This week, we present our first remote recording, as your intrepid host talks about his fortieth high school reunion, memorializes an old friend who recently passed away, and a long forgotten Keanu Reeves television movie that shot at your host’s high school weeks after he graduated high school and moved to Los Angeles to break into the industry.

This week, we look back at 40 years of The Brat Pack, from the naming of the group, to who is and is not a Brat Packer, and which Brat Pack movie was the best Brat Pack movie. (It’s not The Breakfast Club or The Outsiders.)

On this episode, we continue our look back at the 1980s movies of iconoclastic director Susan Seidelman as we pull the curtain back on the film she felt was an appropriate follow-up to her breakthrough film Desperately Seeking Susan, the sci-fi romantic comedy Making Mr. Right, starring John Malkovich and Ann Magnuson.

On this episode, we speak with modern day renaissance man Todd Downing about his five favorite fantasy films of the 1980s.

On this episode, our first episode of our seventh season and first in more than six months, our host apologizes for baiting and switching episodes, explains the long delay, and talks about the only movie ever made to star comedian and talk show host Jay Leno.

On this episode, we’re going to continue with our series on the 1980s movies of director Susan Seidelman, talking about her biggest hit film, 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan.

We pause our retrospective on the 1980s movies of director Susan Seidelman to examine Andrew McCarthy new Hulu documentary about the Brat Pack and how a single article in 1985 may or may not have affect his career and the careers of many of his co-stars and friends.

On this episode, we’re going to start a miniseries on the 1980s films from director Susan Seidelman. Like last year, with Martha Coolidge, I want to highlight at least one female filmmaker each year from the decade that made a significant impact on filmmaking and culture as a whole, and Ms. Seidelman definitely fits that description.

On this episode, we’re going to tackle a movie from the early 1980s that, if made today with the same pedigree, would cause movie geeks and cinephiles to lose their freaking minds over. But because this was made early in their careers, most people are only tangentially aware of its existence, let alone have actually seen it. We’re talking about the 1986 Sam Raimi/Coen Brothers collaboration, Crimewave.

Our first episode returning from paternity leave takes us back to 1983, and one of two sequel bombs Universal made with Jackie Gleason that year, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3. ----more----   TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we’ll be covering one of the oddest Part 3 movies to ever be made.   Smokey and the Bandit 3.   But before we do, I owe you, loyal listener an apology and an explanation.   Originally, this episode was supposed to be about the movies of H.B. “Toby” Halicki, who brought car chase films back to life in the mid-70s with his smash hit Gone in 60 Seconds. Part of the reason I wanted to do this episode was to highlight a filmmaker who doesn’t get much love from film aficionados anymore, and part because this was the movie that literally made me the person I became. My mom was dating Toby during the making of the movie, a spent a number of days on the set as a five year old, and I even got featured in a scene. And I thought it would be fun to get my mom to open up about a part of her life after my parents’ divorce that I don’t remember much of.   And it turned into the discussion that made me question everything I became. Much of which I will cover when I find the courage to revisit that topic, hopefully in time for the 50th anniversary this July.   So, for now, and to kind of stick with the car theme this episode was originally going to be about, we’re going to do a quick take on one of the most bizarre, and most altered, movies to ever come out of Hollywood.   As you may remember, Smokey and the Bandit was a 1977 hit film from stuntman turned director Hal Needham. Needham and Burt Reynolds has become friends in the early 1960s, and Needham would end up living in Reynolds’ pool house for nearly a dozen years in the 60s and 70s. Reynolds would talk director Robert Aldrich into hiring Needham to be the 2nd unit director and stunt coordinator for the car chase scene Aldrich’s 1974 classic The Longest Yard, and Reynolds would hire Needham to be his 2nd Unit Director on his own 1976 directorial debut, Gator. While on the set of Gator, the two men would talk about the movie Needham wanted to make his own directorial debut on, a low-budget B movie about a cat and mouse chase between a bootlegger and a sheriff as they tried to outwit each other across several state lines.   As a friend, Reynolds would ask Needham to read the script. The “script” was a series of hand-written notes on a legal pad. He had come up with the idea during the making of Gator, when the Teamster transportation captain brought some Coors beer to the production team. And, believe it or not, in 1975, it was illegal to sell or transport Coors beer out of states West of the Mississippi River, because the beer was not pasteurized and needed constant refrigeration.   Reynolds would read the “script,” which, according to Reynolds’ 1994 autobiography My Life, was one of the worst things he had ever read. But Reynolds promised his friend that if he could get a studio involved and get a proper budget and script for the film, he would make it.   Needham would hire a series of writers to try and flesh out the notes from the legal pad into a coherent screenplay, and with a verbal commitment from Reynolds to star in it, he would soon get Universal Studios to to agree to make Smokey and the Bandit, to the tune of $5.3m. After all, Reynolds was still one of the biggest box office stars at the time, and $5.3m was small potatoes at the time, especially when Universal was spending $6.7m on the Super Bowl assassin thriller Two-Minute Warning, $9m on a bio-pic of General Douglas MacArthur, and $22m on William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, an English-language version of the 1950 French novel The Wages of Fear.   Reynolds would take the lead as The Bandit, the driver of the chase car meant to distract the autho

