00:01

If you're old enough to remember when phones had cords and the only thing that went viral was a cold, then you're in the right place. Welcome to the Big Six-O with Kaylee Harris and Guy Rawlison. Because who better to discuss life's second act than two people who still think mature is a type of cheese.

00:37

Well here we are again, Kayleigh, how are you? Yes, welcome back to another week. I'm good, how are you? Yeah, real good. Hey, do you remember the first movie you ever saw as a kid at the cinema? Oh, goodness me. I remember the first one that scared the daylights out of me, which would have been Jaws in 1976, and my life was never the same after that, but I think it was the same for a lot of people around the world. Wow, you... Sorry, I have to pre-date you. I remember my parents taking me to go and see Born Free. Oh!

01:04

Elsa the lioness, you know, that orphan lion cub. Oh, I know. And I cried. I love that movie. I still love that movie. Oh, I know. Look, and my life was like bed knobs and broomsticks and the Herbie movies, you know, the money can't buy, you know, promotional stuff for Volkswagen, um, Chitty-Chat, Bang Bang. And for some reason, I remember a movie with a young Kurt Russell and it was like the computer wore tennis shoes. I don't know why that sits with me. Was that the name of it?

01:34

Yeah, it was the computer wore tennis shoes. Oh my goodness. I remember seeing that. What's going on in your childhood? It was a really young Kurt Russell where something happened and all of a sudden he was his brainiac. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, this is, this is perfect hue and time to bring in someone who actually knows all of these movies back the front. Would like to welcome to the studio, our podcast and introduce to everybody. One of my favorite people in the world.

02:00

Simon Foster, host of the Screen Watching and Podcast. And tell us about this, you've got another podcast as well, Simon. Hello. Hi everyone. Hello Guy, hello Kelly. It's such a joy to be on your podcast experience. Our new podcast experience is called Best Movie Year Ever with a question mark 1987. And we're looking at that crazy year in movies. But today I'm talking with you guys about the last 50 odd years of cinema and that couldn't be more exciting. I'm thrilled to be here.

02:27

We're so happy to have you. Thank you, because you're just a walking encyclopedia when it comes to movies. And just in the intro there, we were talking about the movies we remember growing up. But we're going to break this down into chapters. I want to go back to sort of the 60s. And you've titled this chapter The Tide Turns, which is interesting. Why have you called it that? Hollywood was experiencing a changing of the guard, so to speak, a bit of a shift in the way movies were being made.

02:54

and the way people were watching movies. Television had taken a huge chunk of the audience. And at the start of the 60s, the studios had decided, well, we've got to get them back with spectacles. So we're going to have Cinerama, and we're going to have these massive wide screen spectacles like the Bible, like Exodus, like these massive movies that when they're great, they're Ben-Hur. When they're not so great, they're Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, which

03:23

absolutely ruined, came within like 75 cents of ruining 20th Century Fox at the time. So, Hollywood was having this personality crisis, didn't know what the audience wanted, and then three films came out very close to one another, sort of in the mid to late 60s, that changed the game forever. Bonnie and Clyde, the Warren Beatty Faye Dunaway film. There was Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda about the cross-country motorbike trip.

03:49

And of course there was 2001, A Space Odyssey from Stanley Kubrick. All three films did what no other film had done for up to a decade before that. And that was really engage the young audience, get new cinema goers, younger cinema goers into the cinemas and change the way movies were marketed and stories were told. So can you tell us, give us a little bit of the, for people who haven't seen 2001, tell us a little bit about what it's about because we do have a grab for it as well. No, Mike.

04:18

Goodness, that's throwing me under the bus. Try and explain 2001, a Space Odyssey. All right, here we go. In 10 seconds. It is essentially about the beginning of man, the start of mankind, the dawn of man. There's that very famous sequence at the beginning of the film with the cave men like apes who discover this massive monolith. And there's a lot of conjecture as to what that monolith means.

