Sunday 15 March 2015

Obsessed with... the 'How Did This Get Made?' podcast

I'm currently adding my two penn'orth/cents to KQED Arts' new Obsessed feature, "a weekly series featuring everything the KQED Arts gang can’t stop talking about." My contribution to Feb 13's post:


Experience has taught me that comedy podcasts are the best way to make long, tedious car journeys seem shorter, and binge-consuming several episodes of this very funny discussion series about very bad movies made a recent slog down Hwy 1 in one-foot visibility virtually fly by. In each episode, comics Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas (plus special guests) watch a gloriously dreadful movie like The Devil’s Advocate, Anaconda or Neil LaBute’s remake of The Wicker Man, then get together to discuss the burning question of the title: how did something so nonsensical, badly acted or tasteless like this ever get off the ground, let alone onto your screen?

Alongside the incredulous scene-by-scene commentary, there’s some genuinely fascinating “inside baseball” nuggets for movie dweebs like me about the missteps that lead to these cinematic catastrophes. (My favorites so far: Jackie Chan was going to play the Wesley Snipes character in Demolition Man, and there was an apparently quite good Michael Crichton source novel for 1995’s Congo, but nobody involved in the movie bothered to read it.) As a sincere appreciator of this stuff, I cannot wait for my next episode: Nic Cage’s 2011 horror (in all senses) Season of the Witch. Listen up over at Earwolf.

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