Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1937 The Case of the Stuttering Pig, directed by Framk Tashlin.
The fourth wall is broken in this cartoon; the monster tells the audience not to interfere with his plan, particularly antagonizing "the guy in the third row." At the end of the short, when a theater chair gets thrown at the monster, it is revealed that the same "guy in the third row" threw it.
The staff at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour has taken their annual vacay and I'm left holding down the fort. So, I though I'd share with you a back to school advice video:
John Oliver is not like your teachers - he will not lie to you about things.
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1979 love letter to NYC, Manhattan, directed by Woody Allen and starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, and Anne Byrne. The film was one of Woody Allen's most successful and is often listed as one of the funniest movies. Strangely, Allen disliked his work in this film so much that he offered to direct another film for United Artists for free if they kept this one on the shelf for good. Allen later reportedly said, "I just thought to myself, 'At this point in my life, if this is the best I can do, they shouldn't give me money to make movies.'"
No one can avoid the elephant in the room while watching this film. For years after its release, Manhattan was hailed as one of the filmmaker's best, frankly and stylishly telling a story of modern New York life, revealing the embarrassing impulses of a neurotic man struggling through his own acknowledged sexual and romantic weaknesses. But one must confront the fact that the film is about Allen's fictional relationship with an underage girl. Unfortunately, at the time, the plot was seen as a strange quirk of the modern cosmopolitan arts milieu, and many critics remained unconcerned. It wouldn’t be for a few more years, in 1991, that details of Allen's personal life would begin to emerge. He married the much-younger Soon-Yi Previn in 1997, a woman who was once his stepdaughter. The details of their affair came to light during a messy divorce with Mia Farrow in 1992. That same year, Farrow's daughter Dylan accused Allen of sexual assault. The charges were dropped, but Dylan continued to repeat them for years. However, no matter how you feel about his personal life, watching Manhattan is going to dredge up a lot of real-world unpleasantness. That being said, join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour and please watch our feature this evening - Manhattan.
In a 2015 interview to promote her upcoming memoir, Mariel Hemingway spoke about how the role that earned her an Academy Award nomination was, in some ways, an uncomfortable experience. At the time of filming, she was a 16-year-old virgin who’d never even really made out with anybody. She worried about her kissing scene with Woody Allen for weeks, repeatedly asking how long the scene was going to be. She was scared and even asked her mother, "How do I make out?" When they finally shot it, Hemingway said Allen attacked her like she was a linebacker. After the first take, she ran over to the film's cinematographer, Gordon Willis, and asked, "I don’t have to do that again, do I?" But everybody just laughed. She also states in her memoir that, in other ways, the film enormously boosted her self-confidence. Hemingway details in her memoir that once she turned 18, Allen flew out to her parents' home in Idaho and repeatedly asked her to go to Paris with him. Hemingway told her parents that she didn’t know what the sleeping arrangement was going to be, and that she wasn’t sure if she was even going to have her own room. She wanted them to put their foot down, but they didn’t. In fact, though Allen was in his mid-forties at the time, they kept lightly encouraging her to go. Allen left Idaho via private jet the next morning after Hemingway informed him that, if she wasn’t getting her own room, she couldn’t go with him. She states in her memoir that she continued to "love him as a friend," and she stayed in touch with him for several years, including giving her opinion of rough cuts of later films.
Demand Euphoria!
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