04:45

Now, all these years later, decades later, there are still academics who are sitting around saying, is the monolith, the huge black block that the apes find and that then is rediscovered later on in the film on the planet, one of the planets of Jupiter by our intrepid astronaut pair. What does this exactly mean? What is, what bonds mankind? What brings us all together from the beginning of

05:10

the dawn of man right through to the far reaches of outer space. And that's what the film is talking about. Some say it's very spiritual experience. Director Stanley Kubrick has gone on the record saying, oh, it could be that. It could just be the overriding sort of soulfulness of mankind's experience, the very existentialism of being alive on this planet. That is so deep. Like I was just hoping you would say, was, oh, it's where these guys are on a spaceship and the computer takes over and won't let them make any decisions.

05:39

Yeah, see, you were just thinking, you were hoping you'd just say it's about monkeys and it's about outer space and that's all you have to know. There you go, I like somebody. But no, it's a whole lot more than that. Probably which, I'm sure this clip will explain it a whole lot better than I do. Open the 5-bit doors please, Hal. Hello, Hal, do you read me? Do you read me, Hal? Hello, Hal, do you read me? Affirmative, Dave.

06:06

Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

06:13

What's the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. What are you talking about, Hal? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it. Yeah, see, there you go. I'm not gonna do that. All cleared up now. There you go, we're all over. All cleared up now. We finally cracked 2001, I'm glad we could. And of course, Easy Rider was the other one that came along and that was the real counterculture film, which was, you know.

06:42

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonder and a very young Jack Nicholson, I think he earned his first Academy Award nomination for Easy Rider and taking on the flyover states, the inner west of America with this new found sort of counterculture freedom. So those three films really set the stage for the next chapter of our chat. When Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider hit the screen, do you think Hollywood execs went into a collective midlife crisis and they thought out with the musicals, in with the counterculture?

07:08

Oh, you're absolutely right, Guy. At that point in time, it was still the old school executives who were sitting in the ivory towers of Hollywood and they were desperately trying to, you know, make movies like Hello Dolly, or they were trying to make movies like Dr. Dolittle. They were putting millions and millions of dollars into these old school spectacles, old school musicals that the, you know, the pot smoking cool kids of the time were like.

07:32

What? No, actually, Dr. Doolittle for Pot Smoking Cool Kids could be kind of cool, but I don't want to get into that. But so, yeah, you're right. They didn't know. And there was this huge sweeping out of the old executive guard at most of the studios. They all wanted to have the next Bonnie and Clyde. They all wanted to have the next DZ Rider. And you look back now and directors at the time, we've given incredible freedoms and a lot of money.

07:57

to try to come up with the next sort of cool movie for the kids. And there were some terrible movies made out of that period that nobody talks about anymore in the hope that, you know, they would, you know, they'd find that kind of, that gold dust, that magic potion to have the next new zeitgeisty type of film. But yeah, it was an absolute changing of the guard. Did the blob come out in the sixties? I knew you'd ask that. They really voted the worst movie of all time. The blob starring a very young Steve McQueen.

08:27

No, it was pre 60s. I think it was a late 50s film, but that was, you know, that was very much when cinema dominated, when drive ins dominated and movies like that were just sort of a what the kids would go to every week. But yeah, that was that was becoming very old school. Although having said that, one of the other films that really redefined that early period of change in the late 60s, early 70s.

08:51

was the ultimate drive-in movie and that was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That was a movie that came along that was really embraced for its, not so much for its violence, which if you actually watch the film there's not a whole lot of violence in it, there's more, it feels a whole lot more violence than it is, but it was seen as a real maverick film and that's kind of what Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde was. So it defied its bloody sort of drive-in roots to be another film that came to define that changing era of Hollywood.

09:19

Disney was pretty prolific in the 60s as well. And they had a couple of those big screen movies like the Castaways and Swiss Family Robinson to get families, I guess, back in. But then we also had in the 60s from Disney, 101 Dalmatians, which still stands up, I think, and Jungle Book, those classics. So Disney was very active in the movie space as well in the 60s, weren't they? They really were. They were able to sort of transform the popularity and the iconic.

