INTERVIEW: Razzies Founder John Wilson
With just a week away until the Golden Raspberry (Razzies) winners are announced our very own Jeff Beachnau, of the wickedly funny Worst Picture/Best Picture Series, tackles a hard-hitting interview with Razzies founder John Wilson. They explore the beginnings of the Razzies and why they came about, winners that actually show up for their awards and this year’s batch of infamous nominees. To check out this year’s offenders, go to www.razzies.com.
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AwardsWatch (AW): This is Jeff Beachnau from AwardsWatch and I’m here with the founder of the Razzies, John Wilson. It’s exciting to have him here so he can be part of my ongoing series Worst Picture/Best Picture where I compare the Oscar winner and Razzie winner of each year. So, let’s get started, we’ll do a brief history of the Razzies. Could you tell us how you came up with the idea?
John Wilson (JW): In 1980 I was working for a company that was a sponsor for a film festival, and the deal that I cut with my boss was that I would do all the paperwork and promoting the festival but that mean I got first dibs at all of the tickets. So in 1980, I checked the list, and I saw 253 films in one year. When you see that many films, you realize that the odds are it doesn’t favor with the Academy’s thoughts, it favors with the Razzies thoughts. A lot more crud gets out there than quality work. I also was raised by parents who were Depression era kids whose family gave them a dime every week and they would go down to the local theater and saw Gone with the Wind or A Night at the Opera, or you know, some classic film every week. And I grew up watching the Oscars and as a small child I was very impressed with them but by the time I was in college and film school at UCLA, I began to realize that they don’t mean to be tacky but they are, they are.
AW: Yeah, we at AwardsWatch know exactly what you’re talking about it.
JW: Well, if you go to our website I think our slogan is “We do an intentionally tacky ceremony, they do an unintentionally tacky ceremony.” When they got rid of the big production numbers, that was the best bad part of the Oscars.
AW: Recently I saw the production of Georgy Girl at the Oscars, and that was a brilliant performance, you don’t get much better than that.
JW: Mitzi Gaynor. Well, when I was 12 that was my favorite song. For some reason, I guess I thought they voted there that night and I was convinced that it was Mitzi Gaynor’s fault that my favorite song didn’t win the Oscar. But you can’t blame it on her.
Anyway, the third thing that set me off is that in the late summer in 1980, I went to a 99 cent theater in Culver City and saw the double feature back to back of Can’t Stop the Music with The Village People and Xanadu starring Olivia Newton John. And even together that’s not 99 cents. I insisted a refund and, when the manager said no, very rudely I thought, I do recall rather clearly driving home with my windows down in my little compact car and thinking “Man, those two movies ought to get awards for being that lousy.” As I drove home I came up with Saturn 3, Raise the Titanic, Windows, The Formula, Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer, there were so many bad movies. A disproportionate number of them from a new company called AFD.
And so that following spring at the Oscar follow up party that I’ve been doing for ten years, we handed out ballots at the buffet table, I painted a banner over the alcove in my living room, and it was all very silly and innocent. But everyone thought it was such a good idea, they loved the idea of someone going to reach for a sandwich having me go up to them saying “No, you’re about to present Worst Screenplay”.
The second year, enough people wanted to come that it wouldn’t fit in my home anymore, so we had to move it to my friend’s mom’s home who was one of the creators of I Love Lucy. She was a wonderful woman who let us use her places for two years on Oscar night. By the fourth year one of my clients said “You know, if you’re gonna compete directly with the Oscars, you should do it the night before and you’ve got press from all over the world and they’ve got nothing to do that night. You might not just get domestic coverage but you might also get international.” So, the next year, in California they’re called cafetoriums, a combination of a theatre facility and where the kids eat lunch at grade school. And so we were still very silly, I think it was the year that The Lonely Lady won. But from there it has just exponentially grown to the point where, this year’s press list we had people from China, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Austria, England. It’s amazing even to me. And I think it’s partly because it’s such a simple idea. It’s the Oscars done backward. And I think part of the international view is that we’re insulting American culture. [laughs].
