This week’s show was recorded several days early because Dean is off to Canada to workshop a new play, to re-visit some of his old, musical stomping grounds, and to prepare for an art show! Phil hosted a live stage show this past week, one that featured such good friends of Chillpak as Lily Holleman and Jon Lawlor. Phil offers a full report in “Live Event of the Week”. An email from a loyal listener about the dangers and responsibility of making historical dramas leads to a fascinating, deeply thoughtful, thorny conversation, one that promises to continue to unfold in the weeks to come. Another friend of the show, Steve Benaquist, drops in to help answer a question from a listener about the current box office smash Weapons before Dean and Phil tackle Marvel’s Thunderbolts* and all of the MCU’s “Phase Five” before turning their attention to the brand small-screen franchise adaptations “Alien: Earth” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”.

Later this week, your friends in podcasting depart for Europe. Last night, the Oscars were held. Last week, one of their dear friends celebrated his 81st birthday, another friend had a brain tumor removed, and another friend died. So, you will forgive Dean and Phil if this isn’t the most polished installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour. It IS epic in length, and it is full of the heartfelt, the insightful, the irreverent and even the inspiring. Dean reveals that planning a home renovation a few months before getting married might have been a mistake. The winners of last night’s awards get analyzed both for their historical context and for what they say about the art and commerce of motion pictures right now. Actors Gene Hackman and Michelle Trachtenberg, screenwriter and producer Roberto Orci, singers Robert John and David Johansen, and chess champion Boris Spassky get remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”.

Because of some crazy travel plans (London! New York! Tokyo!), the next three episodes of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour promise to be unusual even by our standards! This week’s topics include a forthcoming Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, the crazy, big screen experience Megalopolis, the lineage of Longlegs director Oz Perkins (and a bit about one of the film’s stars), and a “smart house” thriller from Canada, Red Rooms. The North American tour of (“the Modfather”) Paul Weller becomes “The Live Event of the Week”. The deaths of master stone carver Simon Verity, best-selling mystery novelist Nelson DeMille, beloved actor James Earl Jones, and the utterly peerless legend of the stage and screen Maggie Smith all get discussed. Art, architecture, mythology, philosophy, movies, television, music and more on this week’s show – in other words, something for everyone, right?

Their cross-country holiday travels behind them, Dean is back in Michigan, Phil is back in Los Angeles, and they will regale you with stories of Hollywood parties, catch you up on awards season news, analyze the merits of two award hopefuls (the disastrous Babylon and the controversial The Whale) and one indie horror film franchise. They will also remember an award-winning cinematographer, an iconic journalist, a revolutionary fashion designer, and one of the most famous athletes of all time in “Celebrity Deaths”.

Your friends in podcasting (AND broadcasting!) have quite the week to discuss! As the holidays approach, and Covid-19 dashes Dean’s travel plans, Awards Season in Hollywood gets underway. The National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle announced their winners of the best in cinema for 2021, and a consensus has begun to form through critics Top Ten lists about the best of the year in television. Dean and Phil discuss it all. They also try to make sense of the latest in the accidental shooting on the set of “Rust”. A whole lot of classic films get discussed, including which films may have best depicted what life in America was really like in the mid-1980’s. A new documentary series about The Beatles from Peter Jackson gets reviewed and four actors and a musician get remembered in our penultimate installment of “Celebrity Deaths” for 2021. If nothing else, you will learn that the movie Beau Geste is NOT the movie Gunga Din and director Wim Wenders is NOT director Werner Herzog.