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If you grew up in small-town America during the forties or fifties, there's a good chance that your first exposure to cinematic taboo came in the guise of the sex-hygiene film. And most exploitation aficionados will agree that "Mom & Dad" was the king of the genre. Exploitation historian Joe Bob Briggs describes the show as "part biology lesson, part sideshow, part morality play, part medical shock footage." He describes the phenomenon to Brooke.
A budget battle is underway in Mexico that could have grave consequences for the nation's burgeoning film industry. If approved, the President's proposal would gut the industry's state-subsidies, which culture watchers say are the country's last defense against the Hollywood juggernaut. And the increasingly deafening outcry has put the President on the defensive. Bob checks in with Ken Bensinger, who writes about Mexico's silver screen for Daily Variety.
Lining up big donors for not-so-big movies has always proved a challenge for independent filmmakers. So Ethan Hawke is forgetting about those donors altogether, and taking his new movie straight to the people. This week, shares for Hawke's latest project, "Billy Dead," went on the Internet auction block in what is believed to be the first ever IPO for an individual film. Brooke talks to Barry Polterman, who founded the brokerage firm managing the sale.
Journalists in Baghdad received a blast from the past this week when guerillas fired rockets at the Palestine Hotel. Just over seven months ago, the same hotel had been fired on by an American tank during the siege of Baghdad. Two journalists were killed in that first attack, and they are among the six whose stories are told in a new documentary, "Journalists: Killed in the Line of Duty." Bob talks to the film's director, Steven Rosenbaum.
Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by occupying armies fighting hostile insurgents is that the guerrillas never fight them on their own terms. So how to prepare war planners for these sorts of conflicts? How about taking them to the movies? A few months ago, Pentagon officials were invited to a special in-house screening of the 1966 classic "The Battle of Algiers." Rand Corporation terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman routinely uses the film in his courses, and tells Bob why.
Zombies have tromped around the big screen throughout cinema history. OTM’s senior producer Arun Rath, probes the broader significance of the walking dead genre, why it has packed the house for decades, and what zombies say about the rest of us. Eeek!
A year ago this week, armed Chechen separatists stormed into a packed Moscow theater, leading to a 57-hour standoff with Russian troops outside. The tragic end of the siege was broadcast around the world, as Russian troops overtook the Chechens with a powerful anesthetic gas, killing 129 hostages in the process. But in the two days before that, the scene inside the theater was also being documented - by one of the Chechen gunmen. Bob talks to Dan Reed, producer and director of "Terror in Moscow" - a new documentary that incorporates the terrorists' own footage.
This week the movie "Veronica Guerin" hits theaters across the country. It's the story of an Irish reporter who, through assiduous reporting and extraordinary courage, tracked down and exposed the drug lords who were turning Dublin into a war zone in the mid 1990s. But veteran Irish journalist Ed Moloney tells Brooke that it was Guerin's murder in 1996, rather than her years of a crusading journalism, that spurred Ireland to crack down on the drug trade.
