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After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)

Outtakes from Jake Malooley's Air Mail oral history, including the screenwriter admitting he borrowed from Joe Frank's radio piece Lies, and the settlement figure.

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Web source Expanding Dan (Substack), outtakes from Air Mail ↗ 2023

Material cut from Jake Malooley's oral history of After Hours (1985), published by Air Mail on 12 August 2023, and posted as a "takeover edition" of the Substack newsletter Expanding Dan. The Air Mail piece itself is paywalled; this site has read only the outtakes and Air Mail's free preview.

Good for

The Joe Frank story, told by the people involved rather than by bloggers (The first half hour came from a radio monologue).

What they say

Joseph Minion, screenwriter: "I had at one point definitely heard the Joe Frank short story 'Lies' that he read on late-night radio, and details from it unfortunately wound up in the first section of the script, and I got walloped for that in every way imaginable." He also names his models: "I had seen Carol Reed's Odd Man Out as well as David Mamet's play Edmond, both of which took place in a single night".

Michal Story, Joe Frank's widow: "Joe threatened to file a lawsuit, and the filmmakers settled for about $30,000."

Martin Scorsese on the Last Temptation cancellation: "It wasn't just the cancellation of a movie, it felt like the cancellation of my viability in the movie business."

Cheech Marin on the night shoot: "I started to feel like a bit of a vampire. Sleeping all day and living at night totally turned everything upside down".

Go on, then

source Dunne on After Hours (2024) Griffin Dunne, star and co-producer, on the ending they nearly shot, Geffen's reaction, Michael Powell's fix, and SoHo as 'uncharted territory'.
source Kael — Mean Streets review (1973) Pauline Kael's New Yorker review, the one that made the film: 'a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking.'
source Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023) The producers of After Hours on the director they had before Scorsese: a Disney animator called Tim Burton.
source Ebert — The Craft review (1996) Two stars. Ebert liked the four actresses and thought the film wasted them on special effects and revenge.
source Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft The Dianic priestess hired to make the rituals plausible — who invented a fake goddess so that teenagers could not invoke a real one.
source Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021) The A.V. Club interview in which True describes the character being rewritten around race, and why she played the hair spell differently from everyone else.