Armchair Commentary

DVDs from the Vault: Universal Horror and Hitchcock on Blu-ray! Clint Eastwood! '70s Cult Classics! And (of Course) More!

Universal comes out swinging this month with a fistful of Blu-ray presentations for some of their most iconic vault titles. Chief among the line-up is Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials, which boils down the 15-disc Masterpiece Collection (2012) to a (more affordable) quintet - Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) - all of which, as the title implies, should be a part of any DVD/Blu-ray collection. Each has been previously released as stand-alone Blu-ray titles as well as in the Masterpiece set (the Essentials set was also previously released on DVD in 2011), so the Essentials set is primarily an upgrade for those making the switch to Blu-ray or for those whose library of classic films lacks these five very significant entries.

Customers Have Spoken: Amazon Greenlights Five Original Series

Four senators with the same address, four friends with the same Silicon Valley dream. A kid scientist  with robot helpers, an alien artist taking colorful journeys, and a whimsical fox searching for adventure. Comedy pilots Alpha House and Betas, along with kids’ pilots Annebots, Creative Galaxy and Tumbleaf, have been given the greenlight to begin production on a full series of episodes that will air exclusively on Prime Instant Video later this year and in early 2014.

Amazon and LOVEFiLM customers gave feedback that Amazon Studios used to decide which comedy and kids pilots should be made into Amazon’s first original series. 

“We are thrilled at the enthusiastic customer response to our first original pilots,” said Roy Price, Director of Amazon Studios. “We built Amazon Studios so that customers could help decide which stories would make the very best movies and TV shows. It’s exciting to see the process in motion, doing exactly what we set out to do. The success of this first set of pilots has given us the push to try this approach with even more shows—this is just the beginning.”

“We're thrilled to have emerged safely from this harrowing exercise in online democracy,” said Garry Trudeau, Alpha House creator. “All of us at Alpha House thank both Amazon and its wise and wonderful customer base for such a happy outcome. As the future of episodic TV packs up and moves to Seattle, we hope the audience will continue to have as much fun watching the show as we have making it.”

About the shows:

Comedies

Alpha House, which stars John Goodman and was written by Academy Award nominee and Pulitzer-Prize winner Garry Trudeau and produced by Elliot Webb and Jonathan Alter, is a comedy about four misfit senators turned unlikely roommates (Clark Johnson, Matt Malloy and Mark Consuelos)  who rent a house together in Washington DC.

Set in the land of Silicon Valley start-ups, Betas, written by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, follows four friends as they attempt to strike it rich with a new mobile social networking app. Ed Begley Jr., Jon Daly, Joe Dinicol, Margo Harshman, Charlie Saxton and Karan Soni star in the show. Michael Lehmann will direct and produce the show along with Emmy Award winners Alan Freedland and Alan Cohen, and Academy Award nominee Michael London.

Kids Series

Annebots revolves around Anne, a young scientist, who creates three robot helpers to assist her scientific experiments in the back of her dad’s junkyard. This science-based series from creator J.J. Johnson  aims to introduce kids to science and technology in a fun, new way.

Creative Galaxy is an animated interactive art adventure series, designed to inspire kids creative thinking through crafts, story, music and dance. The series was created by Angela Santomero, creator of Blue’s Clues and the Emmy-nominated literacy series, Super Why!.

Tumbleaf was created by Drew Hodges and Kelli Bixler of Bix Pix Entertainment, the award-winning stop motion studio. The series, aimed at preschoolers, is set in a whimsical land where a small blue fox named Fig plays each day and discovers adventure, friendship and love around every bend. Children will be enriched by narratives that promote play through exploration and scientific thinking.

Comprehensive cast and crew information, including bios and filmographies, is available on Amazon’s IMDb (http://www.imdb.com), the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content.

 

Amazon Pilots Inside Story: Creators Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard on "Betas"

Friends with a dream of creating something amazing, something that the public can’t get enough of – this could describe the characters in Betas, a new comedy set in the world of Silicon Valley startups. It also could describe the guys who created the show, Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard.

