, like the ones that created MGM, Universal and Fox, and today there are yet more mergers, th...

2022 was definitely the everything bagel of movie years. No less an authority than Stephen Spielberg anointed Tom Cruise as the savior of movies this summer, which made sense given the success of "Top Gun: Maverick". Then came the fall, and excellent movies were released…and no one showed up. And even when they did, as with the $2.2 billion dollar gross accumulated by James Cameron’s "Dances with...