Beyond the Big Screen

Title: Blade Runner (1982) – Reinventing Science FictionDescription: Today we are joined by our frequent guest, Erik Fogg of the Reconsidered Podcast to talk about a trailblazing piece of science fiction, 1982’s Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and More. This film reimagined and reinterpreted Philip K. Dick’s classic novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Although the movie is 40 years old, it is more relevant today than it was in the early 1980s.Learn More About our Guest:Erik Fogg of the Reconsider Podcastwww.reconsidermedia.orgYou can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:www.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Image Credits:By IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59925545Begin Transcript:, [00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Welcome today. We are going to talk about the 1982 movie blade runner based on the Phillip K Dick novel, do Androids dream of electric sheep. The book and the film are set in a near future. Post-apocalyptic dystopia. One of my favorite genres as is common with the dystopian science fiction, John.Blade runner addresses a number of political and political science issues, political theory, and even philosophy are important for our frameworks while blade runner is not overtly political, it does tie deeply into questions of humanist and theological philosophy and to morality as well. Ultimately, all of this is critical for us deciding on what [00:01:00] political action, which is just our own moral, personal, moral action on collective scale to take.It's why it's fascinated Eric for so long, and I'm very happy to be joined by Eric and Zander hosts of reconsider podcasts. Thank you guys so much for coming on today. We are happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Reconsider is actually a political podcast. Eric and Zane. Help you contextualize current politics and history and broader forces and political theory reconsider helps you rise above the one-liners the 140 character politics and tribal narratives.Their motto is we don't do the thinking for you. And they really don't. That's why it's such an amazing podcast and one of my personal favorites. Thanks. But before we dig in too deeply, the. Here's some production details. We watched the final cut, which is the director's edition. Eric, you had commented on that.Why do you think [00:02:00] that that's a better cut of the film than it? It went through several evolutions. Yeah, it actually went through four there's the theatrical cut. The international cut. The director's cut. And the final cut. The final cut being the one that really Scott. Like the best. And I have strong opinions on this and I think most other diehard blade runner fans do, there's a consensus generally that the final cuts the right one, not only because really Scott liked it best.Uh, I don't know if Philip K Dick liked it best, but the reason we like it best is that the theatrical cut, um, has a number of, uh, sins. The biggest of which is the ending. The second biggest of which is the fact that. Um, Harrison Ford does a monologue. It does it like a backwards memory monologue. Like a lot of new are like, ah, she walked in and was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen lights up to hair kind of thing.And unfortunately what that does is it not only sounds [00:03:00] stupid in the context of what is otherwise a beautiful. Uh, but it also takes away the opportunity for you to do the thinking yourself. So, uh, you know, sort of as is the, our, our podcast motto, I hate when things do the thinking for me. Um, and so the, the, both the director's cut and the final cut take that those two key elements out the final cut adds another element, which is a unicorn dream.That's really important to how you interpret one of the big questions of the movie. Uh, so if, if you guys haven't seen it yet on the show, Or that eliciting, I highly recommend just go straight for the direct or the final cut and skip everything else. Pretend it doesn't exist. It had our runtime of about 120 minutes.And it was released in 1982. It had a $30 million budget, which was today almost $80 million. So it's a really, it was a huge budget, but it only brought in about $26 million. That's [00:04:00] first summer. It was, that was the summer that ITI launched and there was a couple other big movies. So it really, wasn't a huge commercial success for somebody who's into this movie.Do you know the reason why it didn't seem to catch on at the time? I don't know the reason, there's always a lot of speculation with this stuff, right? Some of it's a self fulfilling prophecy, um, and a bit of a, uh, like networking or positive, negative feedback loop effect. Anytime you release a commercial product, however, Um, blade runner really challenged, a lot of norms.A lot of people thought it was going to be an action movie. It was originally in the theatrical cut, um, advertised and, you know, the trailers came out as if it was an action movie and ended up being a very slow paced, very plotting, very grindy, methodical movie. Um, and so it was very different from. The producers or the, the, um, studio originally seemed to [00:05:00] promise to hook people.And I think they just watched it and, uh, you know, action movie fans watch it went, oh, this is garbage. I don't like it. It's not an action movie. And so they didn't tell their friends to go watch it. Um, and so I ended up being relegated to a, you know, sort of hardcore Saifai or dystopia or Neo noir fan cult, film.Uh, it's made a lot of money since that first. Since that first summer, of course. But I think that's why it never really took off if I had to guess. Yeah. I think it challenged the genres at the time. It didn't really fit into hardcore science, science fiction. It wasn't really action, especially that this is the time where star wars came out and Tron Terminator.Yeah, exactly. And so. It's ultimately not comparable to those, even though at first, the studio tried to compare it to those. I think a lot of people are disappointed, but I think for the same reasons that