The practice of itinerant filmmaking - traveling from town to town, charging a fee for residents to become the stars of a film - mostly died out in the early 50's. But one man continued the practice for nearly 40 years, filming the same movie over and over again. Bob talks to Caroline Frick, Executive Director of the The Texas Archive of the Moving Image about her decade-long fixation on filmmaker Melton Barker and his oft-filmed movie The Kidnapper's Foil. 

 

You can watch several versions of The Kidnapper's Foil at meltonbarker.org

 

The Hut Sut Song - from The Kidnapper's Foil

Producer Ken Viselman, the marketing guru behind the explosive American success of "The Teletubbies" and "Thomas the Tank Engine" had a vision – a movie for toddlers that encouraged the audience to sing, dance and interact with the on-screen action. The result was"The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure," a movie that debuted in late August and holds the record for the lowest opening weekend box office of all time, earning just $206 per theater. Bob talks to Entertainment Weekly's Grady Smith about what went wrong and Smith's singular fascination with the Oogieloves phenomenon.

 

Most of us have been lucky enough to never witness someone's innards being spliced out of their body. Or someone's head being smashed into a wall. But in an action or horror film, we often believe that that's what actual violence sounds like. Deep in the Hollywood studios, sound editors have to create these sounds. How do they know what gruesome violence really sounds like? Brooke talks with Slate senior editor Daniel Engber who wrote about the battle between the real and created sound of violence.

Originally released in 1978, Faces of Death became a cult sensation with gruesome depictions of actual deaths, and sensational staged scenes where real footage couldn't be found. Brooke Gladstone talks to Faces of Death creator John Alan Schwartz about the movie's lasting effect and how "real" a film can be when nearly half of it was faked.

Hollywood can conjure realistic car chases, wars, and alien invasions. When it comes to a simple evening newscast, however, the results are almost always unconvincing. Bob speaks with a TV critic, a TV news director, an Onion News Network writer, and two directors to find out why Hollywood gets it wrong.

Battles - White Electric (Shabazz Palaces Remix)

In 1977 a former beauty queen with a 168 IQ named Joyce McKinney became British tabloid fodder when she supposedly kidnapped her Mormon boyfriend at gunpoint and for 4 days kept him as her sex slave.  She's the subject of Errol Morris' documentary Tabloid. Morris talked to Brooke in July of 2011 about what makes for tabloid fare, then and now.

 

10cc - The Things We do for Love

Over the past 9 months, writer, director, and editor Kirby Ferguson has been releasing episodes of Everything is a Remix, a video series about how appropriation, borrowing, and adaptation are inherent in, well, everything we as a culture create. The third installment of the four-part series just came out last week, so we thought we'd ask him a few questions about the project and his personal opinions on copyright and fair use.

 

For the animators of films and video games, creating a truly human looking and acting character has long been the holy grail. But making characters close-to-real and yet not-real-enough leaves them in what's called the 'uncanny valley' where audiences find those characters unsettling, unnatural and zombie-like. OTM producer Jamie York ...

The Nazi revenge thriller "Iron Cross" has received little notice and critics who have seen the film haven't been too kind. The Hollywood trade publication Variety initially slammed the film but removed its negative review following a major ad buy by the filmmakers. Was it a ...

In a galaxy of Hollywood stars, one cameo player can boast the longest career by far. But chances are you've never seen him and you never will. He's appeared in some of the most popular movies ever, but he isn't an actor, though he was probably created by one. Wilhelm ...

Film critic and author David Thomson argues in his new book that Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho" marks the moment when America learned to love violence, sex and voyeurism. Thomson also says that "Psycho" marked the beginning of the end for the film censor's strict code.

For more than 40 years Don LaFontaine was the voice of the film preview. His sonorous, gravelly, ignore-me-at-your-peril delivery became virtually synonymous with the movie trailer. We originally aired this tribute to his career shortly after his death in September of 2008.

When Universal Studios released "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" in 1931, America's love affair with horror movies was born. Michael Mallory, author of Universal Studios Monsters, A Legacy of Horror, explains why these pivotal films revolutionized cinema and how they live on in the recent horror flick "Paranormal ...

Congress created the National Film Registry in 1988 to preserve cherished American films. Daniel Eagan, author of America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry says the registry has become a repository of both classics and obscure titles, all saved from the ...

Documentaries are supposed to represent the truth. But who decides what the truth is exactly? Patricia Aufderheide, professor and documentarian, explains a new effort to interview documentary filmmakers anonymously about their ethical lapses. She hopes that by understanding the extent of the problem the documentary community ...

As Brooke reported eight years ago, witnesses of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and those watching on TV used a common vocabulary to describe the scene: it was like a movie. Not only did that day change the way people process images of mass violence, it also affected ...

Two years ago, Netflix offered a $1 million prize to whomever could improve their movie recommendation software by 10%. Now a team has won (though the winning team has yet to be announced.) Writer Clive Thompson tells us why the competition is important and ...

A year ago at the Consumer Electronics Show, Blu-ray was taking its victory lap as the winner of the hi-def home movie format war. But in the intervening year skeptics have argued that downloading and streaming movies may prematurely end Blu-ray’s reign. Home Theater Magazine editor

Telephones have always figured prominently in film, as a plot device, a prop, a way to generate suspense or a way to reach out and touch someone. But now that we’re all reachable all the time, screenwriters have to contrive ways of using our phones in symbolic or surprising ways, ...

Filmmakers have long been fascinated by the idea of the grizzled reporter chasing a scoop. In the silent era, titles like “The Daring of Diana” and “The Final Extra” treated journalism as adventure – and it’s no different in the modern age. Joe Saltzman, director of the