By Lindsey Bahr, AP Film Writer
Long before Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary won an Oscar for co-writing "Pulp Fiction," they were just a couple of cinephiles working at a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, Calif, discussing and recommending movies and becoming the filmmakers they were meant to be.
Now almost 40 years after meeting at Video Archives in 1983, Tarantino and Avary are revisiting that pivotal moment and the films that made them with the Video Archives Podcast, a new venture from SiriusXM's Stitcher premiering this summer. The company said Thursday that on each episode Tarantino and Avary will rewatch and discuss movies culled from the original Video Archives library.
"We never imagined that 30 years after we worked together behind the counter at Video Archives, we would be together again doing the exact same thing we did back then: talking passionately about movies on VHS," Tarantino and Avary said in a joint statement. "Watching movies was what originally brought us together and made us friends, and it's our love of movies that still brings us together today."
When Video Archives went out of business, Tarantino bought their inventory and essentially recreated the store in his home. He once estimated that it was close to 8,000 video tapes and DVDs. On the podcast, they teased that they'll cover everything from "controversial James Bond films" to surprising exploitation pics and beyond.
"Quentin and Roger have made such enduring marks on filmmaking," said Scott Greenstein, chief content officer at SiriusXM in a statement. "We're so excited to be able to help them revisit this formative moment in their careers, and to bring their recommendations to new and larger audiences."
The Video Archives Podcast will be available this summer on Stitcher, the SXM App, Pandora and other podcast platforms.
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More