Secret Movie Club Podcast

SMC Pod #196: The Godfather trilogy & why it's a true trilogy

One of the greatest American movie trilogies has been right under our eyes for decades. Francis Ford Coppola's & team's The Godfather Parts 1, 2, and 3 form one of the most impressive three part movie projects ever attempted. It's easy to overlook this since The Godfather 3 came out 16 years after The Godfather 2 and is not considered at the same level as the first two movies. And yet, despite its definite shortcomings, The Godfather 3 is still one of the best movies of the 1990's and a fascinating and FITTING conclusion to the tragedy of Michael Corleone. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at what it took to make the three movies (it was always a fight) and how they fit together to form one of the few great Shakespearean level tragedies of American cinema. 

SMC Pod #195: Paul Thomas Anderson's ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER & the 2025 theater experience

Sometimes you have to go see a movie in a theater no matter what. That's a great thing. Auteur moviemaker Paul Thomas Anderson's just released One Battle After Another, shot on the 35mm Vistavision format, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn about a stoner Dad ex-revolutionary trying to save his daughter is just such a movie. What's illuminating, for better and worse, is realizing even with a dynamite movie like this one, the 2025 theater experience needs work. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill talks his theater experience, his admiration for Anderson's movie, and his thoughts-good, bad, ugly-about what where theater going is at in 2025. 

SMC Pod #194: Pixote, Come and See, and the real horror movies

It's one thing to be scared by a ghost story, vampires, or masked killers menacing horny teens in summer camps. It's another thing when you see a movie that forces you to confront horrors that happen everyday around the world. Movies like Hector Babenco's 1981 Brazillian neorealist Pixote about a 10 year old juvenile delinquent struggling in the corrupt reform schools and even more brutal streets. Movies like Elem Klimov's 1985 Come & See which follows wide-eyed Florya as he joins Belurusian partisans in World War II to fight invading nazis only to witness humanity's capacity for limitless atrocities. Movies like Lee Daniel's Precious about a teen girl who has to assert her own dignity in the face of rape, incest, and societal neglect. Movies like Lucas Moodysson's Lilya-4-Ever about how teens can suddenly find themselves being sex-trafficked. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at these and other movies in a search to define what exactly makes these movies so powerful and unbearable. 

SMC Pod #193: Star Persona vs. Great Actors and everything in between

A movie star has "it". You can't learn it. You can't fake it. The camera loves you. The audience wants you. Great actors may never be movie stars but they often have long, rewarding careers filled with powerful work even if they never get that huge paycheck. What's interesting though is how often big stars are determined to be recognized as great actors or vice versa.  And it's that grain of sand that often makes a dynamic career. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at movie stars, great actors, and everything in between like Louise Brooks, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Paul Newman among others and tries to figure out. . .what exactly makes a movie star.

SMC Pod #192: Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, & movies that capture the real Los Angeles

One of the fascinating ironies about Los Angeles is that it is often movies in heightened genres like noir that best capture what the city really feels like to those born and raised in it (like this podcaster). Movies like Billy Wilder's acidic Hollywood takedown classic Sunset Boulevard and Roman Polanski's & Robert Towne's 70's new cinema classic Chinatown show sides of the city with a denizen's inside baseball knowledge. But there's also a neorealist strain in the films of John Cassavettes, Charles Burnett, and others that shows Los Angeles from a working class and middle class ground level. The way we actually live our life here. And finally, oddly, 60's and 70's B movies like 1977's totally couldn't be made today "The Van" show LA as it is because the moviemakers couldn't afford a budget to dress it up. They just shot what they could and captured LA without any soft lighting or makeup.  Join Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill (a 4th generation Los Angelino) as we discuss some of the known and underground gems that shine a real light on the city we who live here love. 

SMC Pod #191: Lorne Michaels & The Movie Impressario

The Impressario is an archetype the movie industry sorely needs right now. Lorne Michaels, co-creator and longtime producer of Saturday Night Live offers a template and some surprising subtle lessons in what characteristics are needed to thrive in the long game. Michaels is one of the last of a breed that started at the very beginning with boy genius MGM studio head Irving Thalberg and includes folks like agent Sue Mengers, producer Kathleen Kennedy, manager Bernie Brillstein among others. Folks who can aggregate talent, people, power to make a mind boggling body of work. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at the characteristics these folks share in the hopes we can learn something for the next chapter of cinema. 

SMC Pod #190: The Children of Caligari-Persona, 3 Women, Mulholland Drive

1920's German expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari did more than inspire a whole kind of cinema-it also became the great-grandparent of a genre. The mind-bending dive into the psyche genre that saw three of its greatest examples all influence each other: Ingmar Bergman's 1966 Persona which begat in many ways Robert Altman's 1977 3 Women. And all those movies consciously or unconsciously begat David Lynch's 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at the journey of inspiration of all these movies as well as side trips to other great examples of the genre like David Fincher's Fight Club, Roman Polanski's Repulsion, and Darren Aronovsky's Black Swan. 

SMC Pod #189: The Val Lewton RKO horror unit of the 1940's & Jacques Tourneur

RKO needed money fast in 1943 and they brought on David O Selznick protege Val Lewton to head a unit devoted to cheapie horror movies. The rules-use their titles like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man-then figure out the rest. Lewton miraculously created a cycle of incredible atmospheric literate horror movies, several masterfully directed by genre master Jacques Tourneur, that helped revive the career of Boris Karloff, introduce subtexts like repressed sexuality, acceptance of death, compulsion, and influence many artists like Martin Scorsese and Harlan Ellison. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a deep dive into a cycle of movies that prove you can make greatness if you accept your limitations and turn that into the engine of your creativity. 

SMC Pod #188: Marlon Brando's ONE EYED JACKS (1961) & the eccentric Western

The Western genre is a home grown art form like jazz and rock and roll. And it occasionally produces really strange and wild movies.  Marlon Brando's incredible 1961 One Eyed Jacks is a western that takes place on California beaches with a psycho-sexual Oedipal focus on a rebel, a father figure, and a step-daughter. Other eccentric westerns like Budd Boetticher's minimalist 1956 Seven Men From Now, John Huston's & John Milius's counter-culture The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean, Clint Eastwood's supernatural revenge High Plains Drifter, and S. Craig Lawler's near Cormac McCarthy unbelievably gory yet gripping Bone Tomahawk are all beautiful bizarre outliers. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a deep dive and looks at around a dozen of the most eccentric westerns ever made. 

SMC Pod #187: The complex American character through 100 years of American cinema

On any given day, you could pick 20 American movies that would show a different cross section of the complex contradictory conflicting aspects of the American character. Today, Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill picks 20 including 1928's King Vidor directed The Crowd, the biting 50's satire Ace in the Hole, 70's masterworks like Husbands, Girlfriends, Nashville, Killer of Sheep, Black Caesar, and more recent works that wrestle with American identity like He Got Game, Better Luck Tomorrow, Nomadland, and Killers of the Flower Moon (+many more). On this 4th of July, Secret Movie Club tries to aid the American experiment by taking a look at how our national character has expressed itself in our cinema.