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Secret Movie Club Podcast

secretmovieclub

Movie theaters by movie makers for movie lovers.

tv & film

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40:14

SMC Pod #175: Adaptation Part 1: Frankenstein (novel)...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/03/07

Adaptation from one storytelling medium to another is key to cinema. Be it a novel, a play, a TV show, an opera, or beloved legend, the work adapted MUST be molded and changed to suit the strengths of cinema. Ironically, faithful adaptations are often the least successful. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at the classic 1818 romantic Gothic horror novel Frankenstein and how subversive clever film director James Whale adapted it in 1931 for Universal Studios. Whale

37:40

SMC Pod #174: Dialogue-less Movies (Pure Cinema)

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/02/28

Today, we look at some of the great "pure cinema" movies with little to no dialogue. Now listen-dialogue is great. Dialogue is cinematic. But to scale the heights, a moviemaker needs to know how to communicate cinematically (image + sound) without using dialogue as a crutch to convey information. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at F.W. Murnau's 1924 masterpiece The Last Laugh (with only two intertitles for the entire movie), avant garde master Stan Brakhage's The Act of

37:56

SMC Pod #173: The state of cinema, 2025 (it's rough)

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/02/21

Movies have always had their ups and downs. Every time it looks like cinema is gonna give up the ghost, it somehow roars back and a new era is born. But is that true in 2025? Or has cinema finally come to the end of the line? Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes stock of the state of cinema. He tries not to pull punches or manufacture a conclusion. Where are we? Do we have a future? Take a listen and let us know what you think.

33:38

SMC Pod #172: Is this Cinema? I: Pasolini's Salo or...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/02/15

Today, we inaugurate an occasional series "Is this Cinema?" in our podcasts. We'll look at a controversial, shocking, and/or divisive movie that divides cinephiles. There may be no better place to start than famed Italian moviemaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film, 1975's SALO or 120 DAYS OF SODOM adapted from shocking source material written by the Marquis De Sade. Pasolini adapted the movie to World War II fascist Italy. Four fascist libertines imprison 18 youths in a villa for the fascists'

45:01

SMC Pod #171: Watershed movies

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/01/31

Today, we look at watershed movies: movies that changed the culture. That became juggernauts. Where cinema was clearly changed/different AFTER the movies. These movies aren't always enjoyable still to watch. OR. . .they were so big, it's hard to enjoy them as movies. They have become markers on the road of cinema. Yet some still offer up endless joys. While others have not aged well at all. We look at everything from 1915's Birth of a Nation to Citizen Kane, Rashomon, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction,

42:56

SMC Pod #170: Bill Murray, the Agony & The Ecstasy

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/01/24

Of all the Saturday Night Live TV actors who have gone on to the movies, Bill Murray has had possibly the most fascinating, long lasting, unpredictable run. Murray is complex, known equally for great performances, hilarious in-real life stunts, endless restlessness, and difficult personal behavior. Yet, very few actors have built up the reservoir of good will Murray has with his fans and the movie community due to his clear love of cinema. From early comedy hits like Caddyshack and Stripes to

42:59

SMC Pod #169: David Lynch, an appreciation

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/01/17

On January 16, 2025, cinema lost one of its greatest lights. David Lynch passed away in Los Angeles at 78 years old. Like all master moviemakers, Lynch contained multitudes. The writer/director behind Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, and many other films crafted a dreamlike, surreal, spiritual, emotional tone with intense lights and darks that was impossible to imitate. Only David Lynch could make a David Lynch movie. And David Lynch LOVED movies. He

32:28

SMC Pod #168: The Lubitsch Touch, a prologue

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/01/10

First and foremost, Secret Movie Club sends everyone affected by the Los Angeles fires (this podcast is posted January 2025) the best. We're here as a community to help rebuild. If it can bring a smile to your face in a helpful way, we offer this podcast on "The Lubitsch Touch". Master classic Hollywood filmmaker Ernest Lubitsch developed a cinematic shorthand storytelling style full of visual, verbal, and cinematic grace/flair. If he could convey character or information cinematically rather than

42:54

SMC Pod #167: Akira Kurosawa, Master Filmmaker, 2025...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2025/01/03

Realizing we've all ready done several podcasts on Akira Kurosawa, we're treating this like an addendum to a revised edition. Today, we work to fill in some of the gaps by focusing on some of Kurosawa's amazing but lesser seen works like his 1943 debut feature Sanshiro Sugata, his incredible I Live in Fear (1954)where actor Toshiro Mifune plays an aging industrialist who loses his mind thinking about nuclear war, and Kurosawa's 1993 final feature Madadayo which features some of Kurosawa's best ever

47:18

SMC Pod #166: 2024, the year in movies

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2024/12/27

Furiosa, Hundreds of Beavers, I Saw the TV Glow, Anora just to name a few showed that 2024 had lots of genius, fight, promise, vitality, relevancy still for cinema. And movies like Dune Pt II, Hit Man, Conclave, Juror #2 were worthwhile, stimulating additions to the annals of moviedom. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at the year in movies 2024...and finds there's mercifully, blessedly still a beating heart at the center of it all.

