Rebekah Blackmon (our announcer):
Rebekah Blackmon is a web programmer by day and an amateur classical pianist, composer, and novelist by night. She likes to refer to herself as a Jill of all Trades, loves to learn, and there is no telling what she might suddenly dabble in from time to time. How does she relate to the film industry? Well, she does have a short IMDB listing, if that counts. Oh, it doesn’t count? She supposes that’s fair.
(Editor’s note: That totally counts! And we had no idea when we recruited her! Also, we should point out that we didn’t give her any direction about how to write the bio, which is why it’s all in the third person.)
(Additional note: click here to see Rebecca being an “amateur” classical piano player.)
Contacts:
Claude Call:
I was born and raised on Long Island, New York, in a town that, at the time, was so small that hardly anyone knew where it was. Usually I told people “Go to Commack and turn left.” It wasn’t always easy being a night owl, especially when you’re a teenager in the 70s and TV stations still had this irritating habit of signing off for a few hours at night. But I did see the original runs of Saturday Night Live, and I’d catch a few late shows (anyone remember the intro that was designed to look like several different movie tropes rendered in lights?
Yeah, that one. I saw that one a lot, on WCBS-TV in New York, but I know it was used elsewhere.) I always had these romantic thoughts about TV signals going out into space, forever and ever, and how at some point an alien would intercept the signal and see Jackson Browne singing, or William Shatner battling the spiders overrunning his town, and wonder what kind of beings we were.
As I neared high school graduation I developed an interest in radio, and I majored in Broadcast Communications in college, spending the bulk of my time at the now-dearly-departed WBAU. But a Communications degree means that you’re also taking a lot of film classes, and I found myself exposed to a lot of films that weren’t late-night B pictures from a studio’s pre-1950 library. I especially found myself taken with the artistic side of films, things like camera placement and angles, and lighting, and I learned to appreciate editing decisions. And all of that has stuck with me throughout my adult life.
I didn’t go into a career in radio or broadcasting; instead I became a teacher. But I never lost the bug and finally in the summer of 2017 I combined my radio skills with my teaching skills and launched my first podcast, How Good It Is. That show is still running, if you’re curious. (Yes, I’m the guy working the websites, which is why they kind of look alike.)
Sean and I met in the early 2000s in, of all places, Washington DC because we’re both fans of Aaron Sorkin in general and The West Wing in particular. We’ve kept in touch via social media since then, and when Sean started posting lengthy movie reviews on Facebook, I said to myself, “This has the makings of another podcast.” Sean was amenable to the idea, and a few months later, we’ve been able to bring this project to fruition.
Contacts:
Claude’s on Facebook but unless you already know him, you’re out of luck.
Sean Gallagher:
My first, and probably my important, teacher when it comes to movies was my father. I don’t remember much about what I watched when I was a kid living in New Jersey, as I was more into sports, though I do remember we had a black-and-white television set, and I know we went to movies, especially the old Disney movies when they were re-released in the theater (back when they did that), since my parents were into that (which may be why I case a more cynical eye on those movies than most people I know). What I do remember is, when we moved to Walnut Creek, California, not only did we have a color TV set finally, but not long after we moved there, my father bought a video disc player (a movie equivalent of a record player, since it played movie discs like a record player played records), and at least once a week, he would bring home a movie from a video disc store, and show it to us. Later, when he bought a VCR (though he had a bad history with audio cassettes, he realized he could record things on VHS), he would buy movies on VHS as well, and show them to us. His taste in movies was limited; he didn’t like most movies made after 1960 (with a handful of exceptions), he didn’t like violent movies, which left out crime movies (except for The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and a few others, and that was mainly because they starred Humphrey Bogart, one of his favorite actors), combat movies (though he liked war-themed movies), and westerns (except for High Noon, which he liked because of Gary Cooper), and while he shared their politics in large measure, he wasn’t a fan of people like Barbara Stanwyck (except for Meet John Doe) or John Wayne (except for Donovan’s Reef).
On the other hand, he was a big fan of early studio comedies and such comic actors/groups as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. He was a big fan of actors like Bogart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn (he was always bitter as the American Film Institute that they never gave their lifetime achievement award to Grant or Hepburn, though I tried pointing out the latter would never show up to receive the award) and James Stewart, and he was a big fan of Frank Capra movies. And while he was a fan of screwball comedies of the era, and tearjerkers like Now Voyager and Since You Went Away, I think his favorite type of movie was musicals. Busby Berkeley musicals, Astaire and Rogers musicals, Judy Garland musicals, and Rodgers and Hammerstein (or Lerner and Lowe) musicals were his favorites (he did like some Gene Kelly musicals, but found his ballet sequences pretentious). And his favorite movie of all time was Casablanca.
