Dean and Phil welcome back a good friend to the show, special guest Chris Mancini! A comic, a podcaster, a filmmaker, and an author, Chris has a new graphic novel and two terrific new podcasts to discuss. He also shares the story of writing, then attempting to save, the ill-fated horror film Asylum, which he turned into a Christopher Guest-like improv comedy (boasting the talents of Dean Haglund)! All in all, it’s a thoughtful, insightful, hilarious and inspiring conversation. Learn more about Chris, his shows, his books and his brand new graphic novel at White Cat Entertainment.

After Chris says his farewells, the drunken red-wine fueled bacchanal that took place two weeks ago atop the downtown Los Angeles art deco wonder that is the Eastern-Columbia building proves itself the gift that keeps on giving. You will hear “drunken Dean Haglund” attempt to celebrate the lives and legacies of a groundbreaking stand-up comic, the godfather of the infomercial and an accomplished actor and activist.

After their most drunken episode ever, this week’s show finds Dean back in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham and Phil in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Thanks to an email from a loyal listener and frequent collaborator, they will be revisiting a discussion of Wu Tang Clan from two weeks ago. And thanks to developing news, they will follow up on last week’s discussion of the movement to remove tributes to D.W. Griffith’s legacy in Hollywood. There will be further analysis on the state of the box office in the U.S. and there will be reviews of two new movies: The comedic DC comic book actioner “The Suicide Squad” and a feature documentary about AND photographed by Val Kilmer. Yet another “Night Court” star will get remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”, along with the actress daughter of an iconic filmmaker, an award-winning folk music star, and a beloved cast member of TV’s “Sherlock”. Plus, we still have many celebrity death memories (of a Clint Eastwood collaborator, a legendary voice actor, and a best-selling sci-fi author) recorded during last week’s red wine bacchanal that we include at the end of this week’s show!

Phil is back from exploring the east coast of the USA. Dean has been in Los Angeles, celebrating his birthday. You can join them poolside atop a certain “historic building in downtown Los Angeles” for big laughs, a lot of wine, and attempted conversations about Dean’s birthday, the joys of Maine, an awesome bookstore, the influence Jack Benny had a on a great law professor, the movement to tear down a possibly racist monument in Hollywood, Dean’s new show about haunted house renovations, Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney and “sexy Joe Namath”.

Happy August, everybody! This month might well tell the tale of whether the USA puts the pandemic behind it or whether Covid-19 stays with us in some form or another for quite a while longer … Before we let go of July, however, Dean and Phil want to celebrate the recent Cannes Film Festival, putting several very promising and fascinating films on your radar. They also want to celebrate the recent, groundbreaking Emmy Award nominations, celebrating the best TV has to offer, while also offering up three picks of current series you might well enjoy! All that plus The Clown Prince of Hip Hop and a beloved sitcom star of the 80’s get remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”.

No broken finger can keep Dean Haglund from joining Phil Leirness for another brand new installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour! This week, your friends in podcasting talk about what they miss because of Covid-19 (and are certain to be missing for the rest of this year at least). Dean and Phil then explain why there might not be many new movies or television shows for a long while. They will, however, discuss several recent titles like Cats, Alita: Battle Angel and It Chapter Two as well as several under-appreciated, vintage gems like John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono and the jazz adaptation of “Othello” All Night Long. Plus, Phil has harsh criticism for a couple beloved musicals from the 1950s! In “Lawsuit of the Week”, Dean and Phil discuss a courtroom victory for Jerry Seinfeld. Then, following a mea culpa from Dean about an error made on last week’s show, the Chillpak Morgue opens for “Celebrity Deaths” where a glass ceiling-shattering broadcaster and a world-class independent filmmaker and director of top television are remembered. Finally, Phil shares a story about perhaps the greatest phrase ever uttered before death. 

As they begin their 14th year of changing the way you listen to the internet, Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness have never seen times quite like these. As if shelter-in-place quarantines and global pandemics weren’t enough, now we’ve got murder hornets?! This week, your friends in podcasting will try to make sense of both, while also remembering several of the notable people who died this past week. They will celebrate one of the women upon whom A League of the Their Own was based, a beloved character actor from TV’s “Scrubs”, a golden age of TV’s private eye sidekick, a legendary poet who helped launch the counterculture beat generation, and one of the truly indelible soul voices of the 1970’s. In fact, it’s been a particularly troubling time for lovers of music, and in “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil will also remember a Was (Not Was) vocalist, a co-founder of Kraftwerk, a chart-topping Jamaican ska singer, one of the true fathers of rock n’ roll, a great Mexican protest singer, and an illusionist who headlined one of the most successful shows in the history of Los Vegas. Dean will also provide an update on his long-awaited graphic novel, and he and Phil will compare notes on all the movies – new and old, foreign and domestic – they have been devouring during lockdown, including the Back to the Future movies, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, film noirs (films noir?!), and a couple Japanese classics, as well as a new Netflix series Dean is “maybe” finding interesting. Irreverent, insightful, and insightful, it’s what long-time listeners have come to expect!