They met while working at Alexander Payne’s production company, and started writing together. Their first optioned work is Betas, one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video and LOVEFiLM. Viewer response will help determine which of these children’s shows and comedies return with full seasons.

Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog contributor Sean Wicks asked Evan and Josh about their show, what they learned from working at Alexander Payne’s production company and how they tapped into the impact that social media has made on our culture as a whole:    

Where did you come up with the idea for Betas?

EVAN:  I worked with a producer named Michael London on the film Sideways and he called me out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in doing TV and this was right after Josh and I had just finished writing a pilot together.  We spoke with him about the idea for a ½ hour comedy about an Internet startup.  We both thought that was a fascinating place to spend some time mentally and we were shocked that nobody had done it yet.  Right away the idea of it being a social media startup was both obvious and important to us, especially to explore that aspect of our culture where so many young people are connected – more so than any time in history – yet how that creates its own isolation and set of problems.    It just seemed of the moment. 

You met while working at Alexander Payne’s production company. Did your background in the development world affect the way you approached writing the show?

EVAN:   Absolutely.  I’ve written a lot of notes and deconstructed a lot of scripts that it was extremely helpful.  We made fewer mistakes as a result of reading so much material and deconstructing it.

JOSH:  For me I have a tendency to be very precious with my writing and being partnered with Evan has been good in that regard as he’s able to get us to take two steps back and shuffle things around in new and interesting way than I am less willing to concede and try initially.

Tell us about the pilot.

JOSH:  It’s about 4 unlikely friends who are trying to launch a social media startup in Silicon Valley.    We watch them try to find new ways to improve and engineer other people’s social lives while they fail in their own lives and engage in relationships.

Our two leads are Trey and Nash, who are friends from Stanford.  Trey is the visionary of the group; he’s the one with the big ideas, the big picture, and the guy who could very well be the next [Mark] Zuckerberg.  Nash is the engineer of the group and not a social being at all.  He does not relate to people or emotional issues very well.  He is perfectly happy to have his headphones on and the world is an alien place to him. 

JOSH:  It is surprising how social media and that lens changes the way as to how we perceive people and the concept of friends and relationships in general. 

EVAN:  And identity, just how these people like to project themselves online because they have all these tools to project an image.  …  It’s a complex and fascinating issue.

JOSH:  That mentality that in a way these are the people that are engineering our social life and they are the least social and that irony was also very appealing. 

Tell me about the genesis of the title, Betas?

JOSH:  They are starting out in “beta” mode and trying to work out the kinks but then we have these young people in the show that are effectively in beta, they are still trying to figure out who they are.  Also it’s a male-driven show and these guys aren’t the alphas – they’re the betas.

This is your first option, and your first production.  Did you make any adjustments to the script once you had actors on set and saw them bringing your characters to life?

EVAN:  Once it was cast we started doing rewrites and started writing things specifically for actors and that’s just a different headspace to be as a writer just to know who is going to embody this and what their strengths are and what they might add to a line.  It’s kind of ruined writing for myself because it’s so much more interesting to write for other people.  I think all my characters sound the same in my head and it was a lot of fun to see other people bring them to life.

JOSH:  We got a fantastic cast from top to bottom.

EVAN:  I hope people like the show.  We’re proud of how it turned out and hope people want to see more of it.

Learn more about Amazon's pilots at the Amazon Studios blog, Hollywonk.

Amazon Pilots Inside Story: David Javerbaum ("The Daily Show") on "Browsers," Bebe Neuwirth, Music and More

When the characters in Browsers feel something, they don’t just say it. You don’t just see it. They sing it. They even dance it. And they do it with such wit – almost like an 11-time Emmy award-winning writer for The Daily Show is putting words in their mouth.

