751: Audience of One

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We bring the movies to you.

Prologue: Host Ira Glass revisits the one movie he’s seen more than any other, about an ocean liner that gets hit by a tsunami and flips over. (9 minutes)
Act One: Our producer, Diane Wu, spent most of her life thinking she doesn’t have a unique and personal take on The Sound of Music. She is wrong. (13 minutes)
Act Two: To cope with the COVID pandemic, producer Sean Cole finds himself turning to a movie about a pandemic. But the virus in this movie isn’t like any you’ve ever heard of. (19 minutes)
Act Three: Comedian Will Weldon’s ex-wife made a movie loosely based on their marriage. Producer Elna Baker watches the film with Will as he revisits his break-up. (15 minutes)
Act Four: Jaime Amor does yoga storytelling for kids at Cosmic Kids Yoga and on YouTube. We ask her to try taking on a film for grownups. (7 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	I know so many people who have films that they've watched over and over, and I have never
0:05.0	really gotten that.
0:06.0	I always feel like there are so many films that I haven't seen, like, why would I watch
0:09.1	one again?
0:10.1	But we get into these conversations, and there always comes a moment where I'm asked,
0:13.4	well, what is the film that you've seen the most?
0:16.9	And then I have to admit, it's the Poseidon adventure.
0:21.7	Which I know is not a good film.
0:23.4	It's this 70s movie about an ocean liner that gets hit by a tsunami, flips upside down,
0:29.7	and the passengers try to make their way to safety.
0:32.0	It's part of an entire genre of films, disaster films that have never gotten any respect,
0:35.9	like nobody thinks of these films as art.
0:38.2	But I loved it at the time when I saw it.
0:40.6	It felt big, and it felt important, and serious, and I remember it was very emotional.
0:47.4	And the reason that I saw it so many times, that this is the film that I saw more than
0:51.0	any other, was not because I loved the film, it's because of where I saw it.
0:55.6	There's a vacation.
0:57.4	We didn't take many vacations when I was a kid.
0:59.2	On one of them, we stayed at this hotel in Florida, where the rooms had this thing,
1:02.1	where they offered a couple movies all day long, and this was so long ago.
1:06.6	In the 1970s, my sisters and I, we had never seen anything like that,
1:10.5	like even cable TV, was rare back then.
	...

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