it challenges that so much is why it's such a great film and something that can really [00:06:00] teach you something in the way that star wars really has very little to do.It was fighting words for a lot of people. Yeah. What was your perspective of seeing this movie as sort of an outsider that you hadn't seen the movie before? So it wasn't as much of a call classic to you. Okay. Yeah. I've seen this movie like one and a half times the first time. Like a vacation weekend. I was with a bunch of folks and we turned it on and we were already, you know, three beers in, so, and we didn't even finish the movie.So I really, I kinda have to pick it back up again and watch it. And Eric, thank God for your movie notes because I went on Amazon and purchased the first thing I found. Kind of flip through the notes and realize it wasn't the final cut. So I went back and returned it and watched the final cut. Good, good stuff.As an outsider or at least someone who doesn't know nearly as much about it as Eric, I was struck by how similar certain elements are to a lot more modern Saifai that deal with [00:07:00] consciousness and artificial intelligence. Now that. 35 years after the movie, we have a much better understanding of how certain cognitive mechanisms work in the brain.And we have people out there trying to really push the envelope for how artificial intelligence works. So I've seen some modern scifi. Television and movies. And I'll bring this up at some point on this episode, that blade runner really seems to have a lot of common elements with, but again, it was 35 years.The movie was based off of a Phillip K Dick book. As Eric. You had said, you've read the bug Zander. Have you read the book? Unfortunately not. It was an interesting book. I believe this was the first Philip K Phillip K Dick novel. That was translated into a movie. Is that right? That's my understanding, certainly.And I think he wasn't exactly ecstatic about the way it came out. Now. It was a very, uh, a very contentious [00:08:00] development process, not as contentious as 2001, a space Odyssey, which is perhaps if I come back the next one, I'll want to talk about. Uh, yeah, Dick was, Dick was even more unhappy with the theatrical cut than Ridley Scott in part, because I think once you have developed a story and Scott came in and he really changed the story significantly, um, it is a different story.It is based on do Androids dream of electric sheep. It is not a really direct, um, uh, Translation of it. It's a it's, you know, changed a lot. And so I think for that reason, Dick kind of went, what the heck? And then he saw the theatrical cut and sort of legend has it, that he walked out in the middle of it.He was just as. A lot of his movies have actually been made into, or a lot of his books rather have been made into films lately, but he died in 1983, I believe. So he didn't really have much to say about how those other ones were [00:09:00] translated. Now, the cast was almost, I would say it was pretty much the perfect eighties past that had Harrison Ford as Rick Decherd look at young and sexy.Yeah, the per yeah, the absolute Harrison Ford at his peak Rutger Hauer who played Roy batty, which he's a very different character than he was

Coming Soon - Dark Ages and Tearswww.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Title: Klaus Fuchs: Traitor or Man of Conscience Description: We are joined again by Michael Holzman author of Spies and Traitors and many other books on the topics of espionage, spies and deceit at the highest levels of government during the 20th century. Michael Holzman is going to guide us through the fascinating life of another spy, Los Alamos and Manhattan Project scientist Klaus Fuchs. We will try to figure out what Klaus Fuchs motivations were for providing important secrets to the Soviets. Learn More About our Guest:Michael Holzman author of:Spies and Traitors: Kim Philby, James Angleton and the Friendship and Betrayal that Would Shape MI6, the CIA and the Cold Warhttps://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Spies-and-Traitors/Michael-Holzman/9781643138077You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:http://atozhistorypage.com/Click to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Begin Transcript:, [00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you again for listening to beyond the big screen podcast. Of course, a big thanks goes out to Michael Holzman, author of spies and traders among other great books on espionage during world war two and the cold war links to learn more about Michael Holzman and his books can be found in the show notes.A great way to support beyond the big screen is to leave a rating and review on apple podcast. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show. Other people learn about beyond the big screen to learn more about the Parthenon podcast networks and great shows like Scott ranks, history unplug James Early's key battles of American history, Richard Lim;s, this American president, and more can be [00:01:00] found at parthenonpodcast.com.You can learn more about beyond the big screen, great movies and story. So great. They should be movies on Facebook and Twitter by searching for. A to Z history, you can contact me there, or just send me an email to my email, address, steve@atwosiehistorypage.coml inks to all of this and more can be found at beyondthebigscreen.com.I thank you for joining me again beyond the big screen. And I think you're going to enjoy this one today.Thank you for joining us today. Again, I am very excited to be joined again by special guests, Michael Holzman, author of the books, spies and traders, Kim Philby, James Angleton, and the friendship and betrayal that would shape the CIA and the cold war. Uh, Michael Holzman is the author of numerous books, [00:02:00] including James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the craft of intelligence biography.Guy Burgess and one on Donald and Melinda McLean, as well as the novel packs, 1934 to 1941. Today's episode is kind of a, uh, add on to our episode when we talked about Jason. Jesus Angleton and Kim Philby today, we're