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Say what you will about Inserts, John Byrum’s 1975 film about a director reduced to manufacturing porn in his own living room—Richard Dreyfuss, Jessica Harper and Veronica Cartwright, give it their all and then some. Harper plays a doe-eyed schemer not as innocent as she looks, and Cartwright, as usual, nearly steals the show as an addict who subsidizes her habit with sex. Playing a low-life producer/pimp, Bob Hoskins gives the film a jolt.

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Bill Murray began his career in comedy with Chicago's improv comedy troupe The Second City. He also became involved with National Lampoon after being recruited by John Belushi. In 1977, he joined the cast of the then-still-kinda-new "Saturday Night Live," bringing him into the public eye. In 1979, he was cast in Harold Ramis' summer camp comedy "Meatballs," and would go on to star in several high-profile comedies like "Stripes," "Caddyshack," and Best Picture nominee "Tootsie." In 1984, Murray landed his first cinematic leading roles, in John Byrum's adaptation of "The Razor's Edge," which Murray co-wrote, and Ivan Reitman's supernatural comedy "Ghostbusters."

Prior...

The post Bill Murray Doesn't Think Bill Murray Has Much to Do With His Success appeared first on /Film.

Turner Classic Movies continues with its Gay Hollywood presentations tonight and tomorrow morning, June 8–9. Seven movies will be shown about, featuring, directed, or produced by the following: Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Farley Granger, John Dall, Edmund Goulding, W. Somerset Maughan, Clifton Webb, Montgomery Clift, Raymond Burr, Charles Walters, DeWitt Bodeen, and Harriet Parsons. (One assumes that it's a mere coincidence that gay rumor subjects Cary Grant and Tyrone Power are also featured.) Night and Day (1946), which could also be considered part of TCM's homage to birthday girl Alexis Smith, who would have turned 96 today, is a Cole Porter biopic starring Cary Grant as a posh, heterosexualized version of Porter. As the warning goes, any similaries to real-life people and/or events found in Night and Day are a mere coincidence. The same goes for Words and Music (1948), a highly fictionalized version of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical partnership.

The director-centric 1970s were a time for pushing the boundaries of 'acceptable' film content, but John Byrum's witty and profane period piece about a Hollywood porn director was a step too far. Richard Dreyfuss leads a cast of utterly fearless actors in a witty and intelligent dissection of movieland decadence. Inserts Region A Blu-ray Twilight Time 1975 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 115 min. / Street Date June 14, 2016 / (Nc-17) / Available from Twilight Time Movies Store29.95 Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Jessica Harper, Veronica Cartwright, Bob Hoskins, Stephen Davies. Cinematography Denys N. Coop Art Direction John Clark Costumes Shirley Russell Produced by Davina Belling, Clive Parsons Written and Directed by John Byrum

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

At least in Los Angeles, the theatrical showings of John Byrum's remarkable Inserts came and went (cough) so fast that nobody had time to be outraged. The reviews made it sound like sordid trash that could only attract men in plastic raincoats.

Now approaching her fourth decade in the film industry, Amy Heckerling admits to not previously considering the possibility of a retrospective to show off her films. That is, until New York City’s newly opened Metrograph theater approached her about a weekend-long look back at her work. “I never thought about it,” she said. “‘Oh, is that what you do when you retire and crap?'”

Heckerling is, thankfully, not retiring any time soon. The filmmaker behind such modern classics as “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Clueless,” and “Look Who’s Talking” has seen a career punctuated by some high highs and very low lows, a few of which almost ended her time in entertainment for good.

But Heckerling is nothing if she’s not resilient, and it’s been both her ability to bounce back and her sometimes stubborn desire to do things her way that have kept her making movies.

The Post-1960S, Pre-Digital Age: Real-time One-offs, 1975-1998

British filmmaker John Byrum is responsible for the first (and in some ways only) real-time period film. Inserts (1975), set in the early 1930s, is about a Boy Wonder movie director (called Boy Wonder, played by Richard Dreyfuss fresh from American Graffiti (1973) and Jaws (1975)) now washed up before the age of 30, resigned to making porn because of Hollywood’s conversion to sound. Not only is Inserts scrupulously real-time (with the exception of the opening credits sequence, which offers glimpses of the stag film we’re about to see made) and period, but it’s rather long for such a film, just shy of two hours. To tell the entire story would be spoiling the fun, but the Boy Wonder deals with recalcitrant actresses, the problem of his own potency, career problems, death, sex, after-death and after-sex…and in the end, as...

American writer and unlikely Beat icon who married Jack Kerouac's wild road companion Neal Cassady

In her book Off the Road (1990), Carolyn Cassady, who has died aged 90, charted her extraordinary life with the Beat writers Neal Cassady, her husband, and Jack Kerouac, her lover. Carolyn was an unlikely, and in many ways an unwilling, Beat icon herself. When she met Neal in Colorado in 1947, Carolyn was a student of theatre design at the University of Denver, having attended a smart east coast ladies' college; he was a car thief, an energetic seducer of women and occasionally men, and possessed of a restless, manic energy that had already bewitched Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He also had a teenage bride, LuAnne Henderson. Soon after they had begun their relationship, Carolyn crept into Neal's flat one morning to give him a surprise, only to find him asleep with LuAnne on one side and Ginsberg on the other.

Years in the making, Walter Salles's movie adaptation of Kerouac's beat classic is bold, affecting and inherently sad

The first two books I bought when I arrived in New York as a graduate student in August 1957 were William H Whyte's The Organization Man and a special edition of the avant-garde quarterly Evergreen Review on the "San Francisco scene". They complemented each other. Whyte's book is a devastating assault on American conformity by a senior editor of the business magazine Fortune. The Evergreen special was a celebration of the countercultural artists soon to be famous as leaders of the beat generation, and the writers featured as members of the San Francisco scene were Allen Ginsberg, whose poem "Howl" was published earlier that year, and Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road was to be the literary sensation of 1957 when it appeared a month or so later.

During that autumn my principal...

Kirsten Dunst/Camille On the Road poster If this isn't an all-out smile, I don't know what is. Those sparkling white teeth and healthy-looking gums belong to Kirsten Dunst. What a world! What a life! What a dentist!. I'm assuming Dunst's is the last On the Road "character" poster we're adding, as every major On the Road character has already gotten his/her poster. Dunst's actually came out before the ones for the film's three leads, Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kristen Stewart. We're just late posting it. In On the Road, Dunst plays Camille, the wife of Dean Moriarty (Hedlund), who leaves her behind to go on the road with the much younger Marylou (Stewart). Camille is based on Carolyn Cassady, the first wife of the sexually adventurous Neal Cassady (Moriarty in the novel/film). Sissy Spacek played Carolyn Cassady in John Byrum's Heart Beat, based on Cassady's 1976 book of memoirs,...

Thirty years ago in John Byrum's soft-centred Heart Beat, John Heard played beat novelist Jack Kerouac with Nick Nolte as the legendary hippie car thief Neal Cassady. Both have minor walk-on roles in this dramatised documentary about the creation of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", its first performance in a small San Francisco gallery in 1955, and the subsequent 1957 obscenity trial of its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights bookshop fame. The movie is framed by an autobiographical monologue culled from numerous interviews with Ginsberg, performed with some conviction by James Franco, who expertly delivers extracts from the poem to the San Francisco audience. Interspersed are courtroom scenes in which Jon Hamm plays the liberal defence attorney, David Strathairn the perplexed, parodically square prosecutor (he anticipates Mervyn Griffith-Jones in the 1960 Old Bailey trial of Penguin Books for Lady Chatterley's Lover), and Bob Balaban the judge. The poem is accompanied by some...