AW: Well that’s a good lead into my next question. You know, the first decade or so you have chosen some pretty horrendous films, but since the late 90s/early 2000s, it’s evolved into awarding famous flops starring some big actors such as Wild Wild West and Battlefield Earth and John Travolta. Do you agree with this transformation?
JW: In the very first year it was less than 40 people who voted I think. This year we’ve somewhere near 800 members and they are in, I think 20 different foreign countries, one of which is Cambodia of all places. And so it’s a much larger group and much more culturally and geographically diverse group of people. Part of the appeal of the Razzies I think is that it’s like the kid at the back of the class with a pea shooter. It’s the people who pay to see these movies who are voting on these awards. I actually kind of like it when the members have a choice between some great big behemoth.
I think it was the year Godzilla was remade with Matthew Broderick, it was up against a real turd of a movie called An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn and Alan Smithee won. Part of it was that Smithee was the last gasp of Joe Eszterhas, the one who had written Showgirls. And part of it was it had every star in Hollywood, I don’t know how they got all these people to be in it. I think the only one who didn’t look idiotic was Jackie Chan because I think he’s a pretty enduring human being. It’s got Whoopi Goldberg, Sylvester Stallone, Ryan O’Neal, and it was just embarrassing.
AW: Sort of like the 90s version of Movie 43.
JW: Yes. And this year there is another standoff with the huge big budget, and I will admit it made a lot of money, the fourth Transformers movie and it’s facing off with, and I would be surprised if it even cost half a million dollars, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.
AW: Speaking of that film, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas a write in candidate?
JW: Well, enough people on our forums had seen the film, and the way we do this is throughout the year we have a forum on our website and I start some discussions and members start others. Over the course of a year there are somewhere between 40 and 80 films that end up being discussed. Saving Christmas came out of a post that one of my members did, and when I saw how much response it got I did some research. Saving Christmas has not only a very rare perfect zero positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it actually is the lowest rated movie in the entire history of the IMDb. They have a thing called the Bottom 100 and it is #1 on that list and it has been #1 for at least a month now. And Kirk Cameron, when he heard that went on the radio and the talk show circuit and Facebook, and twitter and tried to get what he assumed were his Christian friends to, you know, hype the rating on it. I don’t know if it was them or if it was backlash, but I think the rating actually went down.
AW: I haven’t seen the film yet but I’ve read many of the reviews and it just seems horrible.
JW: Well, I have to say that I am proud that our members brought it to my attention. Were it to win major awards it would show that, having seen it or not, I can’t promise you, apparently it is hard to find and I don’t know if that’s the intent of the makers or not, but if we were to give it that major award, it would look like we certainly know what we’re talking about and we sure as heck wouldn’t be alone. I know a lot of people who enjoyed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which is also up for Worst Picture, people who like that stuff get frustrated with us, I don’t think anyone but Kirk Cameron and his family members who are in the film with him, his own sister and his own brother-in-law, I don’t think anyone but the Cameron family would argue that it wasn’t an appropriate choice.
AW: Now that you have hundreds of members, do you fear that people are voting for films based on reputation and not having seen the film?
JW: As I said, I don’t really know. I will admit I’ve tried really hard to see all the film because I feel obligated to discuss it. For the film there is only a trailer, there’s no electronic press kit for it, it was so low budget, and having been a trailer maker for decades, I have to say, having seen the trailer, the movie looks pretty awful. I have not been able to see it, I had a chance to see a bootleg link of it but they wanted you to register your email and I thought the last thing I want is giving out the founder’s email to someone who’s trying bootleg it.
AW: Last year you spoke at USC and showed the trailer for Jack and Jill, but rather than the actual trailer you showed the spoof which had George C. Scott watching the trailer.
JW: Yes, what was the name of that? Hardcore. In that film he’s reacting to seeing his own daughter in a porno film, but it did work pretty perfectly for the spoof. I have to say, Jack and Jill is the first, and still so far the only film, to win every single award we gave. At the time we got to the last category, the audience was chanting the title while the envelope came out on stage. And watching that film, ten minutes into it when the male Adam Sandler went to the airport to meet the female Adam Sandler character and remember thinking to myself, if I weren’t who I am I would so walk out of this theater.