09:48

moment when Disneyland itself opened and embraced all those animated characters, launched new animated characters. Disney and the family audience kind of stayed pretty solid to movie going. There wasn't a lot of change in the number of tickets sold from the classic era of animation through the 60s and into the 70s. Disney certainly hit a rough patch in the late 70s and through the 80s before, you know, many years later when

10:13

They had that resurgence with the Lion King and Aladdin and all those movies came along. But at that point in time, yeah, they had a lot of very popular films. Yeah. Can we just move on to your latter day? Coppola's and Spielberg's and Lucas's. They changed that whole Hollywood landscape, right? Did they have a secret film club where they just swapped, you know, marketing tips and lightsaber recipes, or were they just brilliant enough to rewrite that whole?

10:40

Hollywood rule book and those popcorn worthy sort of hits. You're absolutely right, Guy. That brings us to sort of the next chapter and what I'm gonna talk about. And I've called that New Kids on the Block because out of this new generation of filmmakers and studio operations came these young movie brats who had grown up watching cinema and watching the great sort of horrors and action films.

11:07

of the 40s and 50s, they were all students of cinema. So they wanted to bring their own sort of new flare to what cinema was. First and foremost amongst those was Francis Wood Coppola who had The Godfather, turned an airport novel into an iconic movie and all the studios wanted their next Godfather. But probably the two that actually changed the way the landscape worked was Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Now Steven Spielberg,

11:36

came along with Jaws and totally upended the way movies were released. Even The Godfather, which went on to become like the second or third highest-grossing film of all time, it got to that level over about 18 months. It was shipped all around America and built up its box office with Jaws. All of a sudden, it was the film of the moment. You had to see this film and it just took over that entire summer of 76, first in America and then all around the world.

12:06

Spielberg did it again with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his next film. And George Lucas, of course, had Star Wars, A New Hope, which has been renamed A New Hope. I don't want to call it that, so let's just call it Star Wars. And these were films that harken back to the great old B adventures of years gone by. Had no star power in them. Nobody knew who Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher was when Star Wars came out.

12:31

And not only that, all these films, whether it was Jaws or Close Encounters or Star Wars, had all these sundry lines of revenue, whether it was the soundtrack or the action figures or the lunch boxes or whatever. So suddenly Hollywood had stumbled on this new young audience with a lot of disposable cash and movies became the roller coaster ride event of the American summer of the late 70s. Let's have a listen to a little bit of Jaws first of all, just to...

12:58

get an idea of what a beautifully crafted film it really is.

13:29

None of us will ever get over that. Dum dum dum, will we? We'll never get over that. I mean, I remember after I saw that movie, I was 12 and I came home that night, I was in bed and I was so scared of any of my limbs falling over the side of the bed because I was convinced there were sharks in the carpet. Yeah. I was so scared. Like I think it just ruined the swimming for everybody. And both Steven Spielberg and the author of the original, Peter Benchley, have since come out and said,

13:56

one of the greatest regrets of their lives are that they've demonized sharks that way because sharks, you know, they became the ultimate movie monster and still are to this day. Last week I was at a film festival and there was another shark movie up there on screen telling us how awful and horrible these creatures are, which they're not, but thanks to Spielberg and John Williams' fantastic movie, as you point out, they are like that. And then of course, with Star Wars, you had this film which became what they call a four-quadrant

14:26

everybody, whether it was man, woman, adult, child, and all the sort of Venn diagram crossovers in between had to see Star Wars. It was the, not only movie event, it was the social event of that summer, the summer of 77. And on the back of that close encounters came along by still my favorite Spielberg film. But let's have a listen to Star Wars to remember the energy and bring back all those memories of what it was like to see this incredible outer space adventure. If you only knew the power of the dark side.

14:57

Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father. He told me enough! He told me you killed him! No, I am your father.

