Secret Movie Club Podcast

SMC Summer Pod #6: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me & The Missing Pieces + SMC Pod #86 repost

SMC founder.programmer Craig Hammill continues the podcast summer mini-series deep dive into David Lynch's & Mark Frost's TWIN PEAKS. Today we talk about Lynch's 1992 feature film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and the 90 minutes he cut out that he later released in 2014 as THE MISSING PIECES. Fire Walk With Me was initially met with near universal dislike. Now it is considered one of Lynch's greatest and most essential movies.  Craig also notes how strangely the changes Lynch had to make to get the movie across the finish line helped the movie get more focused and more intense. Then we repost SMC Podcast #86. In this pod, we get to hear the "lost podcasts" recorded in 2018-2019, with friends of SMC that include screenwriters Matt Olsen, Steve Grest, and fellow USC film school grad Brian Hatfield. They represent the kind of wide-ranging movie conversations that great movies can kindle. Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, and possibly the greatest of all Star Trek movies Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan get discussed. There's also lots of laughter. 

SMC Summer Pod #5: Twin Peaks Season 1 & 2 Deep Dive + SMC Pod #85 repost: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

As our Summer podcast series heads into the back stretch, founder.programmer Craig Hammill decides to devote the remaining 4 summer pods to a deep dive into each phase/cycle of David Lynch's magnum opus Twin Peaks which now comprises two tv seasons, a movie, and a limited series on cable. If last week was a kind of general prologue, this week Craig deep dives into television seasons #1 and #2 which aired on ABC 1990-1991. Craig specifically focuses on how the poorly received back half of season 2 when Lynch stepped away from the series set the gears in motion for Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost to re-focus/re-center the show with the Season #2 finale. This in turn set up the 1992 Lynch directed feature FIRE WALK WITH ME which in turn set up 2017's TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (all of which will get discussed in the next few episodes). Then we re-post SMC Pod #85. This was our first pod devoted to a long form conversation of a Secret Movie Club filmmaker of the year-here ultra prolific German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Editor Andrew Groves joins the conversation and adds deep rich detail. 

SMC Summer Pod #4: David Lynch, Twin Peaks, & the nexus of TV and Cinema + Defend This Movie #1 repost

Today in our ongoing August "summer break series" something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. . .Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks about season one of David Lynch's and Mark Frost's revolutionary TWIN PEAKS. Arriving in 1990 on network television, TWIN PEAKS was like nothing anybody had ever seen. Disturbing, unsettling, cinematic. It's also a fascinating case study in what a movie director brings to TV versus how a show runner trained in television would handle a series. Craig talks Lynch's stylistic imprint on the episodes Lynch directed including the still shocking pilot. Then we re-post the very first "Defend This Movie" posted in June 2021 in which Craig defends his love of the 1969 James Bond movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" against the withering scorn heaped by Craig's friend Steve Grest who finds it one of the worst of the Bonds. 

SMC Summer Pod #3: William Friedkin, the passing of the 70’s guard, and SMC Radio Hour #4 repost

Today, we continue our SMC Summer Pod hybrid series of new material and a repost of one our favorite earlier pods by honoring 70's maverick moviemaker William Friedkin. Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill talks about how he actually got to interview Friedkin for two hours in the 1990's. How very few moviemakers get a movie like THE EXORCIST that changes pop culture forever. And how Friedkin's passing really begins the passing of the guard in a way. We also re-post SMC Radio Hour #4 which is a fun (we hope) horror omnibus radio hour we did in our first year with great voice actors as a way to be creative at the height of COVID. 

SMC Summer Pod #2: Box Office, Critical Success, Longevity + SMC Pod #15: Spike Lee Repost

Craig riffs on the Barbie/Oppenheimer current pop culture juggernaut but also notes how strange it is that a movie like Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 which will gross at least $500 million worldwide is considered underperforming. Craig also celebrates a summer where movies are again driving the pop culture. Then we repost Secret Movie Club Podcast #15 where we talked about Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods, Malcolm X with special guests Ajarae Coleman and Kevin Johnson in the age of George Floyd and the horrific police brutality against black Americans in the summer of 2020. 