going to talk about another spy and trader who affected the entire trajectory of the cold war scientists, Klaus Fuchs.The focus of most of your works is on cold war history and particularly spies and espionage during the cold war. How did you become interested in this topic? It's more or less an accident? I drifted into it. Um, I was interested. And ideology the way in which the ideas to. Basically, usually a dominant group affect the actions of everyone within that [00:03:00] group and everyone that's affected by it.So, uh, a very good example of how that works. It's the, these groups of people, um, who are involved in espionage, not from. But because their beliefs, uh, Kim Philby, who we talked to about rather exhaustive with the other day, uh, was part of a group at Cambridge university in England, in the early 1930s that joined the communist party, um, because they were.Concerned about the way, uh, he, uh, dominant group and Britain and the British empire was accumulating enormous riches at the expense of the people who are actually producing them. I've just been reading actually, uh, th the diaries of Henry Chip's Channon, who was a member of that dominant group. He was in [00:04:00] the society.Uh, pages as it were of England. I took me in the 1920s and the rather dazzling, uh, lifestyle that he led, uh, dressing fruit dinner every night, going to two balls, constantly moving from long castle. That's a very good example of how the top 2%, 1% what happened 1% of European countries at that time lived well, on the other hand, we have, uh, coal miners and, uh, going into the general strike at exactly the same time, because they weren't paid enough to, to eat these people.Philby virtuous. Anthony blunt. Who's another very interesting person. I decided to work for a change in that system and we can see then how their beliefs then were enacted in actions. [00:05:00] Klaus Fuchs. And a lot of ways was a bit different than some of the other people that we've spoken about and, and his background and what he actually did and his espionage career.What does, before we drill down into some of the specifics of his career, can you tell us a little bit about what did, what did Klaus Fuchs actually do? Well, what he did and, and why he's famous is that he took the detailed information about the atomic bomb that was developed at Los Alamos and sent it to Moscow.A perhaps. Accelerated the development of the Soviet atomic bomb by a year, maybe two years as we look back at that time. Now this becomes increasingly crucial. Yes. The United States was planning a nuclear war against the Soviet union [00:06:00] to occur. Uh, probably about 1950. The fact that the Soviets exploded an affiliate device in August, 1949, made that impossible.This the point I wish this was probably most probable Ms. During the Korean war. When the Chinese had intervened and, uh, driven back the American and British forces to the Chinese Korean border from the train and general MacArthur wanted to bomb the Chinese forces and he was stopped from doing this and it hasn't done.Much elaborated about why he was stopped, but one good reason that he was talking with, uh, president Truman and Eisenhower the Natera at that time thought, uh, the United States used atomic weapons there. The [00:07:00] Soviets very likely, uh, do so themselves, uh, perhaps by bombing London. So, um, who was clouds? Feats.What was his background? Where did he come from? The background is very interesting. Uh, I see three approaches to, uh, folks, one of us when we were just discussing the espionage and there's, uh, a lot of information about how he was caught and on the American side and how he did what he did on the Soviet.So it's not. Yes that he was a physicist. Uh, he wasn't quite a Nobel prize quality because of this newness, that next notch town, but he was very much admired for his work. I said, theoretical nuclear physicist. And the third approach to him is that he was, um, he was to say, secular. Protestant [00:08:00] his, uh, family had been, his father was a Protestant minister who became a Quaker.This was in Germany, uh, before the first world war, his grandfather had also been a Protestant minister and cloud's folks had drilled into him from an early age that it was very important to do the right. This I, what was right following, uh, say radical Protestant views and following the teachings of Emmanuel Kant.Uh, and then once you've decided what the right thing, uh, to do you call ahead and do it no matter what anybody else is saying. And he took this essentially Christian idea, uh, with him as he became a communist before they, uh, in the 1920s. It was family had been social Democrats socialists, but, uh, he decided, and [00:09:00] his siblings decided simultaneously that the social Democrats in Germany, in the 19 late 1920s, weren't doing enough to stop the rise of the Nazi.And that the only group that, uh, seemed to be willing to actually fight and I mean, literally fight street fights and Nazis was the German communist party. So you'll have these three things. He asked me a notch. And you, uh, have this ethical approach to, um, my folks, uh, started out his education at the kale as a, became a physics student.And as things deteriorated in Germany in the early 1930s, he took a leading role in the, uh, student branch of the chairman Cummings. And got into a serious conflict. [00:10:00] So the Nazis, I think here, we need to talk about the difference between communism at that time and communism, the lease Inc, or the communist party in Germany was the largest in the world, uh, for quite some time and was an internationalist party.It's thoughts. That would be a good thing. If everybody in the world came from. After Lennon brought the Russian communist party to power and what became the Soviet union, there was a split and some people, uh, decided that the thing to do was to build communism in the Soviet again and forget about the rest of the world.And others wanted to continue the idea that there should be a worldwide revolution. The ladder was Trotsky and the former was stolen and stolen. It. But in night in the early 1930s, this wasn't completely clear. So [00:11:00] folks Allegiant the communist. Well, is it an allegiance to the German condiments? Pardon me?Not to the Soviet idea. That was only much later after the German communist party was destroyed by the Nazis in the mid 1930s. That to be a communist meant to, you had to have some kind of loyalty, the communist party of the Soviet. How w how engaged was Fuchs. He did the, he was in the leadership of the German communist party.Was he on the more o

