The 80s Movie Podcast
Edward Havens
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Miramax Films - Part Two
On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s, specifically looking at the films they released between 1984 and 1986. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It’s the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. On this episode, we are continuing our miniseries on the movies released by Miramax Films in the 1980s. And, in case you did not listen to Part 1 yet, let me reiterate that the focus here will be on the films and the creatives, not the Weinsteins. The Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and that Miramax logo and the names associated with it should not stop anyone from enjoying some very well made movies because they now have an unfortunate association with two spineless chucklenuts who proclivities would not be known by the outside world for decades to come. Well, there is one movie this episode where we must talk about the Weinsteins as the creatives, but when talking about that film, “creatives” is a derisive pejorative. We ended our previous episode at the end of 1983. Miramax had one minor hit film in The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, thanks in large part to the film’s association with members of the still beloved Monty Python comedy troupe, who hadn’t released any material since The Life of Brian in 1979. 1984 would be the start of year five of the company, and they were still in need of something to make their name. Being a truly independent film company in 1984 was not easy. There were fewer than 20,000 movie screens in the entire country back then, compared to nearly 40,000 today. National video store chains like Blockbuster did not exist, and the few cable channels that did exist played mostly Hollywood films. There was no social media for images and clips to go viral. For comparison’s sake, in A24’s first five years, from its founding in August 2012 to July 2017, the company would have a number of hit films, including The Bling Ring, The Lobster, Spring Breakers, and The Witch, release movies from some of indie cinema’s most respected names, including Andrea Arnold, Robert Eggers, Atom Egoyan, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Lynn Shelton, Trey Edward Shults, Gus Van Sant, and Denis Villeneuve, and released several Academy Award winning movies, including the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Lenny Abrahamson’s Room and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, which would upset front runner La La Land for the Best Picture of 2016. But instead of leaning into the American independent cinema world the way Cinecom and Island were doing with the likes of Jonathan Demme and John Sayles, Miramax would dip their toes further into the world of international cinema. Their first release for 1984 would be Ruy Guerra’s Eréndira. The screenplay by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez was based on his 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, which itself was based off a screenplay Márquez had written in the early 1960s, which, when he couldn’t get it made at the time, he reduced down to a page and a half for a sequence in his 1967 magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, Márquez would lose the original draft of Eréndira, and would write a new script based off what he remembered writing twenty years earlier. In the story, a young woman named Eréndira lives in a near mansion situation in an otherwise empty desert with her grandmother, who had collected a number of paper flowers and assorted tchotchkes over the years. One night, Eréndira forgets to put out some candles used to illuminate the house, and the house and all of its contents burn to the ground. With everything lost, Eréndira’s grandmother forces her into a life of prostitution. The young woman quickly becomes the courtesan of choice in the region. With every new journey, an ever growing caravan starts to follow them, until it becomes for all intents and purposes a carnival, with food vendors, snake charmers, musicians and games of chance. Márquez’s writing style, known as “magic realism,” was very cinematic on the page, and it’s little wonder that many of his stories have been made into movies and television miniseries around the globe for more than a half century. Yet no movie came as close to capturing that Marquezian prose quite the way Guerra did with Eréndira. Featuring Greek goddess Irene Papas as the Grandmother, Brazilian actress Cláudia Ohana, who happened to be married to Guerra at the time, as the titular character, and former Bond villain Michael Lonsdale in a small but important role as a Senator who tries to help Eréndira get out of her life as a slave, the movie would be Mexico’s entry into the 1983 Academy Award race for Best Foreign Language Film. After acquiring the film for American distribution, Miramax would score a coup by getting the film accepted to that year’s New York Film Festival, alongside such films as Robert Altman’s Streamers, Jean Lucy Godard’s Passion, Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, and Andrzej Wajda’s Danton. But despite some stellar reviews from many of the New York City film critics, Eréndira would not get nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and Miramax would wait until April 27th, 1984, to open the film at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, one of the most important theatres in New York City at the time to launch a foreign film. A quarter page ad in the New York Times included quotes from the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vincent Canby of the Times and Roger Ebert, the movie would gross an impressive $25,500 in its first three days. Word of mouth in the city would be strong, with its second weekend gross actually increasing nearly 20% to $30,500. Its third weekend would fall slightly, but with $27k in the till would still be better than its first weekend. It wouldn’t be until Week 5 that Eréndira would expand into Los Angeles and Chicago, where it would continue to gross nearly $20k per screen for several more weeks. The film would continue to play across the nation for more than half a year, and despite never making more than four prints of the film, Eréndira would gross more than $600k in America, one of the best non-English language releases for all of 1984. In their quickest turnaround from one film to another to date, Miramax would release Claude Lelouch’s Edith and Marcel not five weeks after Eréndira. If you’re not familiar with the name Claude Chabrol, I would highly suggest becoming so. Chabrol was a part of the French New Wave filmmakers alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut who came up as film critics for the influential French magazine Cahiers [ka-yay] du Cinéma in the 1950s, who would go on to change the direction of French Cinema and how film fans appreciated films and filmmakers through the concept of The Auteur Theory, although the theory itself would be given a name by American film critic Andrew Sarris in 1962. Of these five critics turned filmmakers, Chabrol would be considered the most prolific and commercial. Chabrol would be the first of them to make a film, Le Beau Serge, and between 1957 and his death in 2010, he would make 58 movies. That’s more than one new movie every year on average, not counting shorts and television projects he also made on the side. American audiences knew him best for his 1966 global hit A Man and a Woman, which would sell more than $14m in tickets in the US and would be one of the few foreign language films to earn Academy Award nominations outside of the Best Foreign Language Film race. Lead actress Anouk Aimee would get a nod, and Chabrol would earn two on the film, for Best Director, which he would lose to Fred Zimmerman and A Man for All Seasons, and Best Original Screenplay, which he would win alongside his co-writer Pierre Uytterhoeven. Edith and Marcel would tell the story of the love affair between the iconic French singer Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan, the French boxer who was the Middleweight Champion of the World during their affair in 1948 and 1949. Both were famous in their own right, but together, they were the Brangelina of post-World War II France. Despite the fact that Cerdan was married with three kids, their affair helped lift the spirits of the French people, until his death in October 1949, while he was flying from Paris to New York to see Piaf. Fans of Raging Bull are somewhat familiar with Marcel Cerdan already, as Cerdan’s last fight before his death would find Cerdan losing his middleweight title to Jake LaMotta. In a weird twist of fate, Patrick Dewaere, the actor Chabrol cast as Cerdan, committed suicide just after the start of production, and while Chabrol considered shutting down the film in respect, it would be none other than Marcel Cerdan, Jr. who would step in to the role of his own father, despite never having acted before, and being six years older than his father was when he died. When it was released in France in April 1983, it was an immediate hit, become the second highest French film of the year, and the sixth highest grosser of all films released in the country that year. However, it would not be the film France submitted to that year’s Academy Award race. That would be Diane Kurys’ Entre Nous, which wasn’t as big a hit in France but was considered a stronger contender for the nomination, in part because of Isabelle Hupert’s amazing performance but also because Entre Nous, as 110 minutes, was 50 minutes shorter than Edith and Marcel. Harvey Weinstein would cut twenty minutes out of the film without Chabrol’s c
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