The Pink Smoke podcast

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss the "voodoo" thriller that was adapted for the screen into John Schlesinger's The Believers as well as the real-life criminal enterprises inspired by the book/movie. It's a story of oblivious racism, NYC grime, goofy acronyms & the endless recounting of what our hero read in research files.

“The Experiment is The Experiment.” We’re joined by critic & filmmaker Martin Kessler to discuss the Strugatsky Brothers’ magnum opus, The Doomed City. Long self-suppressed by the brothers due to fears of retribution by Soviet government under which it was written, the book has a potency and imagination that rivals their best work like Hard to Be a God (adapted into the legendary film by Alexei German) and Roadside Picnic (adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky into the all-time classic Stalker.) The story concerns a bizarre city operating unstuck from time under the incomprehensible parameters of an opaque social-metaphysical project known only as The Experiment. Theological novel, pointed political allegory, mind-bending sci-fi story; like the land of The Experiment itself, The Doomed City is an ever-changing landscape with mysteries apt to be interpreted wildly differently depending on who is doing the interpreting. We go deep on this challenging but wildly engaging masterpiece from some of the most important science-fiction writers ever to exist. Support our Patreon: 
www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: 
www.thepinksmoke.com Martin Kessler on Twitter:
 https://twitter.com/MovieKessler The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
 twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: 
twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

The great Bill Duke, immortalized onscreen for his roles in Car Wash, Predator, Action Jackson, The Limey and Mandy, also boasts a distinctive five-decade career directing film and television. On this episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs welcome back Pinnland Empire guru Marcus Pinn to discuss Duke's 1984 feature debut, The Killing Floor. After premiering on the PBS American Playhouse series, winning the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and being chosen as an Official Selection of the "La Semaine de la Critique" section at Cannes, the movie practically disappeared from sight until its recent 4k restoration and preservation by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Set during a period of migration of Southern black workers to the giant Chicago slaughterhouses during the first World War, Killing Floor concerns the struggle to build an interracial union even as meatpacking management actively plotted to divide the workface along ethnic lines, a conflict which boiled over in the race riots of 1919. Featuring early performances from Alfre Woodard and Dennis Farina, an exhaustively researched screenplay by Leslie Lee (from a story by producer Elsa Rassbach) and assured direction from Duke, it's a film that deserves more recognition for both its subject matter and its own time and place in American filmmaking. Support our Patreon: 
www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Marcus Pinn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PINNLAND_EMPIRE The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn't sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That's how I began to hate you." On this episode hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss the namesake of this very site, Akira Kurosawa's intense crime masterpiece High and Low! A long-standing favorite of the Pink Smoke, its founders are always excited to dig into this thriller about the harrowing moral decisions forced into play by a botched kidnapping. The film's unique structure moves from a single-set drama about corporate back-stabbing to an expansive police procedural that winds its way through every level of Tokyo and, consequently, shifts its focus from Toshiro Mifune as an executive under pressure to Tatsuya Nakadai as the detective chasing down every lead. Brilliant from start to finish, there's a case to be made that High and Low represents the culmination of the finest era in the Japanese master's body of work. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"Move over Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins... JUICY!" - Booklist Cupid's arrow has struck the Pink Smoke on St. Valentine's Day, and they've decided to give some love to that most disrespected of genre fictions: the romance novel. Recruiting beach-read paperback enthusiast Melanie Daniels from the Cinema Parlor Podcast, hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg access the world of glamorous women and their lusty affairs with truculent suitors via Fame & Fortune by Kate Coscarelli. Known to cinephiles as author of the Phantasm novelization (and mother of Phantasm writer-director Don Coscarelli), Kate produced six salacious books dealing with the steamy lives of rich widows, lonely housewives, ambitious businesswomen and rising starlets struggling to stay on top in the cutthroat upper class society of Los Angeles. Fame & Fortune deals with the circle of friends of one Peach Malone, super-wealthy widow of Drake "Midas" Malone trying to regain control of her estate following the death of her Prince Charming. Her friends include Grace Gable, a hairdressing entrepreneur harboring a dark secret; Maggie Hammond, blossoming interior designer with two smoky beacons for eyes like a Keane painting; Laura Austin, frail wife of an in-demand doctor whose own eyes have shifted to Hollywood's hottest sex symbol Ghilly Jordan; and Belinda Cornwall, the absolute doyenne of Los Angeles society - the lady with the whim of iron! Coscarelli juggles this large cast of characters as they struggle to wrest back dominance of their own lives by outsmarting, upstaging and maybe even murdering the gorgeous brutes who stand in their way. The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com Melanie Daniels on Twitter: twitter.com/plasticwerewolf The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs discuss the new, posthumously-published novel from the great crime novelist, Donald Westlake - author of the Parker & Dortmunder books. Westlake is a Pink Smoke favorite and the podcast has previously covered Forever and a Death (a script for a James Bond movie converted into a novel) and Double Feature (a pair of novellas about violence in Hollywood.) The story of a woman putting off responding to a marriage proposal by contracting a New York cabby to drive her to Los Angeles rather than flying there, Call Me a Cab is a bit of a change-up for Westlake. Instead of a dark thriller like The Hunter and The Ax or a clever, genial crime story like The Hot Rock, this latest novel is a low-key romance built around a meandering road-trip. It’s a unique story and approach by an author from who you would least expect it. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

