Episode 24: 1989 with John Pierson
A podcast about the great movie years.
It’s hard to overstate how important John Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes was to me when it came out in the mid-1990s. I was just becoming a filmmaker (yes, I’m another failed-filmmaker-turned-film-critic, though in my defense, I started doing both in college and went with the one I was better at) and it was such a thrilling, funny, smart look at a scene I wanted nothing more than to be a part of. I probably read it cover to cover about a dozen times, between its original release and its Spike Mike Reloaded paperback reissue (these days, it’s available via the University of Texas Press, where John is an instructor). It’s just a great book, and John’s a great writer, and between that book and his magazine-style series Split Screen (now available on the Criterion Channel), there may be no better or more informed chronicler of the late ‘80s/’90s indie movie scene.
I began a correspondence with John a few years back, when I was briefly attempting to put together an oral history book of the that scene; a few weeks after I started putting out interview asks, the first Harvey Weinstein story broke, so (unsurprisingly) people were suddenly not that interested in talking. But he was kind enough to talk to me for the Fun City Cinema book, and then we used some of that interview in the first episode of that book’s podcast, and now here we are.
I visited John while in Austin for SXSW. He and his wife Janet - who, as we discuss, just stepped down from running that festival after 15 years - have a lovely home there, and we set up the microphones in his office, filled with books and ephemera from his years in the trenches, which he occasionally referenced while we talked about the five most historically significant movies of 1989.
You can see and rate his top five over on Letterboxd.
And if you’re curious, here’s the clip of Kim Basinger shouting out Do the Right Thing at the Oscars:
-jb