Title: Coco Chanel, Nazi Occupation, Collaboration and Historical FictionDescription: Today we talk with author Gioia Diliberto about her historical novel: Coco at the Ritz. Coco Chanel completely reinvented fashion in the early 20th century. By the time the Nazi’s occupied Paris during World War 2, Chanel was fabulously wealthy and highly connected in the artistic and political circles of Paris. Gioia Diliberto brings this larger life character and setting alive in Coco at the Ritz.Learn More About our Guest:Gioia Dilibertohttp://pegasusbooks.com/books/coco-at-the-ritz-9781643138411-hardcoverhttp://pegasusbooks.com/books/coco-at-the-ritz-9781643138411-hardcoverYou can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:www.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Begin Transcript:, [00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you for listening to beyond the big screen podcast, we are a member of the Parthenon podcast network. A huge thanks goes out to Gioia Diliberto author of the historical novel Coco at the Ritz links to learn more about Gioia Diliberto can be found at Gioia Diliberto dot.Or in the show notes, a great way to support beyond the big screen is to leave a rating and review on apple podcasts. These ratings and reviews really help me know what you think about the show and by the magic of apple podcast algorithm, it helps other people learn about beyond the big screen. To learn more about the Parthenon podcast networks and great shows like Scott ranks, history unplug James Early's key battles of American [00:01:00] history, Richard lim’s, this American president, and more can be found parthenonpodcast.com.You can learn more about beyond the big screen, great movies and stories, so great. They should be moving. Facebook and Twitter by searching for a twosie history, you can contact me there or send me a good old fashioned email to my email address, steve@atozhistorypage.com links to all of this and more can be found at beyondthebigscreen.com.Thank you for joining me again beyond the big screen.I am really excited to welcome our very special guests today. Gioia Diliberto, author of Coco at the Ritz. A novel Gioia has written biographies on Jane Adams, Hadley, Hemingway, Diane Von Furstenberg, and Brenda [00:02:00] Frazier. Today, we are going to talk about Coco Chanel, the Paris fashion scene during the Nazi occupation and historical fiction.And I really loved the genre of historical fiction. And part of the reason I started this podcast was my interest in learning the real story behind historical fiction and the decisions authors make when writing historical fiction. So I'm definitely excited to talk about this today. I guess, a good place to begin is who was Coco Chanel.Well, she was a fashion designer who revolutionized fashion after world war one. She basically got women out of corsets and all their fancy clothes for dragging skirts and fancy hairdos with hairpins and, um, pared down the look of. Women's fashion, which is, uh, an essence, a style of elegance and chic that still influences fashion and defines how a lot of women want to look.[00:03:00] Now, she was extremely well connected. Who are some of the people she knew? When was her circle in this artistic community and Paris at that time? Yeah, she was very well connected. And what she was doing in fashion was related to what a lot of her friends were doing. Um, and the other arts like Stravinsky and music and Picasso and painting also what Hemingway was doing and writing this paring away and overturning the old and creating something new though.She didn't know Hemingway personally, but she did know Stravinsky. She had an affair with him and she knew Picasso. She worked with Picasso. She designed costumes for a production of Antigony that John Cocteau did Picasso did the sets for that production. And she would have liked to have had an affair with Picasso, but Chanel was exactly the kind of strong, aggressive woman that Picasa avoided, like the plague, but they [00:04:00] all influenced each other.And she was very much a part of that model. That post-World war one, modernist circle. You don't focus on Coco Chanel's entire life. And this, you really zoom in on one episode during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Why did you select that particular part of her life? Well, I had written another novel about Chanel that was published in 2006 and it was set after world war one when she was just getting.Business going. And in the course of doing research for that book, I discovered that she had been arrested by the French forces of the interior, which was this after the war, after world war II and the FFI were a group of. X soldiers and resistance fighters and ordinary citizens. Who've taken up arms after the [00:05:00] liberation of Paris.And we're going around France, picking up women who had slept with Germans and shaving their heads. You might've seen pictures of the. And shaving the heads of these women. Sometimes they were just girls, young teenage girls, and then often stripping them naked and parading them through streets. While crowds of jeering people looked on and Chanel was picked up by these guys.Because of her romance with a Nazi spy named Hans Gunther Von Dinklage, she was known as spots. And when I discovered this, that she had been hauled out of the wrist by two guys who could have cared less, who she was and cared less about fashion and taken to some undisclosed location for questioning. I thought it was the most fascinating moment in her fascinating life.And so I decided to write another novel that Chanel upset during that period. Well is Chanel at that in her life. At that