Alex Cox was responsible for a substantial part of my 1980s and 1990s film education with his show Moviedrome on BBC television.
That, I wrote a year ago, when I found the Laura Gemser interview from the Alex Cox documentary “A Hard Look”
Last week, I find the very first introduction of the very first broadcast of the cult television programme on cult films.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8IGJjukTzc]
Moviedrome (first broadcast, May 8th, 1988)
The first film was The Wicker Man. To my knowledge, the transcripts of the introductions by Cox were not published. I do suggest that any serious film student would “read” them from start to finish. I wish I could.
Update:
Maybe there is a way to find the missing texts. Cox has just published an autobiography so it seems.
Has anyone read this?
X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (2008) [Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]
Cox’s introductions from seasons 1-3 were published by the BBC in 1990 in a large-format booklet called Moviedrome: The Guide. It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear I have a copy. I expect you could find one secondhand somewhere.
Doesn’t surprise me at all 🙂
I guess we may have “shared time” by watching simultaneously Moviedrome episodes. I missed The Wicker Man, though, and never even heard the score to that film, but I know it’s psych folk, which makes the whole of Cox appear very trendy again.
I believe their screening of The Wicker Man was the first attempt to show a more complete print of the film than had been seen before.
The soundtrack is excellent and a major reason for why the film is so effective. I’ve never regarded it as very well-directed; no one would ever accuse Robin Hardy of being an auteur. Its strengths are the screenplay (also a novel by Anthony Shaffer), the cast and the score. The soundtrack is available in a great CD version from Trunk Records.