We pay tribute to the recently deceased Peter Bogdanovich, considering his work both as a filmmaker and a cinephile by exploring his list of the best American films of 1939 (the year of his birth). We’re joined by Bill Teck, the director of One Day Since Yesterday, a loving celebration of Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed - a box office & critical failure only now being rediscovered in no smart part because of Teck’s documentary. Bogdanovich's list includes screwball comedies, adventure films, melodramas, westerns, movies that (most importantly to Bogdanovich) express the personalities & emotions of their directors. The trio connects these films to Bogdanovich’s life and work, Teck’s experiences with the man himself & a discussion of the cruelty of Bogdanovich’s critical burial and deserving resurrection. The episode includes a healthy “fuck you” to Hal Needham. Support our Patreon:
 www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Bill Teck on Twitter: twitter.com/billteck John Cribbs on Twitter: twiiter.com/TheLastMachine Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: 
twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” 
Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by his old friend Adam Leon to discuss Leon’s new film Italian Studies. Starring Vanesse Kirby (The Queen, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Pieces of a Woman), the film follows an author who suffers a psychotic break and wanders Manhattan, joining up with a group of random teenagers in attempt to take ahold of herself and her identity once again. The discussion touches on Leon’s sudden success with the SxSW-winning, Cannes-selected Gimme the Loot, the weird intersection of success and failure that came with his follow-up film Tramps, and the risks of making a film that you know will be divisive like Italian Studies. Leon talks about the process of working with an actress like Kirby on a somewhat experimental film, how he found the film’s teenager actors, and why his film’s titles are always awful. Support our Patreon: 
www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
 www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
 twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: 
twitter.com/cfunderburg Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss the year in movies. The conversation naturally touches on their favorite films of the year but more than that, the duo discusses why they rarely do these “year in review” pieces anymore and how their approach to cinema has changed as they’ve gotten older. By the end of the conversation can they find a way to balance their negativity about the current state of things with their lifelong love of film? No. The answer is no. Support our Patreon: 
www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: 
www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: 
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:
 twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: 
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

"Not even death is static like a picture is. If you look at a corpse long enough, you see things move beneath the skin, as real and liquid as the blood in your own veins." What is Generation Loss? Is it a crime novel about a jaded never-was photographer turned leather-clad gumshoe? Is it a horror story about furry weasel-like "fishers" stalking tourists in rural Maine? Or maybe it's a dark melodrama about art and redemption in which a middle-aged alcoholic is forced to channel the energy normally reserved for self-damage to save a young girl from a reclusive, decades-old evil? Hosts Chris Funderburg and John Cribbs struggle to get a handle on genre-flipping Elizabeth Hand's Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel, the first of a series featuring tattooed shutterbug Cass Neary. Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter: twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter: 
twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”