Stay ConnectedEvery week, author and pop culture writer Mike Vago pitches stories that Hollywood needs to bring to the big screen, with guests from the pop culture writing world.
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Copyright: © Mike Vago
Something different this week, as we're talking about something that already is a movie: The Moment, a film that's edited in real time by an audience member's brainwaves. Director Richard Ramchurn talks to us about the technology behind his remarkable film, and the hithero-impossible storytelling possibilities it opens up. You can learn more about the film at braincontrolledmovie.co.uk, and see a live screening online on September 25 at 8pm Greenwich / 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific. (More info on the web site)
Welcome back to Season 3 of Why Is This Not a Movie?! Every schoolchild knows the story of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk. But less well known is what came next — a tense couple of years in which the Wrights perfected their design for an airplane in secret, worried that someone might steal credit for their world-changing idea. Matt Voigts, an anthropology researcher who has a side gig in film production joins us to talk about the two eccentric tinkerers who built one of history's greatest inventions... and then wouldn't let anyone see it.
We wrap up Season 2 with a remarkable story, as journalist and author Suki Kim tells us about the six months she spent undercover in Kim Jong Il's North Korea, teaching the children of the country's elite while in constant danger of being discovered. She recounted her experiences in a book, Without You, There Is No Us, now hear how she survived under an astonishingly oppressive regime, why a film adaptation needs to put the characters first and politics second, and why Ang Lee is the ideal director to bring this story of young people in a repressive environment to the big screen.
In 1856, a 23-year-old woman named Kate Warne walked into the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency and demanded a job. They had never hired a woman to be anything other than a secretary, but she impressed them so much they made her America's first female detective. She caught bank robbers, embezzlers, murderers... and prevented the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
A quick episode this week, before we go out on a high note next week to wrap up Season 2 of Why Is This Not a Movie? and then take a break until September.
Dorothy Kilgallen was a beloved entertainment reporter, a regular on What's My Line, when she took a hard left turn into crime reporting. She covered murders and organized crime. She was the only person to interview Jack Ruby after he killed Oswald, and got to see the Warren Commission report even before LBJ. But when she started to challenge the official story on JFK's assassination, she soon died under mysterious circumstances. Was she murdered? Print journalist Orrin Konheim joins us to talk about Kilgallen succeeding in a male-domainted field, getting close to the Kennedys, and then dying in a manner suspiciously similar to Marilyn Monroe.
In the 1980s, American journalist Bill Gentile travelled to Nicaragua during the Sandanista revolution, and El Salvador during that country’s decade-long civil war, risking life and limb to tell human stories from these wartorn countries. Now he's written a book, Wait For Me: True Stories of War, Love and Rock & Roll, and joins us to talk about why it would make a great series.
In the Golden Age of Korean Cinema in the '60s, director Shin Sang-ok and actress Choi Eun-hee were making acclaimed films as a glamorous power couple. But their lives took a turn for the worse as their divorce and new censorship laws hurt both their careers. And then they were both kidnapped... by brutal dictator and rabid cinephile Kim Jong Il. After keeping Shin and Choi prisoner for several years, Kim put them to work building a North Korean film industry he wanted to be the envy of the world. They made several awards-bait films, and then a North Korean Godzilla knockoff, before they made a daring escape. Wyatt Dunn, an American writer living in South Korea, brings us a real life story so unbelievable, it has to be a movie.
The Russian Revolution wasn't just a political and economic revolution. In the brief moment between the idealism of a revolution that overthrew a monarchy to establish a workers' paradise and the ugly reality of the totalitarian state the USSR became, Russia had its own Roaring 20s, with artists and bohemians exploring the freedom of a society that had just thrown off centuries of monarchy. Friend of the show Doug Woycechowsky joins us to talk about why that needs to be a movie that's half Robert Altman, half Downton Abbey.
History remembers Genghis Khan as a violent brute, destroying everything in his path. But the truth is more complicated than that. Ostracised from his community as a child, captured and enslaved, he escaped, became a leader, a warrior, united the fractured Mongols, and then conquered an empire twice as large as the Romans. The lifelong military campaign against virtually everyone else he encountered led to untold death and suffering... but also a continent-spanning meritocracy, with religious freedom and a healthy exchange of cultures and ideas. And Genghis' personal story plays out like a real-life Game of Thrones, with epic battles punctuating a life of intrigue, betrayal, sex, and murder. And it's never been told on screen in America (with the exception of the unforgiveably bad John Wayne vehicle The Conqueror), so we imagine it as a seasons-long epic television series, with a who's-who of Asian-American actors in the cast.
And as a bonus, after a decades-long wait, we're finally getting Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Tune in for more details!
Friend of the show Scott Bunn (Run That Back) returns so we can co-pitch an adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's delightful YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain, which was upending genre tropes only a decade after Tolkein had established them. We discuss Disney's botched attempt to compress the books into The Black Cauldron, give thanks to our 4th grade teacher who introduced us to the series, and speculate as to whether Rian Johnson put an intentional Prydain reference into The Last Jedi.
Side note: sorry to take another break, but I'm going away for Memorial Day weekend and don't have time to edit an episode next week. So we'll be back on 6/8 with more movie ideas!
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