I just bought two tickets to see Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. It’s playing in 35mm at our local arthouse and I’m very excited for this one. I’ve grown to really like Django — especially Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance — but The Hateful 8 is probably my least favorite of Tarantino’s films and I predict history will mark it as a low point in the auteur’s filmography. Suffice to say I’m glad we’re out of the Western genre and back into a dark drama set in a moment when Old Hollywood faded and New Hollywood rose to ascendancy on a wave of countercultural filmmaking that spoke to a youth culture that asked us to “Give Peace a Chance” even as it delivered up Altamont and Helter Skelter. The film tells the story of a fictional washed-up television actor, but it overlaps with the story of the real life Manson murders. Right after I purchased my tickets I saw this post at The Psyco Path that caught my eye. It’s about a special that’s coming to the Oxygen channel that features interviews with the Manson murderers. Here’s a taste…

Manson: The Women, a new Oxygen special premiering August 10, which features interviews with four women who belonged to the Manson family—Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme—as well as experts, including Lis Wiehl, Nikki Meredith and Deborah Herman, weighing in on the infamous murders.

“What was it about Charlie Manson that made these women join his family?” Wiehl asks.

The special aims to answer that very question.

See the full post at the link above and connect to the original article there. In the meantime, here’s an interview with authors Peter Levenda and Whitley Strieber discussing the connections between the Manson Family the Process Church and the CIA. I hope Tarantino alludes to an Intelligence conspiracy in his film…

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The name Francis Ford Coppola conjures a cinematic career crossed by contradictions: he set out to be a “European,” personal, small filmmaker, before creating some of the most popular, successful films in American cinema; he’s a star auteur whose struggles for independence nearly ended his career more than once; he helped to define the New Hollywood-era, but his methods always look back to the ensemble film-making of the golden era of the Hollywood studios.

FFC turned 80 over the weekend and Apocalypse Now is 40 this year. Here’s a great interview between Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson…

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The high point of cinema so far has been the American films made between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Roughly speaking, these dates constitute the New Hollywood period when failing studios turned to young, maverick directors influenced by the anarchistic re-making of genre cinema by European directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Movies like Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull are emblematic of this period of high art on the big screen where films about bikers, boxers and beautiful killers defied expectations while often also bringing boffo box office.

Another great American flick of the 1970′s is Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Parker is a Brit, but the film was distributed by Columbia and written by the great Oliver Stone who won a screenwriting Oscar for adapting Billy Hayes’ memoir of getting arrested for hashish smuggling and being locked-up in a Turkish prison. Stone’s script is a brutal document and Parker puts his audience in Billy’s skin behind bars and bereft of hope. Brad Davis is unforgettable as Billy and while the film was shot in a Maltese fort the depictions of the cruelty of Turkish justice are so savage and real-seeming that Midnight Express was screened as a cautionary tale for U.S. Navy sailors visiting Turkey for years after the film’s release.

Celebrating 40 years of Midnight Express — and its amazing Giorgio Moroder soundtrack — here’s an episode of Locked Up Abroad featuring the real Billy Hayes and the harrowing true story of his time in Turkey…

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The Godfather is one of the greatest American films of all time, and in many ways it represents the best of the New Hollywood movement that flourished roughly from the 1960′s into the early 1980′s. The film included all of the greed, violence and lust for power that earlier films like Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) had established as defining tropes in the gangster genre. But director Francis Ford Coppola expanded his movie’s themes to tell the story of a family and — ultimately — of America itself. Over the course of his Godfather Trilogy the story of Corleone family is one of love and loyalty as well as brutality and vengeance. Coppola’s original movie turns 45 this year. Celebrating half a century of The Godfather here’s a deep dive documentary about the making of the trilogy…

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Continuing our look back at 1977′s amazing year of movies I was able to find Looking for Mr. Goodbar online last night. This flick features Diane Keaton — the quintessential 1970′s actress? — and a slew of budding stars including Richard Gere, Tom Berenger, Brian Dennehy, and Levar Burton. It also has a stacked disco soundtrack to accompany it’s Manhattan-after-midnight mise en scène. But, most importantly, this film, like many of the movies that came out of the New Hollywood of the era, seems exactly like a movie that could never be made now: it features a flawed heroine with body image issues from a childhood illness who seeks out no-strings sex as a substitute for intimacy; the movie consistently blurs lines between sex and violence; this flick is full of disturbing moods exacerbated by lots of drug-taking, and it features one of the most brutal, unforgiving endings of all time. It’s also based on a novel based on a true tragic story. In short, Goodbar is a massive bummer of a movie. It’s also unforgettable.