AW: Like I said, I’m doing this series where I watch the Razzies, and I take notes and things, so I’ve had to watch each film several times, so I’ve grown to appreciate the awfulness of these films. But when I saw Jack and Jill, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
JW: He does so little to suggest that he even gives a crap about the intelligence of his audience, and that may be an oxymoron, if you’re an Adam Sandler fan and you’re still an Adam Sandler fan, you obviously haven’t got a lot of brain matter, but he’s so blatant in not even bothering. The scene where he dresses up as the female character with coconuts in his blouse and a wig and we’re supposed to believe Al Pacino, first of all, is desperate enough to go out with that, and secondly isn’t gonna notice that she would smell different, I mean, the suspension of disbelief by that almost asks that you be comatose. It’s just an astoundingly, insulting, stupid movie. But I actually don’t think it’s the worst one. I don’t know if you’ve gotten to Freddy Got Fingered yet.
AW: I haven’t watched that yet, and I haven’t had a reason to watch it yet. I’m still working on the 90s right now, but I’m dreading that moment.
JW: That is the only worst picture winner that I actually hate. I just think that that’s a loathsome film, and Tom Green’s so called sense of humor is akin to a child poking you in the eye with a twig until you either bleed, scream, or throw him on the floor. I don’t get what’s funny about him. Freddy Got Fingered didn’t totally die at the box office but it certainly wasn’t a hit.
AW: You say Freddy Got Fingered was your worst film, but didn’t Tom Green show up to accept the award?
JW: Yes, and he just reinforced what I already thought of him. We’re actually doing an in memorium piece as part of show this year, we’ve done it the past few years now because we’ve been around so long that there are some major Razzie nominees that pass away each year. And Joan Rivers, who had been very supportive of us, that was the first national TV interview I ever did was on her show on Oscar night, I think it was 1987. But we couldn’t find the master tape of it so we went on the internet and there she did an extensive interview with Tom Green about him going to the Razzies. And he characterizes it as we were not polite to him and I would characterize it as his humor is not polite. Knowing that he’d probably do something, we spoke to the tech guy on the show and said if he goes a whole minute without a lot, turn off his mic. If he goes 90 seconds, turn off his lights. If he goes two minutes, we are dragging him off the stage. So at the very end he marched into a harmonica solo which was not particularly addictive or worth listening to, and his intention was to stand there playing the harmonica. Had we left him alone he probably would have done that for an hour, I don’t know. He was in essence, provoking us to do something. And then he turns around and says were mean when he provoked us and we did something. The moment was quite funny, what we did was, before he came out on stage we all met backstage and said “what can we do?” and someone mentioned the scene from the last Mary Tyler Moore Show where all the people at the TV station did a group hug and took her across the room, so we surrounded him like we were gonna give him a group hug prying his hands off the podium and carried him fleeing and screaming across the stage. The audience loved it, they thought we had rehearsed it and it went very well. But once we were out of eyesight of the audience he was panting and raving and saying he was gonna sue us. He was just very strange.
AW: So continuing with celebrities who show up to these events and other moments, Bill Cosby has been in the news recently. Could you talk about his film Leonard Part 6 and the infamous statue you made for him?
JW: Well, he made a picture when he was at the peak of his career about 30 some years ago, it was in 1987 called Leonard Part 6. And when it was finished and they showed it to him, he was so embarrassed by it, his first instinct was to try to buy the negative back from Sony Columbia and they though it’s too popular, it’s gonna make a fortune, they couldn’t do that. So then he went on the talk show circuit and begged his fans not to go see it and admitted he had made a mistake. The up side of that was that our members saw and heard that and showed up in large numbers on opening day, we were probably half the gross.
