In 32 Sounds, director Sam Green listens. He listens to the last male bird of a dying species chirp for a mate that will never arrive. He listens to a man who can almost hear the voices of dead lovers and friends. He listens to a musician who burned a piano in her youth for art and now records underwater sounds. And he spends a day with a foley art…

In "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," author James Curtis chronicles the silent star’s private life and pictures, including The General, One Week, The Navigator and Steamboat Bill, Jr. But it’s Keaton’s days as a performer that captivated me so we begin the episode with tales from the vaudeville stage, including details about which foot Buster's …

On this episode we open our ears to the sounds of silent films with an audio documentary about musicians who compose new scores to movies from a century ago. These composers are smitten with the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, early Alfred Hitchcock and others. Before the doc, we open with one man’s obsession with the Odessa Steps in Eis…

Before he was Sonny the shopkeeper in Do the Right Thing, or Mike Yanagita in Fargo, or Nescaffier in The French Dispatch, Stephen Park was a confused college student. His father was a doctor. So naturally, Park enrolled in a lot of science classes at Boston University. But it never really clicked. “After my second year, I was on academic probation…

GF1. That’s what the New Jersey gangsters on The Sopranos called the film. To everyone else, it was The Godfather, a 1972 film that saved Paramount Pictures and catapulted the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton to the stratosphere. It also reintroduced a struggling Marlon Brando to the world. In t…

Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt. In this episode, it's Shaft.Von Todd Melby

Inspired by John Wayne, a Texas dishwasher named Joe Buck (Jon Voight) buys a cowboy hat, boots and leather jacket for his new life as a New York sex worker. He figures women will be into that. It turns out, gay men are really into it. After getting off a bus, Joe rents a room and begins wandering around Manhattan. At every turn, New Yorkers pick h…

Bloody. Unnerving. Thrilling. Thirty-plus years after its release, Goodfellas still packs a punch. Or should I say a kick in the head? Martin Scorsese directed the movie. Based on Wiseguy, a book by Nicholas Pileggi about the gangster Henry Hill, Goodfellas stars Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Lorraine Bracco. The movie is renowned for it…

Lots of critics think that Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO has no peers. When SIGHT & SOUND magazine asked hundreds of critics to pick their favorites, the 1958 movie starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak topped the list. But one woman begs to differ. Beth Lewis doesn't much see what all the fuss is about. She watched VERTIGO in London with her partner C…

An interview with Brett Harvey, director of "Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo." After struggling with heroin and robbing stores as a teenager, Trejo spent years incarcerated in California prisons. After his release, he worked as a drug counselor. A fluke visit to a movie set resulted in Trejo landing a tiny role in "Runaway Train." More small rol…

Georges Mourier describes Napoléon as “not just a masterpiece." The Cinémathèque Française restoration expert says the 1927 silent film "is also a monster piece.” Which is why, while working on a new restoration of the Abel Gance classic, Mourier never be alone with Napoléon. Instead, a collaborator will always be with him in the screening room as …

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Albert Serra, the director of "The Death of Louis XIV." The opinionated and entertaining Serra discusses the film's origin as an art installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1:58), Louis XIV's agony (2:58), pre-filmmaking discussions with collaborators (4:00), how he gets five "magical" minutes e…

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Charles Burnett, director of "Killer of Sheep." Critic Terrence Rafferty of GQ called the film "one of the most striking debuts in movie history." The movie examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb fr…

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Frederick Wiseman director of "Titicut Follies," a 1967 documentary about a hospital for the criminally insane. In this interview with Todd Melby, he also reveals why he shot most of his movies on 16mm, how his films are structurally similar to plays and why he hates the term "cinema verite." In the i…

When the Coen Brothers released "Fargo" in 1996, pretty much all of North Dakota and Minnesota got upset. "We don't talk like that," they said. Well, the Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby is from North Dakota and he's here to tell you they do. In this episode, you'll hear an audio documentary he produced with Diane Richard. The doc features the film…

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Barbara Kopple, director of "Harlan County USA," her 1976 film about a Kentucky coal miner's strike Kopple talks about her nervy confrontation with a company-paid, strike-busting "gun thug" and a situation that turned violent on the picket line. “They kicked the Nagra [recorder]," Kopple says. "I had …

The Drunk Projectionist's Todd Melby interviews Kelly Reichardt, director of "Certain Women" and "Wendy and Lucy." Riechardt discusses sound design, her love of trains, how men and women perceive scenes differently and other topics in her films.Von Todd Melby