Ep. 16: Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life

Ep. 17: 32 Sounds

In 32 Sounds [https://32sounds.com/], director Sam Green listens. He listens to the last male bird of a dying species chirp for a mate that will never arrive. He listens to a man who can almost hear the voices of dead lovers and friends. He listens to a musician who burned a piano in her youth for art and now records underwater sounds. And he spends a day with a foley artist who manipulates a shammy to mimic the sounds of fighting, fucking and feasting. In this episode, we talk to Green and Joanna Fang, a foley artist who worked on Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), Clifford the Big Red Dog, In the Heights and other films.

Ep. 16: Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life

In "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," author James Curtis chronicles the silent star’s private life and pictures, including The General, One Week, The Navigator and Steamboat Bill, Jr. But it’s Keaton’s days as a performer that captivated me so we begin the episode with tales from the vaudeville stage, including details about which foot Buster's father preferred to kick him with.

Ep. 15: Shhhh! Silents

On this episode we open our ears to the sounds of silent films with an audio documentary about musicians who compose new scores to movies from a century ago. These composers are smitten with the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, early Alfred Hitchcock and others. Before the doc, we open with one man’s obsession with the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin."

Ep. 14: Stephen Park

Before he was Sonny [https://youtu.be/gXzAwfTC8Wg] the shopkeeper in Do the Right Thing, or Mike Yanagita [https://youtu.be/_3-QguUq_q4] in Fargo, or Nescaffier [https://twitter.com/french_dispatch/status/1443621675430408192] in The French Dispatch, Stephen Park [https://www.instagram.com/stephenpark62/]was a confused college student. His father was a doctor. So naturally, Park enrolled in a lot of science classes at Boston University. But it never really clicked. “After my second year, I was on academic probation,” he says. After transferring to SUNY Binghamton, he continued to struggle. Just before dropping out of college, his girlfriend suggested he take a semester full of classes he wanted to take, not classes he thought his family expected him to take. So he signed up for four theater classes: acting, mime, voice, body work. He loved it. “It didn’t feel like school. I had associated school with pain and torture and things I didn’t like to do,” he says. “It was alien to me to be having fun and enjoying what I was doing.” In this episode, we talk with Stephen Park about his journey as an actor, how he suggested changes to his character in Do the Right Thing, and much, much more.

Ep. 13: The Godfather

GF1. That’s what the New Jersey gangsters on The Sopranos called the film. To everyone else, it was The Godfather, a 1972 film that saved Paramount Pictures and catapulted the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton to the stratosphere. It also reintroduced a struggling Marlon Brando to the world. In this episode, I interview Mark Seal [https://www.mark-seal.com/], author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of the Godfather [https://www.mark-seal.com/], recently published by Simon and Schuster. The book chronicles the unlikely rise of writer Mario Puzo (author of The Godfather novel), gambling habits, mob connections, Hollywood feuds, casting disputes, on-the-set backstabbing. The more one reads, the more one wonders how the damn thing turned out so well.