15:19

Sally lost James Earl Jones this year just recently. Yeah yeah he was one of the great American actors of all time a Broadway trained star who'd been on you know trod the boards for years and been in dozens and dozens of movies but he will be most remembered for his voice the voice of Darth Vader and I digress here a little bit but if you go on YouTube there are making of films sort of making of behind the scenes films from Star Wars

15:48

where you can hear the original English actor, Dave Prowse, inside the suit doing the voice to Carrie Fisher. And it's hilarious. He says, it's nothing like Darth Vader. It's like Darth Vader, you know, one of the great, I am your father sort of thing. And of course with that actually, you know, that I am your father line appeared in so many other movies. The one that springs to mind for me is in Toy Story with, when

16:15

Emperor Zerg says to Buzz Lightyear, no, I am your father. Like it just pops up everywhere, doesn't it? Yeah, it's so much of the Star Wars universe became iconic to a whole generation of moviegoers and a whole generation's after with the, you know, the streaming releases and the toys becoming collector's items. So yeah, it was a landmark moment. I wanna get onto my next chapter very quickly. At the same time that all this was happening overseas, here in Australia, we were going through

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what's been called the Renaissance period, the Aussie Renaissance of films. Australians like Peter Weir were making Picnic and Hanging Rock, and George Miller was making Mad Max, and My Brilliant Career was coming out with Gillian Armstrong's first film. And that came to sort of a pivotal moment, an end point at the end of the 70s, when Breaker Morant and Gallipoli both came out defining that sort of amazing era of Australian film storytelling.

17:12

Here's a question I always wondered, did Mel Gibson drive off from the Mad Max set and accidentally bump into the guys from Baker Morant or Gallipoli on his way to Stardom? Or was Australia just producing a ridiculous amount of iconic films back then? There was a lot of Australian directors who were being inspired by the French new wave of the sort of early to late 60s European cinema. That's where we got Picnic from Hanging Rock and My Brilliant Career from.

17:42

But with films like Mad Max, there's a great Australian film called The Chain Reaction, which has recently had this beautiful Blu-ray conversion. The film schools like NIDA and the Australian Film and Television Radio School were at their peak. They were generating this, they were being funded and they were generating this amazing amount of talent that was finding its way to screens and being given freedom to create what they wanted to create. So for the first time in a long time,

18:10

Australian cinema was going to the Cannes Film Festival, was getting nods at Venice, or were being seen all around the world and being recognised as extraordinary works of film from this little sort of outpost at the bottom of the world that nobody knew even made films. So there was certainly a groundswell of excitement about what we were doing here that helped these films and their stars and their directors travel the world.

18:36

I noticed you didn't throw Alvin Purple or the Adventures of Barry Mackenzie into that. No, I did not. That's not true. I love Barry Mackenzie, I've got to be honest. I don't think I've ever seen the original Alvin Purple. Maybe it's something I should check out with my 2024 eyes and see how I react to it. I'm sure it's a lot of fun. Those films came out of a period, and I don't want to get too heavily into what happened with the Australian film culture at that stage, but there was a tax break called 10BA.

19:05

And that allowed investors to put money into film production and get a huge tax offset, a huge tax break come back. This is a period of cinema that Quentin Tarantino loves because it meant that cheap horror, cheap science fiction, thrillers, dirty movies, you know, could get made. And people look back at the 10 BA period as this time when Australian cinema just had cut blunch to do whatever it want and made some

19:33

wild, wacky, nutty, terrible, but amazing films, the likes of which we hadn't seen before and we've never seen since. Going back to the 70s too, what about the whole disaster films? We had Towering Inferno and Poseidon Adventure and those sorts of films, I guess, are in the line of Jaws again, you know, the terror sort of movies of the time. Yeah, the first one of those that came along

20:01

I want to say the Poseidon adventure early in the 70s, 72 maybe, and it was on a scale like Hollywood hadn't seen. There'd been disaster movies before, earthquake movies and stuff like that, but when Poseidon hit really big, featuring Leslie Nielsen as the captain, and we'll get to a bit more Leslie Nielsen later on, they set in motion this huge sort of wave, I was going to say, no pun intended, of...

