Awesome Movie Year Awesome Movie Year

For this bonus episode of our special retrospective season, we’re looking back to our season on the awesome movie year of 1999, the runner-up year in our audience choice poll, for teen comedy American Pie. Directed by Paul Weitz from a screenplay by Adam Herz and starring Jason Biggs, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Chris Klein, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Seann William Scott, Tara Reid and Mena Suvari, American Pie was a box-office hit that kicked off a long-running franchise.

This special bonus episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1980 features Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back. Directed by Irvin Kershner from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan and starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels and Frank Oz, The Empire Strikes Back was the highest-grossing movie of 1980 and helped establish Star Wars as a pop-culture force for decades to come.

In this epilogue to our season on the awesome movie year of 1980, we talk about alternate movies we considered including in all of our different categories this season, and read suggestions from some listeners about which movies they hoped we would cover.

The finale of our season on the awesome movie year of 1980 features our audience choice pick, John Carpenter’s The Fog. Directed and co-written by John Carpenter and starring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Janet Leigh, Ty Mitchell and Hal Holbrook, The Fog prevailed over two other 1980 horror classics in our audience choice poll.

The twelfth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1980 features our future cult classic pick, William Friedkin’s Cruising. Written and directed by William Friedkin (based on the novel by Gerald Walker) and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen, Richard Cox and Don Scardino, Cruising was met with controversy and criticism on its release but has since been reassessed and appreciated.

The eleventh episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1980 features our producer David Rosen’s pick, the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor comedy Stir Crazy. Directed by Sidney Poitier from a screenplay by Bruce Jay Friedman and starring Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Georg Stanford Brown, Barry Corbin, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, Stir Crazy was the second of four movies that Wilder and Pryor made together.