Search Results for: oral history

Surely You Can’t Be Serious: An Oral History of Airplane!

Longreads Pick

The original creators and cast of the satirical disaster film Airplane! share stories about how the hit 1980 comedy came together.

Source: The AV Club
Published: Apr 17, 2015
Length: 62 minutes (15,708 words)

The Making of ‘Mad Men’: An Oral History

Longreads Pick

Heading into its final season, creator Matthew Weiner, studio execs and cast members reflect on the early days of the show and how it ended up on AMC.

Published: Mar 13, 2015
Length: 18 minutes (4,515 words)

Livin’ Thing: An Oral History of ‘Boogie Nights’

Longreads Pick

How Paul Thomas Anderson created his Lawrence of Arabia for the San Fernando Valley porn scene.

Source: Grantland
Published: Dec 10, 2014
Length: 65 minutes (16,325 words)

‘SNL”s Political Secrets: An Oral History

Longreads Pick

Impersonations, political cameos, and the skit that never made it to air: An excerpt from the newly expanded oral history by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

Published: Aug 21, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,267 words)

‘The Wonder Years’: An Oral History

Longreads Pick

“Because you don’t really realize how magical it is until it’s gone, until you’re old enough to appreciate it. So a lot of the wisdom that the narrator looked back with didn’t resonate with me just because I was kind of living those years as opposed to looking back at them and marveling at them.” The cast of The Wonder Years talk about how the show came together.

Source: Paste Magazine
Published: Aug 5, 2014
Length: 30 minutes (7,629 words)

‘Heathers’: An Oral History

Longreads Pick

Looking back at the classic 1989 dark comedy. Featuring Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, and many questions about why everyone seemed to have a problem with Shannen Doherty:

RYDER Shannen had problems with the swearing. There’s a moment when we’re in the hallway and she’s just shown me the petition, and then she walks away and you can notice that I put my hand through my hair but I stop and look at her. She was supposed to say, “F— me gently with a chain saw.” But she refused to say it.

DOHERTY It could’ve been any of the lines. “Why are you pulling my [pauses] d - - -?” I still have a hard time saying that!

RYDER In her defense, she had come off of, like, Little House on the Prairie. That was how she was raised.

Published: Apr 5, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,953 words)

An Oral History of ‘Ghostbusters’

Longreads Pick

The making of a comedy classic, first published in Premiere Magazine:

HAROLD RAMIS: We very quickly came up with a model: Dan was the heart of the Ghostbusters, I was the brains, and Bill was the mouth.

I found my character on the front page of an abstract architectural journal. There was a picture of a guy and an article about his work. I didn’t understand a word, but his image was great. He was wearing a retro three-piece tweed suit, wire-rim glasses, and his hair was standing way up. I thought, “That could be my guy.” I took the name Egon from a Hungarian refugee I went to grammar school with, and Spengler was from [noted historian] Oswald Spengler.

Source: Esquire
Published: Feb 26, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,562 words)

Street Fighter 2: An Oral History

Longreads Pick

Twenty former Capcom employees and business partners look back on the creation and massive success of the game that ‘helped revolutionize the industry’: Street Fighter 2.

So I remember being down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and we’re launching the game down there. And I didn’t even have the earnings back yet. I mean, they were coming in — we had one unit in Sunnyvale Golfland; the other one was in Milpitas. So I had my testers go out there and I said, “Hey man, I’ve gotta have some kind of idea what’s in there.” So they said, “Well we opened the cash box up. We haven’t even hit the weekend yet, just been cruising through the week.” And … I think it was like $650 that was in there. I go, “That’s not bad. That’s not bad.” So I said, “Well, let me just do a little surmising. Eh, it’ll probably end up doing about 800. That’s a really good report.” So I’m down in Florida basically telling my distribution network, “I think it’s gonna be about an $800 a week game, based on testing in Milpitas.” And then seven days came up after my distributor meeting, and the thing made $1,300.

So one of the things that we quickly found was, Golfland says, “We’re having problems with the players, because everybody’s backed up on the unit. Can we get another one?” “Yes, you can get another one.” We bring another one out. Now I’m afraid if I put a second one in there I’m gonna cannibalize it. I’m gonna have two doing $600. Not the case at all. They both do 14. So now we know we’ve got a juggernaut on our hands. Sunnyvale Golfland and Milpitas, I believe at the peak, were probably operating up to 15 units inside there. And you know, the game went through the ceiling.

Author: Matt Leone
Source: Polygon
Published: Feb 3, 2014
Length: 76 minutes (19,037 words)

How to Do Oral History the Right Way: Remembering the Baltimore Stallions, Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 5, 2014

How to Do Oral History the Right Way: Remembering the Baltimore Stallions, Our College Pick

Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most oral histories are not particularly challenging or innovative – they are, after all, just stitched-together interviews. But this one required some deep reporting to identify, locate, and interview more than 40 sources, including Baltimore Stallions superfans and the team’s former marketing executive. The Capital News Service team went beyond simply interviews and created several interactive graphics to help tell their story in an organic way, not just a tacked-on-for-technology’s sake way. This is the kind of oral history worth repeating.

Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions

Capital News Service | January 24, 2014 | 49 minutes (12,268 words)

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