Welcome to the first episode of our sixth season, the first of three episodes to begin the new year before our two month hiatus. This episode, we do our first ever Listener Freebie, letting Lee Thompson, one of our biggest supporters in the United Kingdom, pick the movie we cover this episode. Lee chose the 1984 British television drama Threads, and we are proud to talk about this hidden gem.

For our final episode of 2023, the podcast takes a look back at the history of one of the best and most popular films of the decade, 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

On this week’s episode, we talk about a movie that was buried by one of the major American distributors back in 1984, due to its similarity to a Clint Eastwood movie they were making at the time, and how it’s finally going to get a second chance with viewers forty years later. Tony Garnett’s Deep in the Heart.

This week, we go back to the 1984 summer movie season, with one of the most forgotten movies of the decade, for good reason: Chattanooga Choo Choo, starring Barbara Eden, George Kennedy, Melissa Sue Anderson, Christopher McDonald, Joe Namath, and Joe Namath’s 1969 Super Bowl III championship ring.

On this week's episode, we talk about a rarity amongst 80s movies, one that is an oldie, a goodie, an obscurity, and one of the best reviewed movies of all the years it was released. John Binder's 1980 debut, UFOria. Or is it 1984? Or 1985? 1986? Listen in and find out.

This week, we look back at another three films for whom their releases would be the only theatrical release for their respective distributors. It's Part 6 of our ongoing series, The Orphans. Would you like to know more? ----more---- This week's films are: Heartbreaker (1983, Frank Zuniga, from Monarex)Hells Angels Forever (1983, Leon Gast and and Kevin Keating and Richard Chase, RKR Releasing)Mother Lode (1982, Charlton Heston, Agamemnon Films)

On this episode, we’re going to do something we haven’t done in nearly a year and a half. Dedicate a show to films for whom their release was the only release ever done by a particular distributor. The Orphans. Since it’s very hard to do a full show on a distributor that only ever released one movie, I collect these orphans like a crazy cat person collects felines, and every so often unleash them grouped together so they can have their moment in the spotlight. Would you like to know more? ----more----  

This week, we spend a bit of our time on Motion Picture Marketing, the oddly named early 80s independent distributor who made their name repackaging European horror films from the 1970s with new titles and new graphics to make them feel new. This policy was so successful, so quickly for them, they could jump right into producing their own films within a year of their founding. Would you like to know more?

We finally complete our mini-series on the 1980s movies released by Miramax Films in 1989, a year that included sex, lies, and videotape, and My Left Foot.

We continue our miniseries on the 1980s movies distributed by Miramax Films, with a look at the films released in 1988.