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 prost
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