20:27

of disaster films like the Towering Inferno. You look at the stars that were in the Towering Inferno, this is off the top of my head, McQueen, Paul Newman, Robert Culp, it just went on and on, these, I.J. Simpson, that really were absolute money spinners.

20:46

They kind of went pushed a little bit too hard with that because come 1980, Paul Newman was starring in a volcano movie called When Time Ran Out with Jacqueline Bessette. And it's hilariously terrible. All movies run their course. All sorts of genres run their course. But at the peak, there was nothing bigger than, you know, Poseid Adventure or Airport or Earthquake or, you know, these are films that have long lived in my memory.

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This episode of the Big Sixo brought to you by Louis Carr Real Estate, helping people in the Hills District find their dream home since 1992. Ready to buy, sell or rent? Check out louiscarr.com.au for all your property needs. Before we move on to the eighties, I just want to bring up a couple of movies that I think everyone has probably seen, and that's Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Yeah. Now I'll ask someone who knows, is it true that

21:42

Saturday Night Fever was never really intended to do anything other than introduce Travolta to the world and it was a low budget sort of film. The Bee Gees were trying to find their identity again and the money spinner was always going to be Grease. Is that sort of how it played out? That's exactly right. A lot of people who only know the name Saturday Night Fever and know it to be the famous dance

22:11

you know, illuminated floor doing all these spectacular movies. If you watch the film now, it is a very dark, very New York story about a little, you know, this Italian family whose older brother wants to be a dance star. It is in no way was designed to be any kind of crowd pleasing film, but late in the production, the producer got hold of the Bee Gees music, cut it all together so that it became a hit and the rest is film history. And you're absolutely right, Grease.

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which went on to become like the fifth or sixth most popular movie of all time in terms of box office, was geared up to be the blockbuster that it became, but they were taking a big risk with Allegra Newton John, who had never acted in a production like that before. Nobody was really sure whether the audiences would take on John Travolta as this goofy sort of high school tough guy who changes. Hollywood...

23:10

was going through a time and society was going through a time where we were doing a lot of nostalgia as well. George Lucas has had his first big hit with American Graffiti, Happy Days was the biggest thing on television. So the timing was right for Grease to come out and be a huge hit and that played out exactly that way. But you're absolutely right. Saturday Night Fever shocked everybody. And I think like even up until like maybe 10 years ago, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was still the highest grossing film soundtrack of all time and one of the top.

23:38

selling albums of all time. So yeah, it was an incredible time for different types of musicals. Now before you two drag me out of the 70s and into the 80s, I just want to, we talked a bit before about Leslie Nielsen, some of those comedy movies from the 70s. I remember the Kentucky Fried movie that was hilarious. And then along came Flying High, but it was called, was it called

24:03

It was Airplane in America, that's right, and Flying High around the world. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I only watched it the other day and it's so inappropriate. It's so funny. And the one line is, I've got we've got a bit of flying high here. Have a listen. Captain, how soon can you land? I can't tell. You can tell me I'm a doctor. No, I mean, I'm just not sure. Why can't you take a guess? Well.

24:24

Not for another two hours. You can't take a guess for another two hours? No, no, no, I mean, we can't land for another two hours. Fog has closed down everything this side of the mountains. We've got to get through to Chicago. Oh, I love it. Peter Graves there and Leslie Nielsen, yep. That's one of my favorite scenes for the movie. That wacky kind of comedy, National Lampoon had had a huge hit. The college newspaper, which was a satirical sort of force in American society, had lent their name to Animal House.

24:53

and National Lampoon's Vacation with Chevy Chase was about to become a hit. So those films like Kentucky Fried Movie and Flying High sort of came out of that crazy no holds barred type of comedy. Flying High was also important because it was a huge hit and it was reinforcing the fact that you didn't need big stars or you could drag out old stars like Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen to a certain extent and Lloyd Bridges was in there as well, all making fun of themselves.

