Ep. 12: Shaft

Todd Melby is joined by Matthew Polly, author of Bruce Lee: A Life. Polly’s parents didn’t want him to study kung fu in China, but he went anyway. He wrote about the experience in American Shaolin, his 2007 memoir about learning martial arts at the Shaolin Monastery. Twelve years later, he published a biography of the martial arts superstar.Host: Todd MelbyGuest: Matthew Polly, author of Bruce Lee: A Life and American Shaolin.Episode Website: Ep. 20: Bruce LeeSubstack: Todd Melby

Todd Melby is joined by David M. Lubin to talk about “Sunset Boulevard,” a Hollywood classic. A quick plot summary for those who haven’t seen it: an aging silent film star (Gloria Swanson) falls in love with a struggling screenwriter (William Holden) while her butler watches (Erich von Stroheim). Billy Wilder directed the film. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr.Host: Todd MelbyGuest: David M. Lubin, author of Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood DreamEpisode Website: Ep. 19: Sunset BoulevardSubstack: Todd Melby

When Hormel cut wages like a buzz saw on a pork shoulder, unionized workers rebelled.Director Barbara Kopple traveled to Austin, Minnesota to document the 1984-85 meatpackers strike. In this episode, Kopple reveals how she gained behind-the-scenes access to key strategy sessions, how she struggled to tell a complex story involving many factions, and just how darn cold it was when workers took to the picket lines.The result was American Dream, an Oscar-winning documentary that has just received a 4K digital restoration by Criterion.We also talked to Kopple in Episode 2 for another union story: Harlan County, USA.

In 32 Sounds, 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.

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.

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."

Before he was Sonny the shopkeeper in Do the Right Thing, or Mike Yanagita in Fargo, or Nescaffier in The French Dispatch, Stephen Park 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.

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, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of the Godfather, 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.

Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt. In this episode, it's Shaft.

Inspired by John Wayne, a Texas dishwasher named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) buys a cowboy hat, boots and leather jacket for his new life as a New York sex worker. He figures women will be into that. It turns out, gay men are really into it. After getting off a bus, Joe rents a room and begins wandering around Manhattan. At every turn, New Yorkers pick his pocket, including Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a coughing, limping, streetwise hustler who takes $20 off of the naive Buck.In this episode, I interview Glenn Frankel, the author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, about the classic film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Released with an X rating in 1969, the movie was a surprise hit for United Artists and director John Schlesinger.