ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (505)

Thank you for joining us today

Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Looney Tunes short, the 1940 The Timid Toreador starring Porky Pig , directed by Bob Clampett and Norman McCabe.



This is the second cartoon in which Porky bullfights, the first being Picador Porky.
 

As you may know, we here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour love to eat. We are among the live to eat crowd. While some of us are not a spicy food fanatic, we do enjoy the Hot Ones videos. We really enjoyed one of the most recent ones and we'd love to watch it with you-



We need to see more of Willem Dafoe


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 1994 documentary, Hoop Dreams, directed by Steve James and starring William Gates and Arthur Agee.

The film was originally intended to be a 30-minute PBS special about multiple players on a single basketball court. After 5 years, the filmmakers had shot 250 hours of footage, which was trimmed down to under 3 hours.

St. Joseph High School filed a lawsuit to prevent the film from being released to theaters. They claimed they were told the film would only air on PBS, and accused the filmmakers of misrepresenting and defaming the school. The two sides reached a settlement, and the filmmakers created an academic fund at the school.

To stay eligible for college basketball (according to NCAA rules), neither player's family received any money for the film's sale while in school. Agee and Gates were later made full partners and received shares equal to the producers'.

Please find a very comfortable chair, dim the lights, and join us here at the ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this absorbing documentary: Hoop Dreams.



According to Roger Ebert, after the film failed to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, he and Gene Siskel learned about the nominating process. He said that members of the Academy's documentary committee held flashlights when they watched documentaries, and anyone who had "given up" could wave it against the screen. The movie was turned off if a majority waved their flashlights. This film was turned off after 15 minutes.

The film was ultimately nominated for Best Picture Editing which spurred a serious controversy when it came to the film for either Best Picture or Best Documentary because of the way the process was handled by the voters who purposely gave the film a lower score for the film to disappear off the ballot because the chairman who was part of the Documentary Branch had her own film in the running and voted for that film as a favor. The film would spur a reform in the way the Documentary branch would handle future films under this category.


Si per infernum pergis, perge!