TV Guidance Counselor Episode 680: Danny Peary

This week Ken welcomes author of the absolutely life changing "Cult Movies" series of books, among lots of other great things, Danny Peary. Ken and Danny discuss the massive volume of guests Ken has had on the show, wanting to expose people to art they never would have known about otherwise, growing up in the 1950s, loving Westerns, Danny's brother Gerald and his film criticism, loving television, Abbot and Costello and Jack and the Bean Stalk, Lone Ranger, foreign cinema, college campus cinema clubs, Hopalong Cassidy, Red Rider, Baseball, Igmar Bergman, seeing subtitled movies as a small child, The Harder They Come, Midnight Movies, NYC, seeing movies alone in the theater, Rocky Horror, word of mouth, why The Wizard of Oz is a cult movie, the niche cults, John Waters, the classics, the weird, and the wonderful, why horror isn't always cult, not just writing about plots, real film criticism, analysis, how you can't have a wrong insight into a movie, giving people something to think about. Eraserhead, doing research in the pre-internet days, Freaks, loving Val Lewton, how the flow of cult movies has damartically slowed in the 21st Century despite more movies than ever and more movies than ever trying to be cult movies, giving things time to build, how you can't make a cult movie on purpose, film festivals, The Substance, Basket Case, The Wasp Woman, The Alternative Oscars, Ken being baffled at how Speed Racer never developed a cult, Howard the Duck, Heaven's Gate, George Cukor, retiring, the lost Val Lewton movie, The Ghost Ship, making movies with zero heroic characters, I Walked with a Zombie, going to USC Film School, writing for Thundercats and Silverhawks, having a love of comedy, James Gray, the film Deep End, Phatom of the Paradise, and the early days of Brian DePalma.