After a cold open in which Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness celebrate the fact that YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour becomes a teen-ager this week, they launch into what they do best, trying to make sense of a (Covid-19) world gone wild with humor, insight, irreverence and inspiration. In the return of “Wingnut of the Week”, Dean and Phil offer a wag of the finger at Covid-19 conspiracy theorists and a doff of the cap to UFO “truthers”. In “Celebrity Deaths”, they pay tribute to a true titan of comedy publishing and filmmaking, an international star who broke big in both Bollywood and Hollywood, a character actor-turned-casting director, an influential folk singer, and the musician who turned Hugh Grant into a pop star! Then, your friends in podcasting tackle how Covid-19 will affect the up-coming television season, and how it will affect the Oscars, before turning their attention to what years in cinema might rival 1962 as the best year ever for movies! 

Sure, Covid-19 may be no laughing matter, but Phil Leirness gets things started with a quarantine lockdown joke nonetheless before he and Dean Haglund dig down into the protests surrounding stay-at-home orders, the hopes they have for how society might change in the long-term, and about the dangers of placing your faith in “distrust”. Ageism in Hollywood gets discussed, and then “Star Trek: Picard” and season 2 of “Star Trek: Discovery” get compared and get praised before the commercial break. In the back half of the show, Phil regales Dean with “Star Trek”-related tales involving the likes of JJ Abrams and … Toshiro Mifune?! In “Celebrity Deaths”, two of the all-time great character actors, three legendary jazz musicians, a ground-breaking sculptor, a pop-culture influencing illustrator, an award-winning cinematographer, and a glass-ceiling breaking animator get remembered. Keep calm, stay safe, and enjoy YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour!

From the inner space of quiet, self-quarantine lockdowns, to the outer space of “Star Trek: Picard”, Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness take you on quite the journey this week! It starts with their latest observations about themselves and others in the wake of another week of isolation. Sadness, quiet and dehumanization are on the thematic menu! They then compare notes on their respective Easter celebrations, which leads to a discussion of a couple of classic musicals: 1934’s Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle The Gay Divorcee and 1948’s seasonal staple Easter Parade, starring Astaire and Judy Garland. The recent, modern classic, Uncut Gems gets championed by Phil, who tries to get Dean to overcome his trepidation surrounding Adam Sandler performances (and yet, Dean once championed You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, so go figure!). The second half of the show consists of Dean and Phil comparing the years in cinema 1973 and 1974, discussing all the notable films from those two halcyon years, in hopes of determining which year might challenge 1962 as the greatest year in cinema. Finally, your friends in podcasting beam up to the La Sirena to discuss and debate what went right and what went wrong in season one of “Star Trek: Picard”, a show so successful that a big-screen movie version is already in the planning stages.

The sad, the irritating, the hilarious, the ridiculous and the sublime – It’s all fair game on YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour in the age of Covid-19! On this week’s show, Dean discusses the steam room he is building, and Phil explains why the pandemic is making him sad and how people’s under-reaction and over-reaction to the pandemic along with bad puns in jokey emails by elected officials are pissing him off! Phil went down a rabbit hole, researching what in 1952 were considered the greatest movies ever made and in so doing, he discovered an amazing, and long-since forgotten, horror: Louisiana Story. Then, Phil poses the question in honor of what would have been the late Toshiro Mifune’s 100th birthday: Was Mifune the greatest movie actor of all time? The discuss that ensues is terrific. Dean and Phil then weigh in on how movie theaters and movie release schedules will be altered once there ARE movie theaters and movie releases again. Finally, Dean and Phil preview next week’s discussion of “Star Trek: Picard” and the year in cinema 1973 before paying tribute to several notable figures in “Celebrity Deaths”, including a jazz giant, a country music great, a soul legend, a popular sitcom actor from the 90s, a soap opera star, and a much beloved children’s book author.