And one is: David Javerbaum. He’s actually got a dozen Emmys, having picked up one for the song “Broadway: It’s Not Just For Gays Anymore,” which so memorably opened the 65^th Tony Awards. And he’s also an author (The Last Testament: A Memoir By God; What to Expect When You’re Expected: A Fetus’ Guide to the First Three Trimesters).

Browsers, one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video and LOVEFiLM,  is about four interns at Gush, a content-aggregating website (a la The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast) founded and run by the charismatic but mysterious Julianna Mancuso-Bruni (Bebe Neuwirth). “The show pokes fun at modern workplaces, the media, and more specifically Gush — starting with its penchant for deriving most of its content by cutting and pasting material from other websites,” Javerbaum said.

We asked Javerbaum about the setting of Browsers, the terrific cast, and the challenges of mixing comedy and music.

Why this world, why these characters?

I’ve long considered The Huffington Post the quintessential cultural artifact of our time in terms of what it covers, how it covers it, and why it remains popular. It literally provides a window into the state of the world, and so I thought setting a show there — and making the entirety of its universe fair game for our show — would provide an enormous amount of material.

As for the characters, as soon as I began formulating ideas for musical television shows, I knew I wanted the leads to be young people in their 20s, because that’s the age where you have the most energy, passion, uncertainty, and all that other good interesting quirky singable stuff. 

How does having music in the show adds to the experience/story?

The songs serve a different purpose here than they do in shows like Smash and Glee, not only because they are original, but because they are not “actually” happening. Rather, the songs are internal, taking place inside the character’s heads, meaning they are bound only by the laws of imagination and not by reality. 

Tell me about your awesome cast, and what they brought to the show.

Bebe Neuwirth (Julianna): The consummate professional. Hilarious on take one, still hilarious on take five.

Brigitte Davidovici (Kate): A beautiful person inside and out. Instantly winning from the moment you see her. Also an excellent baby-sitter.

Dustin Ingram (Josh): Gets more comedy out of one word than most people get out of a book. (Even the Bible, which is pretty funny.)

Constance Wu (Prudence): Beautiful. Intense scene presence. Funny and smart. Extremely fun to be around.

Marque Richardson (Gabe): Brings an inherent likability to a serious, sometimes humorless character. And man, can he tap dance. (For a later episode…)

Chris Wood (Justin): The interns’ supervisor. Half-man, half-douche, all-awesome.

Writing songs is hard enough – how much does it increase the degree of difficulty to also make them funny?

Actually, writing funny songs — at least songs I think are funny — is not that difficult once you come up with a single solid comedic premise for each one. The songs are for the most part much shorter than songs in either pop music or musical theater — two minutes tops, with the one-time exception of the opening song in the pilot episode — and, like a Monty Python sketch, we’re free to stop them at any time as soon as they no longer feel funny. But the good thing about writing songs in this format is that the burden of comedy is shared by not only the song and the performer, but by the visuals and the directing, and that is where a director of Don Scardino’s skill comes in and makes a song that was good on paper look amazing on screen.

How has the Amazon experience been so far?

I would not want Browsers to be anywhere else on TV — not network, basic cable or premium cable. The amount of freedom and trust I’ve been given, the commitment of money and resources, the directness of the communication with the powers-that-be and the quality of their notes, the possibilities entailed in a show about a website being aired on one — I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Check out the Amazon Studios Hollywonk blog for a song-by-song look at the Browsers soundtrack, available for free at Amazon MP3.

"Those Who Can't" Creators and Stars on TV, Comedy, and Making a Pilot for Amazon

Adam Cayton-Holland, Andrew Orvedahl, and Ben Roy, the co-writers and stars behind Amazon’s new original pilot, Those Who Can’t, recently sat down with one another in Adam’s living room in Denver, Colorado to talk about their show, which is now available for free on Amazon Instant Video. It went a little something like this:

Adam: So I’ll start with the first question: Who are you guys and what are you doing in my house?

Andrew: Adam, it’s us. Your early-onset dementia is getting the better of you again.