When it won, his people contacted us and told us, “We know it’s called the Golden Raspberry and we think it should be made of actual gold.” And we’re like, it’s a joke, what are you talking about? Then someone from his organization contacted someone at FOX which at the time hadn’t been on the air for very long, and they cut a deal that they would make his Raspberry awards out of 24 karat gold and Italian marble at a cost of about $7,500 each, if he would accept them live, on the air, during sweeps week. So everyone got something out of it. The awards that he accepted were redesigned compared the ones we had been giving out for the past 7 or 8 years and we were concerned that it endangered our copyright. He decided that nobody had seen it on FOX because the network was new, so he brought them with him on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
He was the first person of his caliber to embrace it and get the joke and enjoy it. And it has been distressing to see what’s been going on with him for the last six months to a year. My impression of him, I spent all of five minutes with the man, was that he was a kind and gentle soul and it’s a disappointment and very difficult to all the people making accusations and I have to think that there must be something there and that makes me very sad.
AW: You said he’s the first to embrace the Razzie he received. Have you ever encountered someone who was not too fond of receiving a Razzie?
JW: Well, throughout the first decade Sylvester Stallone was like Mr. Raspberry. There was one year he was nominated for having written Cliffhanger. But for every year for like 10 or 12 years running he was up for at least one award and usually two or three. And he never thought it was funny. His take was that his movies at that time were mostly successful and made money, so he didn’t think it was fair to say they were bad. But lot of bad movies make money, that’s not the only road stick.
I think my favorite one is Battlefield Earth. After Battlefield Earth swept the Razzies, somebody at a press junket asked John Travolta about the Razzies, did he know about the awards? It still holds the record, 83% of our members voted for that for worst picture. His response was “I didn’t hear about it, I have people I pay to keep me from hearing.” I have this picture in my head of someone waking up in the morning with a pair of scissors and snipping out all the stuff he reads.
AW: Well, I’m in the middle of reading Going Clear right now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they do that.
JW: Yes, there is a degree of being cocooned as part of being a celebrity these days. They don’t interact with the everyday world, they don’t know how to do normal things, buy groceries, how to pump gas into a car, or some probably don’t know how to tie their own shoe. It is a degree of indulgence that leads to vanity projects like Leonard Part 6 or Battlefield Earth. So I suppose it’s to our benefit.
AW: This year you created a new category, The Redeemer Award.
JW: Well, part of it, for years it’s bothered us that the general response on the industry toward us has been either to ignore us or that we’re trying to destroy people’s careers. Really what we’re trying to say rather than how dare you is why would you? If you’re John Travolta and you’ve been an Oscar nominee multiple times and you do have talent, what are you doing making stuff like that? In his case I get that it’s in regards to the founder of his religious cult. But we’re trying to find a way to make a point that getting a Razzie doesn’t mean that your career is over, it doesn’t mean that you can no longer do anything good and that you haven’t done anything good.
What we’re looking at is people who more than once have at least been nominated and had done 2014 work that was pretty good, made a lot of money, or has been nominated for positive awards. The list that we came up with is a pretty impressive one I think. Ben Affleck, who had done Gigli, in the past couple years won Best Picture as a producer on Argo and was the lead actor in Gone Girl which was on one of the biggest moneymakers and best reviewed movies of the year. Jennifer Aniston, who has been a Razzie nominee four times in the past, has been nominated for multiple awards this year, but not the Oscar, for Cake, among them SAG, which is one of the hardest ones to get nominated for because that’s your own peers, so that’s very good. Mike Myers, whose movie The Love Guru swept the Razzies a few years back, did a documentary this year about someone he cared very deeply for called Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon which got wonderful reviews. It has not been widely distributed, but at least has proved he can do something he cares about. Keanu Reeves, who many people will be surprised to hear has never won a Razzie, though he’s been nominated 6 times, his picture John Wick got good enough reviews and was one of Rotten Tomatoes picks for best overlooked films of last year. And then there’s Kristen Stewart, who I can’t remember how many times we’ve nominated her and has won Razzies for the Twilight series. She was in both an arthouse picture Camp X-Ray and had a supporting role in that Julianne Moore film Still Alice. So in the aftermath of Twilight she may have herself a career as a character actress, which would be interesting to see. I don’t think much was asked of her in the role of Bella, she was just asked to stand back when it was her boyfriend’s turn to sparkle.