SMC Summer 2023 Pod #1:When you have to reshape a movie & SMC Pod #1 Repost

As we work feverishly to prep our remaining Summer and Fall 2023 seasons, we're going to do a month of new-repost hybrid podcasts. The first 10 minutes or so will be new and on a short subject. This week, Craig talks about fascinating classics like Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Sexy Beast, and Annie Hall that had to be severely reworked in production and post production because some element didn't work. And how strangely the brainstorming that went into fixing the problem created classics. Then we'll repost a great podcast from our vaults so folks can hear topics they may never have realized the team (Connor Lloyd Crews, Edwin Gomez, Daniel Ott, other SMC Team Members, Craig Hammill) covered when we started way back when in 2020.  Today, we re-post our first ever podcast! SMC Podcast #1 (recorded just a few weeks into the pandemic in March/April 2020) focuses on the team's personal top 10 favorites lists. And the reexamination if such a list even makes sense when there are so many great movies. 

SMC Podcast #155: David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY & Directors’ Oddball Entries

The Secret Movie Club Team (Connor Lloyd Crews, Edwin Gomez, Daniel Ott, and Craig Hammill) talk about David Lynch's 1999 G rated Disney movie The Straight Story. It is agreed that it is one of Lynch's greatest movies yet oddly one of his most underseen because it defies many folks' surface expectations of what is a David Lynch movie. The team also offers up their own oddball director movies. 1941, Gloria, Brewster's Millions, Spike Lee's Old Boy, among many others get discussed. Connor notes how some directors are allowed to branch out and others can get imprisoned in a certain genre. Edwin bristles and swears more than usual. Daniel brings up Francis Ford Coppola's Jack too late. Craig talks Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. 

DEFEND THIS MOVIE #11: William Friedkin’s CRUISING

The return of our side podcast Defend This Movie! Secret Movie Club team member Edwin Gomez has long loved William Friedkin's controversial 1980 police thriller Cruising about Al Pacino going undercover to find a serial killer in New York's underground gay S&M leather bar scene. Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill has long felt uncomfortable about the movie for what he feels is a lurid, uncomfortable use of a gay sub-culture in a slasher/edgelord kind of way. But upon re-watching the movie, Craig's feelings have become more ambivalent. Head projectionist Alex Olivier feels the movie has incredible merit and is far less problematic then some of the other movies Craig has programmed for Secret Movie Club.  The three meet for an Oxford style debate about one of the 1980's most controversial movies. 

SMC Pod #154: The Fourth of July and Other Summer Holiday Movies!

The Secret Movie Club Team (Connor Lloyd Crews, Edwin Gomez, Daniel Ott, and Craig Hammill) gets beach-ready with films for the summer! The Team agrees that Jaws is the quintessential Independence Day (the holiday) movie! Edwin salutes Patton as the greatest American movie ever made. Daniel reports on All the President’s Men and how much he likes watching people be good at their jobs. Connor half-heartedly endorses Mars Attacks! as an Independence Day (the movie) alternative. Craig celebrates “last day of school” movies, like American Graffiti, and camp films, like Wet Hot American Summer! Stay cool out there, Secret Movie Clubbers!

SMC Pod #153: SEVEN SAMURAI Special!

On the heels of Secret Movie Club’s biggest screening to date, SMC programmer and founder, Craig Hammill, sits down with Team member and head projectionist (AND samurai aficionado), Alex Olivier, to spend nearly an hour talking about one of the best films of all time, Craig’s desert island film, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai! Alex and Craig go into the movie’s themes, the legendary cast, the difficult production, and the enormous influence the film and Kurosawa has had over cinema since its release. Edwin makes a brief appearance.