01:20:28

SMC Pod #165: Stanley Kubrick, Director of 2020

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2024/12/19

Stanley Kubrick may be one of the key patron saints of all cinema (even if he himself was an ardent athiest). Born in the Bronx, New York, a mediocre student, Kubrick followed a monofocused drive to make movies. From making low budget features to cut his teeth in the mid 1950's to becoming one of the only true Auteur American moviemakers to work in the studio system yet be on a level with moviemakers like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick created a cinema of ideas and iconography. And he

59:29

SMC Pod #164: Alfred Hitchcock, Director of 2023

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2024/12/13

Has any moviemaker made more out and out hits, influenced 20th century cinematic pop culture iconography, or so married the pop, commercial, and artistic into one as Alfred Hitchcock? Hitchcock directed 53 movies, 10 of which are arguably unqualified masterpieces (39 Steps, Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds). Hitchcock is the rare director whose name alone could finance a picture, so synonymous was it with

34:30

SMC Pod #163: Roger Corman's Rules

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2024/12/06

With the passing of the "Pope of Pop Film" Roger Corman at 98 this year, a key era of American moviemaking left us. Producer/Director Roger Corman famously made hundreds of movies without "ever having lost a dime". He did this by shrewdly making very low budget genre pictures catered to what was hip at the time (monsters, drugs, motorcycles, sharks, aliens...) with super talented hungry young moviemakers. Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdonavich, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan

34:50

SMC Pod #162: Thanksgiving special-Giving thanks for...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2024/11/29

And. . .we're back. After almost a year of radio silence, the Secret Movie Club podcast returns with SMC Pod #162! Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill gives thanks (Thanksgiving 2024 weekend) for the Bravo Channel in the early 1990's. Way back then (Craig was 12-15 years old), the Bravo Channel was devoted to idiosynchratic world cinema and American indie movies. Sneaking to the tv room late at night, to watch these movies when his family was asleep, Craig saw Jane Campion's An Angel

38:38

SMC Pod #161: What is a masterpiece & masterpiece...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2023/12/01

Secret Movie Club team members Edwin Gomez and Craig Hammill hash out what really IS the criteria that makes a movie a masterpiece? Although they easily agree on JAWS, they split when Edwin calls AIRPORT 77 and KING KONG 1976 masterpieces while Craig views Ingmar Bergman's WINTER LIGHT and PERSONA as masterpieces. Craig also is concerned that the term "masterpiece" gets used way too much these days. He fears the term is losing its important meaning as an indicator of a movie that truly rises above

48:44

SMC Pod #160: CRUMB & The dark documentary (A deeper...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2023/11/24

Today, Secret Movie Club Team Members Edwin Gomez and Craig Hammill discuss Terry Zwigoff's breakout 1990's documentary CRUMB about underground comic book artist R. Crumb and his dysfunctional brothers. Both Edwin and Craig talk about how a second viewing really emphasizes how heavy Crumb's home life was. We nominate some other powerful "dark" documentaries. Edwin name checks the Maysles' 1960's key work SALESMAN and Errol Morris's 1980's THE THIN BLUE LINE. Craig talks about Claude Lanzmann's

38:41

SMC Pod #159: Communicating cinematically or ”An idea...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2023/10/27

As part of our final season wrap up on Alfred Hitchcock director of the year, we look at Hitchcock's late career advice to film schools to make sure that young filmmakers knew how to tell their stories visually/cinematically without needing to rely on dialogue. SMC founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about how this approach has come to mean for him the goal of "an idea in every shot". Today we talk about examples from Murnau's The Last Laugh, Renoir's La Chienne, Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing

39:09

SMC Pod #158: Why PSYCHO is the 2001 of Horror movies

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2023/10/20

For as popular and perennial as Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO is, 62 years after its initial release, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill feels it is still underrated. In many ways, Craig feels PSYCHO is the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY of horror movies. That is-a movie which changed the cinematic form, created new film language, and in many ways, has never been surpassed. We take a look at the history of PSYCHO including Hitchcock's own doubts that it worked. We also look at how Hitchcock

28:36

SMC Pod #157: Filmmaker Sensibilities: Blockbuster vs...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2023/10/13

When you love cinema, it's fascinating how some of your favorite moviemakers are beloved by a small passionate group of "in the know" fans and other of your favorite moviemakers appeal to the entire world including your grandparents who know nothing about the film world. What defines the "art house" versus the "blockbuster" sensibility? If you're a moviemaker, where does your sensibility ultimately land? Does it help to be know? Is it even productive to think in these terms? Secret Movie Club

36:52

SMC Pod #156: Sex in American Cinema and the X &...

Secret Movie Club Podcast ·

2023/10/06

While the team re-assembles, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill goes solo to discuss the history of sex in American cinema and the X and NC-17 rating. Craig marvels that 50 years ago X-rated movies like MIDNIGHT COWBOY were winning Best Picture and THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES were mainstream, making the equivalent of $100 million dollars, and getting 3 star ratings from Roger Ebert while now American studios, filmmakers, and films seem to have no idea how to deal with sex scenes (and so

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