25:21

And suddenly you got this hit movie. So it became, and also playing to a very young audience. And that's where the last chapter I wanna talk about comes in. The kids are all right. Meaning that very suddenly, because Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back and films like that were finding traction with the under 21 audience, suddenly the studio said, oh, okay, well, we need to start making movies for kids or for family audiences. So all of a sudden ET becomes a massive hit. Flashdance with its music becomes a...

25:51

another hit. And if you go back and watch Flashdance, it's a fairly dark film as well, not out of like Saturday Night Fever. And then by the mid 80s, film releases are being dominated by stories about teenagers. And they obviously the peak of that was the John Hughes films and in specifically The Breakfast Club, which redefine cinema for a much, much younger audience. So, you know, they're the key decades and key movements within a decade of us watching movies that I'm so fond of.

26:20

Do you think Simon that the Breakfast Club, for example, which at the time was a voice regeneration, do you think those films still resonate with younger audiences today or not? Or is that magic been lost somewhere in the era of streaming and superhero franchises? Oh boy, you're opening a Pandora's box of opinion there with me, I've got to tell you. I do know that The Breakfast Club still resonates. It's one of my favourite films and I've introduced it to my daughters back when they were teenagers

26:49

and they found it to be unlike any movie they'd seen as part of their growing up. And they were conscious that we were very lucky to have those characters on screen speaking those dialogue, that sort of dialogue, which is, you know, white middle-class dialogue. It's very much of the eighties in that respect, but it's also very truthful dialogue, the kind of which you don't see in cinema aimed at young people nowadays.

27:16

So yes, I still think it does resonate, whether the impact of cinema overall still does with the young people, that's certainly up for debate. I've had a lot of arguments about how important it is to get along and see things on the big screen and have that community experience of watching movies in the dark. And others are like, I know I can watch that over three days on the train on my phone. And I'm like, yeah, well, that's exactly the way they meant to be watching it. Knuckleheads. So.

27:42

But yes, I still think there's a place for cinema, but it has certainly changed a lot since the glory days of the 60s, 70s and 80s. You were talking earlier about your podcast about is 1987 the best year for movies? What is it about that year? What came out that year? Well, you can rattle off things like Raising Arizona, Empire of the Sun, Good Morning Vietnam, plus just a whole plethora of

28:09

genre films, horror and sci-fi films that were made for the home video boom at the time that maybe in hindsight, how would I put it, aren't very good, but are also part of this movie watching DNA that I've grown up with. And so yeah, there were some pretty extraordinary films. We've done three episodes to date. We started off with With Nail and I, which was the very coarse British comedy with Richard E that sort of introduced the world to Richard E Grant.

28:39

was this terrible little horror film called The Kindred. And I thought it was so 1987, but that's the kind of thing we'd want to do, look back and have a bit of a laugh as well. So yeah, it was a crazy time. Can I just jump in and say, go back a little bit. I feel as though in the seventies and eighties, there were so many movies, sequels were a thing. We talked earlier about Jaws. Now it got to the ridiculous stage with Jaws sequels where they were so unbelievable and so stupid. But we also had Rocky.

29:08

and Rocky had so many sequels as well. Police Academy comes to mind. And they never seem to work as good as the first one. What are your thoughts on sequels, Simon? Sequels are generally commissioned by the studios to make money. There's no other reason. There's not a lot of creative input. There's certainly nowhere near the inspiration that goes into making the first film or recapturing the essence of what made the first film.

29:35

such a must see that that really happens in sequels. When Godfather Part Two came out and it proved to be just as good a film as Part One, everybody thought that, and many people say that it's better, it could be, many saw that as being the reason that studios kept trying to make the same sequels, that make the same movies over and over again. They're purely financial decisions. There's very few movies that come out that people say are better than the first one. Empire Strikes Back is argued as a better movie than Star Wars.