AW: You brought up Still Alice. With the Redeemer Award, you’re recognizing post Razzie people who have had successful films. There’s a lot of talk that Norbit caused Eddie Murphy to lose his Oscar. This year, Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore may win Oscars for their films, but they just had movies released, Eddie in Jupiter Ascending and Julianne in The Seventh Son, that have been getting horrible reviews.
JW: The reviews on Seventh Son are 90% negative and the reviews on Jupiter Ascending are, I think, 75% negative. And I don’t think Seventh Son cost that much, it certainly didn’t spend nearly as much money as they did on Jupiter Ascending. Jupiter Ascending looks like they spent 30 or 40 million just promoting it, I don’t even know how much the movie cost. I believe Jupiter Ascending didn’t even make 20 million this weekend and Seventh Son didn’t even make 10. So they would be contenders. This is the time of year when I’m usually distracted putting together our show and dealing with media and stuff, but January and February are the two months of the year when the studios know they’ve got a turkey, this is where they’ll put it because they think it’s under the radar of the awards votes and they think they can get away with it and the competition isn’t all that fierce. The grosses on Taken 3 are pretty good but the reviews have been awful. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, you know, February isn’t even half over and we’ve already got five or six titles that are probably contenders for next year.
AW: Do you believe that the Razzies effect Oscar nominees if it’s in the same year?
JW: I think it’s a reasonable argument that Norbit did probably impact Eddie Murphy’s chance, I think it was Dreamgirls that he was nominated for. I don’t think the revulsion over Redmayne and Moore’s film is at the level of Norbit. With Norbit, the public and the critics were just like blech. And Eddie Murphy still is the only actor to be nominated for three of the four acting awards. He was nominated for Supporting Actor for playing the Chinese restaurant owner, I think it was supporting actress for the wife, and then Worst Actor for the title character. It would be interesting to see. If Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne were to win it will not have the same impact, but I think it has to be a degree of ick factor that goes above the level like Norbit. Those two movies bombed, but I don’t think they’ve reached that title.
AW: The Razzies began in 1980, but do you have any films pre-1980 that you think would be great Razzie winners?
JW: In the book I did The Official Razzie Movie Guide, more than half the title listed were released before the Razzies were created. It missed the first Razzies by a single year was Linda Blair in the movie Roller Boogie. She’s a musical genius who helps save the roller disco thing in her neighborhood. It’s sort of a Romeo and Juliet on rollerskates.
One of my all-time favorite ones which the Academy fully cooperated in the making of, which I think makes it more amusing, there’s this awful 1966 film called The Oscar. It has Steven Boyd, and if anyone even remembers him at all it’s because he was the other guy in the chariot racing against Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. Steven Boyd plays an actor nominated for an Oscar who, in the novel, sets out to destroy the other four nominees. Because I found the film so fascinating and went out and bought the book and read it. But in the movie he puts out something that sounds destructive of him on the assumption that the Academy voters will think it was one of the other four people doing something mean to this character. It’s just so cheesy and badly acted, one of its devices that’s really kind of pitiful, is that throughout the whole movie it’s filled with people were mostly nominated for supporting Oscars make cameo appearances. People like Broderick Crawford and Joseph Cotton, Eleanor Parker, people who up to that point had a fairly reasonable reputation. It’s also filled with 60s slang that is today unheard of. I don’t know if you can get your hands on it, it’s almost harder to find than Saving Christmas. I did see that it’s showing a cable network called GetTV because Columbia Pictures now has the rights to that.
AW: Yeah, I’ve been meaning to check that one out.
JW: If you’ve never seen it, it is a must see. I don’t know if they ever close captioned it which would make it even funnier because seeing the stupid word that you can’t believe that the actor just on screen.
AW: You’re notorious for choosing the worst film, but you obviously watch a lot of films in general, so do you have any choices on any of the Oscar films this year?
