It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson here with. Keith Phipps. Genevieve Kosky. Scott Tobias. Here on the next picture show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context. So every other week, we get together to talk over a classic film and consider how it relates to a current movie. This week, we're slathering on the blue eye shadow, practicing our most brilliant smiles, and looking straight into the camera as we explain our grand ambitions to get out of this small town trap and into the big leagues. Scott, you've just about gotten your triple axle down. So why don't you get out there and represent your country by telling us what's on the docket this week? Okay, but only if you can promise this podcasting gig is going to lead to attention from prominent Hollywood producers because otherwise you're holding me back and then who knows what I might have to do to you. Oh. This week's films are both mockumentaries about ambitious women with big dreams and big entitlement, both trying to get ahead in spite of judgmental systems that seem to exist to keep them down. Both of them are used to slapping on big, fake smiles to please an audience, but both of them end up as true crime story tabloid fodder once the men in their lives try to settle their problems with violence. But there are some crucial differences.

And Gus Van Sant's bleak, stylish 1995 satire to die for,

wannabe star Suzanne Stone, uses her teenage lover to get rid of the husband she thinks is holding her back.

Craig Gillespie's new crowd-pleaser, I, Tanya, on the other hand,

suggests that Olympic skater Tanya Harding was completely innocent of using her husband and his buddies to arrange an assault on her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan. But both women do face significant ugly prejudice that gets in the way of their dreams. And both of these stories are told as bright, fast-moving tragic comedies with a little farce thrown in. Both are based on real-life events and both play with the truth in different ways.

So we're going to look at To Die For and I Tanya together to see how both these movies address the truth,

what the news media makes of it, and how filmmakers have their own way of picking it apart.

Suzanne would do anything to be famous.

She's going to be the next Barbara Walters.

I believe that Mr. Gorbachev.

You know, the man who ran Russia for so long?

I believe that he would still be empowered today if he had that big purple thing taken off for him.

To be on television.

You're not anybody in America unless you're on TV.

Was a chance she would die for...

You're on.

Good evening from the W.W.E.N. Weather Center.

Webness Center?

Have any of you actually ever been on television? Weather Center. Weather Center.

...