Ben: Alright, are you guys excited about the premiere of Those Who Can’t?

ADAM SCREAMS UNINTELLIGIBLY.

Andrew: I’m very excited. … I don’t know what the average daily visitor count to Amazon’s website is but I’d imagine it’s quite a few. To think of that many people being able to watch our show for free is kind of intimidating.

Andrew: What other sitcoms inspired you guys in writing this?

Adam: I was watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a fair amount during this. I was watching The League a little bit too. I was also watching The Larry Sanders Show a lot. That’s a great show.

Ben: I watch a lot of older sitcoms. Now that my son is old enough I’ve been re-watching some of my old favorites with him — The Wonder Years, Freaks and Geeks, a few others…

Ben: We definitely were influenced by Strangers With Candy. We all mentioned that one when we started brainstorming the show.

Andrew: Probably one of my favorite shows ever. We all like high school shows and high school settings so it was really fun to make one of our own.

Adam: Andrew, what was your favorite part of filming?

Andrew: Anything other than getting hit in the face with a kickball over and over again. Not that for sure.

Ben: That was my favorite part.

Andrew: The most fun part was watching other people’s scenes, because then you could just sit back and it was kind of fun to watch. I don’t know, pretty much every scene I was in with Rory was pretty fun and really hard not to laugh. I broke like forty times.

Adam: Rory Scovel is hilarious in this episode. He plays the principal of Buchanan High School, where the show is set and where we’re all teachers.

An Inside Look at The Onion's "News Empire"

Truth. Ethics. Teamwork. It’s obvious which of these things drives the Onion News Network team — none of them. (Unless by "truth" you mean "truly amazing ratings.")

Will Graham and Dan Mirk tell the story of these fine journalists in Onion News Empire, one of 14 Amazon original pilots now playing for free at Amazon Instant Video. Viewer response will help determine which of these shows return with full seasons.

We asked Will and Dan about their show, their terrific cast (including Jeffrey Tambor, Cheyenne Jackson, and Chris Masterson), and what the future might hold for their characters.

How do you describe your show?

"Onion News Empire" is about ambitious reporters and anchors working for the world's most terrifying cable news channel. It's a comedy that thinks it's a very self-important drama — so it looks and feels like a combination of an Aaron Sorkin show and a Shonda Rimes show, but it's wall to wall ridiculous jokes. 

Why this world, why these characters?

We started The Onion News Network web video series in 2007 and almost from the beginning we'd been talking about how fun it would be to do a narrative show set behind the scenes at the network. As for the characters, we basically wanted to see the network from its lowliest employees (like our new reporter Sam West who is fresh from a two-bit local news station) to the very top of the corporation (like our evil CEO Helena who is personal friends with dictators and keeps a flesh-eating falcon in her office).

Tell me about your awesome cast, and what they brought to the show.

The cast is extremely talented and physically attractive. Jeffery Tambor takes every line and makes it so much funnier, more compelling, and weirder than you'd ever expect. Cheyenne Jackson looks and acts like he's from a superior species that will gradually replace humans because they're just better than we are  — he's so handsome, so kind, and so funny. Chris Masterson was a real prince  — he came onto the pilot about 48 hours before we shot and knocked it out of the park. He took a role that could have been a little boring and made it really funny and compelling. Aja Naomi King is just such a committed and talented actress  — a show like this get so ridiculous, that it needs someone incredible like Aja who can make even a silly joke about riding roller coasters by yourself somehow simultaneously hilarious and very sad. Bill Sadler is like a God to both of us, because we loved him in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. And Laila Robins — there's not much to say except that she's perfect in every way. She brought a scariness to the comedy that elevated the whole show.

What is the appeal of fake news?

We wouldn't know anything about that. The Onion News Network is real news. 

Writing hilarious headline jokes is hard enough – how much does it increase the degree of difficulty to create it as a part of a show?