JW: My son was really impressed with Whiplash, which I think J.K. Simmons is gonna win Supporting Actor. And my son and I saw Birdman together, and I thought the acting was quite good, I was especially impressed with Emma Stone. I thought the writing was pretty good, but I have to say, I thought almost every technical aspect of it was just out of it. I didn’t like the fact that the camera was constantly moving, it was almost like a homeless person was just wandering around backstage at that theatre and you just had to follow him around for two hours. I didn’t like the music. And I think it’s hilarious that it’s been getting nominated for Best Editing when it’s basically 6 or 7 ten minute takes strung together and the editor only had like one frame to work with. How is that editing? It was more the assistant editor, the guy that glues the two pieces together.
The Academy’s list this is year is fairly eclectic. I would be curious to see the ratings it gets this year because for the most part they haven’t been nominating the pictures the public had seen. I guess American Sniper has grossed a couple hundred million, so that could draw an audience. They don’t ever seem to understand that, although they are supposed to be about merit, it’s important to nominated good movies that the public actually like. A few years back when the first of the new Star Trek movie came out, it made a fortune and got something like 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. I was thinking, okay, here’s your shot. You can nominated something that both the critics and the public like and show the public that you aren’t a bunch of snoots, and I don’t think they nominated it for anything except a couple technical awards.
AW: Yeah, it won Best Makeup and I think that’s it. At least it got something. How do you think the awfulness of films has evolved over the years? Have you seen a change in the quality of bad films?
JW: Well, I think if anything, the most damaging thing to good filmmaking is CGI. With that tool they can put anything you can imagine on screen but yet they wanna show heads blow up and enemies being eviscerated, you know, explosions and violence. I think that there are too many movies these days that rely on big stuff that most of the audience is going to know is fake and they think that’s impressive or entertaining and it’s just not. The other thing that I’ve noticed is, over the course of the 35 years, wow, has it been that long? The people who control the movie business, that actual ownership of it, and pretty much the media in general, I think all American media is in the hands of no more than 10 companies and it might just be six. And so you have this symbiosis where Universal owns NBC, so Universal has all their movies go on all the talk shows and all the daytime TV that NBC has. And then CBS and Paramount. The people making the actual decisions as to what gets made and what gets spent are no longer people who are creatively invested but people who are financially invested. I think that almost never leads to quality work.
AW: The final question, do you think it takes talent to make a Razzie winning film?
JW: The most glaring ones are the ones where everyone knows who has talent steps in a cow pie. One of the most obscure winners but also one of the most deserving in our first decade is a $50 million Korean War movie called Inchon which was financed by the Unification Church, the people who used to hang out at the airports and sing Hare Krishna. Laurence Olivier in that film, he wouldn’t do it unless they flew in a helicopter with a briefcase filled with cash every week that they were shooting. His performance as Douglas MacArthur is the single worst acting job I have ever seen. From one sentence to another, let alone one take or one scene, his accent goes from Yiddish to British back to Yiddish again. It just awful, he doesn’t even care, he speaks in mumbles, it’s almost as though he’s telegraphing that he’s embarrassed to be doing this. And Laurence Olivier is justifiably, based on his earlier work, regarded as if not the finest actor of the 20th century, certainly one of them. He was incredible in most of the Shakespeare adaptations and he was very impressive in his Hollywood debut Wuthering Heights. This is somebody who’s capable of greatness and here he is prostituting himself. The theory goes he needed money because he was worried his children would be left in the gym if he didn’t start piling money. So it was clear at that point he knew he wasn’t going to live a lot longer.
AW: Yeah, when I started this series I had to watch Inchon, and I’m pretty upset that you chose that, I had to watch it a couple times and it was a pretty awful film.
JW: It is the only one that has won Worst Picture that is not readily available on video.
AW: Yeah, I had to rent a copy.
JW: How did you find one? Somebody told me that the Unification Church owns an independent station in California. Somebody had taped it and sent me a copy.