point [00:06:00] in the late 1930s, early 1940s, she had a successful career she's in her late fifties, early sixties and her career and personal life. Where was she? Uh, at? Well, she had closed her.In 1939 on the Eve of war. And it's still a mystery. Why she did that, like so much in Chanel's life. The record is scant owing to the lack of official documents and her own no one really knows why she closed her house. Um, There are, there's a lot of speculation about it, but in any case, she was out of the business of producing the fashion, but her perfume was still being sold and was still a global sensation to this day.It's the book. Best-selling perfume in the world and her boutique where she sold the perfume and a few accessories was still open, but she was idle and she pretty much regretted, I think, [00:07:00] closing her house from the moment that she did it. So when the war opens, we see her. And meeting this handsome blonde Nazi, who she might've encountered before the war, because he had lived in France for a long time.He didn't wear a uniform and he was 13 years younger than she, and she started an affair with him and they lived together at the Ritz, which had been taken over by the Germans Chanel had. Grand suite there before the war, but when the Germans occupied it, they took over the hotel and relegated the French to the less desirable side.So they moved Chanel out of her fancy suite into two small maid's rooms. And that's where she stayed. Uh, spots on Dinklage. If you do a casual Googling of him, not a ton of information comes up, at least in English. So he wasn't one of the top, top Nazis, but he [00:08:00] definitely was an influential in his sphere.Well, it's unclear exactly how influential he was. He worked with the app where, which was the, uh, German intelligence operation that had been in place before Hitler. And of course it was connected to the SS, but it wasn't the SS. And he. Had come from a family of warriors. So he was part of that warrior class.His father had been a military guy and his grandfather, and he had indeed, um, fought during world war one, side-by-side with his father. And also he worked for a group of the German military that was responsible apparently for. Murdering Rosa Luxemburg though. It's unclear whether Spotz was directly involved in that.Um, and he, as I mentioned, he lived in Paris for a long time, lived in France for a long time. [00:09:00] He didn't wear a uniform and his activities are pretty murky. It's unclear exactly what his role was. And now a brief word from our sponsors. Uh, what was the nature of Chanel and Von Dinklage is relationship and well, it was a, it was a romance.It was a sexual relationship. The quid pro quo was that he smoothed life in Paris for her and during the occupation. And he might've been involved in helping getting her nephew, her beloved nephew, Andre. Released from a German prisoner of war camp, Andre was in the French military and he'd been taken prisoner early on in the war.And in spots may have helped her. That may have been one initial reason why she became involved with him. I think it was mostly opportunism. She was lonely. He was the available [00:10:00] man. It didn't hurt that he was German. It was going to make life easier for her. And she always aligned herself with those in power.Um, she was in love with him and I guess, and in a way that Chanel was in love with people, um, he, he, I don't know how he felt about her, but they stayed together for a long time. They were together after the war. Yeah. That's what I thought was so interesting is that in the novel, you can see that there's an element of a romance and maybe a real attraction, bu

Coming Soon - Collaboration Deceit and True Belief in WW2www.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Title: The Passion and Mel GibsonDescription: The Passion of the Christ from 2004 is one of the most influential movies on Christianity of all time. Critics claim the movie was too graphic in its violence, it has anti-Semitic themes and that it went too far from the Gospel accounts. Steve and Garry Stevens of the History in the Bible Podcast will look at what this movie got right and talk about why Mel Gibson made some of the decisions he did when taking this larger than life story to the big screen.Learn More About our Guest:Garry Stevens of the History in the Bible PodcastHistoryinthebible.comYou can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:www.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Image Credits:By The poster art can or could be obtained from Theatrical:Icon EntertainmentNewmarket FilmsEquinox Films20th Century FoxDVD:MGM Home EntertainmentWarner Home Video20th Century Fox Home Entertainment., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63823001https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/passion-of-the-christ-15-years-mel-gibson-jim-cavieziel-movie-reaction-christianity-a8788381.htmlBegin Transcript:, [00:00:00] this is Beyond the Big Screen Podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you for listening to beyond the big screen podcast, we are a member of the Parthenon podcast network. A huge thanks goes out to Garry Stevens yet again, of the history and the Bible podcast links to learn more about Garry and his podcasts can be found historyinthebible.com or in the show notes.A great way to support beyond the big screen is to leave a rating and review on apple podcasts. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show and help other people learn about beyond the big screen, more about the Parthenon podcast network can be found. Parthenon podcast.com. You can learn more about beyond the big screen, great movies and stories.So great. They should be movies on Facebook and [00:01:00] Twitter by searching for a to Z history. You can contact me there or just send an email to my email address, steve@atozhistorypage.com links to all of the, some more can be found beyondthebigscreen.com. I thank you for joining me again behind the big screen.welcome back to another collaboration between the history of the papacy podcast, the history and the Bible podcast. And I'll put on my beyond the big screen. Podcast had too. So I'm wearing two hats. If you were watching on YouTube, which we're not doing YouTube anymore, but if we were on YouTube, I'd be wearing two hats.I suppose you can imagine that. But today we're tackling the big one, the, the movie of all movies, [00:02:00] history of Christianity related history of Bible, Judaism, you name it. And that is 2000 fours. The passion of the Christ written and directed by Mel Gibson. So, Garry, how are you doing today? I'm doing fine. And you know, I have difficulty believing that movie came out 17 years ago.Yeah. It's pretty unbelievable. It feels like it just came out last month or something. And I believe that they're coming out with the sequel to it in not too long from one more recording. That's yeah, that'll be interesting. The, um, Jesus pot too. And maybe it's, it's titled the passion resurrection. So I think that probably gives a little clue.So maybe we could talk about that. Um, at some time what we might predict would be in that film, that would definitely be a lot less gory than this one. That's true. Although Mel Gibson's involved, so you never [00:03:00] know what might happen. The passion of the Christ from 2004 is Mel Gibson's approach to the passion and in his historical filmmaking phase, where he had Braveheart to the Patriot, which were very much stretching, historic, calling them historical, really stretching that to its breaking point.And then the movie Apocalypto and the passion where mal used native languages and, uh, had a very different storytelling style. Um, I think a good thing for us to maybe talk about upfront is our own views about this movie and just to put it out there on the rotten tomatoes, the movie gets a 49%. Uh, grade from the critics and then an 80% from the audience.So it's always interesting to see a big disparity between the critics and the audiences in rotten [00:04:00] tomatoes. Now I thought, Garry, maybe you could go first because you have some strong opinions about your countrymen, Mel Gibson, and some connections with them. Yeah. Melanie and I were born three days apart, so we are almost exactly contemporaries.Mel was born in America and came to Australia for his. And he went to drama school in Sydney. And I saw him in a production of the death of a salesman who he seemed perfectly competent. So I have seen the man closeup for awhile. I haven't shaken his great hand, but still now I just don't like the men don't really ask me why.I just don't like him. I don't like James Spader either. Although I've only ever seen three minutes of him on the screen, I tend to find mil is, is belligerent. And you must've been he's belligerent in his private life. Isn't it. And then we get into the discussion of how much do you separate the men from the work?If we go way back to say the painter Caravaggio love Caravaggio's paintings, but the guy was a murder out murderer. [00:05:00] Woody Allen would be the classic modern case. I still liked Woody Allen, although he seems to be quite a creep, but Mel, well, see, I'm happy to find fault with mil for even his head. And he does about, on the other hand, he does say to me, well, crafted high production value films.There's no doubt about that. And this film is the same. It's well-produced, uh, well-acted with, it seems around the extreme. Now, would you agree with the extreme. Oh, yeah. It's I mean, extreme as probably a, the lightest word you can use. I mean, and I don't remember it affecting me so much because I, I did watch it in the theater.And I think maybe not really, at that point, I wasn't, as quite as familiar, I was familiar with the passion narrative and its broadest strokes. But, um, I don't know, maybe because I didn't know it as quite a detail as I do now, after doing a podcast on all these things and reading the, the documents and all that.I don't know. I connected to [00:06:00] it quite differently this last time. And it was very hard to watch you. You said something which never occurred to me about the difference between say the Catholic and the Protestant approaches to the passion. Yeah. So the, um, well Mel comes to this from a very. Um, distinct perspective of a traditionalist Catholic capital T capital C the, and they have a very, uh, brutal and they've definition of the passion and perspective on the passion.And they, uh, look at it through a, um, they really focus in on the pain and the, all of those, the more horrific aspects of the passion then maybe, uh, other Catholics do or Orthodox, or, uh, even certain Protestants do it's really, they put a lot into the, the physicality of the passion, then others do well. [00:07:00] I mean, I look at a Catholic cross.It often has Jesus on the cross. Doesn't it, but you'll rarely find that in a Protestant church. I mean, it's just a plain cross in a Protestant. And you'll see in a Catholic where, um, Jesus is bleeding with the crown of thorns on and there's blood or there's blood coming from the various wounds where you won't generally see that.And Orthodox iconography, I believe too, in Catholic, uh, and you'll and Catholic iconography. And you'll see this in the film where they, um, almost break Jesus's feet to nail them through that. Won't be depicted in say, I don't believe that even an early iconography, but in Eastern iconography, you won't see that.As well. And so I think that it's, it's interesting that why you don't like Mel. And I think I have there's actors like [00:08:00] Nicholas cage. I can't watch anything Nicholas cages. And because there's just something about him and then probably mine that's on the same level as yours with now. Probably everybody's going to tune out now as Tom Hanks, you kind of stare at him now.And I am really, can't put my finger on why precisely, and I've enjoyed some of his movies and it's nothing really in particular with his personal life or his acting. I just, you know, for me, for him, and this is maybe getting up too much of a tangent he's Tom Hanks and every role you wouldn't call him a character actor, would you know?Yeah. He's he is himself just as a final. Let me get one funnel actor. And that's Tom cruise, like Hanks cruise is always exactly the same person. And he's also one of these people who always has to be portrayed looking good. I read, I once read a interesting thing about, um, Bruce Willis, you know, the film tour monkeys.Yeah. Uh, well, in that film, he spends most of it [00:09:00] drooling and gibbering and looking really bad. So Willis is an actor who's quite happy to, to be pictured looking. But Cruz in his arrogance always has to look like a pretty boy. So anyway, enough of that, we, we could, we could write rave about actors. We can't stand for years.Yeah. If you're really, if there's somebody who, uh, you want to rant about out there, you can send us an email and we can definitely sympathize with you. I think that, um, one of the things that I appreciated about the movie is that it fairly much stuck to the gospel account. And t