Writing the headline jokes is always hard  — for every single headline that gets into the show, we have written pages and pages of others that all get thrown away, which is how The Onion has worked from the beginning. So that process is staying the same, but now we are also adding in the challenge of working those headlines into what we hope is a compelling narrative with characters people want to watch. So basically it is one hard thing plus another hard thing, which equals a harder thing. But at the end of the day you are still writing jokes which is a very fun job. We have nothing to complain about.

What inspires you?

The real news and regular dumb life are always our biggest inspirations. 

What does the future hold for your characters?

A lot of intrigue, back-stabbing, passion, and tragedy. The show is really an intensely serious drama that just happens to be filled with dumb jokes, so expect a lot of dramatic twists. Characters might get killed off, allegiances will change, a guy might go to space.

DVDs from the Vault: Bowery Boys Volume 2, Jackie Chan, Repo Man, Eddie Cantor and More!

Warner Archives has issued The Bowery Boys: Volume 2, a four-disc collection featuring twelve titles from the impossibly long-running comedy series. The dozen pictures collected in the set roughly cover the first decade of the team's stint under the Bowery Boys' moniker after two previous decades as the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys and East Side Kids. The tone of the Bowery movies is decidedly more slapstick than in previous incarnations (thanks in part to the behind-the-camera presence of Three Stooges vet Edward Bernds and Jean Yarbrough, who directed numerous Abbott and Costello features and TV shows), and as the series progressed, swiftly moved into psychotronic territory: in Spook Busters (1946), a mad scientist wants to put the brain of Sach (Huntz Hall) into a gorilla, while a spate of candy consumption in Master Minds (1949) gives Sach psychic abilities, which attracts the attention of another mad scientist (Alan Napier from the TV Batman) with noggin-swapping designs for his monster (Glenn Strange). Bernds' The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1955) goes all-out in its grab for the horror-kid crowd, offering up mad scientist John Dehner a gorilla, robot, vampire and a man-eating tree (maintained by The Waltons' Ellen Corby). The other Boys' adventures included in the set are only moderately less weird - they develop a vitamin drink that makes Hall an unstoppable football champ in Hold That Line (1952), tangle with outlaws in Bowery Buckaroos (1947), faux spiritualists (Hard Boiled Mahoney, 1947) and con artist Amanda Blake in High Society (1955), which was accidentally offered up by the Academy for a Best Story Oscar. The Bowery Boys' titles are definitely an acquired taste, but for former Saturday afternoon matinee habitues of a certain age, their antics are comfort-food-level pleasures, dependably broad and daffy and entirely predictable; the WA set features pressed discs and widescreen presentations on Meet the Monsters and two other titles.

MODs of the Week: Tarzan! The Falcon! Hudsucker on Blu-Ray! And More!

Hot on the heels of Warner Archives' three-disc Philo Vance Murder Case Collection comes another set of vintage screen mysteries, this time devoted to The Falcon, who was originally envisioned as a shadowy freelance crime fighter in stories by the pseudonymous Drexel Drake (or Michael Arlen, depending on which story you follow). In 1941, the character was refashioned for the screen by RKO as a roguish swell in the vein of Leslie Charteris' The Saint, whose own popular series for the studio, starring George Sanders had wrapped that same year. Sanders was quickly snapped up to play the Falcon for three pictures before bowing out of the franchise, which was then assumed by his real-life brother, Tom Conway (Cat People, 1942) who was made the original Falcon's sibling (before taking the whole thing full circle by voicing the Saint on radio in 1951). Conway's Falcon was suitably urbane, if lacking Sanders' charmingly droll self-amusement, and acquitted himself well to nine pictures between 1943 and 1946, six of which are collected in the remastered Falcon Mystery Movie Collection, Volume 2 (the first three Falcon films with Conway, along with Sanders' efforts, are featured in WA's Falcon Mystery Movie Collection, Volume 1). For those who remember whiling away a Saturday afternoon with pics like these on UHF broadcasts (or in theaters), the Falcon films virtually define the term "programmer": fat-free, no-nonsense crime thrillers anchored by a pre-ordained amount of suspense, light comedy (courtesy Edward Brophy and several other actors as the Falcon's rough-hewn sidekick, Goldie Locke), a glitzy location and a dash of sex appeal in the form of Barbara Hale, Rita Corday, Martha Vickers and other second-string starlets. There are flashes of bargain ingenuity along the way - Gordon Douglas and Joseph H. (Gun Crazy) Lewis, who helm The Falcon in Hollywood (1944) and The Falcon in San Francisco (1945), respectively, work their signature brand of under-the-radar sleight of hand, and Elisha Cook Jr. steals the show (again) in The Falcon's Alibi (1946) as a nervous hotel DJ trying to rein in his torch singer wife (Jane Greer). The other three movies in the set - The Falcon Out West (1944), The Falcon in Mexico (1944) and the last film in the series with Conway, The Falcon's Adventure (1946) - offer equally suave-on-a-budget pleasures.

