EPISODE 263: Remembering Jonathan Demme.

The Pink Smoke’s Christopher Funderburg recently appeared on the Wrong Reel podcast to honor his professional acquaintance Jonathan Demme, who passed away last week at age 73. Demme's reputation for being one of the most generous people in show-business squared with his thoughtful, empathetic and frequently joyous filmmaking. Though best known for The Silence of the Lambs, Demme's work spanned every genre imaginable from crime comedies (Something Wild, Married to the Mob), deftly captured peformance films (Stop Making Sense, Swimming to Cambodia, Heart of Gold), Hollywood prestige dramas (Beloved, Philadelphia), passionate politically-minded documentary portraits (The Agronomist, I'm Carolyn Parker, The Man from Plains), exploitation films (Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, Fighting Mad), an homage to the French New Wave (The Truth about Charlie), a Hitchcock pastiche (The Last Embrace), a low-brow CB radio sex comedy (Handle with Care) and tough-to-classify masterpieces (Melvin and Howard, Rachel Getting Married.)

Jonathan Demme was one of his generation's greatest filmmaking talents and one of our favorite Americans. We're going to miss him with all our hearts. Everybody who knew him will.

~ MAY 6, 2017 ~