He also taught my younger brothers and I about the way movies could tell stories, and reveal character. The one I remember clearly was Twelve O’clock High, one of the rare combat movies he did like. It’s a WWII movie starring Gregory Peck, where he plays a general who takes over command of an Army bombardier unit. The scene my father talked about from the movie was when Peck gets driven to the unit. He’s sitting in the front seat with the driver, a sergeant. They stop at a field, get out of the car, and smoke a cigarette together; Peck even lights the sergeant’s cigarette for him and calls him by his first name. After a couple of seconds, Peck stubs out his own cigarette, says, âAll right, sergeantâ, and walks back to the car, waiting for the sergeant to open the back door for him. It’s a way of showing Peck’s character taking command. He also taught us to look out for character actors in movies, showing us how certain actors would pop up in the same director’s movies.
Of course, because of those limits, I had to seek out modern movies on my own, plus, I became interested in the type of movies my father wasn’t into, such as combat movies, crime movies (gangster and noir), and westerns. Also, while I kept some of my father’s tastes (I love Casablanca, I like Frank Capra movies, I like all the actors I mentioned he liked, I like Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and I love musicals), I didn’t keep all of them (I’m no longer a fan of Disney movies for the most part, though I respect the artistry, and I’m not a fan of Rodgers and Hammerstein, except for Oklahoma). I went to the movies a lot when I graduated high school in the summers I was home from college, either by myself or with friends. In college, I took two movie-related courses. My sophomore year, I took a class called âMusic in Film and TVâ, and studied film composers both from the studio era (Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann) and from after that (Ennio Morricone). We also studied how music is used in movies, from source music (when it comes from something we can see, like instruments playing, or a radio), to just playing over the scene, with techniques such as Mickey-Mousing (when the music mirrors the action on screen, like a not for each step a character walks up or down). The summer before my senior year, I took a class called âFilm and Literatureâ, where we watched a number of movies (it’s where I first saw The Godfather and The Godfather Part II), read novels and short stories adapted into movies, learned a little about the grammar of film, learned certain terminology, and were assigned to write a scene of our own as if it was part of a shooting script (detailing everything that would be in each shot). The most important thing I took from that class, however, is how the clichĂ© âthe book was betterâ isn’t always true.
The summer before my senior year, I also started writing for CAPRA (Cinematic Amateur PRess Association), a fanzine published every two months that dealt with movies. While there were a couple of issues I missed when I was sick, or if my submission didn’t get there by the deadline (of course, this was all by mail), I contributed to most other issues, until I left the zine after the July issue of 2012. Starting in May of 1999, I also started writing a monthly column for âThe Moon Valley Tattlerâ, a community newspaper run out of New Mexico (by this time, of course, I was able to e-mail submissions). I wrote a column called âHidden Gem Videosâ (which I later changed to âHidden Gem DVDsâ), recommending movies to rent that were off the beaten path, or that you might not find at your local Blockbuster, but at an independent store. In around 2003, I also started writing another monthly column called âAt the Multiplex”, where I’d review theatrical releases. I quit writing for them in around May of 2009 when the paper went under new management (it had originally been run by a friend of my mother’s). I have also contributed reviews to IMDb, as well for some defunct websites, and also infrequently maintained a blog called âThe Joy and Agony of Movies”.
I moved down to Brooklyn in March of 2001, where I currently reside. Starting in July of 2001, I began working at Video Stop, an independent video store on the lower half of midtown Manhattan. I was let go in June of 2002. While I was there, I wrote up the monthly flier advertising the new movie releases. In December of 2002, I began working for Movie Place, another independent video store on the upper west side of Manhattan, where I stayed until the end of July 2003, when I was let go. In the month of August that year, I got a temporary job handing out free tickets to movie screenings, before their official release (they could be anything from a sneak preview the week before to a test screening). I left that job in September of 2003, when I got a job at another independent video store, World of Video, in the west village of Manhattan. I stayed there until the store closed at the end of April in 2012 (appropriately enough, about eight and a half years). During that time, I worked my way up to manager of the store. During that time, I also wrote the monthly fliers advertising new movie releases, as well as contributing to the store’s website and Facebook page. When I was manager, I was also in charge of ordering movies for the store.
Contacts: