The MacGuffin

For dysfunctional families, you brought up Best Picture winner American Beauty. But there were other notable Best Picture Oscars for this catagory too: Kramer vs. Kramer, Terms of Endearment, Rain Man is about dysfunctional brothers sort of, and probably the most famous Oscar example of dysfunctional family, Ordinary People. Also, while not an Oscar winner, how about some love for War of the Roses. (I know, there’s tons of examples for this list)

As we mentioned in the segment, so many films are based on the concept of dysfunctional families. I mentioned American Beauty not because it was a best picture winner but the fact it left such a lasting impact on me. Arguably as major of an impact as any other film, in its own way. I have more trouble sitting down to watch that movie than anything else.

I enjoy your podcast, but I felt your episode on adaptations wasn’t very well researched. You could easily have looked up these facts even WHILE taping your show: Ian Fleming (9 Bond books published before the first movie came out, 5 more after), C.S. Lewis (7 books in series, of which Lion, Witch, etc., is the first published in the U.S., but *not* the first written or published elsewhere), Puzo only wrote one Godfather book, etc.

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** Your criticism is definitely fair, and we’re sorry about that. That being said we weren’t really trying to talk about the literary side of adaptations, we were focusing on films. You are right it would’ve been ideal to have all the information available, but a large part of what we do is spontaneous so we don’t know where the conversation will go until it happens so unfortunately mistakes do happen.
Also, you’re right about Puzo only writing one Godfather book, but he did co-write the screenplay for all the Godfather movies, so maybe it isn’t exactly a book, but I’ll give him credit still.