Greetings all,
I am out this week at another festival and a conference of film teachers.
There are not one but two film festivals this week here in Dallas.
The Oak Cliff Festival has great films with attitude. Each year it expands and the programming this year is stellar.
Here are my suggestions, many of them I have seen and others I have just heard good things about.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed with live score by Anvil Orchestra
Friday, July 31, 7:00pm @ The Texas Theatre
Films with live scores are great, but what the Anvil orchestra does is exceptional.
The Last Critic (Robert Christgau)
Friday, July 31, 8:45pm @ The Kessler Theater
I was never a fan of his writing, but he had a major impact on music of that era.
Texas Student Shorts
Saturday, August 1, 11:45am @ The Texas Theatre
Barbara Forever
Saturday, August 1, 12:15pm @ Oak Cliff Assembly
A great documentary about the life and films of Barbara Hammer, who was a friend, and perhaps one of the most influential experimental filmmakers of her generation. Many docs about filmmakers don’t rise to the level of the filmmaker, this one does.
Joybubbles
Saturday, August 1, 1:00pm @ Bishop Arts Theatre Center
Cinema 16
Saturday, August 1, 2:30pm @ Oak Cliff Assembly
Always a great collection of experimental films.
Los Lobos: Native Sons
Saturday, August 1, 6:30pm @ The Texas Theatre
I saw this at SXSW and it is one of the better music docs of the year.
Pulp Fiction with screenwriter Roger Avary
Sunday, August 2, 4:15pm @ The Texas Theatre
When We Were Live
Sunday, August 2, 4:45pm @ Bishop Arts Theatre Center
This is a film Austin public access, which was a both a reflection of its time and place but also affected the culture of Austin.
Shtickmen 20th Anniversary Screening
Sunday, August 2 5:15pm @ The Kessler Theater
And there is lots more. There will be many filmmakers in town for this festival. The festival is at the Texas Theatre and other venues in North Oak Cliff .
There is also a Bengali Film Festival at the Angelika Theater. I have not seen any of the films, but I went last year I was impressed. Aside from the films, there will be clothes and food from the region. You can find info here.
-Bart
The prime time TV I grew up with was replete with westerns and variety shows.
And they dominated the Nielsen ratings, whether it was Milton Berle or Gunsmoke, Ed Sullivan or Bonanza.
Slowly but surely, both forms became as extinct as Nehru suits. The broadcast networks’ last big swing at a weekly variety hour came nearly 40 years ago, when ABC signed Dolly Parton to a two-year deal to front Dolly. But even she couldn’t resurrect the form. And after a year, ABC bought her out, torpedoing the planned second season.
Deadwood, the last weekly shot at a western series, ended 20 years ago after three seasons. But HBO was its home on the range, not ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox. Collectively, they haven’t given a western drama series a shot since NBC mounted How the West Was Won, which ended in 1979.
That was the year before I became TV critic at The Dallas Morning News. It was just in time for an onslaught of another broadcast format that since has vanished. It’s also one that I genuinely miss — the once ballyhooed “Big Event” miniseries.
In the late 1970s, the completely unexpected success of ABC’s Roots (followed by Roots: The Next Generations), triggered full-blown spending splurges in pursuit of more multi-night smashes. ABC, by the way, also was feasting on the big viewer appetite for its initial miniseries foray, Rich Man, Poor Man.
NBC’s very ambitious Shogun then led the charge in the early 1980s, with its principal star, Richard Chamberlain, becoming TV’s “King of the Miniseries” after ABC’s The Thorn Birds cemented his reign. ABC spent untold millions on the format, also birthing The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, three editions of North and South, Masada, Amerika and a slew of shorter Stephen King adaptations.
NBC added Kennedy, Marco Polo and Peter the Great among others while CBS weighed in with the likes of The Blue and the Gray, Christopher Columbus, Space, I’ll Take Manhattan, Mistral’s Daughter and my all-time personal favorite, Lonesome Dove, Its stellar cast included five acting Oscar winners (Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Anjelica Huston, Diane Lane and Chris Cooper).
Miniseries, in which viewers were expected to tune in at the appointed hour for multi-night commitments, were so financially lucrative that networks oftentimes added flabby midsections in order to maximize advertising revenues. Sponsors were more than willing to pay premium rates for such “prestigious” fare — and much of it indeed was.
Diminished network budgets, the rise of cable, and the shrinkage of both audience attention spans and “appointment viewing” eventually added up to a death knell for the once grand and glorious miniseries format. The last one to draw both interest and Emmy acclaim (and it was just a two-nighter) was CBS’ 2005 Elvis, which starred Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Randy Quaid. This was also a time when newspapers still had a little expendable money, so I was allowed to spend a few days in New Orleans interviewing the cast and crew during production.
During their heydays, miniseries made the broadcast networks considerably more lustrous than they are today. Productions such as Roots, Shogun and Lonesome Dove were both ratings giants and multi-award winners. Now that’s all gone, with miniseries, westerns and variety hours long erased from the game plans of ABC, CBS and NBC while relative newcomer Fox never really got into any of those games.
So what’s left? Well, the broadcast networks are still clinging to sports, with the World Cup soccer tournament giving Fox a ratings bonanza while the NBA Finals gave ABC a big boost.
A new NFL season, of course, is just around the corner. So that’s more ratings gold for as long as ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox can keep big-time sports out of the hands of streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Peacock.
Those days also are surely numbered in terms of “free” TV exposure. But unlike the aforementioned three extinct genres of TV’s past, sports assuredly will not go quietly into the night. The broadcast networks will fight to the end for those pieces of pie. In reality, it’s really all they have left.
-Ed
Howdy,
I’ve been trying to gain control of my inbox this week, my unread is growing unkempt and I have not even been able to even catch-up on my favorites. Many of my recommendations this week are available here on Substack, which I have going to a dedicated inbox.
The Ankler is a newer media brand created from a former president of The Hollywood Report and Billboard, so like those publications it’s very stats-based and a little in the weeds. I don’t read every single issue that they release because sometimes they come multiple times a day, but they have really great design and a very good podcast counterpart Ankler Agenda.
I love this one, which is the most recent that I’ve subbed to when I was looking for one that would list new movie trailers. I used to use the great Apple TV trailers app, until they discontinued it. Every week they send out a “Trailer Blitz” linking to everything for “The Matchbox Movie” apparently coming to Apple TV+ this fall and a movie about “Hershey” the chocolate founder being released by the Christian-conservative studio Angel Studios on Thanksgiving.
This might appeal the most to readers of our newsletter, written by Tim Hope, it describes the Substack as “for people who love film, live film, and want it to evolve.” It’s a more positive look at the industry than most, although recently there have been a lot of posts about the possible Paramount/Warner Bros merger, but also useful topics like “Who are the programmers at the top film festivals?”
This week at The Modern in Fort Worth we are showing “Reading Lolita in Tehran” based on the 2003 bestseller, a memoir of the same name set during the revolution in Iran during the 1980s.
-Elijah
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