News

Michael Butler, the Tony-winning producer who brought Hair to Broadway in 1968 and later produced the film adaptation and many other productions of the show, died Monday in Santa Barbara. He was 95.

His attorney confirmed the news on behalf of Butler’s family but give not provide details.

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As a producer, social figure and international bon vivant, Michael Butler was an international celebrity in the 1960s and ’70s. As his 1968 production of Hair became an international hit, with 12 productions around the world, his friendships grew among exotic global figures such as the Shah of Iran and the Mahajarah of Jaipur. As a host at his lavish polo grounds in the UK,...

Bring back the Age of Aquarius! Olive Films returns with the company’s best Signature Edition ever. The show is an excellent choice for a special edition, as seen by the simply terrific interviews in its battery of added value featurettes. Top creative contributors have been tapped for some great memories. Rather than filming a simple adaptation, Milos Forman reinterprets the hit show, allowing Twyla Tharp’s choreographic genius to soak into most every scene — the result is a marvelous melding of theatrical and cinematic effects.

Hair

Blu-ray

Olive Signature

1979 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 121 min. / Street Date June 30, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: John Savage, Treat Williams, Beverly D’Angelo, Annie Golden, Dorsey Wright, Don Dacus, Cheryl Barnes, Richard Bright, Nicholas Ray.

Cinematography: Miroslav Ondricek

Film Editors: Lynzee Kingman, Stanley Warnow, Alan Heim

Music: Galt McDermott

Written by Michael Weller from the musical book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado

Produced by Michael Butler, Lester Persky...

A million American GIs are bivouacked in the English countryside, awaiting debarkation to France… and the green fields are loaded with young English women, whose own men have been off fighting for years. John Schlesinger puts together a good drama, with an excellent cast; he also avoids the expected ‘please wait for me!’ clichés attendant to this subgenre of war film.

Yanks

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1979 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 139 min. / Street Date , 2019 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: Richard Gere, Lisa Eichhorn, Vanessa Redgrave, William Devane, Chick Vennera, Wendy Morgan, Rachel Roberts, Tony Melody, Derek Thompson.

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Film Editor: Jim Clark

Original Music: Richard Rodney Bennett

Written by Colin Welland, Walter Bernstein

Produced by Joseph Janni, Lester Persky

Directed by John Schlesinger

Director John Boorman got to tell his personal wartime home front story in his warm and funny Hope and Glory, and eight years earlier the...

Milos Forman was looking for the best writer to adapt the hippie anti-war musical Hair for the big screen. The Czech filmmaker already had a growing U.S. following in the wake of The Firemen’s Ball and Taking Off when 1975’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest took home five Oscars including best film and best director. And while Michael Weller had zero experience as a screenwriter, he did have a reputation for plays that cast a gimlet eye on the generation that came of age in the era of protest against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. His works included Moonchildren (1971), Loose Ends (1979) and Spoils Of War (1988), which interwove the intensely felt political and personal obsessions of Baby Boomers on the cusp of adulthood.

For Forman, Weller would write two of the most underrated films of their time, Hair (1979) and, two years later, Ragtime. Like his...