The Entertainment with Tom Knoblauch

Today’s show is an exploration into the role of sex in popular culture, especially since the turn of the century. What should the role of intimacy be in storytelling? Are sex scenes unnecessary, gratuitous, slowing down the plot? Are they the plot? Is that vulnerability and passion essential to bringing humanity onto our screens? There is a long history in Hollywood of debates on where exactly the line should be—if anywhere at all—from the scandal of Pandora’s Box in 1929 to the enforcement of the Hays Code in the 1930s, censoring most of the sexual content that came before. Then came the postwar period, largely inspired by European movies like And God Created Woman or Belle de Jour, where the erotic, the sensual, and the trashy went mainstream in American cinema again. Ann Hornaday, chief film critic at The Washington Post writes that “The 1980s and early 1990s were a heyday of sex scenes that might have been hot and heavy but stayed within the parameters of bourgeois good taste: movies such as An Officer and Gentleman, Body Heat, 9 ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct were must-see films, not just because of their twisty plots but because of sex scenes that were frank and artfully staged.” But by the 2010s, even with hit shows on TV full of racy content like Game of Thrones, The Guardian reported that the amount of sexuality in movies had declined to the lowest point since the 1960s. And in a UCLA study last fall, a majority of the surveyed 1500 adolescents from ages 10-24 said they wanted less romantic content in TV and movies. A near majority said sex is not necessary and that romance is over-used in entertainment. What should we make of this? Is this, as Doreen St. Felix has speculated, a result of the decline of the so-called mid-budget adult drama? Or what Naomi Fry calls “the very lucrative infantilization of the viewing public?”We dig into all of this: first by speaking with Stephanie Rivas-Lara, one of the UCLA researchers about the study making so many headlines, followed by R. S. Benedict, whose essay “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” seeks to diagnose just what is going on with the characters who populate our content in the post 9/11 world. And Zachary Wigon discusses his new psychosexual thriller/romantic comedy, Sanctuary, and how it fits into a climate that is increasingly at odds with both genres.The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Our artwork is created by Topher Booth. Today’s show features music and clips from Basic Instinct 2, And God Created Woman, Punch Drunk Love, and Sanctuary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re in the lead up to this year’s Academy Awards, otherwise known as the Oscars. Presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the idea is recognizing excellence in cinematic achievement with a little gold statuette. But 96 years into this tradition, it’s not always clear why the Academy makes the choices it does—what excellence really means and to whom. These are questions we’re exploring today with Michael Schulman, author of the new book, Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears, a near century-long history of cultural trends as exemplified by what gets the gold. Will Oppenheimer coast to victory? Will anyone open the wrong envelope? Will anyone get slapped? Will you be watching? Keep the conversation going. Follow The Entertainment on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack and let us know what you think. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and we’d love it if you gave us a review. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from various Emmys and Oscar ceremonies, along with Hollywood Hotel and Of Human Bondage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For over a decade, the box office has been dominated by superheroes—mostly in the form of cinematic universes that linked dozens of movies and streaming series in long, complex mythologies of characters, concepts, and conflicts. In the past few years, this has even meant multiverse concepts linking the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the Fox X-Men series and DC Cinematic Universe with previous Batmans played by George Clooney and Michael Keaton. Everything is now connected. The problem? Audiences finally, after years of predicted superhero fatigue, might just be over it all. The biggest bombs of 2023 were movies like The Flash, Aquaman 2, Shazam 2, and The Marvels. As perhaps part of the same phenomenon, a kind of tentpole fatigue, movies like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One all underperformed despite some of the highest budgets in cinematic history. Rather than the predictable hits, two wildcards emerged victorious in the year of the bomb. And they came out on the same day. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer both released on July 21, 2023, two movies that could not be more tonally opposite and yet became entwined in popular culture as a bundled phenomenon known as Barbenheimer. Both wildly overperformed expectations and are continuing to ride that wave all the way through awards season. Oppenheimer is different in several ways from Nolan’s run of hits leading up to it, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. It is his longest movie to date—3 hours long. It is rated R. It is almost entirely made up of people talking. It is based on real history. And it is about as bleak as a movie can get.In the year of bombs, the question is: how did a movie about the atomic bomb and the foreboding thought of nuclear holocaust make nearly a billion dollars and sweep several award ceremonies? What does this say about Christopher Nolan, our contemporary anxieties, and the relationship audiences have with nuclear war going back through popular culture over the past several decades? Tom Shone, author of The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan explains the phenomenon of Nolan as one of the only blockbuster auteurs who could not only get a movie like Oppenhemier made but turn it into a huge hit. Then David Craig, author of Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped End the Cold War, discusses the use of art to engage with existential threats from Dr. Strangelove to Don’t Look Up, including how The Day After was not only a hit but that it might have saved the world.The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show features music and clips from Oppenheimer, Barbie, Memento, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this final installment of our series on the films of Whit Stillman, we’re discussing Stillman’s return to filmmaking after over a decade of exile, or what he refers to as “development heck,” with the 2011 comedy Damsels in Distress starring Greta Gerwig, which led to a fruitful partnership with none other than Amazon Studios with the pilot The Cosmopolitans and then his seemingly inevitable Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship. Stillman discusses the making of each of these later projects, how they do and don't diverge from his 90s trilogy, and what he hopes to accomplish with his career going forward in the constantly shifting media landscape of the twenty-first century. This episode also features insights from critics Fran Hoepfner and Marya E. Gates as well as author Girish Shambu. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from Damsels in Distress, Love & Friendship, The Cosmopolitans, and Metropolitan. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking the career of filmmaker Whit Stillman, a writer and director who entered the scene with 1990’s  Metropolitan. The film, which was truly independent in its financing and production, became an unlikely success, launching several careers from its cast of unknowns and earning Stillman an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. This was a unique moment in American cinema, a time where independent became not just an economic condition but a brand. Stillman became a symbol of authentic, personal cinema with his subsequent films, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, with each carrying a bigger budget than the last until Disco became Stillman’s first financial failure. Because he’d made three witty, funny, romantic comedies about a certain type of upper class white American, that was what he was expected to keep making. The problem was: he didn’t particularly want to. In this episode, Stillman discusses the difficulties of both the lost momentum following Disco's release and his struggle to break out of the brand he'd created for himself with his 90s trilogy. In addition to conversations with Stillman, this episode features interviews with critic Fran Hoepfner and author Girish Shambu. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and Metropolitan. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking the career of filmmaker Whit Stillman, a writer and director who entered the scene with 1990’s  Metropolitan, a wry comedy about debutante parties. The film, which was truly independent in its financing and production, became an unlikely success, launching several careers from its cast of unknowns and earning Stillman an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. This was a unique moment in American cinema, a time when independent became not just an economic condition but a brand. Studios began to harness the idea of independent cinema and crafted entire marketing campaigns around authentic voices as brands–Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Nicole Holofcener, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Sofia Coppola, and many more.Today's show focuses on the making of his third film, The Last Days of Disco, the conclusion in what is often referred to as his Doomed Bourgeoise in Love Trilogy. Each film follows characters navigating the tensions between who they thought they’d be and who they become, often set in a backdrop of a changing world threatening to leave people like them behind. Disco was the biggest production Stillman had mounted to date, a critical success, but a financial failure that threw off the momentum Stillman had amassed throughout the 1990s. This episode features interviews with Stillman, actor Taylor Nichols, composer Mark Suozzo, and critic Marya E. Gates. The Entertainment is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio. It is produced and edited by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from The Last Days of Disco, Desperado, Slacker and Metropolitan. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 1990s saw a boom in independent filmmaking going mainstream in American cinema. Audiences found that the art house could merge with the multiplex as filmmakers with distinct voices such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, Nicole Holofcenter, and many more were able to pull off an interesting paradox: making independent films mainstream and making them through traditional studios. Rather than describing the economics, independent often began to describe the aesthetic. These were the authentic voices in a sea of corporate sludge, bringing perspectives and styles that only they could. This very much includes the focus of our episode today, Whit Stillman, who came onto the scene right at the outset in 1990, with Metropolitan: a debut about debuts that would go on to earn him an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay. Stillman's follow-up, Barcelona, pushes him into a more overtly political realm and something often more broadly comedic as a common thread emerges: the struggle to preserve virtues in an increasingly barbarous world. In this second episode of our series on the career, legacy, aspirations, and regrets of Whit Stillman, we hear from the filmmaker as well as with actor Taylor Nichols and critics Fran Hoepfner and Girish Shambu to tell the story of a man moving onward and upward, having written and directed two successful films–one explicitly independent and the other fitting into the new brand of American independent cinema. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’ve ever seen a Whit Stillman film, such as Metropolitan, the odds are you’d recognize another. Each of Stillman’s films features this kind of smart, witty, multilayered dialogue–often focusing on an ensemble of young people who have read a lot more about life than they’ve lived, fearing that they are at the tail end of an age of prosperity, looking ahead with apprehension or refusing to look forward at all in favor of attempting a Gatsby-like recreation of the past. More than that, they grapple with the concept of failure in its many dimensions: failure to develop into the person you want to be, failure to acquire the means to live the life you want, failure to appreciate what you have, and failure to preserve the worthwhile traditions of the past in a rapidly shifting world. Stillman, though he bristles at the affiliation, emerges out of what is called the Auteur movement, a construction rooted in French criticism in the 1950s as they looked back at classical Hollywood hits of the 1930s and 1940s. Simply, they argued for the celebration of a filmmaker’s body of work as a coherent whole. Thus the body of work could be viewed through a lens of authorship, with the director as authority analogous to the way we view a singular ownership over the work of novels by their writers or paintings by their artists. This is the first of five episode charting the life, career, and influence of Stillman during the rise of a new American auteur movement in the 1990s, featuring conversations with Stillman himself, collaborators like actor Taylor Nichols and composer Mark Suozzo, as well as critics Fran Hoepfner, Marya E. Gates, and Girish Shambu. Join us each week as we work through Stillman's filmography and contextualize it in a constantly shifting cinematic landscape. The Entertainment was created and is hosted by Tom Knoblauch. The show is a production of KIOS 91.5 FM Omaha Public Radio and is produced by Courtney Bierman. Today’s show featured music and clips from Metropolitan, Jules and Jim, The Wild Angels, and Filmmaker Magazine’s podcast Back to One. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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