Title: Noah, More than Just an ArkDescription: Today we are joined by Garry Stevens of the History in the Bible Podcast to talk about the Biblical story of Noah from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. We will use the 2014 film Noah starring Russell Crowe to examine this popular story. We also see how this movie used non-Canonical texts, such as the Book of Enoch. This movie is much more complex and nuanced than any Hollywood movie deserves to be!Learn More About our Guest:Garry Stevens of the History in the Bible PodcastHistoryinthebible.comYou can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:www.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Image Credits:By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41074894Begin Transcript:[00:00:00] This is Beyond the Screen Podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you again for listening to Beyond the Big Screen Podcast, we are a member of the Parthenon podcast network. Of course, a big thanks goes out to Garry Stevens of the history and the Bible podcast links to learn more about Garry and his podcast can be found historyinthebible.com or in the show notes.Garry is a frequent guest of both beyond the big screen and the history of the papacy. I always enjoy talking to Garry Good friend and I think you will definitely enjoy today's episode. A great way to support beyond the big screen as to leave a rating and review on apple podcasts. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show and help other people learn about beyond the big screen, more about the Parthenon [00:01:00] podcast network found at podcast.com.You can learn more about beyond the big screen, great movies and stories. So great. They should be movies on Facebook and Twitter by searching for a to Z history. You can contact me there or just send me an email to my email address steve@atozhistorypagedotcom links to all of this and more can be found at beyondthebigscreen.com.I thank you for joining me again beyond the big screen.Today, we're going to talk about a movie called Noah, a 2014 movie produced by Darren Aronofsky who brought us movies, such as PI the wrestler, which, um, Garry noted that he liked that. And I liked that movie as well. And several other great movies. The runtime for this movie [00:02:00] was two hours and 17 minutes or forever.I'm not what sure it was. It was a close call. It starred Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe as Noah. And he's a Countryman of yours. Right. And a fellow Australian. Weekly's a Kiwi, but we claim all new Zealanders as Australian. So yeah. Yeah. He's really a versatile actor. I've really enjoyed just about every movie I've seen him in.Although he's one of those actors like, um, he's basically the Australian Tom Hanks. He's he's Russell Crowe and every movie. A slightly different Russell Crowe, but he's still Russell Crowe. Yeah. I mean, he almost has the same haircut and every movie, the haircut and the beard that's um, he's Russell Crowe.Yeah. Then you have Jennifer Conley. Then you have Jennifer Connelly, Noah's wife, Nama and [00:03:00] Connelly. She's an American actress. Then she starred in movies. Very various quality. She won an academy award star opposite Russell Crowe and another Russell Crowe movie. A beautiful mind. Boy, maybe that's another one for the future episode.And then we have Ray Winstone starring as. Ray Winstone and no, no, no. He stars as a, somebody named tubal Cain who probably doesn't come up, uh, in your memories of Sunday school class, but he's in there and he's really the ultimate bad guy of the movie. He really needs to take a couple of comedic roles, but he's really, he's tight cast as a Cockney gangster and he kind of plays one in this movie.He never really drops the Cockney accent at all. What did you think about old, um, Ray in this movie? Well, he's a good meaty actor [00:04:00] and he's got a, not very wide range, but the Cockney accent, I mean, listening to it, the more I listened to it, I thought, Hmm. If you'd played it with a Welsh or Scottish accent, it'd be just as inappropriate, but somehow I suppose it sort of would.But to me, I found it a very thick accent. Whereas the rest of the cast seemed to be playing neutral, you know, trans Atlantic or mid Atlantic accents. Yeah, I would agree you have a, his was, his was out of place for sure. Then we have Emma Watson who had a major role. She played Noah's daughter named Eli.She's not mentioned at all in an exited, but we'll get into that. She's a British actress and she's really well known for her role in the Harry Potter movie series. Yeah. You didn't think she was very well cast in this movie though. I thought she was too fragile. Pretty much all the other [00:05:00] actors looked like they could actually survive in that environment, in this set cloth, primitive clothing, but Emma Watson, she seemed to me as though she was dying to get to the nearest fashion store, to put on something wispy and dare.She was a little bit out of her element and this movie. Yeah, the next one, Logan Lurman, he's an up and coming American actor, star them, Percy Jackson movies. And Lurman plays the much maligned son of Noah ham. I thought he did a decent job. Um, and he gets a lot more action. I think in this movie, he kind of over he's gets more play in the movie than say Noah's other sons, sham and JPEG.Yeah. Yeah. JFF doesn't it doesn't get much of a part at all. That's it? He just sort of hangs around and is noble and helps things. The actor playing him at least was acting, he showed emotion. He had range. He [00:06:00] did things. The other, the other kids just sort of, okay, we'll pick up the paycheck or something and we'll get a little bit more into him, his key into Hamm's character.But I think I didn't always get where ham was coming from. Also when the Genesis version, I didn't exactly know where Ham's coming from. So maybe Aronofsky did nail that and we have, uh, Anthony Hopkins who stars as Methuselah Noah's grandfather. And I mean, he's the venerable Anglo American actor, I guess you could say it's more of a cameo role, but, um, Methuselah really doesn't appear in the actual Noah story in Genesis, but he has a pretty decent role in this movie.Anthony Hopkins. He's been in some of the greatest movies of all time, really since his earliest days. So, I mean, you got to cut, uh, you gotta cut the guy a little slack. Yeah. I think in, in the film now, um, [00:07:00] Hopkins plays Methuselah in a slightly distracted way. Doesn't it? It's like Methuselah isn't quite there or he's just had too many magic.Yeah. I wouldn't say it was so far that Anthony Hopkins, this was a paying the mortgage role. Big. He put more into it than that, but it still, it was, he could, uh, it wasn't, it was more, let's put an, we gotta find a place for Anthony Hopkins. So why not make him Methuselah? Yeah. Yeah. At least he's not a robot or, you know, um, CGI character, like Nick Naulty was as one of the Watchers, which you never even know it.Yeah. That's true. Yeah. You wouldn't even know that the actors who were doing that, the voices for the Watchers, cause they put them through some sort of synthesize it didn't they to deepen them or something. The main watcher was that was Nick Naulty, which like I said, you would never even have known it.Would you think you'd want to, [00:08:00] you know, try and put Nick Naulty on the market. The movie was released in late March of 2014 in the United States. And, um, very shortly after worldwide, it had a budget of 125 million, which is really not that off the wall and a box office of, uh, almost 400 million to this point, which is, I, I would assume in Hollywood, a raving success despite the movie, not really making a lot of waves.Yeah. Uh, that's true. I suppose the, the religious nature of the film, must've attracted a lot of box office. It's, it's a fairly, it's a decent enough film, but you wouldn't, if it had not been a religious film, I'm sure to have only taken in a fraction of that, the things that we had talked about, Garry and I is that this is a tricky movie to talk about because if you're looking at the Noah story, you really have to talk [00:09:00] about Noah, but also.Tie it into the other flood narratives that are, that fed into what the Noah story became. But there's an additional complication to this, to this movie that maybe you can tell us a little bit about Garry. The big complication is something which probably confused many moviegoers. When they walked into the film, it starts off with a prologue of these angelic beings.Who've come down to earth to help Adam Neve, not realizing that God doesn't want them to help Adam and Eve. And in return, the angelic beings get turned into basically rock monsters. And I'm sure a lot of the owners was going, what on earth are these ion in the Bible? Where did they come from? In fact, these angelic beings are known as Watchers in the book of first Enoch, the incredibly important.[00:10:00] work, which was rediscovered in the dead sea scrolls. It's in the Ethiopian Orthodox Canon, and it describes the coming of these angelic beings, watches to earth. Now watch that apparently comes from an Aramaic word and in Aramaic, that word watcher is an exact synonym for angel. So the watches are angels and then trapped on earth and they, they be, the

Today is a group discussion in which the four guys that make up the Parthenon Podcast Network (Steve Guerra from Beyond the Big Screen, Richard Lim from This American President, James Early from Key Battles of American History, and Scott Rank from History Unplugged) discuss a beloved hypothetical that our listeners have separately asked each of us many times: if you could eliminate one person from our timeline, who would it be?And to force us to think outside of the box, we've eliminated Hitler as a choice. That one is too obvious.Check out all our shows at parthenonpodcast.com

Coming Soon - Apocalyptic Chic and Surprises in Biblical Movieswww.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Title: Chekov’s Gun, Alien Fails and PrometheusDescription: This episode is a part of a two part series on the 2012 Ridley Scott film Prometheus. Erik Fogg of the Reconsider Podcast joins us once again to make the case that this movie is ill conceived from the beginning and fails to deliver as a science fiction movie or as an Alien franchise prequel. Let us know what you think of this movie!Learn More About our Guest:Erik Fogg of the Reconsider PodcastReconsidermedia.orgYou can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:www.beyondthebigscreen.comClick to Subscribe:https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feedemail: steve@atozhistorypage.comwww.beyondthebigscreen.comhttps://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacyParthenon Podcast Network Home:parthenonpodcast.comOn Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypagehttps://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcasthttps://twitter.com/atozhistoryMusic Provided by:"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Image Credits:https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-DVD-Noomi-Rapace/dp/B00GLP0ZPSBy The cover art can or could be obtained from http://www.prometheus-movie.com/gallery/view/img/244 Direct Link to Large version - http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/media/prometheusofficialposter.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34060287