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This is Later with Lee Matthews The
Lee Matthews Podcast More of what you hear

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weekday afternoons on the Drive. Mark
Altman is a television and motion picture writer

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producer who is the showrunner and executive
producer of the sci fi series Pandora,

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also the executive producer of The Librarians
Castle Necessary Roughness. But he's got a

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new four part book outs called The
Greatest Geek Year in Films Ever, which

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features stars, directors, writers,
producers, and pop culture historians sharing their

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insights about the greatest geek year ever. Hello, Mark, what was the

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greatest Geek Year ever? Well,
Lee, I think I think we subbed

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it up to the title of TV
series it is nineteen eighty two is the

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greatest geek year ever. And you
know, to pay homage to this incredible

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year of movies in this four part
series on the CW. It was extraordinary

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because if you just go down the
list of movies, it's incredible. Every

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week there was something else remarkable.
I mean, just look at the summer

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of nineteen eighty two. You'd started
two and Poltergeist opening June fourth, a

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week later ETV Extraterrestrial the week after
that, John corperent is the thing at

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Blade Runner opens the same day along
with a little movie called Mega Force,

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and it's just incredible. I mean, look at the year at Sly had

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that year. Rocky three comes out
in April, First Blood comes out in

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the fall. It's just you can't, you know, throughout dart at the

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calendar and not come up with a
remarkable movie we still talked about forty one

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years later that opened that year.
I remember being in the business early in

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my career, and this was back
when giving away movie passes was a big

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deal, especially for the small town
I grew up in, and I remember

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it seems every week we had passes
to give away for what was going to

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be the next blockbuster. Yeah,
and it's incredible because these are these films

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were still talking about all these years
later, and some of them were huge

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hits, like obviously like Et,
but then you have something like Blade Runner,

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which just died at the box office, which is arguably now considered one

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of the great films of all time. But it isn't every genre. I

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mean, a fantasy had Conan in
the Dark, Crystal, and you know

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horror, Poltergeist and creep Show and
Paul Schrader doing cat People and comedies.

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Of course TUTSI in forty eight hours
at Nightshift, which for me was part

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of the best part of doing the
show because we sat down with Ron Howard

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and Henry Winkler, who could not
be more excited to talk about Nightshift,

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their first movie together, you know, coming off a happy days, and

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Henry Winkler gives us his home movies
from the set. He hadn't even developed

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them. He says, well,
I'll give me see show on the air

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as long as you can go and
get them developed and give me a copy

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when you're done, which was wonderful. And so we have always never before

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seen footage from behind the scenes of
Night Shift, and it's just incredible.

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I mean, it was so eye
opening for me. And you know,

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it wasn't just these incredible movies,
but if you look at music, I

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mean, it was Duran, Duran's
Rio premiered Prince's nineteen ninety nine thriller I

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Love Rock and Roll from Joan Jet, and then on TV it's everything from

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Night Writer to t J. Hooker
to Family Ties to Saint Elsewhere, all

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premiered that year. Cheers premiered that
year. I mean it was just an

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exhortinary year, and I think Leonard
Malton says it destined the documentary. He

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says, we didn't know how good
we had it. Well, there was

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another thing coming along, and I
don't know if you touch on it.

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Robert Altman's with us, and I'm
sorry, Mark Altman is with us.

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And the greatest geek year ever in
nineteen eighty two. There was another aspect

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here. This is about the year
when everybody was getting a VCR. I'm

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so glad to hear you say that, because that's such an important part of

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why this year I think resonates.
This was the first year that home video

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went from being rental only to where
they were trying to sell the consumer directly,

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and Paramount pioneered it. At the
end of the year they released an

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Officer Gentleman and started to the Wrath
of con for thirty nine ninety five.