AW: That’s the copy I had, and when it cuts to commercials it has a guy selling antique furniture and clocks at a-
JW: Swap meet.
AW: Yes.
JW: Well it is a deservingly obscure movie and it is in the Razzie Movie Guide book. My favorite quote, I think it was Newsweek that called it “A turkey the size of Godzilla”. I only know a handful of other people who have actually seen it and I tried to get a group of our members together to go see it and I think we only managed to get like 10 people to go. It’s just excruciating to sit through. I would imagine on that channel with all the commercials to go with it that it must be 4 or 5 hours long. In the theater it felt really long.
AW: Yeah, one of my favorite moments in the film is at the end, after Olivier saves the day, he’s about to speak in front a giant group.
JW: Of 12.
AW: Yeah, and you think he’s gonna give a rousing and influential speech and he says-
JW: And he says the Lord’s Prayer.
AW: Yeah, “Our Father…”
JW: Yeah, in that accent of his. Oh my god, that was the clip we showed when it won Worst Picture. One of my biggest regrets was that, the company that I mentioned at the beginning, the company that I worked for, also did trailers. They did the campaign for Inchon, and one of the editors there kept the “director’s cut”. He had it in his garage for years. And by the time I heard about it he had erased it. It would have been so fun to restore one of the worst movies ever made. And it’s the director’s cut, with an extra 45 minutes to an hour of new material. I think it was originally close to 3 hours then they cut it down to 2. I don’t think it would have made a whole lot of difference, it would have just been more dreck.
AW: Well, that’s it. Thanks a ton, John, it was a lot of fun talking to you.
JW: You’re very, very welcome. I appreciate your interest. And let me throw out a couple of links if I may. Our website, where anyone can join and become a member, is www.razzies.com We do have a channel on YouTube, and one of the awards that we’ll be recording this week, the Redeemer Award, we managed to get a Catholic nun film critic to present the award. And she’s sweet and wonderful woman, and unfortunately she said in order to present it she wanted to see some of the stuff that we believed to be Razzie worthy. So our business partner sent her a copy of Gigli and I couldn’t believe it. I went up to him, because my partner had not seen it, and I said “It’s got 4,000 F-bombs. She may not do the award after she’s seen it.” And her comment was “Well, I certainly understand why Mr. Affleck won the Razzie.”
AW: Oh, and just to promote your Razzies as well, this year you’re allowing the general public to attend the ceremony.
JW: That’s the other thing that my business partner would have been mad at me about if I didn’t mention this. We are at the Montalban on Vine in Hollywood on Oscar eve, February 21st, and if you go to their website www.themontalban.com and you can get yourself a ticket for $25 apiece and see Hollywood’s worst on parade.
AW: Thanks a lot, John.
JW: Oh, and let me give you the sign off.
*blows raspberry*
[author image=”https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-1/c0.50.200.200/1621680_10104645198686414_160815090_n.jpg?oh=036db60b27eab5d9a0b563c192df3035&oe=55671725&__gda__=1433249309_f7b7cd483af8a083e3454fce2eb0163a” ]Jeff spends too much time watching movies, but when he’s not watching them, he helps make them by working in the grip and electric department. Some would say he chose this profession because of the thrill of being on set and helping create art, but the real reason is most G&E don’t need to wear pants. Along with being a film nerd, Jeff enjoys riding his bike everywhere around the Southern California and watching his friends perform improv.[/author]
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
- 2024 North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA) Nominations - December 21, 2024
- 2024 Philadelphia Film Critics Circle (PFCC) Winners: ‘Anora’ Named Best Film Among its Six Awards - December 21, 2024
- 2024 Utah Film Critics Association (UFCA) Nominations - December 21, 2024
2024 North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA) Nominations 
2024 Philadelphia Film Critics Circle (PFCC) Winners: ‘Anora’ Named Best Film Among its Six Awards 
2024 Utah Film Critics Association (UFCA) Nominations 
2024 Black Reel Awards Nominations: ‘Nickel Boys,’ ‘The Piano Lesson’ Lead