MODs of the Week: Mysteries for Valentine's Day with William Powell, Steve Martin, Harry-O and more

Mysteries for Valentine's Day? Well, the ways of the human heart have always been a bit of a puzzle, whether in regards to romance or malice, and both Warner Archives and Columbia Choice Collection have a slew of crime cases for you and your beloved (or intended) to deduce over a Whitman's sampler or two. The best of the lot is David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner (1997), a swell Chinese box of a thriller with Campbell Scott (The Amazing Spider-Man) as a naive developer whose priceless but unpatented industrial process makes him the target for an array of nefarious upscale types, including his own boss (Ben Gazzara), a tart-tongued secretary (Mamet's wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon) and a wealthy stranger (Steve Martin, playing well against type). Though Mamet's dialogue strikes an odd balance between a sort of meta-hardboiled grit and the distinctive language of his stage work, the picture's key appeal is the intricate curves and hard corners of the plot, which enfold and entrap Scott, placing both his invention and life at risk. The cast is also top-notch (though Pidgeon remains an acquired taste), with the great magician/author/actor Ricky Jay, Ed O'Neil and Felicity Huffman all offering quality support.

MODs of the Week: Gildersleeve, Hawks and Grimley, Ltd.

For those that believe that they don't make pictures like they used to, Warner Archives has a slate of vintage titles to underscore that notion. Sweepings (1933) stars Lionel Barrymore as a self-made man who rises from a meager beginning in the wake of the 1871 Chicago fire to the owner of a successful department store. Having reached the end of his life, he turns to his children (Gloria Stuart, Eric Linden, William Gargan and George Meeker) to carry on the family business, only to find that his wealth has turned them callous, petty and entirely uninterested in notions of tradition and commitment. A sort of American take on King Lear, the film, directed by John Cromwell (Of Human Bondage, 1934) and co-written by Lester W. Cohen, who adapted his own (somewhat racy) 1926 novel, walks the line between drama and sudsy family soap opera, but Oscar winner Barrymore anchors the picture with a powerful turn as a man who struggles to balance his commitment to business with his dedication to a family that fails to return the effort in kind. For those who revel in the details, Sweepings is the last film on which David O. Selznick would receive a producer's credit at RKO before his departure for MGM (where he would make Dinner at Eight, also released in '33, among many other titles) and then even greater success as an independent producer with A Star is Born (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940). Among the bit players who receive no credit for their appearance in the film is Franklin Pangborn, a charter member of Preston Sturges' stock company of character types, as well as Mary Gordon (Mrs. Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone) as infamous cow owner Mrs. O'Leary, comic Chick Chandler and silent film star Carl Stockdale, who famously defended actress Charlotte Shelby against accusations that she had murdered director William Desmond Taylor. The gentleman playing the Indian sans credit is Olympic hero Jim Thorpe, who by 1933, was reduced to taking walk-ons, among other menial tasks, to support his family after being stripped of his medals in 1909.