30:05

Um, many people say the second Lord of the Rings film is the best of the trilogy. I know personally, I favor smoking the band at part two over the first film. So there's a whole lot of there we can talk about. Looking across the sixties, seventies and eighties, I won't even touch on back to the future and its trilogy. Sure. Um, we had filmmakers breaking down barriers in the, in the sixties, but by the eighties, we're dealing with Molly Ringwald's birthday being forgotten. Um,

30:32

What happened? I mean, did the filmmakers decide, yeah, we've done the heavy lifting, now let's just focus on, you know, just flippant sort of romance and teenage sort of audiences? Well, that was always there. Cinema always had the flippant teen romance. You can go back to the beach blanket bingo days of Annette Finacello to see what it looked like back in those days. It's just that the audience, which was...

30:56

back in the Beach Blanket Bingo days, a very niche audience. The teenagers weren't making the movie going decision back then. By the time you got to Molly Ringwald, and you got to, and we should remember Molly Ringwald got on the cover of Time Magazine as the biggest star of her generation. They were, the kids were driving the ticket buying decision. It was in the eighties that all the multiplex opens around, you know, the shopping malls suddenly became the home of seven or eight cinemas as well. So the kids hanging out at the shopping mall were

31:25

you know, prime for the picking as far as the Hollywood industry was concerned. So, you know, if they've got their slushy and they're walking past a cinema and they can see a movie with Molly Ringwood in it or a police academy film or something like that, then, um, then that is the most important sort of story to be told at the end of the mid eighties. I might just touch on back to the future. Where, where do you sit on those, those three? Because the second one was made just as a, as you know,

31:54

as far as those who are concerned, they were just really just a transient thing to have that blockbuster at the end, wasn't it? There's a lot of debate about the worth of the Back to the Future sequels. The first film is held up as a classic of storytelling. The script for Back to the Future number one is actually central to a major script writing course at one of Hollywood's, one of Southern California's biggest filmmaking schools. So it's...

32:22

It holds its ground and holds its status as a classic. The second one was ambitious. And like most Spielberg sequels, it went a bit darker and a bit more daring in the story it told. I've watched, I've gone back and watched the second one more than I've watched the first one because it sort of goes down some darker territories. Number three, they just had to end on a high rollicking kind of a Western note. So there were three very different films that dabbled in three very different genres, which you don't often see with.

32:52

with sequels, so I give them a fair bit of credit. Simon, just finally, and I want a quick answer to this. I know you love your horror movies. What is your all time scariest or favorite horror movie? Or are they two different movies? Straight away, no film impacted me the first time I saw it as much as The Exorcist has. I still look back at that time, at that film and think, my goodness, for Warner Brothers to stump up the sordid dollars to pay these stars to make this kind of movie,

33:21

and have the scenes in it that it had in it. That is an extraordinary time for cinema. That was the early seventies. That was the time when the studios, as I mentioned previously, were throwing dollars at young directors to say, please do what you can to give us the next easy rider or the next godfather. And out of that came the exorcist. So I would say that the most fun I've ever had watching a horror movie is Toby Hooper's Poltergeist, produced by Spielberg. I mentioned that earlier on as, maybe I did, I can't remember now, I've said.

33:50

Talk so much about movies. Poltergeist is one of my favourite horror films. John Carpenter's The Thing. Okay, now instantly I've got like 40 names in my head that I could rattle off, but I'm not gonna do that. Let's go with The Exorcist with a close Poltergeist follow-up. Beautiful. Simon, thank you. I won't be watching any of those. I get very scared with scary movies. It's been so lovely to have you on the programme again. Simon Foster, he's host of Screen Watching. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

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Hailey, thank you so much. Thank you guys. Lovely to speak with you both. Although I didn't let you speak too much, but it was good to be here anyway. Thanks, Simon. The views and opinions expressed on the Big 6O are personal and reflect those of the hosts and guests. They do not represent the views or positions of any affiliated organisations or companies. This podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice. Please consult with a qualified professional for guidance on any personal matters.

34:50

Ah, and before we go, let's give credit where credit is due. Kaylee Harris and I came up with all the genius content for this week's episode. Our producer, Nick Aboud, well he keeps the lights on and makes sure we don't accidentally upload a cat video instead of a podcast. So thanks for keeping us on track Nick. Nick?