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And that may sound really expensive,
but at the time that was amazing because

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the only way you could get videos
were rent them at a video store,

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and the video stores were paying over
one hundred dollars each and this is nineteen

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eighty two, so now all of
a sudden you could buy them and build

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a home video library. It was
the beginning of home theater. And then

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you also had the emergence of HBO, and that's how so many of these

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films that even people did see affat
became popular, like The Beast Master today

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is a classic, and at the
time people used to joke that HBO stood

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for Hey Beast Masters on because it
was on constantly because they always played the

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PG movies during the day and the
R rated movies at night, so a

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lot of these PG movies would play
over and over and over again, and

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that's when people would start to memorize
dialogue and stuff. But the emergence of

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home video is so important, and
of course the year before MTV premiered,

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so you also see the power of
music and a music video to open a

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movie, whether it be Austin or
Gentleman with that, Joe Cocker, Jennifer

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will Op, will we Belong?
Rocky three, who didn't hear Eye of

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the Tiger in every incestantly everywhere you
went all summer long, Survivor's Eye of

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the Tiger and that helped open Rocky
three. Mark Altman, the CW event,

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the greatest Shiki year ever, nineteen
eighty two. It's a four part

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series, and I remember seeing the
previews for Blade Runner that summer and thinking,

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Wow, that looks visually stunning.
I can't wait to see it.

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It never came to my hometown.
I don't know if it ever made it

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that far, but you believe you
me, that was one of the very

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first things I saw when I got
a VCR. That was where I first

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exposed to it. And I think
that's what made it such a cult classic.

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People weren't seeing it in the theater. They saw it on video,

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absolutely did. That movie was a
notorious failure at the box office, but

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people started to discover it on HBO, they discovered on home video and phs

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and Betamax, and that's where it
started to develop its mythic stature. And

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you know, the second episode,
which airs this Saturday and is also going

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to be available on the c W
app, is the science fiction episode,

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So we do everything from Star Trek
two to Blade Runner to Airplane two and

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of course Megaforce. So it's a
really great episode, and diving into Blade

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Runner was really one of the joys
we had shown young and so many people

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that were involved in the making.
John of Cassidy who were involved in making

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that movie, and such a fascinating
story how that movie came together, how

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it almost didn't happen, and how
it went from being a complete failure to

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you know, considered a movie classic. Mark Altman, the c W event,

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the Greatest Geek Year Ever, nineteen
eighty two. See it on the

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CW in four parts. This also
was a time where our lives revolved around

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the movie theater, and we don't
that that doesn't happen anymore now, that's

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true because movies now you are called
content, right and back then they were

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movies. They aren't. They were
something special. There were something that you

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counted the days, and going to
the theater was you know that that was

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something special. You know, now
everything just shows up on a streaming platform

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and it's all the same and it's
just a little picture and you click on

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it and you consume it and they
call it content. But back then movies

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were really something special. You could
line up. You didn't have a reserve

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seat, You couldn't buy tickets,
you know, on your phone or on

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the internet because those didn't exist,
the cell phones in the internet. But

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what you could do is you'd line
up and sometimes you'd be lining up for

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hours to see a movie that you
really wanted to see. And when you

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were doing that, it wasn't like
online. You were in line and you

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could talk to everyone online who was
as excited as you were to see these

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movies. And it was a really
special experience. Going to the movies was

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something very special and and we've lost
that, and I think that's something we

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really tried to recapture in the document
Menery, and we talk a lot about

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that in the premiere episode, which
is repeated tonight at eight o'clock. And

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it's just such a remarkable It was
a remarkable time to be a fan of

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movies and of popular culture, and
I think it's sad that we've lost a

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lot of that now that everything is
so ubiquitous. It takes away the uniqueness

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of the experience. Mark Altman,
the producer and writer of the CW event

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Greatest Geek Year Ever nineteen eighty two. If you're a nineteen eighty two geek

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like me, you'll love the Greatest
Geek Year Ever. And Mark, thank

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you for joining us. Thank you
so much, Lee, I appreciate you

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having me. Thanks for listening to
Later with Lee Matthews, The Lee Matthews

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Podcast, and remember to listen to
The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to

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seven and I Heearts Media Presentation