The Golden Turkey Awards is a 1980 book by film critic Michael Medved and his brother Harry.
Heaven's Gate is a 1980 American epic Western film written and directed by Michael Cimino, and starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, Joseph Cotten, Geoffrey Lewis, David Mansfield, Richard Masur, Terry O'Quinn, Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe and Nicholas Woodeson, the last two in their first film roles. Loosely based on the Johnson County War, it portrays a fictional dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s.
The decade of the 1980s in Western cinema saw the return of studio-driven pictures, coming from the filmmaker-driven New Hollywood era of the 1970s. The period was when "high concept" films gained popularity, where movies were to be easily marketable and understandable, and, therefore, they had short cinematic plots that could be summarized in one or two sentences. The modern Hollywood blockbuster is the most popular film format from the 1980s. Producer Don Simpson is usually credited with the creation of the high-concept picture of the modern Hollywood blockbuster.
Michael Saul Medved is an American radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic. His talk show, The Michael Medved Show is syndicated from his home station KTTH in Seattle. It is syndicated via Genesis Communications Network.
Brigham Young is a 1940 American biographical romantic drama film that describes Young's succession to the presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after founder Joseph Smith was assassinated in 1844.
Lost Horizon is a 1973 British-American adventure fantasy musical film directed by Charles Jarrott and starring Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, Sally Kellerman, George Kennedy, Michael York, Olivia Hussey, Bobby Van, James Shigeta, Charles Boyer, and John Gielgud. It was also the final film produced by Ross Hunter. The film is a remake of Frank Capra's 1937 film of the same name, with a screenplay by Larry Kramer. The stories of both were adapted from James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is a 1977 American horror film directed by John Boorman and written by William Goodhart, and starring Linda Blair, Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Max von Sydow, Kitty Winn, Paul Henreid and James Earl Jones. It is a sequel to William Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty and the second installment of The Exorcist franchise. The film is set four years after the original film and centers on the now 16-year-old Regan MacNeil, who is still recovering from her previous demonic possession.
Richard O. Fleischer was an American film director whose career spanned more than four decades, beginning at the height of the Golden Age of Hollywood and lasting through the American New Wave.
At Long Last Love is a 1975 American jukebox musical comedy film written, produced, and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. It stars Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, and Duilio Del Prete as two couples who each switch partners during a party and attempt to make each other jealous. Featuring 18 songs with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, Bogdanovich was inspired to make a musical with the composer's songs after Shepherd gave him a book of his songs. All of the musical sequences were performed live by the cast, since At Long Last Love was meant by Bogdanovich to be a tribute to 1930s musical films like One Hour With You, The Love Parade, The Merry Widow and The Smiling Lieutenant that also filmed the songs in the same manner.
The Goldwyn Follies is a 1938 Technicolor film written by Ben Hecht, Sid Kuller, Sam Perrin and Arthur Phillips, with music by George Gershwin, Vernon Duke, and Ray Golden, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Sid Kuller. Some sources credit Kurt Weill as one of the composers, but this is apparently incorrect. The Goldwyn Follies was the first Technicolor film produced by Samuel Goldwyn.
Inchon is a 1981 epic war film about the Battle of Inchon, considered to be the turning point of the Korean War. The film was directed by Terence Young and financed by Unification movement founder Sun Myung Moon. It stars Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur, who led the United States surprise amphibious landing at Incheon, South Korea in 1950. Also featured are Jacqueline Bisset, Ben Gazzara, Toshiro Mifune, and Richard Roundtree. It was filmed in South Korea, California, Italy, Ireland and Japan.
The Fifty Worst Films of All Time is a 1978 book by Harry Medved, with Randy Dreyfuss and Michael Medved. It presents the authors' choices for the 50 worst sound films ever made. Each film's entry includes a story synopsis, the authors' opinions of its quality, and a selection of contemporary reviews of the film.
Toshio Masuda is a Japanese film director. He developed a reputation as a consistent box office hit-maker. Over the course of five decades, 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box office—a second place record in the industry. Between 1958 and 1968 he directed 52 films for the Nikkatsu Company. He was their top director of action films and worked with the company's top stars, including Yujiro Ishihara with whom he made 25 films. After the breakdown of the studio system, he moved on to a succession of big-budget movies including the American-Japanese co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and the science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974). He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship Yamato series. His corporate drama Company Funeral (1989) earned him a Japanese Academy Award nomination and wins at the Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards. In Japan, his films are well remembered by fans and called genre landmarks by critics. He remains little known abroad save for rare exceptions of his post-Nikkatsu work such as Tora! Tora! Tora!. However, a number of his films were screened in a 2005 Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective in Italy and a few have since made their way to the United States. In 2009, he helped produce Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection.
Roar is a 1981 American adventure comedy film written, produced, and directed by Noel Marshall. Roar's story follows Hank, a naturalist who lives on a nature preserve in Africa with lions, tigers, and other big cats. When his family visits him, they are instead confronted by the group of animals. The film stars Marshall as Hank, his real-life wife Tippi Hedren as his wife Madeleine, with Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith and Marshall's sons John and Jerry Marshall in supporting roles.
Cinematic exhibition of the B movie, defined as a relatively low-cost genre film, has declined substantially from the early 1980s to the present. Spurred by the historic success of several big-budget movies with B-style themes beginning in the mid-1970s, the major Hollywood studios moved progressively into the production of A-grade films in genres that had long been low-budget territory. With the majors also adopting exploitation-derived methods of booking and marketing, B movies began to be squeezed out of the commercial arena. The advent of digital cinema in the new millennium appeared to open up new opportunities for the distribution of inexpensive genre movies.
Parnell is a 1937 biographical film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring Clark Gable as Charles Stewart Parnell, the famous Irish politician. It was Gable's least successful film and is generally considered his worst, and it is listed in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. The movie addresses the sex scandal that destroyed Parnell's political career, but its treatment of the subject is highly sanitized in keeping with Hollywood content restrictions at the time.
Him is a 1974 American pornographic feature film produced for gay audiences. It was directed by "Ed D. Louie" and featured gay mural artist Gustav "Tava" Von Will in the role of Jesus.
The Official Razzie Movie Guide: Enjoying the Best of Hollywood's Worst is a book about the booby prize award show the Golden Raspberry Awards (Razzies), written by John Wilson, founder of the awards ceremony. The book was published in 2005 by Warner Books, the same year as the 25th Golden Raspberry Awards.
The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation is a 2008 book by radio talk show host Michael Medved. The book reached #30 on the New York Times Best Seller List.