Here’s the film…

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Bob Rafelson directed some of the best films during the most important period in movies: flicks like Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens guarantee the director’s inclusion among the best of the New Hollywood auteurs, and his experimental send-up of The Monkees, Head, makes him a mad genius for the ages. Rafelson celebrates his 84th birthday on February 21. Here’s the director talking about the Monkees’ transformation from the pre-fab four, to a recording group, to the meta-Monkees that swung through the potent-if-plotless Head…

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Over the weekend we lost a giant of cinema when Michael Cimino passed away on July 2 at the age of 77. Some might wince at the word “giant” to describe Cimino’s work as a writer and director, but he made two masterpieces, and his decade-ish long run between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Year of the Dragon (1985) make Cimino one of the best directors to emerge from New Hollywood — the American films that span from the late 1960′s to the early 1980′s which represent cinema’s high-water mark.

For me The Deer Hunter (1978) is a masterpiece, and so is the version of Heaven’s Gate (1980) that re-emerged in 1982. However, in the end, The Deer Hunter made Cimino one of the most important directors of his generation and his follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, made him a legendary failure. Here’s Variety‘s word on the documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate…

Vet documentarian Michael Epstein (“The Battle Over ‘Citizen Kane,’”) draws heavily from well-received 1985 book by Steven Bach, senior v.p. and head of worldwide production for United Artists when UA green-lit “Heaven’s Gate.” Taking its cue from Bach’s tome, pic renders production of ill-fated pic — originally budgeted at $7.5 million, but completed for $36 million — as a slow-motion train wreck.

Ultimately, however, Epstein comes off as appreciably more forgiving of Cimino’s fanatical perfectionism and “epic mismanagement,” even to the point of suggesting the original 3-hour, 45-minute version of “Heaven’s Gate” is, for all its many flaws, “a beautiful, ambitious film” that deserves critical re-evaluation.

Artfully entwining outtakes, production stills, film clips and newly filmed interviews with executives, actors and crew, Epstein methodically charts stormy progress of the initially promising project.

Fresh from his triumph with “The Deer Hunter” (1978), his Oscar-winning Vietnam War drama, Cimino was actively courted by UA and other studios eager to release the hot director’s follow-up opus. Bach recalls that, upon seeing “The Deer Hunter,” he was equivocal: “This is a potentially great filmmaker.” Right from the start, however, the former UA exec (who frequently appears on camera through “Final Cut”) had minor misgivings.

During pre-production, for example, Cimino insisted on casting French actress Isabelle Huppert as his female lead. When Bach (among others) complained that Huppert couldn’t speak English well enough for the part, Cimino steamrolled over all objections. After that, Bach claims, production went downhill, then off a cliff.

Here’s Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate…

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I’ve been posting about the 35th anniversary of The Shining over the last several weeks, but I thought it might be better to wait until it was officially summertime to post about the 40th anniversary of Jaws. The summer movie as we know it today didn’t exist until Jaws devoured box offices all summer long in 1975. Along with Star Wars‘ release in 1977, the pair of films changed the entire calendar of film releasing, created the template for the modern blockbuster and put an end to the New Hollywood movement that made both of the movies possible in the first place.

Besides the game-changing industry impact of Jaws, the story of the making of the film was nearly as treacherous, desperate and paranoia-inducing as the plot of the film. From shooting on the open ocean, to the doubts about an inexperienced director in Steven Spielberg to the malfunctioning mechanical monster, it’s a wonder the movie even made it to the screen. Of course, it’s also become an American cinema classic.

Like Spielberg’s best films, Jaws is a genre potboiler, raised to the level of art: It features an ensemble cast of diverse believable characters inhabiting an airtight script that balances humor, thrills, chills and bloody gore into a monster movie that’s among the best ever made. The soundtrack is iconic and the point-of-view shark attacks are still enough to scare swimmers summer after summer for four decades, and Robert Shaw’s soliloquy about the sinking of the Indianapolis might be the best performance in any Spielberg film.

Here’s one of the best documentaries about the film. This might not be my last post about Jaws, but I hope you enjoy this first flashback to that scary summer of 1975…

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